Photography and Cinema in Colonial India: Confronting the Other (and the I) through Image

Abstract

This essay undertakes an analysis of two modern image-making practices– photography and cinema–and attempts to link them to the nascent formation of empire in India. Both photography and the moving image are here situated against a backdrop of 19th and early 20th century anthropological thought, a paradigm which in retrospect was integral to the institutional formation of these disciplines. An underlying assumption is that image-making and image-producing were not peripheral to the colonial enterprise of domination and control but were rather constitutive of it. By way of conclusion, I attempt to establish a link between vision-based practices and the spectral figure of a unified Europe which was itself an idealized construction.