Empire of Images

This book centres on the question of how visuality projected ideologies of the British Indian Empire in the Long Eighteenth Century. How did hierarchies of race, class, and gender come to be formulated and instantiated in images? What do images reveal about British dominance over Indian landscapes and the natural environment? How and why did visual languages of imperialism change over time? For British artists and patrons, the chief task was that of knowing India and validating the political system promulgated by the EIC and the British Crown. Indian artists faced the task of interpreting the realities of British political ascendancy in terms of both the cultural modes at their disposal and ones introduced by the coloniser. Beyond the postcolonial constructs of dominance and resistance, early British India was thus fraught with a struggle for visual ascendancy that complicate our understandings of honour, guilt, knowledge, belonging, and commemoration.