Although this book accompanied an exhibition, its ambitions and contributions far exceed those of a standard exhibition catalogue. In Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation 1850–1900, we are given a very substantive analysis of photographic history in India, using the representation of architecture as its focal point. The inspired conceptualization that combined photography and architecture extends to the presentation of this scholarship and its sources: the volume is sumptuous in its presentation, absolutely gorgeous in its visual documentation, and helpfully laid out, with close proximity of examples and related text.

The basic concept is riveting and intellectually sophisticated: to explore the relation between the technology and art of photography itself and the representation of monumental architecture once photography was introduced. Rooted in the late nineteenth century, the volume concentrates on how these acts of representation tied in with the political agendas of British India, but essays on the postindependence period make clear that all representations are political acts that reflect on the historically contextualized exercise of power. This scholarly trajectory also enables a (more implicit) comparison of the uses to which architectural monuments are put, both during their construction and over the years following. Indeed, there are many fundamental questions for art historians embedded in these essays, relating especially to the differences in intent and readings of artistic production over time.

How these readings vary in regard to the intersection of photography and architecture makes this volume especially valuable, for the essays reflect an underlying tension in the field. This tension among analysts runs between 1) those who have argued for a relatively straightforward exercise of power that enabled, first, British imperialists and, then, middle-class nationalists to harness visual representations of India for their own ideological purposes; and 2) those who see visual culture as emerging from a more dialogic process in which those with less access to power nevertheless exercise agency and fundamentally affect the visual (and ideological) outcomes. The authors and editor of Traces of India can each be aligned with one or the other of these stances, but the contribution of the volume as a whole derives from the fact that it has effectively captured (or reflected) the tension in this collective enterprise. The new understandings of the field that we gain from these dazzling points of entry, as well as the access to many little-known photographs, make the book invaluable and original.

The first section of the volume, “Projecting India,” includes introductory essays by editor Maria Antonella Pelizzari and contributors on antiquarianism (Stephen Bann) and a French engineer’s distinctive contribution (Julia Ballerini). The following three sections include “Capturing India’s Past” (essays by Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Janet Dewan, John Falconer, and Peter Hoffenberg), “Memorializing the Raj” (Nicholas Dirks, Narayani Gupta, and Thomas Metcalf), and “Re-imagining India” (Christopher Pinney and Partha Chatterjee). Perhaps the heart of the book’s approach is expressed most immediately by Pelizzari in her introduction, when she observes that “this modern technology [of photography] seized the past”; she goes on to argue that “India’s national heritage was being used as a kind of cultural commodity manufactured by colonial surveyors and curators” (34). Pelizzari tends to concentrate on the political agenda of photographers collaborating with imperial administrators (e.g., she organizes photographic productions under “the modalities of travel, science, and memory” ⁵⁴). However, her introduction also captures the agency of those with other intentions, for instance, when she draws on Hoffenberg’s analysis of the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883–84. Here she sees the “displays of commodities” as “richly suggestive of the relationships between Empire and Indian local traditions” and cites a model of Humayun’s tomb (made by Indian craftsman Hulas Rai and presented by the Maharaja of Alwar) as evidence of “collaboration between colonial and local organizers to raise awareness of the aesthetic value of a Mughal building” (all quotes 41). This is certainly a purpose distinctive from the general agenda that was pursued by British administrators of using representations of monuments to convey their argument about Indian decay and waning power.

The next two essays in part 1 first provide a historical context of the British agenda from which photography emerges (Bann) and then draw a comparison from representations created and organized for consumption by a Frenchman (Ballerini), whose referents were not imperial power but rather a marginalized aristocracy striving to create a new place for itself back in France. In this intriguing case study, the claim to a place was based on “modern” credentials such as engineering and systematic, scientific approaches. These very different French aesthetic representations, organized in a presentation album to make very different arguments, become a way in this volume to document the British agenda by way of contrast. We would need to know how representative this case study is to decide whether it can bear the full weight that this collection of photographs implies; its inclusion here, however, is a provocative way to broaden our own analytical understandings.

In similar ways, we see the complexity underlying the emergence of the British agenda in Metcalf’s essay, which broadly traces the effort by the British to make a place for themselves in India’s past through monumental representations. In particular, Metcalf shows that Lord Curzon’s intentions for the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta were ultimately undermined by those who were determined that no Indian figure would join the panoply of statues. Similarly, so much Indian antagonism greeted the Black Hole Memorial that the monument never stood a chance of surviving independence. As Metcalf notes, no reconstruction of the past can survive if it does not take account of those in whose midst it will be erected.

Resistance to the British agenda is suggested elsewhere as well, even by those contributors who concede that hegemonic control extends to the present, such as Guha-Thakurta’s assertion that the imperialist agenda resulted in a “disappeared image archive” (139). The close attention paid to the work of Linneas Tripe (in essays by Dewan and Dirks) and the photographic survey work of Joseph Lawton (John Falconer) provide more detail about the implicit negotiations made by photographers in harness to imperial state intentions, and show how the documentary aspects of photography could reflect both the tension at the time and the tension inherent in analyses of these processes now. As Falconer notes, commissioning commercial photographers to serve the imperial agenda meant that photographs were taken “to serve the dual purpose of tourist memento and archaelogical document” (164–65). Since Lawton’s work in Ceylon “embraces these dual and potentially discrepant functions with success” at the time, the photographic record that is left for us to examine and interpret has the potential to offer alternative readings (164–65). Dewan’s and Dirks’s treatment of Tripe similarly suggests that one of the most potentially compelling appeals of photographs as historical evidence is the way in which the artifact can be used in the present to extract meaning never intended by the photographer’s paymasters (Dewan, 148). It can convey, as well, an aesthetic intent by the photographer that is at odds with the imperial, hegemonic purpose (Dirks, 204, 207).

Indeed, the commercialism inherent in photography as a technology and art form came to be extended to architecture as well. The commercial ends to which architecture could be put are demonstrated in Hoffenberg’s analysis of the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1884. In this case, the multivalent meanings attached to architecture operated in a complex built for the sale of traditional craft goods. The many Indians who had a hand in these visual representations necessarily opened up the space for resistance and alternative readings: as Hoffenberg notes, “more than one vision of the Indian political community was on view here” (177).

Similarly, the ability to deploy photographic images is explored by Gupta in her study of photography’s application to the Mutiny/Great Revolt of 1857. After exploring the huge body of material generated for an insatiable British audience, Gupta concludes by showing that key images have been turned on their heads through repeated publication: the picture of Colonel Hodson shooting the Mughal Princes after taking them prisoner, for example, or that by Beato of sepoys hung from improvised gallows. As the author notes, “the past, after all, is a foreign country, where both the British and Indians are tourists” (239).

If the application of photography in its early days shows its power to be harnessed by state interests, Chatterjee makes an interesting argument about later photography in his analysis of illustration in postindependence India’s history textbooks. He suggests that the move away from photographs to line drawings is made because “historical monuments are acquiring an iconic quality” (283). Implicit in this argument is that photography as a medium could no longer accomplish the state’s agenda. To me, this suggests that the readings by Indians may have become too nuanced or sophisticated today, given their exposure to other film-based media.

This implication of other readings or aesthetic sensibilities is fully brought to bear on the volume’s inherent analytical tension in Pinney’s extraordinary essay. He insists that an entirely different visual aesthetic was at work, at least for “some” subalterns. He makes clear just how far from imperial intentions (and what Pelizzeri calls the half-life of their legacy) is the visual vocabulary of twentieth-century Indians. He argues convincingly that Indian aesthetic judgments have existed side by side with British intentions, and that we must see the resulting readings and use of architectural representations, through photographic and other treatments, as emerging from both of these sources. From this emphasis we come away with a much more complex understanding of the notion that representations are political acts, and for this we are grateful to the volume and its contributors.