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Holly Shaffer: Victoria Photographic India, circa 1900: The Material of Revolution

In the late nineteenth century, the Poona Photographic Company in western India produced an album titled “Victoria Photographic General.” On each page, the image of Queen Victoria is set within a landscape of swirling vines, elephants, and Indian and British dignitaries. At the center of a diagram of subservience, the Queen also watches over a configuration of rulers, entrepreneurs, and photographers with competing colonial and nationalist affiliations. The album is a portrait of society, photography, and revolution. In this paper, I focus first on the album’s materiality, and then on the transferal of its design across media and anti-colonial purpose. In the format of imperial photographic albums and of carte de visite, the album is also in dialogue with indigenous traditions of portraiture and painting. Unbound by the photograph as contemporary documentation, the album includes photographs of drawings and lithographs of historical personages to fuse media with ornamental design into a lineage of portraiture and artistic practice. In the second portion of the talk, I examine how the material chain of portraits intersects with Indian nationalists’ reuse of the album’s format to serve revolutionary rather than colonial ends. On the one hand, nationalists defiled Victoria’s image while committing violent acts against the empire. On the other, the album offered a unique compositional format ripe for appropriation. The high-ranking Scindia Maharaja, for instance, had portraits painted in the palace to depict Indian nationalists. Drawing on images from across India, and history, the mural program approximates the album’s format while collapsing photographic with painted time. A group obeisant to Victoria in the album coalesces into a messianic guard on the walls. The album therefore identifies the photographic means of spreading Britishness across its empire, while its subsequent adaptations of media and content transform it into a tool of anticolonial resistance on Indian visual terms. Paper presented as part of the "Photography and Britishness" conference held at the Yale Center for British Art, 4–5 November 2016. This conference was co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London; and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.