Empires of light

Vision, visibility and power in colonial India

Niharika Dinkar

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526139658
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Arte asiatica

Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives. This book describes how imperial mappings of geographical space in terms of 'cities of light' and 'hearts of darkness' coincided with the industrialisation of light (in homes, streets, theatres) and its instrumentalisation through new representative forms (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting). Cataloguing the imperial vision in its engagement with colonial India, the book evaluates responses by the celebrated Indian painter Ravi Varma (1848–1906) to reveal the centrality of light in technologies of vision, not merely as an ideological effect but as a material presence that produces spaces and inscribes bodies.

Part I

Technologies of illumination

1

Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta

To the eighteenth-century European imagination the Indian landscape appeared wrought in darkness. The haunting depths of the subterranean caves, the sprawling shaded retreat of the banyan tree and the unspeakable terrors of the ‘Black Hole’ tragedy all conspired to paint an image of a land shrouded in mystery and horror. These indelible images of the darkened landscape recalled its wild, untamed character but, amongst the earliest images of an unseen land gradually emerging into public visibility, they also pointed to anxieties about seeing and a fascination with the limits of the visible that have been identified as central to Romantic visuality.¹ If visibility, spectacle and display dominated eighteenth-century Britain, introducing a culture of visuality for the first time, how did images of the hidden Indian lands brought to a public viewership figure within this emerging visual culture?²

The darkness served as a hermeneutic barrier that withheld the unfamiliar spaces from the European eye and presented a challenge to making them visible, both textually and visually. Explaining his impulse to document his impressions of his travels in India between 1780 and 1783, the painter William Hodges wrote, ‘It is only matter of surprize, that, of a country so nearly allied to us, so little should be known’. Aiming to rectify the ‘hiatus in the topographical department of literature’, Hodges intended to record ‘the idea of that first impression which that very curious country makes upon an entire stranger’. This consisted ‘of a few plain observations, noted down on the spot, in the simple garb of truth, without the smallest embellishment from fiction, or from fancy’.³

And yet, when Thomas and William Daniell visited North India between 1788 and 1791 armed with a camera obscura and ‘a firm attachment to truth’, they privately complained about Hodges’ inaccurate and fanciful interpretations of the Indian landscape.⁴ As each successive account claimed to render it more truthfully, multiple narratives emerged, never quite dispelling the darkness for the European viewer but, shadow-like, clouding the glass, as it were. Writing from Calcutta, William Jones the philologist explained: ‘In Europe you see India through a glass darkly; here we are in a strong light; and a thousand little nuances are perceptible to us, which are not visible through your best telescopes, and which could not be explained without writing volumes.’⁵ What is underlined in these accounts is the desire to marshal text and image to overcome the hermeneutic challenge posed by the land. My analysis in what follows is not to chart the progressive accuracy within which accounts of the Indian landscape were rendered nor to show how the darkness was unveiled to reveal a glorious, ancient civilisation in the past. Rather, I wish to indicate how the darkness itself encouraged the production of a fantastical visual and literary archive that made claims to the real, in part assisted by optical technologies.

The most prominent symbols of the darkened Indian landscape were the rock-cut caves of Elephanta near Bombay whose forbidding interiors and gargantuan sculptures haunted the imagination of visitors and lingered as a symbol of arcane Hindu practices in European visual culture as late as the mid-twentieth century. The caves inspired a great deal of interest from artists, writers and natural historians, who mapped their interiors, speculated about their origins, forwarded hypotheses regarding the iconography of their sculptural programme and visualised their gloomy interiors in paintings, drawings, prints and travel writing. Darkness and gloom appeared to be the most distinguishing features of the caves, repeated in several descriptions. Articulating a view that resonated for much of the nineteenth century, the Reverend William Tenant drew parallels between the darkness and the state of the arts: ‘Their caves in Elephanta and Salsette are standing monuments of their original gloomy state of their superstition, and the imperfection of their arts, particularly that of architecture, which is perhaps the most intricate and laborious of any.’⁶

Elephanta is an island ten kilometres to the east of Mumbai with a series of caves, of which the primary one , built around the sixth century CE by the Kalacuri dynasty, is dedicated to Siva. Locally referred to as Gharapuri, literally ‘city of caves’, the island was named Elephanta by the Portuguese after a large stone sculpture of an elephant that had stood near the main landing and that is now in disrepair. Elephanta was the earliest of the Indian caves to be ‘discovered’ by European visitors and it was followed by forays into the nearby cave sites of Salsette and Kanheri, also on the western coast. Much of the early interest in Elephanta was because of its Portuguese occupation until its conquest by the Marathas between 1737 and 1739 and its subsequent acquisition by the British in 1774. In the seventeenth century the discovery by the French traveller Jean Thevenot of the rock-cut temple at Ellora suggested that Elephanta was not an isolated example and that the skills of rock-cut architecture had been well honed in India, leading Thevenot to conclude that ‘the Men have not been altogether Barbarous, though the Architecture and Sculpture be not so delicate as with us’.⁷ In 1819 the discovery of the Ajanta caves by British army officers revealed yet another facet of cave dwellings in India – fresco paintings that generated a great deal of excitement amongst historians and artists.

Caves were central to the way that India was imagined in the colonial period and had a long-lasting effect on the visual culture associated with the country. The young Gustave Flaubert likened himself to an Indian forest where ‘mysterious and grotesque gods are hidden in the depths of caverns’.⁸ Over a century later, André Malraux would write about the metaphysical import of his visit to Elephanta, where the sacred darkness of the caves ‘closed on the flow of time’.⁹ The caves’ ancient origins served to underline the primitive antiquity of the Indian civilisation, and in the late eighteenth century the paucity of historical records or the tools to translate them preserved the air of mystery that surrounded them.¹⁰ Caves acquired a significance as the earliest habitation of man in popular evolutionary schemes of architecture that drew a progression from the primitive ‘darkness of caves and forests, through the gloom of Gothic structures to the airy elegance of Grecian architecture’.¹¹ The identification of the Indian landscape with ancient caves made it the home of primitive architecture.¹²

In 1845 the Scottish architectural historian James Fergusson explained this interest in the preface to Illustrations of the Rock Cut Temples of India: ‘“the Caves” are almost the only object of antiquity in India, to which the learned in Europe have turned their attention, or of which travellers have thought it worth while to furnish descriptions, or whose history they have attempted to elucidate; and they therefore possess, to a European public, an interest which it would be difficult to excite for other works’.¹³ Fergusson, who went on to establish a distinguished career in architectural history, chose the rock-cut temples for his first venture because, despite their popularity, no satisfactory studies of them existed and many discordant opinions prevailed, ‘for all in India is darkness and uncertainty’.¹⁴

The repeated references to darkness were an invitation to plumb its mysterious depths, and at Elephanta the creative production of speculative literature and imagery dovetailed with a Romantic belief in the generative powers of nature in India. The darkened interiorities of the cave ascribed to it a mysterious feminine quality and in the gendered Romantic landscape, where the ‘prospect’ was the purview of the masculine viewing subject surveying the lands and the ‘bower’ proffered a partial view that related to a feminised viewer, the caves were a darkened crypt to be deciphered by an authoritative gaze that mapped, surveyed and offered interpretations.¹⁵ This Oriental fertility was affirmed by the French writer Pierre Sonnerat: ‘India alone shows the traces of primitive fecundity: the barrenness of the other parts of the globe has been conquered by industry …’¹⁶ The recesses of the Indian cave with its overwhelming and often erotic sculpture served as an archetype of feminine mystique and a model for exploring subterranean hidden truths. The feminisation of the colonial landscape has long been accepted as an attribute of imperial power, but in this case it also resonated with the Hindu designation of the cave as a sacred space which enshrined the gods.¹⁷ The caves carved deep within the womb of the mountains were thus fertile ground for both Hindu ritual and the Romantic mind, to whom they asserted the natural abundance of the tropical world.¹⁸

Elephanta was amongst the earliest Indian sites to capture the Romantic imagination. At the age of nineteen John Ruskin wrote a poem on Salsette and Elephanta, painting a picture of a dark, savage land held hostage by its gods. Ruskin portrays the islands lying across the dark sands of majestic Dharavee on a shadowy night, ‘each hollow cave, Darkling as death, voiceless as the grave’. Beasts of blood like tigers, lizards and deadly snakes haunt the island where the ‘ghastly idols fall not, nor decay’.¹⁹ Ruskin’s poem won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in a competition where the judges decided upon the topic set for the contestants – for 1839, it was Salsette and Elephanta, attesting to the fact that the caves were alive in the British imagination as a symbol of Indian antiquity.

By the late nineteenth century Elephanta had lost much of the ‘gloomy disposition’ that earlier writers had pointed to but remained an important site on the traveller’s itinerary. In 1875 it hosted a luncheon for the visiting Prince of Wales within its large, columned hall. The prominent pillars loomed over the dining guests as the hall was festooned with glittering lights, dispelling with pomp and festivity the terrible images that Ruskin had alluded to. Even without its characteristic gloom, Elephanta remained in the public eye. By the end of the nineteenth century the caves had acquired the status of an emblem of the Indian landscape. ‘Very Indian these islands’, remarked the poet Edward Carpenter on his visit to Elephanta and Salsette, in an account that would inspire E.M. Forster’s famous encounter between the East and the West in the murky depths of the Marabar caves in A Passage to India (1924).²⁰

The Elephanta caves posed a hermeneut...