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`Enjoyable...put together...in an accessible manner, given the writing in this field...is generally polarized between avant-garde cultural studies jargon and commonsensical opinion.` -- Patricia Uberoi, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi
`Marvellous. The photographs...bring to life a Bengal which has been lost...The few historians who wrote about it did so in a vacuum of abstraction...We see now what these Bengalees looked like, what they wore...their lifestyle...There is a great market for this kind of book.` -- Sabyasachi Bhattacharya, former Professor, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University
This book, based on photographs taken in Bengal during the period 1875-1915, aims to introduce a new dimension to the experience of colonialism and reconstructs a history of growing urban Bengali middle-class society. Using rare archival photographs, Re-visioning the Past shows how the entry of the photograph into the domestic sphere coincided with s ignificant familial and spatio-temporal change--and indeed served as a metaphor for the same.
Shortly after its discovery in 1839, the daguerrotype photograph found its way to British India and increasingly replaced portrait and group paintings by commissioned artists. In Calcutta, families who wished to be photographed by British photographers reflected a growing urban, middle-class sentiment: an enthusiasm for having one`s image `fixed` by his revolutionary medium. After the 1860s, individual portraits, those of the conjugal couple, family groups, the child-flooded the homes of bhadra samaj, material objects for display and admiration.
The camera recorded a changing Bengal in the nineteenth century, where there has hitherto been little critical analysis of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The colonial presence led to a collective introspection among educated Indians, and brought into play psychological conflicts over identity and belonging, whi ch ph otography played a significant role in forming. Bengali entrepreneurial tradition in photography was established, and the contributions of three men--Rajendra Mitra, Upendrakishore Raychaudhuri and Maharaja Birchandra of Tripura--are discussed.
Contents/contributors
* Acknowledgements
* Chapter 1: Inventions and the Image
* Chapter II: Visualizing the Indian Empire
* Chapter III: The Bengali Experience
* Chapter IV: Photographic Pioneers
* Conclusion
* References
* List of Photographs
* Index
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Pages : 109
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