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About the Book: Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars This volume explores how photography represented, idealized and publicized the Delhi Coronation Durbars, occasions marking the formal coronations of English monarchs as empress and emperors of India: Victoria in 1877, Edward VII in 1903 and George V in 1911. Formally schematized and instituted by the Viceroys of India-Lytton, Curzon and Hardinge-the Durbars were the first examples of the aestheticisation of imperial politics and the inscription of the Raj in a celebratory history that served to legitimate colonial presence. Lasting several weeks, each lavish occasion was imaged and described in photographs (cartes-de-visite as well as private, popular and commissioned photos), paintings, press illustrations, illustrated souvenirs, memoirs, photo albums and films. The essays in this volume focus on semiotics of image and the role of Durbar photographs in visually rendering the complexities of colonial logic, the scopic regimes of surveillance and spectacle, and the pivotal ideologies and hyperbolic fantasies of a subjugated `Orient` promoted by the imperial administrations to justify British rule in India. ISBN - 9781935677109
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