The Alkazi Collection of Photography: Power and Resistance- The Delhi Coronation Durbars (1877-1903-1911)

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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 Harding-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 (carts-de-visite as well as private, popular and commissioned photos), paintings, press illustrations, illustrated souvenirs, memoirs, photo albums and films. The book focuses on photographs made for those who attended the Delhi Durbars sand for a global audience who did not attend. It features vital photographs that were commissioned from the foremost British and Indian photographers such as Raja Deen Dayal & Sons, Vernon & Co., and Bourne & Shepherd, as well as those shot by amateur photographers.

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.

This book focuses on photographs made for those who attended the Delhi Durbars and for a global audience who did not attend. Photographic records were vital to these events and were commissioned from the foremost British and Indian photographers. In the 34 years between the first and the third durbar, technological developments in photography permitted easy duplication for postcards and press images, as well as the opportunity for much amateur photography of the events.

Retainers' Review-Warriors on Stilts, from the album 'Souvenir of the Delhi Coronation Durbar, 1903', 1903 Silver Gelatin Print, 130 x 205 mm This book will explore how photography represented and publicized the Delhi coronation durbars in visual, historical and political contexts tied to these events. Photographs offer surprising insights into political and cui rural conflicts over national identities, historical origins, and the purpose of media representation. Essays in this book suggest that durbar photographs functioned to express not only the order of the empire and its extravaganzas, bur also complicated, often contradictory, beliefs about race, desire, and history shaped by imperial administrations whose durbars were intended to justify British rule.

The overarching thesis of this book is that the photographs of the coronation durbars, intended to overawe Indians in 1877 and the global community in 1903 and 1911, reveal hidden fissures and tensions in these visually rich, celebratory spectacles. Through close analysis, the authors point out discrepancies, those junctions in photographs where British and Indian photographers, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes deliberately, uncovered contradictions between the Raj's "civilizing" intentions and its military dominance. Unconventional focal points in official and unofficial photographs show events from the margins of the spectacles. In official portraits, dissonances emerge between figures and backdrops. Other revealing interstices are persistent images of photographers at the edge of celebratory scenes, spatial manipulations that create vanishing points for durbar splendor, and discrepancies between durbar photographs and other accounts of durbar events-letters, books, sketches and newspaper reports.

Another important theme that emerges from these essays is the relationship between the durbars and concepts of modernity applied across a variety of issues, such as the formal properties of the photographs, the nature of durbar spectacle and the often contradictory political interpretations of these photographs, both then and now.

The essays offer multiple perspectives on four linked themes: photography as an appropriate medium for these spectacles, the technical and aesthetic possibilities of photography in the colonial project of mapping and recording durbar events (james Ryan and Nicola Thomas, Saloni Mathur); maharajas' portraits and their role and presence as highly politicized signifiers in the imperial arena (Benjamin Cohen, Julie Condell); Raja Deen Dayal's role as coronation durbar photographer in the context of an emerging Indian modern- ism (Deepali Dewan, Gita Rajan), and coronation durbars as spectacles of crowds and events on an unprecedented scale (jim Masselos, Christopher Pinney).

As spectacles, the durbars paralleled the venues of panoramas, dioramas and the international exhibitions held every few years around the world and were modelled after the 1851 London Great Exhibition, the revival of the Olympics in 1896 in Athens, which were then folded into larer hyperbolic displays in Paris (1900) and St. Louis (1904), along with the expansion of the circus into three rings by. the Barnum & London circus around 1881. Coronations durbars borrowed from these spectacles to disguise politics as aesthetic entertainment (fig. 1).

In its attempt to control the protocol and hierarchies of the durbars, the Raj anticipated the mass- political rallies of European totalitarianism and the aestheticisation of politics in the modern world. The Raj hoped to control images of its spectacles, but failed, because journalists and amateur and professional photographers all exposed the underside of these events, such as their rampant commercialism or the concurrent famines in India during these durbars. In their pursuit of media attention (painting in 1877, then photography, journalism and film in 1903 and 1911), Raj policies catalyzed another "modern" development: the conflicted relationship p between political authorities and a self-regulated, autonomous press. A third modern trait is the importance and independence of the crowd. No matter how much the authorities herded the crowd and issued traffic pamphlets, the crowd-a mix of classes, nationalities, and professions-became an entity and a force that helped determine the trajectories and interpretations of these durbars. There to see and be seen, the crowd became larger and more unruly with each durbar. Finally, in an ironic twist, coronation durbars meant to proclaim and ritualize the empire also fed the growing resistance to it among educated Indian middle classes, as evidenced in the press and in gatherings of the Indian National Congress, contributing to modern Indian nationalism.

Photographs, of course, capture much more than their ostensible subject. As anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards points out, texts or images are not simply inscribed with the colonial gaze, but also with their own social relations, exchanges, histories and contexts, all shifting and unstable over time. The photograph is a reciprocal object, not just an image of a referent. In this role it can embody a counter- narrative' and over time convey to new audiences multiple meanings that escape imposed narratives of history and political authority’s These escaped meanings, or reciprocities, or "leaks" of micro-intentions, as Edwards has called them, are analyzed in detail in these essays.

Book's Contents and Sample Pages