Niharika Dinkar 
Empires of light 
Vision, visibility and power in colonial India

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.

Table of Content

Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Part I: Technologies of illumination
1 Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
2 Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Part II: ‘Visibility is a trap’: battles of the veil
3 ‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
4 Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Part III: Chiaroscuro, portraiture and subjectivity
5 Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
6 Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Postscript
Index

About the author

Amelia Jones is Robert A. Day Professor of Art and Design and Vice Dean of Critical Studies at the Roski School of Art and Design, University of Southern California