Indians in view : The representation of British Indians in magic lantern presentations, film and on postcards, 1870-1915

This thesis researched the representation of British Indians in three types of visual media which were enormously popular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Together they reached a wider public than any other visual representations had done before. Magic lantern presentations had become popular in the 1870s, while postcards and film developed throughout the 1890s. To gain an understanding of the meaning of these representations, the thesis compares them with other colonial understandings of India. A comparison between the media reveals the medium specific contributions to the representations. The overarching framework of British colonial rule was one in which they believed to have a civilizing mission to the Indians, bringing both material and moral progress. The perceived lack of this progress in India was explained through a focus on India's religions, with religion believed to be the defining aspect of a person; its social stratification through the caste system, which supposedly permeated every aspect of society; and its treatment of women, who were considered to be either suffering under paternalistic structures or to be sexually immoral. As this was first of all an administrative point of view, cultural expressions in Britain were frequently at least as concerned with the entertainment value of Indians as with morality and progress. This entertainment was generally at the cost of the Indians. The thesis uses these three broad strands as the basis for an in-depth analysis. However, in order to be able to analyse and compare the different media, the concept of the dispositif is applied and developed. The dispositif enables an understanding of the different facets of a medium, while remaining aware of their interconnectedness. The importance of the 'cinema of attractional displays', highlighting the dominance of attraction over narrativity in early film, as well as of the concept of visual narrativity in the individual images, is assessed for the analysis of the images themselves. By applying these theoretical concepts when comparing and contrasting representations of religions, festivals, male occupations, fakirs, women and courtesans in these media with general discourses, the study comes to several significant conclusions. 1.The subjects popular in the representations were generally those that were also part of general colonial discourses, the media did not broach entirely new subjects. 2.Even if the representations reflected general colonial interests, the way in which they were executed and the meaning they acquired was strongly determined by the medium itself. 3.The importance of written and spoken text in magic lantern presentations anchors the visual representations in general colonial discourses, even if these images do not reflect these understandings. 4.Indian postcard publishers frequently reconfigured the colonial meaning given to representations, by using backgrounds and presenting Indians as independent and self-conscious. 5.Film was mostly interested in entertainment and had far less interest in pursuing colonial ideas, although Indians were almost never depicted as equal to Europeans