184
185
LIN ROTHE
JOHN TAGG
30. Elizabeth Edwards. following John Tagg, points out that "the meaning of photographs resides in lhe discursive practices that constitute them and that they
themselves constitute, from relations of power that constitute the conditions
of existence for these photographs to current readings of Lhc image: Edwards,
Raw Histories. 108. A few years earlier, Christopher Pinney began his Camera
Jndica with a quote also from John Tagg. ll maintains that photography "is tie<l
to definite conditions of existence and its products are mean ingful and legible
only within the particular currencies they have. [Photography's I history has no
unity." Christopher Pinney, Camera lndica: The Social Life ofJudia11 Plwtogmplis
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 17.
31. H. H. the seventeenth Gyalwa Karmapa O rgyen Trinley Dorje is currently
In September 2007, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York opened its
doors on a groundbrcaking e, hibition that sought to extend the hi! tory of what
it called "British photographs from paper negatives" beyond the limits of the
conventional account. ' Presented as the first attempt "to explore the opening
Rangjung Rigpe Dorje (1924- 81); Lhundup Damcho, close disciple of H. H. the
seventeenth Karmapa, personal communication, 12 May 20 11.
first decade and a half of what t11e exhibitions remained conten t to describe as
"the development of the new medium of photography: 3 Leaving the question of
"the medium" to hang for the moment, it soon became apparent that the insistence of Impressed by Light o n "British photographs; "British photographers:
and "British artists" would prove equally unsustainable, since the borderline
that was drawn was deceptive and its enforcement inconsistent. It was not just
a matter of the vagaries of curatorial selection, however. Notions of national
identity notoriously turn on the orbit of difference, introducing an unwanted
element of uncertainty and deferral that, inevitably, has a corrosive effect on the
confidently universalist language of masters and monuments, primacy and preeminence, characteristic of the house style of the Metropolitan Museum under
the directorship of Philippe de Montebcllo.
The liberally used adjective British is, of course, particularly fra ught. It has
remained erratic in its definition and manifestly unreliable as a marker of allegiance. Here in the exh ibition-ignoring the Dutchman Nicolaas Henneman,
who gained admission solely as William Henry Fox Talbot's loyal retainerphotographers are variously identified as "English:' "Welsh;' "Scottish," and
"Irish," and o nly in six inexplicably special cases as "British:' The curators did
not invent the confusion, of course, and, when we arrive at Last with the British
186
TAGG
in India, we would do well to recall it was the English flag thal flew over the
coat of arms of the East India Com pany, whose motto was: Auspicio regis et
senatus Anglia (By right of the King and lhe Senate of England). As Tom Nairn
has argued, the strange absences and evasion of British statehood are rooted
that marked it out from the wave of state-ordered, nationalist capitalisms that
Talbot's patent restrictions, wh ich opened the way for lhe fo rm ation of the
emerged in the course of the nineteenth ccntury.s For all the unifying effects of
As their numbers grew, these gentlemen -amateurs (as the exhibition would
the political mobilization and spoils of imperialism, Britain always lacked the
have them) enabled the practice of photography to break out of t11e restricted
unity lent by the nationalist Imaginary, since it never had Lhe second revolu-
circle of Talbot's relations, associates, and scholarly friends that had largel y
tion that might have made it a modern nation-state. Instead, it chose Empire
defined the limits of calotype practice in its first decade. Schooled as they were
wealthy gentlemen, we are told, valued the paper print for its softening of detail,
tion of the Anglo-British stale. The result is the singular instability of the very
its massing of light and shadow, and its graphic smudginess, which seemed
Britishness that the exhibition wants to hold in place as the marker of a guar-
more artistic and, in any case, set thcir work apart from the mechanistic sharp-
ness of the retail trade. It was a sense of distinction these gentlemen took to
their weekend retreats, away from the clamor of city life and the din of industry.
Already. then, the framing of the exhibition shows cracks. Yet its story of
features, ancient oaks, castles, vistas, landed property, good fishing, and hunt-
of carrying it far ther than we might have been led to expect. Previous accou nts
ing estates: this is what interested them and this .is what the exhibition sets us
of the history of early photography had for the most part assumed an almost
or the steam locomotives of the dauntingly named James Mudd into this frame,
the brilliance and precision of the daguerreotype with the reproducibility of the
capitalist in
aspiration."~
would have come to an abrupt stop halfway round the first gallery, after a
Focusing on its story of the work of "men of learning and leisure" and
wall of Talbot and a wall of Hill & Adamson, William Coll ie, and Benjamin
blind spot for the more mundane questions of production, replication, and
the economy of images. Yet it was precisely in relation to these issues that the
image represented seismic events. This other history, however, found itself
all but entirel y erased from the exhibilion whose agenda, once the scene had
of sorts. ll was al the Great Exhibitio11 of the Works of Industry of All Nations,
been briefly set, hurried viewers on past Talbot's didactic double image of the
held at the Crystal Palace in London in t851, that the paying public had its first
real chance to see the commercial and artistic potentialities of photography. The
under the direction of his erstwhi le valet, Nicolaas Henneman. Here, though,
products of the camera thus took their place in the spectacle of industrial and
in the back ga rden, we briefly glimpse the kind of productivity Talbot himself
tech nological marvels that now came to seem magicaUy disconnected from the
bitter labor truggles marking the preceding two decades. The only blemish
and prints, and the mass production of plates for photographically illustrated
fo r this grand British plan was thal, as the Reports by the juries subsequently
books like The Pencil of Nature (t844- 46) and Sun Pictures in Scotland (1845)-
recorded, all the gold medals went to American dague rreotypes and, more
aJI areas in which Talbot's process enjoyed success, even if it was never able to
187
188
TAGG
189
compete with the daguerreotype for market share in the enormously profitable
field of commercial portraiture. 1t is a back garden seen from the window of a
train that is going elsewhere. As Batchen again has sharply observed, Impressed
by Light "carefully erases any signs of commerce or labor from the historical
record, leaving the impression that the caJotype was entirely the preserve of
the independently wealthy."9 In this, Batcl1en adds, the exhibition "repeats the
efforts of the Photographic Society itself, which sought to maintain a clear division between those 'in trade' and those ' in society:"10
This division, however, was not perhaps as consoling as it ought to have
been. The tight-knit preoccupation with the artistically validated picturesque
themes of late romantic and naturalist art betrayed an overinsistenl hymn to
Land, property, and place that, warding off the insecurities of the time, sought to
offer the confirmation of continuity and belonging to relatively arriviste professional men- modernizers, technocrats, and industrialists who, focusing their
cameras in their leisure hours, quite pointedly turned their backs on the dirt
and conflict of the industrial sources of th eir new wealth. 11 It was a careful habit
of shielding the eyes that they would take with tl1em on their travels-first,
on what the curators call "the New Grand Tour;' seeking out the great si tes
and landscapes of European cultural heritage: the Acropolis, Pompeii, Rome;
Bruges, Naples, Segovia, Madrid, Salamanca, Moscow, Malta; Mount Etna, th e
Alps, tl1e Pyrenees.
Here, the sudden change of scene allowed the exhibition to mark another
crucial factor prolonging the life of a process that the tex1:books say was super-
seded after 1851 by t he new glass plates. Collodion glass plates, in fact, repre-
point and the exhibition had to work hard to blunt its impact. For, even as it
sented a far from convenient choice for the traveling photographer. They were
expanded its geographic range, calotype practice was also becoming diversified
heavy and fragile and they had to be exposed in the camera and developed
and institutionally stratified. Jts story was no longer just the story of art and
while still wet-so they had to be prepared and proces ed on the spot, meaning
and track down local sources of chemical supplies. Lightweight paper negatives
uities, and commerce gave visi tors hardly a pa use as it swept them into the
worked just as well when dry as when freshly prepared, so they could be made
last room-into a baked, dry, ochre world that sweltered "Under an Indian
in advance, stored, exposed, and developed later, eliminating the need to travel
Sky" (fig. 1). u Yet something else will prove to haunt the humid, heat-hazed
with a portable darkroom. 12 These decided advantages came in to their own par-
landscapes we find here, and it is at this juncture-with the story of the flour-
ishing development of the self-conscio usly artistic "medium" already unraveling-that we are plunged into an encounter Lhat suddenly outru ns t11e stage
managers' control. The calotype itself may have been well prepared to survive
the rigors of the journey, readil y adaptable, as it was, to work in hot and dusty
climates. The exhibition narrative fares less well, changing color, losing its
breath, and pulling up short on the banks o f the Ganges at the Suttee Chowra
Ghat in Kanpur, th e major up-country bulking point for the cotton- and oilseed trade along the river.
Fig. 1.
View of " Under an Indian Sl\Y,"
t he final gallery of Impressed
by Light: Bri tish Photographs
from Paper Negatives,
1840-1860, an exhibition
held at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York,
25 Seplember-31 December
2007.
190
Fig. 2 .
TAGG
The waters here, at least in the museum's print (fig. 2), are smooth and
the scene of ho rrendous events but also or the undoing of those great tales of
1809- 98).
Suttee Ghat Cawnpore, 1858,
albumen silver pnnt from
paper negative, image: 33 x
43. 1 cm (13 x 16 IS/1 m.);
mount: 40.3 x 51.6 cm
(15?/s x 20s;"' in.).
New Yori<, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
Fig. 3.
John Murray (Scottish.
1809- 98).
Suttee Ghat Cawnpore, 1858,
paper negative, image: 38 x
48 cm ( 14 is;,. x 18?/e in.).
New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
opaque, Oat and impenetrable like the sky. 111e low, scattered trees could be
British invention.
comin g into leafor dyi ng. The buildings behind the perimeter wall are hard to
make out in the tangle of the trees' branches. 111e sun comes in low from the
cers and troops unde r General Sir Hugh Wheeler. together with the women,
right. Nothing moves except one of the two men squatting on the open ground
children, and servants who had taken refuge with them in their hastily fortified
leading down to the river. The scene seems windless and airless. Even the two
barracks at Kanpur. negotiated an agreement with the local rebel leader and
diminutive squatt ing figures who look back at the photographer seem only
self-proclaimed Pashwa, Nana Dhondu Punt, to give up Lheir guns and treasure
to point up the general sen e of de erti on and the distance that has opened
in return for boats Lo carry them from the Suttee Chowra customs ghat on the
between the m and the ca mera lens. Like the curators, we may find it hard to
resist taking the seeming lack or eve nt as the sign of bleak emotion. This is
boarded the vessels at the stepped embankment, the British detachment was
certainly heavi ly overwritten ground. The inscription in the lower left corner of
mowed down by concealed artillery and rifle, with surviving troops and reput-
the large-scale print tells us th is: Suttee Ghat Cawnpore. And, again, in pencil
edly all male children being cut to pieces by cavalry and locals who had joined
title adds a third variant: "Suttee Ghat Caw11pore," Scene of the Massacre-the
confined in a house in the nearby compound. But on the evening ohs July, as
massacre, note.
130
a British force of European, Madras, and Sikh troops with guns of the Royal
The image, in all its inadequacy and excess. is caught in the field of the cap-
and Bengal Artilleries approached Kanpur from Allahabad, leaders of the reb-
tion. There is a tea r in the fabric o f the ex11ibition's story. We have arrived at
els or perhaps the sepoy guard themselves resolved to slaughter the women
191
192
193
TAGG
and children, who were shot and cut to pieces in the courtyard of the house in
whk h they were imprisoned. It is said that the walls were covered with bloody
Medical Service; the Madras Army captain Linnaeus Tripe; John McCosh, sur-
handprints and the floor was littered with severed human limbs. The next day,
geon with the Bengal Native Infantry; Major Robert Tytler and Harriet Tytler,
the bodies of the dead, together with survivors, were thrown d own a nearby
his wife; army engineer Cha rles Moravia; and Richard Oakeley, Fellow of the
dry well. It was the day before British fo rces recaptured Kanpur, bringing their
own brutal reprisals, and exactly three weeks after the signi ng of the agree-
appointees who, in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, mobilized the latest
for memory an occ upied territory that had p roved so suddenly and violen tly
the "indisputably authe nti c" evidence he collated in i859: "Grief here yields to
indignation, and the thirst for revenge; yet adequate retribution can never be
inflicted. Tue punishment of the crime is beyond the power of man.''
15
Tue army surgeon and photographer Jo hn Murray arrived at the scene that
engrossed a nation in February t858, less than a year after the massacres and
a year before Lieutenan t Colo nel Wi ll iams began his in vestigation. 16 Williams,
even after his "most searching and earnest inquiries;' acknowledged the pain
tographic practice steadily spread in the next decade and a half, it did so not
solely in the hands of those linked in one way or another, th ro ugh commercial,
draw a veil, but that duty forbids my concealing aught of the real fac ts attend-
17
ing the closing of the Cawnpore tragedy." Murray, o n direct commission from
of practice as well as Lord Can n.ing's precise instructio ns to capture "as clear
and complete an impression" as possible of the mil itary works and sites associ-
be expected, given the way they learned their practice and given their desire
ated with the mutiny, uncapped the lens of his camera and made his exposures:
to accommodate and adapt, these educated Indian amateurs and their com-
two v iews of the ghat on the G:mges; one of the h ospital in General Wheeler's
actual and virtual pilgrimage si te for the veneration by the British of their mar-
But they were strikingly differen t from the photographs that bega11 to accumu-
tyrs.
18
Of these, the exhibition, true to its bias, gives us only the finer quality
negative (fig. 3) and a tonall y harmonious print. But what do they show us? In
this exhibition-or against it- not a little.
tions were issued by the central administration for local governments to collect
against British occupation that the British still remember as the "Indian Mutiny"
photographs of tribes and castes under their jurisdiction. Military officers were
and that their political class preferred at the time to see as the product of local
like Murray, and civil servants who were encouraged to take cameras with them
19
nial struggle, wttich for a time posed an e ffective threat to British control of
After ~the great co nvulsion" of 1857, their efforts acquired an official standing,
the Gangetic Plain, broughl appal ling atroci ties and reprisals fro m both sides
overseen by the Political and Secret Department and culminating in the publica-
that still live in the lexicons of national memory and that made it clear that
tion betwee n 1868 and t875 of the eight volumes of The People of India. Th is
the landscapes calml y sur veyed by the camera were spaces of irreconcilable
compendious work, compiJed under the patronage of the then Viceroy Lord
visions. H ere, then, the story suddenly ceases to be one of the triumphal flour-
Canning, may have troubled membe rs of an Indian elite to whom it was shown
ishi ng of pho tographic art, since the photographers of the Indian landscapes
in the India Office Library in London, but it was not intended to speak to them.
23
24
194
TAGG
Rather, it was meant to educate the agents of a colonial service that, after 1858,
ll seems that, from the viewpoint of the Suttee Chowra Ghat, here in the
fell directly under the British Crown. To such eyes. the eight bound volumes
final room "Under an Indian Sky;' there is li ttle left unscathed in the history
the exhibition has given us. The singular photographic medium, the gentle-
native groups that had so recently demonstrated attitudes to British rule ranging
man's practice, the flour ishing of art, the prid e that all th is is British: none of it
from acquiescence and compliance to fierce hatred and violent rebellion. There
survives. Whatever it may be that is, as Talbot wrote, "impressed by Lhe agency
of Light alone:' it is not to be so lightly fixed. What is "brought out" in the sensi -
tiz.ed paper always falls short of our investmen ts and desires, whatever lens we
25
brate m ore finely the sustainabiHty of British rule in lndia. If Canning's ambi-
take to it. But, then, as we try to say what we see, we find that what is stained
into the paper goes beyond our stories and what it is we want. "This, however, is
not grounds for silence, any more than it is fodder for the banal belief that the
picture speaks for itself. The puzzling impassiveness of Murray's "Suttee Ghat
which the Indian subcontinent was gridded and framed as a field of knowledge,
Cawnpore," Scene of the Massacre is itself a challenge as the place where a certain
history comes to grief. The exorbitant, inadequate image burnt into the paper
It was hardly unusual, of course, for colonies to be the testing ground for
comes to us from somewhere else, but that is also its challenge. Before it, we
new techniques and technologies. This was obviously the case for military tac-
are called to bear witness to its sight, to seek to grasp its resonance as a specific
tics and hardwaTe, but it was also the case for techniques and technologies of
visual control. Nowhere did these seem more needed than in India. 26 Colonial
Talbot again, musing on the prospect ofloss, once called "the mute testimony
administrators and officiaJ.s complained over and over again of Lhe deceit tl1ey
of the picture:' 29
haps in appearance, attained their objects with Less noise and smoke."
Bourne's shameless image is brutally apt. In the years after the violent rebellion, guns and cameras rolled across the landscape in unsparing ways. 111 addition to hangi ng mutineers, the British had many they captured "blown from
1.
Notes
Perhaps at the outset I ought to say that l found myself rather anxious about my
lack of credentials to speak on the topic at issue in this volllme, and this anxiety
no doubt set the course of the path I decided to follow. lt may appear to have led
me rather far from the intended destination. So l will have to ask to be given an
extremely long leash in order to reach my goal, which is not the goal of unmasking a misrepresentation or reinstating some truth but, rather, that of following
a certain history to rhe point where, on ground it was not the first to believe it
had fully made its own,lt begins to be llllraveled by the very thing for which it
thought to give us a story.
2. Quotations drawn from the exhibition texts came from the "Past Exhibitions"
pages of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website: http://www.metmusellm
.org/special/se_event.asp?Occurrenceld={ 447 A8D76-4D51-4E8C- BiA.4
B888EF85D7CC}; and http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event
.asp?Occu rrenceld={5 BC2298F-FC6B-u D6-94C7-00902786B F44}, accessed
ca nnon's mouth and blown to pieces. Fomented in the aftermath of the Indian
http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2007/impressed-by-lighl; and
April 2010. Almost identical versions of these texts are currently available at:
and otber recent "iars, this was, of cou rse, the climate in which the jingoism
hup://www:metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/ press-room/exhjbitions/2003/
first-survey-of- french-dagucrreotypesmany-among-the-earliesr-photo-
ited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York from 25 September 2007 to
195
196
TAGG
31 December 2007, was described as "the first major ex:hlbition to survey British
calotypes," presenting "works by forty artists, including such masters as WiUiam
Henry Fox: Talbot, David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, Roger Fenlon,
In 1856, the Irish caJotypist ). M. Murray had on hand papers that he had prepared
in 1849 and 1850, still in usable condition. See Larry J. Schaaf with Roger Taylor,
Benjamin Brecknell Turner, and Linnaeus Tripe, as well as many talented but
unr ecognized artists" (see note 2). lhe majority of the works on view. it was also
Ligl1t: British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840-1860, ex.h. cat. (New York:
stressed, had never before been ex:hibited or published in the United States.
historical documentary pho tography oflhe 1840s and 1850s, as well as porlraiLS,
city views, landscapes, nude studies, and genre scenes that arc renowned as key
during tire Sepoy Revolt of 1857 (Lucknow, India: printed at the London Printing
Press, 1879), 70-79.
15. Lieutenant Colonel G. W. Williams." ynopsis of Evidence of the Cawnpore
oah Alfred Chick, Annn/s of the lndinn Rebellion, 1857-58 (Calcutta:
Mutiny," in
16. An editorial in the London Times declared that the events al Kanpur "engrossed
replied that "a book on British calotypes might be more appropriate, as British
the atlention of the whole country . . . for, whatever the issue of this rebellion,
and whatever other prodigie and horrors il may bring forth. the Massacre of
British Photographs from Pnper Negatives, 1840- 1860, ex:h. cat. (New York:
Cawnpore and the name ofNena Sahib wlll hold rank among the foulest crimes
and the greatest enemies of the human race to the end of the world." Editorial,
4. The pho tographers identified as l3rilish" are the Englishmen Robert Henry
Cheney, Alfred Huish. and Joh n H. Morgan; the Scotsman John Muir Wood;
the u11placed Charles Moravia; and Robert C hristopher Tytler, born in Jndia of
J8. Cannings's instructions to Mu rray were conveyed in a letler, now in the National
is allowed into the ex:hibition, though Dutch, while the imporlant fig ure Antoine
Claudet, who spent his enlire photographic career in England, is excluded
because he was born in France.
5. Tom Nairn, "The Twilight of the British State:' in idem, The Break-Up of Britain:
Archives of Ind ia, from C. Beardon, secretary to tl1e government of India, to John
Murray, 22 January 1858, q uoted in Taylor, Impressed by light, 125.
19. See Christopher A. Bayly, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988); and, more particularly, Rudnngshu
Mukherjee, "'Satan Let Loose upon Earth': The Kanpur Massacres in India in the
Revoll of 1857," Past & Present, no. 128 (1990): 92-u6.
20. Not subject to q uite the same constraints as the exhibition, though equally committed to artistic biography and to the same celebratory tone, the exhibition
Was Divided (London: Printed for the Royal Commission by William Clowes &
catalog briefly concedes that "(t]his relationship with officialdom is one of the
Sons, 1852).
features that distinguished Indian pho tography from its counterparts elsewhere
bition tells us "almost n othing" about "the actual history of the calotype." Balchen.
"Photography: Latent History," 55.
10. Batchen, "Photography: Latent History," 57.
11.
12.
and accounted for much of its direction d uring tJ1e 1850s and 1860s." Taylor,
The displacement and fan tasy inve lment negotiated through this attachment to
simul taneous attachment to science and an archiving knowledge, they trace out a
197
198
TAGG
advertised for sale by January of the following year, and, by March 1840, 7/te
Calcutta Courier was reporting an Asiatic Society meeting in which daguerreotypes of Calcutta itself were exhibited. See Christopher Pinney, 711e Coming of
Pliotograpliy in India (London: British Library, 2008). 9. See also John Falconer,
"Photography in Nineteenth-Century India;' in Christopher Afan Ba)ly, ed., 1/te
Raj: India a11d the British. 1600-1947 (London: alional Porlrait Gallery. 1991),
264-n.
22. When the Photographic Society ofBombay hcld its first meeting on 3 October
for India, l11cl11di11g an Outline of a History of Crime against the Person i11 India,
20d ed. (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, 1870), 85, cited in Pinney, 1he Coming of
Photography i11 India. i9.
28. Samuel Bourne, "Narrative of a Photographic Trip to Kashmir lCashmerej and
1854, three of its thirteen fou nding members were aL~o lndia11. On early Indian
\\las
exh. cat. (London: British Library and Howard & Jane Rickells Collection, 2001 ).
friend Gustave Flaubert in 1849, the photographer and travel writer Ma.xime Du
23. J. Forbes Watson and Joh n William Kaye. eds., The People of India: A Series of
Camp complained of the difficulty he had in making his servant, Hadji lsmael,
pose without moving in order to lend a sense of scale to landscapes and monu-
publication, see John Falconer, '"A Pure Labour of Love': A Publishjng History
convey the depth of naivety of these poor Arabs. I told him that the brass tube of
ments. "I finally succeeded:' he wrote, "by means of a trick whose success will
of The People of India," in Eleanor M. I light and Gary Sampson. eds., Colonialist
the Jens jutting from the camera was a cannon, which would vomit a hail of shot
24. The most striking expression of horror was voiced as early as 1869, in a let-
ter from London to the cientific Society at Allygurh by the prominent Indian
Muslim political leader, judge, and educator Syed Ah med Khan. Syed Ahmed
Khan, quoted in Lieutenant Colonel George Farquhar Irving Graham, Life
a11d Work of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan (Edinb urgh: William Blackwood and Sons,
1885), 188-89. See also the discussion by Christopher Pin ne)' in The Comi11g of
Photography i11 lirrli11, 41-49.
Pinney speculates that it was not so much denigrating photographs that out-
raged Syed Ahmed Khan as the implicit sleight of the u11itary and normative
purloin the treasures-if the mute testimony of the picture were to be produced
Henry Fox Talbot, T11e Pencil of Nature (1844], facsimile erution (New York:
istration. John Falconer takes a different view. He reads Syed Ahmed J(h311's
response to the ph otographs in Tlie People of Tndia as springing from the embarrassed recognition of what they reveal: "the lack of educational and social progress which, he felt, justly relegated his country to an inferior status and shamed
his son into disowning it." Fakoner, "'A Pure Labour of Love:" So. Drawing
attention to this dispute while paying close altention to the circurn!.tances
d escribed in Ahmed Khan's narrative, Ajay Sinha has tried to hold the conflicting
interpretatfons of his letter together as indexicaJ oftbe bundle of contradictory.
self-assertive, and self-crit ical impulses felt by British-educated and "cosmopolitan" Indians, then and since, toward a "modernfarn" that is, at once, universalist
and imperialist-a bundle of impulses that evokes a blush precisely at the point
"where an Indian subject becomes aware of its own phantasmagoric appearance."
Ajay Sinha, "Response: Modernism in India: A hort History of a Blush; Art
199