Material and Utopian Visual Cultures in Delhi Durbars

FAIN: FA-50136-04

Julie F. Codell
Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ 85281-3670)

The Delhi Durbars were coronations of English monarchs as emperors/empress of India: Victoria, 1877; Edward VII, 1903; George V, 1911. Each of these spectacles had its own imperial theme and political agenda ritualized in lavish, week-long activities, including exhibitions of Indian art. My project will address several topics: 1-the spectacles as public rituals whose merger of culture and politics foreshadowed modern European public state spectacles; 2-the special contents and functions of each durbar and its exhibition; 3-visual reproductions and representations of events as part of the development and growing global market for colonial paintings, photography and documentary film; 4-diverse receptions of durbars and exhibitions among Indians, Anglo-Indians, and Britons through the press in Indian and the UK and the counter-exhibitions of the Indian National Congress; 5-durbar exhibitions in comparison to Indian art displayed in Victorian museums and international exhibitions; 6-contributions of durbars and their exhibitions to an emerging Indian cultural modernism.

Associated Products

Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (Book)
Title: Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars
Editor: Julie Codell
Abstract: This volume explores how Indian and British photographers, film-makers and artists 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 and foreshadowing modern mass political events of the 20th century. The Durbars were the first examples of 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.
Year: 2012
Primary URL: http://www.mapinpub.in/search_result.php
Primary URL Description: The book focuses on photographs made for those who attended the Delhi Durbars and 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.
Publisher: Mapin
Type: Multi-author monograph
Type: Edited Volume
ISBN: 978-81-89995-5
Translator: no translator

"Indian Crafts and Imperial Policy: Hybridity, Purification and Imperial Subjectivities" (Book Section)
Title: "Indian Crafts and Imperial Policy: Hybridity, Purification and Imperial Subjectivities"
Author: Julie Codell
Editor: J. Potvin and A. Myzelev
Abstract: Collecting and promoting Indian crafts became a part of British imperial policy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I will focus on the large exhibition of Indian crafts held at the Coronation Durbar in Delhi in 1903. I will argue that this exhibition was the culmination of George Birdwood's theories about Indian crafts, various British imperial policy contradictions and the series of international exhibitions that created a discourse about craft in relation to fine arts and to manufacturing.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Ashgate
Book Title: Material Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting

The Artist's Cause at Heart: Marion Harry Speilmann and the Late Victorian Art World (Book)
Title: The Artist's Cause at Heart: Marion Harry Speilmann and the Late Victorian Art World
Author: Codell, Julie F.
Year: 1989
Publisher: Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
Type: Single author monograph

The Political Economy of Art: making the Nation of Culture (Book)
Title: The Political Economy of Art: making the Nation of Culture
Author: Codell, Julie F.
Year: 2008
Primary URL: https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=9781611473827
Primary URL Description: WorldCat entry
Publisher: Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9781611473827

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