Power and Resistance : The Delhi Coronation Durbars

Power and Resistance is published in association with The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts 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.

Focuses on photographs made for those who attended the Delhi Durbars and for a global audience who did not attend. The essays focus on semiotics of image and the role of Durbar photographs in visually rendering the complexities of colonial logic.

The Durbars were 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.

Instituted by the Viceroys of India - Lytton, Curzon and Hardinge - 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.

Contents: Introduction; Photography and the Delhi Coronation Durbars, 1877, 1903, 1911; Landscapes of Performance: Staging the Delhi Durbars; The Durbar and the Visual Arts: Revisiting the Picture Archive; The Delhi Durbar: The View from Hyderabad; Photographic Interventions and Identities: Colonising and Decolonising the Royal Body; Photography at its Limits: The Dayal Studio's Coronation Album, 1903; Evidence of Another Modernity: Lala Deen Dayal's 1903 Delhi Durbar Photographs; The Great Durbar Crowds: The Participant Audience; The Line and the Curve: Spatiality and Ambivalence in the 1903 Delhi Coronation Durbar; Catalogue of Photographs; Bibliography; Contributors; Index.