scholarly journals A full catalogue and analysis of Indian painted photographs at Royal Ontario Museum's South Asian photographic collection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Zotova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Contact Printing ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
Royal Ontario Museum ◽  
Photosensitive Material ◽  
Miniature Painting ◽  
Oil Paints ◽  
Means Of Production

This thesis is based on a photographic collection of Indian painted photographs from the South Asian Photographic collection at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). There are fifty-four photographic objects created by various makers and photographers with dates ranging from the 1880's to the 1990's. For the most part the objects are examples of studio portraiture. Most of them are photographic images with applied colour, however, there are some examples of paintings in this group that were executed in the tradition of photographic studio portraiture, but have no evidence of a photosensitive material underneath. The paintings, as well as the painted photographs, employ different media, such as watercolour, gouache and oil paints. The objects I investigated and catalogued fall under three categories: prints made by contact printing, by enlargement, and finally paintings produced using a photograph as a model. Tinting of photographs was a well-known Western tradition in the nineteenth century, while the process that Indian artists developed was a synthesis of their long practiced tradition of miniature painting and the newly developed technology of photography. Finally this thesis unveils the means of production of Indian painted photographs, and tries to find the reason for Indian artists employing opaque medium in their colourings.

scholarly journals A full catalogue and analysis of Indian painted photographs at Royal Ontario Museum's South Asian photographic collection

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Olga Zotova
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Western Tradition ◽  
Contact Printing ◽  
Photographic Images ◽  
Royal Ontario Museum ◽  
Photosensitive Material ◽  
Miniature Painting ◽  
Oil Paints ◽  
Means Of Production

This thesis is based on a photographic collection of Indian painted photographs from the South Asian Photographic collection at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM). There are fifty-four photographic objects created by various makers and photographers with dates ranging from the 1880's to the 1990's. For the most part the objects are examples of studio portraiture. Most of them are photographic images with applied colour, however, there are some examples of paintings in this group that were executed in the tradition of photographic studio portraiture, but have no evidence of a photosensitive material underneath. The paintings, as well as the painted photographs, employ different media, such as watercolour, gouache and oil paints. The objects I investigated and catalogued fall under three categories: prints made by contact printing, by enlargement, and finally paintings produced using a photograph as a model. Tinting of photographs was a well-known Western tradition in the nineteenth century, while the process that Indian artists developed was a synthesis of their long practiced tradition of miniature painting and the newly developed technology of photography. Finally this thesis unveils the means of production of Indian painted photographs, and tries to find the reason for Indian artists employing opaque medium in their colourings.

Genealogy of Colonial Discourse: Hindu Traditions and the Limits of European Representation

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raf Gelders
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Colonial Discourse ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
The Core ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Eastern Cultures ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Core Issues

In the aftermath of Edward Said's Orientalism (1978), European representations of Eastern cultures have returned to preoccupy the Western academy. Much of this work reiterates the point that nineteenth-century Orientalist scholarship was a corpus of knowledge that was implicated in and reinforced colonial state formation in India. The pivotal role of native informants in the production of colonial discourse and its subsequent use in servicing the material adjuncts of the colonial state notwithstanding, there has been some recognition in South Asian scholarship of the moot point that the colonial constructs themselves built upon an existing, precolonial European discourse on India and its indigenous culture. However, there is as yet little scholarly consensus or indeed literature on the core issues of how and when these edifices came to be formed, or the intellectual and cultural axes they drew from. This genealogy of colonial discourse is the subject of this essay. Its principal concerns are the formalization of a conceptual unit in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, called “Hinduism” today, and the larger reality of European culture and religion that shaped the contours of representation.

scholarly journals Charulata 2011: Dramatizing the Glocal

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-557
Author(s):  
Rituparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Satyajit Ray

AbstractA lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore’s novella, Nastanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal – the colonial and glocal – over the course of a century. Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray’s heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata’s choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown – an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the nineteenth century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her twenty-first century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too – both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband. Charulata 2011 thus dramatizes a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.

Parallel lives or interconnected histories? Anagarika Dharmapala and Muhammad Barkatullah's ‘world religioning’ in Japan

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Samee Siddiqui
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
First World War ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
World Religions ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Parallel Lives ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
First World

Abstract This article compares the ideas, connections, and projects of two South Asian figures who are generally studied separately: the Indian pan-Islamist Muhammad Barkatullah (1864–1927) and the Sinhalese Buddhist reformer Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1934). In doing so, I argue that we can understand these two figures in a new light, by recognizing their mutual connections as well as the structural similarities in their thought. By focusing on their encounters and work in Japan, this article demonstrates how Japan—particularly after defeating Russia in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905—had become a significant site for inter-Asian conversations about world religions. Importantly, exploring the projects of Barkatullah and Dharmapala makes visible the fact that, from the late nineteenth century until the outbreak of the First World War, religion played a central role—alongside nationalism, race, and empire—in conversations about the possible futures of the international order.

scholarly journals AN IMPERIAL APOSTLE? ST PAUL, PROTESTANT CONVERSION, AND SOUTH ASIAN CHRISTIANITY

2017 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-130
Author(s):  
SHINJINI DAS
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The One ◽  
The Ideal

AbstractThis article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.

Fashionable Figures: Narrative Roundels and Narrative Borders in Nineteenth-Century Han Chinese Women’s Dress

Costume ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Silberstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Museum Collection ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Royal Ontario Museum ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Theatrical Performance ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Close Study ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Women's Dress

Figural motifs have received little attention in Chinese dress and textile history; typically interpreted as generic ‘figures in gardens’, they have long been overshadowed by auspicious symbols. Yet embroiderers, like other craftsmen and women in Qing dynasty China (1644–1911), sought inspiration from the vast array of narratives that circulated in print and performance. This paper explores the trend for the figural through the close study of two embroidered jackets from the Royal Ontario Museum collection featuring dramatic scenery embroidered upon ‘narrative roundels’ and ‘narrative borders’. I argue that three primary factors explain the appearance and popularity of narrative imagery in mid- to late Qing dress and textiles: the importance of theatrical performance and narratives in nineteenth-century life; the dissemination of narrative imagery in printed anthologies and popular prints; and the commercialization of embroidery. By placing the fashion for these jackets firmly within the socio-economic context of nineteenth-century China, the paper provides a novel way of understanding the phenomena of narrative figures on women’s dress through the close relationship between popular culture and fashion in nineteenth-century Chinese women’s dress.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Priya Atwal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
Founding Father ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Political Dynamics ◽  
The World ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
The Impact

This brief chapter introduces key figures from the ruling dynasty of the nineteenth-century Sikh Empire. It discusses how Maharajah Ranjit Singh, its founding father, has long occupied a central, glorified position in history-writing about this former northern Indian kingdom. It argues how such simplified narrativization has hampered our understanding of the roles played by his female relations and children in the running of the Sikh Empire; alongside the impact of wider cultural and political dynamics that shaped its fortunes in the period between the kingdom’s rise and fall, from 1799 to 1849. The chapter outlines core goals of the book: to reach a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the world of the Sikh Empire and its broader connections to South Asian and global royal history, by setting Ranjit Singh and his empire within the wider context of his family; as well as within the regional politics of the new, expanding powers of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century India.

Al-Huda’s Intellectual Foundations

2020 ◽  
pp. 267-300
Author(s):  
Usha Sanyal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
The Public ◽  
Islamic Studies ◽  
Educational Trajectories ◽  
Intellectual Foundations ◽  
Intellectual Formation ◽  
The Impact

Chapter 7 explores the intellectual foundations of Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair. Zubair was raised in a family with Ahl-i Hadith affiliations, while Hashmi’s father had ties with the Jama‘at-i Islami. However, Hashmi gradually became an Ahl-i Hadith follower as well. What distinguishes the Ahl-i Hadith from other South Asian Sunni maslaks? I trace its history from the nineteenth century to the present. Following the educational trajectories of Farhat Hashmi and Idrees Zubair, I look closely at their PhD research in Glasgow, Scotland, on aspects of hadith transmission as students of Islamic Studies in the early 1990s. Hashmi’s research has not been available to the public and is therefore of particular interest. What was the impact of Hashmi and Zubair’s intellectual formation on Al-Huda as a social and religious organization, how does Hashmi incorporate secular scientific findings into her classes, and what can one infer from the above about Al-Huda’s politics, are some of the questions that this chapter addresses.

A Tamil Pietist in Ceylon: The Educational Experiments of Christian David

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-68
Author(s):  
Mark E. Balmforth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
School Building ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Missionary Education ◽  
German Education ◽  
Christian Family

This microhistory of the early nineteenth-century school-building efforts of a Tamil preacher in British Ceylon tracks an intersection between missionary education, British colonialism, and South Asian modernity. Christian David (1771–1852) was born into a Tamil Christian family with deep connections to the Royal Danish-Halle Mission at Tranquebar and educated by German missionaries Christian Friedrich Schwartz and Christoph Samuel John, like his more famous contemporaries King Serfoji ii of Tanjore and the celebrated Christian poet Vētanāyakam Cāstiriyār. In the year 1801, after declining employment in Serfoji’s court, David accepted an offer to become ‘Preacher in the Malabar Language in the District of Jafnapatam’. Drawing upon his extensive, albeit little-known writings, this essay argues that David expanded upon the mixed Tamil-German education of his childhood and the pedagogical experimentation of his missionary mentors to propose and construct a pioneering and consequential state-funded boarding school explicitly seeking to cultivate governable subjects.

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