Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-Insurgency in Colonial India

The existing scholarship on insurgency and counter-insurgency in colonial India has rarely engaged with questions regarding visual representation, and the visual aspects of coercion. Using wide-ranging source material, Representing Rebellion analyses contemporary visual narratives and their importance in generating new interpretations of subaltern identity. It examines the interface between the political and artistic agencies that authorized, produced, and disseminated to the British Public, images of colonial coercion against subaltern insurgency in South Asia. The political, artistic, and journalistic representations of the ‘Santhal insurrection’ form the core of the book. It reinterprets the historical context of the rebellion to present contested histories of political domination, subordination, collaboration, and resistance. Rycroft develops the theory of the ‘counter-insurgency complex’ to comprehend the ideological tensions and slippages implicit in imperial visual narratives. He brings together a multifaceted body of ideas and images to inform a reassessment of the relationship between administrative and public discourses of colonialism. Wide ranging and multifaceted–covering colonial geology, ethnology, militarism, imperial exhibitions, and the metropolitan press–this book will interest students and scholars of subaltern and imperial history, colonial and postcolonial theory, art, history and cultural and media studies.