Gujral, Diva;
(2021)
Picturing Non-Alignment: Photography, nation-building and identity in India, c. 1950-1975.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
Abstract
This thesis examines practices of modernist photography and film-making that developed in India in the first few decades of its independence, explicitly concerned with the articulation of temporality/modernity and produced in the postcolonial state. I foreground the adoption of the camera against a larger network of artistic and cultural exchanges produced out of the nation’s early commitment to global anticolonial interventionism, considering photography’s varied mobilisation in the contexts of nation-building, international diplomacy and in art practice as itself enacting a conclusive non-alignment. My emphasis is on photographic/filmic projects such as the exhibitions and films by the Films Division of India that attempted to articulate definitive ‘universalisms’ of the Indian experience for audiences both in India and at trade expositions abroad; photographs taken at sites of state-led infrastructural modernism (such as planned cities and steel towns) that oscillate between the photographic modernism of the machine and views of the terrain flattened into discipline or utilised for resource extraction; and the complex reworkings and repeated photomontages by photographers at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Baroda, who were sceptical of state-centred aesthetic and infrastructural modernism and approached alternative strategies such as indigenist subjects and spaces. At the heart of these varied bodies of work is an interest in how the indigenous/rural body was positioned in relation to the notional ‘modern’, and the means in which temporal signifiers were mobilised to either reiterate or upturn the iconography of ‘modernist’ lens-based practice in its Indian context.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Picturing Non-Alignment: Photography, nation-building and identity in India, c. 1950-1975 |
| Event: | UCL (University College London) |
| Language: | English |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of History of Art |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10136585 |
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