Papers by Ranu Roychoudhuri
South Asian Studies, 2024
Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a global aesthetic movement... more Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a global aesthetic movement that argued for photography's artistic status on par with other plastic arts more powerfully than ever. Archives from South Asia demonstrate the movement's thriving life in the subcontinent with Calcutta emerging as a centre and its bilingual amateur photographer-writers as major participants simultaneously engaging in globally circulating specialist discourses on pictorialism and popular discussions of their practice aimed at public pedagogy. By looking into Bangla periodical press this paper investigates how Bengali pictorialists used popular Bangla magazines in the early twentieth century to establish their distinct voice regarding what counted as artistic photography as they engaged with a non-specialist mass readership. Mass-circulated Bangla articles were not vernacular translations of knowledge and practices produced in metropolitan locations and disseminated in transregional languages like English. Vernacular was an extension of Bengali amateur photographers' participation in global photography, as they remained grounded in their historical specificity. These amateur photographers were bilingual intellectuals who wrote in English for a global public and in Bangla for a Bangla-reading publics and refraining from translating culture as they moved across languages. Indeed, articulations in vernacular didn't mean a venularization of practice; they indicate plurality of belonging and affiliation that crafted the pictorialist aesthetic of the Bengali amateurs. By unpacking this intellectual history, this paper decenters the Euro-US-centric history of pictorialism towards writing an interconnected history of the artistic movement, while also complicating the category of modern Indian art.
photosouthasia.org, 2023
Waddell’s Calcutta album offers a rare occasion to analyze what the returning GIs took back as a ... more Waddell’s Calcutta album offers a rare occasion to analyze what the returning GIs took back as a souvenir and how it became a memorial site.
History Compass, 2023
Despite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather la... more Despite its long and layered histories, critical analyses of photography in India began rather late and remain comparatively limited in number. However, the burgeoining scholarship in the field illuminates photography's role in conditioning modern South Asian experiences, while also highlighting the global character of the medium that complicate the unmarked history of photography. Three intertwined historiographical threads are influential in narrating the colonial Indian camera cultures. The first thread emphasized descriptive histories, the second thread debated cultural essentialism, while the third thread inquired into myriad photographic genres to rethink colonialism. An inquiry into these three threads helps reflect on the intellectual scope of photographs from colonial India, while also directing to future archival and analytical possibilities.
Points of View: Defining Moments of Photography in India, edited by Gayatri Sinha. Delhi: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art., 2022
BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, 2017
Through historicizing photographs made by celebrated Indian photographer Sunil Janah (1918–2012),... more Through historicizing photographs made by celebrated Indian photographer Sunil Janah (1918–2012), this paper will elucidate the ways in which Janah created “secular icons” of historical moments during India’s passage from the colonial to the postcolonial. I will primarily focus on two sets of Janah’s photographs: the first set is from the 1940s, and centers on the Bengal Famine of 1943, communal violence, and the displacement of population before and after the partition of 1947, while the second set is from the 1950s, and emphasizes in particular photo-documentations of independent India’s industrial growth during the first two five-year plans. Contrast between these two sets will focus on two distinct ways of becoming iconic, while also highlighting the politics of revival/retrospection and the ways in which particular genres of photographs are memorialized, while others remain relatively unknown. Later day viewers of Janah’s photographs have seen only the political import of his pre-independence photographs of the Bengal Famine (1943) and the post-Partition mass exodus, while I argue for a seamless continuity between Janah’s pre-Independence social-documentation and post-independence industrial photography. I further contend that Janah’s photographs were material traces of an indubitable reality that embodied and at the same time exceeded their ideological message.
Book Reviews by Ranu Roychoudhuri
Critical Collective, 2021
Critical Collective, 2021
Show Reviews by Ranu Roychoudhuri
Take on Art , 2022
Review of "Singed But Not Burnt," Solo show of Shahidul Alam, Emami Art, Kolkata, 19 June–20 Augu... more Review of "Singed But Not Burnt," Solo show of Shahidul Alam, Emami Art, Kolkata, 19 June–20 August 2022.
Critical Collective, 2022
Showcasing 26 images from the Indian industrial landscape of the 1950s and '60s captured by the l... more Showcasing 26 images from the Indian industrial landscape of the 1950s and '60s captured by the lens of ace photographer Sunil Janah (1918-2012), this exhibition reflects on the possibilities and the perils offered by post-independent India's Nehruvian modernization project. The exhibits demonstrate how Janah's practice was rooted in global and cosmopolitan conversations on documentary realism, modernist abstraction, and social commitment for photographing machine-scapes, while also remaining grounded in the historical specificities of postcolonial India. Simultaneously, the show provides a rare opportunity to appreciate photographic prints as material objects embodying histories of production, reproduction, archiving and decay.
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Papers by Ranu Roychoudhuri
Book Reviews by Ranu Roychoudhuri
Show Reviews by Ranu Roychoudhuri