Photo State: Experiments in Eaton-escence

[bell] My name is Shria H and I'm head of research initiatives here at the Paulme Melon Center. Um and it's really my great pleasure to welcome all of you to the center um today. This as you can see is an intimate gathering. Um thank you for being here. Um, we are here today to honor the legacy of the late art historian Natasha Eton, who was involved with many projects at the center over the years and whose sparkling insight has left indelible traces on the ways we think about British and South Asian art history and the world more broadly. Uh, we feel very lucky to have Professor Chris Piney here to deliver a lecture in Natasha's memory titled Photo State Experiments in Eaton essence. The lecture comes to Penny's own adventures in rural India and South Asian photo studios with the wider illumination and brilliance of Natasha's distinctive approach. I know that for most of us in the room Chris Penny needs no introduction. I will though do a short intro. Um so Christopher Penny is emmeritus professor of anthropology and visual culture at uh University College London. He has had held visiting positions across the world in Australia, the United States, South Africa, Turkey and Poland. Um his research interests cover the art and visual culture of South Asia with a particular focus um on the history of photography and chromolithography in India. Se also worked on industrial labor and Dalith goddess possession. Among his publications which have had an immense impact on my work and I know and that is the case for most of you in this room um are camera indica photos of the gods the coming of photography in India photography and anthropology the waterless sea and lessons from hell as part of the photo demos collective he published citizens of photography the camera and the political imagination um without further ado over to Chris. Well, thank you for that uh [applause] thank you for that um uh introduction and um thank you everyone for coming. Um I feel it's a great honor to be able to um offer a a tribute to um Natasha. Um what follows is intended as a heartfelt tribute to Natasha. It presents 12 fragments of a radically different length from an already fragmentaryary text photoate which I hope will make her smile out of recognition and the affirmation in her own work of what she saw as the utopian alternative regime of value to be found in the bizaar the shrine and the nwabi court. Natasha's work is characterized by a fascination with images not as fixed outcomes of lineages or identities but rather as volatile unruly migrants. Uh translational vectors whose material stickiness produces not a fixity of place but a continual movement as it fuses with something else that crosses its path. It is these qualities that I seek to affirm. I attempt periodically to confront my own relatively conventional conceptualizations and explorations in bizarre shrines and nabi centers such as Lucknau, but also in rural India and South Asian photo studios with the wilder illumination and brilliance of Natasha's distinctive approach. Uh earlier this afternoon uh when we heard um wonderful series of um tributes and engagements with her work, I had caused a comment that reading her grant proposals and her work more generally always left me feeling rather quaint and archaic. >> [snorts] >> I had a feeling that the new generation was the next generation was racing ahead uh leading the old guys uh uh bewildered in their wake. Okay. So there are 12 sections and the first section is called photo state. One scorching afternoon in 2018 I set out for NY Surak in old Delhi. As usual, the journey there from Ramnagar, a few kilometers away, had taken about an hour. My auto rickshaw stuttering to a halt in the congestion approaching Chney Choke. Dismounting by the Jane Bird Hospital where in the 1990s I'd gotten myself photographed by one of the few remaining box camera wallers, I savored the bustle and energy. I wandered past the front of New Gramophone House where I'd purchased so many remarkable early 78 RPM records of songs from films including Awara and Mother India. Next was Daragali where photographic supply shop still sold hand painted studio backdrops. And then I pressed on past the Gurudoara and turned left into the relative cool of Nai Surak heading for the southern section where dozens of calendar retailers were stocking up for their pre- Diwali frenzy. Then on my right in a tiny passageway that served as a shopfront I glimpsed a hand pine handpainted sign that seemed to say photoate. The heavily serif and irregularly spaced lettering was a fine example of what Botnik and Raja ulogize as subtle technology. Beneath the sign was an ancient typewriter and a battered photocopier. Both looked decades past serviceability, but were clearly still viable and in use. As Sudia Mahadeavan observed, quote, "No technology dies a predictable death in India." In his memorable phrase, there is an obviation of obsolescence. There was no one in the shop, so I waited and gazed at this profound tableau, feeling comustrigated by this defamation of the photocopying service into a name that so perfectly described my decades long fascination with the ways in which the camera has been embraced by Indians. State conjured both the territory of India that has been my chief interest and the conditional manner of existing that photography engenders. Photo State also exemplifies the zone which so interested Natasha. What in mimmesis across empires she offers as a utopian alternative to bourgeoa modernity and which she characterized as the regime of value established in the shrine the bazaar and the nabi court. It is these locations with which the rest of this talk engages. Next section is called positively in a certain shape. It is one of those photographs that seems to occupy the wrong time. On a first casual glance, you might imagine it was made in the late 1920s or 30s. But as is often the case, evidence of its actual date comes as a surprise. 26th June 1952 is the rubber stamp below the name of the maker Mahanand Studio Madai. The artful arrangement of a group of men in two informal rows is testimony to the photographers's skill in dealing with large groups of sitters. The figures are arranged in a pleasing open formation and the photographers clearly directed the sitters how best to arrange their hands and arms. There are 10 adult males all dressed in South Indian white shirts and lunges and one younger boy at the left. Conversely, we might say there are 10 figures still present as the camera caught them, and one figure who's been subject to a furious defacement, a scratchy blue pen, having been wielded in an attempt to obscure the presence of the figure at the far right. What actions could have caused such offense? Perhaps these these are 10 office workers with their young peon their assistant and the figure in blue was found to have embezzled the firm. Perhaps he was found guilty of adultery. Perhaps having cuckolded the wielder of the pen. Perhaps the figure in blue contravened his cast strict dietary protocols was made an outcast. Whatever his crime, he was not alone. A Bombay studio image scanned from a glass negative exhibits the same vigorous defacement. The Okconor class fury being viscerally indexed by the energetic scrolls that obscure both faces of a couple. Yet the technique is different. If the Maderai defacer sought an impossible removal from the scene of photographic presence, the Bombay iconoclass seeks not oblivion but some sort of highly visible injury on the faces of those who remain recognizable. As with other icono clashes, the attempt to destroy instead creates or as instead creates or as Natasha who was fascinated by defacement puts it, the iconoclastic hammer strikes sideways. Next section is called tablet 19th January 2017. As frequently happens, villagers profer images of past events or deceased relatives for reef photography. Gordon Lal Babal produces an image of him and his wife seated before the main chamunda goddess image at a shrine in Nagda. It is perhaps 20 years old and is framed in rusted tin with a glass front. Its shape, size, and weight is remarkably like a tablet, say a larger Samsung of the kind which are popular with richer locals. Gur and Lal offers it to my camera, classed in the same way that the day before, Pratik Punjabi, the son of a leading local photographer, had held a shiny tablet for me to view an opulent pre-wedding shoot made at an upscale upscale resort on the banks of the river Narmmada. Next section is called photography in an expanded field. In November 2012, a Jane Guru Rishabch Chandra Surji who spurned motorized transport visited Batsura village pushed all the way from Nagda junction in an elaborate handcart by enthusiastic devotees. He was fated on his arrival. blessed a warehouse owned by one of the Janes took tea and read a newspaper in the center of the village and then evaluated the dynamics of the village puja room using a vastu sacred space app on his mobile phone. Towards the end of his visit, 10 puglia or panki nishan were made. These were footprints permanently recorded on small sheets of cotton after the guru's feet had been dipped in a bowl of saffron water. Following this, the images were dusted with Vashkip, a sandalwood powder that had been blessed by the guru. These puglia were imprints of the guru, indexes of his presence, and were treated with profound reverence as they were distributed as holy relics. They were what Natasha might have referred to as vernicles, i.e. icons associated with St. Veronica uh which show her holding uh the world's earliest photograph an image of Christ uh on a veil with which he washed his face throughout throughout many of the devities took photographs of the prince with small digital cameras as though these modern devices could pay homage to this foundational moment of mimmesis. At the close of proceedings, the Jane host soaked the guru's feet in the water and then pressed them to his head in the gesture of subordination. Cheron Raj the whole encounter laying bare as it did the mechanics of transmission seemed to present in almost mythic form a parable of representation and authority and what Natasha liked to call the magical contract of photography. Next section is called cool photography. Perhaps situating photography in this expanded field should also involve an appreciation of its thermal properties. There is straight photography, pictorial, studio, documentary, and many other ways of describing and dividing photography as a practice. Sometimes photographs will be categorized as co as cool or hot but usually this is intended metaphorically. The image stuck with electrical tape to the door of Ragna Samsung fridge suggests that a literal interpretation would be more appropriate. The photograph on the fridge is roughly inscribed at the top in Devonaguri Omar Shivai, an invocation of the god Shiv and documents raath firew walking during the festival of holi. Despite the egalitarian ideology of holy when it is claimed that everyone becomes one, several cast specific bonfires are lit at dawn on the morning of the first lunar day of the month of Chetra. This marking a period of seven days leading up to Shitla Saptomy Shitla's seventh during which only cooling foods are prepared and eaten and water is poured over the stones that littered the old Shitla shrine. Then follows a bangfueled carnival in which color is thrown or rather violently applied to the faces and bodies of relatives, friends and neighbors. And earlier today we saw a great photo of this on used as the cover to Natasha's color book. The heat of midday and the exertions of the morning encourage a lull in proceedings until the afternoon's main event. traversing a trench filled with glowing charcoal in a collective effort to contain the thermal and cosmooral heat of the coming hot season. Known as a jewel in the village I'm familiar with, the trench is usually about 4 feet wide and 15 feet long, although claims are always made about neighboring villages where supposedly the tulle is 40t long. Significantly, it is dug directly outside the shrine to Shitla, the cool one, goddess of smallpox, besides the new Shiv shrine. Prospective fire walkers disappear to purify themselves in wells and tanks on the periphery of the village while preparations continue at the jewel. As the embers burn down, the Shiv temple priest fans the flames with large sprigs of neem leaves and pours donated ghee onto the fire. Neem is considered very cooling, its shade being prized on hot days by exhausted travelers. We could do this some neem today. The fire walkers emerged from the surrounding terrain forming a long line. Each person bearing a kalash, a brass pot filled with water and topped with mango leaves that they decant over the shiveling near the Sheetla shrine. Then along with Rag Ragunath, they traverse the fiery chul. He was photographed on a fellow villager's phone as he walks barefoot slowly towards the end of the fire pit. I'm not sure how clear it is in this image. Um, a line of younger villagers patiently files be behind as they all undergo this public demonstration of internal tranquility and placidity. There are two local theories that explain how this is all possible. One is expended by the higher cast grouping in the village, James and Watis in particular. This stresses Krishna's cooling power. It is the ghee, the clarified butter, they argued, which releases heat from the cinders. And ghee is intimately associated with Krishna as a cooling and imperishable product of the cattle which Krishna preserves. for Rajputs and casts lower in the local hierarchy like Ragunath. However, the firew walking is made possible because the participants like the god Shiv mobilize their internal heat to conquer the heat of the jewel. It is a model of thermal exchange that also lies lies at the heart of refrigeration technology. Ragunath prevented from birth from sharing his complex cosmological thoughts for he is both nonverbal and deaf seems to be using photography and his domestic appliances to communicate clearly. Natasha I feel would have enjoyed this literally sticky image. Next section is called Nazar and Dulam. It's not only that photography is entangled in thermal exchanges. We need to also consider the material and embodied landscape in which vision operates and in which images exert their power. Firstly, consider an elaborate practice that I witnessed in a rural household in central India in 2012. It's called naza utana or the removal of the evil eye and is a procedure that's deployed whenever anyone in the household is affected by the evil eye. I realize here that I sound like a modern incarnation of Edgar Thirsten writing in 1912. Natasha was pretty much obsessed with Edgar Thirsten. So um I'll take the compliment if indeed it's offered as such. In the case of this particular household which has four members, this is about twice per year. The person afflicted with Naza, the patient sits before the healer. In this case, the healer was the patient's father, but elsewhere, it's likely to be a Brahman priest or Dalit shaman of Gora who performs this procedure. The healer prepares a one- foot long wick made from raw cotton which is then soaked in ghee. This is then placed in front of the head of the patient seven times before being tied to a short stick and allowed to hang vertically over a small water pot, a lot that is placed directly in front of the patient. The wick is then ignited and as it burns with the accompliments of much hissing and spluttering drops of burning ghee regularly drop into the water pot below where an accumulated slick of soot starts to gather. This material process visualizes a transference of the physical presence of Nazar into the water pot. the relocation of Nazar from the body of the afflicted onto the surface of the water. It recalls the common anti- Nazar phrase to be seen throughout North India which declares buri naza term kala evil naza person your mouth will go black except that in naza utarna it is a kind of watery eye that turns black. The Burin Nazo slogan is often written on the back of vehicles from which may hang a shoe or a totka, a lime with green chilies on a thread, but will more commonly display the grimacing face of a demon or an apotropeic spot pattern. The demon's face and the vibrant dancing spots are intended to deflect the malevolent extra transmissive vision of the Nazal. This vertigenous exchange of form makes me think of the endless transformations that appear in Natasha's work. Shark charmers who turn into telegraph poles. telegraph poles that turn into pebbles and shells that blur the boundaries between mouth and ear. The next section's called on the category of the deotic. Some popular photographic practices are doubtless best described as vernacular. If Pierre Bordeau's analysis can be trusted, then 1960s French popular photography perhaps qualifies. Although he nuances his description by pointing to a pervasive naturalistic popular aesthetic, he chiefly emphasizes the position photographic practices occupy within hierarchies of taste. As he puts it, barbarous taste is never entirely free of all reference to good taste. Popular practices, in other words, are reactions to dominant practices. The demotic following JF Champolon who elaborated this concept in his engagement with the Rosetta Stone in 1822 denotes a groundup practice of the people rather than the reactive top-down trajectory of theories of vernacularity. Deotic assumes a widespread subton practice which is more than local and less than global. While vernacular based on linguistic models assumes popular practices which are reactive to dominant hierarchies, the linguistic paradigm of vernacularization involves a distilling out of local idioms from much larger cosmopolitan structures or as the Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock puts it in conscious opposition to some larger world in relationship to wi to which they choose. used to speak more locally. Pollock contrasts vernacular place with cosmopolitan space, describing vernacularization as choosing, quote, to write in a language that did not travel as easily and as far as the welltraveled language of the older cosmopolitan order. It is apparent how models of vernacularization applied to media suit a rather conventional mode of anthropology invested in emphasizing localization as active cultural practice. It affirms the heroic estimation of the human subject [clears throat] who always proves capable of overcoming the potential tyranny of technology and unwittingly feeds exnominating narratives through its celebration of divergent local appropriations. Demotic seems a better description than vernacular for much of the popular practice encountered in India for two central reasons. Firstly, a good deal of popular photography reveals a desire to engage with rather than withdraw from the cosmopolitan. Telephones, cityscapes, motorbikes, airplanes, or hear radios are all symptoms of a modernity and mobility that connects rather than disconnects localities. This melange of speed, glamour, consumption, and aspiration forms the repertoire of much global popular photography. Secondly, much global popular photography looks very similar. This is the more than local less than global space of the demotic. A distributed horizontal space of popular practice whose dynamic space is quite different from the vertical space of the vernacular. [cough and clears throat] Next related section is called modern studio. Photography offers a device for encroaching on what is yet to be a space for imagining and enacting a future. as for the performance of new hybrid identities through in messing the subject of portraiture with technological artifacts such as bicycles, planes, motorbikes, radios, and telephones. The subjunctive becomes in an instant the prolleptic. As Karen Strassler writes of Javanese practices, quote, the studio portraits charge emerges from its marriage of the possible this might be to the actual this has been. But the material repertoires that inform these local iconographies of modernity repay study. So they are not simply signs of progress at the level of consumption. Unlike in Philip Auglia's Garnan studio, Indians have no visible desire to be pictured with fridges, washing machines or shiny bathrooms. The modernity that is invoked in South Asian studios is not that of affluence or success per se, but is rather connectivity, speed and transmission. James Seagull serves as a good guide here. Writing about photography in the colonial East Indies, he argued that quote, "Photography emblematized the pervasive fantasy of a lingua franker that would offer perfect translatability and open transmission, a medium ideally suited for a new orientation to the globalized world of modernity and away from closed boundaries, rigid hierarchies, and fixed identities. We could say that photography provides a medium through which all these various proceses bike, radio, telephone, television, etc. are united. But we should also note that all these technological artifacts involve the mobility and liquidity, physical movement across distance and through space and transmission of sound and image. It is in this context that a late 1970s Maja Pradeshi Swag Studio montage from a wedding album showing the groom erupting from a film canister seems simultaneously archaic and foresighted. analog film through this imaginative presentation seems to preempt not only the procession of simulacra whose egalit egalitarian nature Natasha often celebrated. This image also seems to perfectly capture the explosive nature of Natasha's thinking about the visual. Next section is called an accelerating aura. The observation that the proliferation of photography in India has encouraged the production of more rather than less aura has to be the starting point rather than the conclusion of any account of media history in the subcontinent. Walter Benjamin in his optimistic Marxist incarnation had predicted that photography's exhibition value would erode the images cultic value. Natasha was definitely interested in the persistence of the cultic. Benjamin's account is understandably monotheistic. Its entire causitative and explanatory logic is grounded in an assumption of singular origins in which the cultic, the authentic, and the hierarchical find their ground zero. The early missionary fear of proliferating Hindu images was not driven by a simple misrepresentation. Despite attempts by Hindu reformers such as Ram Moan Roy to monotheize their religion, most Hindu practice continues to affirm an originary multiplicity which technological reproduction mirrors rather than subverts. An early montage print produced by Suresh Punjabi of Swag Studio [snorts] in the late 1970s features multiple appearances of his brother Mahesh, who is his go-to model. At one level, it is a demonstration of virtuoso printing techniques achieved in very basic conditions by a new studio keen to make its name, but is also illuminated by the endologist Betty Hyman's use of the metaphor of a crystal to describe the Hindu worldview. Quote, "Whatever man sees, he has seen or will see is just one facet only of a crystal. Each of these facets from its due angle provides a correct viewpoint, but none of them alone gives a true all comprehensive picture. Benjamin's fundamental assumptions about images, origins, and authenticity arise from what the Egyptologist Yan Aman describes as the mosaic distinction. It was Akenatan the pharaoh of the 18th dynasty about 2700 years ago who tried to end cosmism a world of endless overlapping images. Akenatan attempted unsuccessfully thank goodness to overthrow polytheism to put a stop to a proliferation of gods and images through the imposition of monotheism. He was the inventor of what Ashman calls the world's first counter religion. The source of the idea that images were a betrayal of something purer and less vis visible. What he attempted to destroy was a world of promiscuous images of a respect for the visible where it was assumed that different communities had arrived at their own slightly different visions that were all ultimately exchangeable. What Ashman called techniques of translation created an ecumen of interconnected nations. Indeed, Benjamin's utopian yearning for a comprehensive liquidation of the privileging of the original might be seen as both embodying the legacy of the mosaic distinction and also as a deep aspiration to transcend it and participate in a similar ecumen. Natasha's work can be seen as a re-energization of this cosmistic potential. Next section, I think we've got three to go, is called inverting the lens. In North India, there is a strong connection rooted in the Sanskrit prefix prati between the representational and political. Among the denotations and connotations of Pratti, our copy, print, likeness, comparison, repetition, continuity, towards, against, and in opposition to. It is suggestive of a double-facing mirror that signifies mimemetic reflection but also opposition and destruction. Some Indian objects dramatize this reversibility in unforgettable ways. Consider the Jane Hawa Morti or air statue, usually only to be found in temples. These heavy brass artifacts, afraid mine was too heavy to bring on a hot day like this to show you. These heavy brass artifacts present a cutout of Mahavir, a powerful depiction of presence through a figure ground reversal. So they're a brass outline where the outline is the cutout. The presence is the absence of Mahavalia. It's a genius artwork. It's a tool for extraordinary thought uh for amazing contemplation. Mahavir's transcendence, renunciation and power is conjured by presenting what he is not. That is the surrounding contours of his missing body. Equally instructive are mirrored images of deities still common in rural central India. Usually the product of artisanal work in pilgrimage centers, these prints place elements of commercially printed images of gods behind a mirrored surface. Parts of the print are excised and the remaining elements form templates for areas on the mirrored surface where the tain is removed. The desired end result is a palims of printed images of the divine and plain mirrored surface. The final effect is that when the beholder pays homage to the god, she sees herself adjacent to the deity in a perfect exemplification of the mechanism of duran [clears throat] in which the devity looks at the god who also sees them. This also recalls the remarkable mirror story in Nisami's Iscandam with which Natasha opens mimmesis across empires. I reflected on the reversible or more properly invertible nature of representation. One blisteringly hot day in a rather desolate field known as Dantalab about 2 kilometers from the village of Batsura. Dantalab, a mango tree in the middle of nowhere, is where the priest Sam Maharaj thrashes. It becomes possessed sometimes as frequently as every two weeks. Though an exceptionally bleak location in especially in the summer, remarkable events unfold here and pilgrims travel great distances to participate. Dunelab is a place I always associate with the burning heat of the brain fryingly cruel variety. The flatness of the terrain and the white light make your eyes shrivel. And once you reach the sagus's chosen spot, there is minimal shade. I try and pack three lers of water to see me through each jatra. Ram Maharaja's jatra or choki involves manifesting successively as five different sagas archetypally the spirits of warriors decapitated in battle also known as juja in parts of Rajasthan. Um they all smoke cigarettes except Ambbeal the head sagas who smokes ganja in the chillum. The other sagases will smoke any cigarette. They don't have brand preferences and are usually offered the cheapest. There's one called Midlands. [snorts] All the action unfolds under the mango tree. Ram Maharaj [clears throat] removes his battered pugry turban and sways himself in a thick blanket. Indifferent to the insufferable heat, he starts to twitch and utters a standard vocalization of impending possession. Aim. This functions as a dramatic stage direction precaging the onset of thrashing and the switch between the identities of different sagases. Meanwhile, the sagas' needs have been attended to. They are offered their chillum and cigarettes and incense stick incense sticks are lit. Agabati. Soon the area at the foot of the mango tree acquires the look of a first world war battlefield. A mini passionale wreathed in the smoke of battle. Then the logic of Pratty starts to make itself felt. Maybe it is the heat. Maybe the starkness of the location, maybe the manner in which I'm using my camera, but I suddenly have the sense of being trapped in a Rabininoian i.e. uh following Paul Rabinau's definition of externality. So the sense of being trapped in a Rabinawian externality as a distant spectator looking at the sagas. Until this point, my apprehension of the sagas as representation had simply involved a unidirectional act of looking. What did they look like to me? But this, I realized, was not enough. And perhaps I heard Natasha whispering in my ear. That the logic of Duran demanded that I close the gap and try and see what it was they saw. Using my camera lens as prostthesis, I positioned it to mimic the eyes of the sagus, trying to capture what it was like down at ground level, surrounded by the stubbly goat eaten vegetation, breathing the perfume of ganja and tobacco, the hazy outlines of human devities just visible on the horizon. Uh next um section is called Sufi Light. Oh, sorry. We had another slide of the Sagas's view. I suppose that I was still in search of some kind of nomination, some visual tz, some ethnographic booty to salvage from my fieldwork, something like the allure of the Muslim court that so enchanted Natasha. I was in Lockchn now, North India in 2018 and trying to get to know the workers in a cluster of a halfozen photo studios in Aminabad in the old part or one of the old parts of the city. Despite the vengeful destruction reaped on the city by the British in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, much of the glory of Aad endures and the old center of the city Husseinabad presents a bejeweled skyline comprising the big and little Imamaras and the two fine gateways, the largest of which is the roomi daaza. During research in the city in 2018 and 2019, I was struck by the sense of Avadi architecture as a beautiful facade of buildings turned into pictures, structures made to be seen as much as lived in. But there is a striking absence in the Euroamerican imagination. Luck now conjures the work of early photographers Feliz Pat, Samuel Bourne, and others. uh Bato obviously was a huge interest of Natasha's. It is a city that endures in a sepia imagination and yet in contemporary lock now there is zero presence of that sepia strike. Uh this is um borrowing Adorno's notion of the radio strike, the continual chatter of radio in the background for the sepia strike strike that um one does often encounter in um uh cities. Uh so zero presence of that sepia strike no postcards no calendar images no posters of the many cities that Lucknau has since become it is the new ones the capital of India's most populous state the dullit monumentalism of of anka park that dominate the one space where aad ud the old sheia luck now which so fascinated Natasha met the camera in contemporary luck now was a fast reducing one. I recalled a much earlier visit to the bar I imbara maybe circa 2005 and seeing a small desk display under the interior of a photo interior arch of a photographer a Mr. Raza. The desk was covered with a sheet of glass under which were which assorted photographs were displayed including several recording the visit of the film and stage actor Puri. In October 2019, Mr. Raza was still flying his trade as he had for the last 42 years but only just. Tisib was the fabled old luck now etiquette which many people complained was being destroyed by the new brutal connibation of rural migrants that was replacing the old city. Maybe it was there in the requests often made that I should not copy old photographs of female Muslim clients that were displayed within studios and sometimes perceptible in the Polish politeness of Sudep, the proprietor of student photo and the courteous professionalism of Baba, their striking chief studio photographer. I'd asked many local photo studios to produce images that featured a luck. Now I'd attached a few adjectives and clues in my commission paramper traditional ithasic historical and so on in the hope that this would precipitate visual tazib. Most of the resulting photographs were unimaginative conjunctions of my portrait placed in front of obvious facads referencing Loch Now's striking architectural heritage in ways that did little or nothing to illuminate the history and traditions they embodied or the sentiments that might be attached to them. Strikingly different was one of the images produced by the aforementioned student photo service. The process of having my portrait made had already alerted me to the distinctiveness of their approach. Barbara, the photograph, the photographer, sorry, took great care in posing me and directing my line of vision to his raised finger held on either side of his camera and sculpted my hand gestures in what I understood to be an archetypal Sufi declaration of appreciation. offered most commonly when listening to music. The gesture always put me in mind of Rishi Kapoor's ecstatic kowali performance in Amma Akbar Anthony uh the man moan desai 1977 film. The resulting photoshopped image was remarkable. It montaged my studio pose against the dramatic backdrop of the roomy Darvaza at night. my upraised hands seeming to respond to and also usher forth a stream of light that burst at seemingly immense velocity from the base of this late 18th century archway adjacent to the bar I imbar in the center of old luck now maybe this was new the heatless light of Allah that light was of course the effect of innumerable car headlights captured on a slow exposure I would later see this visual appearance mirrored in a series of street advertisements in the same part of town advertising Vodafone's 4G services. The river of light materializing the unimaginable speed of data transmission. Both these images involving the room darwaza babas and the vodafone adversement seem to materialize light as an effect of speed of vision and information as mobile and unstoppable. That Sufi gesture also invoked memories of the portfolio of images that Suag studio had prepared in 2010 for Sonagiri Sarkca from Mansour, a town about 100 kilometers from Nagda junction. Sonagiri was an aspirant healer and sage who took inspiration from the nearby shrine of Hussein te at Jara, a renowned pilgrimage center known for its great therapeutic powers. He had met Suresh Punjabi at a function and admired his work so much that he commissioned an ambitious set of publicity images for use on largecale flex banners and for printed momentos to be given to devotees. Although the true beauty of some of them only works digitally. I think Natasha would have enjoyed that. The photographs captured Sonagiri's distinctively expressive hands in ways that I'm sure student photos Baba would have admired. Uh the final section is called the magical double. Photography's duplicatory propensity is often celebrated in portraiture. Many Nagda studio wedding albums in the 1980s including double included double portraits of the bride and the groom. These involve printing the negative on one half of the paper and then flipping the negative so that the face of the subject is shown symmetrically confronting itself and testifying to photography's uncanny mode of production. what Natasha termed its magical contract. The Kiran Kala Mandia studio in Bombay active during the 1950s and60s specialized in mirror montages. There was one on the left that seemed designed to render a woman's dress fully visible revealing the full extent of skill in tiring tying and wearing a sari. However, in the Kiran Kala Mandia images, the mirror does not simply duplicate. Rather, it provides additional iterative information that would otherwise be concealed. They bring to mind the folklorist AK Rammanagen's observation that quote mimmesis is never only mimmesis for it evokes the earlier image in order to play with it and make it mean other things making mirrors turn into windows or you might also say to echo Dur and Derrida and also Natasha there is No repetition without difference. Doubling starts with a fantasy of a desirable moreness but quickly dissolves into a destabilizing multiplicity. The cinematic notion of the double provides one pathway into this. Richard Allen following Ashish Nandi points to the prototype of deities who quote incarnate and thereby reconcile differences and which the film star quote playing the double role allegorically incarnates. Allan further suggests that the centrality of the double tradition within Bombay cinema is quite an expression of the mimemetic textuality of Bombay cinema itself and functions as a form of selfmicry that allows a redemption of its products from their quote incipiently abject status as derivative even degraded copies. The numerous Indian versions of the magic pot tale express the conclusion that repetition never occurs without difference rather perfectly. One memorable version from Uttar Pradesh describes the joyful amazement of two poor farmers Kalu and Razia who found a large pot in their fields. Kalu dropped his tobacco pouch in it and Razia extracted two pouches. So they put almost everything they had into the pot to magically double it and were delighted with their new wealth. Then while cooking, Razia slipped on some potatoes and fell into the pot. Kalu immediately pulled her out, but then saw a second Razia struggling to get her hands and feet out of the pot. Kaloo pulled her out as well, whereupon Razia shrieked, "Where has this woman come from? Why did you pull her out? Just stuff her back in again." Khalu faced a dilemma. quote, "If we stick her back in, won't we just be making the same mistake again?" The tale ends with Kaloo losing his footing and falling into the pot so that there were two couples whose households were supplied through the magical properties of the pot. Quote, "The neighbors were surprised to see how wealthy Callu and his wife had become, and they were still more bewildered to discover that next door to them were another couple resembling themselves." Exactly. "It must be his brother," they concluded. I hope Natasha enjoyed all my stories from the bizaar, the shrine, and the Nabi court, but I think she would have enjoyed this last one most of all. It captures something of her joy in the figure of the copist as someone swept along in the river of mimmesis. For her, the copierist subverted western hierarchical models of mimmesis, being able to see it, as I quote from mimmesis across empires, a stream without a beginning and an end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle. It captured the paradox of mimmesis that so fascinated fascinated her the fact that as she wrote the more it resembles the more it differs. This is one aspect of the vitigenous dynamic which her thought and writing so brilliantly embodied. Thank you. [applause] Thank you so much Chris. That took us to so many different places and kind of ideas and thoughts. We have time for questions and conversation really. So >> do you get water if people want? >> Yeah. Yes. >> And also if there are questions online that's um feel free to put it in the chat or thoughts um are fine. >> I can ask myself a question [laughter] >> which is that um I imagined before assembling this that I would be able to counterose my perspective with Natasha's. And as I hope I've made clear, Natasha's was a far more revolutionary, challenging, wilder, more imaginative. I mean, at heart, I'm basically applauding empirical anthropologist who likes living in his Maj Padeshi village whenever he can. Um but I realized in assembling it that um Natasha's work had um had had infected my work so much that I couldn't really usually easily disentangle a position that was hers. So there was um yeah so I I I found myself wanting to add on what would Natasha have thought but I feel that actually in the weave and >> heft of the thing she's there in her presence is there >> in ways without naming it. Yeah, >> Chris is is she is she unique in your exper is she unique in your experience in having that effect on I mean effect on your perceptions and your understanding and your looking back at at things. Um have you ever experienced that sort of response to other any other >> scholars or does she have a very particular position with you? >> Barack Obama might have said she's at the front of the queue. I'm not sure she's unique. I mean, she's >> very distinctive and um yeah, there's a quality of firstness about her work. I think one of the things that as you were speaking because you talked about so many things like the magic contract of photography but also u my messes and repetition difference it it sort of flowed very organically and one and I I was wondering how that was it conversations how did you exchange um work was it you know was it were you tell her >> stories from Madhya Pradesh for instance were you sending each the drafts and >> yeah, we read each other's work. Um I I didn't read the most recent book for the publisher, but I read um the first two books. Um so I Yeah. So, so it was as a colleague. I mean, it's actually kind of now I think about it a bit odd that um um the publishers sent them to someone in the same Anyway, it was my good fortune that they did. >> Um, so um, so I was I was very deeply engaging with her work. >> I mean, there was also a kind of common set of conversations that, um, were multi-olar, I'd say. >> So, you know, my Taik's work was very important to hers, >> very important to mine also. M >> um then the the kind of historical lineage of Benjamin especially >> hugely important. >> Um and I think um a lot of her apheristic style >> derives from Benjamin. Um, so I think my LSE, my social anthropology LSSE training taught me to write in long sentences with verbs rather than aphoristic poem lists. I guess I just wanted to say it's not a question and it's not a clear thought but I had the luck of being supervised by both you and Natasha I mean mainly Natasha and when you were talking I was thinking yeah what are the strands that I took from each of you and what is it that Natasha gave to me I think for sure this ability or this cur curiosity to read everything not that I did it justice but I think that's what she passed on to me and even the books that I have from her. It's like Benjamin and it's Bart's the neutral and Christa Thompson's shine. I was just thinking of the things of myself but something I guess I was wondering about. Yeah. So what is it? Did she give me a way of writing or a way of reading a set of arguments? I I don't actually know what the arguments if she did and I something I'm wondering about when I listen to your talk is like what was politics for Natasha and maybe for you and also in this word photo state because on the one hand I've been trying to understand politics actually or like my way of understanding it through Natasha was actually description and reading and just describing the way that the world has come to be and can be. But then there's another part of me that's like politics should be transformational. And yeah, I guess I was just wondering if other people had thoughts on this because I I I'm trying to think how I would if I now presented Natasha with a set of arguments that I've made because she I haven't talked to her in a long time. And >> yeah, I guess I was just wondering a little bit about politics specifically. >> Well, I think her work's explicitly political but not in instrumental ways. Um, I mean, she's a prime candidate for potentially being cancelled. >> Yeah. Uh so so I mean I think her impulses are all admirable but I I I don't recall instrumental pragmatic political discussions with her but I think her commitment to the the image as a migrant you know to no that nomadic quality is I think profoundly political especially on um especially this week which um not only did I manage to get through this lecture but um it looks like uh uh the forces of evil may have peaked in this country. We have a question from one of our online um audience members, Thomas Travers. Um asks, "Do you think there were particular intellectual encounters or influences that gave Nadasha her spark and her nimleness?" Um her personal encounters in India and with the 18th century seem important, but were there also uh art historical currents she picked up on? her in I I can't speak about her influences. I mean, I can speak about the influence she's had. >> I mean, I was very struck looking in the um bibliography of um uh Tom Young's recent book >> making and unmaking of the East India Company and then Holly Schaffer's grafted history. two brilliant and I might say brilliantly produced um books from Paul Melon Center um you know your average painter has one or two references in those the bibliography of those books but there's like you know Natasha's is kind of six inches um so so if um size is any or length is any indication of inference um I think That says quite a lot. >> Yeah. >> Um I mean the thing about Natasha is um I'd like to be able to offer indepth conversations about Benjamin which I'm sure we did have but I remember the kind of the the frivolous things. They're the things that stick in one's mind. I remember I got her when I was briefly teaching at Northwestern in Chicago. She came over to do a talk and um it became expletive laden at the end for reasons that were you know in a very good humored way but it completely shocked a rather prim and proper um audience. There was a reference in one of the uh talks uh this afternoon to Holly Clayson who was part of the audience I remember. Um so I remember swearing um Natasha I remember um organizing at UCL um uh disc a conversation between Will Self and Jonathan Lamb the 18th century literary historian and um author of the brilliant book um uh preserving the self in the South Seas. a conversation on travel writing and travel literature. Um and Natasha was invited to the um afterevent dinner which for fiscal reasons had to be in um the fish and chip shop [snorts] around the corner from Jud Street um where which did turn out to have an interesting history because apparently it's where um Arthur Scarle and the NUM executive used to dine during the minor strike and they were bugged by MI5. >> Good lineage. >> Um but what I remember from that >> Yeah. What I remember from that whole event was um being nabbed by Natasha outside afterwards pointing out that was it called Colling and Clark. There was a very up market private press bookstore that had served as the TV location. Right. My walking rig chain. Yes. It would served as the um filming location for the um TV series Blacks. So she then got on to a Graeme Lahan, the collected works of Graeme Linhan and inevitably Father Ted. So we had 20 minutes gazing into black books and her giving me a rundown of all the best bits of Father Ted and I have to say her her knowledge was extensive. [laughter] So So I can't really comment on the serious stuff. >> I think that's great. Hi Chris. Um I was just I was struck by a phrase that you use the magical contract of photography and as I was kind of doing my own sort of review work. I um I did pick up we're on Natasha's often talking about enchantments and magic and um there's a there's a brilliant article in literature compass I think there's a journal about enchanted traps >> as well but there's I was wondering that sort of where >> you think that her her magic was was placed or where she was driving or receiving that kind of sense of the magic particularly of photography as well. I think there was something or >> maybe not just photography but um reproductive images or um and and what kind of magic she was drawing on because it does seem to be a trope or a a way of describing the again the power the she often talks about the agency >> and maybe that's something again that she was connecting with your work and Talig and maybe an anthropological tradition as well which allows for >> um a magical agency of photography of not just photography of image making and I wondered whether that was something that you had discussed with her or was a was a was a kind of theme that >> um connected you. Well, I think there was discussion earlier about in fact I think you no Rosemary in her introductory comments um spoke about the the breadth of Natasha's interests um whether she was really an art historian what what other discipline she could have worked within and I think anthropology is the obvious one. I mean one of her earliest um pieces which became the Kolkata print chapter in um mimmesis cross empires was published in the anthropology department journal journal material culture. I think the title was excess in the city. Um, and I think she took from in particular, but from a much broader range of anthropologists, you know, what one could call a kind of neoanomism, >> but I think it was a neoanomism that was tempered by Lour. I suppose one of the kind of things we used to talk about were Yeah. What what what's useful about neoanomism and what's um what's silly about it? Someone had a quote from her on the screen earlier where she said enough of vibrant matter. >> So I think that was her kind of distancing herself from the sort of Jane Bennett excessive neoanomist discourse. And I think one of the way well one of the the kind of things we spoke about were how lour among others helps one modify the more absurd claims of neoanomism which see which the danger of which involved simply generously exporting human qualities to nonhumans and I think there's one bit in lour's we have never been modern that we both fixated ated on where he talks about um Boil's air pump and he says that it was it was it lacked will but was capable of showing so it's not it's not humanlike it it has agency but it lacks will it can show so that there's a theory of materiality in there and I think she she you know ran with that much more nuanced, useful. So, so alongside the kind of wild poetry, there's a much more considered um perspective, I think, and and magical traps. I mean, as she's riffing there off um the anthropologist Alfred Gel, who wrote a very um uh celebrated piece called Vogal's net um which was basically on artworks and enchantment. Um, and I think she, you know, she she liked the the cabalistic mystical Benjamin rather than the rational Marxist Benjamin that, you know, obviously most time intimately curled up against each other. >> I think I have a big voice. >> Oh, it's recorded. Okay. No, I was just thinking um one of the things that I've noticed about Natasha in recent years is her turn to Catholicism and the level of it. And then I thought it was actually very much part of her earlier beliefs in other kinds of mysticism and uh various uh forms and that they she actually connected the two or the more than two because she was as somebody said promiscuous with her thinking and um I sometimes would say Natasha but that's not you're you're talking about certain issues around you know she became very attached to her church and all that. And she said, "I don't see the difference." And it it struck me that she thought about that. She thought about the the shift in a way, but also the something that she didn't think was as much of a shift because for her, I think she suffer. She just moved if she wanted to. And I I hearing more recently about her interest in mysticism, I thought I wonder if that Catholicism was a continuity in a different way um to attach to that or it was communitybased because she was very very fond of her community in the church, you know, and really relied on them for and did so much work for them. she did a lot of work for that church um and gave money as well. So there's some way in which her thinking moves through things that we normally separate or we normally think that you know there's some way in which uh I like your point though about her um her the nature of her uh thinking about Benjamin because she had a very uh difficult relationship right uh she was she never really liked to have the theory thrown at her or to be have to account for it unless she had already gone through it, you know, kind of thing. But it it struck me that her thinking had moved almost to multiple types of areas that we normally don't connect as being conjoined. Uh she found I think no problem with that. >> Well, re read the Catholicism. I think that's her cosmism. See, >> so you know this is where Yan Aman's >> obsession with Akenatan is is really useful. So the idea that the mosaic distinction, the Akenatan's counter religion, monotheism, attempted monotheism is fundamentally different. That's what signals a break in traditions of cosmism which are intrinsically polytheistic promiscuous interransatable. So the cosm Aman's model of cosmism is basically to say that prior to the counter religion moment everyone understood that they had their own version of basically the same thing. So there was translatability overlap interoperability. So I think you know it's poly Catholicism presumably it was the polytheism of Catholicism. I'm blanking on the name of that famous book on religion in Naples which basically argues that you know it's saints that are uh as important as Christ or the pope. Um it's like Alan Daniloo's Hindu polytheism. So I think you know that's an easy transition and um you know I can think of um several great scholars of Hindu polytheism who had um Catholic convent educations. >> That's very interesting. >> No no it's really good we have time uh for conversation with a glass of something as well. So if you wanted to um continue or Is that okay? >> Um, so we want to say a very very big thank you to Chris Penny. [applause]