ABSTRACT
Delineated in a cochineal red on a delicate ivory background, S. C. Sen’s standardized trade design pictures a south Indian temple and a Mughal pavilion in a manner that looks back toward the colonial concerns of earlier artists like William Hodges and Thomas and William Daniell. The paradox, which in the case of Sen’s image is split between the two sides of the cabinet card, is, in modern Indian engagements with architecture, compressed into a single complex surface. Anthropologists are given to citing Rousseau’s dictum that to better understand man close-up one should view him from afar. In that spirit, consider popular Indian “occidentalist” representations of exotic monuments. Generic highrise buildings, reminiscent of those in the Vivekananda image, can be found in the backdrops used by the traveling photographic studios that migrate through rural India serving peasant customers. In the case of the Chicago image, however, a moral message is also implied: Swami came and conquered a materialistic West.
