ABSTRACT
The arrival of photography in South Asia, with the officers of the British crown in India (including present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh), marks the early registers of the practice as a tool of control and survey of the colony. As a region comprising multiple former colonies, and its historical relationship with the medium close to its invention in Europe, South Asia offers a fertile ground for the identification of decolonial practice. However, the departure of the colonizer does not result in an immediate shift in the depiction of the region in images. And so, the event of political decolonization, and independence, does not align with decolonization of the photographic medium.
This paper observes how the postcolony begins to embody strategies of oppression against its own citizens that were once used by the colonizer against its colonial subjects. In this atmosphere, artists from the region respond by articulating political and cultural imaginations that address true sovereignty within the nation-state. The image is mobilized to self-author narratives to redefine representation particularly of marginalized communities. The archive becomes a site of response—through reinterpretation of the colonial archive and the construction of new community-based archives. Decolonial practice can then be seen as having a dialectic approach, one in which there are multiple definitions of postcolonial freedom, often running counter to the singular narrative of the postcolonial nation-state.
