Monumentality and Its Discontents

Abstract Connoting immensity of scale, the aura of power, and the ambition to create a highly visible presence and lasting legacy, monumentality was a cardinal attribute of British India's scopic regime and the self-legitimization of imperial rule. From the 1850s onward, monumentality was central to colonial photography, whether through the archiving of precolonial edifices or, increasingly, through the visual representation and reproduction of colonial public works and engineering projects. In focusing on hydraulic engineering, especially canal building and bridge construction, and by citing the work of Samuel Bourne and other colonial photographers including engineers, this article argues for the constitutive role of photography in the making of colonial monumentality, in the creation and circulation of monumental imagery, in pacification and memorialization, and in the exercise of hegemonic power and scalar authority. It assesses the practical as well as the polemical uses of monumental image-making, the transmissibility of images, and the scope photography allowed for, or denied to, monumentality's multiple “discontents” (its obstacles, antitheses, and subversions) and for alternative readings of monumental power.