In his Sketches Illustrative of Oriental Manners and Customs, published in 1797, British soldier and artist Robert Mabon made a last-minute change to the frontispiece (Figure I.1). While we do not know exactly why he changed his mind, this illustration encapsulates the interface between visual arts and British imperialism. Mabon brings together the emblematic figures of History and Painting. While History draws the attention of Painting to Indian subjects as depicted on a tablet, a rainbow unfolds with the power of the latter's pencil. A picture is worth a thousand words, but, more importantly, visual representations convey deeper and more subtle significances than words are capable of producing. These are constituted by the images’ literary and historical backgrounds, the decisions made by artists and patrons alike, audience response, and, above all perhaps, the ideas that are revealed about power. Mabon's frontispiece allows us to think about imagery as an important arena to address how the British Empire in India can be known, understood, and, most importantly, remembered.

An Empire of Images is not a history of the British Indian Empire as told in images; rather, it foregrounds the visual arts’ centrality in the making of political legitimacy during the early years of British rule in India. I am concerned with the visual languages of imperialism between 1688 and 1815, a chronology internalized as the long eighteenth century in British historiography. A reassessment of this period, however, requires us to turn to its wider colonial context.

This book began after a series of conversations with Ayesha Jalal on the nature of reform and religious life on the campus of Tufts University over a decade ago. An extension, of sorts, of the many discussions with her on the topic since my days as her PhD student twenty years ago, I was struck by the need to study religion in the era of nineteenth-century reform not with an eye toward communalism that developed later in time, but to the many meanings of religion, especially comparative religion, in the nineteenth century.

Another important moment emerged at a 2014 conference on the occasion of the anniversary of the Centre for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, convened by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. In a panel on religion in nineteenth-century India in which I discussed religious reform, I fell into a long conversation with the great scholar Professor Susannah Heschel on various aspects of religion, history, and approaches to empire. This chance encounter led me to think seriously about religion's many historical guises. For that generative discussion and for ongoing friendship and fellowship, I am grateful.

Ideas developed in this book grew after the ‘Religion and Its Others: Power, Sovereignty, and Politics in Indian Religions Past and Present’ workshop, funded by the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute at the University of Victoria in March 14–15, 2019. This workshop featured the generative work of Rinku Lamba, A. Azfar Moin, J. Barton Scott, Shruti Patel, Brian Hatcher, Uday Chandra, and Ramesh Bairy.

This book has studied the making of political legitimacy in the early British Empire in India through images. In so doing, it has argued that central to the creation of political legitimacy was the fabrication of an imperial self-image. The foundation of British imperial authority has been examined here through visual representations of people, landscapes, and flora and fauna in India by both British artists and Indian artists. The importance of art was to be measured not only by the range of audiences for such works—which was vast—but, as demonstrated in the previous chapters, also by its status as a medium through which empire was visualized and even shaped. Visual arts, in other words, enabled the British to see themselves ruling India.

Although the exercise of power necessitates a degree of abstraction, colonialism brought the idea to its most extreme. The importance of abstraction was central to the maintenance of difference, which possibly was the colonizers’ only resort in a strange, unfamiliar land. As noted in the second chapter, the formulation of abstract ideals in matters of governance seeped easily into British private lives in India. While Beth Tobin has viewed art as a mode of abstraction, which she parallels with colonial extraction, this book suggests that visual arts in the British Indian Empire itself came to be shaped by abstraction. Such an assertion redirects us to the question of acknowledgement of the role of Indian artists, who provided low-paid creative labour while remaining mostly anonymous.

The chapter explores the Indian public’s proactive efforts to participate and insert themselves into the constitution-making process. This ran against the accepted wisdom at the time, which held that constitutions should be crafted by mature political elites and constitutional experts behind closed doors. Their insistence on having a say ultimately forced the Constituent Assembly to incorporate the public into its chambers and procedures, and it turned the constitution-making process into an open public affair. Newspapers, magazines, and radio programmes closely tracked the constitution-making process, and the draft constitution became a bestseller. The Indian public acted as unsolicited citizens, as sovereign-subjects, in their pursuit of their constitutional visions and aspirations. Even before the constitution arrived, the Indian public was busy working out its potential implications for their lives. Indians claimed ownership of the constitution, suggested amendments, translated it into vernacular languages, and they held the central and provincial governments to account on its basis. They, thus, legitimated the constitution even while it was being made.

The public who acted as unsolicited citizens during the time of the constitution making continued to expect and insist, moreover, that state authorities and politicians open avenues for their participation. The public ensured that in India, there was no idolized constitutional ’moment’, frozen in time. Instead, they turned the making of the constitution into an enduring momentum for India’s democracy and its democratic politics. The constitution became an open site of struggle, never solely within the purview of judges and legislatures. The multiple acts of assembling beyond the Constituent Assembly during the time of the constitution making took on a life of its own, creating organisations and social movements, which animated local politics and sustained a vibrant constitutional culture.

This chapter explores the overlooked constitutional reforms and the constitution-making process in the over 550 princely states spread across 45 per cent of the subcontinent’s territory that were not part of British India. We argue that the constitutional processes in the princely states were fundamental to the subsequent successful merger of the states and to the making of the Indian Union. Constitutionalism in the princely states was an insistent refrain to India’s constitution making and became the standard language through which to think about and act on political aspirations for democratic government. The numerous parallel constitution-making processes in the states produced comparable constitutional templates that could ultimately be assembled into the new Indian constitution. The chapter analyses constitutionalism within the states, among different states and between the states and the Constituent Assembly. It examines the understudied constitution making process in Rewa and Ratlam states, the formations of unions of states, and finally looks at Manipur state in the north-eastern frontier of India to show the limits of the constitutional process of integration.

This chapter offers a new way of understanding the workings of the Indian Constituent Assembly. We move beyond studying the script, or the published Constituent Assembly debates, making visible the labour, infrastructure and ideas that went into the staging and the atmospherics of the assembly itself as a public and a lived space. The procedural rituals, the pulse of the debates, and the physical setting of the Constituent Assembly building enabled and shaped the constitution-making process. We follow a few actors from the Constituent Assembly as they moved across different assemblies in India and abroad while the constitution was still in the making. In doing so, we reveal the Indian constitution’s part in an emerging international regime of human rights and practice of comparative constitutional law and reconstruct a sense of the everyday ordinary life of the Assembly, which was deeply connected with the Indian public and the world outside.