The Phantasmagoria of Elephanta: Caves and the Optics of Darkness in Colonial India

In studies of optical media from the long nineteenth century, phantasmagoria shows have been posed as a significant moment in the development of a proto-cinematic audience for theatre and film. Phantasmagoria was instrumental in the genealogy of cinema not only for the projecting mechanism of its apparatus, but also the production of a darkened space of viewership that manipulated the senses. Beyond phantasmagoria, Noam Elcott draws attention to the production of an ‘artificial darkness’ through black screens, darkened theatres and photographic dark rooms that functioned as a shadow history of modern art practices.  The simultaneous discussion of the black box of cinema has continued this conversation about the infrastructures that accompanied representational technologies associated with cinema and the production of visual subjects through an apparatus of darkness. 

Yet, this discussion has ignored the historical fact of empire and its production of darkness, a dominant trope through the course of the nineteenth century. How did colonial darkness figure within the new infrastructural architectures of representation? Colonial darkness would likely be dismissed as metaphorical in these material histories, where the colony exists as an object of representation, without problematizing the question of representation itself or its role in the production of visual subjects. Taking the case of the caves at Elephanta in Western India, I demonstrate however, that such practices of darkness were not solely a result of technological experimentation, but a darkness produced actively in relation to the colonial world. Nor was this colonial darkness merely metaphorical as has been commonly posed, but had a material basis in journeys of exploration and the rediscovery of cave structures.