| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 310 words from this article are provided below; about 737 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Malavika Karlekar. Re-Visioning the Past: Early Photography in Bengal 1875–1915. New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 197. $49.95.
Historians battle everyday with the opacity of the past. Since the 1960s, this has been made particularly challenging by the subjectivity of interpretative practices. Documents and texts no longer simply empirically narrate the words contained therein but are almost encoded visions of their times waiting to be unraveled through contextual interpretations. Given the potential and reality of conflicting interpretations, one assumes that a direct visual record would simplify, and more importantly objectively convey, the past as transparent series of events. This is where Malavika Karlekar's book makes an important critical contribution; she points out that photographs, despite their formal concord with empiricism, where they are seen as direct records of the real, are anything but "innocent" (p. 15). Creatively using Roland Barthes, Karlekar shows the colonial photograph to contain "onion-skin like layering ... lead[ing] to multiple meanings, each determined by the specificities of the viewer's situation" (p. 15).	1
Karlekar makes a case for the analytical significance of the visual at two important levels. First, the past, she rightly advocates, needs to be viewed "visually" as opposed to simply "textually," as is done more frequently in the historical profession through documents, diaries, and letters. Following from this, photographs, Karlekar argues, should be read as "a narrativized visual history" of both individuals and institutions. But photographs record reality more than just imagistically. At another level, beyond direct depiction, photographs prompt a "more critical insight into what lies behind the image ... this is the interface between roles and changing expectations." Photographs, then, do not simply record reality, they also serve as tools to complicate any monologic versions of it for along with images they project social norms, institutional mores and contemporary morals (p. 96).	. . .

There are about 737 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.