Representing Rebellion : Visual Aspects of Counter-insurgency in Colonial India

This volume is a study of British nineteenth-century representations of India in the popular press, specifically the Illustrated London News around 1850-56. It focuses on the work of Walter Sherwill, in particular his treatment of the Santhal hul and also looks at earlier and later work by Sherwill and others in the same journal.

The monograph analyzes the visual narrativization of counter-insurgency campaigns and discusses in detail how various colonial and metropolitan communities emerged as having an important input into the discourses of imperial domination. Using the analytical framework called the 'counter-insurgency complex', the author offers a new field of inquiry which is attentive to both the metropolitan and colonial representational strategies, and more specifically to the entanglement between colonial panopticism, imperial narratives of counter-insurgency, and the metropolitan exhibitionary complex.