Page - 55 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Unruly Images | 55www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 55–86 Philippe Bornet Unruly Images Representing India in the Calwer Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde (1883) Abstract This article focuses on a work published in 1883 by a German Christian press associat- ed with a missionary society. The book provides a visual panorama of all the world’s cultures in 1,690 engravings. Most images were reproductions of material that had initially appeared in a variety of other contexts, ranging from missionary periodi- cals to secular travel magazines and British colonial literature. This study examines the message that the volume’s editors wanted to convey: the extra-European world was portrayed as devoid of historical agency, non-Christian religions as false, and the presence of western agents – in particular, missionaries – as providential. Retracing the life story of a few images, I show that some of them communicated these notions better than others. For example, engravings based on photographs were often not as polemical as those based on drawings, simply because of the characteristics of pho- tography as a medium. Complicating the critical reading of the images as simply mis- sionary propaganda, I argue that a volume like the one examined here is best under- stood when placed within a transnational (or connected) history of visual practices. Keywords Christian Mission, India, Engravings, Orientalism, Photographs, Hinduism, Calwer Bilder-Tafeln zur Länder- und Völker-Kunde Biography Philippe Bornet is senior lecturer at the University of Lausanne, in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilisations. After time at the University of Tübingen and at the University of Chicago, he completed a PhD in the comparative history of religions on rituals of hospitality in Jewish and Indian texts (University of Lausanne, 2007). His current research examines interactions between India and Europe and, more specifically, Swiss missionaries in South India at the beginning of the 20th cen- tury and the circulation of epistemic and visual cultures. Recent publications include Rites et pratiques de l’hospitalité (2010), and the edited volumes Religions in Play (2012) (with M. Burger) and L’orientalisme des marges (2014) (with S. Gorshenina). DOI: 10.25364/05.7:2021.2.4