Page - 79 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Unruly Images | 79www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 55–86 “modern” (and widely successful) pilgrimage site.41 Making an engraving out of the photograph had the consequence of removing the progressist aspect of the scene and so to say returning the swami back into a distant and past world of exoticism. While I am not suggesting that such an image is a counter-example to Saidian criticism of visual orientalism, its production does not conform to the scheme of a “western” invention of the “East”. Images like this carry a certain ambiguity and have the potential to resist the narrow evangelical subtext which runs throughout the volume: the “orientalist” aspect of the composition largely stems from the transposition of the photograph to an engraving and from its editorially determined location in the volume. Picturesque India The volume also includes a series of pictures that are not directly related to any religious theme and that show extraordinary natural landscapes, archi- tecture, or human scenes. Previous collections of such images, such as F. B. Solvyns’s Catalogue of 250 Coloured Etchings,42 and images accompanying ar- ticles in the French Le Tour du Monde attempted to give to the stay-at-home viewer the experience of travel. An example is an image republished from the work of James Fergusson (1808–1886), a British historian of architecture better known perhaps for his rather eccentric work on comparative mythol- ogy entitled Tree and Serpent Worship (1868). While the original publication (fig. 23) rightly indicates that it depicts a space adjacent to a temple for the temporary hosting of visitors, the choul- try, the image’s republication (fig. 24) suggests that we are actually looking at the dark nave of a temple. Other images show Indian landscapes remarkable for one reason or an- other, such as alpine-like sceneries or picturesque views in which architec- ture is in harmony with a natural setting, as in the picture of Gorakhpur (Uttar Pradesh) in Figure 25. Here, and without mentioning the obviously Islamic building in the im- age’s centre, the accompanying book with text comments on the contrast between the beautiful scenery found in India and the “horrible religious 41 Conlon 1977, 143–144. 42 Solvyns 1799. See Hardgrave 2004 and the comments of Karlekar 2005, 29.