Jacqueline Gold
“Moving Images: Colonial India on Film, 1917-1938”
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Abstract
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Was British imperial identity solely an imperial project? My research explores 1920s and 1930s films about colonial India in order to investigate the production of British imperial identity as a transnational project. As the future of the Raj became increasingly unclear, harnessing the image of colonial India became increasingly important. But some of the most powerful and popular images of the British empire, those that had the most significant influence on British understandings of the empire and British imperial identity, were produced outside of Britain. Americans, continental Europeans, British expatriates, and Indians all contributed to producing moving images of India and inter-war British imperial identity through a variety of film formats: popular films; state-sponsored, commercial, and independent documentaries; newsreels; and amateur films. British lawmakers attempted to harness these representations, but their attempts were constantly confounded by the fact that these images moved into, through, and around the empire with swelling volume, mounting speed, and from a variety of competing sources.
I will use my fellowship to begin in-depth research in several British archives. I will continue my previous work with amateur films held at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum in Bristol, England, viewing several recently required additions to the film archive and exploring their related paper collections. I have compiled a list of approximately 200 reels of film held by the Imperial War Museum and will compile a list of pertinent files held in the paper archive. Finally, I will conduct an exploratory search of the film holdings at the British Film Institute and the British Film Institute National Library.
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