Excess in the City?

This article examines the role of imported prints in early colonial Calcutta. It explores the critical entanglements of this art of mechanical reproduction within the cosmopolitics of imperialism. Questioning the 18th-century ‘consumer revolution’ and contemporary ‘actor network theory’, it asks whether either help us to comprehend fully these picture-human relations. In time of economic boom and recession within this early East India Company state, art was valued not so much as an inalienable possession but for its seemingly contradictory status as both quasi-fetish and as an aesthetic of the ephemeral. Patriotic yet disposable, such pictures participated within a visual labyrinth driven by lotteries and gambling, theft and debt. Using Indo-Muslim and British attitudes towards the colonial art market, this article exposes the centrality of chance and luxury for a creole heterotopia that ultimately hinged on a tense ambivalence.