Nomadism of colour: Painting, technology and waste in the chromo-zones of colonial India c.1765–c.1860

Abstract

This article explores the contested ‘nomadic’ agency of colour in relation to colonialism in northern and eastern India. The author argues that colour provides us with a vital, if underexplored, field for analysing technologies of enchantment and questions of scarcity and waste in relation to the fundamental centrality of art to imperialism. Her intervention considers the ways in which the fetish, alchemy, alien(ating) material practices on the part of artists and the ontology of Sufism became implicated in struggles for power at the level of the political, the aesthetic and the globalizing economic. Although the palette can be thought of as a micro-centre of calculation – displaying as it does a range of hard-won substances from across the globe that wait to be transformed and perhaps sublimated into the aesthetic of empire – it is nonetheless the heterogeneous space for intense debate and violent, ironic Indian elite and subaltern resistance.