In search of pearlescence: Pearls, empire and obsolescence in South Asia

Abstract

This article explores pearls as an allegorical device for thinking about British colonial art and economy in the later 19th century in South Asia. It takes as its focus elite and subaltern attempts to utilise pearls as a form of 'armature' and mode of resistance through an analysis of south Indian fisheries, the use of pearls in coercive portraiture and their 'blind spot' appearance in a well-publicised legal case for treason. The article argues that pearlescence -the sheen and light associated with pearls -was central to modes of understanding and representing the British colonial economy more broadly defined. Associated with both scarcity and waste, the pearl and the pearl shell came to define the shape of a globalizing modernity whose primary aesthetic was that of kitsch.