ART REVIEW; Beyond the Facade: Searching for Clues to India's
History  Published: November 02, 2003  ''TRACES of India:
Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation,''
at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, is the kind of
show that repays patient viewing. Immersion might be a better
word, for you really need to spend time looking at the show's
more than 200 exhibits, reading the brochure and digesting
copious wall texts to get a sense of what the curator, Maria
Antonella Pelizzari, is trying to say.  Ms. Pelizzari, a
lecturer in photography at Concordia University in Montreal, has
this message: that colonial-era photographs of architectural
monuments and historical sites, mostly by expatriate
photographers, intersected significantly with a larger, more
widespread program of colonial domination. In short, what seem
like innocent architectural studies are in fact agents in the
service of imperialism.  For example, take a series of
photographs of Indian architectural monuments from sur