31 Jan 2025 — Nitin Verma

Imagining the Past in Color

One afternoon, a while ago, while reading Ramachandra Guha’s Gandhi Before India I began wondering about the difficulty of imagining that forgone Gandhian era in color. Whenever I think about Mahatma Gandhi, or Jawaharlal Nehru, or the World Wars for that matter, I can somehow only paint mental images of them in black-and-white. It seems extremely difficult to imagine those times in color, in high fidelity, and at the “frame rate” of real vision.

What’s a little strange, though, is that imagining life during the times of the writing of the Mahabharata—or any other period of un-photographed—history, in color comes much more naturally to me. To me, that’s somehow got to be related to the televised images we have seen of these two swathes of historical time. Despite the times of the Mahabharata or Jesus having been much, much older than those of Gandhi or the World Wars.

Even though I’m speaking of myself, a simple web search would tell you that many other people have a similarly hard time imagining life from the last couple of centuries in color. At any rate, it takes a lot of conscious effort to imagine life in those days as appearing like the present appears to us. This is the power of photographic images, and in some sense the power of vision—even if that vision is mediated through a technology.

This begs the question: which other technologies could be shaping our inner ‘image’ of our collective past?

Perhaps, a more interesting question is: how would the documentation technology of the current era shape its image as contemplated by future humans?