|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"I have had two Delhi miniature painters here", recorded Emily Eden, sister of the Governor-General, Lord Auckland, who travelled in Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Punjab in the thirties of the 19th century, "translating two of my sketches into ivory, and I never saw anything so perfect as their copy of Runjeet Singh. Azim, the best painter, is almost a genius except that he knows no perspective, so he can only copy. He is quite mad about some of my sketches, and as all miniatures of well-known characters sell well, he has determined to get hold of my book.." The book she was referring to, Portraits of the Princes and People of India, eventually published in London in 1844, is one of the most well-known visual records of the Punjab of the 19th century, and with reason was the painter "determined to get hold of" her book, for she was undoubtedly one of the most accomplished amateur artists active in India in the early nineteenth century. There is an interesting afterword to the above-cited passage in Emily Eden's book, however. Speaking of the sketches in her book, she says: "I do not want them to be common, so I cut out of the book those that I wish to have copied, and I never saw a native so nearly in a passion as he was, because he was not allowed the whole book." We do not know how many of the Eden sketches Azim was eventually able to "translate" into ivory, nor is it possible to track where his highly-prized work now might be. But without doubt the kind of work he was doing has survived, mostly in the form of small portraits of figures who dominated the Punjab scene in the first half of the nineteenth century, from the Maharaja himself to the wide circle of men of talent around him. A whole industry, as it were, of painting portraits on ivory, quickly grew in the Punjab at this point of time. And that seems to have come about through a coming together of two very different developments. One, the decline in the royal patronage of painting in Delhi, where the Mughal empire was by now on the point of becoming defunct, and the consequent moving out of painters in search of work elsewhere. And, two, with the sinking of the Sikh kingdom of Lahore into oblivion, the growth of a strong feeling of nostalgia for lost times. Somehow, the Punjabis - not only Sikhs or the nobility, but also commoners - seem, at this point of time when the century was moving into its second half, to have gone into the mode of thinking intensely of 'things past'. As William Archer put it: "It was not only the grandeurs of Ranjit Singh that they viewed with ineffaceable regret. Any member of the Sikh royal family, any minister at the Sikh court, any foreigner who had defied the British, any matter that was truly Sikh, acquired fresh value." Whole sets of portraits of Punjab figures of the first half of the nineteenth seemed suddenly to answer a need. And painting them on ivory, in a small oval format, meant bringing many individual figures together within the same frame, while imparting to the work a feeling of preciousness. The painters from Delhi who moved into the Punjab were used to painting portraits of the Mughal emperors and the imagined portraits of their queens. But here the figures were different, and the range considerably wider. When they undertook to produce sets of portraits on ivory, new realities, in part predictable, had to be taken into account. The Maharaja, Ranjit Singh, naturally loomed prominently in these sets, but there were others of his family: chiefly Sher Singh, whose handsomeness few foreigners, including Emily Eden, were not able to get over, and the young Dalip Singh who, even though removed from the Punjab by the British and taken to England, had turned gradually into an icon. A surprising entrant in this assembly was a woman, the controversial Rani Jindan, who suddenly acquired, in this period of nostalgia, an aura of beauty and high-mindedness. Then there were the sagacious group of ministers and advisers who had served the state, and the warriors who had led the Maharaja's forces to great victories. Thus, the Faqir brothers, Aziz-ud-din and Nur-ud-din; the Dewans, Dinanath and Bhawanidas; the Dogra brothers, Dhian Singh, Suchet Singh, and Gulab Singh; the Sandhanwalia chiefs; the Sardars, Hari Singh Nalwa, Sham Singh Attariwala; Jamadar Khushal Singh; even the Amir of Kabul, Dost Mohammad, who, by opposing the British, had become in Sikh eyes a hero. The list is long, and the choice of clusters of figures varied from painter to painter, or from patron to patron. Only one thing in all this is certain: what was being encapsulated in these sets of paintings on ivory, and kept alive through them, was a memory. In all this, there has been no mention of matters of style, or quality. That is another territory. And all that one needs to say here is that, with sets being produced on a large scale, the standards of workmanship began to decline with time. And other media began to enter the scene, among them lithographs and woodcuts, but, above all, photography. But, then again, that is another and long story. |
||
|
|
||
