'ART & SOUL: A view from the Raj

IN an old, old issue of a Kolkata journal — the Calcutta Gazette it was, I think, going back to the dying years of the 18th century — I remember seeing a short advertisement inserted by a painter. Having recently arrived from England, the artist stated, he was here to offer his services to the noble ladies and gentlemen of the town, for painting their portraits or those of their families, for very reasonable amounts of money. Then, followed a short description of his qualifications and a rate list: one sum for a bust portrait, another for a full-length portrait, all in oils, and so on. I do not recall the name of the artist now or the exact date of the journal, but the fact of the advertisement has stayed in my mind for a long number of years.

Clearly, this gentleman was not the only English artist, then, working in India. The East India Company firmly in power, and growing in influence with the years, there were droves of enterprising people who started making their way to India: traders and private merchants, mercenaries and freebooters: seekers of private fortunes, in other words.

Among them also were artists: not such as were in the service of the Company, but essentially freelancers, attracted as much by the exotic prospect of sights that the mysterious East offered, as by the possibility of making money. The story has been told before, but interest in it never flags. For, as one scans the years, a whole host of colourful names begins to surface. There was, thus, Tilly Kettle, often spoken of as "the first British artist to have made a career in India". Having come to India in 1768 and made fair money working for Indian princes — such as had survived, that is — and East India Company merchants, he went back to his own land but wanted to return. It is another matter that he never reached India again, having walked into the desert between Aleppo and Basra, and never seen again. Ten years after Tilly Kettle, who was essentially a portrait painter, the highly gifted William Hodges, who had earlier travelled to Antarctica, New Zealand and the South Pacific with Captain Cook, landed here, "the first British landscape artist to visit India".

Not long afterwards came to India the uncle and nephew team, Thomas and William Daniell, who reached India in 1784, stayed here for 10 long years, scoured the country — constantly painting and sketching — for picturesque sites and themes, and whose wonderfully accomplished views of India almost define British art in our country. Their most celebrated oeuvre, Oriental Scenery, published with as many as 144 plates in six large volumes, became, and stayed, a rage with collectors over the years. For most Englishmen, this was India, savagely romantic and atmosphere-wrapped: ruined temples, magnificent forts, dense jungles, crowded towns, quiet village ponds and majestic mountains. The Daniells, turned celebrities back home, travelled a great deal, painting and publishing other works — Views of Calcutta, Excavations at Ellora, Picturesque Voyage to China, for example — but it was their Oriental Scenery which has tended to linger the longest in public memory.

The 19th century saw a host of artists, trained professionals and talented amateurs, virtually descend upon India, painting the land and her people: William Simpson, George Landseer, Edward Lear, William Carpenter, Emily Eden, Robert Grindlay, Franklin Atkinson, and the like. But before this turns into a hand-list or a catalogue of names, one needs to remind oneself of the lively debate that goes on among scholars about the art produced in and for the Raj in India.

Did this kind of art subserve the imperial design in India, thus "becoming a significant point of representation and resistance within the subcontinent’s indigenous visual cultures", as one scholar asks? Did these works play a role in "the articulation of colonial power, desire and anxiety?" What were "the colonial artefact’s relations to issues of knowledge, identity, memory and ritual"? And so on. Elaborate methodological approaches — anthropological, sociological, art-historical — are being applied, and post-colonial theories have come into play. It has been contended by some that, with their "imperial and controlling gaze" in India, many of the British artists working in India were participants in the establishment of colonial hegemony, accomplices as it were in fashioning the British Raj. Cultural theories are having a field day.

And yet, before one is completely submerged in theory, one must return to art as art. Not every artist could have been working, consciously or otherwise, to the imperial agenda, or simply making a record of things. And it is not difficult to conceive of many of them being drawn, in purely aesthetic terms, to exquisite sights and different people. To remain informed by theory is not without a point, but to see everything in terms of theory is to take an extremely "impoverished view of art", as one protesting scholar has put it. There are formal aspects of works of art, and the aesthetic joy that resides in them. To deny those is to deny oneself a great deal. Why should it be necessary, one wonders, to read the work of these artists — regardless: from Tilly Kettle to Lockwood Kipling — in imperial terms and not discover in them qualities that they are imbued with?

One could take any example. Like the accompanying view of the inside of one of the magnificent Jain temples at Mt Abu that William Carpenter painted in 1851. Carpenter travelled a great deal in India — Rajasthan and Punjab he appears to have been specially fond of — and was apparently drawn to people as much as to sights: his oft-published portrait of Tara Chand, court painter of Mewar, with his family, is a moving study. Here, he turns to capturing, in watercolour and pencil, his impression of an exquisitely carved monument, every inch of which one knows to have been worked on as if the material were not stone but ivory: such is the suppleness of forms and the delicacy of workmanship. There they all are in his painting: undulating brackets and massive pillars, the filigreed dome and crowded niches, dancing figures and meditating siddhas. But also real people. One can imagine that they were not all there when he was painting the ‘scene’, and that, while inducting them into his work, the painter must have been drawing upon his memory, and his sketches, of the types that he must have been seeing all around himself in Rajasthan. But by bringing them in — men performing rituals, ochre-clad sadhus, shy women dressed in saris — he humanises the place instead of seeing it simply as a great architectural monument. The Empire is not in his mind: art is, and people are.

This article was published on December 7, 2008