Colour, Art and Empire: Visual Culture and the Nomadism of Representation 9780755603534, 9781780765198

Citation preview

List of illustrations



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Table 1 Table 2 Table 3

Anon., Advertisement for Indian cow urine drink, date unknown; public domain. John Forbes Watson, Dyers from his book The People of India, 1860s; albumen print reprinted in 2007, author’s collection. A.C. Haddon, Use of the letter E as a test for visual acuity, from Reports of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits, 1906; author’s collection. Anon. artist working in the Torres Strait, drawing of a European shooting a cassowary, 1898, pencil on paper; by permission of Cambridge University Library. Julius Lips, African representation of a screaming European, unidentified, from Lips, The Savage Hits Back, 1937; author’s collection. View of an installation dedicated to the Tagore family’s celebration of Japanese culture, in Jorasanko, Kolkata; photo by the author, public domain. Nandalal Bose, Gandhi as Bapuji on the Salt March, 1930, linocut, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan; public domain. The Black House (present-day boys’ hostel) Santiniketan, designed by Nandalal Bose, 1930s; photo by the author, public domain. Nandalal Bose, rhythmic diagrams from his book Vision and Creation, Calcutta, 1956; author’s collection. Chittaprosad, Woman and child during the Bengal Famine of 1943; author’s collection. Quit India Installation in the Calcutta Panorama, Kolkata Town Hall; photo by the author, public domain.

Colours of mythical ages. Murray Island average units as opposed to the English. Different expressions, colours and presiding deities of nine aesthetic essences.



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Plate 3 Plate 4 Plate 5 Plate 6 Plate 7 Plate 8 Plate 9 Plate 10



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Poras Chaudhary, Photograph of Holi celebrations, c. 2008; copyright Getty Images. Mughal artist working at the court of Lucknow, Nawab Asaf ud-daula Playing Holi, c. 1780; by permission of Sackler Gallery, Washington. Sheela Gowda, And Tell Him of Your Pain, 1998/2001/2007, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; copyright Getty Images. View of the Millionenzimmer, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, 1760s; photo by the author, public domain. Johann Zoffany, Prince Jawan Bakht receiving Warren Hastings at Lucknow, 1784, oil on canvas; Victoria Memorial, Kolkata. Robert Home, Ghazi-ud-din Hyder, King of Awadh, receiving Tribute, c. 1820, oil on canvas; Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata. Mazkhar Ali Khan, Self Portrait, c. 1820, gouache on paper; copyright British Library. Anon. ‘Company School’ artist, View of Taj Mahal, c. 1800, watercolour on paper; copyright V&A. John Absolon, View of the Interior of the Crystal Palace, 1851, watercolour on paper; copyright V&A. Owen Jones, two pages of Indian ornament from his book The Grammar of Ornament, 1856, lithograph on paper; author’s collection. Rabindranath Tagore, Portrait of Muhammad Yasin, c. 1930, watercolour on paper; Jorasanko, Kolkata. Rabindranath Tagore, Yellow Animal in a Forest, c. 1930; watercolour on paper; Jorasanko, Kolkata, permission sought. Nandalal Bose, poster for the Congress meeting at Haripura, 1937; public domain. View of the entrance way to Kolkata Town Hall, with a print after Jamini Roy’s Madonna and Child; photo by the author, public domain. Anon. Bengali artist, 9/11, c. 2004, synthetic pigment on cloth and paper; author’s collection. Zainul Abedin, Woman and Child Seeking out Food During the Bengal Famine of 1943; author’s collection.



Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without a very generous Philip Leverhulme Prize (2009–11) and a one-term sabbatical leave from UCL (University College London) which enabled me to undertake much of the research in London, Cambridge, the United States and India. What was a glimmering of an idea – kickstarted by a forgotten pigment recipe book by an obscure British artist based in nineteenthcentury Lucknow (in present-day Utter Pradesh), which I unearthed in the India Office, British Library – has grown into something quite different. I am grateful to the late John Gage for sharing his great expertise on colour. At UCL, I am deeply indebted to my colleagues in Art History – I have learnt so much from their inspiring and richly varied work, as I have from many discussions with our students. It has been a real privilege to work with Emilia Terracciano and Sanjukta Sunderason who have far greater expertise than me in relation to twentieth-century famine in Bengal. My research in India was made possible by the generous assistance of curators, scholars and archivists at the India Museum, Kolkata, and Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, West Bengal. It was made fun by numerous offthe-wall, quasi-surrealist and heartfelt conversations in the course of my travels – Nadia, Lottie and Julia in the Andamans; Martin and Anita at Tolly; Marjolijn, Patricia and Rickey in Agonda. The staff at the Asia, Africa and Pacific Collections in the British Library have made my life so much easier; working in such a library and archive has been and is a real joy. Recently I have been so fortunate to meet Sadan Jha whose own work on colour is inspirational. Research at the British Library has been happily supplemented with conversation and trips to the café and the pub with Renate Dohmen and Sarah Thomas, whose own projects on the visual culture of imperialism have been enlightening. I have a longstanding debt to Michael Rosenthal, Geoff Quilley and Christopher Pinney, whose support and scholarship have been such guiding forces. ix





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At the University of Michigan, Deirdre Spencer has always been on hand to help with my library queries and to be my partner in crime in terms of joviality. Aspects of this project have been presented at various locations including a Northwestern University/University of Chicago graduate seminar; Leeds City Art Museum; the University of Sussex; the University of York; Roehampton Institute; Queen Mary, University of London; the University of Wales; UCL; and Bilgi University, Istanbul. Amongst many others, I am enormously grateful to William Mazzarella, Miles Ogborn, Kate Teltscher, Michael Franklin, Christiane Brosius, Sarah Turner, Vera Wolf and Karen Lang for their comments and insight in relation to such presentations and my project at large. Although I was unable to take it up, I was very pleased and honoured to be awarded a Clark Art Institute fellowship – thanks to Michael Ann Holly and Mark Ledbury for their understanding. It has been a simply wonderful experience to work with Liza Thompson and Alex Higson at I.B.Tauris. I am so excited to be publishing with such a forward-looking press and to be able to share and create ideas for the book by working together, hands-on. This project was researched in times of sickness and its bleak desperation, and in periods of better health. I could not have done it without the support of my family and friends – especially Jane, Beaves, Echidna and little Shelby; but my greatest debt goes to my husband, Achim, who, working sometimes so very far away, nonetheless makes me feel there is always a home for us somewhere in the world. This book is dedicated to him.







Introduction Chromo Zones and the Nomadism of Colour

Identifiable in part by a scarf dripping with a shimmering trim of glinting mirrors, a figure struggles with/over a sack of pigment. A potential partner in crime adjusts his own spectacles so as to try to espy what might be something, anything, in or beyond this possibly poisonous, beautiful miasma of colours (plate 1). Although the photographer of this intriguing image holds the camera askance above the revelling figures, the scene is still disorienting and spectral: what happens to the harmony or to the faciality of colour when confronted with this splattering of clashing blues, pinks, zesty yellows, turquoise, indigo, red and other more indeterminate hues which so evocatively capture saturated fabrics, bodies, filtered, fuzzy fusions and chromo zones of colour in the air? Red and indigo constitute a veritable river which courses through the composition: red like spilled blood on the heads and necks of those lowest in the picture; dark blue garbing, guarding the clothes of those encircling the figure with the mirrored headscarf. Vertiginous and disorienting, colour wreaks havoc with both the conventions of its gendered coding and its engendering of what we might term its ‘orientalism’. The figure with the headdress of shimmering mirrors is possibly male, female or may be androgynous; the stained clothes of all of the figures constitute a (dis)guise with which to ward off and to embrace colour – colours that are like shadows, showers, after images or even auratic presences or certain presences which generate aura. Colour strikes! Colour is the subject and the object of the data ratio of this digital image. Here there is a certain iconoclash (or rather, chromoclash) literally at play! By being so carnivalesque, the photograph inverts the everyday order of things to invoke sacrifice. But colour can also be a critical and a vitalising vehicle for redemption in relation to waste. 





colour, art and empire

In plate 1 what I mean by redemptive waste is the drama of the passing of winter and the celebration of spring which the photographer so aptly captures. This is Holi, the coming of the Hindu New Year, associated not only with the love between Radha and one of the most famous of god Vishnu’s avatars – Krishna – but also with the bravery of Holika, the sister of the evil King Hiranyakashyap.1 As folklore and mythology would have it, Holika immolated herself to save her nephew Prahlad who had been condemned to death by Hiranyakashyap because of his devotion to Vishnu. Holika’s sacrifice is today commemorated by the lighting of bonfires on the eve of Holi, on the night before the full moon in the Hindu month of Phalguna.2 Holi, as either Krishna’s coloured water play or as royal celebrations, may have become a subject much celebrated by Mughal and Rajput artists, but it was avidly avoided, perhaps even feared, by European colonial painters (plate 2).3 The free play of watery and powdered colours on the pictorial surface allows painting to become a complex palimpsest or to constitute the blank space for experimenting with the blurry indexicality, the materiality of colour. Holi tests the limits of pictorial representation. The stuff of Holi is also the stuff of paint. Perhaps the tactility of chucking, rubbing, mixing pigments during Holi is to enact a kind of painting. And to throw dry and wet colours at the paper is to perform painting as Holi. Holi is actually and virtually holy; Holi embodies a sacred desire for excess which liberates colour from its confinement in carefully piled pyramids of spice and pigment – as seen in the bazaar and on greetings cards sent out during this time of celebration. Although originally made from ground flowers (which were also used for medicinal purposes), today many of Holi’s pigments are toxic. Colour is potentially and really dangerous, noxious or even ‘contagious’.4 But this pigment is also magical.5 There are, then, several colours of the sacred. And the sacred can also be slippery because of the existence of what I call the ‘nomadism of colour’. Colour, Art and Empire is about the conflicting chromatic genealogies of colonialism’s visual and material cultures. It takes colour as its subject and as a device for thinking about how we can approach anew the question of cultural exchange, violence and resistance. This is not to bestow upon colour a certain perspectivism, a world view that merely anthropomorphises it into the glorious and sometimes tragic protagonist



Introduction



of an epic narrative, but rather it is an attempt to trace the line of flight of colour as and beyond a narrative subject. Sometimes colour is pressingly present but often it is the more spectral, elusive ground for investigating colonial encounters. To make use of genealogy, as South Asian artist Sheela Gowda does, is to draw a thick line with pigment, a line which tries to navigate its way through a labyrinth of colour, violence, a cacophony of voices, brushes, buckets, threads, looms, burning plants, steaming vats, rags and knives, streaming veins, revolution and death (plate 3). I find Gowda’s work pertinent here because she twists colour – she makes it hang, knitted together, where entwined with many other forces at play it finds its own shape and means of becoming.6 My own project explores how colour transforms and, more critically, shapes and even defines or justifies colonialism and struggles for freedom. Colour’s agency plays with harmony, conflict and camouflage to give, with stunning effect, a fresh perspective on colonialism and its limits. Colour, I want to show, provides us with one way of approaching the still relatively neglected artistic practices of this period in history. Treading familiar and unfamiliar ground, Colour, Art and Empire aims to provide a cogent, if modest, series of snapshots of the entanglement of art, science, economy, politics and race in and beyond the British Empire. Why I have to chosen to term this the ‘nomadism of colour’ is because nomadism so readily evokes and invokes both mobility and the possibility of a gathering together. Nomadism has a discrete and uneasy relationship with colonialism and modernity but also with what Deleuze and Guattari term the ‘war machine’. What I mean by nomadic is a potentially revolutionary figure who or which is able to move smoothly and silently through and across the spaces of colonialism as a ‘vector of deterritorialization’.7 To be nomadic is to ride difference and to do away with the artificial divisions between representation, subject, concept, human and thing. To be nomadic is not merely to reflect on the world but it also to be immersed in a changing state of things – it is to take/ make method as flux. Nomadism occupies a mode of thought which exists outside of state power and which is ultimately concerned with relations of uncertain heterogeneity.8 The paths taken by the nomad are curvilinear, spiral and transversal, and they create a space in which things are distributed as a rhythm without measure which relates to the upswell of a flow.9 Power then is dispersed in unpredictable ways





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which enable us to disrupt, even to dispose of the apparatus (dispositif ) of discourse. To be nomadic is to follow and to create new paths in more complicated trajectories than the diasporic trajectory of the migrant.10 I read Deleuze and Guattari for what I believe to be the curiously subjectless stasis of the nomad.11 The way these nomads occupy space and work against empty homogenous time creates an intellectual zone for thinking afresh about ideas of agency. Here it is pressing, I think, to read the nomadic qua the pictorial.12 In spite of the importance of planes and bodies, in relation to the nomadic it is colour which is critical to artistic practice. In its spatialising energy, the analogical urgently ‘finds its highest law…if you push colour to its pure internal relations you have everything’.13 All pictorial relations issue from colour so as to create a tactile, haptic space.14 This haptic space, I would argue, is what determines the nomadic. Nomads (from the Greek nomos – law or custom) apart from being artists, ‘are’ also pastoralists, gypsies, hunter-gatherers and peripatetic tribes, mathematics or music, amongst being many other persons/things, whose distribution is that of irreducible multiplicity in a space that is without precise limits. What they perhaps have in common is that they wander over undulating surfaces to put pressure on space to the extent of its capabilities (puissances).15 The smooth, non-pulsed time of the smooth space they occupy (musical by analogy) is determined by interrelations that are heterogeneous and rhizomatic, which are irreducibly plural and affective.16 These qualitative multiplicities are in constant flux.17 I want to suggest that colour in being nomadic so defies and yet also determines the ‘striated’ spaces of British imperialism. Whilst the nomadic and its seeming inverse – the sedentary nature of the perspectivism of the state – are real and opposed, they can only ever be experienced in mixed states. They co-inform: they are in some real sense part of one another. Even when colour literally adorns the columns of imperial buildings (think Crystal Palace, 1851), there is constant opposition to its relationships with line, form, materials, structure, harmony, symbolism and language. In the period this book addresses – 1765 to 1970 – colour is pushed around by colonial theorists and artists who tried to imprison it in fixed laws or to admit that colour must be beyond such laws, that it existed at the level of instinct. Whilst bickering among themselves about the shifting contours of this symbiosis



Introduction



of intuition, instinct and the applicability of law, colonialists had to confront sudden bouts and persistent resistance from the colonised. Colour could and did incite revolution in the colony. And colour did kill. The time frame I explore has to account for the technological transformation of colour as viewed from the use of semi-precious stones, minerals and plants to a partial reliance on or at least a fashion for coaltar, arsenic-laden, synthetic pigments. Although these technological innovations kick-started tremendous anxiety (as is well documented in Britain and the rest of present-day western Europe), the colonies barely feature in such narratives. This is shocking given the virulent racism of the Victorian period which linked skin, eye and hair pigmentation with question of evolutionary development (to which I will return later). Colour, Art and Empire takes 1765 to 1970 as its time frame precisely because it allows us to examine in depth the transitions involved in the formation and remaking of a colonial, a nationalist and a postcolonial colour field – which I term ‘chromo zones’. Between European admiration for Mughal miniatures and the Leftist agenda of Jagdish Swaminathan, colour is radically remade to become almost but not quite unrecognisable. ‘Almost but not quite’ because however much you might push it around colour has an obdurate, if for us humans quasi-inexplicable, agency. This agentive ambiguity requires a visual history that will be attentive to what also cannot be said, materially analysed or conjectured about colour. It invites us to read even the most confident colonial statement about its nature against the grain, to feel for the sentient cracks in British imperial discourse. If colour is a borderline at which the aesthetic account of art has often stopped short, in this very suspension/arrest art confronts its presumptions about itself. Colour of course can be expansive; perhaps as I will variously argue, it is an impossible object. I am not suggesting that colour was inevitably identical with the artistic and political struggles of the colonised against colonial subjugation – a subjugation which after all could involve the projected hegemony of colour. What I am hinting at is the possibility that colonial subjects identified with colour’s potential alterity. This process of identification, whether espied through the work of a subaltern dyevat labourer seeking to eke a little bit of the magic from indigo and its auspicious/evil eye, or the intellectual, elite artist pushing colour into meditative, new amorphous forms against the pathological agenda of





colour, art and empire

colonial art, science, economy and politics, shows how colour can be a living, vitalising mirror. Specifically in the pages which follow I think about colour as a mirror and how as mirror its modes of identification are substituted and supplemented by the artist’s, scientist’s or ethnographer’s fascination with the colour patch and its related optical technologies. Before I move on to these nomadic specificities and the historiographical frameworks available to scholars of colour I wish to return once more to the revelries of plate 1 so as to explore very briefly the third term of my title and inquiry – redemption. Less explicitly than empire, redemption is nonetheless an underlying theme of Colour, Art and Empire. Redemption may offer the hope of release from the relentless chains of history but like Paul Klee’s Angel of History it is buffered against the debris towards a futures-past. Weirdly, given their opposition, hatred and rivalry, both British colonial and Indian nationalist artists and critics turned to colour as an escape from the mundane and the normative. They variously wished that colour could come to the rescue in so far that it could resuscitate and rejuvenate tired or vexed artistic practices. It could be excavated (quite literally) from the detritus of History and pre-History. There is something disjunctively messianic about colour which aligns it with in/as waste and waste’s relationship with rubbish – sacred or otherwise. Magic Chromophobia, Efficacy, Ontologies Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned beseechingly to others…the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. Frantz Fanon, ‘Black Skin, White Masks’

Hanging from a tree in B.C. Roy Market close to Kolkata’s international cricket stadium at Eden Gardens, purple jerseys flutter like giant butterflies in the warm, spring breeze. Snapped by a city journalist, such seemingly innocuous garments recently became the target of local and national hostility. Intended as proud souvenirs, these signifiers of Calcutta patriotism simulate the shirts of IPL heroes – the cricket team Kolkata Knight Riders: by wearing one of them you too can look like and perhaps play like a cricket/Bollywood star!18 But as is perhaps already



Introduction



clear, the shirts hang alone and unsold as punters keep away. In the midst of the cricket season then igniting Eden Gardens in spring 2010 (whose hype is heightened by the much vaunted, high-profile presence of the Knight Riders’ co-owner Bollywood superstar Shahrukh Khan) the shirts are not to be trusted. The Knight Riders have been losing and rumour has it, this is because the colour of their ‘cricket whites’ is not auspicious. And this colour is deemed to be indigo.19 Although revived in Bangladesh – at Jhenidah locals even demonstrated for the restoration of a neel kuthi (planter’s house)20 – the production of indigo in West Bengal is still much reviled.21 Indigo speaks of colonialism and bloodshed: indigo is a malevolent colour. In contrast, as seen in figure 1, the thick yellow moustache of the American model, posing provocatively in Times Square, is a marker of the ultra-sexy spiced up with joie de vivre. Mimicking the American and British milk campaign designed to promote healthy living, here the launch of India’s new cow urine soft drink (nicknamed Pisspi or Cowka cola), promises to cure numerous ailments and diseases, to offer the key



Anon., Advertisement for Indian cow urine drink, date unknown.

Fig.1





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to a long and fulfilling life, to be the analogue of fakirs’ ritualistic use of urine, whilst showing respect to the cow.22 Collected from 600 cow shelters daily, this drink sells for 20 rupees a bottle across India.23 In colonial India, the British maltreatment of cows – which meant forcing them to live off mango leaves to produce rich, bright yellow urine as the basis of artists’ pigment – led to rioting and even to its uneasy censorship by the state. The materiality of colour then has complex interwoven genealogies that straddle colonial and postcolonial contexts. I hope, as these snapshots have shown, there can be another underlying theme of my narrative – colour can be context making.24 Colour has been both a virtual and actual colonising and freedom fighting device. Empires were built on and destroyed by colour. In the period I discuss Britain and India became awash with colour as never before. The introduction of synthetic dyes in household fabrics, wallpapers, paints and artists’ pigments, seen under the glare of the phenomenologically disorienting new technologies of mass gaslight, and in the polished/tarnished glass of arcades, museums and world’s fairs, forced a new poisonous and therapeutic palette of sonorous shades onto men, women and children in these far-flung places.25 At this time, the aesthetics of a novel palette of colour began to dominate artistic, architectural and design attitudes where debates on nonWestern intuition or laws of colour (especially India) played a critical role. In this discursive bent of orientalism, Eastern colour promised redemption from the dreary or garish tones of European art and design.26 Colour became an intellectual resource as well as a force to be colonised – or at the very least to be reckoned with. As the epigraph from Fanon suggests, one chromatic, contextmaking issue that postcolonial critics have addressed in detail is the representation of race and the fetishisation of whiteness and how this seeps into alterity.27 The question of British social status as performed through portraits of glistening black servants can be seen in the painterly fashioning of likenesses that flatter through the blush; the threatening stereotype of the West Indian creole or mestiza mulatress passing for or slinking past a European norm of white have all become areas of intense scholarly interest.28 What Anne McClintock terms ‘commodity racism’ demonstrates how an emergent globalisation hinged on this linkage of pigmentation and the civilising mission of the commodity.29 Soap



Introduction



as fetish gleams as a magical object which promises not only to wash the impoverished British in need of eugenic cleansing but also to make the colonised white. Soap collapsed skin colour into Victorian hysteria surrounding dirt. This soap saga captured the hidden affinity between domesticity and empire so as to embody a triangulated crisis in value: the undervaluation of women’s work in the domestic realm, the overvaluation of the commodity in the industrial market and the disavowal of colonised economies in the arena of empire.30 From the outset, commodity fetishism perhaps invoked an intercultural contestation that was fraught with ambiguity, miscommunication and violence. In some instances, elaborate forms of mimicry of European stereotypes of black savagery were created by colonised people to maintain control of local trade and long-distance networks.31 At the same time certain colours like indigo and mummy brown performed as the currency financing the slave trade even before they became a driving force behind the slave-like conditions of nineteenthcentury indentured labour in Africa, India and the Americas. Colour, as I have intimated above, can be auspicious or horrific. And being nomadic it always had the potential to be supplemental, doubling as a philtre or filter for imperial practices. In spite of this by now well-established (if still highly problematic) linkage of colour to race, I find it more than a little strange that scholars have largely side-stepped its many other imperial connotations – with two important exceptions. In his recent book What Colour is the Sacred? the anthropologist Michael Taussig plays with chromophobia, chromofetishism and colour as the coke of empire. He speculates on how and why European powers have talked about colour: ‘We in the West are nonsensuous creatures who are frightened of passions and the body. To the contrary, it is the combustible mix of attraction and repulsion towards colour that best brings out its magical qualities’.32 This corporeal, chromo-entrapment Taussig identifies as modernity’s alchemy. He toys with colour’s Latin etymology celare in relation to its other significations as crime or deceit – here I’m also thinking of Derrida’s play on Plato’s definition of writing as cur(s)ing toxin which posits the pharmakeus as ‘grinder and mixer of multi-coloured drugs’.33 Because the gush of colour is held back, it mobilises more violence. Colour is not merely a secondary characteristic to be regarded with dreary Kantian suspicion as subordinate to drawing, but it is also the



10

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site of originary potency. Both Taussig and the artist David Batchelor identify this ambivalence towards colour with its material sources in the East. Here orientalism carves the world into chromophobes and chromophiliacs – those who, like the seventeenth-century French academician Roger de Piles, celebrate an ‘eastern’ style of Italian (that is, Venetian) painting and those who despise – are frightened of – colour’s substantive relation as form or surface: colour as a deceptive scarf of little shimmering mirrors. Desired, derided for being sensuous, non-intellectual, feminine, ornamental, supplemental, colour bears the burden of many genealogies of chromophobia. In a provocative recent account of modernist and postmodern colour, David Batchelor playfully insists on a certain ludic persistence of chromophobia in relation to the tyranny of white(ness). The obsession with pure white he sees as a specifically Western problem from which there is no escape: white is a labyrinth without exits. He also raises the issue that if colour were so unimportant why have so many people sought to exclude it so forcefully to the point that it is critical to our understanding of the deep structure of Western culture.34 Perhaps in chromophiliac accounts colour remains other to become more other than before, more dangerous, more excessive. Perhaps colour is defamiliarising at its most dangerous, seductive and susceptible edge. Somewhere nearly at the same time, to be chromophobic is merely to become chromophiliac – but without the stress on colour.35 What I find compelling with regard to Batchelor’s approach is the way in which he seeks out a far more nuanced space for colour which avoids the stark polarities of chromophobia and chromophilia. Taking his inspiration from Roland Barthes’ subtle musings on colour as a kind of bliss, as a tiny fainting spell,36 Batchelor views colour as falling into a state of grace, of gracious momentary blindness. This falling into a state of grace might also be placed alongside Barthes’ phenomenology of the shimmer and the power of brightness, of illumination.37 There is then in this account no sharp contrast between chromophilia and chromophobia. But where does this leave ethics in relation to colour? In a paper given at the International Association of Colour (AIC) conference in Sydney, the late art historian John Gage explored the existence of good and bad colour.38 Although his findings cannot be reiterated here, the value of Gage’s work is in its synthetic and impressive orchestration of



Introduction

11

European thought on colour which concludes that since ‘colour has a vivid life outside the realm of art, its problems even within that realm cannot be understood exclusively from within the history and theory of art itself ’.39 In addition to his two major studies Colour and Culture and Colour and Meaning (plus monographs, articles and exhibitions on Turner and the nineteenth-century colourman/theorist George Field), Gage has also discussed the difficulty of tackling colour from a coherent and satisfactory methodological standpoint. His contingent solution is to grasp the epistemic and maybe also the material tools of the ethnographer.40 For Gage, colour may be a globalising force but it is also local and it must be historically grounded – which perhaps goes without saying. What interests me about Gage’s position is his tantalising glimpse at the ‘ethnographer’s magic’ as one means for thinking seriously about why and how colour has generated so much suspicion, fascination, even hatred. An ethnographic investigation into colour calls for a selfreflexive and ethical practice which gestures towards an awareness that we have never been modern. Following recent anthropology of science, it is impossible to cleave cleanly between subjects and objects, humans and things.41 This position is also informed by a wider anthropology of the senses whereby colours act as social agents to produce a connectivity of persons and things.42 When approached in this manner, colour can be seen as a form of action intent on mobilising the world rather than merely representing or symbolising human relations.43 I take the ethnographer’s magic to be concerned less with underlying social structures and the symbolics of colour and more as an identification/method for experimenting with an enchanted, magical practice which attempts to explore its efficacious potentialities. This approach is necessarily playful, supplementary, figural and nomadic. A focus on the nomadic and the figural allows us to take seriously the urgent need to rescue colour from its trivial status, to free colour from universalist versus relativist approaches and to reevaluate the relationship between physiological experience, language and affect. The semiotics of colour, whose nineteenth-century British colonial genealogies I explore in this book, continue to hold some authority in colour perception science and anthropology.44 Most notoriously, Berlin and Kay’s study Basic Color Terms (first published 1969) claimed that all languages follow universal evolutionary patterns of colour names



12

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which progress from the relationship between light and darkness, to black and white, to red and a scale of as many as 11 terms to be found in Indo–European languages.45 Their approach has been thoroughly taken to task by Barbara Saunders who seeks to disconnect such an ‘inevitable’ relationship between language and perception.46 Bringing together philosophical and anthropological approaches, Saunders calls for a far more nuanced stance on the agency of colours in different cultures by arguing that anthropological writings on colour have too often served as a form of colonisation.47 In many ways her concerns are preempted by a dazzling little essay by Umberto Eco which proposes that the search for colour terms is based on a referential fallacy.48 He sees scientists’ fundamental error as being the assumption that colour terms inevitably denote the immanent properties of a sensation which leads to grave confusion between meaning and referent – a position which is further complicated by the perceived absence of colour terms in several cultures – to which I shall return.49 An eccentric take on the ethnographer’s magic allows us to think that somewhere between our minds and the world colour can be both elusive and obdurately material. In current Western philosophical debate, colour is being used as a device for envisioning the quest for what might be an independent reality that may or not may not be ‘exhaustively physical’.50 If an object’s colour is part of its appearance – that is, how it looks – colours create their own unique category of appearance which is not about illusions or deception and which can be compared with other sensations and intellectual faculties.51 Colour then allows for a ‘primitivist’ theory according to which colours are either sui generic, mind-independent properties (integral to a ‘non-perspectival phenomenal objectivism’)52 or they invoke a relativism (‘comparative phenomenology’)53 which argues for objects as being really all the colours they appear to be. Colours then do affect subjects and objects and as such they have causal power.54 This question of causality through the eye of colour has been approached perhaps most effectively by Deleuze in his reading of Bergson’s work on Ravaisson. Here the concept can be a genus in relation to several species (that is, individual colours) or as a concept referring to several objects. In the first instant, the concept is generated by a process of negation (for instance, not red) where there is clearly a gap between the concept and the object. Here the relation



Introduction

13

between concept and object is that of subsumption. The alternative, and for Deleuze more intriguing alternative is to begin with a rainbow to see how through continuum colour can be put through a convergent lens to reach clear light. In this way all colours are nuances or degrees of the concept itself – the clear light is the virtual whilst colour is the actual. This movement privileges participation over subsumption. If things have nuances of the concept, the concept itself becomes a thing as each colour is a manifestation of the process of differentiation. Thought and its object unfold as part of a single process.55 Even though all of these valuable approaches obviously ward us against the temptation to think only semiotically or symbolically about colour, their ontological ground is for the large part determined by European epistemology. Much writing on the humanities and empire has yet to take the idea and the existence of ontologies seriously.56 Rather than being an exclusively European inquiry, ontology in the plural can be thought of in relation to Sufi and Hindu ideas on colour – which I hope to explore in the course of this book. As part of this exploration of chromo- and chrono-topias, I hope to unravel the colonial and Indian genealogies for an anthropological concern with the cultural symbolism of colour which as late as the 1960s and 1970s still held tremendous sway in the writings of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Victor Turner.57 Beyond semiotic or symbolic difference there are alternative ontologies at stake. So what I am getting at is that to think of colour as nomadic, as mimetic yet flitting, is to test the thresholds of conventional inscription techniques founded on semiotic and representational models. Rather than making a plea for relativism, I am concerned with the continua of translation across ontologies. In these processes and spaces colour finds an agency which complicates the visceral relationships between persons and things in relation to Indo-Islamic, Hindu, Sufi, British and colonial concepts of matter and planes of affects. The figure of the nomadic incites contingent relations (rivalry, metamorphosis) between persons and things. To think of colour through the figure and nomadism is to free it from the confines of discourse so as to explore its transversal entanglements with colonialism.58 Thought of in these terms, colour has the ability to animate things, to embody and to transform social relations. Colours can be agentive and thus capable of effecting events and transformations.59 Through their rhizomatic, transversal sticky rhythms, colours laugh at



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the conventional subject–object oppositions of mind-in-a-vat and the world. Anthropologist Diana Young makes the important point that one tactic for studying these dimensions of colour is through colourperson crises, conflict and states of emergency which destroy and bring into being new assemblages of politics, aesthetics and materiality.60 The experience of colour as an amplification of being61 in the world can be more rigorously explored through the lens of hybridising social, artistic and political practices. The Chromatic Spaces of Narrative The shape and spaces of my narrative take their inspiration from Sheela Gowda’s gathering together and cryptic threading of red threads with a symphony of needles to fashion a series of intricate, monumental, transversal ropes (plate 3). Whilst to weave is to construct a striated space of rigid horizontal and vertical threads, Gowda’s work creates a more felt-like assemblage whose fibres by being pressed together create heterogeneous and subtle adhesions. She distributes a continuous variation through their entanglement of red. The four chapters of this book are also bound together with the heterogeneous threads of colour to bring forth the strange, the vortic and the often unpredictable genealogies of colour. As with Gowda’s two looped chords, the genealogies I trace in each chapter overlap, intertwine, become entangled with one another at certain turns. The threads of my narrative implicate the colonial, Indian elite and subaltern approaches to the ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, economic and material stases of colour. I begin my narrative with a focus on the ethical materiality, violence and mystery of painting in the court of the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa. Following the death of her husband in 1765, Maria Theresa became the exclusive acting ruler; this new and heavy responsibility required a radical overhaul of the symbolic performativity of sovereignty. She turned to oriental, in particular Mughal, art as a means of asserting her cosmopolitan identity. Indo-Islamic art was highly prized across India and Europe: Maria Theresa’s proud display of 266 miniatures in her palace at Schönbrunn, Vienna attests to her role as monarch on the world stage. The technical difficulty and secrecy of the workmanship of these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings gave them particular allure, which her



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court artists attempted to emulate. I suggest that in this period (c.1765– 1860), European artists tried to engage seriously with the subjects and materials of Mughal art. When at Lucknow, northern India, in the early 1780s, Johann Zoffany, one of Maria Theresa’s favourites employed a chromatic scale partially borrowed from Mughal artists. By the 1810s, Lucknow had come under direct British colonial rule, one effect being the coercive treatment of the symbols and politics of state – including the role of art. The English East India Company forced the Lucknow King Ghazi-uddin to patronise a British artist, Robert Home. At this time Home began to experiment with a range of obnoxious substances as his palette. The colonial palette acts as a trope for exploring the violent materiality of imperialism and it shows the centrality of art to colonising practices. In the case of mummy brown, indigo and Indian yellow controversies raged over the production and circulation of colour. The rest of this chapter tracks subaltern resistance to the colonial economy of colour through both the Blue Mutiny of 1860 (its assault on the indigo planting class many of whom fancied themselves as artists, archaeologists, writers and collectors) and the alternative ontology of Sufism. In very different ways to the colonial palette, Sufism employed a rhetoric of alchemy. Colour played a vital role in a vastly divergent range of Sufi spiritual exercises. I propose that these spiritual exercises also seeped into the subjects and chromatic range of contemporary Indian artists living in nineteenth-century India. Chapters 2 and 4 ask how far colour was subaltern. Here I take a lead for the Subaltern Studies Collective which searches out histories from below and modes of resistance to colonial ‘hegemony’ to explore the status of the dyer and the artist in India, c.1851–1947. Chapter 2 picks up the narrative where Chapter 1’s discussion of Sufism closed – 1851, to chart the dramatic impact of Indian colour at the first world’s fair at Crystal Palace, Hyde Park, London. Colour provoked an extensive and intensive debate on the status of design, the role of chromatic harmonies through the figure of the native dyer. I consider how this new-found euphoria – oriental colour as inspiration in the South Kensington Museum (SKM), colonial art schools and museums – would be contested by British art theorists, designers and Indian dyers, artists and weavers. Did colour possess or invoke nazar – the evil eye? How then under these circumstances could colour become a tool for colonial governmentality?



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Intensely critical of the figure, the stereotype of the native dyer, the colonial state vented its frustration at his perceived civilisational and pathological impoverishment. The imbrication of race, colour and pathology are the subject of Chapter 3. Taking the extensive fieldwork of Arthur C. Haddon and W. H. R. Rivers in India and New Guinea, 1898–1901, as a focal point, I navigate the debates involved in using colour as the index of evolutionism, animism, perception and language. And this anxiety about pathology deeply implicated Britons. For nationalist/art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, German chemists in league with the British Raj disseminated a ‘ghastly uniformity of ugly, glaring colours’.62 This epoch is articulated by an epistemological shift from the inference of what colour is in the world to the ‘reality’ that colours are phantasms created by the interaction of human perceptual apparatuses with particles of different shapes and speeds. Colour can be relentlessly enchanting and threatening; as affect it had the potential to feel like a qualitative overspill, an excess that escapes the knowable, manageable subject. Its conditions of possibility colonialists believed to be too closely associated with politics as active experimentation. The new vogue for mechanically engineered artists’ colour charts was accompanied by scientists’ trials to standardise colour vocabulary. For both, the swatch pre-empts Munsell’s system of hue, value and chroma and the employment of basic colour terms. Paradoxically, imperial painters initiated the denigration of art as little more than an equivalent to, or collaborator with language. At best colonial art now occupied an equivocal, volatile status akin to ‘rubbish’. Here I explore whether the colour swatch acted as either an analogue or radical critique of the function of mirrors in anthropological fieldwork: what kinds of (mis)recognition and mimetic identification did the swatch provoke? At this stage I suggest that Rivers’ exhaustive investigations into cultural experiences of colour played a defining role in his eventual rejection of evolutionism in favour of a more nuanced theory of diffusionism. Like the Nobel Prize-winning novelist José Saramago’s terrifying world of a nation turning blind (people confined to asylums, terrorised by goons, becoming the victims of horrific sex crimes and other acts of violence), Victorians believed colour defects to be contagious and that several of Britain’s leading artists were colour blind.63 This focus on art and pathology provides



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an analogue to the conjectural ‘detective’ mode of connoisseurship exemplified by Morelli’s method. Aside from these anxieties, scientists and anthropologists debated the status of blue as the marker of civilisational development. Blue (as opposed to the predominance of red in the colonial artistic palette) became a kind of Holy Grail as the elusive blue flower of German romanticism was transferred to colonial British anthropological, artistic and linguistic debates. And this begs the question, was a picture sense linked to a Colour Sense? How also did this régime of race mutate in the later anthropological investigations of Branislaw Malinowski and Julius Lips – men who promoted the first immersive fieldwork and investigations of the representation of whiteness in non-European art? While Chapter 3 ends on the ominous note of Lips’ ill treatment by the Third Reich, which of course had its own notorious programme for racial extermination,64 Chapter 4 picks up a thread introduced in Chapters 1 and 2 – Indian resistance to colonialism through the lens of colour. My emphasis is on the work of the Bengal School artists, Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy, and the ways in which they debated, painted with and staged colour as the inspiration for resistance to the strict pedagogy of South Kensington then still being imposed by colonial officials at the Calcutta Art School. Abanindranath and Bose made colour central to their writings, paintings and system of intuitive, meditative education. Lyrical, intimately engaged with Sanskrit epics and art treatises, they revive and hybridise colour as the basis of the Bengal School aesthetic in Calcutta. At his radically innovative university of Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore established a dialogue with Gandhi over the space for art and education in the nationalist project. Although highly respectful of one another, they disagreed bitterly on all of these issues. Also at this time (1905–47), the localisation and materiality of colour was transformed into a critical issue of public debate. Materiality had now to possess an ethics of identity. And this genealogy can be fast forwarded to the postcolonial work of the artist Jagdish Swaminathan and his relationship with magic realist poet Octavio Paz, which is the subject of the Postscript.



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Colour, Art and Empires What is it to be a colour? Orhan Pamuk, ‘My Name is Red’ Across steppes, deserts and other haptic planes of treachery, death, desire and the sacred, the palette of an Islamic court becomes nomadic. In this colour tribe, it is Red: splendid and violent who shimmers most brilliantly as paint, blood, passion, as cochineal, vermillion, dragon’s blood. Like other works by Pamuk, and much philosophical and fictional writing besides, My Name is Red has its own colour.65 Colour burns with intensities, movements and affect that are ‘yet to be named’.66 Each of my chapters I conjecture has its own colour or combination and conflict of hues and tones.67 Chapter 1 thrashes out the relationship between red and indigo and its ‘other’ – the almost silvery, colourless shimmer in Sufi painting. Chapter 2 begins with the relationship between the primaries as introduced by the writings on harmony by George Field and Michel Chevreul later adapted by Owen Jones and Richard Redgrave of the South Kensington Museum and disputed by John Ruskin. Again indigo raise its head in relation to the equivocal status of the dyer. Chapter 3 is, as noted above, shot through by the quest for blue and the fear of red-green confusion associated with colour blindness. Colour blindness returns in Chapter 4 but without some of the phobia or hysteria of Victorian Britain. Here inky blacks, brilliant greens, yellows and reds, or pale, frail washes of indeterminate hues and the ethical cleansing possibility of white, demonstrate the tremendous diversity and creative potentialities of colour in the Indian nationalist struggle. Here colour can be out of order; it defies harmony whilst still doing the ideological work of a collective. Colour, Art and Empire attempts to illuminate the ontological and sacred heterogeneity of colour – which includes Sufism, Islam, Hinduism, nationalism and finally, with Swaminathan, synthetic devotional – bhakti and tantric practices. Swaminathan’s collaboration with Paz explores the forging of new, unexpected encounters between the South–South (South America, South Asia), those chromo zones which aim to provincialise, to marginalise, to ignore Europe, in order to ensure that colour is nomadic.



1

Alchemy, Painting and Revolution in India, c.1750–1860

The Spectre of Colour: Matter and Empire In his short story ‘Indigo’ Bengal’s most celebrated film maker Satyajit Ray explores the spectre of colonial colour.1 His protagonist is a twentynine-year-old bachelor employed by an advertising agency in Kolkata. Easily bored by such work, he takes to reading anything he can about colonial indigo plantations to such an extent that indigo begins to cloud his mind. When his car breaks down in the Birbhum district one stormy night, he seeks refuge in a deserted bungalow – the neel kuthi of the notorious Mr Martin, a long-dead indigo planter. After dozing off in the bedroom, he undergoes a mysterious, Kafkaesque transformation: I passed my right hand over my face and realized that not only my complexion but my features too had changed … there were sideburns which reached below my ears…The thing I was looking for was right in front of me: an oval mirror… By some devilish trick I had turned into a nineteenth-century Englishman with a sallow complexion … and light eyes from which shone a strange mixture of hardness and suffering.2

He had become a malevolent yet fearful planter who in spite of repeated attacks of malaria could ‘not resist the lure of indigo’.3 He was then compelled, almost against his will, to begin writing a diary entry for 27 April 1868 – the last night of his life. His final thought was for his dog Rex and what would become of him. As the dog approached the kuthi’s verandah, the planter shoots him before firing a bullet into his own head. Silence. The protagonist awakes, only to realise that he had lived and died as an indigo planter last night. Indigo is here a strange mirror: as mirror it plays with the narcissistic and alter processes of identification. Lurid and alluring, colonial colour has many afterlives. So what does it mean to occupy the space of colonial colour and how could it be resisted? 19



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This chapter explores the nomadism of colour through the kaleidoscopic turns of painterly technique, physiology, revolution and sacred agency in Indian and British cultural encounters. Before ‘England served India as a curator serves the collection’, exemplified by the Archaeological Survey and The Great Game of Kipling’s Kim, I suggest that the palette acted as the modus operandi of early nineteenth-century colonisation.4 And this palette was variously constituted by colour forces and disharmonies of black, white, but especially gold, yellow, indigo and red. The palette acts as a force field constituted by waste, secret technology and the sacred where different concepts of matter collide. Through this trope of the imperial palette, my inquiry focuses on the three critical networks which construct its planes and matter-force: first, European attempts to imitate the appearance of the technologies of Mughal art at Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa’s Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, and the artistic experiments of her favourite – Johann Zoffany. Then I track what happens to this desire for material semblance in relation to global rivalry for the raw materials of pigments – focused on indigo and the squalid labour conditions that the English East India Company’s economy sought to inculcate. The ensuing modes of subaltern resistance and the tactics of de-territorialisation offer a glimpse into an alternative ontology: Sufism. Here colour becomes associated with subtle matter, or with light without matter in ways that are hermeneutic and alchemical. Through the writings of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Sufis Mir Dard and Shaykh Kirmani I explore the mystical dimensions of colour, its spiritual phenomenology, the scale of colours in the universe and its complex hermeneutics in relation to the Black Light (light without matter) and the theology of the Cosmic Throne. I suggest that Delhi- and Agra-based painters working in the Sufi milieu translated or rejected some of these concepts in their production of an aesthetic which turned to colour in relation to the subtlety and the power of the shimmer. The molecular and spectacular movements of colour through and beyond the imperial palette involve contingent, competing definitions of matter which entangle the nomad with the monad – some of the metaphysical and ‘atomic’ stuff of which Material Culture Studies is one instance. In the period I consider artists’ understandings of what colour is or could be, worked with and sometimes against,



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scientific-philosophical articulations of matter in terms of plurality and flux. From the philosophy of monads, to entropy in thermodynamics, to emergent ideas of space as finite and unbounded, wrapped around itself, colour interferes with matter.5 This trajectory shuttles between Monadology, where Leibniz poses matter as an aspect of corporeal substance in terms of the infinite, the singular and a cosmos driven by the compossibility of monads and a late nineteenth-century anxiety about the complex, virtual dimensions of affect. Leibniz frequently refers to monads as atom-like structures, as ‘living mirrors’, each being endowed with internal action which expresses the universe from its own point of view.6 In addition to his radical reinscription of theories of the monad by Pythagoras and Plotinus, there is something of the mystical, alchemical and orientalist in Leibniz’s writings on matter which implicates colour.7 For Indian and British painters and writers, the concept, affects and matter of colour thought of in terms of alchemical and chemistry experiments came to be dramatically modified in this period of imperial expansion – which art historians have yet to take seriously. Outside of the ‘quasi-laboratory’ conditions of their studios, the transformation of raw materials such as cochineal and indigo by enormous subaltern workforces aimed at the transformation of matter through heat flow. This everyday practice provides the dark underside to Goethe and his ‘disciple’ J. M. W. Turner’s experiments with theories of afterimages and thermodynamics which privileged colour (in relation to heat and metamorphosis) as the primary target for phenomenological, even ontological inquiry.8 Such a construction of modernity in relation to the material practices of empire was obliquely implicated in the metaphysical and artistic practices of north Indian Sufism. In their very different ways, visions and afterimages operate through the presence of a sensation in the absence of a stimulus and its subsequent modulations which unfold over time cutting against the virtual instantaneity of optical transmission (whether intro- or extromission) so prominent in theories of vision from Aristotle to Locke.9 Goethe’s Farbenlehre performs as modern analogue to a far more powerful precedent – twelfth-century writer Najim Kobrā’s physiological, ecstatic writings.10 I propose that the legacies of these writings in the period I discuss also participated in subaltern struggles over colour.



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This opening chapter explores the struggles of colour in two interlinked grass-roots cases – the perplexed agenda of colonial painters anxious at being out of the loop of metropolitan/Company strategies, and how Indian subalterns united with the elite to speak, paint and sing against empire. Here what I mean by singing is to hit that space beyond speech acts; to get at its kind of affective, performative contradiction which ‘leads not to impasse but to forms of insurgency’ for which we ‘have yet to develop a language’.11 But how does colour sing? How does colour entangle technology with enchantment to create value for Mughal artistic production in terms of the artist as ‘occult technician’ of objects desired for their ‘halo-effect of technical difficulty’?12 In spite of the degraded conditions of indigo labour in Bengal, there is in the manufacture of colour something redemptive: ghastly and yet strangely magnetic and gorgeous. Technology, Scarcity, Waste: Mughal Colour/Colonial Mirror In his versified Persian treatise, Qānūn us-Suvar (The Canons of Painting), c.1570–1602, Sādiqī Bek (1533–1609) describes how art became for him, a mystical vocation, a line of flight out of the subject: My spirit now winged heavenwards…For from my heightened viewpoint everything appeared overly facile. I clung to but one profound hope; to be informed with the touch of Bihzad. And there, bare of all illusory passions I would paint the bazaar world of pictured things with the sole Idea of drawing near to their Real Nature. I was alive to the possibility that by painting, the artfully continued shape of things could yet be truly delineated.13

Sādiqī Bek explains that he composed the work to communicate the ‘alchemy’ of painting to an acquaintance whose ‘deep taste for the arts had led him astray and he had completely abandoned himself to this passion. Dreaming of nothing else night or day but art decoral and art figural he became increasingly agitated’.14 Rather than dwelling on the mystical significance of painting, Sādiqī Bek offers glimpses of the clandestine technologies of art – the use of flowers from the Judas tree and plucked violets; the grinding of pigments (verdigris, vermilion, red lake); the making of brushes and varnishes and the techniques of tinting and gilding. Although he does note in relation to the extraction of the essence of flowers that ‘the process used to do it is immaterial – you



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will find their inner secrets stand revealed’, throughout his narrative he stresses precision, patience and that this kind of treatise is in itself extremely rare.15 Bek exhorts artists to apply colours in sequence from background to figures, to flesh and dress – that is, one shade should be painted wherever it is desired throughout the picture and so on, the effect being the erasure of any visible brush marks.16 This wet-on-dry technique, which takes several weeks, entailed the use of pigments ground from semi-precious stones that were then bound with gum arabic and applied with a very fine Persian cat or black squirrel hair brush. As described by Sādiqī Bek, the paper was burnished with agate from the back after the application of each pigment (with the exception of gold leaf and lapis lazuli) so as to bring forth their luminosity.17 This technique requires precision from perception which privileges the artist’s intricate skills and makes it ‘impossible for the viewer to comprehend how an image has been made. It is as if the image is born into this world unmade’.18 Painting allows for an alchemic sublimation of the particles of divine light imprisoned in the matter of the picture which can be released through careful contemplation.19 Like Chinese porcelain, both Europeans and Indians admired the play of material fragility, translucency, technological secrecy and impenetrability embodied by the technology of painting. The miniature professed a discontinuity with profane space; it planes gesture towards the universe as a series of hanging forms – Sufism’s Five Divine Presences which move upwards from the physical world to the archangelic, the intermediate, the world of Divine names and Divine Essence (dhāt). Poised at the plane of the intermediate, the miniature has the potential to act as gateway to a higher state of being.20 Scarcity in relation to rarities and secrecy created the allure of Islamic panting for Europeans in the age of empire. They sporadically attempted to imitate to appropriate the appearance (and perhaps the Mughal imperial aura) of such art objects and to generate a dialectic of scarcity and emulative wastage. The combination of scarce pictures and the desire to do damage to them thus performed a critical role in European collecting. The mechanism of waste becomes an object of desire; waste operated as a defining principle in an affluent society driven by the anxiety of scarcity. To be wasteful is a competitive achievement; the desire to possess is a desire to make waste.21 What



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results is not so much gaspillage (the logical priority of destruction outlined by Bataille in his discussion of non-productive expenditure, dépense) as a theory of rubbish which is central to the construction of imperial value. Between waste and rubbish emerges the condition for the re-evaluation of things. This combination of secrecy and rubbish informed the treatment of Mughal art by the widow of the Hapsburg Emperor Franz I and mother of Marie Antoinette, Maria Theresa. At Schönbrunn Palace near Vienna she reoriented the axis of power away from her recently deceased husband’s overblown state rooms with their allegories of war to a series of intricate cabinets celebrating the exotic (plate 4). Known as the Millionenzimmer because of the enormous cost of its interior décor (including rich mahogany from South America), in this intricate chamber, which functioned as both a public audience room and as the waiting room to her private apartment, Maria Theresa displayed 266 Mughal miniatures.22 Originally bound in albums (muraqqa‘), acquired from Prince Eugene of Savoy and previously ‘copied’ by Rembrandt, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century miniatures are painted in the standard royal karkhāna manner of ‘watercolour’23 on either paper imported from Iran or on wasli – old fishing nets (which produces the finest sheen). Muraqqa‘ – a term which derives from Persian for the patched cloak of Sufi mystics – contained a number of unrelated ‘nomadic’ themes to suggest a kind of aesthetic of wandering, to admire each image as an instance of aja’ib – wonder. Muraqqa‘ encouraged judgement as differentiation; Mughal rulers and their scribes frequently ranked each image in a cryptic code raqām, on its border or reverse side.24 Maria Theresa was seemingly unfazed by or more probably ignorant of the exacting standards of Mughal judgement. She ordered the images be taken out from their bindings to be cut, pasted and overpainted by her own court artists. Either positioning herself between these cartouches or anticipating that her guests would examine them up close whilst waiting for her arrival, Maria Theresa wanted these cut and paste miniatures to function as the critical symbols of her feminine cosmopolitan style of rule, as indicated by her choice of subjects – private durbars, picnics and female audiences. In the upper, less visible parts of the room, she employed her own court artists to imitate with oil paints, the precious



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materiality and compositions of Mughal imperial art.25 Possibly aware of the shortcomings of such mimicry, Maria Theresa ensured that the finest Indian miniatures were strategically located at eye level in cartouches which would reflect in the room’s many mirrors so as to fashion a dazzling spectacle characterised by imitation, mimicry and doubling. Today the Millionenzimmer partially performs itself as simulacrum. Some of its brightly coloured miniatures are twentieth-century copies made by European artists using industrially produced pigments. The originals, some of which are now in the Austrian National Library, Vienna, have become brittle and drained of all their colour. Against the grain of the Mughal imperial practice of preserving miniatures by keeping them in albums in the royal library or zenana, Maria Theresa wanted these paintings to dazzle during her lifetime, not caring about their inappropriate display or subsequent fate. The decision to do violence to the materiality of these well-travelled albums kept them out of circulation which enabled them to become inalienably associated with her sovereign identity. Overpainted and curling at the edges, rare miniatures came to approximate rubbish which establishes a wry analogue with Maria Theresa’s identity as sovereign because to treat ‘one’s things as metonyms of oneself is to substitute a sacrificial destruction of loss of objects for one’s own mortal person’.26 Maria Theresa also tried to establish a trading company with links to the Orient. Possibly the failure of this enterprise arose from the growing power of the English East India Company (1600–1858) which one year before the completion of the Millionenzimmer had taken over the rule of Bengal by claiming ‘the right to diwani’.27 Although a seemingly insignificant part of the Company’s economy, the dissemination of Indian art in Britain provides an oblique, even ironic perspective on this crisis-ridden era of monopoly and coercion. Outside the official realm of trade, colonial traffic in Indian art would repeatedly undermine the Company’s commercial regulations. The British removal of bullion from India reversed the pre-colonial norm of importation of silver from the Americas to Bengal for financing the Company’s purchase of oriental merchandise. Reacting to this, the Directors now encouraged and tried to promote commerce in European goods in India, including English prints but not oil paintings whose expense and hazardous materiality did not suit long voyages or the tropical climate. Such a strategy could



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not counterbalance the ‘drain’ of Mughal images to Britain. This drain relied on an established clientele and a pattern of taste which predated Company rule in Bengal. From the late seventeenth century through to the 1790s, Mughal art held a discrete metropolitan market in thrall. British elites, including a number of artists (Richardson, Hodges, Reynolds, Zoffany) incorporated Indian pictures into their formation of taste. At Lucknow, Johann Zoffany (1733–1810) the European artist who styled himself most notably as an ‘Orientalist painter’ in the 1780s, experimented with a palette which deliberately invokes the chromatic scale of contemporary Indian art (plates 2, 5). Following repeated invasions of Delhi, Mughal-imperial artists migrated to the wealthy Shi‘a city of Lucknow and experimented with dramatic cityscapes, portraiture and landscape views. The works of Mir Chand and Mir Kalan Khan reject the sappy yellows, purples and whites associated with their predecessors at the court of Emperor Muhammad Shah in favour of saturated yellows, whites and reds, ground and mixed from lead white, gold leaf, carmine, Indian yellow and the soot from lamp black. I find that their spectrum has an intriguing parallel with the development of the modern Urdu ghāzal penned by exiled poets Mir and Sauda, whose literary imagery is infused with Sufi mystical references to precious metals, highly polished surfaces, the pleasure of spring, Holi (as seen here, pigment being one of its subjects), the rich reds of wine, blood and love, the mystery and longing for the Beloved at night-time. Zoffany’s oil sketch of Prince Jawan Bakht receiving Warren Hastings at Lucknow (plate 5) is loosely based on the night-time informal durbar scene favoured by north Indian artists such as Nidha Mal onto which he superimposes an older, more public genre – the use of a pyramidal composition and style of likeness associated with the durbar scenes of the reign of ShahJahan. For the seventeenth-century Mughal Emperor ShahJahan, the profile signified as the exemplary likeness of imperial authority. Although Zoffany represents Hastings at the feet of Jawan Bahkt, his position close to the viewer and more importantly his profile portrait suggest that he is the principal focus and powerbroker. This then is the compositional inversion of many Mughal imperial durbar scenes. In terms of his use of colour, Zoffany substitutes the Lucknawi qalam of bright reds, yellows and whites ground from burnt sienna and lead



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white to his own imported oils on panel. The choice of panel possibly indicates that he was running short of imported canvas; perhaps the instability of oil on wood and the small horizontal format were possible reasons why he failed to find the picture a buyer. The scarcity of familiar materials haunted colonial artists. Consulting the recently returned Scottish portraitist George Willison, miniaturist Ozias Humphry made notes concerning the need to carry ‘materials for two years’ which should include numerous brushes and copious lead white.28 Although the colonial press indicates that artists’ materials were available alongside a whole range of imported luxuries, these arrived only during the shipping season. The competition over limited materials is indicated by their high prices and by artists’ desperate attempts to establish long-distance trading networks with London colour dealers.29 George Chinnery, for instance, favoured vermillion cakes manufactured by James Newman for which he was willing to give Rs 100 (the enormous sum of £20, the value of annual rent of a reasonable apartment in Calcutta). He employed a sparse palette of highly stable pigments whilst avoiding certain dyestuffs including the newly patented and fashionable Prussian blue.30 On return to London, Zoffany styled himself as an orientalist artist by cramming his studio with exotic artifacts including Mughal miniatures, peacock fans and an ivory Shiva which were complimented by a self portrait showing him smoking a huqqa (private collection). But several of his critics deplored this Orientalist self-fashioning. One review of a late work, Embassy of Hyder Beg Khan to meet Cornwallis (a composition which combines Hogarthian comic history with the processional ethic of nawabi representation), condemned its descent into ‘oriental despotism’: In speaking of the grouping and colouring we know not which to condemn first, as both so irresistibly demand our scorn. In the management of [the] picture… he has laboured hard to sacrifice the dignity of humanity, to the pride and parade of aristocracy; indeed he seems so familiar with slavery, and so enamoured of its effects, that we doubt if even the black catalogue of governing infamy can furnish a subject equal to his hunger of degradation.31

Less harshly, other critics played on the combination of Zoffany’s meticulous technique with colonial desire for a certain mimesis directed towards jewels: ‘For every pair of eyes capable of receiving a lustre



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from his pencil, he receives a brace of diamonds, for every cheek that he displays a carnation blush, he is to be paid with a ruby!’32 Ignoring Mughal or Lucknawi portraits of princes depicted wearing jewels and framed by haloes, painted with pigments ground from semi-precious stones and embellished with gold, in Zoffany’s work there is seemingly little material continuum between subject and representation as it is merely the jewel-like appearance which increasingly articulates the colonial palette.33 Although two of Zoffany’s patrons in Lucknow (Colonel Polier and Claude Martin) commissioned as many as 21 Mughal ‘copies’ of Zoffany’s paintings, Indian artists do not appear to have held much interest in their technology, preferring to paint in watercolour on paper in miniature.34 And Zoffany’s only sovereign patron Asaf ud-daula, Nawab of Lucknow also refused to invest aesthetic value into oil painting. Although he famously kept hundreds of such pictures and enormous European mirrors in one room of his ‘aīna khāna (the mirror house of the Asafi Kothi Palace, now in ruins) their display disrupted Western standards of taste. Both pictures and looking glasses do the work of reflection. As mirrors, they have the power to separate objects from their images and to lift images from their adhering surfaces. Reflection warps the matter of painting to produce a skimming which not only lightens substantial things, it also makes them transportable and permeable. This process of thinning matter occurs through the dissolution of physical objects in borrowed light.35 Pictures crammed together, hung back to front or upside down, made European visitors exclaim at these pictures’ virtual disintegration and their own disorientation: ‘aīna khāna becomes a stage for the méconnaissance of the colonial self. The pictures invite entrapment. Each object has a certain force, a certain way of resisting or accepting the gaze and returning it. Through reflection, the ‘aīna khāna plays on extromission in relation to reflection; colonial visitors send out images of themselves which return, radically defamiliarised so that ‘the object not only looks back at the observer: it makes the observer by looking and the other way around’.36 This staging of decaying European art as a kind of rubbish not only signifies nawabi resistance towards colonial attempts to impose their artists and artworks as part of their economic and political sanctions but its intensity and affect offer up a mirror to Maria Theresa’s transformation of Mughal art into palimpsest



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and pastiche. Both of these cases testify to the oscillation of scarcity and rubbish, desire and violence in the recognition of technological alterity. By the 1780s, I suggest that a colonial check list for judging Mughal aesthetics came into being: Nawab Asaf ud-daula’s collection of Indian pictures is considerable and preserved in large portfolios…Many of them are antique productions and though the figures are generally small yet the drawing is correct and the colouring admirable…In the design of houses, in attitudes of human figures and in perspective, the artists appear eminently defective…They are inimitable.37

Inimitability replaces the desire for the singular in relation to imitation and destruction. President of the Royal Academy Sir Joshua Reynolds bestowed relatively little value on Indian art except to note that South Asian architecture could offer up ‘barbarick’ ‘hints’, but perhaps not the tints of composition.38 Later, as I discuss in the following chapter, John Ruskin condemned Indian paintings and fabrics for being absolutely unnatural because of their lack of a chromatic harmony; their ‘compositions [emerge] out of meaningless fragments of colour’.39 This radical dismantling of Mughal techno-aesthetics worked in tandem with the collapse of the British market in Indian art as numerous colonial officials began offloading their collections at public auctions in London – collections which often sold for just a few guineas. Two of the last Indian image tycoons, ambassador-merchant Richard Johnson and former Governor-General Warren Hastings, negotiated the sale of their collections to the Company – admittedly for a pittance.40 Horrified at what it perceived to be the devastation and devaluation of Mughal visual culture, the Company’s directors established a museum and library to which it hoped colonial officials would bequeath their unwanted collections. However, the museum refused to pay more than a fraction of their estimated value. The main agenda of the Company’s museum was to promote its own status as a cultural laboratory and as an economic powerhouse by showcasing the raw materials of empire – including the versatile, volatile ingredients of pigments. While contemporary visitors repeatedly condemned the shoddy, muddled display of these shrivelled specimens in gloomy rooms (‘filthier than [those of ] a tavern’) behind the sealed doors of the Court of Directors, debates over the sources and patenting of Indian ‘nature’ had long been raging.41 This institutionalised, imperialist nostalgia



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attempted to police the private trafficking of Indian miniatures whilst simultaneously endorsing the further plundering of Mughal art and natural resources in the name of imperial commerce. Monad, Nomad: The Revolting Imperial Palette and the Faciality of Colour, 1810–60 The painter’s box is a very museum of curiosities, from every part of the universe. For it, the mines yield their treasures, as well as the depths of the sea: to it come Arab camel, and English ox, cuttle-fish…in it the Indian indigo lies next the madder of France, and the gaudy vermilion of China brightens the mummy of Egypt. George Field, ‘Chromatography’

Empire is where England loses control through encounters with zones of occult instability. This global beyond is also the imperial within which is always a ‘reflection of other times and places, never a self-present unity awaiting its replicatory colonial enunciation’.42 Against the Mughal colour spectrum, colonial officials now sought new sources for artistic production in order to compete with ambitious chemistry experiments in Europe. Across the British palette, poisonous and illicit substances and pigments, as suggested by Field, assume an increasingly ominous agency. The imperial palette revolts, becomes revolting in and against colour along two convergent networks – through the suspect materials used by colonial artist Robert Home working for the Lucknow court and in terms of the international scramble for natural and archaeological resources as the prime elements in dyestuff production. But whether at the nawabi court of Lucknow or on the indigo plantations of eastern India, the imperial palette when faced with the resistance tactics of a Muslim king and subaltern labourers is threatened with virtual or actual collapse. And this begs the question, what is subaltern colour? Whilst I concur with Gayatri Spivak that subaltern subjects cannot speak precisely because their speech acts are warped or silenced by the very existence of the colonial archive, there is something in the agenda of the early Subaltern Studies collective (Guha on misrecognition innate to colonial inscription of insurgency) which can sing to hint at other potentialities of colour.43 The critical themes that my bi-focal discourse on the revolting are, how colonial, nawabi and subaltern (sometimes masquerading as elite)



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bodies become the subject, even the stuff of imperial painting and how imperial painting articulates the materiality of the colonial self. To espy the thingness of colonial pictures is to account for the chance interruptions, the occasions of contingency when objects break down so as to evoke in humans an experience with the ‘anterior physicality of the world’, whose sensuous presence exceeds the materialisation and utilisation of objects.44 There are, however, alter ways in which art objects assert and deny themselves as things, as folds of matter, as monads. After all, European artists (such as Reynolds) wilfully scratched into paintings in search of thingness in relation to their own self-awareness and the mechanism of affect. This self-awareness is perpetually shifting, radically destabilising and motivated not only by the ‘smooth’ processes of purification but also by the desire for the proliferation of pigments and persons as hybrids, to which I now turn. Wallowing in what he termed the ‘deep bondage of opium’, Thomas De Quincey relates how he became the materials of, or threat to, the imperial palette: ‘For as Midas’s touch turned all things to gold that baffled and degraded his human desires…faint and visionary colours… [become] the fierce chemistry of my dreams’.45 India and the immanent terror of being crushed into raw materials; to be sacrificed as painterly pigment are his worst nightmares. Animated, Indian miniatures stimulate horrific affect: Southern Asia, in general, is the seat of awful images and associations … No man can pretend that the wild, barbarous, and capricious superstitions of Africa, or of savage tribes elsewhere, affect him in the way that he is affected by the ancient, monumental, cruel and elaborate religions of Indostan … Man is a weed in those regions … I am terrified by the modes of life … I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals … Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures … that are found in all tropical regions and assembled them together in Indostan … I ran into pagodas: and was fixed, for centuries, at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol … I was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath of the Brahma through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me, Seeva laid wait for me … I was buried, for a thousand years … with mummies.46

For those readers who were economically attuned to the economics of colonial India, these projected ‘weeds’ could possibly endanger the survival of indigo and opium. At the same time readers could perhaps identify with oriental corpses and with De Quincey’s despair at the



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banality of gold when becoming Midas. I propose that weeds, indigo, gold and mummies are the threatening doubles to the contentious experiments for the sake of colour in empire. Before I get to the polemics of indigo, its mechanism must be explained in relation to its most potent precedent – bodies as pigments – so horrifically experienced by De Quincey. Both mummy brown and indigo blue became the globalising capital of empire in terms of the digging up and covering over ancient remains (pharaohs’ tombs, antiquities in Bihar); both used a huge number of labourers treated like slaves, and a series of intermediaries as brokers who would transport and talk up the ‘quality’ of their product. Both were amongst the most highly prized ingredients of Western European/colonial art and industry as the colour of uniforms or as flesh tones. As dress or as skin, both constructed the critical fold of affect between bodies and the world. Mummy becomes the ‘talkative’ flesh of the modern, bourgeois individual; its reverse, its blue mirror, indigo tries and maybe fails to silence majorities. The fetish-like, animating characterisation of mummy brown set the tone against which colonial representations of the ‘personality’ of indigo would be measured. The case for mummy brown is made most emphatically by the poet George Keate in his elegy to Zoffany’s fellow Swiss and Maria Theresa’s favourite – Angelica Kauffmann: Sweet Paintress! Mixed with these be laid The Mummy and still laud its aid Rich with the gums of ages past… Make every shadow clearer show And every light more brilliant glow… Called from the darkness of the tomb Once more apparent life resume.47

For Keate, the archaic embalmed corpse is brought back to life in ways more wondrous than the animation of Pygmalion. The paintress’s alchemy induces a mesmerising magic; archaic bones become the delicate sheen of flesh in London’s polite society. Although dealers in mummy claimed that they used only ‘lower’ anonymous bodies from communal tombs, Keate here insists on their regal status.48 And each pharaoh should be used differently as pigment, depending on his life achievements: ‘The pulverized NITOCRIS now/ May grace some



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Queen’s majestic brow’; ‘Then let CEPHRENES’ Atoms live,/The piece a darker shadow give,/And rouge in all th’ indignant fire’.49 In spite of this extraordinary combination of technique, paint and royal corpses, there is no sense of the conceit of concordia discors here; Keate does not shed a tear for the mummies’ fate as he refuses to criticise Kauffmann for her complicity in the controversial trade in body parts.50 Artists advised that in choosing mummy as skin tone, ‘the most fleshy parts are the best parts…it must be ground up with nut oil very fine and can be mixed for glazing with ultramarine’.51 The annotations to painters’ colour charts go into detail of which bones should be used: ‘permeating rib bone of a strong smell resembling Garlic and Ammonia’.52 Mummy could be ingested orally as medicine whilst the wrappings and bandages of the embalmed bodies were used as paper, fertiliser or burned as fuel. It was also used by forgers as a substitute for umber because its soft colour gave the appearance of age. Age then was more than mere impression; forgery demanded certain indices to make itself appear true. More ominously European travellers recounted how the preservative process of mummification began even whilst the victim was still alive: They take a captive Moor, of the best complexion; and after long dieting and medicining of him, cut off his head in his sleep, and gashing his body full of wounds, put therein all the best spices, and then wrap him up in hay, being before covered with a sear-cloth; after which they bury him in a moist place, covering the body with earth. Five days being passed, they take him up again, and removing the sear-cloth and hay, hang him up in the sun, whereby the body resolveth and droppeth a substance like pure balm.53

The fetish-like, animating characterisation of mummy brown set the tone against which colonial representations of the ‘personality’ of the ‘ubiquitous anonymity’ of indigo would be measured. As late as July 1904 a firm advertised in the Daily Mail for a mummy: It may appear strange to you, but we require our mummy for making colour. Surely a two thousand year-old mummy of an Egyptian monarch may be used for adorning a noble fresco in Westminster Hall or elsewhere without giving offence to the ghost of the departed gentleman or his descendents.54

Although by this date the exportation of mummies as trophies or souvenirs had been outlawed by the Egyptian authorities, who attempted to prohibit all excavations, mummy continued to fascinate or to horrify. Lawrence Alma Tadema was so concerned when he discovered the



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browns in his studio had been made from mummy that he gave the paints a ‘decent burial’.55 ‘Reactivated’, these ancient substances are like amulets or fetishes; they give magic, depth and a touch of ancient majesty to the painted likenesses of vain and ambitious bourgeois men and women. Stepping out on the town in gowns and jewels worth several thousands of pounds, these conspicuously competitive Britons wanted portraits to reek of as rich, rare and geographically varied substances as possible (to smell of mummy, to imagine what pictures would taste like) – skin painted with mummy, lapis, ground-up pearls; hair, dress, jewels and wigs touched up with saffron, ivory-black, gold and silver.56 Rather staid likenesses by artists such as Kauffmann are in fact complex world maps of colonising forces. More than the performative pose, portraits should produce unusual affects; the globalising matter-force of a likeness constituted its deep value.57 There is something also in this technology of enchantment that imbricates cannibalism. In this age of exploration, cannibal talk – that is, the discourse of anthropophagy – fascinated Europeans. I suggest that not only were they hungry for tales of man-eating in the Pacific (a major theme of Cook’s voyages – which as Obeyesekere argues actually increased cannibal practices amongst peoples anxious to show their powers to Europeans who they believed to be cannibals), but that consuming bodies as fleshy marrow helped fashion their artistic identities.58 As those substances used in portraiture were often rare and expensive, colour men, artists and institutions sought substitutions and alternative sources preferably sourced from the British colonies. The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (hereafter SEAMC) offered premiums for anyone who could gain access to substances which either imitated Indian pigments or made South Asia into a test site for new painterly supplies. If sources could not be found, SEAMC recommended an imitation of their appearance in Britain and its colonies by using alternative materials.59 In 1768 SEAMC advertised premiums ‘for the best specimens of indigo [to be] made in His Majesty’s dominions in America, equal to Guatimala [sic] indigo, not less than 4 lb to be purchased to the Society with certificates of the place where it was made and an account of the culture and process’. If this could be effected before February 1770, the entry would receive a



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gold medal.60 By this date the English East India Company had fallen out with SEAMC over the rights of either to cultivate cinnamon in Sumatra. This constituted a minor but pointed ploy on the part of the Company to quash any rivals to its commercial monopolies.61 Attempting to break the Portuguese and Spanish dye/pigment monopolies in the Americas, British and French traders began to produce production of cochineal (for red) and indigo on their West Indian plantations. And this involved long-term investment in slavery and slavery-like conditions. Slaves in the New World were literally ‘bought with colour’ and they were put to work cultivating and processing indigo which at times surpassed the monetary importance of sugar. Successful slave revolution on Haiti and American Independence led to the collapse of these rival ventures which for the English East India Company spelled opportunity. The president of the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Banks, complained that cochineal could not be grown in the British West Indies because of the ‘dearness of labour’. The solution was to transport the insects to India where he believed labour would be cheaper. In spite of the Company’s implementation of slave-like conditions in India, the propagation of the imported insects to make cochineal repeatedly failed.62 Slave-like conditions, imported plants and polemacy also determine the ‘mood’ of indigo. Indigo is the global cross-over colour par excellence. But as Taussig suggests, indigo was intimately entangled with both a certain obscenity of redemptive labour and with magic.63 Magic redeems indigo from being primarily about exploitation and human degradation. Indigo had long been valued in Asia and Africa for its use in medicine; it could soothe snake bites; as an admixture with egg white it could set broken bones; it acted as an excellent diuretic or as a dye for hair and it was believed that it could guard against the ageing of the skin.64 Hindu women wore a cloth dyed with indigo in the mourning rituals that took place before mounting the funerary pyre of their husbands; at both the initiatory and final stages of spiritual enlightenment, Sufis dressed in indigo robes. Enlivened by the fusion of colour with the magic of the sorcerer, this elision of Africa with India stretches back ‘we might say mimetically, to become something alive, flowing and moving like polymorphous magical substance to preceding centuries’.65 I suggest that in the imperial economy, indigo has another magical aspiration



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– alchemy. It acted as the curious parallax to the alchemist’s desire to grow gold – that is, making fantastic pigments out of banal, unexpected substances, even from waste. Indigo bears down on, disciplines and stains the lives and labours of subaltern subjects worldwide. Indigo constructs two distinct but interlinked definitions of the subaltern. Forcing a largely Muslim workforce into its service, it then became the ubiquitous dye of workers’ clothing, prisoners’ dress and army uniforms across the globe – the colour despised by bourgeois society. Indigo acts as a strangely annihilating interface for the body and the world. It made subaltern bodies almost invisible or at least unwillingly camouflaged; labouring in indigo vats at night, or hidden in Western factories, barracks, gaols, shipped with bodies to imperial wars, its intense saturation disguised sweat, dirt and blood. Likewise in artistic practice, indigo at once proliferates (like subaltern bodies) as never before, but its presence is discreet, literally in the shadows – again it tends to camouflage – even threatening to annihilate its own presence as subject. Although by the late eighteenth century European artists had largely abandoned using indigo in oil paint, it was increasingly popular in watercolours due to its marvellous versatility when mixed with water. In spite of complaints about its fugitive, chemical nature, indigo is frequently anthropormophised as calm, grave, solemn if a bit dull: ‘It is a good substitute for Prussian blue being clear and sober.’66 The growing number of amateur artists and drawing manuals and the rise of Picturesque tourism brought indigo into high demand. Either painting out of imperial boredom or conspicuously mixing colours before potential suitors, British women dipped their brushes into the politics of empire.67 This performativity of a limited accomplishment not only involved a degree of narcissistic waste and desire – giggling softly, catching a lover’s eye and other gestures associated with distracted, lavish painting – but also a reconstitution of imperial landscape as miasma. Articulated by death, violence, as wasteland or the space where virtual and actual merge, miasma further disorients and redirects empire. Fashionable and highly prized, indigo worked wonderfully well in overgrown, picturesque landscape painting, whether in India, Britain, Italy, Australia or elsewhere: the harsh labour of tropical plantations (sap, sweat, blood from the whip encapsulated by the cake) literally become the shades, the dark spaces of ‘polite’ representation.



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The propagation of indigo was made possible because of the vast tracks of land turned over to the colonial state following the Act of Permanent Settlement in Bengal, 1793 and the Charter Act 40 years later.68 From 1833, the British government abolished the Company’s commercial monopoly and removed all restrictions on European immigration in India. Four years later, Parliament declared that any subject of the Crown could acquire and hold in perpetuity land in any part of the territories of the Company. As if this weren’t enough, in 1862 Sir Charles Wood, Secretary of State for India, proposed an extension of Permanent Settlement to create country pockets of planter-led influence which he believed to be necessary to defuse the ‘blue revolution’ against indigo. Alongside sugar cane, tea and what came to be its main rival, opium, the Company introduced indigo into India in the hope of dominating the global market in cash crops. Between 1779 and 1788 the Company advanced capital to private traders to commence its cultivation – an experiment which due to lack of expertise and resources foundered. Aware of the limited knowledge of its own officials, the Company then invited slave drivers from the West Indies not only to instruct colonialists and ryots (peasants) on the processes of production but also more ominously to impose as far as possible their system of land management and concept of labour on Indian subaltern everyday life. In 1802 the Company relinquished direct control over the indigo factories which fell into the hands of agency houses and European planters who organised themselves into the Planters Association. By 1815 Bengal alone exported over three tonnes of indigo valued at six shillings per pound produced by four million peasants employed in a system of labour that forced them into permanent debt. The Company and then the Planters Association annexed valuable land from Bengali (mostly Muslim) ryots to insist that indigo take precedent over the cultivation of all other crops – including those required for staple foods. The Company encouraged long land leases which locked rural communities into a system of intensive labour and low wages whilst planters notoriously used coercive strategies by employing thugs to beat ryots with sticks and whips. Indigo must be sown and harvested first; it had to occupy the best earth and take priority in field rotation, effectively destroying the fallow land principle. A very delicate plant, it required rich red earth to thrive; as soon as it began to flower it had to be cut to extract the sap;



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it needed to be dried for six weeks and its alkaline had to be fermented in vats which was relentlessly stirred for hours on end – which I believe effectively transformed peasant cultivators into machine-like labourers. It takes over two thousand square feet of land to make just one eightounce indigo cake.69 The inevitable outcomes were poverty, starvation and mass migration of ryots to Nepal. Even imperial officials admitted to the inhumane conditions of indigo workers: ‘These ryots are not Carolina slaves’; indigo is ‘a system of bloodshed’; ‘in practice the ryot is made to act like a slave not a freeman’.70 Indigo contractors also rounded up male members of the Santhal jungle tribes from the Bihari district of Manbhum and from the West Bengal regions of Singhbhum and Midnapur who they forced into labour. Migrating with their families, this coerced diaspora of coolies led to dispossession of customary land and fostered starvation. Time and again the colonial state imprisoned coolies and ryots for either breaking their contracts with the planters or for the ‘malicious destruction of indigo’. From the 1830s through to the collapse of the Bengali indigo trade in 1862, local gaols became overcrowded with people rebelling against the plaintive agenda of ruthless planters. Here they could at times petition the government; in effect even from here they could act as a vector for subaltern revolt. The polemics of indigo and the power of the planter junta were fiercely debated in one of the few ‘public’ spaces in Calcutta that facilitated interaction between Europeans and Indians – The Photographic Society of Bengal. The Society frequently discussed the judicial, forensic and ethical uses for photography: photography must bear the weight of governmental responsibility. In his address to the Society, Reverend Joseph Mullens made the impassioned plea for the agency of photography in terms of its ‘stern fidelity’.71 This indexicality allowed the calotype (his preferred photographic medium) to approximate his own belief in the Baptist missionary ideal of unmediated access to truth: ‘The photographer will endeavour systematically to depict them [his subjects: forensics, the dead, in court, criminals social types, religion and trade]… It will give him a deeper interest in the welfare, of the proceedings, the comfort and progress of the curious people among whom we live. It will give him further knowledge of the modes of thought’.72 A few months later the focus shifts from photography to the expulsion of one of the Society’s members – the famed art historian and archaeologist



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Rajendralal Mitra. Mitra had made a speech at the Society against the destruction caused by the indigo plantocracy.73 Given the ensuing state of emergency – that is, the Sepoy Uprising – perhaps for certain members of the Society (including several planters), the indigo junta was deemed to be one of the only governmental forces still functioning. The planter class thought of themselves as the equivalent to the British landholding elite; they professed a certain gentlemanly capitalism and a rule of property for Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. Mitra by contrast saw indigo as not only destroying ancient manners and customs but also as infringing on the material heritage of eastern India; indigo planters had no respect for ruins or archaeological excavations.74 Once expelled from the Society, one of its members wrote anonymously in his favour, defending him as ‘one of the few practical photographers of which the Society can boast’, who had produced exciting and innovative images when many ‘Europeans hung back’.75 This ‘photographic disturbance’ would, the writer warned, lead to the loss of many members.76 Photographic disturbance would soon become embroiled in indigo disturbance. Five million Bengali peasants took up arms against the production of indigo against the strictures of Act XI, The Ryot Coercion Act of 1860.77 In Nadia district, three thousand ryots marched on the Beniagaon factory whilst at the Ratnapur factory, men, women and children led an organised assault in six divisions using slings, brass plates and kitchen implements. Indigo gave rise to songs of resistance which had long afterlives well into the twentieth century. Against the mantra of bare life, to be killed is to be sacrificed:78 The babus of Calcutta have sailed down in great numbers to watch the fight. The ryots are prepared this time for a struggle And are determined not to bear oppression silently Or to lay down their lives without fighting.79

At this time a second, contemporary Mitra, Dinabandhu Mitra, published a celebrated, inflammatory play in Dacca, September 1860, entitled Nīl Darpan, or The Indigo Planting Mirror.80 Set in Lower Bengal, the drama relates the destruction of one community by two planters – Wood and Rogue intent on profit and the celebration of violence. The main characters are beaten, corrupted, raped or killed: all respond to the mirror of indigo very distinctly. Against the skimming, the lightening of matter offered up by the European looking glass in Asaf ud-daula’s Lucknow palace,



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darpan makes matter heavy, profound; its reflections offer the potential of a universe constituted by a multiplicity of perspectives. The inference of the multiplicity of subaltern viewpoints on the evils of indigo outside of the performativity of the play, grounds Nīl Darpan in a wider politics of representation as action so feared by the crisis-ridden colonial state. Throughout the play, marginal, subaltern characters merely dubbed ‘ryot’ by Mitra, make the most impassioned claims against indigo. In response to Planter Wood’s threat ‘I shall write to our Indigo Plantation Association to make a petition to the government for the stopping of schools in the villages’ one man declares ‘I would rather have my body rot in the gaol than any more prepare indigo of that white man’.81 The village elder, protagonist Goluk Chunder Basu is sentenced under Act XI, thrust into Inderabad prison where he later hangs himself. His son Bindhu speaks of the tragedy of indigo: The cobra de capello, like the indigo planters, with mouths full of poison, threw all happiness into the flame of fire. The father, through injustice, died in the prison; the elder brother in the indigo field; and the mother, being insane through grief for her husband and son, murdered, with her own hands, a most honest woman… The world I look upon is a desert full of corpses.82

These lal monkey 83 planters have no sensitivity to what it means to make, to be, blue. Mitra stresses that it is the planter system not the indigo plant per se which is destroying the Bengali economy84 and as such Nīl Darpan demands mimetic identification from one target audience: ‘I present the indigo planting mirror to the indigo planters’ hands; now let every one of them having observed his face erase the freckle of the stain of selfishness from his forehead.’85 In this mimetic circuit indigo dissolves boundaries between images, bodies and doubles. Mitra wants the trope of the ‘mirror’ to act as a switching point where performative representation can effect the realm of embodied practices. His composition-of-action writes against the grain of British treatises on indigo where it is given an animated, fetish-like status: ‘Among the vast variety of vegetal products there is none so interesting to science by the curious complexity of its nature and the protean shapes it may be made to assume than indigo.’86 It is far more fascinating than ‘the simple crystalline product sugar’87 partly because it is difficult to describe ‘what precise colour it really has’.88 Being ‘like the sea exposed to the sky’ through peasant beatings



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indigo manifests ‘a variety of beautiful changes, gradually darkening into a Prussian green…into the intense deep blue of the ocean in stormy weather’.89 An ocean of artists’ colours is then the spectrum of indigo. Synthesis and Ennui: Indigo Aesthetics Responding to the Indigo Commission set up by the government to investigate labour conditions and corruption in 1860, the Planters Association lobbied the British Parliament with a series of pamphlets which attacked indigo’s usurper as the leading colonial export – opium.90 They claimed that the government was publicly destroying indigo (whose profits had fallen dramatically since the 1840s) and that it had incited ryot riots to distract from its sly promotion of opium in eastern India. The processes of animating indigo which entailed self-sacrifice to a lifestyle determined by boredom, or at best ennui, the planters insisted had transformed the rural economy of eastern India in a positive manner: ‘Indigo has cleared the jungle and turned the wilderness into cornfields and the lair of the wild beasts into villages, while opium has only covered rich arable land with poppies’.91 Indigo did help to produce a new landscape whose social and physical engineering became the unpictured subjects of colonial art and aesthetics. Aside from ‘picturesque’ views of ‘timeless’ village scenes indigo production ploughed up the land and demolished settlements in favour of factory compounds. For amateur and professional artists, several of whom were indigo planters, the factory acts as an ersatz country estate. While colonial artists’ views of archaic Bengali villages are surrogates for the spread of indigo, the factory constitutes the colonial economy in microcosm; it is the visual manifestation of Permanent Settlement which is otherwise nearly entirely absent in colonial aesthetics. The vats and their ordered ryots, taking the place of immersion in the rice paddy as organised labour, usurp the previous artistic interest in portraying individual castes surrounded by occupational-endogamous attributes. Artists themselves profited directly from indigo. The professional painter William Florio Hutchisson made enough money from portrait commissions in Calcutta and at the Bengali court of Murshidabad to buy two indigo plantations which effectively acted as his country estates thus allowing him to indulge in a colonial version of



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‘gentlemanly capitalism’. Likewise James Fergusson – the archaeologist and staunch critic of Rajendralal Mitra whose work he vehemently condemned, made tours of the ancient sites of eastern India during fallow periods of indigo production.92 Fergusson’s ‘indebtedness to the exploitation of the rural poor’ against Mitra’s criticism of indigo laid the ground for animosity between the two, which was extended to ‘the use of the photograph as evidence, the ability to read photographs and the very nature of indexical being there through which this conflict was articulated’.93 For Fergusson, a concern with recording the ancient past supposedly made up for the demolition of more recent villages, temples and ancient monuments. I suggest that in the decline in colonial interest in British art from the 1800s onwards, indigo planters proved to be ‘one fertile area’ which came to be associated with the colonial production and patronage of visual culture – whether archaeology, oil painting or illustrated memoirs. I propose that the amount of spare time, conducive to colonial boredom, and the relative isolation of these men made writing and painting a far more attractive option than it would have been in the urban environs of Calcutta. These men produced a new landscape and an often hypermasculinist aesthetic of open plains and jungles ripe for hunting peppered with occasional potlatch dinners with fellow planters. The eye of the planter was attuned to the macro-state of the land through which he passed and the micro-transformations of indigo at every stage of its transformation. This formed a chromatic lens used for assessing both the aesthetics of landscape and everyday life. Rather than viewing land through the aesthetics of the picturesque which favoured overgrown, dilapidated ruined buildings which could excite associations with past glory or a more limited delight of the formalistic play of rough textures of trees and ragged staffage, the indigo aesthetic admired plantocratic order. For planter Minden Wilson the visual highlight of his memoirs is not the open country but the Government Horse Nursery at Poosah, Bihar, which he viewed as being: A lovely place, with fine avenues of teak and suckooah trees leading from one stable to another. The stables were neatly-thatched houses, well kept, with large embanked enclosures in front for young cattle…The garden was nicely kept, and full of rare fruits and plants. Poosah was originally intended for a Botanical Garden, [and now it housed a factory].94



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According to Wilson’s Reminiscences of Behar, his work at Sibnuggur as assistant planter: Had not much to vary it, and might be described as monotonous; though, on the whole, I liked it…I had been able to gather together a few extra pieces of furniture and some pictures, with which I managed to make my little bungalow quite cheerful and nice…placed above the edge of a lake, with a garden to the south, in which were several good mangoe trees.95

Like many other memoirs of lonely planters the landscape is marked by memories of ryot rioting or with the presence of strange, long-dead Europeans. Wilson’s ‘estate’ was haunted by a man who due to love and liquor had committed suicide; ‘his restless spirit was still seen to wander by the banks of the lake where he had destroyed himself ’ after drinking a dozen squares of gin. He shot himself with a pistol and fell onto a sword he had planted in the lake. There was also a second ghost, ‘a wild man [who] had on different occasions rushed out of the cane-fields on travellers who were cooking their food at the roadside’.96 In Wilson’s bungalow the ghost causes mayhem: ‘everything in extraordinary confusion – the pictures turned with their faces to the wall…I own I was never happy on a dark evening here…which made things uncommonly creepy. I had almost satisfied myself that I was under an illusion’ when a strange face appeared, ‘a cold shiver ran down my back and my hair stood on end’.97 Wilson’s Reminiscences, like the majority of planter memoirs, were written up as autobiography back in Britain. His production of the self steeped in nostalgia (prose often triggered by old drawings reproduced in the memoirs as prints which planters used as aides de mémoire) mourned not only a lost way of life but also conjured a sadness for the demise of indigo which by the late nineteenth century had ceased to be a principle cash crop due to its synthetic replacement with a tar-based substitute. The planters and their scientist allies in Britain reacted angrily to what they came to see as even more dangerous than government ‘betrayal’ in favour of opium – the German manufacture of aniline indigo.98 According to the Borgesian Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, the principle of laboured substitution drives this all too mechanised, normalising economy. Like De Quincey’s opiate self-awareness (‘I was the idol’), synthetic indigo elicits a kind of synthetic, imperial idolatry:



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It substitutes the factory for the field, and makes for the congestion of the urban population which seems inseparable from an advanced civilisation. Moreover, the substitution of an artificial dye for a natural one has a defect of the same kind as the substitution of mechanical work for that of the hand. The artificial dyes have the defects of their qualities: they are too good, i.e. too pure. Their use is apt to lack interest … Natural dyes are … more or less complex mixtures, and they yield in consequence in the hands of a skilful operator peculiar tones which are not easily realised.99

Substitution rather than representation does the work of sacrifice and doubling.100 Through substitution, indigo initiates the colonial hybridisation of fetishism with idolatry. Fetishism which acted through a mechanism of substitution is here supplemented by idolatry as ‘worship’ based on calculated resemblance. In addition to debates on the mystifying forces of commodity fetishism, colonialists wrote anxiously about what they perceived to be an increase in image worship in India. Idolatry becomes the order of things: ‘Hindu idolatry has been sinking lower and lower. It has grown more debased in its number of gods’.101 There is a certain ‘magic’ to this new aniline dye which took its name from the Sanskrit term for blue – nīl. Coal and tar become the new colours of the sacred. Alchemy and chemistry are intertwined as the ‘colonization of nature now began in earnest as the chemists got down into molecular structure itself ’.102 Colour emerged from the waste products of coal and iron ore as part of a new economy of technological phenomenology: living coal-gas light now illuminated the streets so as to alter the poetics of night-time forever whilst bright new hues in this strange light gave off a new and unsettling aura.103 Indigo emerged alongside an entirely novel range of synthetic colours exemplified by mauve which was the unexpected by-product of investigations into the manufacture of caffeine, quinine and morphine. Once again colour can be seen in related to or as a drug: ‘Dyes led to spectacularly successful treatments for incurable illnesses such as syphilis and certain bacterial infections … while also opening new fields in bacteriology and cell biology with the use of stains derived from aniline dyes … Like the microscope colour made the invisible world visible’.104 Just as aniline dyes came to stain the basic unit of the human body, the cell, and its constituent parts so Marx broke capitalism down to its basic cell – the commodity – both of



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which seemed to be endowed with magical powers. So for Germany ‘synthetics were the wealth of the Indies’. Colonisation now meant colonisation of ancient nature (fossils for fuel), of the human body, of life itself (organic chemistry). Whilst this did create a conceptual leap between man and nature, there is something in the nature of substitution and colour as currency which has its genealogy in colonial India. Indigo as Ersatz Gold and the Alchemy of the Palette: Robert Home at Lucknow Throughout the period of colonial rule, Company officials and planters attempted to codify indigo’s lengthy cultivation and manufacturing processes in numerous, competing treatises on dye technology, which although filled with tables of prices and qualities lacked the technical sophistication of eighteenth-century Indian writings on dyeing such as the Nuskha Khulasatul Mufarrebat, 1766.105 They employed Indian artists both to represent the complicated processes of production and the intricate botanical details of (ideal) plant specimens. For example, Monsieur de Cossigny de Parma commissioned Brahmin Sadanund to make a series of watercolours in the manner of the technological prints of the Encyclopédie, to illustrate his Memoir of Indigo which range from detailed bird’s eye maps of the equipment, a taxonomy of processes and several detailed representations of plant specimens which capture the plant in flower, in the process of dyeing. As I will later argue, Company officials frequently commissioned Indian artists to represent subjects in which they themselves were either technically inept or of which they had limited knowledge in the hope that artistic representation could facilitate a glimpse into an alternative episteme. And this extended to the work of colonial painters. In his small sketchbook of 1786, professional portraitist Ozias Humphry records an Indian artist at work (British Library). A popular subject in the margins of seventeenth-century Mughal albums, this new-found colonial interest in the artist absorbed in the act of painting manifests a certain enthralment with vernacular technology. To accompany his portrait of the anonymous painter, Ozias Humphry penned a few lines on the application of gold leaf. Although his comments elsewhere on Indian art are in general derogatory, in



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this instance Humphry appears fascinated by the technical novelty and potential of precious metal. Gold was glaringly absent in colonial territories. Due to this shortage of bullion and the need to remit finance to Europe, the Company came to rely increasingly on profits from indigo production. Ploughing land revenues into financing wars and borrowing money from private merchants, the Company hoped that indigo would help pay off its debts and allow traders to transfer money to Europe. In this way indigo acted as substitute for gold. The absence of gold leaf and the presence of indigo in colonial oil portraits were critical reasons for their dismissal by nawabi patrons like Asaf ud-daula. Throughout his reign he preferred the work of Indian artists who had migrated from imperial Delhi and from whom he commissioned portraits which represented him in dresses made entirely from gold leaf (Museum of Modern Art, New Delhi; Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata). This concern with materiality and technology continued to act as a driving force for the appreciation of art at the Lucknow court long after Asaf ’s death in 1797 in the work of Robert Home. As opposed to the six years Humphry and Zoffany spent in India, Robert Home made the East into a career. Being part of a second generation of colonialists, the paucity of patronage in the Company’s settlements forced him to seek clients ‘up country’ – in his case at the fabulous court of Lucknow. Perhaps colonial recession, which led to a decline in the trade in imported goods, including pigments, induced Home to experiment with colour – much to the horror of his principal client, King Ghazi-uddin Haidar. Following Asaf ud-daula’s death and a bloody coup, the Company imposed its chosen candidate Saadat Ali Khan as ruler of Awadh. He and his successor Ghazi-uddin Haidar were coerced into patronising Home. As an exertion of its power, the Company stripped Ghazi-uddin of his nawabi title, his right to alliances with Indian princes thus transforming his iconography of sovereignty into a hybrid concoction with mimetically charged reference to the regalia of British monarchs. Relentlessly portrayed by Home in numerous squared-up drawings of his left profile, Ghazi-uddin is forced to sport ermine, riding breeches and a crown. Whilst the Company sucked the life out of the Lucknawi karkhāna, Home became the court’s self-styled artist, furniture designer and engineer, where according to one colonial visitor he found ‘it necessary to paint in glowing colours



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to satisfy’ Nawab Ghazi-uddin Haidar.106 Although Heber’s remark here can be read as yet another British suspicion of the sensual oriental associations of colour (a debate that had been raging for centuries), Home did spend a tremendous amount of time working on his palette which he later codified in the form of a manuscript.107 In 1895 Home’s grandson inscribed the opening of The Recipe Book with the curious comment: ‘All the insights seem to belong to the Italian fifteenth-century methods of painting and differ widely from modern’.108 Albeit never published, the existence of The Recipe Book indicates his belief in the success of such experiments. Notoriously secretive and often unstable, the studio practices of British and colonial artists played with the layering, the oil and with the ‘alchemy’ of painting. The collapse of painting into alchemy enabled colonial artists to experiment with an enormous array of illegal, clandestine and noxious substances. In their search for colour harmony, British artists often chipped off bits of famous paintings in the hope of inducting the alchemical secrets of dark, battered and frequently fake Old Masters. Unlike the minute, thin and carefully sealed and burnished layers of Mughal miniatures, the thick crusts of oil painting offered a rocklike, mineral-rich sample whose physiognomy in cross section could be studied under the microscope in a manner analogous to Robert Hook’s exploration of crystalline materials (including snowflakes) in his Micrographia, 1665. Both alchemy and painting rely on strange admixtures of water and stones. In alchemy, the Stone as the monad (the all in a single mark; Leibniz’s indivisible spiritual substance related to a harmonious universe with other like substances which form the basis of the material world) is the ultimate goal; one of its purposes is to turn liquid into a substance as unmeltable as stone and as desirable as gold. The monad then ‘is the autonomy of the interior, an interior without exterior’.109 It is the infinitely small which is bound up with a restlessness made up of intoxication, giddiness, even death: ‘The infinite number of simple substances creates the appearance of as many different universes. Yet they are but perspectives of a single universe varied according to the points of view which differ in each monad’.110 If there is a monad in painting it is the shapeless, formless masses of oils waiting to be distilled or the endless rocks of the earth ready to be exhumed, purified



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and ground into pigments: ‘The monad is all paint.’111 Painting and alchemy wished for the same malleable things – linseed oils, spirits, brilliant minerals – and artists’ manuals sometimes used the language of alchemy calling for materials that might also be cosmic signs such as vitriol, sal ammoniac, rocks in the shape of fishes, loaves of bread, stag’s tears, pearls, unicorn horns and the blood of a dragon. In this last case, the dragon was only of value once it had wrapped itself around an elephant and begun sucking its blood; more highly prized was when the two fought to the death; their mixed blood contained in the fangs of the dragon should be immediately collected by the watching alchemist. Realgar and orpiment, common to paintings, are also favoured alchemical ingredients because they yield arsenic and sulphur. For centuries alchemists tried to find a substitute for the expensive Afghan lapis lazuli. Likewise the red mineral cinnabar usually found in an impure state mixed with rock which made it hard to purify into vermilion was for European and Islamic alchemists a critical source of sulphur and mercury. Sulphur and mercury were for many alchemists following the eighth-century philosopher-scientist Jābir ibn Hayyān’s groundbreaking claims, the ultimate dyad; this doubling of the monad made up the two fundamental materials of the universe. Robert Home’s working practice differed radically from many of the basic tenets of European alchemy and Indo-Islamic grinding and application of pigments as can be when we make a comparison of those methods for the preparation of the most precious paint – lapis lazuli from Badakhstan, Afghanistan. Alongside his explanation of the application of gold, in the appendix to his treatise Gulistan-i Hunan (Rose Garden of Art), Qāzī Ahmad focused primarily on lapis lazuli by detailing how it should be washed with soap, how it can be mixed with indigo to make sky blue (asman-gun) and how it can be lightened with ceruse.112 To make lapis lazuli Qāzī Ahmad stipulates that one or two drops of gum must be poured over it to form a paste, before grinding. After this no more gum must be added. In the process of grinding, you must choose stones with the most lustrous colour which at a later stage must be sifted through a flour sieve before being washed with soap. Then the ground stones are cast into the water, then stirred and left for an hour until the agitated mixture becomes calm. Next the water is poured into a different bowl and the hard residue is collected,



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pounded again, washed with lye and put into another vessel. Again the residue is washed and ground using the same soap, or alternatively, it is treated with hot water mixed with milk several times until the lapis lazuli entirely comes out of it before it is dried and wrapped in paper. According to Home, lapis lazuli should be prepared with two ounces of common yellow wax, with two ounces of rosin and with two ounces of olive oil: These melted in a pan and after standing by the fire let the dirt settle, pour the paste into a basin of water – this must be separated to clean it from the dirt. When it is cool enough to manage with the hands the water should be well squeezed out of it and the paste by well working brought into a proper consistency for use. In hot weather it must be made with less oil and more wax and rosin. The lapis using well ground and dry, the paste is then mixed with it by rolling the paste in the powder and when it is well incorporated with colour, it must be managed with the hands in a clean basin of warm water adding from time to time hot water if the paste is too stiff.113

In addition to gilding in watercolour, making aqua fortis, drying powders and glue from quick lime, Home wrote extensively about his experiments with oils, lacquers and the gilding for watercolours – the last of which is probably a reference of Indian courtly practices. Unlike the preparation of Mughal pigments, he made infrequent use of gum arabic and he does not mention the rigorous washing of minerals detailed at such length by Sādiqī Bek and Qāzī Ahmad. Like Sādiqī Bek, Home employed verdigris, lake and carmine, but whilst Sādiqī Bek detailed the raw materials for verdigris – sheets of copper coated with winy vinegar buried in a pit for one month – Home was far more concerned with the later stages of preparation and this involved bread. The verdigris should be ground in water with 1/40th spirit of vitriol then made into a paste and put inside a loaf of bread. This has to be made with yeast or leaven to prevent it from cracking and then placed in the oven ‘as if it is to be baked for eating’.114 The rest of Home’s recipes were far less appetising. Against the grain of Irani-Mughal colour sources which rarely include animal materials (occasionally bone, ivory for black and insects for red lake), Home employed a number of taboo substances. His formula for red lake boiled up two ounces of pearls which should be dissolved in a pint of warm water, filtered through paper and then added to half a



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tablespoon of cuttlefish bone; his copal varnish includes old cheese and spirits of wine; his preparation of Prussian blue relies on bull’s blood whilst he used an unspecified animal bladder to store amber varnish. In addition to its excurses on pigments, the Recipe Book discusses at length the importance of oils and varnish as the agent against the decay of paintings. Home seems to have used a huge amount of poppy oil, adjusting the imperial palette to accommodate the by-product of indigo’s nemesis – opium. Poppy oil also formed the base of his varnishes as preserve, varnish as a cosmetic for pictures – to bring out colour; varnish as guard against the atrophy of canvas, ill designed for a hot climate. Given the threat of insects, mould and the unpredictable structural movements of frames and canvas in such tropical heat, oil paintings hardly served as the best economic investment. With the average life span of a European in India gauged at just two monsoons, sitters and pictures competed in a race for death. Just as sick colonialists ingested both medicines and vast quantities of Madeira, pictures soaked up layers of varnish, as if by being saturated yet brittle were to be immunised. After all, oil paintings were widely believed in both India and Europe to be poisonous or contagious. As is well known, leading artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds (nicknamed Sir Sloshua because of his notoriously unstable material practice) took their life in their own hands when they experimented with toxic substances such as the arsenic and orpiment found in yellow and lead white. Many of their subjects in addition to inhaling the paints’ noxious fumes at lengthy sittings, already consumed or applied the same substances to their hands, necks and faces. Most notoriously, one of Reynolds’ favourites, the courtesan-beauty Kitty Fisher wished that her complexion could be repeatedly painted in a startling lead white – which she also applied as facial make-up, whilst taking arsenic in the hope of appearing ethereally fair. And this anxiety over whiteness appears exactly at the time of imperial expansion and fears of cultural miscegenation. Although Reynolds’ portraits disintegrated during his own life time, in the case of Kitty Fisher her reliance on whitening substances took a more premature toll: at the height of her popularity she reportedly died of lead poisoning.115 During the formative years of the National Gallery London, the open, flexible weft of large canvases on display curators and physicians believed made them



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the literal harbingers of smallpox, diphtheria and tuberculosis. Sick bodies meant sick pictures and vice versa in the vicious continuum of infection. Hence portraits moved in and out of the covert, magical zone of rubbish. Their disposal takes place in the shifting of portraits into dark corridors or attics; like a lot of trash, painted likenesses are market inalienable. But the instability of Reynolds’ pigments, oils and varnishes, and the ways in which they bite into each other and into the canvas added to their immediate value. Whilst Neil De Marchi, Hans J. Van Miegroet and Matthew Hunter provocatively suggest that Reynolds wanted his portraits to decay, to age with their sitters which would bestow on them a strangely sympathetic corporeal continuum, there is also the possibility that the artist carefully stage-crafted the moment when all his stinking oils and varnishes would congeal – to produce their most dramatic effect.116 Perhaps then painting by the late eighteenth century is where alchemy ‘lies’. As such painting is not merely about gradual deliquescence but about the projected success of risky experimentation and their venturous transference in and out of the public/clientele realm. What I term ‘this epiphany’, its moment and its momentum, could be for the opening view at the Royal Academy or the first time the portrait was unveiled to the waiting sitter. Perhaps then painting as alchemy necessitated this elixir where, when the finished picture holds within itself its own epiphany. Because this is epiphany qua alchemy or alchemy qua epiphany, perhaps for all Reynolds’ professed academic skill, representation is arbitrary; it is but one force in relation to materiality, affect and alchemy. Maybe painting is best thought of as both the dialogue of eye and hand and as the acheiropoeton – the self-made, if not necessarily the self-aware image. Perhaps the momentum of the self-made image pertains to a market which is self-made, self-regulating via Reynolds’ close cohort Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Aside from this moment, I suggest that oil paintings such as Reynolds were in constant flux; portraits allowed sitters to recognise waste as in things. Things become conspicuous when they are in a state of transition – that is, when they are in the process of being re- or de-animated. To think of portraits as, or to frame them as, potential rubbish, is to ‘experience the fantasy of self-sovereignty and ontological separateness’.117



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In their very different artistic networks, Sādiqī Bek and Home warned that the preparation or removal of certain substances such as varnish from paintings was extremely dangerous. At the conclusion of Canons of Painting, Sādiqī Bek cautions that ‘home is not the place for these operations. They should be performed somewhere at a safe distance away from town. For not only is there a fire hazard but one must take cognizance as well of the foul chemical odours which arise’.118 Working from a studio in his Lucknawi house, Home advised: If a spirit varnish when you find it very thick and cracked, you may rub it with spirits of wine on a bit of cotton but take care not to get too close if you have the least idea that the picture is finished by glazing; if it is not, there is no danger.119

This is how he resolved to remove the armature of hardened varnish from suspect paintings: If the varnish has darkened or gone hard, stale piss will kill the varnish and soften it so it may be taken off with fine needles…When taken as much of the varnish off with cotton, wash it over with stale piss and dry it with a cloth, then rub it with your fingers…Every now and then repeat rubbing it with the piss.120

An extremely toxic element when boiled, urine produces phosphorous, which was marketed as the highly addictive Kunckel’s Pills.121 This was not Home’s only recourse to urine as the vital ingredient of colonial artistic practice. Although his painting cabinet (which today still includes remnants of his pigments and varnishes) is now housed in the India Office, London, few of Home’s Lucknawi paintings survive – with a critically ambitious exception: Ghazi-ud-din Hyder, King of Awadh, receiving Tribute (plate 6).122 Recently restored at Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata, Home’s lavish use of Indian yellow to imitate gold leaf dominates both the chromatic scale and the narrative of the composition. Due to its association with the wilful ill-treatment of malnourished cows whose impoverished diet of mango leaves produced the golden urine at the base of the pigment, Indian yellow was censored by Indian nationalists and fearful of communal riot, it would be tentatively outlawed by the colonial state. Although highly prized for its luminosity, its versatility and durability, Indian yellow is almost too startling; its sheen and saturation make it stand out against other pigments; it is also difficult to mix with other colours.123 In this way it acts as a substitute, perhaps even as a fetish for gold leaf. The allure of Indian yellow would be Robert



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Home’s downfall. Not content with introducing yellow to represent Ghazi-uddin’s throne and crown, Home inserted a genuflecting figure whose gesture he hoped would set the necessarily mnemonic, ceremonial tone of the viewer’s subordinate position and whose gold yellow robe could provide a chromatic counterpoint to the splendour of the King. He laboured for four years on the composition, repeatedly complaining to British visitors to his makeshift studio that ‘the durbar has been quite neglected for months; the king will not let me finish it and now talks of introducing our new Resident. It will be a fine medley if it is ever completed’.124 Far more, however, than an appraisal of the changing faces of the durbar, is at stake. Knowingly or otherwise, Home breached the viewing etiquette Indian rulers expected from oil portraiture. According to Colonel Robert Smith, writing from Lucknow: A few days before the picture was to be put up in the palace, the king came to see it and was highly offended because the officer had his back turned towards him. When it was explained to His Majesty that though he had his back turned towards him it was not so in the scene it represented; but he could not be convinced or satisfied until a promise was made to change the position of the offending servant. This same picture Mr Home informed me was many years on his hands.125

Eventually landing up in a private collection in late nineteenth-century Britain before being sold to the India Office and re-transported to Curzon’s colonial heritage project – Victoria Memorial in Kolkata – the painting moves in and out of various circuits of exchange. Like Zoffany’s Prince Jawan Bakht receiving Warren Hastings at Lucknow (plate 5), Home’s picture refuses to become an inalienable possession; there are explicit limits to colonial coercion in relation to nawabi patronage. Seduced by the beauty of Indian yellow Home understood neither the symbolic importance of the durbar nor the kingly viewing position expected by Ghazi-uddin. Indian yellow in itself and as supplement or substitute for gold here generates a ‘sense of movement through colour juxtapositions that fetishizes things and brings them alive’.126 For the Shi‘a rulers of Lucknow yellow at best has a supplemental agency. Although associated with the early stages of Sufi enlightenment (see below) it did not have the auspicious Islamic genealogy of green, red, turquoise and indigo or the paradisiacal aura of white. In Home’s painted durbar, the robe of the turned figure is haptic: its brilliance produces a space which dazzles too much of itself. After all, no visitor to the durbar



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should be more fantastically dressed then the ruler, whose prerogative it was to gift carefully gradated robes of honour, khil’at, to subordinates.127 The spirit of khil’at was in Mughal culture intended to combine with the moral substance of the giver and the receiver; colour could also control the heat or coolness of the body.128 Coerced by the British into the public display of habitual identification with George IV through crown and ermine, the presence of this golden robe (so favoured by the last independent ruler of Awadh Asaf ud-daula in his Mughal court portraits) was perhaps for Ghazi-uddin a highly saturated, mnemonic and ‘sticky’ political/artistic device; perhaps it resonated as a reminder of lost power.129 In contrast with Prince Jawan Bakht receiving Warren Hastings at Lucknow, where Hastings’ figure, and especially his feet, press upon the viewer, Home’s bowed figure possesses neither Zoffany’s private irony nor does it display the expected function of a princely image with the possibility of bestowing respect, neither did it participate in the sacral economy of darsán then being represented by Mughal artists at the court of Emperor Akbar Shah II. Only through a decisive, usually low viewpoint, the proper management of perspective and an emphasis on the body of the sovereign could European portraiture hope to find favour with Indian princes.130 Squashing the ruler into a confined space where he was painted in ‘crude’, sweeping brushstrokes on rotting canvas, western portraits like Home’s failed to live up to the aesthetic technology of Mughal art. Although Indo-Islamic chroniclers praised oil portraiture and invented a new terminology to describe its processes and appearance – tasvir rowghani (oily pictures, perhaps an adaptation of the term used to describe coloured varnish coined by Sādiqī Bek – rang-i rowghan) – for Ghazi-uddin, European art could only be celebrated through translation. From his own Mughal court artists Ghazi-uddin commissioned gouache and gold-leaf cityscapes of Lucknow or banquet scenes whose aim was to create a dazzling aura around his own person: the body should be identifiable by a material aura. European visitors noted that such Lucknawi banquets were strategically divided between different cultural factions; the ruler was reported to have refused wine and certain meats whilst offering colonial officials alcohol in chamber pots (which is perhaps a retort to Home’s inappropriate use of piss).131 Such British comment suggests both colonial scorn at the partially anglicised etiquette



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whilst perhaps unintentionally inferring a carefully coded nawabi slur on British care/abuse of the self. Albeit instructed in the narratives of modern individualism by successive colonial governesses, Ghazi-uddin adopted foreign objects for various public–private occasions, the result being his highly personalised formation of a vernacular modernity. In a similar manner his court artists structurally adjusted Home’s failed painting as watercolour and gold-leaf miniatures in order to celebrate the king in Indo-Islamic terms. This can be seen in their deployment of huge gold haloes which they combined with a dress of brilliant Indian yellow whilst experimenting with the crowded dining table and reflectionless mirrors as the novel spaces for sovereignty. Barred from making political alliances with other Islamic rulers in India, Iran and Afghanistan, perhaps the use of yellow in, as representation was intended to align Ghazi-uddin with his largely Hindu subjects. As the colour of fire, saffron, knowledge, abstinence associated with the iconography of Vishnu’s dress, yellow becomes the ground for experimenting with the potentiality of colour. Incorporated onto or into the body of the king and etymologically linked to gold (Urdu zard; zar), yellow becomes the mimetic switching device, the alternative to and the ground beyond Regency ermine and the colonial gaze.132 The colonial artist’s palette is violently unbalanced. Starving cows, bull’s blood, urine, poppies, wax and indigo, made greasy, stinking and unstable on large stretches of canvas, cannot substantiate the expected agency of art as a mirror of sovereignty. The matter force of colour plays with colonial anxiety about ignorance and instability. Colour sizzles; its dynamics of fear and attraction sear through these artworks. But does colour also impose limits on its own representation? How does colour step out of the local into those spiritual exercises that deny matter whilst simultaneously becoming an ontological force that pushes the bodies of even its most ardent disciples to the brink of destruction? Colour demands sacrifice, even of itself. Shimmer at the Edge of Colour: Delhi Artists and the Alchemy of Sufi Mysticism, c.1800–51 The artist Mazkhar Ali Khan represents the process of painting as a navigation of the materials of European and Mughal art (plate 7). With two cases of imported industrial paint cakes to hand, he prepares them



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using a Mughal technique – as is evident from the small porcelain bowls and a fine-hair brush. His studio is illuminated strangely: to the left a mirror-like space suggests that the act of painting can be, or refer to, Sufi exercises. This reflectionless mirror, perhaps suggestive of the ecstasies and terrors of Sufi self-realisation as annihilation, is I suggest the realm of the alchemy of the Black Light. According to one of the most important Sufi philosophers, AlGhazālī, alchemy as allegory best explains the spiritual journey that Sufi murids (disciples) must undertake: The spiritual alchemy which operates this change in him, like that which transmutes base metal into gold, is not easily discovered, nor to be found in the house of every old woman. It is to explain that alchemy and its methods of operation that the author has undertaken this work [Kīmyā-yi Sa’ādat, The Alchemy of Happiness]…Now the treasuries of God, in which this alchemy is to be sought, are the hearts of the prophets, and he who seeks it elsewhere will be disappointed and bankrupt…This alchemy may be briefly described as turning away from the world to God, and its constituents are four: 1 – knowledge of the self; 2 – knowledge of God; 3 – knowledge of this world as it really is; 4 – knowledge of the next world as it really is.133

Just as ‘iron by sufficient polishing can be made into a mirror, so any mind by due discipline can be rendered receptive to such impressions’.134 This arduous journey out of the self involves corporeal exercises which are frequently described in alchemical language – calceration, dissolution, separation, conjunction, fermentation and distillation. Like the journey undertaken by pigments in the process of becoming, Sufi exercises combine colour with metamorphosis. According to the Delhi poet Mir Dard (1721–85) steeped in the Naqshabandi tradition of Sufism, existence is travelling, non-existence is home which must be continually refined until the seeker has reached a state of selflessness where there is ‘no thought of a journey; no reminiscence of home’.135 This journey postulates an idea of pure colour. Mir Dard explains that colours should be perceived with eyes closed, as first Sufis should orient themselves to where the shadow is. In the beginning, these lights are ephemeral flashes which can gradually be prolonged; their colour also changes from white to yellow to blue (where faith makes itself present for the first time) to green which marks a new tranquillity of the soul, to azure followed by red whose intensities are experienced only by those with intense mystical knowledge. These spiritual exercises also stimulate a vertical journey – out of the ‘Western’ well-like abyss whose mouth



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glows with an extraordinary green – a green which is also the colour of the northern pole of energy – Qutb. This phenomenology of the north culminates in Sufi experience of the desire to be at Mount Qāf, the emerald mountain which surrounds the world and which exudes its own dazzling light which is like a kind of Midnight Sun. But Qāf is veiled in darkness which destroys all sensual experience and annihilates the self. This is the region of the Black Light. The Black Light (Pers. mir-e siyah) is light without matter which becomes visible when released from matter. Unlike the previous stages of Sufi techniques for revelation, articulated by the soul’s tranquillity, the seventh realm of the Black Light demands passionate, ecstatic love; it sets the mystic’s being on fire, it attacks, invades, annihilates and then annihilates annihilation. It shatters the apparatus of the body. Henry Corbin argues that all beings have a double face of light and darkness; on seeking light the seeker is a particle of this light; like aspires to its like in a method of alchemy which can only be known by its like. This involves the liberation of light as colour from its alchemic sublimation in the fabric of paintings. Freed from the objects which had absorbed them, colours become pure, super sensory only to be opened up to the northern pole which secretes its own light. While colours are restored to their origin, light descends to meet them as far as the surface of the objects out of which it attracts them. In terms of artistic representation, this rainbow of light becomes one of hanging forms – the world of ‘images in suspense’ – mothal mo’allaqa. Forms and figures could not subsist in the purely intelligible world; they possess an extension and dimension, an immaterial materiality compared to the sensible world, but they also have corporeality and spatiality of their own comparable to the mirror. The material substance of the mirror is not the substance of the image; the substance is merely the place of its appearance and the space for rigorous analogical knowledge: ‘the existence of this intermediary world therefore became a metaphysical necessity’.136 The Power of Red: The Sufi Legend of the Red Hyacinth This metaphysical necessity is taken further in Shaykh Muhammad Karim-Khan Kirmani’s text The Book of the Red Hyacinth: Risalat alyāqūtat al-hamrā’ (1851) which refers to the precious stone named red



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hyacinth and to the concept and reality of colour in terms of its descent from the world of archetypes and its relationship with hermeneutics and the Qur’an. Shaykh Muhammad Karim Khan Kirmani relates the legend of how God made a red hyacinth which He melted and turned into water and out of whose foam He created the earth and out of the subtle part vapour Heaven. A red gem then is at the origin of the earth. Kirmani explains how the red hyacinth typifies Nature: it turns into water which is Nature’s matter; it exudes subtle vapour which is associated with the air while from the earth it helps to created telluric mass which is the world of bodies. So it embraces the four modalities of air, fire, water and earth, each of which have their own colour and relationship with God’s or archetypal light, as I will explain below. As a letter, as word, a verb or verse and thus corresponding to all components, red contains a ta’wil. Ta’wīl returns a thing to its archetype; it performs as an anagogical hermeneutic. The starting point for colour perception is in its exoteric dimension zahir; at each hermeneutic level exoteric and esoteric dimension are contained in matter – ta’wil. Perception of colour is made possible through the bi-unity of rabb (divine matter) and marbub (human matter), which are responsible for each other in the formation of a mystical chivalry. The exoteric dimension of red is Nature – the lower pillar of the Cosmic Throne so that all red light in the world comes from this pillar – from which the elements of fire, air (which is yellow), water (white) and earth (black) descend. This process of heavenly descent is reversed by us as we try to ascend up to fire. Fire comes to be associated with colour, air with sound, water with touch and earth with taste. The scale of colours is distributed over the seven levels of the universe – intelligence is associated with white; the spirit with yellow; the soul with green; nature with red; matter is ashen and the material body is associated with black. Kirmani explores the division of the existence wujūd of colour from its manifestation – zuhūr. Colour may exist and yet not be manifested which means we have to investigate the complex relationship between colour and light. He proposes that in order to do so we should think about treasures/archetypes and the ways in which they explain all phenomena of the terrestrial world which takes in consideration the notion of composition – maurakkab of all levels of the universe.137 Colour attends to the totality of these universes therefore a hermeneutics of



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colour would employ not abstract symbolism but a symbolics founded on an integral spiritual realism. The concept of colour encompasses the totality of the universe through the idea of subtle matter – latifah – each part of which is an independent act of coloured light. The gradations of latifah determine the scale of levels of being.138 Light is the subtle aspect of colour – latif al-lawn – or colour in its subtle state. It is colour in its strong state, whereas colour is light in an opaque state, thicker and denser in its relationship with matter and the four elements. Both colour and light are formed from the same genus otherwise they could not interact – light receives the alchemical tincture of colour: ‘Light is the spiritual element or angel of colour…while colour is the corporeity of light in a materialised state’.139 The distance of a signature or light from its archetype explains the gradation of colours and that without colour light is inert and inanimate, like a body without spirit. According to Kirmani colours do not issue from white (as in Newtonian physics) because they have other sources. The primordial colours are yellow, red, white and black and these can be seen only through specific modes of perception which are determined by impression, embodied vision and perception by union.140 Perception by impression reveals that the forms of the higher world cannot imprint themselves on the organs of the lower world; perception of embodiment – ihatah – seeks out the imprinted signature by that which impresses it; perception by union – ittihad is the perception a being has of itself. The celestial spheres are transparent; for instance, if stars are visible it is because they are a condensation of sidereal matter; even earth as glass or crystal has a transparent element. So long as these transparent and diaphanous (shaffah, shaff ) bodies remain in their subtle state, their colours and lights are not perceptible to our senses for they are in too subtle a state. Here colours and lights are far more intense and vigorous than in opaque bodies. The invisibility of colour is therefore due to its extreme intensity.141 For Kirmani, colours are generated through their relationship with their primordial sources in the doctrine on the Cosmic Throne of the Merciful One which is supported by four columns of coloured light.142 From here colours are generated and distributed to the signature’s double dimension as light and colour. There is an anamnesis of colours that we contemplate in this world; this theory of correspondences makes possible a transcendental hermeneutic of the colour red – which seeks the most esoteric in esoteric



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reality. This becomes the consummation of The Book of the Red Hyacinth. According to the hadiths and Shi‘i theology concerned with the ‘Throne of the Merciful One’, white is linked with Seraphiel, yellow with Michael, green with Azrael and red with Gabriel, who as the Angel of Revelation intermediates with our lower world. This construction is attributed to the first Imam (white at the top, yellow on right, red at the bottom).143 These are the absolute and universal lights from which all partial lights are derived. Each manifestation or partial light hikayah, are not the results of intermixture but primordial acts of light. Nature is associated with red and fire; the colour of fire which makes light visible in subtle matter is red. Colour from fire becomes visible in our world through the combinations of hot, dryness and cold. When heat and humidity are in a substance they result in swelling which as the opposite of the suppleness of dryness (red) postulates the colour white. When cold and humidity are combined, its humidity causes expansion whilst cold demands a downwards movement which makes a substance revolve upon itself although it tends to a lack of compactness and thus its parts disperse. Hence dispersion being the opposite of density and of visible colour tends towards transparency which is associated with white and which is akin to phlegm. When cold and dryness come together the cold produces a downwards movement whilst dryness creates a compactness resulting in the colour is black. Colour in its pure state is too intense for our eyes, the imagination and inner vision to imagine in each of the superior universes.144 How then did Sufi artists produce their own version of a Sufi aesthetic in relation the phenomenology and hermeneutics of colour as described so differently by Mir Dard and Kirmani? If light and colour are so intense can they be represented? Can an artwork be thought of as a series of hanging universes whereby through a series of thin layers of pigment colour is transmitted forward through the planes of the paper? These scales of colour are often so intense that they are almost transparent; they reveal the mystical and material diversity of colour – precious substances ground as if in alchemy to create brilliant hues. Mazhar Ali Khan specialised in representations of Sufi shrines and tombs in Delhi – spaces which although they came into British jurisdiction after 1803, maintained a degree of sovereign independence and powerful status as an alternative public sphere. I suggest that his work and the numerous other Indo-Islamic artists operating in



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early nineteenth-century northern India experiment with imported, industrially produced watercolours to produce a new ‘colour’ for the sacred – the shimmer. As the opposite – the mirror – of the Black Light, the shimmer exists at the edge of colour. The shimmer is also a spiritual version of the neutral – subtle, exquisite, beyond grisaille, the nuance not the paradigm, silence as a tactic to outplay speech; it shivers at the borderline of thought.145 I argue against the grain of colonial officials (and later scholars) who suggest that Company School painting can be classified in terms of its bright pigments, to intimate instead that it is the shimmer – the use of lead white (burnished as intensely as the steel mirrors of Sufi allegory) or the spaces between colour – which becomes so critical to their balance. The now anonymous artist’s representation of the interior of the Taj Mahal portrays in impressive detail through abundant burnishing of white, the sacrality of space (plate 8). Against the indigo, cow-yellow, mummy brown and generally red tinge of the colonial palette (blood, Company uniforms, pink skin) Indian painters make even industrial colour become nomadic; they let it shine. Through the shimmer, Company School painters deterritorialise the aesthetics and the technologies of colonial art. To be nomadic is to be intermezzo and to be mindful of the matterforce of painting. This form of deterritorialisation constitutes such a relation to the earth, to the Sufi cosmos, to such a degree that ‘the nomad reterritoralizes deterritorialization itself ’.146 Oil paintings decaying and neglected; watercolour adapted into a language of the vernacular and the sacred; the failure of cochineal, nawabi dislike of oily pictures; the decline of indigo: what then in empire remains the space for colour? Postscript: My Home is Red The blind live in a world that is inconvenient, an undefined world from which certain colours emerge: for me, yellow, blue (except that the blue may be green), and green (except that the green may be blue)…As for red, it has vanished completely. But I hope some day…to see that great color. Jorge Luis Borges, ‘Blindness’

There is one last, singular colourist of postcolonial intensity who pits blue against red to highlight the threshold at stake in ‘the uncanny of cultural difference’ – Anish Kapoor. By his own admittance, Homi



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Bhabha has made Kapoor’s mirror/colour installations a muse for over a decade. Kapoor explains in relation to his concave mirrors that ‘from certain angles there is no image at all in either’, which Bhabha seizes as an exemplary blind spot: ‘the presence of an object can render a space emptier than mere vacancy could ever envisage’.147 And colour is critical to these processes of spectral recognition. For instance, in Kapoor’s My Body, Your Body, what from a distance looks like a membrane panting of deep, saturated blue, is not the expected coloured patch-as-centre but what seems like a cavity determined by the forces of anti-matter. Colour is a constant reference point in Kapoor’s work (‘the sculptural material of spatial and emotional energies’) from A Thousand Names (1978–79), To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red (1981) to Imagine Blue (2003) where the play of light transforms a lapis-toned pile of pure pigments red. In many of his sculptures colour forms indeterminate boundaries which contribute to the absence-presence of ghosts or voids. In A Thousand Names what Kapoor terms islands of pigment are intended to evoke the piles of spices and pigments he remembered from childhood in India (red he singles out as being a particularly ‘Indian’ colour).148 Sometimes these are piles of pigment, sometimes objects coated in pigments; there’s no modernist ‘truth to materials’ here. Colour does not do the work of skin or surface; nor is it a quality divisible from matter but rather it evokes an uncanny absence and invasion of matter. Colour is, I believe, most powerfully problematised in Kapoor’s monumental work for the Kunsthaus, Bregenz, 2003 – My Red Homeland. According to Kapoor, red is resonant not only with blackness but with complicated (a)cultural references: I use red a lot. I’ve gone so far as to title a work My Red Homeland. It’s true that in Indian culture red is a powerful thing; it is the color a bride wears; it is associated with the matriarchal, which is central to Indian psychology. So I can see what leads me there culturally, but there’s more to it. One of the ways color has been used in art since the eighteenth century is to move, as in Turner, from color to light. My tendency is to go from color to darkness. Red has a very powerful blackness. This overt color, this open and visually beckoning color, also associates itself with a dark interior world. And that’s the real reason I am interested in it. Is that Indian? I don’t know that it matters.149



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My Red Homeland constituted from steel, a hydraulic motor, pigment and Vaseline, is ragan-i rowghan for the now. Its iron hand carves an hourly circuit by churning through this stinking by-product of contemporary Empire’s most fought over resource – oil. Constituted from 25 tonnes of petroleum jelly, its sheer scale and relentless clockwork-red motion offer an instance of the continuum of history; the past flashes up as afterimages of an indigo vat; the cyborgian labour of subaltern workers; noxious fumes; extortionate quantities of all sorts of pigments shipped from nineteenth-century India to Europe, not a ‘modest’ 25 tonnes. Against the many instances of the colonial obsession with red – skin, uniforms, drapes, blood, cochineal, Maria Theresa’s red mahogany ground for Indian miniatures, the crimson sap of indigo (its hue before fermentation) and as the determinant, unearthly hue in The Red Hyacinth, this postcolonial red is ambivalently unheimlich – unhomely and sinister. More ambiguously My Red Homeland participates in the anti-war debates as addressed by a range of artists (Noriyuki Haraguchi, Vivan Sundaram, Rasheed Araeen) who have all used oil to invoke a state of encounter so as to make it into the medium of protest. Through its ambitious materiality, My Red Homeland may also be complicit in exploitation that pipeline oil and paint production directed to our spaces for virtual refinement. But the actually embodied refinement happens elsewhere: waste and recycling in Dharavi, Mumbai. Sticking with the problematic of artistic representation in relation to affect, I finish with Timo Novotny’s remix of the documentary Megacities which works with pigments post-production. He plays with speed, edit, speech to make anew Michael Glawogger’s more conventional representation of poverty and the dignity of human labour, through the equally problematic agenda of Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics.150 Novotny’s screenplay focuses on another ‘editor’ in postproduction – Akhbar Ali, a Mumbai-located recycler of industrial dye stuffs. Working to the rhythms of Central European techno, Novotny as a ‘tenant of culture’ re-cuts pigment sifting as a struggle as part of ‘bare life’.151 He recycles Glawogger’s translator’s interview with Akhbar Ali, so as to be perhaps desirous of making documentary occupy virtually the role of Spivak’s ethical, knowing position of the ‘Native Informant’:152



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My name is Akhbar Ali. I work with dyestuffs. I work hard. My work is tiring. I have no choice so I work here. I earn 50 to 60 Rupees per day. To go to the village I live in I need money which I don’t have so I’m obliged to stay here. Only I know what troubles I have…Sitting in the sun for the whole day, not eating at regular times…What shall I do? I’m worn out, totally worn out. I am unhappy.153

The toxic fumes of unrefined pigments – sack upon sack staining, contaminating Akhbar Ali’s body – is then the prison house of colour. Mindful of his intended Western audience, Novotny experiments with recycling yet another economy – Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, who, facing the wreckage of ‘the deadly repetitiveness of time’, sees ‘the pile of debris before him grow skyward’.154 Perhaps inadvertently this filmic confrontation with wasted things also crystallises the dynamics of globalising commodity value. Artworks of the now, as celebrated by Bourriaud for being a ‘social interstice’ or the space of ‘random materialism’ spreading out from its material form fails, I believe, to engage with the non-chic violence of contemporary empire.155 The gap between the function of materials and the desire inherent in the potential or the anxiety of the congealed therein is clearest when these materials are deemed to be outmoded. The liveliness of matter, as rubbish rejuvenated by recycling for global markets, seems for European film audiences to be a kind of underbelly for the enchantment of modern life. Ignoring or engaging with this culture of enchantment, in the refining business of art criticism and art history, the violent materiality of the pigment economy is still a blind spot (so much for ‘learning from below’, ‘unlearning one’s privilege’).156 But there are potentialities for the supplemental disruption of knowing by doing to be done to colour which is to say that maybe it’s only now thinking through its multiplex agency that we can sing again, like indigo workers, for its insurgency.



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Supplement, Subaltern Art, Design and Dyeing in Britain and South Asia, c.1851–c.1905

Prelude: Jai Jai! Captured during a dacoit shoot-out during the Hindu spring festival of Holi in the small town of Ramgarh, Jai (played by Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan) approaches his would-be executioner, bandit king Gabbar Singh. At this point in Ramesh Sippy’s 1975 box office smash Sholay, the camera which had swung with a pony carousel to the chants of Holi’s revelous celebrations, and become awash with pigments – pink, yellow and red – now freezes on the slowly advancing body of bighearted criminal Jai as he encounters Gabbar for the first time. Certain death awaits: the only hope for Jai is if he can somehow reach a rifle more than an arm’s length away. The risk is too great; the horrified crowd can hardly breathe; in a split second Jai’s hands reach into the dirt. From the dirt Jai throws blue Holi pigment into Gabbar’s face thus temporarily blinding his assassin: such a desperate yet ingenious act enables his own escape.1 ‘Redeemed’ from sacred waste trampled into the earth, pigment is in Sholay a transient weapon. As opposed to Bruno Latour’s definition of action as the co-efficient collaboration of men and things – exemplified by the speed bump, the hotel key or the gun, here with colour another kind of agency is, I think, at play.2 In Sholay the gun has little potential danger without human intervention but colour’s agency is far less easily defined. From being a pyramid pile of vermilion and spices used for cooking and puja to its use as the ‘ammunition’ in the water guns used ludically in Holi, or its transformation into temporary ‘makeup’ (it is smeared onto faces during this festival), to its flight as airbourne coloured dust, colour escapes conventional and more imaginative ideas of the social life of things. In Jai’s situation, colour can thus easily supersede the animated analogue of a rifle. An enormous hit in the 1970s, part of Sholay’s success aside from its stars, songs and dexterous 65



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mixing of genres was due to its emphasis on violence in a country reeling from Indira Gandhi’s suspension of democracy, her enforced sterilisation programme, the duresse of living under both a state of emergency and the aftermath of war with East Pakistan. Here in filmic representation colour is a participant in emergency but it also has the possibility to become the emergent figure of redemption. Introduction British colonial and Indian nationalist genealogies of colour’s multivalent agency are the subject of both this chapter and of Chapter 4. In these two chapters I investigate how or if colour could become a critical site for contestation and experimentation in Victorian aesthetics in relation to the formation and reform of the Bengal School of artists. Whilst my Introduction suggested that this book’s argument is tightly bound, this bound-togetherness can be read as a series of alternative, transversal pathways. For instance, Chapters 3 and 4 track the legacies of scientific racism, whilst when read together Chapters 2 and 4 deal directly with colonial and nationalist uses of colour. There are then multiple genealogies and means for approaching colour – which I hope will encourage pluralities of narrative interpretation and a certain freedom for the reader to become a phenomenologically/politically, cynically ‘emancipated/alter aware spectator’ to seek out your own connections and genealogies for colour. Specifically in this chapter I examine colonial attempts to discipline colour production by honing in on the rise of a colour-driven pedagogy in Britain and India whilst tracking the opposition that both of these projects incited through the slippage, the multiplicities of the subaltern and the supplement. Perhaps ironically given the staid morals of the Victorians, colour became axiomatic to debates on education, art, fashion and design; this was a world awash with dazzling, phenomenologically disorienting colours as never before experienced. Such investment, desire and repulsion towards colour helped to fashion a new colonial–orientalist discourse which veered away from earlier debates on Venetian colour and the allure of the Eastern pigment trade to focus instead on chromatic harmonies in British architecture and design. Aside from institutional and individual artist-writers’ attempts to control or at least to harmonise



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colour, there are other ways of thinking through its collusion and collision with subaltern practices in relation to the supplement. Perhaps colour’s equivocal agency can be glimpsed through certain codes, visual signs, figures and mutterings in the colonial archive which demonstrate the contradictions and the aporia in colonial governmentality.3 As with the indigo worker, the figure of the Indian dyer becomes the site of colonial anxiety. The dyer was made to embody the contradictions and the ambivalence at the heart of colonial constructions of colour. Beyond the orbit of colonial art schools, factories, museums and prisons, the dyer was nonetheless the primary supplier of colour to Indian weavers and painters: ‘his’ ambivalent status also draws our attention to the supplementary status of colour in imperial art, design, economics and politics. My concern in this chapter is then the relationship between the supplement and the subaltern and how their entanglement could embody a mode of artistic and political agency which could defy the strictures of colonialism. According to Derrida who I take as a critical if problematic lead, the supplement is extraneous; as parergon it may frame but it also cuts. Perhaps it is akin to a freshly severed flower which whilst severed from its environs does not bleed. The disavowal of the supplement creates a sense of truth and immutability which is actually and virtually contingent. To conceptualise colour as supplement is to think of something added to design to supply a deficiency; it is a part to complete what is wanting. There was certainly colonial anxiety that British art and design lacked judicious or intuitive colour – which a certain investment in and perhaps even a certain kind of mimicry of Indian colour could offer. But Indian colour did not easily or merely fill this gap; it created an in-between space with its own anxieties and modes of resistance. In Derrida’s reading, there is a double logic at work in the process of supplementarity – that is, the supplement adds to but also substitutes at the same time. It is a ‘surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence’, but ultimately it ‘adds only to replace’.4 Compensating and vicarious, the supplement ‘is an adjunct, a subaltern insistence which takes-(the)-place’.5 It puts any supposed fullness of colonial art and design principles in doubt so as to suggest that we consider colonial practices in terms of counter-flows, extreme crossings and destabilising circulation. But to think of colour as supplement is also to question the enunciation as agency in relation



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to the subaltern outside of and beyond insurgency and the prose of counter-insurgency. The subaltern can after all be both subordinate and instrumental – at least in definitions of class which do not constitute class consciousness. In Gayatri Spivak’s translation of Of Grammatology where she discusses the supplement, the subaltern can imply the subversive potential of the marginal instance.6 Perhaps due to her experience as the translator of Derrida’s work, Gayatri Spivak has a tendency to elide the supplement with her own unique take on what might be the subaltern. As opposed to the Subaltern Studies collective which used the subaltern as the term for a history that seeks to describe the contribution made by the people on their own – that is independently of the elite, Spivak argues that the political agency of the subaltern can never be recovered.7 Perhaps this position, albeit effectively represented by the figure of the Hindu widow fated to be burned with her dead husband (sati) is persuasive, but in other case it can entail a deliberate deafness which inadvertedly attributes an absolute power to the presumed existence of hegemonic discourse.8 The collusions and the tensions of the subaltern and the supplement regarding the production, circulation and perception of colour form the research trajectory of this chapter. My line of thought considers how Victorian chromatics were profoundly informed by a debate on Indian colour in relation to ornament and if this process of hybridisation itself became a colonising tool as these practices were exported to the new colonial art schools in India (Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Lahore) through the agency of the Department of Science and Art (DSA).9 As provocative, silent and yet I would say a vital, perhaps also vitalising if also often ‘moribund’ aspect of the colonial curriculum, colour could potentially wreak havoc with the division between design and ornament from the fine arts; it had a troubled relationship with line and form. It further exposes what Arindam Dutta has identified as the equivocal status of design in the British Empire.10 On the one hand, the appearance of exquisitely coloured Indian artefacts at the first world’s fair, Crystal Palace, 1851, astonished the public, the exhibition organisers and contemporary art critics; on the other hand, the power of colour many designated as almost overwhelming: did then colour embody excess? This dilemma, or intriguing possibility unleashed the colonial



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paradox that colour acted as a signature of barbarism and civilisation which was found in nature but it could also be the figure of reflective reason. In dialogue with design, colour exposed the double logic of pattern in relation to craft and mechanisation. Colour signified as the motif of industrial education in Britain and India and as the means for reintroducing South Asian artisans to their vanishing ‘artistic heritage’. As with indigo production in colonial Bengal, there is a certain coercive dimension as well as what Taussig terms as the ‘redemptive obscenity’ to labour which informs the disciplining and circulation of colour which comes to be condensed as commodity fetishism.11 This desire for colour as metropolitan spectacle has less to do with Marx’s Asiatic Mode of Production and more to do with the colonial belief that craft flourished in the idealised, archaic ‘Indian village’ – in its competing definitions. The figure of the dyer was made to embody the contradictions and the ambivalence at the heart of colonial constructions of colour. The figure of the dyer adapted his practice to embrace aniline colours, thus boosting imperial trade but simultaneously, ‘he’ was vehemently condemned by colonialists for destroying the rich chromatic heritage of India. Neither viewed as artist nor artisan, the dyer had a troubling, liminal status in relation to colonial governance. This liminality (supplementarity) bestowed upon the figure of the dyer a certain menacing presence. Outside the orbit of colonial art schools, factories, museums and prisons, the dyer was nonetheless the principal supplier of colour to Indian weavers and painters. The tension between the subaltern and the supplement in relation to the production, circulation and perception of colour is then the basis of this chapter. To ‘throw’ pigment (metaphorically and through the dyeing of cloth) at the oppressor, is to rehearse multivalently Sholay’s Holi shootout. The Phantasm of Chromatic Grammar and the Abstract Plant Form: From Empire to Aesthetics Partly in reaction to the introduction of new pigment technologies and synthetic dyes, the period 1800–70 brought about dramatic changes in art teaching and chemistry of colour in Britain and colonial India. The emergent discourses of what constituted ornament involved a fundamental agency for colour which positioned it between science,



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craft and the fine arts.12 Colour had to possess a physical as well as a metaphysical status which could be explained through its relationship with light, aether and philosophy. I set out these ideas here because they had a long afterlife in the imperial constructions of art, design and orientalism. I propose that the importance of the plant form is in part due to the economics of empire – its drive for and fascination with raw resources, including pigments and plants such as indigo. I hope to trace a line to see how beauty and intuition come to be implicated in midnineteenth-century British debates on ornament, which as the rest of this chapter shows would be radically undermined by the subaltern and the supplemental. Two of the most famous writers on mid-nineteenth-century colour harmonies, the English artist/colour man George Field and the French dyer Michel Chevreul, both promoted a speculative chemical philosophy concerned with natural powers and empirical experimental analysis; their ideas would be given an ‘objective’ basis in the writings of design school advocates Owen Jones and Richard Redgrave especially in relation to ornament.13 But it is by no means clear whether colour inhered in bodies as a result of chemical composition, produced by the refraction and selective absorption of light or whether it primarily constituted a subjective product of the human visual sensorium.14 For Chevreul, the principles of simultaneous contrast were rooted in human colour vision – as seen in his research into organic chemistry.15 He produced an experimental aesthetics of coloured objects which was dependent on the physical basis of units of colour in the medium used to make the design which emphasised the importance of flat tint.16 The other source of chemical precepts was the speculative colour cosmology of Field – especially his colour–music analogies with their appeal to the chemical nature of things as the root of harmony and beauty.17 In his work Analogical Philosophy (1839) Field sought to fix deep truth between German idealism and English empiricism in the hope that aesthetic objects when experienced through the senses-ascommunication would provide mediation between external and internal, mental nature.18 He borrowed the idea of subtle matter from Oken, as seen in his frontispiece to Kyan’s On the Elements of Light (1838) where magnetic energy is seen to be streaming from the ends of the spectrum to produce red rays which are identical to positive electricity through



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their gravitational attraction.19 Both Kyan and Field reduced the seven colours of the spectrum to just three primaries which they believed made white light. For Field, red was associated with oxygen, yellow with nitrogen and blue with hydrogen, all of which must exist in a specific ratio that he later systematised into his metrochrome. The metrochrome consisted of glass wedges filled with red, yellow and blue liquids whose varied thickness formed the ratio of 3 yellow: 5 red: 8 blue. Field’s most famous work Chromatography mapped out a scale of 13 colours. In this book he explained the phenomenon of the ‘prismatic fringe’ which becomes visible when a black spot is observed through the device of the chromoscope. The chromoscope allows us to see if colours can be viewed as being generated by light and/or darkness. He warned that the predilection for one colour would disrupt the balance of heat and colour and he cautioned against overexposure to many highly coloured paintings partly because of the effect of afterimages: ‘Vision becomes over stimulated, unequally exhausted even before it is fatigued with a spectrum which not only clouds the colour itself but gives a false brilliancy by contrast to surrounding hues’.20 Throughout history Field claimed that painting owes ‘everything to colour … [which is] its flesh and blood. Without it the finest performances remain lifeless skeletons … colour alone is the immediate object which attracts the eye’ because it imparts warmth and life to become the body of art.21 He also advanced the idea of colour as relativity so as to state that colours are wholly relative; each hue throughout a work is altered by every touch added in other places and this is because there is no colour disharmony in nature. Colours must be kept distinct in the art of blending or ‘they will run into dusky neutrality and defile each other’.22 In spite of his ultimate predilection for the three primaries of red, yellow and blue, Field did praise white both for its neutrality and its purity: Had we all necessary colours thus relatively pure as white, colouring in painting might be carried up to the full brilliancy of nature…Locally white is the most advancing of all colours in a picture, and produces the effect of throwing other colours back in different degrees, according to their specific retiring or advancing powers; which powers are not, however, absolute qualities of colours, but dependant upon the relations of light and shade, which are variously appropriate in all colours.23

In a picture the eye should seek white for respite:



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…brilliant though it may be; and feel it as a space of strange heavenly paleness in the midst of the flushing of the colours. This effect can only be reached by general depth of middle tint…and by keeping the white itself subdued by grey, except at a few points of chief lustre.24

For Field there is a certain depth to colour: colours advance and recede – the nearest being yellow and the remotest being blue. Yellow, by advancing, has the greatest power in reflecting light; like red it can easily represent the effects of heat and fire, although it is also tender, delicate and easily defiled by other colours: ‘In painting it diminishes the power of the eye by its actions in a strong light at the same time becoming less distinct as a colour; while on the contrary it assists vision and becomes more distinct as a colour in a neutral somewhat declining light.’25 Yellow, like white works best at a distance as opposed to blue which needs to be viewed up close because it is a receding colour. Blue alone has coldness which it communicates with other colours. It is most powerful in strong light but is natural and pale in declining light; it has the power to absorb light and it does break and contrast well with white. Red then is the most intermediate colour although being located between black and white light and shade, between blue and yellow its powers are difficult to manage.26 Each colour requires its own viewing distance; together colours orchestrate a series of competing movements; they literally create motion and depth as they act as the space and the time of the image: ‘To remedy the ill effects arousing from the eyes having dwelt on a colour they should be either passed gradually to its opposite colour and refreshed amid corporeal or neutral tints or washed in the clear light of day.’27 So in many images ‘colours will be more duly estimated by sometimes walking to the window or by taking an occasional glance at a millboard which may be carried in the hand, painted a cool grey’.28 At times colour is overwhelming to the extent that its afterimages must be annihilated by a non-colour. Field’s ideas about the ratio and movement of colours would be variously adapted by British orientalists in the wider debate on morphology, art and empire. In 1849 the indigo planter and archaeologist James Fergusson endeavoured to convey his esoteric ideas of geometry, beauty and architecture whilst apologising for his ignorance and lack of attention to the subject: ‘the indigo factory of all places in the world is perhaps the one least suited for a cultivation of any knowledge in the



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fine art.’29 As opposed to the indigo planters – artists William Florio Hutchisson and Colesworthy Grant – Fergusson refused to invest in what he termed the banalities of the usual subjects of the colonial picturesque.30 In his extremely ambitious text Principles of Beauty in Art he coined the terms ‘eumorphics’ and ‘euchromatics’ to distinguish what he deemed to be the pure arts of form and colour from subject painting.31 Eumorphics constituted the beauty of form and proportion independent of representation; euchromatics classified the beauty of colour harmony. Euchromatics assumed the form of decorative painting, illustration and ornament whose rationales worked with natural philosophies of chemistry. The idea of eumorphics finds its source in the new relationship between art and anatomy as the highest ideal of beauty, which Fergusson transferred from the human body and action to the stylised plant form. Contemporary debates on ornament placed it between formalism, abstraction and a metaphysics of transcendence which bestowed on it a new depth and importance. Ornament became subsumed in the single category of ‘impulse to beauty’. ‘Art anatomy’ or more precisely ‘chromatic governmentality’ became critical to the teaching in London Schools of Design whose Mill-driven liberalist agenda endorsed the replacement of the human body with the stylised plant form. The plant form I conjecture embodied the economics of empire – the concern with raw products through the lens of the specimen and its own vagaries of the metonymic and abstraction; the plant form – whether the raw materials of cotton, indigo, silk, tea or opium – provided the financial and even the ontological ground for British imperialism. Although there is not space here to develop the centrality of the economically viable plant specimen in depth, I propose that to a large extent the governmental agenda of the colonial state, concerned as it was disjunctively with ‘the imbrication of men and things’,32 relied on the botanical form via its visual representation. Even the early ethnographic classifications of different human ethnic groups operate within an episteme which intellectually still has resonances of Linnaean classification.33 As seen in numerous writings on indigo, the scripting of the colonial body has nothing of value compared with the much desired and magnified characteristics of the plant specimen.34 Governmentality’s management of life in imperial art is transacted at the level of that detailed focus on



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and abstraction from the specimen. The specimen becomes for British designers the equivalent to the botanical relic; it could be reengineered and reproduced in England’s field of cultural production. Abstraction also does the work of condensation through aesthetic surrogation. Reduced to surface and geometry through design, the plant form functioned as the equivalent to the flattened specimens which filled the display cabinets of the East India Company’s London museum and the tiers of the Indian display at Crystal Palace. Oriental design with an emphasis on flora acted as an equivalent to the specimen, but with the critical supplement of colour. This aesthetic, botanical-driven vision is the overt product of the race for empire and raw resources on the part of several European states. The early thermodynamics of Field’s generation whereby colour advances and recedes (infused with the anxieities of entropy) must now focus in on the globalising vegetal or geometric motif and its skewed sometimes anamorphic take of depth. Design reform I take here in its narrower sense as the mid-Victorian campaign against the excesses of florid, naturalistic ornamentation. Euchromatics and eumorphics elevated an aestheticised science whose invocation of transcendental anatomy for the design of ornament acted as an early British imperial response to Goethe, Herder and Schiller for art based on indirect imitation of nature. The transference of the highest ideal of beauty from human subjects to stylised vegetable forms was based on the idea that the deep structure of plants united the virtual and the actual by exhibiting the perfect balance of the aesthetic principles of unity and variety. Ornament by using this indirect imitation of nature had principles of its own that were equal to but distinct from subject painting. This reinterpretation of art theory, rooted in the notion of an ideal type, underlay the variety of natural forms. For instance, Goethe’s conception of the archetypal plant (Urpflanze) and its gradual transformation from the leaf came to be interpreted as the common structure of all plants. Ideal imitation should then be associated with the typical which was formed not from individuals but from the generality of natural laws. In Britain, Joseph Henry Green’s aesthetics showed that the deep structure of organisms as unity could be adapted from Goethe’s idea of the type by uniting eumorphics with euchromatics. He also advanced the idea that the plant enabled the perfect balance between



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unity and variety.35 Colour here in conjunction with line, performed as the archetype of expression. Line should have curvature to express life and the vegetal; the spiral, like the recently discovered cell, showed the presence of the past and anticipated the future through the deep structure of the plant. When the geometric structure of form grafted to the canon of complementary colour the result showed a reversal of the principle of representational painting. The pure forms underlying the multiplicity of appearances were used to contain areas of flat colour in intricate geometrical arrangements. In a similar manner David Ramsay Hay worked out the relationship between aesthetics and ornaments to write on the importance of colour to decorative schemes. He identified beauty with the abstract formality of mathematics whilst stating that visible beauty was of two kinds – form and colour which were mutually enhanced when combined in a single object: harmonies of colour independent of form were insufficient.36 For Hay, beauty becomes the harmonious relation of regularity, the ideal or variety which blended Green’s interest in transcendental anatomy with his own investment in a mathematical theory of beauty based on abstract colour and form. What is common to both men is their concern with rules or laws of colour which could be inculcated to become almost intuitive. I would like to suggest now that the tensions underpinning the symbiosis between laws and instinct are most stridently and urgently played out through colonial perceptions of the chromatic harmonies of Indian art in 1851 at the first world’s fair – Crystal Palace. Instinct, Intuition, Law: Colour at the Crystal Palace It has been an actual necessity, in order to obtain power of colouring, that a nation should be half savage…nobody can colour anywhere, except the Hindoos… John Ruskin

In his discussion of the world’s fairs, arcades and the phantasmagoria of the commodity, Walter Benjamin points to a crisis in perception itself. Crisis is the result of a sweeping remaking of the observer by a calculated technology of the individual, derived from new demands on the body.37 In the course of writing the Arcades Project Benjamin became preoccupied with the question of attention and the related issues of



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distraction and shock. To this end, he turned for guidance from the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory as a way out from what he saw as the standardised and denatured perception of the masses. Bergson had fought to recover perception from its status as sheer physiological event; for him attention was a question of the peculiar engagement of the body which entailed a state of consciousness arrested in the present.38 He described the vitality of the moment when a conscious rift occurred between memory and perception, a moment in which memory had the capacity to rebuild the object of perception.39 Critical to Bergson’s philosophical method is the concept of élan vital – vital momentum or impetus. Élan vital stages the elevation of intuition as method. For Bergson, writing against a philosophical and scientific tradition which encompasses Kant and Darwin, intuition is not merely feeling, inspiration or sympathy: it gives philosophy precision. He argues that intuition offers a form of knowledge which differs in its nature from intelligence and whose life force far exceeds the demands of intelligence. Simply put, the intellect cannot comprehend all that is life. The intellect may not be commensurate with life but it can still act as a kind of luminous nucleus surrounded by a fringe of intuition; this intuition is of the nature of instinct. Instinct is an innate knowledge of matter whilst intelligence is an innate knowledge of form: ‘The intellect is characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life. Instinct, on the contrary is moulded on the very form of life.’40 Instinct corresponds to the power of intuition whose simplest manifestation is in the expression of an aesthetic ability to reveal a reality which though not refusing logical form, overflows it. Bergson also refuted Darwin’s well-known argument that adaptation (survival) was premised on the automatic elimination of the unadapted. Bergson discarded Darwin’s method of exploring survival through a study of all that has perished in favour of a celebration of all that is alive. For Bergson, the original impetus of life is the cause of variations – and these variations are accidental rather than the result of adaptation.41 For Bergson, the evolution of life does not follow one forward direction, which he sees as analogous to the course of a cannonball; the evolution of life is akin to the explosive movement of a bursting shell. This explosive force is due to the unstable balance of tendencies which life bears within itself.42



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I have outlined the principles of Bergson’s thought on intuition here because intuition proved, I believe, to be so central to colonial understandings of Indian colour. Intuition and instinct, as intimated in my discussion of ornament above, were already buzz terms by the time of the first world’s fair held in Hyde Park, London, in 1851. I would go so far to suggest that the criticism of Indian art at this world’s fair set the tone for a decidedly imperial definition of the difficult relationship between intuition and instinct in the coming decades. I wish to use Bergson’s ideas of life and accidental variations as a cogent device for approaching afresh the ‘crisis of perception’ at the world’s fairs. I will try to read Bergson perhaps a little bit eccentrically (or postcolonially) to transpose his philosophical ideas of intuition as method for understanding life in relation to the power of Indian colour. What I find persuasive is the way he deals with life movement through the explosion of a shell. Of course his thought postdates some (but not all) of the historical material I deal with here, but between the trajectory of the cannonball and the explosion of the shell there is a transversal, hybrid colonial mo(ve)ment which can be glimpsed through the production, circulation and hybridisation of colour. This transitional definition of the shape of instinct, intuition and the limits of life in its imperial form can perhaps be most easily and dramatically explained through recourse to a picture reported to represent colonial activity in 1850s India. The Russian artist Vassili Verestchagin’s anachronistically titled oil painting Execution of Rebels in Delhi during the Mutiny, 1857 (1886) featured not the explosive force of life but the shattering, the shell-like explosion of the body by the cannon.43 Put on public display in 1886 (the year of a major world’s fair celebrating India and empire in London) Verestchagin’s image sparked major controversy amongst colonial-biased Britons who objected to his use of modern-day imperial uniforms to represent an historical event, which clearly implied that such atrocities still could (and maybe did) take place. According to an enraged Mr Cook writing in Harper’s Weekly in response to a print after the painting released in 1888: The natives do not fear to die, but they fear to die in any way that destroys the identity of the body. They cannot enter heaven blown limb from limb…the English, says our artist, have always blown from guns, blow from guns today, and will blow from guns as long as India is held…[Mr] Verestchagin is not only a prophet of evil, a poet of night and cruel deeds…44



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Whilst reviled by Cook for its anomalous representation of ‘anachronistic’ practices, Verestchagin’s stark palette of red and white I suggest echoes the chromography of much Uprising writing.45 In the mid- to later nineteenth century, colour came to constitute a highly contentious topic and trope en face Raj debates concerning Indian intuition and instinct. My argument proposes that colour becomes one area defined by a certain life force pulsating through Indian artistic production which colonial art administrators struggled to comprehend. Could such a vital(ising) force be imitated and what did instinct signify in relation to the fashionable and influential theories of the ‘Colour Sense’? The debates which raged over Indian colour between Richard Redgrave, John Ruskin and Owen Jones came to a head over these issues. Whether ‘oriental’ colour possessed a life force or whether it was dangerously close to extinction or even barely developed above the most ‘primitive’ instinctual level (which had long ceased to hold an importance in Western Europe) are, I believe, the issues determining Victorian ideas of the agency of art in evolution. These tensions between colour, intuition and colonialism are both directly and obliquely informed by the gargantuan expansion of London into a self-proclaimed imperial metropolis. By the late nineteenth century London controlled 75 per cent of the flow of global capital, although as a kind of ‘Victorian Babylon’ it had less connection with its immediate surroundings than with India; it acted as a floating signifier for an undefined urban agglomeration.46 It produced the ‘image of a city incessantly translating itself, the image of a migratory city carrying itself over onto its adjacent spaces’.47 Such multilateral flows entailed drastic crossings for colour perhaps best encapsulated by the legacy of the world’s fair at Crystal Palace in 1851.48 A monstrous glass cabinet, as a chilling fantasy of Britain’s claims on industrial and technological superiority and as a shining new framework for imperial possessions, the Crystal Palace tried to straddle both the museological demand for object lessons and the desire for spectacle. Its agenda could not be more different in its reaction to colour to its Sufi contemporary Kirmani’s Book of the Red Hyacinth (see Chapter 1). Colour, light and lustre were the phenomenological shockpoints as seen in the Crystal Palace’s iron and glass components, and in the display of the fabulous Koh-i-noor diamond recently obtained coercively from Pratap Singh, the exiled



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ruler of the Punjab. This glitter of distraction, this phantasmagoria of enchantment, elevated the spectator to the level of the commodity to become surrendered to its manipulations whilst enjoying his or her own alienation from the self and from others. Here Indian jewels ‘seem to draw not only the eyes but the very hearts of men by a mysterious force’,49 as though ‘magic alone could have gathered this mass of wealth from all the ends of the earth…supernatural hands could have arranged it this, with such a blaze and contrast of colours’.50 Dazzled and disoriented, observers formulated a tremendous variety of sentient means for responding to the novel phenomena that aroused and confused them. Frequently the periodical press allegorised this phenomenological event in terms of optical illusions. The experience could be likened to the sporting of coloured glasses through which ‘all falsified tints of nature begin to assume the appearance of true and natural tints’ whose proliferation creates an ‘immense variety of judgements thereon!’.51 In the spoof catalogue described in Mr Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition, exhibit number 2000 displayed on April Fools’ Day were ‘glasses for enabling everybody to take the same view of everything so that there will [no longer] be disagreement on’ anything.52 This ‘Tower of Babel’53 constituted for art administrator and critic William Whewell, a crystallisation of global space-time: ‘by annihilating the space which separates different nations, we produce a spectacle in which is also annihilated the time which separates one stage of a nation’s progress from another.’54 As an ‘anachronistic space’55 for the display of past and present races, the exhibition performed as a snapshot of a sedimented present where the supposedly stagnated East proved to be unexpectedly invigorating.56 Whewell’s lecture to mark the exhibition anxiously asked: ‘wherein is our superiority?’ The Great Exhibition exposed the shoddy state of British industrially produced manufactures and the dazzling superiority of Indian handmade, wonderfully coloured artefacts.57 Oriental splendour highlighted the crisis facing British design: reform or perish.58 The Crystal Palace thus acted as an anthropological watershed; it exposed colonial cognitive failure to perceive the quality and fragility of Indian design in relation to British industrial commodities. As the supplement to the urgent debates on the category of design (a driving force for the programmed overreach and the peculiar duplex of universal policy and local initiative



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of the DSA) colour certainly could not be ignored. The two areas where colour featured most prominently in relation to this world’s fair involve first the display of Indian artefacts and second the decoration of the Crystal Palace.59 In tandem with industrial and chemical experiments focused on its materiality, colour in relation to abstraction, thermodynamics, mathematical ratios and modern philosophy had by the 1850s assumed a central role in writings on art, class and social structure.60 Field’s theory would be partially applied by the architect and theorist Owen Jones to the transepts of the Crystal Palace.61 After attending the Royal Academy, Owen Jones travelled to Cairo, Istanbul and Granada where he developed a love of Moorish design which earned him the nickname ‘Alhambra Jones’.62 Throughout his career Jones argued that because oriental art and ornament supposedly held no interest in its object, it was felicitous for design. Shorn of use value it invited reason to extend its free play with the imagination. The oriental subject on the other hand ‘wallows in the sinuousness of the pattern, unmindful of purpose … As perpetual produce of effects without cause – interdicted by an irrational relation against imitating nature – the oriental artisan is even better able to approximate a nature whose unifying causality remains irreducibly transcendent and insensible’.63 In the work of Owen Jones and the DSA, Eastern design came to be framed in terms of flat colours and non-analysed geometry.64 In the increased differentiation of materiality and industrialism, the resolution was to articulate the surface as the bearer of the aesthetic. The surface is not just a surface in the sense of its envelopment of the structure; it is freed from these concrete associations to become the pliable ground for colour and ornament. For Jones ornament is the basis of an aesthetic that transcends the purpose in the commodity which served to consolidate his belief in the nonpurposiveness of colour. Jones’ colour theory paralleled Hittorff ’s contention that the ancient Greeks had developed a harmonious system of polychromy which could still be gleaned through a careful reading of the archaeological investigations by those with a trained eye.65 Both men’s investment in polychromy participated in the amplification of these antiquarian interests in colour and structure which had characterised architectural debates since the 1830s. While in the period 1834–38 architects argued



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for the application of painted colours to built exteriors, by the 1850s the use of coloured building materials became of pressing concern. The concepts of space and volume shifted from the wall seen as a barrier between coloured spaces to their status as a homogenous unit which should combine colour and form. In this view, colour then should be brought forth as an inherent value to materials.66 Although Owen Jones championed the all pervasive influence of colour, his long-term ideological opponent John Ruskin argued that colour should be seen as being independent of form.67 Throughout the upper galleries of the Crystal Palace, Jones hung Indian calico in order to reduce the glare of the sunlight through glass (plate 9). He chose a ‘Turkish red’ which he hoped would elicit a ‘neutralised bloom over the whole of the contents’ (plate 10).68 In spite of this attempt to manipulate light for the sake of best staging the artefacts on display, Jones’ colour harmonies proved so controversial that they were even described as hideous. Jones defended his own colour scheme at the Crystal Palace whilst condemning the decision to remove the Indian calico from the roof which he believed had not only reduced the glare but also enhanced the building’s dramatic sense of fast-receding perspective. This disruption to colour harmony made the interior appear not only shorter by up to 300 feet but also it seemed to transform it into an incoherent array of gaudy blue girders.69 Before this happened, Jones’ fabrics were defended for their subtlety by Mrs Merrifield, the translator of several Renaissance treatises on artists’ media and techniques.70 Merrifield expressed astonishment at what she perceived to be the perfect realisation of Field’s colour ratios, the flat colours and non-analysed geometry in Indian design at the Crystal Palace.71 Before I turn to the reception of Indian fabrics, I will say a little about Jones’ exposure to Eastern design on his travels which as a forerunner to his work at the Crystal Palace had such a profound impact on his thought that he sought to codify design and colour in his influential book of 1856 – The Grammar of Ornament. The Grammar was a magnum opus which aimed to provide an encyclopaedic history and geography of world ornament and whose principles could be readily ascertained (through the assistance of copious colour illustrations) and possibly emulated. Part design manual, part aesthetic treatise, part luxury art



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object, The Grammar furnished the lexicon for a new imperial culture then seeking to forge a modern style from oriental ornament.72 Its extensive use of the novel technology of chromolithography literally brought oriental colour to life in ways never before seen in the championing of chromatics on a mass scale.73 The art of mechanical colour reproduction would provide the ultimate space (along with the courts of the Crystal Palace remodelled at Sydenham) for disseminating the theory of chromatics in relation to space and ornament via an oriental genealogy. Although Jones firmly advocated that Indian artefacts, in particular fabrics, should provide inspiration for the Schools of Design, he insisted that they should not be slavishly copied. Nevertheless, Indian, ancient Egyptian and medieval Moorish colour were for Jones governed by strict rules – a point which he drove home in his South Kensington lecture ‘An Attempt to Define the Principles which should Regulate the Employment of Colour in the Decorative Arts’.74 Because England had been ‘far outstripped by the nations of the East’, the genealogy and underlying principles of colour had to be excavated from elsewhere. In Eastern nations ‘the ornaments on a mummy case are analogous with those of the Egyptian temple…It is different with ourselves, we have no principles, no unity’ due to the effects of the division of labour, the result being ‘novelty without beauty or beauty without intelligence’.75 To combat this woeful status quo Jones outlined a set of ‘Propositions’ which could be made nationally available as guides to the employment of colour in the decorative arts and architecture. Some of these Propositions were, he claimed, drawn from Nature or from Science, but they ultimately championed his belief in the perfection of Eastern design. His underlying Propositions foreground the role of colour as a guide to form; the use of colour on flat or rounded, high or low surfaces; the balance of tones and the importance of primaries (drawn from Field) and Chevreul’s law of simultaneous contrast. The use of the primaries on architecture acted as a marker of civilisational achievement: This beautiful law [was] invariably followed [in ancient Greece, Egypt and oriental countries] but on the contrary when the art of each civilization declined, the primaries were no longer the ruling harmonies: the secondaries and tertiaries from being subordinate became dominate and ruddiness and indistinctness resulted.76

Jones exhorted the government to purchase as many of Indian textiles on display as possible because they could contribute ‘fruitful lessons’ for



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both the cultivated mind and the art student. Due to the strong system undergirding Indian art and design: It would be very desirable that we should be made acquainted with the manner in which, in the education of the Eastern artists, the management of colour is made so perfect. It is most probable that they work only from tradition, and a highly endowed natural instinct for which all Eastern nations have ever been remarkable.77

As a perhaps unexpected analogue or even shield to architecture, oriental fabrics constituted the principal dual registers of colour in relation to space and design at the first world’s fair. Against the shocking disappointment elicited by British industrially produced artefacts, Indian objects, in particular fabrics and an embroidered saddle, imparted wonder not only from the lay public but also from well-established art critics.78 In the Official Catalogue to the Great Exhibition John Forbes Royle emphasised ‘the command the natives of India have over colour’, while Jones’ collaborator on the decoration of the Crystal Palace, Matthew Digby Wyatt, singled out ‘the quiet beauty by the right employment of the most brilliant colouring when broken up into the most minute and properly contrasted forms and arranged for flat surfaces’.79 If colour in India and Britain was governed by underlying principles akin to natural laws (even if these seemed vague and to approximate instinct), it could be harnessed to the imperial project precisely because it could be learned, disciplined, governed and most importantly replicated. But as postcolonial critics have shown, the replication of cultural practices in the colony was fraught with difficulties. Incomplete, unstable and anxious, translation proved an arduous task. Central to these ideas or replication is the faciality of colour. Writing at the same time as Ruskin was delivering his lectures The Two Paths in 1858 (which I discuss below), the feted scholar and social thinker Sir J. Gardner Wilkinson yoked colour perception to the exigency of establishing a benchmark for public taste in art. This taste could be inculcated through the apprehension of certain techniques of reading and perception. Drawing on the writings and artworks of Hogarth, Field, Brewster, Owen Jones, Hundertpfund, Werner and Chevreul amongst others, Wilkinson nonetheless complained that the English were entirely indifferent to colour in spite of its centrality to everyday life: ‘Any face which is deformed however perfect the individual features



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would fail to please while the same features properly put together would make it beautiful…so too with colours.’80 Whilst Gardner Wilkinson conceded that some people are colour blind and that others have no hope of attaining taste, so that it is useless to convert them, for the vast majority instruction in colour harmony is desperately required. However, the application of laws leads to error; there is a fundamental difficulty in inculcating certain rules: ‘It is not by forming a theory on some fanciful basis that a perception of harmony of colours is to be required … it is a natural gift…The power depends on the perceptive faculty.’81 The science of colour is of no use for ornament: Field’s ratio can only be used as a guide and not as a rule because colour needs accidental circumstances.82 In sum, Gardner Wilkinson categorically denies that colour works through rules: the work of Jones and Field is but a guide and not a template for the apperception of colour. This debate on how colour was to be or not to be governed helped to centre Ruskin’s attacks both on the South Kensington group and, by implication, Gardner’s education for the masses. Jones’ elevation of ornament in relation to colour in Indian design would be partially eclipsed by anxieties surrounding the supposed decline in the quality of South Asian art – which could I suggest be attributed to the colonial administration and to a far more sinister discourse on cultural degeneracy.83 Throughout his career Ruskin advocated an idealised chivalric imperialism while vilifying modern, industrialised, democratic or mass warfare. In spite of this political consistency, Eastern colour performs as a contradictory space in Ruskin’s many writings. In his magnum opus The Stones of Venice (1851–53), Ruskin identified the defining feature of Venetian architecture as the ‘love of pure and bright colour which in a modified form was afterwards the root of all the triumph of the Venetian schools of painting, but which in its utmost simplicity is characteristic of the Byzantine period only’.84 Colour is sacred, even divine: The fact is, we none of us enough appreciate the nobleness and sacredness of colour…The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay colour, and sad colour, for colour cannot at once be good and gay. All good colour is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.85



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For Ruskin, the temperance and governance of colour which he so admired in relation to Byzantine art had degenerated during the Renaissance when it had been gradually ‘sacrificed’ to the new principles of a modernising taste. It would be partially revived in the ‘English school of landscape, culminating in Turner’ which was nothing less than a ‘healthy effort to fill the void which the destruction of Gothic architecture has left behind’.86 Against the growing influence of Lamarck on linear, evolutionary progress and Darwin on evolution in relation to natural selection, both of whom played a critical role in advancing (and questioning) the agency of colour in physiological aesthetics, Ruskin bemoaned the civilisational and moral decline of colour – with one important exception. Sacred colour operated on the premise of a universal law when connected with profound and noble thought, which for Ruskin was exemplified not only by Fra Angelico and the early religious paintings of the Flemings but also by modern ‘oriental’ art:87 Let us not dream that it is owing to the accidents of tradition or education that those races possess the supremacy over colour which has always been felt, though but lately acknowledged among men. However their dominion might be broken, their virtue extinguished, or their religion defiled, they retained alike the instinct and the power: the instinct which made even their idolatry more glorious than that of others…as it treads the costly carpet, or veils itself with the variegated Cachemire…And observe, farther, how in the Oriental mind a peculiar seriousness is associated with this attribute of the love of colour; a seriousness rising out of repose, and out of the depth and breadth of the imagination, as contrasted with the activity, and consequent capability of surprise, and of laughter, characteristic of the Western mind: as a man on a journey must look to his steps always, and view things narrowly and quickly; while one at rest may command a wider view, though an unchanging one, from which the pleasure he receives must be one of contemplation, rather than of amusement or surprise. Wherever the pure Oriental spirit manifests itself definitely, I believe its work is serious.88

Against the dislocated, distracted gaze of the modern Western tourist (whether in Venice or at the Crystal Palace) colour is for Ruskin’s orientals born out of tranquillity and imagination. Embedded in tradition where it is stationary and content, colour is the anathema to the restless techniques of the modern observer. At least in this instance, archaic oriental art is the potential antidote to the fragmentation of perception which Jonathan Crary identifies as the visual crisis which rejects the model of calm, judicious interiority (exemplified by the camera obscura) in favour of dispersion and shock.89



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There is something intuitive, even instinctual about this use of colour which Ruskin makes explicit in an early attack on both Owen Jones and the rules-bound agenda of the South Kensington collective. In his lecture ‘The General Principles of Colour’ of 9 December 1854 Ruskin complained that these ‘rules would never teach anyone to colour and the artist who submitted himself to the law of those primaries [ Jones and Redgrave’s use of Field] is lost forever’.90 Contra Jones, Ruskin declared ‘neither he nor anybody else could tell anything which would be of the least value beyond what every person present could find out for himself by the exercise of that noble faculty…instinct’.91 For Ruskin instinct constitutes that peculiar faculty by which all creatures did particularly that which it is their function to do. The case of art rests on the validity of instinct.92 More cogently respecting colour and empire, in Modern Painters III, 1856, Ruskin declared that ‘the Chinese and Indians and other semi-civilised nations can colour better than we do…[which is] inimitable by us …It is their glorious ignorance of all rules that does it; the pure and true instincts have play and do their work’.93 As I will go on to show the ‘inimitability’ or not of colour would become a major preoccupation for both the South Kensington collective and Ruskin. What reappears in Ruskin’s writings is a concern with the inimitability of colour as universal law and as instinct whose predecessors are perhaps to be found less in aesthetics and more in popular science. In the realm of phrenology, it had been commonly accepted since the 1810s that colour comprised one of the cerebral faculties as mapped out of Franz Joseph Gall. For Gall, the brain consisted of 27 organs which contributed to the establishment of the personality. The first 19 organs could also be found in other animal species; they ranged from the potentiality to commit murder to guile, pride and affection.94 All 27 faculties are innate and independent. Between spoken language (no.15) and the faculty of music (no.17) hovers the sense of colour. According to Gall, ‘as the organ of the arts is located far from that of the sense of colour, the circumstance explains why historical painters have rarely been colourists’.95 In Britain, Gall’s theory of instinct and mental faculties was popularised by the scientist George Combe’s interpretation. According to Combe’s reading, the eyes alone cannot conceive of differences or harmonies of colours and they have no colour memory. The question then becomes one of



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techniques of perception qua the acquisition of habits of attention in relation to judgement and intuition: In point of fact, those in whom the power of perceiving colour is naturally great, have a great development of that part of the brain situated in the midst of the arch of the eye brows. In the Chinese, the development of the organ is conspicuous. The faculty is generally more active in women than in men. In this as in other faculties, it is necessary to discriminate between the nature of the general function and the degree of activity of the faculty. There are individuals and nations who are fond of colours, but who have no feeling of their harmony or discord, that is, have no judgment or taste regarding them … It is probable that the lower animals may be possessed of this faculty, although they do not paint. The function of this faculty, is simply to perceive colours and their shades. In order to produce pictures by the application of colours, the faculties which trace the connection betwixt the means and the end must be possessed; and of these faculties the lower animals are destitute.96

For Gall and Combe, the mind manifests a plurality of innate faculties whereby each faculty, including colour, functions through distinct organs in different parts of the brain. Although man is driven by instinct, ‘he who has powerful faculties of form, colour and ideality and moderate reflecting faculties will reason better a painting as an art than he who has powerful reflecting faculties but limited faculties of form, colour and ideality’.97 This concern with colour as an innate faculty informed Ruskin’s more immediate contemporaries. According to the research of the famed ophthalmologist Hermann von Helmholtz, one of the sources for Darwin’s Descent of Man, colours are of primary importance in relation to the differentiated sensitivities of the nerve fibres in the human eye and their stimulation by the longest, middle and shortest light waves in the spectrum.98 For Darwin, colour instinct was crucial to the battle for survival and for sexual selection. His view of Nature as a dynamic, highly variable, shifting and symbiotic entity made colouration a fundamental aspect of its operations. Along with fellow scientist Alfred Tylor, Darwin argued that although all animals possessed the Colour Sense, as early man developed intellectually he experienced drastic atrophy in this faculty.99 But the Colour Sense had been recently reawakened by man’s increasingly sophisticated aesthetic principle which bestowed on colour ‘a vividness and power as unequalled as his mastery over nature’.100



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Avoiding what I believe to be any explicit confrontation with Helmholtz, Darwin, Gall or Combe, Ruskin insisted that instinct could be governed by a set of ‘necessities’. Although he denied that these were in any way rules analogous to the agenda of the South Kensington collective, nonetheless he stipulated a restricted reference to gradation, subtlety and surprise. Gradation demonstrated the passage of one colour to another; subtlety rested in the placement of colours while surprise emphasised sudden changes. This emotional and rhetorical approach veered between instinct and intuition and it did, I think, clearly have its own chromatics. As opposed to Field who believed it to be intermediary but unruly, Ruskin singled out crimson as the most sacred colour: as the symbol of life it must be used with extreme care. Ironically, in a lecture of 1858 crimson as symbol of violence becomes the inferred, ‘infrared’ and excessive element driving his aesthetic and moral justification of art. The Colour of/in Emergency: ‘The Mutiny’ Remixed To fast-forward incisively to our own times, in February 2003 the Rockefeller tapestry version of Picasso’s Guernica, which had hung outside the Security Council meeting room in the United Nations Building since 1985, was covered by blue curtains and US flags. In the name of security, this symbol of peace, which depicted the devastation of war, had to be censored.101 This act of temporarily erasing the representation of violence in the name of violence has, I suggest, a powerful precursor in one artist and one writer’s depiction of the Indian Uprising of 1857–58. In 1857–58, colour incited revolution in taste and warfare on a number of fronts. When seeking out a vaccine for malaria, which so plagued colonialists in India, the chemist Perkin accidentally discovered aniline mauve. The vogue for mauve ‘spread like a disease’ across Europe and the colonies.102 The euphoria stimulated by this phenomenologically unfamiliar hue – which no doubt glared in the still alien, new conditions of quotidian living driven by electricity, gas light and speed (the flash of a mauve dress glimpsed on a train) – would be counterbalanced by the far more violent and precarious stasis of colour in India. The Uprising of 1857–58, or in Marx’s terms the ‘First War



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of Indian Independence’ which had been partially triggered by sepoy objection to the taboo use of animal fat to lubricate British weaponry, ignited mass revolt on a scale never before seen in northern India. The Uprising bankrupted the English East India Company because of its massive military expenditure deemed necessary to smash Indian resistance. In addition to massacring thousands, the British terminated the rule of the Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar who they exiled to Rangoon for life. I suggest that during and after the Uprising colour would be also treated as a scapegoat; its wilful sacrifice colonialists hoped would act as a purifying process and as the beacon of hope for a more pacific British empire. Haunting images of executed Indians and dug-up skeletons at Lucknow and Delhi taken by the Corfuborn photographer Felice Beato in addition to the English artist Joseph Paton’s melodramatic oil painting of memsahibs about to be killed by Indian soldiers, captured and fuelled the metropolitan taste for bloodshed in places that would come to figure as the grisly lieux de mémoire of colonial tourism. Horrified, members of the London public are reported to have found the terror on the women’s pallid faces in Paton’s painting so appalling that the artist had to agree to paint out the sepoys in favour of a Scottish regiment. Like Picasso’s Guernica here is an imperial cover-up. The threat of impending death is now trounced by the repainted ‘heroic’ imperial bodies of Scottish soldiers as the subject of sacrifice switches to that of redemption. This erasure of, or at least painterly overlay of Highlanders onto sepoys and the juxtaposition of the two paths of narrative they offer are strangely paralleled by Ruskin’s frenzied lectures on the rebellion.103 Ruskin gave his lecture The Two Paths as the first section of his excurses on ‘The Deteriorative Power of Conventional Art over Nations’.104 The subject and the tone of the lecture were no doubt intended to provoke outrage, or at least heated discussion, given its delivery in the thick of the Uprising at the Museum of Ornamental Art – an institution otherwise known as ‘The Chamber of Horrors’.105 The talk, which targeted an audience of South Kensington sympathisers and which no doubt assumed that these people had a deep-held admiration for the many Indian objects kept at the Museum, serves as an outpouring of Ruskin’s Tory chauvinism. Ruskin rebuked both Jones’ colonial liberalism for its futility and all Indians from time



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immemorial for what he condemned as the culmination of their barbarity – that is, those supposed ‘atrocities’ carried out during the Uprising.106 For Ruskin, the Indian objects used for teaching at Marlborough House (many of which came from the 1851 world’s fair) may demonstrate ‘subtle design’ but this is only if design is understood through the South Kensington agenda of surface abstraction, and for him abstraction ran the risk of the negation of what he perceived to be moral (mimetic) responsibility. In his eyes such love of subtle design on the part of Indian artists and patrons, and by extension also the South Kensington clan, far too easily ‘attaches itself with the same intensity and the same success to the service of superstition, of pleasure or cruelty’.107 While Indian art is ‘wilfully sealed up’ by a veil of ‘spectral vacancy’ from any mimetic and by extension any truly moral engagement with the world, do we, the audience at South Kensington, ‘know what we are about?’.108 For Ruskin, art followed for its own sake in this way is destructive: art here indicates the decline and failure of civilisations. Let Indian ornament be a warning of what Britain could become! Unlike Paton’s act of painting sepoys out of sight, to become the spectral top underlayer of his epic picture, for Ruskin, the moral and artistic differences between India and Scotland are best expressed by colour juxtaposition: there can be no chromatic harmonies to provide a nicely synthesised perspective. Colour juxtaposition for him facilitates one means for thinking about horror, as the mnemonics of home (rural England) are played off against both the palaces of Lucknow and Delhi, as well as the windswept Highlands. Against those ‘Indian palaces whose marble is pallid with horror and whose vermilion is darkened with blood’ the remembrance of Scotland’s ‘rough grey rock and purple heaths must have risen before the sight of the Highland soldier’.109 Ruskin makes the reality of India vanish in the minds of British soldiers who project the image of home onto the site/sight of bloody conflict. For both artist and writer this ‘veiling’ of the colonial representation of Indian bodies or architecture treated like a body (marble pallid with horror) is a means of escape from the colonial reality. Red on red – whether Paton’s overpainting of the scarlet uniforms of sepoys so as to make them into a regiment of Scots, or Ruskin’s invocation of blood soaking, seeping into the vermilion decoration of marble



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palaces – constituted a key aspect of the orientalist palette during the Uprising. Ruskin’s excurses on red are but one element of what I deem to be his attitude towards Indian colour at this time. The Two Paths advanced the notion that Indian colour unnaturally marries beauty and cruelty: beauty is severed from its rightful place in relation to morality so as to expose how extreme and unnatural Indian art is. Even when he felt obliged to accord Indian art slight praise (‘It is quite true that the art of India is delicate and refined’) Ruskin observed that: It has one curious character distinguishing it from all other art of equal merit in design – it never represents a natural fact. [It] forms its compositions out of meaningless fragments of colour…[Indian artists] lie bound in the dungeon of their own corruption, encompassed only by doleful phantoms, or by spectral vacancy.110

He displaces the ubiquitous, hysterical Uprising trope of incarcerated Britons (again most obviously represented by Paton’s painting) onto the ‘impoverished’ artistic spirit of Indian painters and artisans. Pleasure and degeneracy, Ruskin argued, reign over the rightful search for truth – which was all too clear from the display of despicable Indian art at the ‘Chambers of Horror’: Among the models set before you in this institution, and in the others established throughout the kingdom for the teaching of design, there are, I suppose, none in their kind more admirable than the decorated works of India. They are, indeed in all materials capable of colour…almost inimitable in their delicate application of divided hue…it attaches itself with the same intensity, and with the same success, to the service of superstition, of pleasure, or of cruelty.111

Although in 1856 Ruskin had claimed that Indian colouring was inimitable, he had on this occasion shifted his position to propose (like members of the South Kensington collective) that in fact it could possibly be appropriated through mimicry. Precisely because he wished to condemn Indian art, Ruskin felt obliged to make it the object of successful imitation. Colonial mimicry has the potential to subvert the principle of ‘barbaric’ oriental chromatics. In his pitting of artless Scotland against artistic India, Ruskin sought to assert the exigency of an ideal(ising) imperialism which Britain must exercise over a ‘dissolute nation’ like India: ‘Since the race of man began its course of sin on this earth nothing has ever been done by it so significative [sic] of all bestial and lower than bestial degradation as the



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acts of the Indian race’.112 The paradox is that Indians are lovers of art in contrast with the dour Scots whose only art is their tartan kilts. The Scots are too puritanically virtuous to produce any art; Indians produce much that is subtle and seemingly beautiful but which Ruskin believes is degraded and unnatural: ‘out of the ivory palace comes treachery, cruelty, cowardice, idolatry, bestiality – whatever else is fruitful is the work of Hell.’113 However, Ruskin did not identify Scotland as the vanguard of the civilising process – England principally must account for South Asia’s discipline and punishment. Nor did he predict that the renewed subjugation of India would be able rescue the world’s ‘most diabolical race’ from absolute damnation. He believed that artful though Indians are or because they are artful, they must be conquered and ruled for their own and for the world’s sake – all in the name of global security. The question of security’s embroilment with emergency obviously structures Ruskin’s attack on South Asian colour. Preoccupied with the question of political emergency, during the Uprising (before and beyond) the colonial state had acted outside of the law in the name of security. The nomos of modernity shifted from the city to the camp as Mughal Delhi was evacuated, the Jama Masjid closed and the Lal Qila occupied by Company forces. The discourse on security demonstrates how contradiction in the form of the political threshold now bound law and the lawless: governmental norms break down. In his diatribe, Ruskin transfers the discourse of state of emergency to an artistic doctrine which contains within itself violent contradiction. Here the space of exception brings forth colour as a borderline concept. Colouras-exception is not bound to the ‘necessities’ of aesthetics; colour-asexception bears the evidence of a relation that now constitutes a new virtual, suspended space for thinking about global aesthetics. In spite of this outpouring against what ostensibly can be dubbed ‘Sepoy colour’, Ruskin did accord a more ambiguous, even semi-redeeming space for colour in Indian art which he also voiced in The Two Paths. He praised the Indian application of ‘the minutest atoms of colour to gradate other colours which confuse the eye…the first secret of their gift of splendour’.114 Throughout his writings on European art, colour is elevated as the highest and most difficult artistic achievement.115 Indian colour is, however, as I have stressed, inimitable. It is authentic, tradition bound and this is how it should be admired. In this way colour singes at the level of



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affect. As affect it is difficult to classify but it does have an actual effect on the senses to a degree that it has profound intellectual resonance. For Ruskin, empire is the site of occult instability; its spaces of bewilderment are perplexing partly because of the unheimlich nature of colour. Invoking the ‘colonial Gothic’ as a means of recalling-to-reform modern design, there is something messianic about Ruskin’s writings. According to Ian Baucom, a ‘profound similarity links Walter Benjamin’s messianic time and Ruskin’s orders of recollective and proleptic nostalgia’.116 Certainly for Benjamin, messianic time marks the present as a time that at once anticipates the future and recalls the past and a time in which both anticipation and recollection are manifest in and at one with a redemptive now. Messianic time discloses itself as an order of temporality that represents an essentially typological relationship of prefiguration and fulfilment where there is a ‘secret agreement between past generations and the present one’.117 And for Ruskin it is the Uprising of 1857–58 which really encapsulates these temporal horrors. But in the following decades Ruskin would occasionally, perhaps ironically group Indian art with what he termed ‘the Gothic School’ which he believed extended from ancient Egypt to modern South Asia. The Gothic School he argued could be identified by ‘beautiful harmonies of colour without any representation of light; and which have, many of them, rested in such imperfect expressions of form as could be so obtained’.118 The Gothic for Ruskin was the epitome of proleptic nostalgia; the Gothic promised a return to an absent past which would yield up the promise of an ideal future.119 Ruskin declared that a keen Colour Sense alone could not make up for the lack of moral ideas: ‘the pure colour gift when employed for pleasure only degrades in another direction; so that among the Indians, Chinese and Japanese, all intellectual progress in art has been for ages rendered impossible by the prevalence of that faculty.’120 In A Joy Forever he once again chided Indian art for its lack of mimesis and for its relationship with savagery and ornament: And so the Indians…got at it from below; they refuse all true portraiture of nature, produce nothing but grotesques and monsters, and seek mere relations of colour… All ornamentation of that lower kind is pre-eminently the gift of cruel persons, of Indians…mere line and colour, without natural form – seems to be somehow an inheritance of ignorance and cruelty… Get yourselves to be gentle and civilized,



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having respect for human life and a desire for good, and…you will not be able to make such pretty shawls as before. You know you cannot make them so pretty as those Sepoys do at this moment.121

Even as late as 1873 Ruskin could not forget what he viewed as the devastation and pure violence of the 1857–58 Uprising. What does ignite his writings is the soldering of colour to political action and his ardent belief that colour can function as both a virtual and an actual indicator of Indian resistance to colonial rule. At this time colour was also fast becoming a source of pathological and evolutionary anxiety on other epistemological fronts. Ruskin’s and Owen Jones’s rather loose definitions of instinct and natural law were usurped by a philological and scientific interest in the cultural conditions and genealogy of colour in relation to vision. Colour now served as the paradigmatic example of private, incommunicable subjectivity in the epistemological shift from what the world is really like to our perceptions of the world. This rejection of interest in what colour is in the world now championed a science-motivated reality in which colours are phantasms created by the interaction of human perceptual apparatuses with certain kinds of particles of different shapes and speeds. At stake from the 1870s was not whether colours constituted a property of the world or only the human way of perceiving the world but whether all minds perceived colour in the same way. The issue then becomes what is the correspondence among minds and also, with urgent purpose, ‘what is colour doing to the subject?’, especially colonial and colonised subjects?122 The Figure of the Artist/Artisan: Unheimlich Colour in the Colony and a Resuscitation of the Dy(e)ing It would be impossible, after teaching a student anatomy…to study the flesh tones in the green or pink incarnations of Vishnu. R. F. Chisholm, Principal of the Madras Art School, ‘The Function of Art Schools in India’ No art suggests so much the want of vernacular instructors or trade manuals as that of dyeing. J. J. Hurrel



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‘Indian colour’ through education – that is, the inculcation of its ‘laws’ as viewed through the lens of South Kensington vision – could and did become a colonising device.123 Aside from Ruskin’s condemnation of South Kensington, how would the colour theories of Jones et al. die or survive in colonial India? Did the supposedly ‘universal’ laws of colour constitute the spaces for resistance and the site of interdiction; did they embody something hybrid, even entirely unrecognisable? Saloni Mathur and Deepali Dewan have insightfully explored the colonial ‘cult of the craftsman’ and the ‘figure of the artisan’ in relation to the celebration and anxieties surrounding the propagation of ‘fine arts’ manufactures in India.124 Dewan in particular has emphasised the visual and textual reduction of Indian subjects to bodies who labour (figure 2). In this mode, the artist/craftsman performs as a contradictory space onto which colonial officials projected contested opinions about the revival and the decline of high-quality ‘traditional’ arts. This ambivalence was intended



John Forbes Watson, Dyers from his book The People of India, 1860s, albumen print reprinted in 2007.

Fig.2



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to justify the presence, continuance and revivalist if ultimately hybrid policies of colonial museums and schools of art in India. I suggest that the frustrations and failures which dogged so many such institutions are due precisely to the figure of the artisan. Here I wish to reinscribe Dewan’s use of figure through the lens of Lyotard’s use of figure where figure is taken as that intensely visual space which in no way can be merely reduced to discourse.125 Figure creates an affective, unsettling domain where ‘meaning is not produced and communicated but where intensities are felt’.126 Such a method allows for a certain unspoken agency that enables us to read colonial accounts of colour and labour for their gaps and fissures. This mode of figural inscription could, I think, prise open a space for subaltern resistance. Figure then creates a space for exploring the subaltern status of colour. I suggest that there is a doubled alterity for colour both in relation to the obdurate, even unruly figure of the subaltern artisan as viewed through the prism of the colonial museum, art school, survey and prison and through the slippery agency of colour itself which pertains neither to the mind nor to the world. For the South Kensington collective, if there were laws applicable to colour then this meant it could and possibly must be integrated into the colonial governmental project. Radical agitator and close ally of J. S. Mill, the organiser of the 1851 exhibition Henry Cole, advocated the need to teach colour in all art schools. The superintendent of the collection of Indian art, design and manufactures for the Great Exhibition, John Forbes Royle, asserted that artefacts should be examined from a ‘general point of view …disencumbered of manufacturing details’ whilst also stressing the governmental potential of scrutinising oriental labour.127 Forbes Royle’s dismay at the absence of Indian artisans at the Exhibition is critically ambivalent: contact with modern technology would improve their tools and increase productivity and ‘though they had much to learn yet that they themselves have something to teach’; it is ‘incredible that we should have remained ignorant till now of the existence of many of their arts’.128 What his comments do acknowledge is that colour becomes a symbiotic if somewhat disjunctive space for exploring the metropolitan-colonial construction of design. Like Jones, Forbes Royle staged the importance of the Crystal Palace’s India Court to design by congratulating the British state on its purchase of 250 objects of



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the ‘highest instructional value’.129 Art administrator John Sparkes observed that although the principles of British design had declined, the craftsmanship remained of a high standard although the inverse he believed to be true of Indian art. Likewise Alexander Hunter, the first principal of the Madras School of Art, was already complaining about what he perceived to be the defects and decadence of Indian art in 1851.130 Hence the parallel position of design decline seems to have stimulated art administrators in Britain and India to stake a claim in South Asia’s artistic revival, for this revival would possibly help to ensure Britain’s own improvement in craft, art and ornament.131 Undergirding this is the welding together of two seemingly opposed colonial views of the state of civilisation in India. Although several generations of orientalists bemoaned the decline of what they believed to be the world’s most admirable culture, by the mid-nineteenth century political theorists exemplified by Mill (and by implication his close ally Cole) argued that India had never been far removed from a contemptible condition of barbarity.132 This ambivalence would be underscored by the policies of the Madras School of Art in its early years under the tenure of Alexander Hunter. Hunter would apply the orientalist position to the decorative arts (these had once been great arts but which were now in decline) whilst condemning Indian painting and sculpture as arrested in cultural and evolutionary development. Colonial education would perform as a civilising mission – but with unexpected and uneven consequences. This subjunctive disjuncture produced a series of differences in the colony exemplified by the transfusion/ transmutation of the South Kensington National Course of Instruction in to the ‘outreach’ curriculum of the four colonial art schools in Madras, Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore. This can clearly and variously be seen in Hunter’s ambition for the supremacy of the Madras School as the powerhouse of empire for disseminating taste and education, but also through those blind spots in colonial knowledge relating to colour and finally in the perceived refusal of Indian artists and artisans to embrace the revivalist and commercial agenda of these state-run institutions. Informed by his predilection for Indian artefacts in relation to a broader, liberalist/imperial agenda, Owen Jones and his fellow South Kensington instructor, superintendent of the DSA Richard Redgrave, attempted to systematise/codify colour in publications which became



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integral to the National Course of Instruction. These manuals would then be exported to the colonies – in particular New Zealand, Australia and South Asia where they remained influential well into the 1890s.133 Redgrave played an extremely active role in the pedagogical agenda of the Department of Practical Art (DPA, known as the DSA from 1853) where he devised a system of art instruction for its schools which included courses in drawing, painting, modelling and composition in design.134 Nearly the entire DSA course focused on drawing and only at the end stage which dealt with theory, design and ornament did colour appear, and even then it was carefully monitored: the student should merely fill given spaces with colour. Redgrave even prescribed certain pedagogical shades for the decoration of art schools: ‘in choosing the colour or paper for such a room little variation of tint should be used and in olive green or neutral tint preferred which may be relieved by narrow lines of some more positive colour in the cornice.’135 His General Principles of Decorative Art which were in part based on his DSA report of 1854, were printed in a very large format so that they could be pinned to classroom walls. Colour then should be a constant point of mood, inspiration and instruction; its ubiquitous presence could provide the framework and inspiration for artistic activity. Under pressure from the DPA (in particular from Henry Cole), Redgrave published An Elementary Manual on Colour (1853) which he claimed he had mostly compiled from the writings of Field, Jones, Chevreul, David Ramsay Hay and David Brewster’s Optics.136 His preface included the critical diagram for explaining the laws of colour encapsulated by the diagram of a cube whose ratios followed Field’s laws for primary colours. The diagram aimed to simplify, for the purposes of pedagogy, the relative quantity of each hue that should be present in any ornamental arrangement. Redgrave divided his manual into three sections so as to discuss the validity of colour ratios and harmonies both of which were followed by an extensive series of questions that was intended to test the understanding of the student readers in relation to their own artistic practice. This self-proclaimed colour catechism used bullet points and colour combinations as rigid, mnemonic devices. Redgrave admitted that pigments could only very imperfectly represent the primaries as either viewed by the human eye or as found in nature; he also concluded that the laws of



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colours (derived from Field and Chevreul) can never be transferred to art and design with complete satisfaction.137 Yellow is the colour most allied to light whilst purple is the darkest shade and green is the most soothing.138 Following Chevreul, Redgrave argued that the simultaneous contrast of colours consisted in the contrast of depth, intensity and the juxtapositions of hues.139 Saturation is the key to his argument as hues of equal intensity must be combined to create chromatic satisfaction: ‘Thus the law of harmony will be found in complementary contrasts of colour.’140 In spite of his tepid reception of Field, like Owen Jones Redgrave believed that: The laws of simultaneous contrast agree with the practice of the oriental and medieval ornamentalists who separated coloured ornamental forms from coloured grounds by edgings of black or white and used ornamental form of any colour on white or black grounds without outline or edging. They also used gold in the same manner as the neutral.141

In sum Redgrave sought to condense some of the tenets of The Grammar of Ornament whilst expanding upon a few points which he had gleaned from Owen Jones’ rumination on design pedagogy – points that were to be admired precisely for being anti-representational in intent.142 Both Jones and Redgrave favoured a course of study based on geometry which would form the basis of a wider curriculum that divided arts and alumni tasks by function. This essentially utilitarian agenda pared down ornament, plants and animals to their barest essentials, to those principles which would then by the student/teacher be classified, isolated and reduced to common characteristics. These empirical observations had to operate within the framework of ‘laws’ which would determine the ‘conception and realisation of the Beautiful’.143 This type of lawdriven abstracting ornament did possess its own ‘character’; it had to be imbibed with ‘fitness’, ‘proportion’ and ‘harmony’ to such an extent that their combination would eventually lead to ‘repose’. But how would this fascination with repose infiltrate Indian and British design outside of Britain, especially given the violent contradictions or at least the perceived ambivalence of recent cultural/ political practices in the colony? What colonial officials did agree upon was that colour, however marginalised, could occupy a space in art school pedagogy. But given the equivocal dangers of what constituted mimicry in the colony, colour had to be carefully monitored in other



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ways to its stipulated application and form as stated by Redgrave.144 These art school policies do, I suggest, have ramifications for the colonial pedagogical project in its extended global networks. In colonial India, the delimitation of the principle of liberty would be undergirded by a theory of civilisational hierarchies so that the purpose of articulating the principle of liberty was to specify the conditions under which that principle would facilitate the maximisation of utility: utility should be the ultimate indicator of progress. According to Mill the Younger, under the conditions of backwardness liberty would not lead to the maximisation of utility; he believed it to be perfectly consistent that liberty should be decried as inappropriate to colonial governmentality. His definition of colonial paternalism advocated that the father must be the oppressor of the people and that education in India must accentuate English at the expense of Sanskrit and Arabic. English literary education was adapted to the administrative and political imperatives of British rule although these initiatives charged the content with an altered significance enabling the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment to be co-opted so as to support education as the instrument of social control. The teaching of literature at colonial schools aimed (at least in colonial rhetoric) to be character building, to shape critical thought and to facilitate the formation of aesthetic judgement.145 Perhaps in the utilitarian imagination, race signalled as the visible (warning) marker of the unfamiliar. This might be so much so that it stood for or at least supplemented the alterity and the plethora of differences which lay behind it. In this way it was able to limit the very constructive enterprise upon which it was supposed to be modelled – that is, as being familiar or almost the same but not quite.146 Race, like colour, in imperial pedagogy operates as a malleable space to be both strategically and tactically revealed and concealed.147 Colour in relation to race occupied an extremely ambivalent position with regard to multivalent governmental attempts to promote aesthetics as a science as can be espied through the principles of technical drawing, geometry and abstract design and the denigration of the fine arts.148 Initially the teaching of colour appears to have been largely confined to the stringent rule books of Dyce and Redgrave accompanied by Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament.149 Colour circulated as the ‘aura’ of the South Kensington Museum (SKM) collective whose authenticity was compounded by its problematic status as fetish.



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By 1860 the South Kensington Museum, in collaboration with the Government of India, had introduced mobile museums of textiles in an attempt to standardise the vagarious tenets of colonial pedagogy.150 Out of these 21 samples contained in these travelling cases, 13 were of Indian origin.151 Even though Redgrave corresponded with Alexander Hunter in Madras; even though he was instrumental in appointing Henry Locke as principal of the Calcutta Art School in 1864, both these colonial administrators sought to produce colonial difference as the key to art education in the colony. They modified the National Course of Instruction to fit their own ambitions thus incorporating what they perceived to be the exigencies of the local status quo. Perhaps in response to the demands of the Bengali elite who made up the majority of the Calcutta School students (or due to his own ambition to be an ingenious art administrator), Henry Locke shied away from Redgrave’s emphasis on industrial design, geometry and abstract ornament in lieu of lessons in painting, lithography and photography so as to champion instead the arts of mimetic representation which he believed offered the means for establishing taste. He wanted the Calcutta Art School to resemble more an art academy and less a school of design.152 Although Hunter initially adopted the South Kensington curriculum in Madras, sent the work of his students for perusal by Forbes Royle and Redgrave in London, and received lessons, plans and equipment from the organisers of the National Course of Instruction, he favoured a pedagogical model that was closer to the master–apprentice than to the teacher–classroom ethic.153 In his report to the Government of India he stated that the ‘system of instruction followed in the schools of art in England… is not quite suited to the requirements of our schools in India’.154 He condemned South Kensington’s emphasis on European plants and manufactures as the proper inspiration for abstracting design because he believed that they were not only unfathomable but also irrelevant to the aesthetic and commercial interests of Indian students. They should be replaced with a curriculum that favoured an exploration of vernacular botany and crafts – that is, with a style of pedagogy that only vaguely resembled that in Britain. As well as establishing the Madras Art School, Hunter sponsored the formation of an industrial college with which the art school would later be amalgamated under the aegis of the government in order to



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form the School of Industrial Arts. As an arts administrator Hunter had pan-Indian ambitions. He acted as government consultant for the newly formed J. J. School of Art in Bombay and he sent several of his students as instructors at the art schools in Jaipur and Calcutta as well as dispatching advisors trained at the Madras School to work in Lahore, Lucknow and 11 colonial jails.155 In this way the Madras Art School functioned as the hub in a network of colonial artistic projects in such a way that it usurped the metropolitan centralised schemes of South Kensington. In more positive terms, perhaps it served as the interface for the transfer of knowledge between metropole and colony. At least up to 1873 (the date of Hunter’s retirement) the Madras Art School ‘played an equal if not greater role than South Kensington in shaping the early history of colonial art education’ in India.156 In colonial India, colour ricocheted across the space between fine art and art purely mechanical; it developed a highly ambiguous relationship with what South Kensington instructors had termed ‘ornament’.157 It had to target both intellectual ambition (the cult of civilising the self ) and it had to appeal to the decorative arts which many (but by no means all) colonial administrators believed to be critical to the improvement of society. According to Dewan, this ‘dual presence is what made the art schools colonial’.158 The task of colonial art schools was to elevate Indian art to the ‘sameness’ of European art whilst emphasising its difference. Although their existence rested on the premise of Indian art’s improvement and the difference between coloniser and colonised, the basis of colonial authority determined the necessity to represent these schools as almost reaching their goals but not quite. The obligation of showcasing India’s artistic revival in order to justify art education and the need to maintain difference so as to justify colonial presence resulted in a fissure in colonial discourse which shows its limits. And this is perhaps most ambiguously problematic in its confrontation with colour. In the colonial discourse underlying the multivalent, even competing agendas of the four art schools, colour becomes a potentially anarchic or at least an ungovernable space. According to the first head of the J. J. School, Bombay, J. A. Crane, writing in 1857, ‘it has been the good fortune of eastern nations to possess a natural gift for harmonies of colour’, which is instinctual and ‘without any laws’; because colour is



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based on instinct, it has been able to survive relatively unchanged for at least hundreds of years and as such it should hardly be reformed by colonial education, which should not endanger ‘the existence of that which is already good’.159 Writing in another part of the Bombay Presidency (Lahore) at the time of Hunter’s retirement, the art administrator Richard Temple protested against the commercial and technical drive of colonial art schools in favour of a gymnastic and holistic approach to pedagogy. He believed that Britons had destroyed ‘native genius and originality’: It behoves us, therefore, since the original instinct is lost, to mould the opinions and tastes of the natives on a rational system. Rules and laws exist and are known, founded on an analysis of the impression received by educated minds from the inspection of certain forms and colours and combinations, which show the reason why those impressions are produced…The ‘line of beauty’, the ‘law of preponderance’, harmonies and contrasts of colour…can no longer be looked upon as matters of taste or fancy, but are regarded as established principles. These laws can all be learnt, illustrated, and applied, and on them practical rules can be founded.160

But exactly what these underlying ‘laws’ were is less easy to determine as each art school followed the trajectory of their successive administrators rather than any centralised policy directed by either South Kensington or the Government of India.161 John Lockwood Kipling, Principal of the Mayo School and Curator of the Lahore Museum (1875–93), advocated a character-(re)forming pedagogy channelled through a curriculum which combined traditional crafts of the region with aesthetic theory and free-hand drawing.162 Although intensely and extensively involved with the production and promotion of Indian arts and crafts for world’s fairs and expositions in Europe and the US, Kipling remained vehemently opposed to what he saw as the exhaustive colonising drive of South Kensington. The ‘detestable business’ of ‘their abominable London exhibition’ of 1886 could only be detrimental to the production of vernacular art in India.163 His views had long been publicised in the Allahabad-based publication The Pioneer where he made repeated reference to the need for locally based exhibitions to promote trade as far more beneficial than adhering to the collecting exigency of South Kensington: ‘Nobody cares very much I imagine for those weary alleys, cellar passages and saloons [which] are such a long way off.’164 Such resentment was no



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doubt in part stimulated by the government’s stipulation that goods must be collected from artisans and commissioned from art students with the exclusive aim that they appeal to the taste of the European consumer.165 Colonial administrators frequently complained that they had been given insufficient time to commission and to source highquality arts and crafts which could meet the demands of European exhibitions. The display of hurriedly made, shoddy objects they feared would only have the inevitable negative effect of denigrating the art schools’ pedagogy, museums’ collections on the international stage and their own reputations.166 Responding to their pleas, the Secretary of State to India did pledge that from 1878 ‘it would no longer be desirable for India to be represented in future at such exhibitions to the same extent and at so great a cost’.167 Obviously given the very agenda of the Colonial and India Exhibition of 1886, this promise (not official sanction) was not upheld – as is so clearly voiced by J. L. Kipling. In spite of such complaints and promised action, the Government of India, the Royal Commission and the South Kensington Museum continued to order thousands of objects and to send their personnel on ambitious collecting and commissioning campaigns in India.168 Underfunded and overburdened with such demands, both colonial art schools and museums buckled under the weight of this metropolitan colonising drive. After Hunter’s departure as principal in 1873, his successor Richard Chisholm tried to close the Madras Art School following the recent collapse of the five provincial museums under the jurisdiction of the Central Museum, Madras.169 The government, which had stipulated that the four major museums at Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay and Madras come under its jurisdiction by the Museum Act of 1866, refused to comply.170 Just a year before Chisholm’s demand, the government proposed that the Indian Museum, Calcutta (est. 1814) should act as the leading museum in India; in effect this projected centralisation was intended to echo the high-profile status of the Madras Art School under Hunter’s directorship.171 The Indian Museum would in theory serve as the buffer between South Kensington and the other museums in South Asia. In the case of both art schools and museums, the colonial government stridently believed that the heavy demands of South Kensington needed a counterpart, even a space where they could be resisted in the form of a centralising institute on the ground.



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Nonetheless, the pull of the metropolis continued to place heavy demands on art schools and museums. In 1877, in order to commemorate 50 years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the government ordered a series of Jubilee museums as ‘gifts’ – again many of which proved to be short-lived.172 At this time regional exhibitions had to be cancelled or postponed with the aim of redirecting funds towards the Prince of Wales’ visit to India. In the 1870s officials from both the art schools and museums complained that their collections of ‘works of art for both use and ornament are also of the most meagre description. The apparatus and applications of the liberal arts is unrepresented’.173 Lockwood Kipling had already protested that: The best examples of art that this country produces are to found at home and the last place to go for information on Indian art and archaeology is the Museum of Bombay. All that we go in return are a few casts of European ornament and the wiry outlines of the Science and Art Department [South Kensington].174

Most notoriously in Europe, the poor quality of art school goods at the Paris Exhibition 1878 drew gasps of horror from the worried public. This display of shoddy goods became symptomatic of the ‘decadent’ and ‘impoverished’ nature of South Asian visual culture under British colonial policy so much so that it elicited a petition from leading art administrators (many from the Arts and Crafts Movement) who protested against the further production of such third-rate objects.175 Five years later the Government of India drew up a series of ‘Resolutions on Museums and Exhibitions’ which promoted the improvement of museums through trade and the development of commerce in art manufactures. Totally ignoring the issue of pedagogy, the primary resolution highlighted the need for trade museums and a system of uniform numbering of collections at local, provincial and presidential museums.176 Under pressure from museum officials opposed to its centralising plans, the government had to concede that its project was ‘likely to involve excessive interference and supervision’.177 The influence that the museum ‘would thus exercise over an industrial art would be the indirect one of excluding articles of bad design or workmanship from its collection’.178 Whilst the Secretary of State for India believed that the ‘presidency or provincial museum ought I think to be allowed to grow up gradually’ he expressed unease concerning the role of art schools and their officials.179



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In 1893 the Government of India attempted to abolish the art schools for serving no purpose – which was vehemently challenged by officials from these institutions at the Museums Conference held at Lahore in 1894.180 The Arts and Museums Committee which convened at Lahore ‘unanimously agreed that one of the chief objects of every museum should be the preservation of every good example of the art of the past and that such specimens would prove the surest guide to the native workmen of today’.181 They vehemently contested the imposition of a transregional standard of taste, stressing instead the primacy of locality. Although several art schools made fundamental changes to their structure and curricula, the sense of impending crisis could not be averted. In 1909, Cecil Burns, Principal of the Bombay Art School, convened a session at the Royal Society of Arts on ‘The Function of Art Schools in India’, which condemned the government for its policy of ‘tepid acquiescence’ towards cultural institutions.182 He blamed the opening of the Suez Canal for the transformation of India into a mere suburb of London or Paris whilst condemning the influx of English and German goods which had the effect of producing barbarous, hybrid designs. As well as being isolated from one another, with a lack of trained staff, Burns believed that the invasion of foreign commodities and manuals of design caught the students ‘before they have been equipped to meet it and they have been forced to struggle against extinction’.183 He vilified the capricious whims of each governor for either neglecting or encouraging what he believed to be dying arts, thus concluding that only if India is isolated economically can art schools flourish although ‘the task is a hopeless one from the very start’.184 Birdwood responded by defending the living ‘sacre-sant crafts’ of India whilst other members of the committee stressed the importance of local demands and the somewhat ambiguous ‘inculcation of the true principles of art … rather than to teaching slavish imitation of the past’.185 E. B. Havell, former principal of the Calcutta Art School, criticised the innately unartistic nature of colonial governance: In Europe nobody expected Government to be artistic, but in India things were very different. The people of India are an artistic people, or they were until Englishmen began to educate them, and they believed that the Government was artistic. Sometimes even the Government itself believed that it was and



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that made matters much worse. The real question is whether the British people individually, collectively and administratively are an artistic example to the people of India.186

In spite of his own extensive reforms of its curriculum, Havell complained that the Calcutta Art School resembled a ‘fourth rate provincial art school in Europe thirty years ago’.187 Havell himself wrote a series of six teaching manuals directed specifically towards ‘the Indian student’. Relatively large in scale, without text, this now exceptionally rare series of pared-down line drawings are printed in bold red. Possibly this decision to use a dark red was an attempt to mimic the media and techniques of Mughal art. Here the use of carmine with lamp black was frequently used for draughtsmanship. But apart from this one gesture in favour of colour, colour is not the subject of Havell’s pedagogical exercise. Instead he focused on simple, traceable outlines of animals and motifs which were very loosely based on architectural and painterly motifs from Mughal visual culture. Colour then becomes a matter of filling in once these outlines have been learned. As was the case with Redgrave’s catechism, colour should supplement design only after the tenets of design have been inculcated, but its absence, its silence, here indicates its ungovernability. Colour then would at first sight appear to have slipped through colonialism’s discursive net. In terms of its pleasing harmonies, colour is far less frequently mentioned in relation to the international exhibitions post 1851 – one important exception being Birdwood’s Handbook to the Paris Universal Exhibition, 1878. Using the unspoken standard of the carpets exhibited at earlier exhibitions, whether Indian or Persian, Birdwood declared the colours of modern carpets to be too strong, especially given the expected effects of interior decoration in Britain.188 Although a leading figure in colonial art pedagogy, Birdwood admitted to the difficulties in analysing ‘the secret of the harmonies of the bloom of Indian textiles, even with the aid of Chevreul’s prismatic scale’.189 Elsewhere he did attempt to excavate the ‘hidden meaning’ of colour in relation to the ‘deep and complicated symbolism’ of Indian carpets.190 Birdwood believed that the irregularities in colouring were seldom accidental and that whilst this symbolism was usually connected with flowers, colours had precise significance. White and green together spoke of joy, whilst white alone referred to mourning; yellow denoted



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honour and distinction; red and purple marked rank and distinction; finally, black and dark blue signified sadness, darkness and trouble.191 This colouring he argued was the evidence of ‘a sacred gift’ as: Colour is the most difficult [aspect of art] to teach. Though general principles can well be imparted by rule, a true sense of colour is most rare…It often exists where a knowledge of the value of form is unknown. And it accompanies a quiet sense of sympathy with nature.192

Perhaps the most intriguing comment Birdwood makes in relation to colour is its direct association with nazar – the evil eye. To seek out this chromatic ‘amulet’, the eye of the expert is need as it reveals itself only as ‘one or two small patches of colour not used elsewhere in the patterning … these are worked in to avert the evil eye, to keep off sickness or trouble or to bring good luck’.193 But elsewhere Birdwood lamented that colonial collectors ignored this warning in their thirst for oriental carpets which were then irreverently displayed at the 1878 Paris Exposition: It is a carpet, however, which it will be difficult to put into a European room, as its surface is too beautiful to allow of its being broken by furniture. It is a carpet to be looked at like a golden sunset, and it was a sacrilege to remove it from the mosque where it evidently once was laid.194

The question of the agency and the scarcity, the sacrifice and sacrilege of colour flashes up with an unknown urgency and violence at this time. Dangerous, sacred, fleeting, furtive, colour faces the beholder, to uphold its physiognomy as one of the better-kept secrets of public life. Freed from its obligation to harmony, colour ‘manifests its allegiance with the deepest streams of Orientalism, an interesting and fraught affair in which the visual turns in on itself, so to speak, in a medley of fear and fascination’ at being absorbed.195 It’s time to put a face on colour. Colour may be an elusive presence in colonial art schools, but in the wider economy the production of dyes in India fuelled a global trade. This is made most explicit by Birdwood’s comment that ‘formerly there was a large manufacture of blue salampores at Nellore, which was quite broken up by the West Indian Emancipation Act, for the freed negroes refused very naturally to wear the garb of their slavery’.196 Birdwood’s take on the global economy is of course ambivalent: infused with liberal acknowledgement of the rhetoric of liberty pitted against the slump in colonial commerce – this is the price of freedom.



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This fusion of Africa with India stretches back magically, we might say mimetically, to preceding centuries when African men, women and children were ‘bought with colour itself ’.197 For centuries slave traders were forced to offer a wide range of goods for slaves – most of which came from India in the form of cloth.198 The slave trade thus owed much to the colour trade linking the chromophilic parts of the globe only to be reinvented through the indentured labour of enforced exile throughout the Indian Ocean.199 The linkage of enforced or ‘model’ labour, confinement and colour was a recurrent theme in Birdwood’s writings. In his Handbook to the Parisienne Exposition of 1878, he could barely find words to describe the mimetic/mnemonic deception of lifelike models of Indian labourers: ‘The Lucknow models are so true to nature as to defy detection until handled.’200 His emphasis on the presence of these almost human models anticipates a readership which also increasingly favoured the representation of India in Europe through the intermediating media of life-sized clay or plaster models and dioramas at world’s fairs. The presence of these models acted as a substitute for the absence of the labouring subaltern body.201 This substituting absence and the European desire to unpack commodity fetishism so as to espy the processes of labour behind the Indian objects on display, to strip the labourer of his valuable possession of labour in his own body, are captured most dramatically in Birdwood’s description of carpet production: In an evil hour, the Indian Government, thinking only of how to effect small economies, hit upon the plan of using their jails for the supply of the now lucrative trade in carpets…The examples exhibited in 1851, which gained their reputation…for the originality and great beauty of their designs, the harmony of their colouring, and their special fitness for the houses of the cultivated, the wealthy, and the great…But what did the Indian Government do? They handed this great historical craft, this glorious art, over to the Thugs in their jails, and the Thugs strangled it.202

Through the lurid sensationalist stereotype of Thuggi as strangler and as an iconic member of those tribes and castes officially dubbed criminal by this time, Birdwood constructs an image of colonial complicity. From strangling travellers, Thugs now murder the art of carpet making – including the judicious harmony of colours – under the purview of colonial prison wardens. This problem is elusively located in attrition



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– somewhere in the prison compound. At Lahore gaol, Birdwood deemed the quality of the wool to be excellent; however, ‘the dyes with which they are coloured are hideous and the arrangement of the colours is harsh and inharmonious…[which] are not copied in Persian dyes but in local ones compounded, I could believe, out of the jail medical stores’.203 The brightly coloured Indian rugs shown and sold in Britain were largely the products of this ‘sinister’ colonial project. From 1862, the production of these commodities, which emulated the patterns and colours of those carpets previously celebrated at the world’s fairs, was transferred to the responsibility of prisoners in the jails and Bazaar Factories across India.204 The proliferation of jail manufactures is borne out by their representational prominence in the published monographs on all aspects of the textile industry. In his edited survey of cotton fabric production in the Madras presidency, Edgar Thurston gleaned most of his ‘evidence’ – that is, observations or hearsay – from the prisons.205 Thurston complained that at the Tanjore and Bangalore Central Jails only bright and gaudy colours from Europe were employed although at the latter old patterns were effectively copied.206 At Vellore Prison Thurston noted that none of the profits from cotton fabrics went to the inmates.207 In spite of this one of Thurston’s collaborators hoped that ‘the stigma which thus attaches [itself ] to the carpet industry in the jail will soon be removed’.208 In this manner the prison would be transformed into a dominant calibrating mechanism for informal labour so that gaol activities became critical to the anti-economic rubric of ‘tradition’ which occupied and shaped the infrastructure of the colonial economy. This incarcerated, hidden labour would be transformed into metropolitan spectacle as prisoners from Agra were forced to display their newly learned craft skills at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, South Kensington, 1886, and their presence was to undo the mystifying animism at the heart of commodity fetishism.209 Whilst Tony Bennett argues that in Britain punishment and the space of the gaol folded in on itself and that exhibitions became the spaces for self-regulation, the spectacle of Indians making carpets exposed to the public’s glare complicates what he dubs the ‘exhibitionary complex’.210 This incessant relay between India and Britain indicates just some of the power struggles surrounding the use of



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colour. As with indigo production, there is a certain coercive dimension and ‘obscenity’ to labour involved in the disciplining and circulation of colour which comes to be condensed as commodity fetishism.211 Aside from his comments on prison labour and colour, Birdwood sought to track a genealogy for the production of dyes which included Pliny, ancient Egypt, Herodotus, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Code of Manu.212 He interpreted the use of colour terms in the Ramayana as being the same tones shown on Egyptian monuments, whilst praising the representation of blue robes on the Ajanta cave paintings.213 He also attempted to identify what I term ‘a cartographic palette’ by observing that the favourite colour north of Gujarat is red, that in Kothiwar red, brown and yellow are much favoured and that in village guilds women wear blue and red robes whilst seated at the back of their houses under the yellow flowers of acacia trees.214 Colour then becomes one space for ruminating on the idealised life, the ‘invicible immobility’ of the Indian village, then being championed variously by colonial officials.215 By the 1880s, dyes regularly featured at international and Indiabased regional exhibitions as each district was made by the government to show its true colours. Beneath the pink imperial spaces of the world map the local could cast its own tones. In his report for the Lahore Central Museum following the first major exhibition in Upper India, Punjab, 1884, Baden Powell undertook a chemical analysis and nomenclature of vernacular colours. From his perspective, the best specimens were produced by indigenous artists, including a beautiful and rare piece of lapis lazuli shown by the illuminator Imam Wairdi and Lala Ratu Chand’s vitreous blue, green and red enamel colours – whose constitution was rumoured to be known only by two persons in Lahore.216 For the imitation of lapis lazuli Baden Powell directed his readers towards Wood’s Personal Narrative – although the subsequent recipe he includes derives from what he dismissed as ‘the absurd account of lapis in the native standard book on materia medica the Makhzan-ulAdwiya’ – a Persian medical text by Meer Muhammad Husain dating back to the seventeenth century.217 Baden Powell’s reference to what he perceived to be the fundamental, indigenous manual signals a new colonial investment in tracking the genealogies of colour production in India, which I will go on to discuss later. He also paid unusual attention



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to a category of pigments which he termed ‘Artists’ Colours’.218 He complained that there was nothing analogous to European cake colours or oil paints, although he did discover ‘an inferior bad smelling oil colour’ which he believed to be unfit for painting; indigenous colours had to be mixed with water and gum in the shells of river mussels.219 He also denounced the inability of ‘native’ artists ‘to grind the colours with sufficient fineness to produce transparent washes of colour’ which gave their pictures a heavy body that was highly undesirable in relation to the aesthetic of watercolour painting.220 His argument goes on to revile vernacular browns while puzzling at the absence of oil painting which he deemed exceptionally strange given the Punjab’s abundance of natural oil resources. Oil painting must be introduced – and it has to be standardised. Baden Powell reported to the jury appointed to consider the value and potential of dyes that ‘a simple book on the processes of dyeing as they are and as they might be would be a great desideratum: the same may be said of oil paints’.221 He did, however, offer ambivalent praise of the practices of Indian painters: In common with the inhabitants of lower India [the artist in the Punjab] has an instinctive appreciation of colour, and, though without any knowledge of the principles which should regulate its use, is often more happy in his combinations than the educated workman of Europe. His colour is often exaggerated, but it is always warm, and rich and fearless. The native artist is also patient: for weeks and months he will work at his design, painfully elaborating the most minute details; no time is considered too long, no labour too intense to secure perfection in imitation or delicacy in execution. The greatest failing in native artists is their ignorance of perspective and drawing, and it is fortunate that this want is the most easily supplied.222

Pan-Indian colour is almost anthropomorphised in this account, to take on a fetish-like life of its own. Baden Powell like Kipling put tremendous faith in the art school system and unlike many of his contemporaries he admired the intensity of labour that went into the production of arts and crafts. In spite of his exhortation of technological and pedagogical improvements, what is missing from Baden Powell’s account is the growing sense of urgency associated with what colonial officials believed to be the dying art of dyeing and the need to train artists and craftsmen in relation to correct colour harmonies. Debates generated by imperial nostalgia for the fragile status of colour production and perception were



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played out in newspapers, official reports, colonial art schools, gazetteers, craft monographs, laboratories and museum displays which sought to discipline, politicise and to resuscitate the chronotopic, heterotopic nature of colour. From strangely fetish-like, almost disembodied and yet instinctive, colour became a major preoccupation for the reinvention of the colonial administration in relation to what Nicholas Dirks has termed the concerns of the newly ‘ethnographic state’.223 In 1883, the Government of India instructed its district officials that museums at local, national and regional level should all possess ‘a typical collection of the arts and manufactures of the province’.224 The museum now professed to act as a place for study and its object lessons, the government asserted would help to standardise, regionalise and hence geographically characterise colour.225 Although this attempt at museological standardisation was rejected by those colonial officials attending the national meeting in relation to curatorial practice held in Calcutta, 1883, in the following decade represented colour – that is, colour gleaned from text-based surveys – was being partially systematised with the aspiration that artisans would assume an active role in adapting traditional ideas to modern chromatics.226 The establishment of the Journal of Indian Arts and Industry in 1884 sought to normalise colonial views on Indian art, to increase trade, to shape public taste in Britain and South Asia as well as to promote art education based on the revival of indigenous models.227 Although it included few studies of art industries in detail or patterns for use (unlike drawing manuals), it was remarkable in terms of its regularity, cheap price and its technologically innovative employment of coloured plates. Rather than mere illustrations, the plates acted as supplements and samples for study and like The Grammar of Ornament they worked through the swatch effect of close-ups of patterns and design. In a similar vein, the government art schools issued Industrial Art Pattern Books which like the JIAI were deliberately inexpensive and aimed primarily at artisans. This pictorial turn, where image did the work of text and pedagogy, also became the organising mimesis for the use of colour in carpet weaving in colonial gaols. Thomas Holbein Hendley’s lavishly colour-illustrated volume Asian Carpets (1905), based on the collection of antique carpets in the collection of the Maharajah of Jaipur, would be used as a pattern book in the Lahore, Delhi, Agra and



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Ajmer prisons, where instruction happened at the level of the visible, reproducible swatch.228 Like district gazetteers and monographs on trade, the JIAI used colonial cartographic and political divisions to determine the boundaries of regional styles, thus imposing recent and artificial limitations on its definitions of timeless, caste-bound labour articulations which were frequently accompanied by representations of ‘the native craftsman’. In this way colour became intimately bound to the body. The commissioning of government gazetteers from the 1880s and the government-endorsed crafts monographs of the following two decades placed new emphasis not only on the processes of manufacture but also on the manners, customs, social and biological status of the artisan – especially in relation to the village, region and caste.229 All of these enterprises were descriptive rather than analytical or synthetic, which meant that they proved to be of limited use in terms of the regulation or replication of craft. Colour production was especially elusive; maybe this elusive status/stasis was either because of colonial neglect, or maybe colour was dying otherwise. Is it the case that colonialists’ crude accusations of subaltern dyers’ and weavers’ neglect of colour was in fact a projected displacement-as-disavowal of their own negligence, increased apathy, aversion or even despair in relation to Indian chromatics? Is this to cast colour as rubbish, and if so, what does this mean? In his account of the Commerical Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition held at the South Kensington Museum in 1886, George Watt complained that in spite of the presence of 300 Indian dyes proudly displayed, South Asia ‘does not possess at the present moment a single dyestuff of importance to European commerce’.230 Was this due to the projected hegemony of European anilines which being artificial looked pleasurable under artifical light; had India been depleted of yet another natural resource due to the colonial artistic engineering of the past few decades; was this paucity or poor quality of dye a possible mode of resisting colonial demands in the arenas of pigments, cloth and design? This new aversion to, or lack of interest in, subaltern colour also implicated colonial mismanagement of artistic production. Even jail carpets otherwise so prolific and commercially viable in Britain in the past two decades, had not been sent to the exhibition from the North West Provinces precisely because they were so saturated with



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aniline.231 Responding to this economically impoverished show (or not) of dyes and carpets, the Government of India ordered each colonial administrative district to conduct a survey, to write up and publish an extensive report on the state of dyeing. The government no doubt wanted to collate, to distill, to organise and to assemble this data in the hope of formatting an imperial standard for colour.232 This constituted the desire to ‘black box’ colour, to make colour into a coherent, dense and efficient condensation of data would transform colour into the material equivalent of the imperial map.233 What I mean by this is that colour once assembled out of regional and local components could be made reproducible and transferable. But what does it mean to map, to survey, to seek out colour? Is colour merely confined to a study of dyeing practices? What role do market conditions and manners, customs, dress, taste, food, death or other indicators of social customs/local contingencies play? And what happens when colonialists fail to ‘see’ colour? Some of these men were ‘phenomenologically’ familiar with the art of dyeing or at least they had studied textiles; others were not. Perhaps this is to expose the limits to their census-style quest which could become the space of resistance or the modus operandi for what Sumathi Ramaswamy has termed vernacular ‘barefoot cartography’.234 The resolution to undertake a survey on dyeing came out of the 1894 Lahore Art Conference. The perceived collapse of native dyeing led the government to establish a committee in 1895 which would not only look into dyeing practice across India but which also aimed to capitalise on the reorganisation of the Madras Art School as the space for experimenting with the reform of colour training and production. The committee wanted a separate dyeing school which would be equipped with dye-houses and a chemical laboratory and which would introduce the technologies of European dyeing.235 Although not the first in the series of economic surveys ordered by the colonial state, dyeing was the one to which numerous regional officials responded the most quickly – as indicated by the publication of the majority of their reports in 1896. In each designated region the district surveyor (or appointed official) attempted to identify the economic and ethnographic conditions for the decline, survival or proliferation of dyeing by mapping out the colours favoured in their locality which allowed, at least in theory, the Government of India to construct a



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colour-saturated map of the subcontinent – to study its contours and to try to fathom its (dis)harmonies. Very occasionally these officials provided detailed dye genealogies whilst attempting to discover if there were ancient or modern theories of colour in their district and how this might implicate sumptuary and symbolic practices. In Awadh, Saiyid Muhammad Hadi traced IndoIslamic colour combinations whilst concluding that there had never been a Hindu chromatic theory.236 He noted that sumptuary laws at the Lucknow court meant that rulers had restricted the entry into the royal palace on the basis of colour. One had to wear saffron yellow (a marker of loyalty to the nawab) whilst during Muharram all Shi‘a in the city would wear only black or green. Hadi characterised red and yellow as auspicious Hindu colours.237 In contrast he believed indigo to be extremely dangerous: ‘so great is Hindu abhorrence of indigo that the dried stalks of the indigo plant which are sold as fuel are never used by the Hindus of even the lowest class for cooking their food as the food cooked thereby becomes impure’.238 Quoting the Laws of Manu Hadi prescribed that brahmins entirely avoid blue or red apparel; if it is worn one must perform a fast and drink a mixture of cow dung, curd, cow urine and water from the Ganges. If land is cultivated with indigo it automatically becomes polluted for as long as 12 years; whoever bathes, touches or lies near indigo needs to be purified.239 Intriguingly and unusually Hadi attempts to map a symbolism of colour onto Islamic law and customs. Male Sunnis may wear any colour except safflower and saffron but according to the Dur-ul-Mukhtar it is abominable for males to wear dyed red and yellow cloth; Shi‘a favour white, yellow, green, pink, blue and grey but red is undesirable especially during prayer.240 Colour then can perform as a multiplex lens for gauging vernacular and hybrid manners and customs. In this way it could be a useful tool for organising what otherwise might be seen as the infinite complexities of Indian life. Colour could potentially make sense of the world on behalf of the ethnographic state. Like Hadi, the most thorough research conducted on this topic was carried out by N. N. Banerji – another ‘vernacular informant’. Both men had insider knowledge, linguistic skills, and they produced lively, colourful prose as opposed to the rather staid empirical accounts of dyeing processes written by Britons. Colour is not just an article of commerce but the key to a rich and varied world view



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or series of worldviews. Banerji, Assistant Director of Land Records and Agriculture in Bengal who became Bengal’s dye investigator highlighted the prominence of lac, tumeric and safflower in this region which underscores the importance of colour in spices, bazaars, dress, personal adornment and cooking. He listed, in order of preference, the colours that he had found to be favoured in Bengal: indigo, light blue/grey, red, yellow, orange, green, purple, chocolate, gold (sonali) and asmani – sky blue. In spite of this variety Banerji concluded that in most of Lower Bengal coloured cloth was seldom, if ever worn.241 Clearly he linked colour here to dyeing rather than to the subtle natural gradation of tone in woven cloth. Observing that most weavers in Bengal were Muslim, Banerji conjectured that along with prostitutes they seemed to show the greatest desire for coloured cloth. Colour then signifies as something on the geographical and social margins of Banerji’s economically directed agenda. Colour is liminal and potentially associated with transgression and the taboo. Cloth then could be harnessed to religion, caste and profession; to substantiate these claims, Banerji included information on dyers’ caste gleaned from previous district reports and the 1891 Census which he included alongside a series of tables detailing the prices and types of cloth available in Bengal and Bihar.242 Banerji, like other colour investigators was here taking a lead from the Reporter on the Products of India, John Forbes Watson’s extensive photographic project The Peoples of India in an attempt to fashion ethnographic insight into the lives, appearance and characters of the elusive figure of the dyer (figure 2). Watson also produced an ambitious ethnography of Indian dress – Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India – which was beautifully illustrated with hand-coloured photographs, several of which he had also used in The Peoples of India.243 Although dyeing does not feature in Textile Manufactures colour performs, I suggest, as a kind of surrogate for Forbes Watson’s description of physical and social characteristics. In these hand-coloured photographs colour shivers as the faciality and the vibrancy ignite otherwise dry and repetitive textual descriptions of cloth. According to Watson, who had initiated a sample museum of fabrics and the Industrial Survey of India thus demonstrating his professional investment in colour, dyers were mostly Hindu worshippers of Devi



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or Bhowani or they were Sunni sheikhs. While there was ‘little to remark’ in relation to their habits and customs he considered them to be generally peaceful and industrious, ‘they have in many localities a reputation for intemperance and it is certain that the use of ardent spirits is not forbidden to them and they have too an indifferent character for morality’.244 District officers, following Watson’s lead, classified dyers as being very poor, working only on a local, ad hoc basis and whose exceedingly low caste status further restricted their access to regional and long-distance markets. Using the recent Census, John Fawcett’s Bombay Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing counted 43,033 dyers in western India – twice as many as in Bengal. Fawcett believed that Hindu dyers tried to claim that they belonged to the kshatriya caste although in fact that they were sudras. Aside from what he believed to be this social deception, he then deduced that the majority of indigo workers were in fact Muslims, which for the ‘ethnographic state’ with its keen investment in Hinduism meant they were marginal.245 In the face of this charge of social deceit and liminality, Fawcett proceeded to study the ‘character’ of dyers as a ‘class’ – an analysis which was based largely on hearsay gleaned from unspecified sources. Collating this data he surmised that dyers are ‘generally reported to be honest, hard working, thrifty and in spite of their occupation clean and neat. They are generally sober and simple in their habits and though some are reported to drink and gamble they do not do so to any very great extent’.246 However, in his view, dyers have made little improvement in the art of dyeing, hence they are not prosperous nor can they compete with the presence of aniline dyes found both in every bazaar and in those European-style dye houses attached to the cotton mills and the large dyeing factories in Ahmedabad. Since the Famine of 1876–77, most people have forsaken coloured head scarves and turbans in favour of mourning dress – which is not dyed.247 As in Bengal there are clear limits to the use of colour. Far from the chromophilia that yoked Indian taste to colour, here clearly is a certain chromophobia at work. Vernacular social practices excluded the colonial marketability of colour. The results of the colonial surveys of Assam and Bengal on dyeing conjecture that there was no separate dyeing caste and that very few people wore colour at all. Dyeing remained confined to a limited number



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of Muslims and to the Manipuri tribe.248 Overall colonial officials voiced disappointment at what they perceived to be the vernacular lack of interest in dyestuffs. Why don’t Indians like colour? And how is this possible – given the ‘intuitive’ talent for colour harmony previously seen at the world’s fairs? Their findings problematise the stereotype of oriental chromophilia, the European trope that the East is the ultimate source of colour and that colour is given the highest value in India. J. Fraser’s account of dyeing in Burma suggests that colour is socially abject and associated with a backward community. It is shunned by mainstream society to the extent that he believed that appealed only to ‘the savage mind’. This savage, tribal mind was in itself limited to isolated tribal communities.249 In this way colour was hermetically sealed off from the proliferation of social practices. Colour then is alienating, anti-social and not part of everyday life. Unlike Banerji who by referring to McCann’s Dyes and Tans of Bengal (1883) could eschew the need to detail the processes of dyeing, Fawcett (relying on a number of published sources and eyewitness observation) included recipes and thick descriptions of every stage involved in dyeing – perhaps with the aspiration that his monograph could also do the work of a practical manual for teaching so as to revive what he perceived to be a stricken practice. Fawcett believed that dyeing could neither be rationalised nor reduced to an exact science. Dyestuffs he argued were constantly shifting and inherently unstable; they varied in purity and strength; their conditions of potentiality were determined by local factors such as the mineral content of the pigments and the quality of the water in which they were washed. Dyeing he argued was risky, unpredictable and frequently subject to failure.250 But he also urged that colour’s agency be displaced from the figure of the artisan to the colonial official – as evinced in the numerous manuals which began to investigate practices of dyeing.251 The lens through which colonial officials viewed Indian fabrics was not only reliant on a largely imagined standard – their exposure to a few antique pieces, the majority of which they believed were still in the homes of the vernacular elite, or the samples from museums and prisons – but also depended on imported fabrics and the disseminated aesthetic agenda of South Kensington’s contribution to the Arts and Crafts movement. British imitations (whether factory or



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hand made) and the uneasy hybrid concoctions whose florid, fantasmic and anachronistic names (Mysore Marigold, Tanjore Lotus, etc.) sought to further marginalise the integrity of indigenous dyers. Sourced skeins of wools or swatches of cloth sent to Britain turned the art of dyeing against the dyers themselves. Thus the rhetoric of degradation, compounded with that of scarcity, intended to insert dyers into an evolutionary chain where the survival of the fittest was clearly located in the factories and companies of Leek, Macclesfield and Manchester. Although diffused and usually decidedly unscientific in its application, this loose use of evolutionism stressed the importance of changing social and environmental conditions and the ways in which extant groups were able to adapt. Lack of adaptability meant extinction, which coupled with the pervasive rhetoric of imperialist nostalgia honed in on the inevitable demise of Indian dyers. This is of course a displacement of colonialists’ frustration and anxiety at their lack of access to the technologies of dyeing. Fear and the question of adaptability form the ground of these accounts. For instance at Ellore: And, as I understand that several of the best of the old weaver-dyers are dead, it is to be much feared that many secrets of the Art have passed away with them. The dyeing profession has always been more or less conservative and hereditary, and has rarely been adoptive, unless the dyer, having no son, has occasionally adopted a nephew or the son of some relative or intimate friend. Almost everywhere in the East dyeing has been a trade brotherhood, in which the effort of each has been to show better results than his neighbour, and in which the bond and the creed have been reverence for the colour secrets…He never was a chemist, as we moderns understand the chemistry of colour…but he got fast colour results, which were at once the joy and the envy of his employers and fellow workers. To-day this art has gone, never I fear to return.252

So dyeing becomes archaic and tainted with the no hope of the eternal return. And here certain colonial officials blamed themselves. According to J. J. Hurrel, writing on dyeing in the Madras area in the 1880s, the British had failed to detect what he perceived to be the decline of dyeing – which he believed had begun 20 years previously.253 But then perhaps colonialists’ anxiety fails to see beyond the paranoia of the stereotype of their own making. Even in the publication I have just cited, the calculated collusion of a professional British dye firm and a jail superintendent cannot reveal the secrets of the beautiful and much prized Indian red



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which resembles silk and which was then being produced by inmates of Vellore prison.254 Even in the prison ‘docile subjects’ can keep their technologies in such a way as to eschew the disciplinary penetrating strategies of the British-colonial system of punishment. And outside of the prison colonial officials complained that it was ‘strange how little is known of the carpet industry outside the district where it is carried on’ – a matter not helped by colonial reliance on such ill-informed texts as W. P. Ellwanger’s much used manual The Oriental Rug which hardly mentions India.255 For the colonial disciplinary project this neglect constituted the worst of evils. Outside the government-aided institutions, dyeing and fabrics were perceived to be ‘debased and degraded because the weaver is left uncontrolled; he uses the commonest and most satisfactory of dyes’.256 In spite of this ‘it is difficult to blame him’.257 In certain cases the Jail Department and the Presidency Art School came together in the hope of appropriating, disseminating and ‘improving’ colour. Using the Vienna Carpet Book as its manual, the Madras Art School and Jail Department discussed the matter of looms, vegetable dyes and sources of indigo – all of which were at present unregulated in the domain of the local bazaars.258 From the perspective of J. J. Hurrel writing on the Madras Art School, there was little demand for the lore of the dyer as most of the students wanted drawing classes.259 He believed that: The one remedy for the existing state of things in the dye-shed appears to me to be the establishment at Ellore, or at the Madras School of Arts, of a fullyequipped dyeing class, under a master dyer imported from North India, where trained young weavers, who are able to read and write fairly well, can be admitted as Government scholarship holders and be put through a thorough course of dyeing. They should be practised in the old vegetable colourings, and also, possibly, put through a course of proper wool-dyeing in the better classes of chrome and alizarine colours. It is unfortunate that the need for teaching this exists at all, but this class of colour has come to stay, and it seems advisable therefore that efforts should be made to teach thoroughly and scientifically its proper application.260

Hurrel’s was but one response to the resolution of the Lahore Art Conference of 1894 which aimed to establish expositions which would showcase ‘distinct local industries, small museums or more correctly showrooms’. These would be placed under the supervision of the local authorities to be ‘inspected periodically by the superintendent of the provincial museum’.261 But Hurrel’s editor, the curator of the Central



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Museum of the Madras Presidency, Edgar Thurston, believed that such stalls would be far more effective if located at railway stations.262 Railway stations, as Douglas Haynes and Laura Bear argue, performed as critical as well as liminal spaces for the production of heterogenous publics.263 The unspoken accompaniment to the colonial preoccupation with staging the body and tools of the Indian labourer is the vernacular colour patch or small piece of mineral dye as the sourcebook of knowledge. As ‘black boxes’ they had to be chemically analysed and literally pulled apart in the reverse operations of alchemy’s desire to construct precious substances. One of the best-known colonial authorities on silk and dyes, Thomas Wardle, a staunch supporter of indigenous dyes and a longterm ally of William Morris, made an extensive tour of India in 1882 where he collected 3,500 dye samples from 181 dyestuffs which were subsequently compiled at the DSA, South Kensington and printed as his famous Blue Book.264 Although like Morris, he advocated the therapeutic value of colour harmonies which could be achieved by a return to Indian dyes, behind such experiments and public rhetoric both men favoured aniline dyes; their textile designs and colour combinations bear little resemblance to Indian fabrics.265 Hence Morris’s famed lecture on dyeing and his concern with a return to a workshop pedagogy have to be viewed more as a pleasing sideline to his highly organised business operation, his relationship with South Kensington, Wardle and Liberty’s.266 Revival and limited imitation and appropriation of Indian colours are colonial smokescreens. From Liberty’s maltreatment of Indian men and women brought over to market their wares, to Wardle’s South Asian tours, a new colonial ethic intent on rendering authenticity the standard by which to judge South Asian colour and labour became the norm. Authenticity (the appearance of something that, however distant, appears to be up close, to be graspable) replaced the sense of aura (however near, so very distant) that had initially characterised British expert and public responses to oriental fabrics. Against this colonial archival drive for authenticity, there are glimpses of South Asian, subaltern resistance to the demands of the imperial economy. After all the decline in the dyeing industry, colonial officials blamed on the spectral figure of the obdurate artisan, who at the margins or more beyond the inculcatory scope of the art school, museum or prison ultimately determined the appearance of



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‘traditional/colonial’ arts and crafts. During his tour of India, Wardle complained that native dyers were unwilling to adapt to changing market conditions citing the instance of when he tried to have a piece of cloth stained red whereby the artisan made a very respectful salaam but said very firmly, ‘Tell the Sahib that I and my forefathers have dyed blue for thousands of years and that I will dye it only blue. No monetary inducement or the promised information on the processes of dyeing other colours is of any avail’ and so I brought two yards of white calico to England undyed.267

Vernacular colour production is thus infused with magic, which colonial officials feared. Wardle, whilst objecting to the order to remove his shoes at an indigo vat in Lahore, nonetheless did so for fear of the effects of nazar – the evil eye associated with dyeing. This pathology concerning colour appears most ardently in colonial accounts of imported aniline dyes. According to Baden Powell, ‘the worst form of disease is the passion for bright, raw and fleeting colours of the imported aniline dyes’.268 Aniline dyes and imported pattern books were nearly everywhere – with the exception of Kashmir where the Maharajah’s recourse to ‘sly civility’ outlawed their importation.269 In artistic production, synthetic dyes played a critical role in the production of chromolithographs whose colours and iconography the government tried anxiously, even absurdly to censure.270 Beyond the scope of my discussion here, the saturated colours of vernacular chromolithography alongside their mass circulation and political resonance offered an alternative scopophilic regime and religiously charged economy to colonialism’s search for the organic and the archaic. Their rich colours in association with xeno-realism and political allegory made these highly charged images capable of doing the work of agitation.271 And of course anilines, frequently infused with arsenic and other noxious substances, did literally spread disease.272 But anilines are best characterised through the poison/cure of the pharmakon. After all, Perkin discovered mauve accidently when mucking about with coal tar in search of quinine. As arsenic green, dyes could treat syphilis; Congo Red came to be employed as a cure for diphtheria and rheumatism and in 1917 one newspaper claimed that ‘whatever serves the modern dye worker directly serves modern health’.273 Anilines opened the new field of cell biology. The scientist Paul Ehrlich used synthetic



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dyes to stain cells as this made them easier to study. Consequently he noticed that dyes adhered to some cells and not others and these cells he identified as gene carriers – chromosomes. He hypothesised that dyes interacted with cells in a similar manner to their contact with the fibres of fabrics while noting that some dyes killed the micro-organisms that absorbed them.274 Like ‘the microscope colour made the invisible world visible … Just as aniline dyes came to stain the basic unit of the human body, the cell and its constituent parts…so Marx broke capitalism down to its basic cell the commodity’.275 The colour from tar is the commodity’s commodity – that is, it is infused with mana which nonetheless had to grapple with the paradox of standardised newness.276 There were complex local and individual reasons for the rejection or acceptance of modern looms and artificial dyes. Aniline dyes being cheaper helped artisans cover costs although not necessarily to increase production. The novel technologies of easy-to-handle European (increasingly German) dyes, cheap and brilliant in hue, jarred against the ‘want of ingenuity’ on the part of vernacular artisans who colonial officials believed had made no attempt to change ‘their crude processes’.277 Whilst some colonial officials praised the importation of synthetic dyes into India which they believed were far easier to work with than natural dyes, others concluded that this aggressive importatation of new materials had forced khatri caste dyers into other professions. In the view of Pandit Natesa Savstu, at the carpet centre of Ayyanpet artisans were now living ‘in utter poverty’ from a loss of access to vernacular materials, from their ‘awkward imitation of European patterns and an admixture of Hindu with European magenta and other colours’ which constituted ‘a most hideous appearance’.278 That aniline can be combined with vernacular dyes is the ultimate, hybrid outrage. Such radical heterogeneity produces brisure – a breaking and joining conducive of an impossible simultaneity. This double logic, which exhausts the differences between aniline and mineral/vegetable dyes, brings together not only varied, competing or nuanced tones and hues but also two time frames (tradition, modernity) to produce new harmonies as parataxis. The Cooperative Societies Act of 1904 failed to promote productive communitarian industries whose project for reform included scientific analysis of dyestuffs in the hope of securing the data necessary for future efficiency, standardisation and large-scale production through



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the establishment of weaving institutes and dye laboratories, as the government monopolised the technical aspects of dyeing.279 Yet for all the ‘talk about erasing the gap between craft and industry by borrowing the logic of the latter, public modernization efforts often themselves operated on the basis of the idea of craft’s difference’.280 In spite of the emphasis in the Monographs on the impact of European aniline products as a contributing factor to the dying of dyeing, this is frequently counterbalanced by bias towards negligent, decadent and ignorant dyers. Seen as marginal to village life, dyers hover at the threshold of the cult of the craftsman.The sign of economic backwardness and capitalist exploitation, the figure of the dyer was variously held up and precariously upheld as a repository of hereditary skills, as the key to an indigenous social and political economy and the cause of India’s backwardness. Against the idealised figure of the craftsman peopling the pages of the JIAI or modelled in clay in museums and exhibitions, the dyer did not promise to ‘facilitate a connection between urban society and the peasantry’.281 Even in Gandhi’s speeches the dyer/tanner is a trouble spot. Tanning and dyeing are so low as to be demeaning: ‘No one can say when tanning became a degraded calling. It could not have been so in ancient times. But we know today that one of the most useful and indispensable industries has consigned probably a million people to untouchability’ which he believed to be based on the ‘divorce of intellect from labour’.282 Weary, stained, poisoned by dye, the dyer is neither artist nor artisan. To toil with colour is to battle with colonialism on an isolated, uncanny front. Somewhat ironically, Gandhi called upon the South Kensington use of chemistry as the model for improving dyeing at his Sabarmati ashram, Gujarat.283 If there is a colonial episteme for colour it must be used against itself. The activities of the dyer, whether using ancient secret recipes or turning to aniline, become a blind spot and the space for colonial frustration.284 Repeatedly in colonial accounts of dyeing and artisanal practice more broadly defined, it is the figure of the ahistorical artisan who is arresting the development of modernity. A colonial aporia, the refusal of dyers to act as mimic men infuriated these officials; the dyer thwarted attempts to read their social status and skills as archives of indigenous practice. The same observations emerge time and again. Dyeing is archaic, rarely profitable and mostly dysfunctional:



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Any improvement in colour or production of a new one has been rather a happy accident than the outcome of the application of rules of chemistry and no better results can be expected till the properties of the various dyestuffs are investigated and the natives are taught how to turn them to practical use … Until European capital is directed to this branch of industry there is no prospect of improvement.285

Colour through the agency of the vernacular dyer refuses to speak to colonialism’s demands. Given the impenetrability of the technologies of colour, the figure of the artisan at work became a recurrent trope in the illustrations of the JIAI, whilst colonial art school administrators tried to employ master craftsmen as teachers in the hope of creating adequate sites for the transfer of knowledge. In museums, artisans were to be the producers and consumers of the artefacts on display. Against these endeavours, imperial officials frequently vented their frustration at the inability of both industrial and art schools to attract craftsmen.286 They also complained that artisans had become mere copyists of European art, the resultant hybrid objects being to the detriment of Indian and Western aesthetic principles. According to Thomas Holbein Hendley, Principal of the Jaipur Art School: The Indian art worker…has proved far too ready to comply with the demand… patterns are repeated ad nauseam…the principal object of many workmen has been…to search out in a pattern-book something which might meet the immediate want…In this way no thought [is] required…By this method balance is soon lost, styles of ornament become mixed, and the whole effect is weakened.287

For colonial officials, the undiscerning native craftsman became the locus of artistic corruption which ‘fits the larger colonial discourse of the imitative Indian, lacking mental faculties’ of judgement and who could not be ‘the keeper of traditional knowledge and the saviour of Indian art without colonial intervention’.288 Supposedly idle, stubborn and ignorant, artisans failed to kowtow to Raj demands. Pushing the discourse of civility/civilising mission to its colonial threshold, Baden Powell remarked ‘the only way to get native workmen to do anything is to shut them up in a jail!’289 Thomas Holbein Hendley more specifically condemned ‘the dyer as a nuisance to everyone near him. Some of his proceedings are of the most filthy description’.290 Abject and possibly contagious in his practice, the dyer hovers on and beyond the margin of acceptable definitions of what might be society.



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What emerges here is colonial frustration with the course taken by colour in relation to labour. Mimicry of or refusal to work to a colonial timetable became tactics for the subversion of Western demands for authentic copies of archaic objects.The effect of mimicry and partial labour on colonial authority is profound and disturbing. For in normalising colour in the colony, the dream of post-Enlightenment aesthetics alienates in its own standard of taste indicative of a further displacement of the already hybridised status of colour produced in colonial art schools. Here in the doubly inscribed space of colonial representation where the presence of authority is also a question of repetition and displacement, the immediate visibility of such a regime of recognition is resisted. Resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention but an ‘effect of ambivalence produced within the rules of recognition’.291 Aside from this angst over new technologies (aniline, machine mills) and odd harmonies that defy the category of tradition, colonial officials deliberated the pathology of colour in relation to artistic production. Colonial anxiety about the limits of its scopic regime had to be relocated in the eugenic shortcomings of their Indian subjects. Maybe they are poor copyists because they can’t recognise the colour harmonies of ‘the colonial master’. And there’s a displacement here. The hysteria surrounding the proliferation of colour blindness ‘cases’ in Europe during the 1880s and the exploration of the evolutionary development of a Colour Sense brought Indian craftsmen and dyers under fire.292 Once more the uneasy linkage of intuition and instinct behind Indian colour is the object of attention. Ruskin’s hysteria is repeated as sociological and philological investigations into the civilisational status of Indian colour. Was then the Colour Sense universally and uniformly developed? Could it be improved in the service of colonial economy? And did the existence/extinction of a vernacular test the thresholds of colonial mimesis? Darwin’s follower Grant Allen dispatched a questionnaire concerned with the perception of colour across and beyond empire whose published results focused on the presence and the absence of blue and tribal nomenclature.293 Allen believed that the Nagas, Gons, Dublas and Bhils amongst other ‘lowest races’ in India had perfect perception but faulty colour terms. Although they could recognise blue, green and violet they had no separate or precise lexicon with which to



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describe the phenomenon.294 Also focusing on colour nomenclature, James Furrell praised the colour perception and sophistication of what he termed the ‘Indian Colour Sense’.295 In addition to his analysis of colour words, many of which he compared favourably with Homer, Furrell concluded his article in the prestigious journal The Nineteenth Century by presenting evidence of a highly developed yet subaltern Colour Sense: ‘it can hardly be necessary to adduce detailed proofs of the existence of this highly developed Colour Sense among the natives of India. Indian coloured textile fabrics and works of art are now so common among us and furnish such conclusive testimony on this head.’296 Whilst on the one hand Furrell’s argument contributed to the debate on colour and evolution waged between Gladstone and Allen (which I discuss in Chapter 3), on the other hand it knee-jerked an immediate colonial response. Incensed by Furrell’s piece, colonial official Allan Cunningham juxtaposed what he perceived to be English and Hindustani colour terms: Paucity of colour-terms is probably fair evidence of a poor colour-sense … the colour-sense evidenced in the Homeric poems is certainly poor, and that of the natives of India is also poor compared with that of modern western nations; as to the latter, it may be said that a great development of colour-sense is now going on, and much more rapidly than in the past, judging from the frequent additions to the stock of dyes and pigments of late years.297

For Cunningham, aniline refined the English Colour Sense by introducing new colours and names. Brandishing his 33-year Raj tenure, he vehemently disagreed with Furrell’s positive deduction. Subaltern colour is troubling: The textile fabrics have certainly a good blending of colours; the cloth dyes and colours laid on pottery and other art-productions are also often beautiful. But the cloth-workers, dyers, potters, and other artisans in colours, and the educated classes, are the few among whom the colour-sense is well developed, and they are few among the 250,000,000 of India. The colour-terminology of Hindústání is poor, especially out of the classes above-named. Moreover, in the writer’s experience the eyesight of the uneducated masses in India is defective in every way. They have great difficulty in threading a needle, in reading small type or small M.S., also in reading at all except in a strong light, in discriminating colours, and (strangest of all) and in making anything out of a picture, engraving, or photograph. This last defect is at first sight most surprising to an Englishman: it would seem as if a certain ‘picture-education’ were necessary to develop a



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‘picture-sense’. A villager in India, or a quite uneducated servant, will sometimes examine a picture sideways, or even upside down, and will hazard the most incongruous ideas as to the subject, even when it is that of an object quite familiar to him.298

Not to make ‘anything out’, Cunningham fires off in all directions – Colour Sense, picture sense, picture education, hazard: colonial mimesis spinning out of control!299 Perhaps there are resonances of Ruskin’s condemnation of the lack of mimetic and ethical engagement with Nature in Indian art but also an acknowledgement that pattern books which were intended to be used for improving design are imperfectly comprehended. This want of ‘picture education’ exposes the limits of colonial art pedagogy in order to be indicative of mimetic play; here mimetic excess is the intransigence of colour and its failure to translate into the tool – being of colonial knowledge. Conclusion: The Nazar of Colour Many thousands of people came to the V&A Bombay one day in consequence of a rumour circulating in the town that a child had been born with a cobra round its neck, that it held its hood over the child and that the monstrosity had been taken to the museum. This is ascribed to an indigo dyer. They spread these false stories under the impression that the dye is improved thereby.300

Thomas Wardle’s recourse to assonance here to tackle rumour captures many of the issues discussed in this chapter. Museum as jadhu ghur, wonder house, is a recurrent, anxious trope for the colonial imagination.301 The V&A Bombay has a turbulent history: its collections were tossed from the windows by fleeing staff to save them being ravished by soldiers in the Uprising in 1857. Subsequently, after reopening, it was crippled by recession and in Wardle’s account, it became the space for potential riot all because of a magical cobra loved by colour.302 This ‘stuffing college’ is (be)sieged, seized by colour’s nazar. Colour Strikes! Its magic sings to singe the fibres of indigo-dyed cloth exported the world over. Ever fearful of absorbing noxious toxins through skin or dress, colonialists certainly did cherish or recoil against Indian dyes, dyers and even cloth.303 Sweating in their flannel, colonialists feared that cloth carried and promoted long-term disease including malaria, cholera, smallpox and



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leprosy.304 They believed that smoke from a funerary pyre could infect anyone in the vacinity – hence the need to circulate images of disease goddesses or bottles ‘containing’ the immanent disease as preventative measures. According to William Crooke, the sick left their rags at crossroads in the hope that a stranger might be so curious about such remnants as to pick up and transport the disease to another locality. In his account, Indian children were inoculated by wrapping them in the shrouds of smallpox victims whilst the blankets of the sick were used as secret weapons against one’s foes. The ultimate is to get hold of your enemy’s cloth onto which you should draw secret images (preferably in lamp black) which as volt sorcery, contagious or sympathetic magic will cause them much harm.305 To get hold of is to be intimate with (and to wish death through dye) and to glimpse the fear of those colonialists anxious about the globalising economy and its investment in colour. The figure of the subaltern dyer, marginal, subaltern and outside the bounds of the museum and the art school, uses colour to disturb classrooms, exhibitions, museums, bazaars, gaols, to satisfy or to incite fear. Silence: figurative practice, ‘efficient’ rumour. If there is colour control it pertains to this world of the dyer. The dyer – lazy, archaic, urgent, driven by sympathetic or contagious magic – is the embodiment, like colour, of nazar. Resonant in anthropological discourse since 1870, sympathetic or contact magic and animism are taken (in, as rumour) too literally by colonialists to produce a certain ambivalence of fear. They have to admit that colour has never been modern. At the Third International Art Congress, 1908, the serpent of colour once again holds its hood over the proceedings. The proceedings are dominated by the exigency of disciplining colour. Art schools across the globe must teach from objects selected for their colour alone – in a manner analogous to the taxonomy employed in the Mineralogical Section at South Kensington. Museums and art schools should have analytical colour sections, whilst the project of establishing colour museums is a top priority.306 Although Munsell introduced his Colour Standard around this time (which is extremely esoteric in its scientific mapping of colour) colour refused to be standardised. Infused with magic, the partial presence of the dyer/artist/artisan, colour becomes totemic, subaltern and infused with nazar.



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Whilst Cunningham’s condemnation of the lack of an awareness of colour in relation to Indian pictorial sense may seem to be yet another instance of bigoted racism in the Victorian era, the question of visual acuity as a cultural phenomenon which could be best measured through art, became a valid mode of scientific and anthropological inquiry.307 In 1933, British psychologist R. H. Thouless attempted to explain what he saw as the absence of perspective in Indian painting as a result of a ‘measurable difference in the perception of these races’. He argued that oriental artists produce strikingly flat, perspective free drawings because ‘they see objects in a manner much further from the principles of perspective than do the majority of Europeans and…they tend not to see shadows’.308 He based his evidence on an experiment whereby he had given 20 Indian students higher scores in ‘phenomenal regression to the real object’ than 49 British students. With regards to one laboratory task, out of a series ranging in axis from 0.25:1 to 0.95:1 of one ellipse that best matched the apparent shape of an inclined circle, the Indians showed a very high degree of shape consistency, which to Thouless suggested that they ‘regress to the real object’ to an unusually great extent. Rather than being an instance of admirable visual acuity, Thouless argued that this meant the people of South Asia had difficulty in seeing things except as they know them to be, and hence they can only draw them in this fashion. He sought to explain art in terms of prior perceptual habits; the students tested, he believed, displayed high phenomenal regression because they had learned how to see from looking at paintings. This pervasive, ‘faulty’ art made for a faulty faculty of perception and vice versa. Far from unique, Thouless’s study demonstrates both how the category of culture overlaid with older questions of race and how oriental art posed a threat through its alterity.309 The question of visual acuity had by this time also come to be closely associated with a perceived degeneration of eyesight in the tropics. Colonial doctors and ophthalmologists began questioning the effects of diseases such as cholera and malaria, the heat and the glare of bright light on the vision of colonial officials and the Indian population at large. In a particularly savage piece, Henry Kirkpatrick concluded that Indians from the Madras Presidency had a surplus of pigment in their eyes, that a very high percentage suffered from syphilis which was affecting their vision, as seen in the prevalence of patients with



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septic gums in the Madras Hospital. He also blamed inbreeding for the woeful state of South Asian sight.310 Kirkpatrick wrote in detail about the damage to Hindu vision due to the widespread adoption of the self-hypnotic yogic practice of gazing at the sun for long periods of time during midday prayer: It is sometimes considered to be ‘lucky’ and to confer supernatural powers… [Yogis] are in the habit of fixing a sustained gaze on some bright object, or of using their eyes in some manner which entails a fatigue of the ocular muscles. Thus a common yogi habit is to gaze at the tip of the nose or at the eyebrows, the power of sustained over-convergence…is, in some cases, astonishing…On the whole it is extraordinary that sun-blindness is not more common than it is.311

Not only tied to the figure of the indigo dyer but also now to visual acuity and climate, Indian vision possessed a certain menacing magic which could not be disciplined by the colonial state. Aside from his astonishment at this indigenous ability to withstand the glare of the sun, Kirkpatrick ends his essay by admitting that it is the colonialist whose vision degenerates most drastically in India. This then is one of the ‘penalties that the European has to pay for residence in the tropics’.312 In order to treat this tropical predicament, scientists began to devise chromotherapy geared towards the physical conditions of living in India. Taking a sun bath could be beneficial whilst malaria and fever must be treated with exposure first to blue-coloured glasses and light and then to yellow and purple.313 Although fair people should be exposured to yellow, ‘dark people (with dark eyes and skin, black or dark brown hair of the Latin or eastern type) often suffer from poor circulation and require stimulation of their vital functions with red. They are excitable and passionate and might require soothing treatment with blue over their heads’.314 Perhaps most famously, the émigré scientist Dinshah P. Ghadiali pioneered the spectrochrome and spectrochromotherapy. Ghadiali first experimented with the use of coloured light when treating a girl in western India for colitis by exposing her to the glare from a kerosene lamp which was filtered through indigo-coloured glass and by feeding her milk which had been stained with the same colour. Ghadiali argued that for each organism or part of the body there were two conflicting colours – one which stimulated and one which inhibited. Discovering these colours he believed to be the key to treating all ailments, diseases and neurological disorders.315



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One time, sometime menace, perhaps colour could also cure; it is after all famously resonant with the spirit of the pharmakon. And as I have just indicated, in other parts of empire (South India, Britain, the northern coast of Australia and New Guinea), colour was being tied to race and the existence of an aesthetic sense as a critical tool for testing alterity. This testing for alterity was not all about pathological or tropical degeneracy: colour had now also to be redeemed. According to one of the most respected colonial administrators of the early twentieth century, Richard C. Temple, Indian colour deserved to be studied in its own right.316 He exhorted Indian scholars to take an interest in the symbolism of colour in its divine qualities and to adopt a method borrowed from Donald MacKenzie’s research into the role of colour in ancient religion, art and literature.317 Temple then quoted Muir’s Sanskrit Texts 318 to assert that ‘caste (varna) literally means colour’ before stating that brahmins favoured white, red, yellow and blue.319 This choice of ‘colours of the mythical age’ he saw as remarkably similar to the chromatic choices of other civilisations: the four primitive earth colours black, white, red and yellow have been used by many peoples to divide space and time, ‘to distinguish the mountains, rivers and seas in the mythical world, to distinguish the races of mankind and, as in India, the various castes’.320 In order to justify this point Temple then included a cryptic table: Mexican Celtic Indian I Indian II Greek

Table 1

1 white 1 white 1 white 1 white 1 white

2 yellow 2 yellow 2 yellow 2 yellow 2 yellow

3 red 3 red 3 red 3 red 3 red

4 black 4 black 4 black 4 black 4 black

Colours of mythical ages. 321

With a different focus to Birdwood’s and Wardle’s indictment of colour as the evil eye, Temple read the Mahabharata to seek out the emotive qualities of certain hues. He associated red and yellow with happiness, white with extreme happiness and black with the inauspicious while the current age of destruction – Kali Yuga – was necessarily black.322 He concluded that ‘we still name black, white, red and yellow races,



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[and] black, white, red and yellow castes in India’ – and that these amongst other colours must be studied ‘solely from the Indian point of view’.323 Temple aimed at making a strong case for what he perceived to be a subject which had been dismally neglected by previous generations of colonial officials.324 His predecessors had failed to address the centrality of colour to ‘Indian’ (Hindu) society. Aside from his reliance on recent ethnography in India, Temple maintained that he had been much inspired by the scientific investigations of the Cambridge anthropologist W. H. R. Rivers. As I will go on to suggest in the next chapter Rivers played an instrumental role in the promotion of a new fascination with colour in relation to race.325 Did colour then continue to be linked with the intellectual faculty, or as a pictorial or aesthetic sense did it become the marker of civilisational degeneracy or civilisational constancy? Through the eye of science could colour, when faced with race, be redeemed, or was it too deeply entrenched in the pathological bent of colonial discourse to be seen as anything other than primitive, degenerate, gaudy or under-developed? Maybe there were alter and mimetic tactics for thinking through colour as local, universal, relativist, totemic and magical in ways that are perhaps still yet to be named.



3

Part 1: Still Dreaming of the Blue Flower? Race, Anthropology and the Colour Sense

To learn to see colours is to acquire a certain style of seeing, a new use of one’s body; it is to enrich and recast the body image. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘The Phenomenology of Perception’

Prelude: Aerial Tattooing in 1898 In what looks like fading evening light which encroaches upon a shadowless, cloudy afternoon, two men with a sign, or at least a trace on their mind, stand six metres apart on windswept ground in the Torres Strait (figure 3). One man grasps a letter E turned downwards like a fork, while the other in European hat and crumpled clothes, points to the position of various receding Es which, to our eyes a metre or so to the right of the second man, are not discernable. The first man, Peter, tries to grasp what the second man, William, is doing. In this test E is less a letter than an abstract space – the device for figure marking. William has no way of seeing the virtual inscription devices made by his own and Peter’s turning of E. E is perhaps for both a kind of blind spot – but maybe a blind spot of difference in kind given the ‘data ratio’ indiscriminacy and eery co-substantiability of the technology of photography.1 The men’s and the Es presences, ‘as part of the instrument’ are of vital and intellectual importance. They have to accommodate the presumed identity of the photographer (Charles) in this process of mark-making. Speaking, turning, gesturing in the air, they, the signs and the camera create the play of ‘aerial tattooing’. Positioned between Peter and William is the unseen photographer/scientist who must perceive the receding letters until he like Peter he can no longer see them. Perhaps already he is trying to communicate orally/gesturally with the hatted William about which E he the scientist has chosen. Or maybe they just keep on photographing into the seeming twilight. 135



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How would this performance, given the still relatively slow processes of 1890s photographic exposure, fulfil the dramatic, prophetic or extraneous demands of the ‘[ab]use of the experiment’?2 This experiment, along with the other tests for the kinetic energy of the senses in the Torres Strait, leads us to puzzle over the disjuncture between the transference of knowledge between the field and the laboratory. Perhaps now we can muse over the (in)stability of inscription devices and the processes of their collection and eventual transference to the men’s chosen centre of calculation – Cambridge University.3 Given the diversity of thought from Helmholtz to Bergson on the nonveridical status of vision and perception which posited the individual as a centre of indetermination, can vision still be seen in 1898 as a distinct and isolatable phenomenon? Have the bodies of the three men (the photographer included) become ‘sensitised plates’4 so as to appeal to numerous contemporary conceptualisations of reality as a dynamic aggregate of sensations whose fascination lies in the ceaseless transformation of perceptual information into purposeful action in the world?

A. C. Haddon, Use of the letter E as a test for visual acuity, from Reports of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits, 1906.



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But what about the direction of E? As you will see in the pages that follow, E fascinates me almost but not quite as much as the (be)coming of blue. Here on the island of Mabuiag the turning of E is given a distinct vernacular name depending on its position. To be E is to be paipakit (windward); to be leeward is to be popakit – that is, E reversed was said to be paipakit when the open side was towards the direction of the prevailing south-east trade wind.5 The white man’s chart of diminishing Es is then a hurricane, a whirlwind, or a compass of the cardinal points, a map or a condensed world view for movement in, across the island and the ocean to mythical and totemic places which push us viewers towards the mysterious vernacular. According to Arthur C. Haddon, leader of this colonial expedition to Mabuiag (also the unseen choreographer of this image, the fourth man), ‘in no case should the investigator theorise; it is the native’s explanation that is required’.6 Even a simple experiment becomes analogous to what Bruno Latour terms as a ‘black box’ in that it is constituted by complex activities and inscription devices which need to be cross-referenced.7 The four men may share the same space but they appear to communicate only with the dark marks on the white boards – the many and the singular E. After the test, the photographer and the scientist have to play with immersion in the scene by other visual ways, not merely with their own bodies, notepad and camera but through the processes of developing the photographic plate or film: the Es have to be seen to emerge through the difficult and delicate combination of chemical solutions. The greys are grainy and dark, even fuzzy in places, a bit like the experiment itself. Published to accompany a discussion of visual acuity in the Torres Strait, the image perhaps appears to have nothing to do with either the colour tests that would preoccupy one of its protagonists – the scientistphotographer W. H. R. Rivers – or with the early colour photography used on the expedition by its leader Arthur C. Haddon. I propose E is the analogue, perhaps the supplement, to the scientific centrality of colour. Colour so pervades the Torres Strait expedition that it lives on, even sears through this monochromatic representation.8 Perhaps there are colours in E that we cannot see. The multivalent preoccupation with the technology, perception and evolutionary structure of colour in relation to sensation and affect and



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the ways in which they are hybridised and undermined by vernacular knowledge and indigenous ‘participants’ including Peter (figure 3) are the subject of this chapter. As with the recreation of totemic rituals for the anthropologists here the experiment is itself repeated for the specific purpose of photography. Here colour becomes unseen: it dissolves as you watch yourself seeing where it might be – the sea, the sand, the sweat, the wind – the windward. Maybe what comes into play is the inseparability of colour and illumination where the experience of the singular assumes a critical role. The singular is without model or resemblance: it is comparable only to itself. And as Brian Massumi puts it ‘what is singular about colour is the relationality of its ever-varying appearing’.9 In the act of seeing, things retain a synesthetic tinge of singularity and here colour is of particular interest because it is the last ‘objective’ element to hypostasise by meeting the measure of words. The haunting singularity of the ‘experiential confound’ leaves its mark even in conventionally used language. My discussion seeks to demonstrate how the colour swatch and the colour term acted as a kind of mirror to scientific and anthropological investigation. The mirror, the colour term and the swatch became eccentric and standard tools in scientific, artistic and anthropological practice. Here colour acts as a loss of consciousness, even a kind of blindness, at least for a moment. It pertains to bliss which is based on surface and delirium. Nameless colours occupy the gaps, the thresholds of the anthropological tests I analyse in such a way that colour could be both abstract and analogical. For the Torres Straitbased scientists it should be mimetic, mnemonic and it should produce a range of forms of identification: wheel, rainbow, tintometer, cards, wools. But is colour really a means of coordination, like the mirror, for completing/alienating the subject from without? Was colour the necessary evolutionary device for thinking through alterity, or was it rather a form of camouflage which could also be perceived in nature? I suggest that the kinds of self-awareness these scientists sought to discover can be anchored in a transversal genealogy that incorporates artists and colour men. Far from being a simple little sample, instantly recognisable in its saturation, lightness and hue colour invoked both abstraction and affect. For David Katz in his book The World of Colour (1911) the colour patch opened up the space to test the effect of memory



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of colour constancy. Katz asked the subject to match the blue of an absent friend’s eyes, the red of his own lips and the brown bricks of his house.10 However, it soon becomes an uncontrollable experiment as other factors creep in: Katz’s objects are so linked with intimacy and affect that what was being tested was memory as affect. At the same time, colours still act transparently, abstractly and universally. Language performs with a generality in relation to a kind of neutrality which researcher and subject can both access so that the function of colour is to stage a match or mismatch. Colour and language become interchangeable to the point that they virtually erase one another in this search for transparency and direct communication. The swatch involves the transformation of the singular colour sample – the capturing of a window of pigment where the grain of the ingredients could be identified by artists. The mystery and snobbery of artists’ and colour men’s knowledge had in science to be flattened, to be made horizontal. Experimentation moves outwards into questions of cultural alterity. Perhaps ironically then, Umberto Eco playfully suggests in his essay on the threshold between colour perceptions and colour words that trained artists alone can recognise over a thousand hues.11 Artists set a powerful precedent which practitioners of objectivity sought to capture and normalise in their own terms. As Jonathan Crary has shown with considerable erudition, Cézanne’s late experiments with colour produce a ‘liquid, groundless space, filled with forces and intensities … hovering at a threshold where revelation is inseparable from the onset of its dissolution’.12 Colour becomes the unruly subject of sensory physiology; it is always in excess of the demands of the colour swatch tests: becoming virtual in this way colour ‘is a limit of objectivity’.13 Against the openness and singularity of affect, European scientists sought uniformity through the swell in the Norm – a desire in part effected by the industrialisation of pigments and the dissemination of the technologies of chromolithography and other kinds of coloured printing. The alchemical mystique of the artist’s studio displaced to the laboratory still keeps its secrets and multiplies their shared claims to aura and authenticity precisely because of global reproducibility. It is this age of mechanical reproducibility which makes the provocative entanglement of aura with its ‘spatial’ opponent authenticity (endowed with proximity) possible.14



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Anthropological Dreaming: The Blue Flower in the Colonies of Technology No one dreams any longer of the Blue Flower. Whoever awakes as Heinrich von Ofterdingen today must have overslept. The history of the dream remains to be written…No longer does the dream reveal a blue horizon. The dream has grown grey. The grey coating of dust on things is its best part. Walter Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch’

If according to Walter Benjamin no one can be a medieval poet who dreams of the face of his unknown beloved in his quest for the mysterious Blue Flower any more in the modern land of technology, blue – azure, indigo, lapis, cobalt – in its scarcity or semiotic impoverishment was for colonial scientists, artists and anthropologists the glimmering holy grail of inquiry.15 As an elusive presence this version of the Blue Flower offered the appearance of unmediated reality which is like the appearance of the Blue Flower in the world of romance. The Blue Flower has an imagistic fullness and a metaphorical density which for Benjamin only survives in modernity through rare flashes of recognition of an older, primitive world view of similarities, myths and magic. Romantic dreams have disintegrated into grey dust to become a ‘short cut to banality’ – although this banality does not dismiss their meaningfulness in psychic life or their potential to play a decisive role in historical events.16 There is something still of romantic longing and the Blue Flower’s elusive ineffability in Benjamin’s and in Gaston Bachelard’s readings of Novalis’s novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). The novel opens with the poet sleepless, fitful with yearning to see the Blue Flower of which he has heard so much about from a stranger. In his dream, he undertakes a quest to a remote cave in a wild country filled with bluish light which is reflected from a fountain; later he finds himself in a meadow surrounded by dark blue rocks cast under an indigo sky. It is here that he discovers the tall, striking Blue Flower: I long to behold the blue flower. It is constantly in my mind, and I can think and compose of nothing else…I am often full of rapture, and it is only when the blue flower is out of my mind, that this deep, heart-felt longing overwhelms me… [He] gazed long upon it with inexpressible tenderness. He at length was about to approach it, when it began to move, and change its form. The leaves increased their beauty, adorning the growing stem. The flower bended towards him, and revealed among its leaves a blue, outspread collar, within which hovered a tender face.17



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It is Blue who is the true protagonist of the tale and whose presence smoulders like heat in Novalis’ attempt to convey ‘the desire for bright, hot, penetrating ether’ and which would make Bachelard exclaim that ‘this blue flower is red!’.18 For nineteenth-century scientists and physiologists blue flowers at dusk did move towards the red end of the spectrum. At first camouflaged but then bursting like a flame out of the darkness, the mythical Blue Flower acts as an imaginative yet ardent device for the anthropological, scientific and artistic endeavours discussed in this chapter. Specifically, my discussion tracks the trajectories for the Colour Sense in Britain, the Torres Strait and South India (1898–1901) disclose in flashes and more expected moments this ground of blue. To organise what is admittedly an enormous subject – Colour Sense, race and blue – I take as my main focus the genealogies for and the legacies of the anthropological, scientific and artistic inquiries and experiments of Rivers and Haddon in relation to the evolutionary agendas of Francis Galton and Grant Allen amongst others. Did they all search for elusive blue? If so, did this mean travelling the world over? As is well known, Rivers’ investigations have been used by scholars as the precursor to Berlin and Kay’s now notorious Basic Color Terms. Berlin and Kay’s Basic Color Terms have been condemned for their emphasis on ‘a priori biology and biophysics for universality and perceptual evolution’ which is rigidly schematic and unadaptable to the point of being almost nonsensical.19 What is clear in their argument is the virtual absence of blue in ‘primitivist’ societies. My intervention seeks to recuperate or at least to complicate the agency of blue in relation to Berlin and Kay’s chromatic nomenclature and the Color World Survey. As we have just seen, the figure of the Indian dyer and the contingent and contested materials and the contiguous (dis)harmonies of Indian cloth caused tremendous anxiety for colonial officials. This anxiety is, I have hinted at, part of a much broader concern with the pathology of colour in the later nineteenth century. Whilst for Bergson intuition became the key element of a brilliant insight and reactionary philosophical method, this radical way forward held little value for scientists and government officials in Britain and its colonies. They refused to trust intuition and instinct. This was not merely the matter of governmentality and subaltern resistance (seen most obviously in the case of the nazar of indigo) it also indicates the fundamental instability of colour perception. Colour defects could



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be viewed as either eugenically driven or as constitutive of a disease that could be medically, socially or racially contagious. And this imparted a new urgency to the status of colour. Colour veers between its location in the mind and being out there in the world. Colour disrupts the narrative of scientific objectivity. Colour upsets the proud claims of the prototype and other novel technologies of scientific experiment – traffic signals, the photometer, the tintometer, photography, as well as wreaking havoc with theories of eugenics and evolutionism. How unfortunate that red and green had been chosen as traffic signals – when just a few years later a series of horrific train accidents brought scientists’ attention to redgreen confusion as the most common, congenital and ‘contagious’ form of colour blindness.20 Whilst this anxiety about colour in relation to degeneracy and eugenics has been dealt with by several scholars, they fail to register its inherently aesthetic dimension and its material grounding in pigments.21 Colour blindness was after all only one aspect of the evolutionary debate on the existence and stasis of the Colour Sense. I propose that the discourse on the Colour Sense profoundly implicated artists. Whilst the colour vision of employees of the transport industry, military and marine services was from the 1880s viewed with intense suspicion by the Board of Trade, how were artists (both European and non-European) now viewed? Were they too accused of pathological colour defects? And if so, was this one reason why, alongside the prevalence of eugenics, artists would attempt to codify so as to standardise the painting of race? Given their nuanced and extensive experiences with colour could artists act as government advisors on new colour regulations or were they themselves even seen as the source of an epistemological, chromatic anxiety? I propose that artists, scientists and anthropologists had now to navigate the new technologies of colour – that is, the painter’s manual, the skin swatch, the chromolithograph, aniline-dyed wools or tinted glasses. All of these novel technologies sought to regulate and to discipline the ‘dangerously subjective’ status of colour. As part of my inquiry I examine the development of what can be loosely termed ‘proto-participant ethnography’ through the lenses of colour experiments to consider how colour became the focus of the scientific/visual agenda of objectivity. In spite of the ethic of objectivity which aimed at an unmediated scientific access to truth, it had to



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contend relentlessly with the work of affect. Affect and colour make for a dangerous combination: they have the capacity to disrupt the work of scientific experiments. I suggest that a few possibly still prototype technologies (Loribond’s tintometer, Cohn’s letter E, Galton’s skintone mosaics, Holmgren’s wools, early colour photography, Dr Stilling’s tables, Leipzig’s coloured papers) tried to discipline the perception and the production of late nineteenth-century colour. These tools promised a certain ‘meta-narrative of visuality’ which in part involved ‘thinking photographically’.22 Coupled with evolutionist discourse, these novel technologies not only brought the question of race to the fore but they also honed in on the developing concern with the origins of art in relation to the Colour Sense. The Colour Sense would be tested against the material culture of peoples in India and New Guinea. I argue that the work of Haddon and Rivers acts as a powerful critique of the ‘armchair’ anthropology of E. B. Tylor and James Frazer. The former fashioned a new form of anthropology which privileged experiments, intensive and extensive fieldwork into colour and kinship networks; they also staged ‘primitive’ art, colour perception and nomenclature as the focus for phenomenological and cultural inquiry. By way of a conclusion to this extensive chapter I track their legacy in the period between World Wars I and II to see what happens to colour in the collaborations between Bronislaw Malinowski and the curator of the Cologne Museum for Ethnology, Julius Lips. Malinowski’s ethic of immersion also involved a certain chromatically tinged aesthetic as can be gleaned in his lyrical notes which are awash with colour. In a different vein Lips’ fascinating endeavours to record and to collect those non-Western art objects which overtly criticised or appropriated the appearance/powers of the White Man, engage with and critique Rivers’ and Haddon’s earlier investigations into the alterity of art in New Guinea. Together Malinowski and Lips had to face up to the hardening of a racial regime which straddled Britain, the United States, New Guinea, northern Australia, southern Australia and 1930s Germany. In this period, colour, I suggest, does bear the weight of the messianic and the redemptive – but with sinister overtones. Colour was by white colonialists and anthropologists both fetishised and sacrificed.



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The Colour Swatch and the Picture Sense: Proleptic Materiality and Artistic Pathology It would seem as if a certain ‘picture-education’ is necessary to develop a ‘picture-sense’. Allan Cunningham, ‘On the Colour Sense’

By the 1870s colour had become a paradigmatic example of private, incommunicable subjectivity. What now preoccupied scientists was the problem of representational accuracy: the contents of perception do not look like things in the world although perceptions and light stimulus may be correlated with one another. The question arose of the irreducibly private nature of sensation. The problem of colour became one of individual variability and communicability. Colour thus raised the question of whether there could be an objectivity of mind and if it could be related to the objectivity of the external world and to the subjectivity of mental processes. Numerous experiments with the pathology of colour in the 1870s and 1880s made the perception of colour a paradigm of individual differences in mental representations. In Germany, the physiologist Herman von Helmholtz aimed to transform philosophical claims for the spontaneity of consciousness into empirical research programmes.23 He anchored the new terminology of subjective and objective phenomena in practices which explored their vital differences. One of the inspirations for Darwin’s Descent of Man, Helmholtz’s experiments showed the variability of colour vision of the normally sighted and pointed to the difficulty in producing objectivity from such data. He demonstrated that colours are primarily important in relation to the differentiated sensitivities of nerve fibres in the human eye and that they are stimulated by the longest, middle and shortest light waves in the spectrum. He concentrated on how nerve impulses conveyed the impression of colour to the higher nerve centres. This meant adapting the ideas of English physician Thomas Young, who 50 years earlier had stressed that colour vision depended on the presence in the retina of three independent nervous mechanisms each of which when stimulated aroused a specific colour sensation. Contrary to Newton, who argued that colour was a property of light, Helmholtz (following



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Young) conjectured that three colours – red, green and violet – formed the basis for experiencing the spectrum.24 Against Helmholtz’s ideas, Ewald Hering suggested that there were some characteristics of colour vision which found no explanation in this trichromatic scheme. Rather the functional pairing of the classic colour qualities used by artists – red-yellow, green-blue, blue-yellow and redgreen – and the intermediate hues which combine one from each pair are critical to the physiological basis of vision.25 From this, Hering deduced that there are six primary sensations which fall naturally into three pairs of polar opposites – red-green, yellow-blue and white-black. There are then two opponent retinal processes – breakdown and resynthesis. All three colour pairs are affected simultaneously to different degrees of luminous radiation. As colour complementaries are antagonistic, their effects neutralise one another. Hence the difficulty for scientists lay in their ability to separate subjective from objective visual impressions. According to philosopherscientist Poincaré ‘the sensations of another will be for us a world eternally closed. [Whether] the sensation that I call red the same as that which my neighbour calls red we have no way of verifying’.26 However, this was not enough to disqualify colour as objective. At stake was not whether red was a property of the world or only the human way of perceiving the world but whether all minds perceived red the same way. The correspondence among minds rather than that between a mental picture and the world became the critical issue in the debate over the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Poincaré did not see this as a philosophical problem but rather as a fascinating case of sensory physiology. This sensory physiology involved matching light wavelengths to the perceptions of the spectral colours. Poincaré chose red to epitomise the privacy of the subjective experience. His account eliminated all sensations including his own: there could be no communicability of others’ sensations. Even if two people label a cherry red, their experience is not compatible or even comparable. Nonetheless, he believed that relations were communicable. Even abstract concepts of physics could be traced back to the sensational elements from which they are built. And these elements are times, sounds, spaces and colours. For Poincaré, there was no reality except in fugitive and changing impressions and even that reality vanished as soon as one appeared to touch upon



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it. To experience a collective sense of red, minds had to be cemented together by groups of sensations which resisted detailed, individual analysis. The ideal, under these circumstances, was complete visual passivity: ‘The primitive Naturmensch sees a painting as a mere surface of various colours. Through this abstraction which is simultaneously the most specialised empiricism, one enters into the sphere of the organic living subject-object in which every material process is at once an ideal, subjective one.’27 This extreme self-observation needed an imaginal subject-alter – the primitive man and the painting had to act as the screens necessary for such rigorous corporeal dissection. Art and race became critical elements in the debates concerning the communicability of the pathology of colour. Proponents of the new structural objectivity accepted the psychophysiological account of colour as the ineffable personal experience and sought a science by demonstration that could open windows for the closed-up self. They sought to expand outwards so as to critique Poincaré’s absolutely uncommunicable subjectivity to make colour into a device for extraordinary communication. For instance, in his investigation of the congenital nature of colour hearing, Darwin’s cousin, the eugenicist Francis Galton,28 extolled the benefits of what he termed chromotherapy: ‘There is no doubt that blue has a calming effect and red an irritating one, for the Italian mad doctors find an advantage in putting their irritable patients in a room lighted with blue light and their apathetic ones under red light.’29 Both Daae’s Die Farbenblindheit und deren Erkennung, which devised a system for testing colour blindness and apperception through a series of multiple-industrially dyed yarn samples, and the French neuro-scientist Paul Broca’s coloured plates, manufactured with the aim of identifying nuances of iris pigmentation, became standard works for doctors and anthropologists preoccupied with what they perceived to be ‘pathological colour’.30 As part of an academic collective which included the French anthropologists Paul Topinard and Paul Broca, the president of the British Anthropological Institute, Galton desperately attempted to standardise colour in the belief that colour tests could help to determine criminality, race and eugenics.31 But for Galton, writing against the work of his more established Gallic counterparts, this proved no easy task. He complained that Broca’s original paintings and lithographs of patches



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of colour relating to skin tone although once innovative, exciting and authoritative, had already faded and that this change of colour was now too outmoded to be practicable.32 Because of this perceived ephemeral unreliability of chromolithographic reproduction, the endeavours of the painter and the scientist had to be supplemented, even replaced by a new colour standard. And this Galton believed he had stumbled upon purely by chance. On a visit to the Vatican studio of the Reverenda Fabbica de San Pietro he had a revelation: Mosaic! The materiality of mosaic offered the potential for the reproduction of ‘permanent specimens’ of ‘standard colours’ for the depiction of numerous tints of skin. This mosaic material, of a hard, vitreous mass of glass rendered opaque by oxides of tin and lead, was manufactured as flat cakes, circular or otherwise, of about six inches in diameter, one quarter-inch thick. Each cake had to be ground on a lapidary’s wheel to the desired size, polished and then cemented. The beauty of mosaic was not only that it was inexpensive; the hues were uniform throughout each piece and most critically, it was permanent in colour. Permanency could be equated with the agenda of objectivity in its criticism of the incommunicability of individual subjectivities. Uniform tone, chroma and hue, which were primarily intended for Catholic didacticism through the reverence of the physical representation of biblical figures, were now to be transformed into the means for testing the catholicity of physiological/aesthetic perception among the (possibly heathen) masses. Ecstatic at his find, primarily because this form of mass reproduction overrode the materiality of the paling plates of Paul Broca, Galton then examined the state of the mosaics in St Peter’s, Rome, which to his amazement were so fresh and dazzling that they appeared as though brand new. In his eyes there was a remarkable resilience to mosaic materiality which overrode colour’s agency on paper: ‘If the surface is dirty, it can be freely washed. If stained in any way, the stain can be ground off. If the surface is roughened it can be repolished.’33 The only problem as he saw it was that such mosaics were so obviously not intended for the purpose of eugenics: ‘it is a very difficult matter to produce an exact tint to order. The method employed appears to be to make a large number of trial tints and to sort and classify according to results.’34 However, there was already no shortage of colours for Galton counted upwards of 40,000 bins in the Vatican manufactory containing



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trial samples. Out of these, he classified 10,752 into 24 cases in each of which he sorted 16 rows made up of 28 samples. The flesh tints appropriate to European nations (as to be found in the second of two pages of selections from Broca’s tints which also appeared in the ‘indispensable manual’ Anthropological Notes and Queries) were around 500 in number. Given the proleptic excess of such an archive, Galton sought a streamlined, workable solution which would operate on the basis of about a dozen identical slabs. Each slab he surmised should contain six small pieces of mosaic which would be lettered A–F and which could be efficiently aligned with the corresponding tints of Broca’s (faded) scale. These slabs need be no larger than letter-weights and as such they could be effectively disseminated to all of the leading anthropological institutions and museums. Such dispersal would create a new commensurability for testing the (in)communicability of colour in relation to the body. Against the heavy investment in mechanical reproduction associated with exponents of objectivity (exemplified by the camera) Galton was here endorsing the collaboration of eye and hand – and the value of skilled labour. Mosaic so laboriously prepared could outdo the data ratio validity and the precision value of the printing machine. Mosaic should supplement Broca’s plates in more ways than one. Galton wanted to use mosaic patches as an updated version of Broca’s skin tones in such a way that they would become the normative standard for scientists, anthropologists and travellers in the colonies. As carting about slabs of mosaic would not be practical for most, Galton advocated two-dimensional painted equivalents. Painting and not printing should do the reproducible work of objectivity. Although these painted versions would be twice removed from Broca’s coloured plates Galton firmly believed that they were effective inscription devices in the production of epidermic knowledge. He wrote to Topinard, who was then in the process of revising Broca’s skin-patch chromatics, to request the latest tone classification which he wished to test as mosaic. But the enchanted technologies of mosaic making were not easily transferable. Galton soon became aware of the difficulties in dealing with the clandestine archive of the Vatican and that a more accessible source needed to be established – preferably in Britain. He contacted the South Kensington Museum in the hope its authorities could mediate



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with Rome, whilst also suggesting that in future a selection of the mosaic tints could be dispatched to the DSA’s schools of art in Britain and India where their value could be inculcated and where they could be manually reproduced.35 Although initially the Vatican suggested a price for such innovative work which South Kensington could not afford, Galton observed that it was now producing skin-tint mosaics.36 As far as I have been able to ascertain Galton’s own epidermalisation of mosaic came to nothing. Galton’s sense of urgency is, I propose, symptomatic of a contemporary exigency generated by the belief in the existence of pathological colour. Pathological colour required immediate testing, standardisation and, if possible, rectification. Pathological colour was invasive to the extent that it was becoming pervasive in both physiological and artistic terms. Such debates seeped into mainstream aesthetic and scientific discourse from the 1870s onwards. In the catalogue accompanying a fascinating recent exhibition relating to Darwin’s legacy in nineteenth-century art, Diana Donald and Jan Eric Olsén argue that although evolutionary theory insisted that man’s Colour Sense had declined, in the later nineteenth century it was being revived and rejuvenated.37 This new investment in an ‘aesthetic principle’ was stimulated by the production of a far more nuanced painterly practice that was partially informed by the growing presence of novel shades of aniline dyes. Aniline dyes provided uniformity and communicability especially when artists were engaging with Darwinian principles. Using the work of Swedish artist Bruno Lilejefors, acclaimed for his camouflage paintings of wild life undercover as their focus, Donald and Olsén conclude that ‘in this context of ideas the visual sensitivity of artists was now felt likely to make a significant contribution to scientific understanding’.38 My own interest here is also on visual sensitivity – but with a twist. I am less interested in the efficacy of the image (now such a pervasive rhetoric in Art History) than in how images break down or how they expose aesthetic-psychological faults. If artists did contribute to evolutionary debates in relation to the Colour Sense, it was as much about blindness and pathology as about the success of painters like Lilejefors. In order to unpack this nuanced and controversial issue, I intend to situate artistic practice within the predicament of visual acuity qua colour blindness at around the time Lilejefors and Galton were expounding



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the values of minutely graded colouration. One major reason for the anxieties surrounding colour blindness in the later nineteenth century was due to the shock, awe and violence of railway travel.39 Aside from the resultant trauma of high-speed accidents, hysteria surrounded what was viewed to be an increasingly common problem – the failure of railway workers to distinguish between red and green signals. Although it was suggested ‘at various times to minimise the risk by having only one coloured signal light (say red) and using white light as the second signal, or by employing two colours – red and blue’, the Committee of the Royal Society on Colour Vision favoured the greater luminosity of green over blue glass as employed in marine signals.40 ‘Pathological’ red-green became the subject of intense scientific investigation in relation to eugenics and the demands of labour.41 Against the optimistic evolutionist belief that the European Colour Sense was still or at least now improving (which I discuss below) colour blindness seemed to be on the rise. Was there a faciality of the colour blind? Scientists conjectured that it was possible to identify colour blindness from a person’s appearance. According to Dr George Wilson at Edinburgh University (one of the earliest investigators of colour blindness) the colour blind have ‘an absent, anxious glance’, a ‘startled, restless look’ and when seen up close their eyes have a liquid look as if slightly suffused.42 But could this desire to identity a certain physiognomy of colour blindness be taken much further; what would it be like to identify with, to become at one with the colour blind, and how was such Victorian narcissism disrupted by the gaze of the colour-blind other? Today philosophers are asking with renewed urgency, what things look like to the colour blind:43 ‘Can we tell, does it matter?’44 After all, the theory of normal colour vision is one of the triumphs of nineteenthcentury science emerging as it does from the work of Helmholtz and Maxwell in the 1850s, and Young 50 years earlier. The trichomatic theory – the view that a normal perceiver can, in light mixing match any colour with some combination of the three primaries – still finds confirmation in the fact that in colour photography with three emulsions works, as does television with three phosphors.45 But rather than being a peripheral abnormality, colour blindness has so often been a guide to the nature of normal vision and its tests. Maxwell conducted his



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first research comparing the colour matching of ten normal perceivers with two colour-blind people. As transgression creates the norm, so did the colour blind confirm the normality of vision. If on the one hand normal vision involves, as Helmholtz and Maxwell thought, three basic sensations of red, green and violet produced by three receptor or nerve types, then they expected someone missing one of these types to have sensations corresponding merely to the other two. On the other hand, if, as Hering believed, colour vision involves some kind of distinct redgreen, yellow-blue, light-dark processes, it was expected that colour blindness would not have one of these ‘dimensions’. In spite of the differences between these two views, both camps agreed that for the colour blind, all colours appear as if composed of blue and yellow. For Hering, the colour blind had the sensations of yellow or blue; for Helmholtz and Maxwell the colour blind had (in the case of the most common red-green case), sensations of green and violet but called them blue and yellow: they were only relevantly sensitive to yellow and blue.46 The perceived deficiency is not a local one confined to certain reds and greens or to those colours under very specific circumstances; it amounts to a total loss of a whole dimension: ‘Orange and purple must lose their red component, turquoise and chartreuse lose their green, and the whole world of colour collapse from three dimensions into two.’47 In his study of the artist ‘Jonathan I’, contemporary writer Oliver Sacks describes the painter’s pain and anguish on becoming colour blind. Following a traffic accident which resulted in transient amnesia, Jonathan I became appalled by everything around him. People seemed to be animated grey statues; flesh had a sickly grim even grimy pallor; his own paintings were glaring and inharmonious. He could not bear the touch of his wife and he could not stand the sight of food.48 Although Jonathan I’s condition did slightly improve (he was able to begin painting again – in black and white with the aid of dark green spectacles), Sacks’ poignant study opens up the world of the colour blind – its limits and indescribability. And this has a genealogy in late nineteenth-century Europe. Several years before the Board of Trade’s detailed inquiry of 1885–86 into the possibility of introducing tests for colour blindness amongst railway and maritime workers in Britain and the empire, Popular Science Monthly published an article describing what a colour-blind world might be like.49 Whilst he argued that to



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view paintings, especially landscapes, stimulates the colour faculty to the highest degree, the anonymous author of this piece asks how would we cope phenomenologically in a colourless world and how could we communicate this ‘affliction’ affectively and scientifically to others? Perhaps even more than the need to communicate this experience through words, the author advocates an experiment which would give us the equivalent of a colour-blind world. Not mosaic but salt should provide the supplement to existing scientific testing. The author recounts an experiment he had conducted which involved rubbing salt into the wick of an alcohol lamp. To test the effect he turned first to one of his cherished artworks. The salt on the flame had the optical effect of an immediate draining of the red and blue from a beautiful Chinese painting he owned. Likewise his watercolour sample charts also lost their colours. He then wandered around his room examining all of his things which now appeared to have the same sombre hue.50 Such an experiment was pre-empted by Wilhelm von Bezold in his influential Theory of Colour and its Relation to Art and Art Industry.51 Von Bezold believed that it was not difficult to arrive at the ‘condition of a colour-blind person, at least approximately’.52 One could hold a piece of coloured glass before the eye, paint at night with only a lamp as light or pour a solution of sulphate of copper into a glass vessel with flat, parallel sides and then view the change of colours effected by looking through the liquid.53 He argued that a simple set of coloured glasses would enable the colour blind to correct their vision – which was absolutely essential for ‘suspect’ artists and all those who worked with drawing, signals or patterns.54 Von Bezold’s thesis would be rejected by scientists concerned with colour. Colour, as is well known, came to be tested with Frithioff Holmgren’s wools. Candidates kept their hands behind their backs at first and sorted colours by eye; the examiner watched their ocular and hand movements closely.55 Holmgren believed that the attentive examiner could discern the candidate’s intelligence and moral character from his behaviour in conjunction with detecting his chromatic sense.56 Fundamental to Holmgren’s long-term obsession with the colour blind is his idea that they were les viciés – the polluted. He and many fellow scientists believed that the perception



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of colour was a crucial faculty in human sympathies. In their eyes the colour blind were dreamy, inattentive and effete, lacking warmth whilst exhibiting ‘mild dementia’.57 As Jordanna Bailkin persuasively argues, ‘colour blindness was unique in modern taxonomies of disease; invisible, incommunicable and purified through its early associations with Dalton. Indeed, the status of colour blindness as a disease was unstable’.58 It had no mechanism of contagion yet it was so often linked to social and psychological ailments that could facilitate the deterioration of a national community. Certainly by the 1870s colour blindness was being viewed as a peculiarly British problem – one which the government was woefully neglecting.59 In 1880 the Ophthalmological Society of London appointed a committee to test colour blindness amongst young men. The results indicted the police and the middle classes while the working classes were condemned for attempting to conceal their ‘affliction’ for fear they could find no work. The Society noted that deaf-mutes, Quakers and Jews had the highest rate of colour blindness using paucity of artists in these communities as ‘evidence’.60 The lack of a Colour Sense is back to its relationship with a picture sense and or physiological aesthetics. The Royal Committee, which sought to promote the value of Holmgren’s wools, hoped that this test would alert workers to the nuances and varieties of colours and so provide the stimulus for the correction of both colour ignorance and colour stupidity.61 There were of course many complaints about the wools. They were seen to elicit a machine-like response which through their relentless repetition was exhausting and exploitative. At the other end of the testing spectrum, the strange experiments of Professor Fontan tried to identify the magnetic powers of colours by hypnotising subjects who would then sort coloured wools with his eyes completely covered.62 The most common complaint was that the wools invited intensely subjective responses that opened up room for error.63 Ironically, this anxiety about subjectivity had initially furnished the raison d’être of wools as psychological tools. The Royal Society hoped that this exposure to colour matching would alert workers to ‘something attractive’ in the process – that to be tested by colour is to engage with an element of the aesthetic sense.64 Holmgren’s test required candidates to make complex



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aesthetic judgements and as such it was either condemned for being inappropriate for uncouth workers or as limited and outmoded in its choice of hues. Both labourers and wools were criticised for being out of step with modernity. Perhaps then ‘colour blind workers were not only a threat to public safety but also a challenge to an explicitly modernist sphere of aesthetic judgement’.65 But this was not because the tested were colour ignorant, defective or stupid, rather they possessed such a nuanced Colour Sense that it could never be tested by a few little wools. And this was justified by at least one scientist on the reaction of a painter. The Glasgow artist George Henry agreed to undertake Holmgren’s test for the purview of his friend the ophthalmologist Freeland Fergus. While Fergus was experimenting on (or rather with) George Henry in 1894, he had another agenda at stake – the integrity (or not) of the Colour Sense of painters. Henry’s refusal to partake in Holmgren’s test was no doubt accepted by Fergus because of their camaraderie but I also want to suggest that such a refusal also acted as a deliberate rebuttal to the contemporary obsession with colourblind artists – made (in)famous by a certain German ophthalmologist. Highly respected for his ambitious publication Atlas of Ophthalmology, and his work at St Thomas’ Hospital, London (from 1871 to 1878), Richard Liebreich expressed such deep concern on seeing the works of Turner and Mulready that he gave an impassioned lecture at the Royal Institute which was subsequently published as part of a small book of essays.66 On arriving in England in 1871, Liebreich went eagerly to the National Gallery primarily to see Turner’s paintings. And what he saw horrified him beyond conception. Turner’s Crossing the Brook was suitably impressive but oh how awful is the later Shade and Darkness! In order to discover the causes of this dramatic deterioration in Turner’s Colour Sense, Liebreich chose to focus on paintings from this great master’s middle period which he considered ‘pathological i.e. not quite healthy’.67 His method considered colour in all the painted details – with an emphasis on what he saw as vertical streakiness which he believed became increasingly noticeable in Turner’s work after 1831. At this time light assumed a bluish colour which Liebreich believed to be too much in contrast with the shadows. Colour became more and more exaggerated in paintings from the following two years. Turner’s



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vertical streaks were now so wilfully chromatic and so chromatically hideous that all meaning from his pictures seemed to be emphatically lost.68 In Liebreich’s view, the crystalline lenses in Turner’s eyes had dispersed light more strongly than was normal, the effect being a pervasive, bluish fog which haunted all his illuminated objects. Like the anonymous author of the article on the colour-blind world in Popular Science Monthly Liebreich offered his public the possibility of sharing in this episode through visual equivalence. Experiment and phenomenological experience coalesce through the substitute. Once again there is a certain fetishisation of pathological colour. At this point in his lecture Liebreich showed his audience the copy of a painting of Venice by Turner in the South Kensington Museum which with the assistance of lighting he manipulated in order to show the effects of the artist’s changing vision.69 Immerse yourselves as you will in to the otherwise incommunicable subjectivity of defective vision. Following this melodramatic demonstration Liebreich then considered the effects of mild colour blindness in a painting of a cattle market (without attribution) which he had recently seen at a London exhibition. The shadows and the oxen he believed to be painted with too great a contrast of red and green, which he deduced to be the result of the yellowing of the artist’s optical lenses.70 This he argued was a common fault amongst artists: ‘To me their pictures have so characteristic a tone of colour that I could easily point them out while passing through a picture gallery.’71 Given limited time, Liebreich concluded his lecture with an excurses on the work of the ‘colour-blind’ artist William Mulready. He detected that in his mature work Mulready ‘used to paint in tones that are too much into the violet…while the distinguishing feature of his last paintings is produced by an excess of blue. The shadows on his fleshy colours are painted in pure ultramarine blue’.72 However, ‘if you look at these pictures through a yellow glass, all the faults disappear; what formerly appeared unnatural and displeasing is at once corrected; the violet colour of the face shows a natural red; the blue shades become grey; the unnatural glaring blue of the drapery is softened’.73 This glass – the colour of pale sherry – should be gradually graded deeper in tone so as to simulate the effects of the ageing optical lens. With the aid of this technological device, Liebreich argued that by comparing two similar subjects of a young boy and his sister painted by Mulready in 1836 and 1857 (on display at the



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South Kensington Museum) where in the colours, except the blue sky, you could see a dramatic, chromatic alteration: It would be more important to correct the abnormal vision of the artist, than to make a normal eye see as the artist saw when his sight had suffered. This, unfortunately, can only be done to a certain extent…If science aims at proving that certain works of art offend against physiological laws, artists and art-critics ought not to think that, by being subjected to the material analysis of physiological investigation, that which is noble, beautiful, and purely intellectual, will be dragged into the dust…artists will avoid the inward struggles and disappointments which often arise through the difference between their own perceptions and those of the majority of the public.74

Liebreich was thus participating in a wider debate which accused artists of neglecting the scientific aspect of aesthetics.75 The growing emphasis on the sensual qualities of form and colour in the 1860s and 1870s – in aesthetic theories of philosophers and psychologists, such as Helmholtz’s collaborator, the philosopher James Sully – is paralleled by Darwin’s account of the primarily physiological nature of perception as laid out in the Descent of Man. Taking to task the theories of Newton, Goethe and Chevreul, Sully sought to dissociate colour from musical harmony or precise laws. Colour combinations are far more nuanced, subtle and highly individualised.76 This emphasis on the physiological basis of aesthetics came to be connected with the ‘unadulterated pleasures of the work of art’ and to scientific studies of the nature and physical mechanisms of perception and sensation.77 Aside from these unadulterated pleasures, the work of art was increasingly arousing suspicion which had to be dealt with in ‘scientific’ terms. The artist’s physiological or psychological traits had to become the object of intense scrutiny. Liebreich’s forensic training provides a fascinating lens for comparing his approach with his contemporary, the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli. Morelli, as is well known, developed a way of detecting copies, misattributions or fakes of Italian old masters by examining the details – those flecks, shapes and minute spaces, those fingernails, earlobes and other marginal body parts where the painter has paid less scrupulous attention to (dis)simulation.78 Here, on the ‘rubbish heap’ of the pictorial surface, an artist’s identity could be seemingly revealed – just where personal effort is weakest.79 Very much the physicican and the connoisseur, Morelli was taken seriously by his contemporaries precisely because of his extensive and impressive



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knowledge of old master paintings in many major European collections.80 As Carlo Ginzburg suggests in a series of astute articles, this ‘divinatory’ approach may be eccentrically forensic but it is clearly not scientific in any modern sense.81 In Morelli’s connoisseurship, colour is a marginal presence; sometimes it literally hides in the shadows or else it is the occasional telltale sign of a master’s hand.82 For instance, he contested the authorship of a drawing as being the work of Antonio Pollaiuolo because it did not show ‘a single characteristic’ of the artist’s easily recognisable ‘staring rough yellow tints, forming a strong contrast to the delicate, clear, pale yellow colouring of the drawing at Munich’.83 Art should be judged not so much for its merits but more especially for its defects – and this indicted colour.84 Morelli, like Liebreich, attempted to excavate artistic practice; both wanted ‘to take the pigments off the canvas’ to view anew the act of painting. As opposed to the intentional deception of Morelli’s fakers (the Sherlock Holmes style of piecing together clues) – that is, forensic deduction – Liebreich’s artists, as their vision wavers from the expected norm, are unaware of their errors. The examination of infinitesimal colour traces permitted the comprehension of a deeper, otherwise unattainable reality – whether medical symptoms, pictorial marks or detective clues. There is then a medical basis which unites the work of Sherlock Holmes’ author Conan Doyle, Freud, Morelli, Galton and Liebreich’s approach to art as critical, forensic knowledge.85 To decipher or to read marks may be to read marks as metaphors but these men tried to take them literally as condensations of a lost reality, by reading causes from effects – that is, to privilege abduction – a method then being advocated by the American philosopher Charles S. Peirce.86 Peirce forwarded three hypotheses on colour: (1) the appearance of every mixture of lights depends on the appearance of its constituents; (2) he followed Young’s theory that every sensation of light is compounded of not more than three independent sensations; (3) the intensity of a sensation is proportional to the logirithms of the strength of the excitation – which is the principle of Fechner’s law.87 Using Ogden Rood’s coloured disks, Peirce found that all colours are yellower when brighter. He also endorsed Fechner’s law that if any light be gradually reduced, colour will fade to leave just one primary hue.88 Aside from these complex formulas, Peirce placed synaesthesia



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at the heart of his later philosophical musings. Colours can be gay or sad: he was intensely moved by a blind man’s inquiry into whether the colour scarlet is like the blare of a trumpet.89 Peirce likened colour to the definition of feeling: it eludes analysis and yet it is a state of being which is contaminated with space extension.90 Whilst hue, luminosity and chroma may define the quality of colour, they do not speak to colour’s vividness which is independent of all three. There is something elusive to this vividness of feeling: ‘nobody’s immediate consciousness when he is much more than half asleep, ever consisted wholly of a colour sensation.’91 As opposed to Ruskin, who praised Mulready and Turner as the most forward-looking and exciting British modern painters, partially because of their palettes, for Liebreich they embody the most pitiful and obvious cases of optical defects. His matching of colours makes no space for the free play of abstraction with naturalism; his mimesis is thoroughly conventional and retrograde in its artistic expectations whilst at the same time ambiguously analytical in its examination of colours. Here colours had to be matched – but with what is unclear. It is as if he had to adjust or rather to superimpose his own colour range (à la Poincaré) onto the defective oil paintings of Turner and Mulready. Three years after Liebreich’s lecture, the clinical procedures for the examination of colour vision with the use of diagnostic albums, were developed by the ophthalmologist Dr Stilling with the cooperation of a congenitally red-green colour-blind painter.92 Conversely, scientists began to use the copying of paintings as a critical test for assessing colour blindness amongst individuals who were not trained as artists.93 Art then appeared to hold the key to unlocking the mysteries of the colour blind. Long after his lectures, Liebreich’s own method was still being championed by the Ophthalmic Yearbook as a standard for testing the defective vision of artists: As pointed out by Liebreich, green is used for the shaded parts of flesh, while the lighter parts may be too red. When, by practice, the colour-blind artist learns to use red correctly, green is still too freely used. By the absolutely colourblind, purple may be used to represent flesh, and by the red-green blind it is used in shadows. Differences of green are exaggerated; in high lights becoming yellow, in shadows blue. There is excessive mixing of colours. When, however,



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the colour-blind learn to diminish their colour defects, and become expert in drawing and perspective, their pictures are so powerful in light and shade that the relief effects resemble those of the great masters.94

But at least for this now anonymous writer, the colour-blind artist can learn to diminish these ‘defects’ to focus instead on drawing and perspective so that their relief effects can resemble those of great masters.95 As for colour-blind painters, they were considered by scientists to be highly suitable as engravers precisely because modern printmakers manifested so much anxiety when attempting to translate the mood of a picture from colour into black and white.96 The work of colour-blind artists became such a source of scientific fascination that in 1908 the ophthalmologist Professor Arnaldo Angelucci staged a sizeable exhibition of their works in Naples, which he later tried to explain to his baffled audience.97 According to one of Angelucci’s supporters writing anonymously, he ‘only bought works of art from artists whose Colour Sense he himself had investigated – a fact which makes his collection the more valuable…which is not only of supreme value to medical men but is also of great importance to all who are interested in art’.98 Angelucci not only commissioned several of these pictures but as ‘evidence’ of their ‘defects’ he also ordered non-colourblind artists to paint the same subjects. Through such comparisons it seems that ‘some of these patients, if they may be so called, had defects of vision more extensive than mere Daltonism, but with this consideration he did not deal’.99 The first painting on display in his collection confused red and green in its presentation of a Roman peasant. The justification for this is, however, based on deviation from a mimetic norm: The author shows himself to be a master of line and possessed of admirable technical skill, but his choice of colours is unconventional. The shadows of the face and neck, which constitute more than half the canvas, are rendered in green…Red predominates in the lights of the face…The green shadows look flat and appear to fall back from the red lights.100

The same ‘clash’ of colours can be seen in the unidentified, otherwise non-described work of a second artist where ‘the advantages of correct design and good drawing are nullified by the bizarre tones employed’ whilst yet a third work although exquisite in its deployment of light and shade displayed a ‘grotesque choice of tints’.101 This disparity had to be re-tested immediately:



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In a study from the nude in soft light he painted the chief parts of the picture in leaf green. The shadows were all rendered in dark red with dark red, while the sky was intense violet. When tested with Holmgren’s wools he matched dark red with dark equal saturation, he said that the red was a more sombre colour than the green. This fact explains the persistence with which he used red for deep shades.102

Examining his own collection, Angelucci came to several conclusions about the character of colour blindness amongst painters. First he endorsed ‘Liebreich’s Sign’, which he linked with a loss of perspective; second, colour-blind artists after long practice may come to recognise red but rarely do they manage to adjust green to fit with the norm; third, the absolutely colour blind abuse violet to an intense degree. They used it intensely ‘in representing skin’.103 Once again skin raises the most anxieties: ‘This error enhances the contrasts in the colour scheme and has been adopted by the normal sighted to such an extent that at one time the abuse of violet in art was quite deplorable.’104 Fourth, green undergoes intense exaggerations to become either too yellow or too blue while, fifth, the colour blind mix colours excessively so that the skin of an ox may be grey, red and violet.105 According to Angelucci, the colour-blind artist should confine himself to black and white or to yellow and blue because these produce the most effective contrasts, which should be primarily applied to nocturnes and snow scenes. The colour-blind artist will never be able to ‘reproduce the diverse scales of colour presented by Nature bathed in sunlight’.106 Angelucci called for the immediate testing of artists believing that at least in Italy ‘the existence of so many dichromic painters in Italian art is explained by the fact that the colour vision of students was not tested. Had they been examined many of the pictures in his collection would not have existed’.107 For one anonymous British writer taking up his method, the detection of colour blindness was far less certain. Out of 843 oils and watercolours on display at Burlington House not one afforded a definite case of ‘Liebreich’s Sign’.108 In spite of this ‘Anon’ goes on to complain that several of these paintings gave the impression of having been rendered during a partial eclipse of the sun as ‘the use of green in the shadows, which Professor Angelucci associated with the undue redness of the highlights, seems to be a favourite with some exhibitors’.109 The exhibits of Alfred Munnings



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here come under intense attack although the writer has to concede that such work shows ‘the wide differences which may exist between the impressions recorded by the eye of the painter and that of the man in the crowd’.110 Whilst the writer observes that there is no equivalent to Angelucci’s ‘tests’ for painting in Britain he does end by conjecturing ‘if the distinguished professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) were to examine the colour vision of the Academicians, Associates and students of that august corporation the results might be interesting’.111 This rather noncommittal ending to his article with a comment on what might merely be ‘interesting’ at least exhorts the one scientifically trained member of the RA to take action. Following Angelucci the writer notes that colour-blind artists had the tendency to deceive or at least to attempt to correct their vision through recourse to others’ vision or to the nomenclature of pigments. This made the diagnosis of Daltonism from the examination of painting far more difficult as ‘after some years’ experience the victims learn to know the names of the colours of many objects and employ pigments which are similarly labelled’.112 Although one of Angelucci’s ‘patients’ bought colours ready mixed he could not avoid the mistakes which constitute Liebreich’s Sign.113 This problem was far more acute with pastels precisely because they were not labelled with the names of their tints.114 Whilst it might be ‘interesting’ to test RA members, according to another of Angelucci’s critics, art should be confined to those with perfect sight: Angelucci rightly urges that all art students should be tested for colour blindness to avoid the lamentable waste of time which ensues when a Daltonian takes up the profession of art. From a consideration of Liebreich’s lectures it is also obvious that he should have any error of refraction fully corrected…Unfortunately the senile artist cannot correct the yellow tint of his lenses nor is he ever conscious of the gradual change in his perception of colour.115

The detailed connoisseurship of Morelli and the conventional colour harmonies of Liebreich reviled the dazzling, disorienting hues and tones of modern artists Seurat, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and the Fauves.116 But their legacy was not forgotten as modern art became the source of ophthalmological anxiety. Several ophthalmologists condemned contemporary painting as degenerate, and as a clear indication of the failure of eugenics to engineer biologically an



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advanced and advancing society.117 From their perspective modern artists were outlining all their objects with blue. Blue, from being cool and restraining was now being abused, spread about too much and made to do the work of line and form.118 In France, the Impressionists were accused of ‘violettomania’, of seeing too much in blue – theories substantiated by the work of the ophthalmologist Xavier Galezowski and Charcot’s notorious colour experiments with hysterical female patients in the 1880s.119 Well into the 1930s, ophthalmologists, using a loosely adapted version of ‘Liebreich’s Sign’, argued that: Colors, especially blue, are not seen correctly. A considerable percentage of painters have this type of vision…This is only to be expected, since few persons who use their eyes to such extremes as artists do escape some visual defect…If you recall some of the modern art you have looked at, you can see how well Dr. Mills’ explanation fits the pictures.120

Dr Loyd A. Mills argued this is caused by an over-reliance on peripheral or side vision. ‘Truly great art’ depends on ‘the use of side and central vision’.121 Although numerous artists, it was believed, were to be suffering from eye disorders, ophthalmologists remained optimistic that ‘the present spread of better visual hygiene will make the eye defects of the artist much less of a factor in his painting’.122 But still, pathological colour was not only the domain of the painter: it had a dramatic and dangerous effect on the viewer.123 Pathology had its own colour as the viewer faced the danger of being ‘contaminated’ by too much blue.124 Blue is used too much; blue was now being used to excite, to shock, to effect the place in painting perhaps more usually associated with the glare of red. But the Blue Flower of Romanticism already had its scientific counterpart – the red blooms of evolutionism. The Red Flower: Aesthetics, Colour Nomenclature and Evolutionism Red acts as the definitive, even indexical colour for exploring theories of evolution – theories which included anxieties over the colour blind, the status of artists and how and why colour existed in nature.125 From its reinvention as the aniline dye red fuschine in 1859 red became tremendously popular in fashion, art and science.126 The flash of a red feather in the hat of a society beauty not only spoke to the latest Parisian



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trends but it also engendered a certain displacement (or ultimate realisation) of evolutionary theories of attraction. Whilst colour was used, like pain, to demonstrate the subjectivity of individual experience, the use of colour words could be made a matter of public agreement; as such they participated in debates concerning the development of objectivity.127 Wittgenstein’s teacher Fregé insisted that the use of colour words rather than the experience of colour sensations must become a matter of universal consensus.128 The philologists /writers Lazarus Geiger and Hugo Magnus and the future British prime minister William E. Gladstone all variously assumed that the lexicalisation of the spectrum was based on physiological development: colour words acted as the reflex of the spectral stimulus thereby exhausting the definition of colour.129 The communicability of colour became intimately bound up with the tensions between physiology and material culture as is clearly seen in the writings of these three men.130 In 1867 Lazarus Geiger gave a lecture to the German Naturalists at Frankfurt am Main on ‘Colour Sense in Primitive Times and its Development’.131 Colour words he proposed were of two types – the most definite and recent derived from those objects which had a definite hue and which admitted to easy comparison – such terms he dubbed as ‘artificial’. Second, he investigated what he believed to be ‘natural’ colour words which had developed from extremities (for instance, light and dark). They were gradually transformed into more subtle designations in order to describe similar things of a less extreme character. Colour words were then a reflex to coloured stimulus. Geiger argued that there was no term for blue in Homer’s verse, the Bible, the Parsi Zendavasta, the Qur’an, the Edda or in the Rg. Veda. The Sanskrit word for blue nīl he believed derived from the word for the Nile and that the Nile the Greeks had called black. He argued that even in a later period Greeks and Romans confounded blue and violet with grey and brown, that Aristotle omitted blue from his description of the rainbow, whilst Xenophanes saw only purple, red and yellow. Geiger’s definition of the Colour Sense thus evolved from a vague general hue to red, yellow, lightness, green before finally reaching blue in certain advanced societies. In a similar vein, the William E. Gladstone had also chosen to focus on the ancient Greek use of colour nomenclature as part of his voluminous Studies in Homer and the Homeric Age (1858). Here he



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argued that Homer’s use of colour was slight in comparison with his many other vivid terms of description.132 In his reading of Homer, Gladstone identified only eight chromatic terms which he concluded to be compounds rather than terms for colour in the abstract.133 From Gladstone’s perspective, Homer never referred to colour in connection with the body except the hair; overall his Colour Sense relied primarily on comparisons between light (or brightness) and darkness – a view shared by Geiger.134 The reason for such paucity Gladstone construed could be discovered in ancient skin tones, the status of art in Homeric Greece and the lack of a chromatic logic, all of which are difficult for us moderns to comprehend: We must then seek for the basis of Homer’s system with respect to colour in something outside our own…The olive hue of the skin kept down the play of white and red…The art of painting was wholly, and that of dyeing was almost, unknown; and we may estimate the importance of this element of the case by recollecting how much, with the advance of chemistry, the taste of this country [Britain] in colour has improved within the last twenty years…It seems easy to comprehend that the eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the condition of its being able closely to appreciate any one among them.135

However, Gladstone did admit that there was enough archaeological evidence to reveal the ancient use of blue dye, lacquer, lapis lazuli and carbonate of copper – a position which inadvertently substantiates Owen Jones’ investigations beautifully laid out in the chromolithographs of ancient Greek, Persian and Egyptian design in The Grammar of Ornament. Gladstone’s argument that the proliferation of synthetic colours was improving the taste, vision and lexicon of colour advanced the notion that the modern Colour Sense was becoming far more nuanced and refined due to technological innovations.136 Here art played a critical role in the refinement of perception. In this way physiology, aesthetics and material culture colluded to produce the Colour Sense in its many shades of development. Such optimism was fiercely debated by his contemporaries – especially in relation to physiology’s close associations with evolution and race. As Barbara Saunders has argued, in the decade from the later 1870s colour and its relationship with culture and pathology became critical topics for intense scientific debate.137 Following a terrible train crash in Sweden in 1876 and the arrival of a group of Nubians in



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Berlin, the question of the existence of a racialised Colour Sense took on a new exigency and immediacy.138 The scientists and philologists Virchow, Krause, Kirchhoff and Magnus debated the relationship between evolution, physiology, vision and language. According to Kirchhoff and Virchow, the Nubians in Berlin best identified black, white, grey and red whilst blue and green were seen to be the same colour. They concluded that although these Africans could see colour they lacked a number of colour terms because they were largely indifferent to chromatics. Pushing these experiments further, Hugo Magnus identified an impressive acuity of vision on the part of primitive peoples which curiously did not extend to nuanced colour perception. This he put down to differences between the elementary capacity of a sense organ – that is, the perception of light divided from other possible functions which he termed Functionsäusserungen.139 Colour was associated with more advanced civilisational development. Magnus rejected Newton’s colour scale in favour of a theory of perception which he believed was closer to the ancient capacity to see through light richness – Lichtreichthum. This theory operated as a hierarchy of colours which began with what Magnus termed ‘colours of luminous intensity’ – red, yellow and orange – to be followed by colours of medium intensity – green – and colours of little intensity – violet and blue. The cause of the development of the Colour Sense corresponded with the prismatic order – that is, primary colours such as red are the richest in light content, which gradually fade to colours of less intensity.140 Sensitivity to colour he argued was the highest function of the retina; it required intense and refined activity.141 Evolution then had to be judged through the darker parts of the spectrum and not through colour harmonies. Magnus identified four stages of evolution which he classified from the lowest to the highest – red; red divided from yellow; green; blue and violet. His physiological explanation was that over the ages primitive peoples living in hot climates had been far more exposed to light than Western Europeans and this had altered their retinas. This claim he substantiated in his interpretation of the Sanskrit epic the Rg. Veda – a text which he believed to be dominated by red and white thus complementing Gladstone’s interpretation of Homer’s verse as lacking the terms for brightness, purple and black.142 Magnus argued



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on the basis of philological ‘evidence’ that the ancient peoples who had produced the Rg. Veda, the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric epics, could distinguish only the brightest colours of red and yellow while darker tones at the other end of the spectrum – blue, violet and green were perceived as an undifferentiated dark hue. Magnus’s research shows no awareness of the famed archaeologist Rajendralal Mitra’s contemporaneous discussion of colour in relation to ancient Hindu temple sculptures in Orissa.143 Focusing on the symbolism of colour in dress and manners and customs, Mitra concluded that in ancient Sanskrit poetry fair women dressed in blue were: often compared to a dark cloud relieved by the lightning flashes of beauty. No rules, however, appear to have been laid down for the use of distinctive colours by householders…in India no colour, or combination of colours, seems to have been forbidden to any one class or individual from the highest to the lowest. In the total absence of old paintings, it is, however, impossible to obtain any evidence on the subject from ancient remains.144

Although Mitra’s investigations were vehemently attacked by British archaeologist James Fergusson, his nuanced work found a parallel in the scholarship of Edward Hopkins at this time. In contrast with Magnus, Hopkins’s analysis of colour terms in the Rg. Veda argued for the reoccurrence of blue (nīla) as a compound term in a range of contexts, whilst pointing out that in Milton’s Paradise Lost the adjective blue is found only once:145 That the sky is not called blue nor the fields green rests on reasons which have nothing to do with the development of the retina … the cause of the apparently inexact employment of words lies in the variable and uncertain color of the objects to which the color terms are applied.146

Nevertheless, the arguments of Gladstone, Geiger and Magnus, coupled with the use of mass-produced and synthetically dyed swatches, became standard anthropological equipment for testing the tensions between racial perceptions of colour in terms of a limited vocabulary that discriminated against the presence of blue. Their ideas were, however, contested by Alan Cunningham who argued that much ancient Egyptian art employed bright colours (the case for this had previously been made by Owen Jones in his discussion of The Grammar of Ornament) and that modern Polynesian art on display in the Ethnological Room of



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the British Museum showed a clear use of blue and green. He made the case that Homer really had no need to use colour terms and that their absence had nothing to do with defective perception. Here material culture, utility and disinterestedness came to the rescue of ancient and primitive colour.147 Precisely because Hugo Magnus maintained that colour organised the human faculty of vision, he devised a project which would confirm or at least test his own theories. In 1880, at the request of Dr PeschuelLosche he dispatched over 60 questionnaires and colour charts to all five continents in order to investigate the pivotal importance of colour to race and evolution.148 So as to organise the questionnaire into manageable terms, he focused his inquiry on the cultural nomenclature for white, black, red, green, yellow, brown, purple, orange and grey, while omitting blue altogether. A ‘chromatic’ evolutionism should be the key to unlocking human genealogies. Peoples of the same nation or tribe should examine a scale of colours so as to ascertain whether they could differentiate between hues and bright or dull colours; the whole scale must be viewed first and then colours perceived in isolation by covering up the other colours. This experiment should be repeated as often as possible. The subjects of each nation/tribe were also to be asked if they had a general, abstracting word for colour and whether this constituted an indigenous word or whether it was derived from other languages – that is, perhaps it was a ‘pidgin’, creole or hybrid term (such as ‘fetish’) resulting from trade or religious encounters. In relation to pattern, people were required to identify words for ‘striped’, ‘dotted’, ‘speckled’, ‘spotted’ as well as being quizzed on their awareness of terms for ‘light’, ‘dark’, ‘bright’ or ‘shining’. Magnus concluded that in most societies colour as an abstract concept hardly exists; while most people could identify long-wave colours (reds), in 35 of the 61 completed questionnaires short-wave colours exemplified by blue could neither be seen nor named. He concluded that blue and green were most often confused; the naming of blue marked a higher level of civilisation whilst colour awareness could not be measured in the terms of chromatic nomenclature. Although in the societies studied colour naming was evidently patchy, Magnus conceded that all of the peoples tested did demonstrate an awareness of colour. Colour thus seemed to be a universal.



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All of this data Magnus aimed to standardise in a four-page questionnaire which concluded by addressing the issue of the colonial civilising mission, its potential and effects: ‘has the man or woman been or could be improved by foreign influences?’ Like the mirror, colour then becomes a potential tool for examining ‘native’ self-awareness and its various stages of reflexivity. In spite of this provocative endnote Magnus’s questionnaires were themselves very limited and limiting in their areas of inquiry and in their chromatics. The choice of colours negated what artists had long identified as critical tertiary shades in the production of colour harmonies, depth and perspective. Even Magnus had to admit to the failure of this experiment precisely because colour terms could not clearly determine colour perception: there would always be an enigmatic discrepancy. On the basis of the questionnaire results he concluded that there existed a lack of words for abstract colour amongst many ethnic groups and that terms for long-wave colours were more advanced. Red, as a long-wave colour, was the most sophisticated in its varied nomenclature while bluegreen constituted the most frequent compound. He reported that colour was by many ethnic groups frequently identified with form, surface or pattern (the last finding is not surprising given its presence as a question in his project).149 This emphasis on materiality (advanced as much by the questionnaire as by the results) usually meant the absence of abstract colour terms. In relation to materiality, colour assumed a kind of semiotic and affective camouflage. By this I mean it tended to slip through the discursive net into the elusive, figural world of things.150 Magnus refuted the scientist/writer Grant Allen’s speculation on the evolution of the Colour Sense in animals and he criticised Allen’s own use of a questionnaire which he believed lacked systematic chromatic description.151 Nevertheless, Allen’s work had a tremendous impact on the international scientific community. He tapped into the growing belief that an independent Colour Sense existed not only in humans but also in animals, insects and possibly in plants.152 He paid close attention to the relationship between evolutionism, colour and aesthetics and he opened his tour de force, The Colour Sense (1879), with a quote from Ruskin which alludes to the elusive, subjective and physiological nature of taste: ‘Why we receive pleasure from some forms and not from others



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is no more to be asked or answered than why we like sugar and dislike wormwood.’153 Dismissing Ruskin’s view on the God-given status of beauty, Allen swiftly turned to an evocative citation from Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) to show that the aesthetic sense was located not in art but in nature: No doubt the perceptive powers of man and the lower animals are so constituted that brilliant colours and certain forms as well as harmonies and rhythms give pleasure and are called beautiful; but why this should be so, we know no more than why certain bodily sensations are agreeable and others disagreeable.154

Grant aimed to explore and to analyse the causal relationship between pleasure and pain, likes and dislikes, in relation to natural selection and to situate his work in relation to Herbert Spencer’s ‘Aestho-Physiology’ which sought to explain aesthetic feelings as constant subjective counterparts to nervous states.155 Like Helmholtz, whose Handbook of Physiological Optics he used extensively, Allen wanted to fashion a physiological basis for aesthetics and to demystify its esoteric, elevated relationship with the persona of the privileged aesthete – exemplified by Ruskin.156 In contrast with this rarefied position, the ubiquitous presence of an aesthetic sense he believed to be stridently indicated by the taste for colour which ‘delights the child and the savage’.157 Colour best demonstrates the existence of a purely physical origin for the sense of beauty whereby aesthetic feelings are the intermediary links between bodily senses and higher emotions. This is illustrated by how the tissues and the senses respond to pain as stimulated by: Masses of bright colour, monotony of hue…the vulgar are pleased by great masses of colour, especially red, orange, and purple, which give their coarse nervous organisation the requisite stimulus: the refined, with nerves of less calibre but greater discriminativeness, require delicate combinations of complementaries, and prefer neutral tints to the glare of primary hues…Compare an Egyptian painting, staring in red, green, and yellow, with a water-colour by David Cox…each has its own circle of admirers.158

As opposed to the grey haze which plagues city life, Allen advocated the pleasure of novelty and pungency in the strong imitation of the analytic colours – red, blue, yellow, orange, green and purple – in ways reminiscent of Field’s scale of chromatic equivalents and Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament.159 This desire for colour harmony he believed to be universal. It privileged the principle of symmetry – especially present in the natural forms of shells, corals, seeds or crystals. Symmetry furnished Allen with



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a ground for ornamentation which gradually developed in evolution to include a use of pigment which had been initially employed in the form of equal-sized stripes of red, green and yellow.160 In this primitive usage, colour had to be carefully controlled and used with a rigorous caution which implies the danger of its vitalising excess. If colour as a potent, optical stimulus is excessive it will result in physiological fatigue – a condition which Allen blamed on the uneven gratification given by certain hues – even those found in nature:161 ‘Only an occasional flower…yields us [the bearable experience of ] crimson, purple or orange’ because the eye is more capable of prolonged stimulation gleaned from green and blue surfaces.162 Green and blue are far less pleasurable than hotter hues precisely because they are so common in nature and hence they do not excite rarely used nerves. Allen assigned red to weaker nerve fibres than those of violet. These weaker nerves rapidly fatigue the organs and they must be relieved by other tints.163 Due to this physiological excitement Allen claimed that the presence of red was vital for sexual attraction and reproduction: ‘one need think only of the cherry lips, rosy cheeks, blue eyes and golden hair of our Aryan maidens.’164 Aside from this obvious racialising fetishisation of whiteness, the blush and the anticipated kiss define this intensely corporeal aesthetics. Red, as in the case of Pygmalion or female portraiture, seemingly brings the figure to life. Red best demonstrates the analogy between the partial distribution of colour in the environment; it is caught in the peripheral portion of the retina where it cannot be seen.165 In spite of being a veritable blind spot coupled with its association with the ephemeral glistening of Western beauty, Allen eulogises, elsewhere in the world red-as-rarity possesses a material obduracy that only augments its status: Hence the value attached to any bright-coloured object which permanently retains its tints. While roses and peonies, starfish and sea-anemones, soon fade away and become positively unpleasant, shells, feathers, pebbles, pearls, and seeds are prized as personal decorations. The precious metals delight the savage eye by their glitter; and it is a curious thought that the commerce of the civilized world is still carried on by bartering the shining baubles which once hung round the necks of barbarian chiefs.166

Curiously, given this concern with permanent objects whose colour does not fade, Allen claims that the ‘emotional life of savages is chiefly



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confined to the present’ without a sense of History and certainly not of evolution.167 Their chromotopia only becomes chronotopic when these bright things are subsumed within a Western capitalist economy. In spite of this dismissal of the futures-past of non-Western societies, according to Allen ‘savage taste’ is not merely an anomaly or a mere example of colour, it is also the standard for measuring the intrinsic beauty of colours.168 This standard perhaps paradoxically provides the teleological origin and gauge for measuring the evolution of art. According to Allen, contemporary art has its genealogy in ancient savage experiments with colour; without these we would not have achieved such greatness: The earliest attempts of the savage are devoid of any care for harmony of colour… Beyond bright and striking hues, the mere pleasure of successful imitation is all that he prizes…A step higher up, Egyptian art delights in the powerful and unusual stimulation of the analytic colours, but does not attempt harmony, shading, or tone…A step above this we may interpolate Chinese art, whose line of development was unconnected with the West. This gives us much improvement in colouring and shading … but the emotions aroused are usually low … The Japanese arrange brilliant colours in very effective combinations…classical painting shows us an enormous advance over all that preceded it with that marvellous rapidity which characterizes the whole growth of Hellenic culture. In it we get a sudden yet traceable transition from simple imitative painting to aesthetic art…[until] the gradual decline of Byzantine art – with its recurrence to primary colours.169

Curiously, given the debates over polychromy in the previous four decades, Allen ignores the presence of colour in sculpture, claiming that the ‘optical consciousness’ can only attend to form or hue and not to both which makes chromatic plasticity almost oxymoronic, or at least not intellectually relevant.170 Allen’s The Colour Sense participated in the (anti-)Darwinian debate concerning the status of colour in relation to life, sex, camouflage and survival.171 In his book, Natural Selection in Tropical Nature (1891), the scientist Arthur Wallace examined ‘mimicry and other protective resemblances among animals’ to argue that the most assimilative hues had been developed by insects who could even take the form and colours of other insects.172 This capacity for mimicry relied on instinct, which Wallace defined as a disposition operating without aid of instruction or experience but which could become habitual.173 His thesis is highly critical of Darwin’s argument which had staged



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colour primarily in relation to sexual selection as seen in the plumage of brightly coloured male birds and the glistening bodies and wings of insects.174 Wallace’s case against Darwin is easily made through reference to the proliferation of female insects which are far more brightly coloured than their male counterparts.175 The selection of a mate by the female is not then the primary source of colour. Rather colours are fixed or modified by natural selection for various purposes – the most critical being the fundamental need for protection through chromatic camouflage. Wallace dismissed Allen, Magnus, Gladstone and Geiger’s various theories of Colour Sense and their reliance on black and red in favour of a focus on blue and green as the original colours to be found in nature.176 The drive for survival derives from the nuanced hues of plants, trees, rivers and the sky. It is only at a far more advanced evolutionary stage that recognition begins to play a critical role in the (re)production of life.177 With Wallace’s argument in mind, Grant Allen revised and extended his own position on the Colour Sense.178 Against Wallace, Allen shifted the focus of the debate from biology and philology to aesthetics and comparative psychology. The existence of bright colour he believed to be due to the potency of the Colour Sense in the animal kingdom. The Colour Sense derives from the basic ability to discriminate between light waves at different rates of frequency as conveyed through aether. Aether is present wherever there is an absence of matter (a position already advocated by Helmholtz and von Bezold). Aether transmits undulations from a centre of disturbance.179 Objects have a molecular constitution that they select from the waves which fall upon them, which in the organic world are mostly constituted from pure hues.180 Unlike Wallace, Allen approached the question of the cumulative sense of colour across the animal and insect world in such a way as would ultimately endorse the key aspects of Darwin’s argument.181 This accumulative method focused on the chameleon and the way in which reflexion was connected with the optic nerve so as to produce a variety of mimetic resemblances which animals/birds/insects could use to fool their predators. Pushing Darwin and Wallace’s arguments further, Allen conjectured that the Colour Sense was weaker in higher animals because very few ate or depended on flowers and fruits:



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the want of close relations with the coloured parts of plants has probably resulted in a want of any peculiar love for bright colour, such as we see reason to suspect in the butterflies, humming-birds, and parrots. This absence of a taste for brilliancy is probably marked by the absence of brilliant hues in the animals themselves, the result of sexual selection; for these hues … only appear among the mammalia in a few higher arboreal and frugivorous species, such as the mandrill and certain squirrels.182

Aside from colour’s evolution through food and habit, Allen plucked an evocative phrase from the second volume of Darwin’s Descent of Man which indicated the existence of a disinterested love of colour and a sense of beauty in its simplest form: ‘the reception of a peculiar kind of pleasure from certain colours, forms and sounds’ which, however, is still a ‘very obscure subject’.183 Darwin believed that beauty was the effect of natural selection and that colour had to be understood as a contrivance to ensure survival. His implied reduction of beauty to the stimulation of mere visual pleasure clearly had its critics in the artistic and scientific communities. Allen, with his interest in aestho-psychology, expands upon Darwin’s thesis to conjecture that the love of colour is founded upon the natural food of various species which was then transferred to the choice of mates, moving higher up the scale of evolution which he articulated in an almost breathless chain of production:184 Insects produce flowers. Flowers produce the colour-sense in insects. The coloursense produces a taste for colour. The taste for colour produces butterflies and brilliant beetles. Birds and mammals produce fruits. Fruits produce a taste for colour in birds and mammals. The taste for colour produces the external hues of humming-birds, parrots, and monkeys. Man’s frugivorous ancestry produces in him a similar taste; and that taste produces the final result of human chromatic arts.185

And this involved the development of colours per se. He believed that the first pigments were in fact the waste products of organs most apparent in the smallest – that is, the brightest-coloured – creatures. In relation to the development of the Colour Sense in man, Allen rejected the findings of Gladstone which were founded on the basis of absolute colour blindness in primitive culture a mere 3,000 years ago to argue that the world had indeed once been colourless and constituted by undifferentiated hues but through the hues of flowers and their unconscious selection by insects, colour had come to be perceived as an essential component of survival.186 By the time man had evolved, the Colour Sense had already many purposes – which were still developing



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across the globe. Allen decided to test his hypothesis that the Colour Sense is fundamentally the same in all humans living today by sending a questionnaire to as many countries as possible. Targeted primarily at Europe’s colonies, this circular letter addressed questions of colour in relation to race, the ability to distinguish blue from green and blue from violet, the capacity to see intermediate colours such as mauve or lilac, colour nomenclature and the number of colours in a rainbow.187 A section of the questionnaire focused on pigments in relation to their use, their names and the discrepancy between colour terms and pigments. To facilitate the examination, Allen dispatched copies of Dr Stilling’s Tables for the Examination of the Colour Sense, as well as stressing the primacy of artistic and material culture: ‘the mere inspection of the works of art and especially of their imitative paintings clearly shows that they [all the peoples tested] perceive and represent external objects of the same hue as ourselves.’188 The results demonstrate that in spite of variations in the perception, the facture and the nomenclature of colour, certain constants emerge – especially the presence of blue. With the exception of Australian Aborigines and the Andamanese who Allen dismissed as ‘wild half human’ and the ‘lowest species of the human race’, the difference between blue-green terms or their application as body paint, tattooes, glass work, textile dyeing and nomenclature could be seen not only amongst contemporary peoples from Samoa, North America, Peru, Jamaica, Africa, India and New Guinea but also amongst the artefacts of Bronze Age ‘savages’ in Europe and ancient Egyptians. The findings of the questionnaire also indicate relatively nuanced investigations on the part of the informants who clearly differentiated between the tasks of perceiving and naming colour in conjunction with the evidence of material culture. For instance, the response of Adarji Jivaji, Deputy Collector at Maldha, India, recorded that although the Chandras, Gamtas, Dublas and Bhils peoples could perceive blue, green and violet they possessed no separate names for such colours.189 In conclusion, Allen argued that colour theory was relative to each culture; it was not based on chronological development, and for thousands of years colour had been used by humans as it is now.190 However, his subsequent discussion in The Colour Sense contradicts these findings. It is as if Allen’s commitment to evolutionism was too



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deeply embedded to be entirely abandoned.191 Evolution has its own teleology of lustre and colour. In terms of lustre, it gradually diminishes from fire, to torch light, to a taste for gilding and gems – the last containing the residue of animals’ response to flames. Developing an argument made in his earlier research, Allen returned to the evolution of an aesthetic sense of colour which he ultimately located in many species’ taste for fruits which had gradually been transferred to flowers, shells, corals and crystals to the eventual invention of pigments – which evolved from ochre to chalk and charcoal applied to hair and body, to vegetable juices (such as indigo), to mixed pigments, to dyeing and painting.192 In a nutshell, the colours of the objets trouvés that the primitive man plucks from nature are usurped by his advancing aesthetic sense as ‘the mere passive stage of aesthetics enters the active career of the artist’.193 The development of pigments was for Allen systematic. First, people of all ages and cultures discovered ochre and chalk before employing vegetable juices and then they developed dyes for cloths. Finally they became fascinated with colour for its own materiality – which took the form of pigments. Pigments in and of themselves had the power to revolutionise the environment.194 Allen ardently believed that a large proportion of modern, ancient and ‘primitive’ colour terms derived from pigments to such a degree that when and where ‘man comes to employ a pigment the name of the pigment will easily glide into an adjectival sense’.195 Although Allen advocated that colour application became more balanced the more it was refined over time, ‘all art decorative or imitative retains to the last something of its original character as a direct stimulant of simple, chromatic pleasure’.196 Pigment became highly valued across all cultures because it increased the availability and number of coloured objects in the world. Colour now needed to be refined and transported to a higher state of civilisation via ‘transference’: From the red ochre and brilliant feathers of the naked Andamanese, up to the paintings and decorations of European palaces, we can trace its gradual development from stage to stage, becoming more and more divorced from lifeserving function…until at last the aesthetic sentiment claims to rank with the moral feelings among the most disinterested elements of our nature…The final step, it seems to me, is taken, when we arrive at the pure love of colour in nature for its own sake…the crimson and golden hues of evening.197



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Allen advocates a disinterested love of colour which must be elevated, associated with morality and located in – but which transcends or at least sublimates the survival tactics associated with – the natural world. Whilst the earliest aesthetic objects excite the whole nervous organisation of the human sensorium, the more nuanced evolutionary developments required the milder stimulation of analytic colours. Analytic hues – supposedly disinterested and elevated, are the same ‘crass’, synthetic anilines condemned by colonialists and the Arts and Crafts Movement. Allen then attempted to discover universal colour preferences. Strangely again this meant abandoning the evidence of his outsourced questionnaires. Red and orange are decidedly more pleasurable than blue or green and this is because the former force us to be alert to those possible food or sources of danger which stimulate the nerves. Here Allen concurred with Gladstone and Geiger that red once appealed to and still appeals to the earliest and least aesthetically developed presentday races and social groups. The reason he gives is the prevalence of red ochre which he believed to be the commonest and the most easily attainable pigment.198 But yet again the other to red is blue. Where sources of blue are accessible for decoration its use is exceedingly common: Welsh woad, Polynesian tattoos and Indian indigo are the most obvious examples. All other colours are intermediaries between red and blue.199 For Allen, red was the first colour term to evolve, which perhaps is not surprising given its intimate linkage with ochre and the fact that for him all language derives from concrete objects. To reiterate this point, Allen stressed that most colour terms derive from dyes which has allowed for the evolution of adjectival and abstract nomenclature. Colour then is essential to and predates language. It is not merely some by-product to be inferred through interpretations of Homer et al. – it is the becoming of being in the world. Against Gladstone, Magnus and Geiger, Allen stressed that the second colour term to develop was blue. The term blue he conjectured had also once been applied to green, which in archaic societies had yet to be named. The reason why green had no name was because it had little usage as a pigment.200 Although he is unclear about how other colours developed after blue, Allen anticipates a future awash with new exciting experiences due to dyes, ‘which are welling up within us ever nearer towards the perfect day!’ to form a synthetic



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rainbow which will attune taste across the globe. The more colours that proliferate in the world the higher are the aspirations for intellectual excellence as colour constitutes the globalising force driving the engine of civilisation. Civilisation is motivated by a phenomenology which relies on paints that in themselves make History and teleology possible. The Burning Flower Returns This blue flower is red! Gaston Bachelard The sudden flash of a scarlet flower. Havelock Ellis

For the famous and prolific late nineteenth-century social commentator Havelock Ellis, red is fascinating in every way.201 Red rays give life to all Nature: The vision of poppies on a background of golden corn, the glint of roses embowered in green leaves, the sudden flash of a scarlet flower on a southern woman’s dark hair – it is in such visions as these that red gives us its emotional thrill altogether untouched by pain … A meadow, it has been justly said, is a vast field of tongues of fire greedily licking up the red rays and vomiting forth the poisonous bile of blue and yellow.202

Red rays heal skin diseases such as smallpox which is treated by placing patients in red-painted or red-lit rooms. Red can cure measles by means of coloured blinds or via the rays in the photographic lamp; red ensures that there will be few scars. Red can act positively on nervous disorders although Ellis concedes that the mental effects of different colours are still largely unknown.203 Red ochre is a blood substitute in Australia and the Central Indian hills.204 Citing colonial official William Crooke, Ellis links red with sexuality in Bengal where tribal groups take blood from the husband’s little finger which when mixed with betel is eaten by the bride.205 The ubiquitous, evolutionary and sacrificial power of red Ellis sought to prove by recourse to a gruesome little experiment. He cut off the head and tail of a worm: still the worm preferred red to blue as it had done



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before it was ‘injured’.206 But the ultimate laboratory test should be on the most famous source of living red pigment – the cochineal beetle. Ellis plucked out its eyes and covered its glands with wax; in spite of this the cochineal still demonstrated a delicate sense in relation to colour and brightness.207 So red, alive, dead, or more aptly somewhere in-between, is violent and dangerous in its allure, which is clearly not confined to vision. These influences Ellis argued we must attribute to the disturbing nature of the emotion aroused by the group of red sensations and the fluctuations in the predilection felt towards it. Red is at once the most attractive and the most repulsive of colours.208 Red may bring out the congealed life in petrified objects to be potentially contagious and sacred but if the ‘sky were scarlet or all the vegetation crimson, the horror of the world would be painful to contemplate for nervous systems moulded to our vision of nature’.209 Red then attests to the complexity of our visual regime – to the tensions between the conditions of objectivity and to the drive for the momentary, the glimpse associated with speed, desire, even with distraction. Red as blue, blue as red. For Ellis, blue can only flourish as the loveliest of colours in northern, cloudy skies, to be a colour patch the size of a ‘cat’s pair of trousers’.210 For Grant Allen, the colour blue embodies the theory of transference. Blue comes into play at the vital stage of evolutionary production which he explains through the evidence of pigments and language. As the embodiment of transference, blue remains elusive as both hue and metaphor for the (in)decipherability of colour: ‘Whatever the sensation or mental idea, blue, as perceived or thought of as a butterfly or a humming bird, is the same in consciousness with the sensation or mental idea blue as perceived or thought of by you and me [which] we can never know.’211



3

Part 2: Creole Laboratory: Anthropology and Affect in the Torres Strait

Imagine a tribe of colour-blind people, and there could easily be one. They would not have the same colour concepts as we do. For even assuming they speak, e.g. English, and thus have all the English colour words, they would still use them differently. Ludwig Wittgenstein, ‘Remarks on Colour’

In the early ‘draft’ for his Philosophical Investigations, The Blue Book, Wittgenstein takes to task the calculus of language. To satisfy our craving for generality he invoked Galton’s composite photographs which had acted as the shock to thought for eugenics. Aside from this interest in ‘family resemblances’ Wittgenstein makes a subtle ploy to play on the validity of colour tests: There is one way of avoiding at least partly the occult appearance of the processes of thinking, and it is, to replace in these processes any working of the imagination by acts of looking at real objects. Thus it may seem essential that, at least in certain cases, when I hear the word ‘red’ with understanding, a red image should be before my mind’s eye. But why should I not substitute seeing a red bit of paper for imaging a red patch?…Imagine a man always carrying a sheet of paper in his pocket on which the names of colours are co-ordinated with coloured patches. You may say that it would be a nuisance to carry such a table of samples about with you…We could perfectly well, for our purpose, replace every process of imaging by a process of looking at an object or by painting.1

Does painting and even the colour patch allow us to learn something totally new? Elsewhere Wittgenstein explores the impossibility of translating colour words from different experiences to test the limits of language: ‘in every serious philosophical question uncertainty extends to the very roots of the problem, we must always be prepared to learn something totally new.’2 His desire to discover something totally new entails a critique of contemporary colour theories in art and science and their entanglement with empire.3 For Wittgenstein, puzzle propositions in relation to the colour problem are central to philosophy. Colour negotiates intimately 179



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with propositions, mathematics, psychology, music and logic. Ultimately colour is for him (as it had been very differently for Goethe) resistant to theory. It cannot be seen as merely abstract or as a primary phenomenon; the conditions of transparency, saturation and effects of different media all have a critical role to play. Colour is so elusive and contingent that it frequently must take refuge as camouflage. In Philosophical Grammar Wittgenstein addresses the complexity of arranging colours into a logical order: how can colour sensations be ordered or recorded when there is always a borderline between normative rules and experience? Can there be a logic of colour concepts? Suppose it is the word ‘red’ and I say automatically that I understood it; then he asks again ‘do you really understand it?’ Then I summon up a red image in my mind as a kind of check. But how do I know that it’s the right colour that appears to me? And yet I say now with full conviction that I understand it. – But I might also look at a colour chart with the word ‘red’ written beneath the colour. – I could carry on for ever describing such processes.4

One answer for Wittgenstein was to reject the primaries and the spectrum in favour of a more expansive notion of colour concepts that takes into account the barely perceptible and ineffable which defy normative representation in painting and science. For instance, at twilight colours become difficult to distinguish; they cannot be compared as they exist solely in the mind which turns them into abstractions. Or colour works the other way through its association with saturation: ‘that must be an alpine [blue?] flower because its colour is so intense.’5 Hence colours for Wittgenstein exist in the active mind neither in the ‘passive’ organ of sight nor in an objective medium. He wants nonetheless a nuanced sense of colours’ world which he sees as determined by ‘kinship and contrast. And that is logic’.6 His exploration of colour takes the form of a coloured pathway through sensations which becomes a kind of language game or Sprachspiel which is intended as a move back to ‘childish’ or ‘primitive’ patterns of thinking: it represents a step towards a primary philosophy of colour which means forgetting about systems and nomenclature: In a greenish yellow I don’t notice anything blue. – For me, green is one special way-station on the coloured path from blue to yellow, and red is another…What advantage would someone have over me who knew a direct route from blue to yellow? And what shows that I don’t know such a path? – Does everything depend on my range of possible language-games with the form ‘…ish’?7



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‘Ish’ invites a certain play for language games but also demonstrates the absolute individuality of sensation: consensus is nil. Mastery over one colour game does not engender comprehension of another – which includes cultural alterity: ‘can’t we imagine certain people having a different geometry of colour than we do?’8 For Wittgenstein colour for all its play can be threatening; as affect it has the potential to feel like a qualitative overspill, an excess that escapes the knowable, manageable subject. It exposes how affect becomes disruptive relationality, that colour perception is an everunfolding relation. Affect which disrupts opposition between self and world, thus allowing people to see how they are in and of the world through the opening up of processal, indescribable rhythms of being, is perhaps intriguing for an erudite like Wittgenstein but threatening for anthropologists and scientists. Affect warns that politics become most intensive and most fateful at those junctures where micropolitics and macropolitics intersect – as seen in the case of Rivers’ research in the Torres Strait. Trained as a medical doctor W. H. R. Rivers had already published on the structure of the eye and colour blindness in Britain before embarking on the Torres Strait expedition in 1898.9 He engaged closely with the older generation’s takes on colour including the scholarship of Magnus, Geiger and Holmgren while exhaustively collecting as many articles on colour vision as possible.10 He also looked to the evolutionary theories of Spencer and Galton: the former advanced a hypothesis which proposed that primitive peoples surpassed the civilised in their psychological performance because more energy remained at this level rather than being channelled to higher faculties.11 Having lectured at Cambridge on physiology from 1893, in 1897 Rivers was appointed as the director of the first experimental psychological laboratory – which put him a strong position to be chosen for Haddon’s second expedition to the Torres Strait (April to October 1898).12 Haddon selected six scientists, including Rivers, to undertake extensive anthropological and psychological fieldwork on the islands of Mabuiag and Mer where they would investigate physical anthropology, customs, art, physiology, psychology, material culture, languages, indigenous medicine and genealogy, using the latest technologies of Ives and Joly’s handheld series B camera, film, colour photography, the



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phonograph, the colour wheel and colour discs, and so on – technologies which were put to work with varying degrees of success.13 As seen in his personal papers, throughout his career Rivers maintained an active interest in the physiology of colour.14 Named after the Spanish navigator Luis Boes de Torres, the Torres Strait had by the later nineteenth century not only become a strategic trading passage but also the much vaunted source of tortoise shell, beche du mer and pearls. Coming under the colonial government of Queensland in 1879, this extensive group of islands was already in the process of being missionised – which meant the widespread suppression of customs and the enforcement of European dress and education.15 The indigenous population was restricted in its movement by the colonial government which imposed an economy driven by rice, flour, sugar and tobacco production. Run by various evangelical groups as petty theocracies (which condemned the locals as ‘grown-up children’), the inhabitants of the Torres Strait were harshly disciplined and punished; their heads were heads shaved, they were flogged and put in the stocks whilst their religious images were either burnt or sent to the London Missionary Society (LMS) Museum in London.16 Nonetheless, the Meriam did resist by attacking the missionaries’ livestock whilst as far as possible taking their religious practices underground.17 Part of the Cambridge expedition’s inquiries into vanishing customs thus had to be conducted in secret away from prying missionary eyes although Haddon admitted that already many customs ‘can never be recovered’.18 Although Rivers would assure his readers that the people chosen for testing had come under the ‘mollifying influence of the official and the missionary’ so that they would ‘not fear or be offended by inquiry into their customs’ according to one review of the published Reports Vol.II, Physiology and Psychology: The story was circulated that the black man could see and hear better than the white man, and that the white man had come to see whether this was so and would record the results in a big book for all to read. An over-zealous native, in impressing the necessity of truthfulness in answering the questions asked, had hinted that Queen Victoria would send a man-of-war to punish those who told lies, and so frightened off a group of subjects altogether.19

Most of Rivers’ data derived from his experience in Murray Island where he spent four months working in a small laboratory set up in a disused



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missionary house – a space which could hardly fulfil the stipulations for the ideal, three-storey psychological laboratory as formulated by the famous scientist E. B. Titchener.20 Rivers’ project was to examine vision through the lenses of colour in relation to the peripheral retina, binocular sight, visual illusions, its interaction with the other senses, especially ‘tactile acuity’, in addition to vision’s relationship with drawing and writing. Trying to combine principles from the opposing theories of Hering and Helmholtz, Rivers’ approach was remarkably synthetic, even synaesthetic. Haddon’s team had chosen Murray Island because it had been ‘missionized’ by the LMS since 1871 whilst being directly administered by the colonial Australian government of Queensland. The younger people spoke pidgin English and they seemed to Haddon and Rivers to be amenable to gifts of sweets and tobacco so much so that Rivers recorded that most of his visual experiments were conducted under the conditions and effects of tobacco. In Britain it was widely believed by scientists that tobacco damaged vision and that it could lead to colour blindness – which is here displaced to the processes of colonisation.21 So it is somewhat ironic, perhaps even sinister, that these early anthropologist/ scientists so concerned with simulating certain laboratory conditions in the colony used tobacco as the ‘bribe’ for the individuals they wished to test. The missionised people and the makeshift laboratory were thus both disjunctively creole. Rivers had great difficulty in getting his human subjects to commit to his designated appointments for field interviews which, following Galton’s research, should ideally be half an hour each. Sometimes his subjects did not show up; they refused more than a summary interview or the whole process could take up to three days which obviously slowed down or even impeded Rivers’ desire for as much information as possible. Rivers made an investigation of the Colour Sense of two tribes of Papuans in the east and west isles and on the island of Kiwai as well as Australian tribes on the east shore of the gulf of Carpentoria. He used Holmgren’s wools, Rothe’s papers and the tintometer as well as attempting to discover terms for ‘colour’ and he collected objects which were either brightly coloured or which could be associated with colour names such as bam tumeric.22 During the physio-psychological tests he hoped that the tone and hue of the coloured glasses, papers and wools



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would speak for themselves: ‘care was taken to avoid the names of the colours as possible till after the matching was completed.’23 On Mer he admitted that he had much trouble in discovering an ‘abstract term for colour’, the nearest being the suffix gimgam which he believed to be similar to the term gamul used by the western tribes on Mabuiag.24 Rivers was alarmed to find that ‘even in so simple a matter as colour nomenclature, native knowledge is being lost’ – especially in the case of missionised women.25 He puzzled over the term akòsakòs which he conceived to be blue or brown or dull or faint and to tally to a particular glass in the tintometer. Part-coloured objects he believed to be termed warowar – which Rivers interpreted as marks or writing.26 He also associated words for big, little, good and bad with brightness; zoromzorom signified glittering whilst sunursunur connoted lighter skin – including his own pallidity.27 Overall he sought to link an aesthetic sense with the Colour Sense which could be gauged through the perception (or not) of Nature: There is, however, one striking difference between the English language and those of Torres Straits…Objects which might have attracted attention on account of their beauty seldom seem to form the basis of colour names. In Murray Island only one of the names used, zomkolberkolber, was derived from the name of a flower; while of the large number given to me in Mabuiag not one was derived from the name of a flower.28

According to his research, several of the people from the gulf of Carpentoria had only three colour epithets which he described as broadly covering red, purple and orange – oti; white, yellow and green – yopa; black blue, indigo and violet – manara. He identified the next cultural stage (he avoids the term evolutionary) as being the peoples of Kiwai who he believed had a very definite term for red but not so for yellow: the brilliant blue of the sky had the same name as black. Rivers worked most intensively on Murray Island where he recorded the very definite name for red, mamamamam, and two definite names for orange and yellow (bambam, mairmair) but blue proved far more problematic as it was characterised by ‘great indefiniteness’.29 But was blue really so elusive? On Mer, deep sea and the sky shared variations on two colour terms – golegole black, or bulu-bulu – which may have been adapted phonetically from imported pigments that were ‘blue’. This recourse to a pidgin version of blue reappears throughout



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Rivers’ work in the Pacific. Drawing on the findings of numerous other scientists he conceded that the terms for blue in New Zealand, Africa and Sumatra were borrowed from European languages which might indicate faulty perception.30 He believed that blue and black were commonly confused across the Torres Strait, Melanesia, Tanna, South Africa, Madagascar, the Nilgiri Hills, southern India, Borneo, Gabon, Egypt, amongst the Nubians, the people of Gabon and the Chinook.31 In spite of this seemingly almost ‘universalist’ problematic, the lists of words prepared by Ray and Rivers contain a disproportionate amount of terms for blue. On Mer indigo and blue are called golegole, suserisuseri, gaugaus, giazgiaz, lulam gimgam and soskepusoskep. On Mabuaig the terms buiad gamul, buradenga, gabauiad-gamul, gainad-gamul, giad-gamul, iadgamul, inured, kubi-budad, kubikimad-gamul, mauld-gamul muru-gamul and wibad-gamul were among those recorded for blue, blue-black, bluegreen or violet. Rivers puzzled over why highly intelligent islanders ‘deliberately compare a brilliant and saturated blue to the colour of dirty water or to the darkness of a night in which nothing can be seen’.32 May be they did see blue as much darker; they seemingly confused blue frequently in the Holmgren tests but at the same time they could easily recognise a saturated blue in indirect vision which must be ‘regarded as evidence’ of a heightened sensitivity to this colour.33 For Rivers colour names were frequently associated with objects as suffix meanings; the equivalent of ‘like’ was often added by many of the participants on the spot. These words were almost but not quite abstract colour terms in that they were applied to a vast range of objects. Between the concrete and the abstract, the subjective and the objective ‘like’ is not ‘ish’ but it does show an idiosyncratic, highly individualised camaraderie of things and persons; their mysterious, magical associations existed as a logic that was to colonial outsiders utterly impenetrable. Colour is as immediately abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extend into an incorporeal yet perfectly real dimension of pressing potential. One woman named colours after the people she knew whilst one man had over 30 terms for the word colour.34 In spite of this heterogeneity, in his published results Rivers concluded that colour adjectives in Murray Island are formed by the reduplication of the names of various natural objects which he claimed he had thoroughly examined and which he arranged as a table. Purple, for instance, he believed to be associated with the fruit of



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somer; orange and yellow with tumeric or ochre; green with leaf or newborn child; white with lime; grey with ashes; or clay and black and blue with cuttlefish. Other words emerged out of his use of Joseph William Lovibond’s tintometer but which seemed to have no concrete association. The Lovibond tintometer (which Rivers had on loan) functioned through the use of squares of light which could be coloured in any intensity of red, yellow or blue by the application of a delicately graded series of glasses.35 The subject would look from two separate apertures into a tube at colours which began very faint and which were in an irregular order. In structure, the tintometer is similar in construction to a stereoscope although it used ordinary as opposed to prismatic lenses. Under one eye is placed the object of which the colour is to be measured and under the other, a pure white surface; both the object and the surface are equally illuminated by diffused white light, the intensity of which must be within certain defined limits. Between the eye and white surface one, two or three glasses of red, yellow or blue colour and of graduated density are interposed until an exact match with the coloured object is obtained. From the values of the glasses used the exact amount of each colour constituent in the coloured object can be ascertained. The density of these primaries is divided into 155 equal degrees, each of which is represented by a coloured glass and when the three glasses are superimposed they show no colour as they are reduced in brightness.36 The threshold for each colour would then be determined by finding the most faintly coloured glass which the subject could recognise and name correctly. Rivers concluded that Murray Islanders saw dim red and more pronounced yellow and blue only when of considerable intensity. Although by this date the tintometer’s glasses were frequently criticised for being imperfect and impure, and its coloured glasses were deemed far from satisfactory, nonetheless they did yield for Rivers a series of recordable results which he published in the expedition’s official Report: red yellow blue

Table 2

0.18 0.27 0.60

Murray Island average units as opposed to the English.

0.31 0.20 0.36



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This data ‘proved’ not the existence of blue colour blindness but rather Murray Islanders’ insensitivity to blue (more on this problem later). Here the colours are more saturated than the combination of glasses and ‘had to be diminished by the addition of neutral glasses’ to make a match: Pulp of Somer (purple) + 2.0 neutral = R + 2.6 Y. Petals of Zom (yellow) + 2.0 neutral = 11.5 Y + 3.2 R. On Murray Island, Rivers tested 107 islanders with Holmgren’s coloured wools in the search for colour blindness. He did not ascertain a single case of red mistaken for green – as was common in Europe, but blue and green-blue and red were confused. He was uncertain whether this arose from the ‘lack of interest or to some natural deficiency in Colour Sense, there is a distinct tendency to confuse those colours from which their terminology is deficient’.37 Rivers had found blue-green confusion in several other races and that the colour for bright blue was the same for dirty water ‘which seemed almost inexplicable if blue were not to these natives a duller and darker colour than it is to us’.38 He used another test which employed Rothe’s papers to determine the distance at which small spots of different colours could be recognised. Murray Islanders could detect the 2 mm red spot on a white ground at over 20 metres; blue was confused with black at a distance of 2–3 metres so that deficiency was put down to language and Colour Sense; the cause of which is physiological conditions: ‘The Murray islander is more primitive and he is more pigmented and his insensitiveness to blue may be either a function of his primitiveness or of his pigmentation.’39 Rivers conjectured that there was a lack of the development of some physiological substance or mechanism which acted as a basis for blue perception or because the retina is more strongly pigmented. The macula latea is more pigmented and therefore blue and green are more strongly absorbed. This he tested with the tintometer whose differences in glass tint were sometimes so small that only the macula latea could be stimulated. As a test for peripheral vision Rivers employed colour patches mounted on black cards from the Milton Bradley set of pseudoptics and other cards with orange and purple of the same size. He sat in front of the subject with his face turned towards the best light whilst the subject closed one eye as Rivers brought the card which was shaped as a disc at arm’s length from outside the field of vision. Blue proved to be the largest of these fields and in some cases it was recognised very distinctly outside



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the limit of red while no case of red was seen outside blue. He concluded that Murray Island colour fields were smaller than Europeans. Blue is very intense in the extra-macular region and he perceived no defect here; if there are problems to do with the perception of blue this was due to pigmentation. Rivers revisited his argument put forward in Popular Science Monthly where he had observed that Murray Islanders could not see blue on the peripheral retina. Through reconsideration of the data, blue finally becomes part of the picture. Perhaps blue was no longer the impossible flower that it had been and this I suggest acts as a switch from Rivers’ investment in evolutionism to a concern with a deeper, more psychologically motivated and more difficult to define (or as yet defend) new anthropology. He would come to reject what he termed independent evolution to focus on transmission so that ‘instead of human culture presenting us with a simple process of direct evolution we have a highly complex process of interaction between peoples and their cultures, producing blended products’.40 Blue like magic and medicine (the subjects of his subsequent investigations by Rivers and his brilliant follower Malinowski) involved the belief in an elusive mimetic faculty on the part of the ethnographer. This mimetic faculty became folded into this uncertain colour space which had no linguistic base but rather assumed some form of enigmatic being which threaded in and out of the logic of sensation: There appear to be many parts of the world where a blue pigment is wholly absent. Probably the most widely distributed blue pigment is indigo, and I have endeavored to ascertain whether those races which are familiar with indigo have a word for blue…It is probable, however, that the distribution of pigments has helped to determine the characteristic features of primitive color nomenclature…Another factor, which may have been of importance, is the absence in the savage of an aesthetic interest in nature. The blue of the sky, the green and blue of the sea and the general green color of vegetation do not appear to interest him. It is, however, possible that the sky and sea do not interest the savage, or interest him less than the civilized man, because their colors are less brilliant than they are to us.41

Rivers concluded that on Murray Island the favourite colour red is given several names and this is possibly because it is the colour of blood and that it is associated with rites and warfare. Red becomes almost a fetish: the ‘constant use to which red pigment is put is to…the body in the war dance, to imitate the bloodstained victor or replace the blood of the various ceremonies of which it so often forms a feature’.42 He deduced



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that the etymology of red on the Murray Islands is the same as the word for blood. By the time of the official Report, Rivers did concede that in spite of the absence for terms of blue ‘this colour can be recognised by Torres Strait islanders while different shades or tints of blue can be distinguished from one another’.43 He also conjectured that what might be an abstract word for colour – mairmair – which he associated with red suggesting that maybe red is the abstract word for colour.44 He observed that colour adjectives were formed by reduplication from the names of various natural objects many of which he collected and which are now in the Cambridge Archaeological and Anthropological Museum and that amongst the west tribes miakalunga was used for the colour of skin of white men which was also a common term for white (as opposed to lal – red in India). Here cultural alterity had to share its own colour with the everyday. Totemic Mimesis, Pigments and Affect in the Torres Strait If the savage has one name for one blue flower and another name for another…he will not require a name for the abstract quality of blueness. It is possible that he only begins to require names for colors when he begins to use pigments. W. H. R. Rivers

Perhaps blue was, as Brian Massumi puts it, just ‘too blue’.45 Blue as affect effectively opens up a new field of vision and way of seeing being in the world. It also exposes the limits of the hermeneutics of the isolated swatch and questions the status of colour as readymade and transferable. Blue in, as art could possibly be the key to the evolution of language – but language mediated by the power of pigments. Like Grant Allen before him, Rivers shows how art and perhaps the aesthetic principle of the Colour Sense are critical to the development of chromatic nomenclature and perhaps to language more broadly defined. The materiality of colour acted as a safety valve against the danger of affect which was so present in the Cambridge Expedition’s experiments into aestho-pscyhology. Here the body is all flesh and nerve; a wave flows through it and traces levels upon it; a sensation is produced when the wave encounters the forces acting on the body, an affective



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athleticism, a screaming breath. The body as a mass of sensations coming from without produces what Deleuze terms a spasm, a life force which operates through the virtual at the level of affect and sensation. Sensation – a term from phenomenology – established a fundamental distinction between perception and sensation.46 The pre-rational world of sensation is not prior to the world of perception or representation but coextensive with it. The concern is not with the ‘lived body’ of phenomenology but with a ‘profound almost inalienable power which is precisely the power’ of rhythm in its confrontation with chaos. Sensation is constituted by the ‘vital power’ of rhythm and it is in rhythm that the logic of sensation occurs in relation to affect. In his studies ‘Too Blue: Color-patch for an expanded empiricism’ and Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi notes that the principle difference between subject and researcher happens at the level of affect.47 The subject is made to remember extremely personal things or colours but they almost always select a colour that was too bright, too dark or too saturated so that the co-functioning of language, memory and affect here exaggerates colour.48 This exaggeration results from the absolute striking character of certain colour peculiarities. The remembering of a colour is to bring into being the becoming of colour. Matching is not inherent to colour memory: the singularity of each experience frequently overrides the researcher’s agenda as the remembered colour exceeds the testable meaning of the colour term: In the name of color constancy, the subject has expressed a singular and excessive becoming of color. Between ‘blue’ used as the trigger for the production of a memory, and ‘blue’ used to test the identity of that memory, something extra has slipped in which the color-word, as the common property of the experimenter and the subject, does not designate.49

This pushiness of colour produces an excess which slips into language between the experimenter and the subject although it belongs to both of their situations. Whilst the colour experience is not fundamentally personal it becomes personalised by enveloping this social asymmetry. Colour acts as an event which creates its context so that ‘colour singularity by virtue of its self-motivating experiential autonomy can in and of itself be considered a kind of imperative subjectivity’.50 Blue becomes a differential object working with memory, retina and test patch to produce complex results of its multivalent contents in the presence



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of the experimental process. Colour is bound up in the trans-situational nature of affect. Memory colour works through affective modulation which is anomalous so that the real conditions of this ‘repetition’ of blue include not only its conditions of reproducibility but also the conditions for anomaly: ‘The interfering charge of affect invested itself in one objective dimension of colour. It made that dimension stand out excessively: absolutely strikingly.’51 Affect itself is brought out in the form of mismatch; it makes colour lively, imbued with life directly amiss in conventional scientific discourse. If ‘it is possible that he only begins to require names for colours when he begins to use pigments’, then pigments and their colour combinations in relation to memory, natural phenomena, mimesis and affect had also to be the object of scientific and aestho-psychological inquiry. To test affect, Rivers and Haddon allowed their subjects to paint themselves into the picture.52 Even before his first expedition to New Guinea in 1888, Haddon had been fascinated by the relationship between art and evolutionism and now on the second expedition he and Rivers eagerly set about distributing paper allowing islanders on Mer to draw anything they liked.53 Were these drawings ‘experiments’? If so what evidence, inscription devices or results did they provide?54 Haddon championed the liberation of art from Western metaphysical principles; art must be studied by the methods of inductive psychology which rejected disinterestedness in favour of personal, political, ethical or religious motivations.55 He contested the authority of the ‘play-theory’ formulated by Groos which afforded an explanation of the high artistic level reached by primitive peoples because the aim of play as the discharge of surplus vigour has to take into account the motor-impulses which divert joyous movement into thought. Haddon did, however, endorse the importance of the rhythmic form of the arts as its most ‘contagious power’ – especially in relation to geometric ornament.56 Although like Yrjö Hirn he believed that the art-impulse is a form of social expression and that likeness between things is the origin of art as a kind of pictorial sorcery, he pushed this much further to suggest that the fundamental principle of the belief in a magical connection between similar things is one of incalculable importance: in every society art ‘never loses something of a magical efficacy’.57



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Haddon’s own approach was zoological: he used art as a (biological) index of the character of a people which in his book Evolution in Art as Illustrated by the Life Histories of Designs he divided in ‘Art’, ‘Information’, ‘Wealth’ and ‘Religion’.58 Art qualified the sensuous pleasure of form, line and colour; as information it acts as the medium of communication; it can form a type of wealth; it is through the collection of art directed towards religion which places man in sympathetic relation to unseen powers.These unseen powers are articulated as magical knots and patterns, tattooing, pigments, fantastic marks in sacred ceremonies, pictorial symbols and totems. He took inspiration from Count Goblet d’Alviella’s Migration of Symbols which at least one critic perceived to be ‘one of the few sane books on a subject that has flooded the world with drivel’.59 Haddon’s own interest hinged on the evolutionary metamorphoses of ornament – how certain forms improved or declined and how advanced art forms could contain within their formal structure evidence of their stages of development. An art form is analogous with a living organism in its temporal, palimpsestial, multi-dimensional, multi-directional character. Hence what Haddon termed the skeuomorphic aspect of an artefact may have a utilitarian structural artifice – for instance as rope pattern – but it can also be read as ‘zigzag’ which links it to the zoomorph – that is, with reference to the legs of a crocodile, the head and beak of a bird, snakes, or extended bat wings and even the idea of human extremities. The zigzag could also be a physicomorph with reference to water, lightning or clothing or with allusion to a plant form, it could be the phyllomorph. What is critical to the zoologist/aesthetician is that these forms are not analogous; they are homologous and it is nomenclature to some extent which divides them. The aim of Haddon’s work is to show how and under what laws the figure of an animal or plant passes through so that it becomes indistinguishable from a skeuomorph which renders it subservient to decoration. This clearly means excavating life from what had previously been thought of as primarily geometrical forms. In this way ornament and the artwork more broadly defined, become animated with all sorts of exciting potentialities. His retrospective method with its emphasis on condensation shows how seemingly dissolving forms can be recognised at many different levels as well as allowing us to identify the ‘original’ subjects of art. In spite of this, Haddon had a tendency to read his rubbings and traces of



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Torres Strait animal drawings from the Western perspective of empirical realism: ‘there are numerous little touches which will appeal to the eye of the naturalist and as indicating keen observation on the part of the artists … on the other hand there are several anatomical mistakes for instance gills are given to crocodiles.’60 Perhaps more curiously, he observed that Western mimesis becomes a kind of mirror image (figure 4). Are these tactically self-aware images that disrupt the colonial anthropological gaze by throwing back an unfamiliar, even alienating ‘reflection’ on the imperial view of the world? Maino, the chief of Tud, drew the right-hand side of a figure from above with his right hand whilst the left side was completed with his left hand. In a view of Mer, which made use of a new, imported European blue pigment, Haddon concluded that the topography was shown in reverse.61 According to Haddon, ‘bright colours please all’ and that colours are highly symbolic in every culture.62 In technical terms, he detected that the peoples of the western Torres Strait made their pigments from ground shells which produced white lime, whilst black was obtained from burnt coconut; red ochre ‘their favourite colour’ was far more frequently employed than yellow ochre; extremely rare was the use of a bluish grey stone which he



Anon. artist working in the Torres Strait, drawing of a European shooting a cassowary, 1898, pencil on paper.

Fig.4



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believed to be the nearest to blue in their art and environment: ‘this latter colour is now often obtained from white men and is valued as being an impossible colour for them to obtain from their own resources.’63 Elsewhere Haddon took issue with the only professional European artist to visit the Torres Strait – Hume Nisbet.64 Nisbet praised Papuan art for its ‘quiet and subdued’ colouring which indicates his belief that the people of New Guinea had reached an advanced level of civilisation.65 Haddon by contrast concluded that: The natives will gladly employ glaring red, in the form of red lead, if they can get it, and are very fond of imported bright blue – a colour which they cannot obtain locally. Much as I admire their artistic skill and taste, I am afraid that they use subdued colours because they can obtain no others – they employ the brightest they can get.66

Haddon himself wanted to get hold of the stuff of pigments. He intended to obtain ‘a special kind of yellow earth that was traded as paint’ only to be told that this would be impossible due to the interior location of such materials: ‘the snakes would bite anyone who went to the bush on a Sunday – those snakes must be very degenerate.’67 As both Rivers and Haddon were fascinated by indigenous mimesis they asked local men and boys from the Torres Strait Islands to make drawings of ships, warriors, houses, fish-filled seas, men on horseback, self-portraits, crocodiles and white men – the last may even be likenesses of the two scientists.68 In an article subsequently published on his return to Britain in the anthropological journal Man, Haddon records that his colleague Ray had also requested drawings of amongst other subjects a man, turtle and a paddle from 12-year-old boys at Bulaa in the Rigo district of British New Guinea. Haddon chose to reproduce ‘the least realistic efforts’ by a boy named Pokana while concluding that this ‘very rudimentary power of delineation’ corresponded closely with drawings by members of the Bororo and other central Brazilian tribes.69 In contrast, the drawings of Torres Strait islanders, which he himself had commissioned, he considered to be much better. Although he could not tell whether most of the images had been taken from life or drawn from memory, Haddon conjectured that their mimetic quality might be attributed to recent exposure to European pictures.70 But he firmly stated that these men and boys had never been taught drawing in the mission schools.71 He surmised that this reasonable dexterity was due to



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their indigenous art of woodcarving and mask making whose mimetic principles favoured subjects of men and animals which could be easily transposed to paper, pencil or pigment: ‘it was on account of the people being in the habit of representing their totem animals that the extended the practice to other forms which were familiar objects about them or which attracted their attention as being strange or remarkable.’72 In this way Haddon was transferring his own zoological-mimetic reading of ornament to two-dimensional, figural art – including the representation of foreign, modern subjects such as white men and sailing ships.73 Thus even the boys’ drawings from British New Guinea – the way in which they condensed the human body to a few lines can perhaps, but not definitely, be associated with the evolutionary metamorphoses of forms. A more resonant mimesis, Haddon argued, was evident in those societies that engaged in totemic, magical practices: ‘magic practices are as a rule primarily a kind of mimetic representation combined with crude symbolism.’74 Magic involved the imitation of beings it wished to control as a ‘primitive protoplasmic art’ whilst totemism set up material emblems as tokens of kinship or clanship.75 A totem (augu˘d) for Haddon was usually an animal – whether edible, harmless, dangerous or feared – which stood in a peculiar relation with a clan. It could be the clan’s common ancestor or their guardian helper; members of the clan were under sacred obligation not to kill or destroy their totem. According to one of Haddon’s principal sources the famed anthropologist J. G. Frazer, ‘the totem is stronger than the blood or family in the modern sense’.76 Although Frazer went on to surmise that under certain cultural circumstances colours can themselves be totems, Haddon is less interested in this than in how the clansman seeks to emphasise his kinship with the totem by making himself resemble it externally.77 Haddon believed that each clan originally subsisted on one species of plant or animal and that they perhaps traded that totem with other clans.78 In districts lacking totemic practices Haddon perceived that there was a want of ‘energising influence’ on decorative and pictorial art although he iterated firmly ‘it must not be supposed that these people are incapable of making more accurate and artistic drawings. It is probable that they could easily be educated up to a higher standard of excellence’.79 Rivers also concurred that the artistic skills of the Islanders was not innate but learned and that their



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drawings ‘indicate keen observation on the part of the artists’ although ‘they did not take the same aesthetic interest in nature which is found among civilized peoples’.80 Haddon became fascinated with what he believed to be the transference of totemism from animals to the cult of hero worship.81 Sometimes he tried either to make analogies between totemism and ancient British practices or to insert himself (problematically) into totemic practices: When I was sitting among a group of natives sharing pictures of yarning someone hinted a doubt as to an English man having a crocodile augu˘d. I immediately rolled up my sleeve and showed my vaccination marks – as it happens I have them on both shoulders and I pointed to this as proving I was a ‘big man’ in my own country. This silenced all doubt…Unfortunately my clan though once an important one here is on the decline and I was disgusted to find that a plant clan was more important.82

Aside from Haddon’s investment in the relationship between mimesis, ornament and evolution which privileged the figurative and an ambiguous concern with drawing from life, Rivers wanted to include colours in this otherwise almost monochromatic exercise. And this he did with a focus on rainbows.83 Rainbows were to be painted with pigments, made with Holmgren’s wools, to be observed or to be remembered orally: Billy Gasu said he saw five colours ; three chief colours, red, indigo, yellow from without inwards, with a very narrow strip of orange outside the red, and a narrow strip of purple inside the yellow. Pasi, on the other hand, only remembered two colours, red outside and blue inside. Kudub gave three colours, red, green and blue, but gave red inside and blue outside. [He] had reversed the natural order. Ulai’s answer was very interesting. This old man had a good colour sense and was a good observer, and yet the only colour he described in the rainbow was red, and he called the rest of the bow white and black. The fact that only one colour is mentioned in a description of the rainbow, as in that given by Homer, is far from showing that only the power of perceiving that colour has been developed. Several natives in Mabuiag made coloured representations of the rainbow for me. Very nearly all drew two rainbows, a big and a small; and on the occasions when I saw a rainbow in Torres Straits, the secondary rainbow was well marked… Gizu called the outer part of the rainbow ‘zuru’ glittering; then paramadgamulnga, red, kubikubinga, black, and murdgamulnga, yellow. Waria called the outermost part daiadgamulnga (an unusual word for white), then murdgamulnga (yellow), paramadgamulnga (red) and maludgamulnga (blue). The descriptions of the others were still more faulty. I am sorry that I did not examine a larger number of men, and especially of old men, on this subject.84



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Here Rivers and his colleagues had to rely on pidgin English and limited understandings of local languages where the rainbow was identified with the term kurruai which had close association with the tail of a stellar constellation.85 Elsewhere with the assistance of Sydney Ray he concluded that on Mer the word for rainbow suseri was closely related to the term for blue/green – suserisuseri.86 Rivers jotted notes on the drawing or paper arrangement (it is not clear from his publications which) of one man from Tapau who arranged the colours in the ‘correct’ mnemonic – that is, mimetic order moving from outside to inside. Nearly all the other participants put red in the ‘right’ place – a test result that Rivers was no doubt seeking given his preoccupation with the absence/presence of blue and red. The inhabitants from Mabuiag drew rainbows – nearly all drew two, one large and one small although one was not a reversed image of the other as Rivers expected from his own observations in nature: colour as mirror or in relation to an evolutionary/developmental mirror stage again breaks down. Elementary missionary education was impoverishing to the anthropological belief in primitive man’s proximity to natural phenomena. In spite of this, all except one man put red in its correct place, whilst one old man described the rainbow in the terms of red, white and black. Outer parts of the rainbow were frequently spoken of as being zuru – that is, as glittering or white. Rivers did not cross reference these terms with their links to natural objects although it can be conjectured that linguistically ‘rainbow’ becomes associated with red as the same term was used for ochre, and black with darkness or charcoal. Here he seems less interested in the cultural status of the rainbow 87 and its various chromatic combinations than in the test’s affirmation that blue does lurk somewhere in spite of the absence of terms as ‘different shades or tints of blue can be distinguished from one another’.88 Concluding that there were no definite terms for rainbow in the Torres Strait, Rivers somehow managed to ask people to make rainbows from memory out of coloured papers or to fashion what he termed ‘rough drawings’. It is quite likely that he used a photograph or drew an image of a rainbow which makes the question of what should be the mnemonic, mimetic referent – an actual or virtual rainbow or a representation – extremely problematic. It also opens up the



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issue of the typical and the singular; are all rainbows alike and hence interchangeable? Are they better seen as virtual phenomena that cannot be easily tested or recorded (think of Haddon’s own frustrated attempts to use colour photography in the Torres Strait). Like the delicate shades of the tintometer or Rivers’ own lack of knowledge of local languages, colour is here pale, even frail and fuzzy in such a way as to make its documentation extremely slippery. Although delicate, colour marks the threshold of perception. It is not a framing device, as might be expected, but liminal and characterised by jouissance. This liminality of colour opens up colour as the space of play, not the play of Wittgenstein’s later word games, but play which sears through representation. This type of inquiry into colour at its liminal verge opens up an approach to mystery, where aesthetics and philosophy at their edges are weakened as they approach non-being, silence and absence. There is then a delicacy and sensitivity to colour at its most subtle level. Colour comes to be described as a kind of bliss, as morally a little dangerous and technically more potent than it was before. The question of colour purity becomes mixed up in variable harmonies, paint, paper, wool, as smear and the wobbly line. The isolated patch loses its autonomy. Colour is then an event – almost an accident – characterised by imprecision and malformed spontaneity. Following on from the rainbow, Rivers investigated afterimages to see if a negative or a complementary colour could be seen by using a patch of coloured paper on either a grey or a coloured ground which was removed after ten seconds. Then the subject was asked to point with a pencil to a colour on the chart to indicate which colour he or she saw. Red, not blue, appears the most common colour – a finding which went against Rivers’ expectations. He had little interest in the cultural or philosophical status of afterimages in either the Torres Strait or in Europe. In Europe, a theory of vision associated with Goethe’s generation long before had insisted that new techniques of the observer had emerged which both freed vision from any external reference (for example, the model of the camera obscura) to become more rigorously located in the subjective and quivering body (hence the need for the ascetic exercises of objectivity to discipline and standardise experience in science). Afterimages as free fall produced a new phenomenological means of being in the world. For Rivers in the Torres Strait perhaps they had a status akin to rainbows.



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In his test for ‘Colour Preference’, Rivers asked people to choose three coloured papers from a pile, which he mixed up so as not to give any indication of what his intention was. Several Papi ordered the papers back to their ‘original’ order which, although it demonstrated memory, was not highly valued as an evolutionary marker by Rivers. He also encouraged them to discuss their favourite terms but found that these were linked to objects so that ‘they may have of course been discussing something else’.89 In spite of this perceived lack of abstraction, Rivers deduced that red, indigo and purple were favourites whilst green, blue and violet were rarely chosen: ‘the blue of the sky’ did ‘not appear to interest the savage’.90 But overall he viewed the test as being unstable compared with his laboratory of coloured glasses, drawing utensils, cards and papers. Sitting in the dank, dark, surroundings of the decaying missionary hut, Rivers noted down that the vernacular dress was often green and that the tones of their clothes were quite brilliant unlike the dull colours of Rothe’s unsaturated papers which lay on the desk before him – and which constituted one corner of his own colour reality.91 Dress comes closest to the colours of his tests: ‘The blues worn are saturated and closely resembled in colour the indigo paper which so many preferred. The undoubted popularity of this colour may seem to be in conflict with the idea I have advocated that blue is a dull colour to these people.’92 Like Gladstone and Magnus before him, Rivers has to acknowledge the powerful presence of blue in material culture. Such materiality speaks to the vitality of blue to its nuanced and elusive presence in complex societies which elude the scientist’s grasp. Rivers’ overall conclusion from his series of experiments was that peoples of the Torres Strait, like all humans, had limited energy. As opposed to Europeans, they spent a tremendous amount of energy on the sensory foundations of sheer survival in a rude, natural environment so much so that it is ‘natural that the intellectual superstructure should suffer’.93 But perhaps the colonial, anthropological fieldworker was the functional equivalent of his ‘unsophisticated, exotic subject in the purity of his responses to environmental stimuli’.94 As suggested by reviewers of the Cambridge expedition, the published Reports constituted a virtuoso exercise in the art of writing up unsatisfactory research as positively as possible. In spite of such a sceptical reception, Haddon’s student Henry Radcliffe-Brown, Charles Seligmann and Rivers himself would apply the same technologies and methods to their research projects in South



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Asia.95 Seligman observed that when shown coloured wools or papers of the blue, violet or purple tone ‘most Veddas said they did not know these colours or had never seen anything like them’.96 Nevertheless, they likened the colour purple to the ‘blue flower’.97 Before I examine the ‘unfolding orchid of technology’ amongst the hill tribes of southern India, I want to turn briefly to the possibility of ‘ish’. For Wittgenstein ‘ish’ is at the edge of colour; it is the borderline of thought. Even for Rivers, ruminating on the inconclusive results of the tintometer, the ‘observations are however interesting in showing that under favourable circumstances the psychological method of just perceptible enough can be used’.98 From ‘Just Perceptible Enough’ to ‘the Unfolding Orchid of Technology’:99 Instrumental Fear and Chromatic Faciality in South India Only the human features I had attributed to him were not there at all!…It seemed as though it wasn’t a face, as though it must needs be a mask, a horror, a deformity… I have tried to draw one of these heads, but I cannot. H. G. Wells, ‘The Man in the Moon’

Edgar Thurston, Curator of the Madras Museum (1885–1908), likened his anthropological fieldwork in the hills of southern India to the adventures of H. G. Wells’ travellers to the alien world in the adventure novel The Man in the Moon.100 His fantastic analogy I suggest unveils some of the proto-surreal difficulties facing the ethnographer in the field – difficulties which form the subject of my discussion of the Colour Sense in colonial India. Writing in the journal Nature in January 1901, Haddon passionately condemned the lack of a ‘sufficiently cultivated’ ethnographic method which could facilitate the study of anthropology in India.101 As opposed to the well-ordered Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, Haddon complained that the Indian section of the South Kensington Museum ‘affects an example of the worst style of museum arrangement’.102 Given the complexity of Indian social and religious practices and the devastating impact of colonisation, an ethnographic library and the ‘systematic study of various races’ in South Asia Haddon believed were urgently required as a corrective to the arrogant, imperial anthropological entanglement with empire which had splattered the



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world map with ‘the red paint of British aggression’.103 In the same year Rivers travelled to southern India in an attempt to substantiate his groundbreaking fieldwork in the Torres Strait and to rectify what Haddon believed to be the woeful state of anthropology in South Asia.104 A constant theme in Rivers’ writings, both published and in the form of notes, is the need to establish objectivity through comparative cultural analysis. He constructed the idea of ‘locality’ through fieldwork so as to straddle sites as far apart as London, New Guinea, Upper Egypt and South India. Ethnography should not stand in the singular. Although he conducted work in Upper Egypt and London, Rivers’ most intense investigation in the field following the Cambridge expedition took place in southern India where he was assisted by the energetic colonial curator Edgar Thurston. The hill tribes of India like the peoples of the Torres Strait had come under direct colonial government regulations as well as being missionised since the 1850s. Under the aegis of the ‘ethnographic state’ such colonial investigations deeply implicated museum personnel who were under pressure to gather information for the epistemological use by the government.105 Under the leadership of Edgar Thurston (1885– 1908), the Madras Museum acted as one of the most vital centres of calculation for the forging of anthropological practice in southern India.106 Trained in medicine, with a thorough knowledge of numistics, fabrics and geology, Thurston also conducted extensive anthropometric research with the support of the head of the Census, Herbert Risley.107 Like Risley and Galton, Thurston firmly believed that the colonial museum had to fund and to disseminate anthropological (in particular anatomical, physical) knowledge which could act as the eugenic solution to indigenous, social problems.108 His zest for anthropometry did, however, excite sardonic comment: ‘A visit to the Government Museum at Madras is always a pleasant experience, although one at first alarming such is the author’s zeal for anthropometry that he seized every man, woman and child in order to measure them.’109 Here then is Galton’s health exhibition at the South Kensington Museum translated and inflated as something more monstrous in the colony. By this time Thurston had also come to rely on the variously revised editions of the anthropological/travellers’ guide Notes and Queries. Following their return from the Torres Strait, Rivers and Haddon had



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both been involved in the revision of Notes and Queries with regard to physical anthropology, technology, sociology, arts and sciences, including the expression of emotions, gesture, language, writing, songs, drama, games, natural science and religion.110 Most critically they downplayed the importance of physical anthropology, which although an important criteria for the Torres Strait expedition they now rejected as unfashionable, unreliable and marginal to their psychological concerns.111 Genealogy and a thorough knowledge of local culture were now on the agenda.112 Rivers committed himself to the idea that the elemental social structure of any group would be systematically revealed in its kinship terminology. In the first but final volume of the official Reports to be published only in 1935, Haddon devoted only three pages to physical anthropology concluding that ‘facial characters are difficult to describe with accuracy’ and that the nasal index was extremely unreliable.113 Both men stressed that indigenous interviewees should be allowed to talk freely in the vernacular from which immediate field notes must be taken because ‘the native also has a point, probably of far more interest than his own’114 – a perspective which had to be witnessed (and preferably substantiated) by two independent individuals. The rationale behind this was that ‘the abstract should be approached through the concrete’ and that the concrete assumed a bewildering variety of forms which obfuscated the abstract.115 Clearly Haddon and Rivers were overtly critical both of Risley’s optimism for anthropology and his pessimism in relation to vernacular speech.116 Although Risley championed the role of colonial officials as the men best equipped to act as anthropologists, he complained of ‘the extreme difficulty of entering into savage modes of thought, of the imperfection and untrustworthiness of testimony and the extraordinary fluidity and mutability of custom itself ’.117 According to Haddon and Rivers’ revised edition of Notes and Queries, visual acuity including colour, should be tested on the largest number of people as possible precisely because of the dangers of variation and error. If there was limited time in a locality, only adult males should be examined. Observations on the body must be divided between ‘descriptive characters’ and measurements. Descriptive ‘characters are far better recorded by a series of typical photographs in full face and profile or failing this by sketches than by any description in words’.118 These photographs could be staged against an artistic backdrop although a



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neutral ground is better and if possible you should attach a mirror at any angle in front of the snapshot camera so that you can photograph unsuspecting bystanders whilst apparently aiming in another direction. Here then is a degree of trickery other than the visual illusions used by Rivers in the Torres Strait. Complicity, so difficult to achieve, had to be captured on the sly. So although colonialism threatened to destroy the object of anthropological inquiry it was at the same time a conditio sine qua non of ethnographic fieldwork.119 In this revised version of Notes and Queries colour began to feature more prominently than in the earlier editions where it had been directly linked to eyes, skin and hair through a limited classificatory system borrowed from Broca and Topinard.120 Colour classification had since 1874 been critical to the measurement of the body, to anthropology’s mimetic faculty as well as being instrumental to a certain corporeal ‘violence’.121 In the 1899 revised edition of Notes and Queries the Colour Sense in relation to Holmgren’s wools was advanced as a mode of inquiry which needed to be accompanied by chromatic naming: ‘In the case of savages this is particularly important; it may be found that their language is deficient in not having a word to express some colour – e.g. blue.’122 If possible, the investigator should try to get a lock of hair ‘or better still a small portion of the scalp with the hair attached…A portion of ½ square inch may be preserved in a solution of formalin, 1 part to 10 of water to spirit’.123 Hair colour should be recorded through the nomenclature of ‘jet black’, ‘dark brown’, ‘light brown’, ‘fair’ and ‘light or dark red’, whilst eye colour should be classified from the following – ‘dark’, ‘neutral’ or ‘light’.124 The height, facial height and nasal index should also be taken and if possible skulls should be obtained. Whilst the statistics of the Census of India of 1881 were still in the process of compilation, the census commissioner suggested that steps be taken to collect full information regarding castes and occupations throughout British India. The Bengal government undertook such a survey using anthropometric techniques adapted from the work of Broca and Topinard to extract the ‘exact’ physical characteristics of selected tribes and castes of Bengal, the North West Provinces, Awadh and the Punjab, the results of which were published in Risley’s four-volume Tribes and Castes of Bengal.125 While the preliminary arrangements for the 1901 Census were underway, the British Association for the



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Advancement of Science recommended to the Secretary of State that ethnography, anthropometry and photography of ‘typical individuals’ be employed.126 Haddon had put photography to excellent and effective use in the Torres Strait to record individuals and Rivers’ experiments and reenactments of archaic, totemic rituals had the result of a heightening of reality ‘through the intensity of the photographic moment’ as opposed to the ‘insistent allochronism’ of the anthropological temporal paradigm.127 Through photographic inscription, ‘micro-happening was still and translated into an event and impressed visually upon the memory’.128 All of the scientists on the Cambridge expedition had the latest cameras (Newman and Guardia’s Series B) and at least 600 photographs were taken for varying public and private purposes.129 Elizabeth Edwards has suggested that there is an intimate relationship between Haddon’s sketches and the expedition photographs – which at times borrowed closely from one another’s subjects and which shared a peculiar visual choreography.130 But for The British Association for the Advancement of Science photography was overruled as expensive and as interfering seriously with the proper duties of the Superintendents [of the Survey]… Moreover a large collection of photographs already exists at the India Office Library. The Government of India are further advised that, in comparison with measurements, photographs possess but little scientific value and they are not disposed to spend a large sum on making volumes on ethnography more popular and attractive.131

In spite of this dismissal, individual district collectors were permitted to make photographic records in the service of anthropometry.132 According to E. F. im Thurn in his lecture on the ‘Anthropological Uses of the Camera’, the bodies of ‘primitive folk’ ‘might indeed be more accurately measured and photographed for such purposes dead [rather] than alive could they be conveniently obtained when in that state’.133 His so-called ‘physiological photographs’ should be taken at a fixed distance and accompanied by a series of exact measurements although he admitted to the difficulties in finding individuals willing to pose.134 The camera, as his contemporaries noted, so readily invoked the evil eye.135 Herbert Risley, famed for his near-obsession with the nasal index, admitted to the difficulty in using both photography and colour as solvent anthropological tools. Nevertheless, his own publications made



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extensive use of Edgar Thurston’s field photographs and physical data. Here colour could be effectively controlled through black-and-white exposures.136 Working closely with Thurston, Risley exhorted colonial officials and anthropologists to take critical physical measurements which should include what he termed ‘secondary physical characteristics’ – namely, the colour and texture of the skin; the colour, form and position of the eyes; the colour and character of the hair; the form of the face and features. All of these could be gathered and classified by recourse to Broca’s by the now 44-year-old chromatic scale which consisted of 20 shades for eye colour and 34 skin colour tones. But ‘conspicuous as these traits are, the difficulty of observing, defining and recording them is extreme. Colour, the most striking of them all, is perhaps the most evasive’.137 The problem was again the limits of objectivity in the face of the space of subjective response inherent to Broca’s method: ‘different people are apt to arrive at widely different conclusions and that even the numbers have been correctly registered no one can translate the observations into intelligent language.’138 Topinard, by contrast, had advocated simple description in relation to colour, whilst the most recent edition of Notes and Queries attempted to combine both systems with a greatly simplified colour scale whereby each colour is briefly described. But even this Risley found frustrating: I doubt, however, whether it is possible to do more than to indicate in very general terms the impression which a particular colour makes upon the observer. In point of fact the colour of the skin is rather what may be called an artistic expression, dependent partly upon the action of light, partly on the texture and transparency of the skin itself, and partly again on the great variety of shades which occur in every part of its surface. It is hopeless to expect that this complex of characters can be adequately represented by a patch of opaque paint which is necessarily uniform throughout and devoid of any suggestion of light and shade. The difficulty which besets all attempts to classify colour is enhanced in India by the fact that, for the bulk of the population, the range of variation, especially in the case of the eyes and hair, is exceedingly small. The skin, no doubt, exhibits extreme divergences of colouring which any one can detect at a glance. At one end of the scale we have the dead black of the Andamanese, the colour of a blackleaded stove before it has been polished, and the somewhat brighter black of the Dravidians of Southern India, which has been aptly compared to the colour of strong coffee unmixed with milk. Of the Irulas of the Nilgiri jungles, some South Indian humourist is reported to have said that charcoal leaves a white mark upon them. At the other end one may place the flushed ivory skin of the typical Kashmiri beauty and the very light transparent brown – ‘wheat-coloured’ is the common vernacular



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description – of the higher castes of Upper India, which Emil Schmidt compares to milk just tinged with coffee…Between these extremes we find countless shades of brown, darker or lighter, transparent or opaque, frequently tending towards yellow, more rarely approaching a reddish tint, and occasionally degenerating into a sort of greyish black which seems to depend on the character of the surface of the skin.139

In spite of this gesture towards classification, Risley complained of the ‘chaos of tints’.140 He pitted art against anthropology by claiming that the former relied too much on resemblance (that is, mimesis) as opposed to the value of difference (that is, alterity).141 At this time contemporary artists were also attempting to codify this dizzying ‘chaos of tints’. According to J. Arthur H. Hatt, author of The Colourist, artists were lagging behind scientists in their attitude to colour. Hatt complained that there was a lack of practical manuals on colour and that theorists such as Chevreul were misguided in their search for colour harmony.142 Whilst condemning archaic and primitive Colour Sense as inferior to the hues of birds and butterflies, he concluded that ‘the flesh colours in portraits or figures are admittedly hard to paint successfully. One reason may be that the observer is more likely to be well informed as to its appearance and consequently more critical’.143 Although Hatt makes no direct reference to non-European peoples in his excurses on art, his contemporaries the artist Oliver Olds and Hume Nisbet were attempting to classify and to prescribe the way in which race should be painted. In his manual Trinity of Colour art instructor Oliver Olds stressed to his readers that just as there are national laws which discipline the intermarriage of races, so too the principles of science govern their interaction on canvas. He determined which pigments artists should use in order to convey without confusion the racial identity of their subjects: for example, raw sienna should be deployed only for the representation of ‘Negro’ skin.144 Hume Nisbet was more explicit on exactly which pigments should be employed for the representation of flesh: In a fair complexion the purples predominate in the shadows, rose madder, terre verte and cobalt, while in the lights ochre with vermillion and rose madder are chiefly used. In a dark complexion, green and more intense purple blend about terre verte, raw sienna, brown madder and cobalt while the lights are combinations of different yellows, ochre principally, and sometimes direct touches of yellow; the deepest shadows are made rich and warm with burnt sienna, brown madder and Van Dyke brown.145



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That artists like Olds and Nisbet felt compelled to stipulate exactly how skin should be depicted discloses, I believe, a certain colonial anxiety about the impossibility of its standardisation. Pigments might have become increasingly industrialised and hence uniform but the palette continued to evade precise laws. Chaos of tints is what faces the painter of race. Artists and art teachers had been attempting to standardise skin colour through charts and nomenclature since the 1860s. It is here that we see the clearest overlap of science, race and pictorial production. The Colour Sense of the peoples of the Nilgiri Hills had been famously contributed to Hugo Magnus’s chromatic questionnaire in 1880. Magnus’s unnamed missionary source (a man who had spent 25 years in southern India) interviewed and tested men from the Irula, Coda, Badaga and Toda people to conclude that their Colour Sense began and ended with red and that their perception and nomenclature for green and blue was incomplete: I was amazed to find that these mountain dwellers were giving such hesitant and unclear answers when requested to identify the root words ‘has’ and ‘pas’ (‘hase’ and ‘pase’ mean ‘green’ and ‘young’ …), although I had put a great variety of different colours before them. In fact, the Todas are in this respect like small children. As I said, they only have three colours: ‘black’, ‘red’ and ‘white’ and in the ‘malle billu’ rainbow they only see the red; of other colours they knew nothing.146

In line with his bleak perspective on aniline dyes published elsewhere, Thurston writes about what he believed to be the salvage paradigmatic status of anthropology: ‘The unrest is real, inevitable and unnatural. It is due entirely to the revolution caused in native life by the contact of old eastern and western civilizations.’147 Thurston, author of several monographs on textiles in southern India, combined his medical training and his administrative duties as superintendent of the Madras Museum with a keen personal and professional interest in anthropology.148 Anthropology in southern India, as Nicholas Dirks suggests, emerged out of official, governmental projects which collected and interpreted information about Indian social life.149 Most of these subjects were directed towards the possibility of reform and focused on the question of criminality, so much so that the first ‘Honorary Superintendent of Ethnography’ for the Madras Presidency was Frederick Mullalay, a policeman.150 Thurston, as his successor, gave



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anthropological lectures to the Madras police in which he advocated the importance of the Bertillon system and fingerprinting.151 All police officers he believed had to be trained to take Bertillon-style measurements – although many members of the police opposed this emphasis on science and the number of measurements they were supposed to take.152 Up until the 1890s the basic colonial premise was that ‘only members of criminal tribes and persons convicted of certain definite crimes’ should be measured – although this in itself was a huge undertaking as Thurston believed that up to 40 per cent of the Kallar people were criminal and that this number was currently imprisoned in Madura’s gaols.153 But like his collaborator, Risley, the Director of Ethnography for India, Thurston ardently believed in the power of physical anthropology as a much more expansive governmental tool. Risley, who had previously been the census commissioner for India, saw anthropology as having two central aims: first, to construct a catalogue of customs, and second, to make a meticulous record of physical characteristics. If custom were a concern in Indian anthropology, which directed attention towards the social body, anthropometry was still fundamental to the definition of the ethnographic project at this time. Anthropometry sought to locate the scientific study of man in the biological body. In India, this was seen as especially relevant because Risley believed that the caste system had an endogamous character where notions of individuality were underdeveloped. Bodies within a certain social group all shared and produced a fundamental unity. In 1894, equipped with a set of anthropometric instruments obtained on loan from the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta, Thurston made a three-month circuit of the Nilgiri Hills in order to study the Toda, Kota and Badaga peoples. This preliminary research was followed up and substantiated by his role as the key coordinator for investigating the southern part of India in the Census of India commissioned by the government in 1901.154 In the next eight years he worked systematically to structure his ethnographic survey along the lines stipulated by Risley by collecting a myriad of ethnographic details and by establishing extensive archives of corporeal measurements both of which he arranged according to the different castes and tribes in the Madras Presidency. As part of the output of his travels, Thurston published several bulletins, built up a collection of photographs, lantern slides, phonographic



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records of local songs and music, artefacts and skulls and he established an anthropological laboratory. He published his research as a series of articles and as a book of essays entitled Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (1906, written whilst he was in the midst of his fieldwork) and which culminated in the seven-volume Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1909) – a work that copiously cites Rivers’ celebrated study The Todas (1906).155 Arranged alphabetically, Castes and Tribes, which follows the structure of Risley’s Tribes and Castes of Bengal, covers over 300 castes and tribal groups representing more than 40 million people spread over an area of 150,000 square miles.156 Although Thurston acknowledged the great assistance he had received from his associate editor, K. Rangachari – who not only headed the survey whilst he was on leave in England but also acted as interpreter, took many of the photographs and made the phonograph records which accompany the text – Thurston insisted that all of the anthropometric measurements of 6,000 individuals he had taken himself, so as to avoid any variability in method or ‘error’.157 For his critics, this is where the true merit of his published writings lay.158 Shridhar V. Ketkar, a Madras-based scholar, wrote critically about the flawed and sloppy nature of much of Thurston’s work.159 He condemned mistranslations, misunderstandings of Brahmanical practices, overly casual and untrustworthy historical discussions and he dismissed the photographs as being vaguely amusing but of no scientific value. He questioned Thurston’s method which following Risley, referred to numerous authorities on castes and tribes, which gave ‘the impression of many scraps being thrown together by an unskilled hand…On the whole the work shows Mr Thurston to be more of a collector than a scholar or investigator’.160 Nevertheless, Ketkar concluded that Thurston’s anthropometric data was excellent, even authoritative.161 Thurston paid close attention to the work of Topinard, Risley and Notes and Queries whilst also conjecturing the geological, biological and cultural similarities between India and Australia.162 Following the research of Sir William Turner, he considered the similarity between the craniums of Aborigines and Dravidians.163 A strident supporter of craniology, Turner had argued that both races exhibited skulls that are dolichocephalic although in the case of the Australians, the crania are longer owing to the prominence of the glabella and that the forehead



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is much more receding with a heavier jaw.164 Thurston’s own findings discovered that the average cephalic index of 639 members of 19 castes and tribes to be 74.1 – showing that the nasal index was higher in the Todas than the Dravidians.165 But the more he travelled through the Madras Presidency, the more problematic and complicated became the question of the ‘Dravidian head’. Thurston broadly concluded that there is an almost long-headedness of the Tamil people, with the tendency for the width of the cranium to increase as the Kanarese and Western Telugu regions are approached. With more certainty he compared a ‘Hindu’ skull with that of a European concluding that the south Indian skull (‘a prosperous Linga Banajiga in the Canarese country’) lacked convexity at the back of the head.166 He also compared measurements of Hindu skulls from the Royal College of Surgeons, London and the collection in the Madras Museum – the latter had been excavated by his colleague Alexander Rea at the burial ground of Aditanallur in the Tinnevelly district.167 Taking a lead from, but also expanding upon and occasionally problematising Risley’s colour nomenclature, Thurston concluded that Toda women were of a café au lait skin tint, whilst their children were of a warm copper hue.168 He classified the Badagas as the fairest of the south Indian hill people, their opposite being the Irulas, who like Risley’s unacknowledged source he also paraphrased: ‘on some of whom, as has been said, charcoal would leave a white mark.’169 This image is almost artistic: the body of the Irula becomes then the negative image of the normative, whitish sketchpad; charcoal becomes white. It also plays on the idea of the inversion of the conventional expectations of light and shade and as such I suggest that it can be associated with the development of negatives and plates in colonial photography. Although a dynamic supporter of the Government of India’s various information-gathering projects and an ardent believer that as the director ‘of a large local museum [I] happily made an excellent blend with the survey operations’,170 Thurston maintained an ambivalent relationship with the effects of colonialism in the Nilgiri Hills.171 ‘Imperialist nostalgia’ – the urgent task of recording the manners and customs of castes and tribes which were being eroded by colonialism, clearly underwrites Thurston’s agenda.172 He predicted that ‘there will be plenty of money and people available for anthropological research



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when there are no more aborigines. And it behoves our museums to waste no time in completing their anthropological collections’.173 At the beginning of Castes and Tribes he stated that whilst a few years ago the tribes and castes of southern India had been ‘living in a wild state like pigs and bears…[they] have now come under the domesticating and sometimes detrimental influence of contact with Europeans’.174 Syphilis had contributed to the shaken and decrepit appearance of the Todas.175 He also complained that human sacrifice had demised and that an Irula woman was not only curling her hair with the assistance of a cheap German mirror, but that in personal ornament, vernacular dyes had been abandoned in favour of tinned alizarin and aniline.176 Given his scholarly and professional interest in textiles and natural dyes, this last cultural change was particularly drastic (see Chapter 2).177 Nevertheless, in Thurston’s Castes and Tribes vernacular resistance to colonial policy is a persistent presence. By 1893 the government had taken over the management of Toda lands and framed rules under the Forest Act for their management – to which the Todas objected. Now they had to apply for permits for building mands and temples.178 In 1902 the Todas petitioned the government for special legislation to legalise their marriages – which the government viewed as unnecessary.179 Three years later they again petitioned the colonial authorities against the prohibition of the burning of grass on the downs – a custom which they argued improved its future growth.180 For Thurston such resistance was partially framed by local stories, songs and folklore which he attempted to gather extensively and intensively. Not content with merely recording these in an ‘objective’ fashion, he wrote himself into local mythology. The white man (or in his published account only himself ) becomes shaman-like and alien, not so much to be venerated as to be staged as the object of horror capable and culpable of casting his evil eye wherever he ventured.181 In conducting the anthropometric aspects of the survey Thurston records fear, hostility and his inability to conceal his colonial identity: ‘It was unfortunately impossible to disguise the fact that I am a government official and very considerable difficulty was encountered owing to the wickedness of the people, their timidity, their fear of increased taxation, plague inoculation and transportation.’182 Thurston’s personal papers and published accounts delight in the sensationalist and sometimes violent vernacular reactions to his practice. When enlisting the help of



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colonial planters in the Irula-inhabited part of the Nilgiri hills he found that one of the local men they brought before him had been ‘wanted’ for some time in connection with the shooting of an elephant on forbidden ground. He, suspecting me of base designs, refused to be measured, on the plea that he was afraid the height-measuring standard was the gallows. Nor would he let me take his photograph, fearing (though he had never heard of Bertillonage) lest it should be used for the purpose of criminal identification.183

During Thurston’s visits to the Oddees and to the region of Mysore, the people feared that he was a recruiting sergeant intent on sending them to southern Africa. Not surprisingly they fled as they were so terrified that they would soon be transported either as soldiers or as indentured labourers.184 Frequently when Thurston entered a village the people scattered – except for the incapacitated and the ‘senile’; in one town so many coolies ran away from Thurston that there were not enough men to drag the holy temple car in procession for an important annual festival.185 In the Irula-inhabited district of the Nilgiri hills, ‘a mischievous rumour had been circulating that I had in my train a wizard Kurumba who would bewitch the Irulas, in order that I might abduct them (for what purpose was not stated)’.186 Others refused to fire a new kiln of bricks at Coimbatore until Thurston had gone, whilst ‘the untimely death of a native outside a town at which I was halting was attributed to my evil eye’.187 The nazar in relation to the colonial museum, in this case its curator, once more asserts its presence. Time and again Thurston’s measuring instruments were believed to be those of torture – and perhaps they were torturous: ‘The gonimeter for estimating the facial angle was specially hated as it goes into the mouth of castes both high and low.’ When he did manage to get hold of someone to be measured, the results were traumatic: ‘an elderly municipal servant wept bitterly when undergoing the process of measurement and a woman bade farewell to her husband as she thought forever, as he entered the threshold of my impromptu laboratory.’188 The members of a certain caste insisted on being measured before 4 pm so that they would have enough time to remove, with ceremonial ablution, the pollution of Thurston’s touch.189 The little white spot which he made with white paint to indicate the position of the fronto-nasal suture and bi-orbital breadth was widely believed to possess vesicant properties and to blister into a number on the forehead which would serve as a means of future identification for



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the purpose of kidnapping by the colonial authorities.190 His records of head, chest and foot measurements were viewed with great suspicion by numerous individuals who believed that he was masquerading as a military tailor intent on manufacturing sepoys’ clothing that they would have to wear when conscripted to the British army.191 Whilst at one point acknowledging Rivers’ endeavours to collect Toda music, Thurston recounts an incident when a funerary song was recorded and then played to two young women who began crying bitterly: ‘the selection of the particular lament was unfortunate as it had been sung at their father’s funeral.’192 Even Europeans complained about Thurston’s ruthless techniques as he set about weighing local tribesmen on the meat scales of a butcher’s shop.193 Several Paniyan women of the Wynaad district ran away, ‘believing that I was going to have the finest specimen among them stuffed for the museum. Oh that this is possible! The difficult problem of obtaining models from the living subject would then be disposed of.’194 Thinker, tailor, soldier, spy: Thurston seemingly desires to deride wherever he goes. Colour-testing instruments, while seemingly less physically invasive than callipers and the gonimeter, nonetheless also incited absolute terror. People ran ‘for all they were worth’ from Lovibond’s tintometer.195 Holmgren’s wools also provoked rumours of incarceration and deportation amongst the Uralis and the Sholagas. From what he could glean, Thurston perceived that they believed: that the object of our enquiry was to settle them in a certain place near London, and that the wools of different colours…given to them for selection, were for tying them captive with. Others said that they could not understand why the measurements of the different organs of their bodies were taken; perhaps to reduce or increase the size of their body, to suit the different works which they were expected to do near London.196

The spectre of imperial London and the aversion it provoked amongst many a colonial museum official (such as Lockwood Kipling discussed in Chapter 2) threatens to impose an instant corporeal re-engineering for the purpose of labour. But Thurston also attempted to use his instruments to lure people to be measured. When in camp spending endless, frustrating days at a time without volunteers, he tried to charm or lure the locals with his phonograph, hand dynameter and series of pseudoptics (cards illustrating visual illusions) as ‘an attractive bait’.197 But the excitement aroused by the spectacle of the instruments precluded the possibility



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of any strict adherence to the prescriptive guidelines of his ‘manual’, Notes and Queries.198 When one chilly afternoon the Todas refused to come out of their huts to be measured and tested, a missionary, possibly in the company of Thurston, thought to assist the Survey by adapting from his technique of preaching. This style of preaching relied on the representation of Christianity through the didactic spectacle of the magic lantern and lantern slides. The missionary: threw on the screen a picture of the Prince of Wales, explaining the object of his tour [of India], and, thinking to impress the Todas, added ‘The Prince is exceedingly wealthy, and is bringing out a retinue of two hundred people.’ ‘Yes, yes,’ said an old man, wagging his head sagely, ‘but how many buffaloes is he bringing?’199

For this group of Todas, colonial ritual is out of touch with the demands of Toda worship and quotidian practices. Sometimes indigenous individuals used Thurston’s reliance on scientific devices for their own advantage. In return for a copy of his photograph, cheroots, cloth and money, a blacksmith agreed to draw an elephant which Thurston compared with ‘the more crude efforts of a Toda lad to depict a man, a buffalo’.200 In the Kotagiri bazaar in the Nilgiri hills – that great meeting place for Kotas, Kanarese, Badagas, Irulas, Todas and Kurumbas, one of Thurston’s party took a ‘tribal’ photograph of members of these collectives. The people in this photograph drew up a petition so as to insist that they be compensated for this intrusion: ‘“We, the undersigned, beg to submit that your honour made botos [sic] of us and has paid us nothing. We, therefore, beg you to do this common act of justice”.’201 Thurston had to acquiesce. Thurston admitted to both his repeated failures and his meagre results, which in spite of his attempts to win favours by offering cheroots and king’s shillings were treated with suspicion.202 He even observed that one man got rid of the coin which he had gifted to him by offering it with flowers and a coconut to the village goddess at her shrine. The man then presented her with another coin as a peace offering to cleanse himself of the pollution contaminating Thurston’s money.203 Lively and lurid, Thurston’s published accounts at least admit to a certain failure of anthropological fieldwork. Rivers’ work by contrast omits this self-reflexive practice in favour of ‘hard’ data – with one exception: These people [Uralis and Sholagas] were hardly ideal subjects for psychological experimentation. They came to us in a state of abject fear at the prospect of our examination, and in some cases continued so terrified throughout that their



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observations were of little value. In most cases, however, they soon found that we were comparatively harmless, and settled down to their observations satisfactorily.204

As opposed to the Uralis and Sholagas, Rivers in general found the Todas to be amenable to his investigations. He assured his readers that each person was paid for their time and that he did not exhaust them with his test requirements. In groups of three or four they were tested in the morning; to divert those waiting for their turn he showed them portraits of themselves ‘an occupation of which they are never tired’.205 This practice clearly shows that Rivers had to make previous contact with his test candidates and that photography played a vital brokering role. Three of Rivers’ informants died during his fieldwork, while some of his other guides feared that they would incur the gods’ wrath if they were to reveal their secrets to him.206 He surmised that both the suspicion of these diviners and his reliance on interpreters during his six-month visit meant that he was unable to uncover much of profound significance about Toda society. Underlying this idea of abject fear is, I suggest, the colonialists’ obsession with what they perceived to be native fascination with mimetically capacious machines and technologies. In the West, this modern magic was largely ignored, or even seen to be inarticulable and understood as the technological substance of civilised identity formation. These tools (phonograph, wools, tintometer, and so on) were wonders that after the first shock waves, had by now passed into the everyday. Yet these shocks are reactivated to be eviscerated as magic in the frontier rituals of colonial fieldwork; here they are assumed to invoke technological supremacy. I take a lead from Michael Taussig to think about what happens to the talking machine once it challenges/is challenged by the jungle.207 Is it there alone that it now embellishes the genuine mystery of mechanical reproduction? More than impressing ‘the natives’ this act of translation reinstalls remarkably the mimetic faculty as mystery, to create a surfeit of mimetic power. But as I hope to have just shown, there is also anxiety and instability to colonial mimesis in other alter contexts. If they are indeed magical, the magic of these scientific instruments is rumoured to be associated with the malevolent military and labour designs and the nazar of colonial governmentality. Their ‘surfeit of mimetic power’ spins into an affective field of effects whose efficacy can neither be



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contained by the colonial anthropologist nor entirely resisted by the indigenous population. By 1901 Rivers had refined, repeated and standardised his own technological ‘wonders’ – wools, cards for visual illusions, the tintometer and Cohn’s E. In that year he travelled to Dinumbhum where he tested 83 individuals for optical acuity, visual illusions and colour vision – all of whom had been previously physically measured by his companion Thurston.208 Once again this reliance on a bio-sample indicates the difficulty in obtaining spontaneous ‘native’ acquiescence.209 As in the Torres Strait, Rivers conducted research on individuals accustomed to, or at least partially aware of the arcane methods of colonial ethnography. Like Thurston and William Turner, Rivers was seeking direct racial links between the peoples of the Torres Strait and southern India. As was his usual practice, Rivers began his research by recourse to Holmgren’s wools because he hoped that colour would perform as a vital, preliminary means of communication that could supersede the linguistic barriers of his investigation. Faced with people with whom he could not even converse with in pidgin English and working with a translator because he knew no Indian language or dialect, Rivers believed that the wools offered unmediated contact. Wools performed as a form of linguistic surrogation. Their standardised, aniline dyes, otherwise so despised by Thurston, became both his and Rivers’ desired point of access to vernacular vision. In spite of Thurston’s reports of vernacular fears of wools as potential shackles, wools did prove to be one experiment that could yield plentiful results. From his observation of wools shuffling, Rivers noted that the most striking feature of Toda vision was the unusual prevalence of colour blindness.210 Out of the 503 individuals eventually tested, over 12 per cent of the males suffered from red-green colour blindness in contrast with similar data of Europeans where the figure was just 4 per cent.211 This Rivers found puzzling as he believed that in most peoples of ‘low culture’ colour blindness was far less frequent than in Europe. In fact he had never come across such high frequency. Rivers’ experiments showed that one out of 81 Uralis were colour blind in relation to red with brown and green in relation to grey and pink in relation to blue and violet. The most common colour blindness involved red and green – as in Europe. Rivers was seeking out what he termed the ‘Torres Strait’ type whereby red was confused with pink, green with blue and blue with



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violet and an overall tendency to put together the more faintly coloured wools according to shade and tint rather than through colour tone. This overall tendency he saw as stronger than in the Torres Strait. However, a sample of four out of 81 participants failed to prove this hypothesis and the results were far more similar to his results in Upper Egypt – with the exception of blue. Rivers noted the sensitivity of 14 individuals to red, yellow and blue in the tintometer which he also compared with Egypt and overall the variation of colour is far less in Egypt especially in the case of blue. Here the results adhered closely to the Torres Strait and Egypt.212 In order to test his findings, Rivers experimented with his genealogical method to try to trace the hereditary transmission of this ‘defect’.213 He wrote with surprise that the average visual acuity of the Sholagas was very similar to the people of the Torres Strait (2.12). But in the Torres Strait physiological decay was seen to begin at an earlier age which was probably due to a large amount of sunlight exposure.214 In southern India he concluded that in all his tests a pigmentation of the conjunctive part of the eye in diffuse form which he had not seen elsewhere. In half of all cases, the pigment was seen in distinct lines radiating from the edge of the cornea, although the ring of pigment around the cornea was less definite than evident in his work in the Torres Strait. Rivers also recorded that some individuals had pinguicula and than it was common to see a blue ring at the margin of the cornea and that cornea opacities had been caused by the Western disease of smallpox. Like tobacco in New Guinea, colonial practices disrupt the anthropological search for ‘pure’, untainted racial groups who were nonetheless missionised or exposed to colonial jurisdictions. Rivers argued that this did not necessarily mean that the Todas were at the lowest level of civilisational development; he located them between the Papuans and Europeans which followed the results of the other sensory tests he was also conducting in southern India.215 He concluded that as opposed to Europeans, the Todas were distinctly less sensitive to blue: This defect in the sensibility for blue is associated with deficient nomenclature for this colour which is almost universal in races of low culture; and the observations on the Todas strengthens the conclusion reached by previous work that physiological insensitiveness is one, though only one, of the factors upon which the defect in language depends.216



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Rivers observed that in this case there was an almost complete absence of the tendency common among many races to name colours by direct comparisons with natural objects – especially among the colour-blind Todas. He concluded that several people compared red to bluish tattoo marks and green to the colour of the moon whilst one man called violet kaka which otherwise meant ‘crow’.217 His writings identify a certain nomenclature wherein red was associated with blood; orange was also called blood or earth; green was semiotically identical with leaf or moss, whilst violet and brown he believed to be indefinite terms without concrete references. In addition to these associations of concrete objects with colour, Rivers was impressed by the colour acuity of the elder Todas. One man compared different colours to changing skies while: Blue was said to be like the sky when the sun is hiding behind the clouds; indigo was like the rising clouds of the monsoon; white was like shining after rain; one grey was like a cumulus when the sun is shining brightly; another grey was said to be the sun is setting and it is getting dark, and a brown was like the dawn when daylight is coming…[this shows] the close observation of nature which is found so often among primitive people, while at the same time they point to an almost artistic appreciation of light and colour effects.218

But as with his report on the Torres Strait, Rivers self-contradicts on the question of blue. The Todas ‘confirm the conclusion reached in my previous papers, that the defective nomenclature for blue which is so generally found among races of low culture is associated with a certain degree of defective sensibility for this colour’.219 Blue perhaps is too nuanced and elusive; it slips through the ethnographer’s grasp. In contrast with the Todas, for Rivers the matter of real interest in relation to the Sholagas and Uralis lay in the make-up of their languages. These, he conjectured, were strangely fascinating in terms of the anomalous nature of their hybridity. Wielding his genealogical method, Rivers argued that the languages of the people in the south were predominantly Tamil and those to the north was Canarese. The Uralis used colour words from both languages.220 Throughout his Indian and Torres Strait experiments Rivers worked with the concept of variability in terms of the mean variation in its relation with the average. Overall the results from the tintometer are first that the thresholds of the three different colours agree more closely with Upper Egypt than with Papuan or English subjects. Second, Indians are



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more sensitive to blue than Egyptians and, third, the mean variations point to the fact that different Indian groups actually form a far more homogeneous group than any of the other peoples tested. The language used to connote colour showed exactly the same characteristics as those ‘usually met with in uncivilized races’. In spite of this initial reliance on Holmgren’s wools, Rivers’ published account of his south Indian fieldwork gives greater prominence to visual acuity as tested with Cohn’s letter E. He had modified the experiment since his work in the Torres Strait where he had shown E at a short distance and then at further distances so as to test at what point E could no longer be seen (figure 3). In south India he chose the ‘number 6 size’ of letter E because ‘6’ he discovered was the common denomination of the number of metres at which E is normally recognised.221 Even in very cloudy conditions, no one failed the test in the Nilgiri Hills even though Rivers remarked that several subjects took their time – especially the older men. Rivers concluded that the Sholagas had the advantage in visual acuity of about one metre over the Uralis although he had to concede that age played a defining role.222 Curiously E in its standard, alphabetical position proved far more difficult to recognise than when ‘lying on its back’ pointing upwards like a fork held upright. Rivers could not determine whether the individuals tested had definite names for all four of the positions of E ‘but they called the letter itself mamam after the forehead sect mark of the Vishnavites’.223 But perhaps its uncanny similarity to a caste mark disrupts what the Uralis and Sholagas expected from an experiment. Perhaps the brahmanical, elitist associations of lying-down E were far from desirable. Maybe these peoples did not want to be seen acknowledging Hindu authority through the inscription device of E. There is an ambiguity, possibly also a figural and affective aspect to E which refuses legibility. To conclude my discussion of Rivers’ work, I take a lead from Simon Schaffer’s provocative essay ‘On Seeing me Write’.224 Schaffer construes cultural encounters through analogy and misunderstanding inherent to the experiment, the voyage and the polyvocality of inscription devices. In his case, a European astronomer is astounded when an inhabitant of Resolution Bay in the Marquesan Islands lies down before him pointing at his own thigh. This, the astronomer surmises, is because the man has seen him write and that perhaps the act of writing is a kind



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of tattooing. And it some ways it is. Schaffer takes this performance between writing and tattooing to examine the efficacy and ambiguity of inscription devices in relation to the mobilisation of European (colonial) knowledge and power. His emphasis on assemblage as the putting together of transportable knowledge which will act robustly at a distance perhaps fails to account for the frail instability of inscriptions – especially when faced with stable, vernacular practices. While historians of science may be rethinking fieldwork as the space for the ideal production of knowledge, as the alternative or a priori to the lab, I hope to have shown that between the field, the diary, the experiment and the laboratory, colonial knowledge fails to emerge certainly. Colonial assemblage is unstable, partial and shot through with a desire for alterity – alterity which is magical, mobile but far from describable let alone inscribable. My case study – ‘on seeing me with letters E’ (figure 3) in the Torres Strait – enacts a kind of mark making that inadvertently invokes spatial and ontological cardinal directions which call to powerful winds. Rivers believed that E in its ‘normal’ position was called paipakit – windward – and when seen in reverse it was termed pòpakit – leeward: ‘E is said to be windward when the open side is towards the direction of the prevailing south east trade wind.’225 Pòpakit and paipakit Rivers surmised to be trading terms because they were constantly used by all of the islanders, including immigrants from Melanesia, to refer to direction and locality. He had previously identified this trend (to his frustration) in his experiments in Egypt.226 He also conjectured that the reliance on direction was characteristic of many communities living close to the sea – including certain Scottish clans.227 E is in excess of, or falls short of, its acuity status. Certainly for Haddon, leeward and westward held complex associations with Mabuiag life. In the course of his own research Haddon found that the mari (ghost, reflection, spirit, shadow) of the dead went to Kibu – a mythical island located leeward of Mabuiag. He surmised that this western location of Kibu was due to the strong south-east trade wind which blew for at least eight months of the year so that ‘it is quite possible that the leeward pòpakit is the dominant idea and not the westward or in the direction of the setting sun’.228 In the published Reports Haddon recounts how in 1888 he was told that when a mari arrived at Kibu ‘by and by the devils hit the mari with a stone club and killed him’.229 Ten



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years later Haddon’s narrative is a little different. When the mari arrives at Kibu he is hidden by a friend and on the first night of the new moon he is introduced to the collective dead who club him with a stone before teaching him how through fish spearing the initiate mari can create a waterspout. The waterspout is vital for bringing dugong and turtles to the surface where they can be killed. In Haddon’s account, the direction of the winds is so vital to island life that the power of a wind man – the Gubaupuilaig – must be sought. To invoke the force of the leeward, the wind man paints himself black on the rear parts of his body while applying red to his face and chest. Red is meant to typify the morning cloud whilst black indicates the dark blue sky at night. The Gubaupuilaig then uproots bushes which he places at the edge of the reef at low tide so as to call up the wind. If the wind cannot be stopped, he uses black to represent a clear sky so as to calm the wind whilst burning the bushes recovered from the reef.230 Haddon stated that most of this information about the leeward was collected from Peter (figure 3).231 Peter’s held-up E is not leeward, not windward and not Vishnavite but in its fourth incarnation as something other. But the spirits are there. Beyond and buffeting E to the leeward pòpakit the south-east trade wind rips through the palm trees; to the north-west Kibu is calling. Although the light is bright the direction of Kibu also spells sunset and death. The ghosts are sailing with the prevailing wind: Haddon wondered if they can be identified with flying foxes.232 Is there something in photographic exposure which transports our eyes and our ears, whipped by the wind from the experiment to almost magnetic, illuminated sky where we can envisage the journey to Kibu where the dead are crying from the treetops yearning to return?233 To push this three ways in the direction of the beyond: beyond the ghost in the machine, beyond the search for that vital glimpse of your dead mother as the punctum of an image or the desire for the tiny spark in the image; to go beyond the violent/ morbid/predatory nature of photography is to ride like a shimmering, deadly wave, the leeward wind. Searching the sky, perhaps the colonial photographer, Peter and we ourselves step into the living aura of the image’s strange presence to become momentarily co-substantial with mariimaigarka – the Ghost Seer.



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Conclusion: Does ‘It No Longer Feel Right to Dream of the Blue’…? Walked around the island a second time; marvellous richly coloured sunset. Roge’a: dark greens and blues framed in gold. Then many pinks and purples. Sariba a blazing magenta: fringe of palms with pink trunks rising out of the blue sea. – During that walk I rested intellectually, perceiving colours and forms like music, without formulating or transforming them. Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Diary’

Malinowski’s fieldwork diaries make for fascinating if almost agonistic reading. For him, writing is a private experiment which transfers Haddon and Rivers’ concerns with the professionalisation of psychology on to the body of the anthropologist. The personal journal grants him the space for intimate musings on ‘the nature of psychology and to what extent introspective analysis modifies psychic states; also is introspective analysis discredited because it modifies states?’234 We follow him on his ecstatic or tedious forays to the local village, his occasional attempts to take photographs but more importantly his private papers disclose the loneliness and the ennui of the anthropological fieldworker. Shut up in his tent, he is short of energy, sick, despondent. He tries and then gives up reading Dostoevsky in between bouts of fever and intense creativity. Aside from his photographs, Malinowski paints a sensual if sometimes almost hideous picture of his quotidian wonderings: ‘Rotting trees occasionally smelling like dirty socks or menstruation, occasionally intoxicating like a barrel of urine in fermentation. I am trying to sketch a synthesis.’235 This reference to writing as like the act of drawing which floods the human sensorium is a recurrent theme in his musings; perhaps these musings are supplements to his own occasional drawings. Raw nerves, suffering from the heat: In the morning wrote alone and despite everything I felt a little more deserted than when the niggers are here. – Got up as usual. On both sides of the gray interior, green walls – on the east weeds of fresh odila, on the west a couple of pink palms divide the upper half of the picture vertically.236

In his pictorial writing, colour provides Malinowski with rare respite from the tedium and ardour of tent life. On his walks or in his tent it is frequently the sky and the sea which raise or become at one with his mood: ‘The open, joyous, bright mood of the sea – the emerald water over the reef.’237 But colour could depress. As a projection of the self



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it is nonetheless alienating: ‘demoralized by fever, headache and rain, sin embargo nevertheless went to the village. The mountains were dark sapphire; bluish white cumulous clouds amid dark, leaden shadows; the sea shimmers emerald against these bleak colours. It is sultry and oppressive.’238 In Malinowski’s notebooks, colour becomes a palimpsest mixed in with fever as landscape comes to mime his inner state. The body of the anthropologist immersed in the field replaces the work of the camera: there is a certain mimetic teleplasty to the body (akin to Caillois’ work on insects) which is now the substitute for Haddon’s early experiments with coloured photography. From Rivers’ ‘immersion’ in a certain faith in his coloured papers and glasses, a phenomenological shift makes the body of the anthropologist take the place of the papers: colour acts on, in and is the body. For Michael Taussig colour may be the jinn that lets ethnography out of the bottle ‘but then there are times when colour has to be held at arm’s length from what might be considered real intellectual work’.239 But I believe that colour can never entirely vanish – even from the driest or most ‘objective’ narrative. Reading Malinowski’s diaries before approaching his published ethnography perhaps allows us a glimpse into the mnemonics of colour. I suggest that even in these admirable, thorough studies there is a certain chromography at play. Perhaps colour weaves invisibly into the magical coral gardens of the Trobriands. Even here Malinoswki allows himself to indulge in, to be immersed in the rich greens and yellows of these wonder-filled spaces. At the close of Coral Gardens and their Magic he has to admit that for all his pain-staking investigations into the complex system of Trobriand land tenure he has not been able to disentangle the nuances and genealogies of ownership. The ethnographer’s eye requires colour: If our registering apparatus could discriminate between kinship grouping, let us say by means of coloured labels attached to each individual, the sociology of effective gardening then would be readily defined. By such means the principles of governing the distribution of the total annual yield could also be perceived. A large portion [of this knowledge] remains within the village community.240

The poetics of colour may have to be held at arm’s length but they do not entirely vanish. Colour can be a guide for the sick anthropologist; colour can assist in his investigations; perhaps it can help to reveal a little bit of vernacular magic.



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Clearly in the generation after the Torres Strait expedition, colour begins to occupy a much more elusive and discrepant agency in fieldwork as it becomes bound up with immersion and self-reflexivity. In a different manner to before colour does the narcissistic/alter work of the mirror. Participant ethnography and the figure of the isolated anthropologist ‘exposed to’ the field for up to 18 months may seemingly do away with the anxious, schematic classification of Notes and Queries – but certainly colour refuses to give way. Words are no longer abstract colour terms held up to transcendental empiricism but part of a sympathetic magic that holds the anthropologist in thrall to the sacred. Ruminating on his self-reflexive practice, Malinowski believed that the task of the ethnographer was or would be empathetic projection: …given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and through his eyes to look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him to be himself – yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our world’s vision, to understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically.241

Perhaps ironically, writing the preface to Julius Lips’ The Savage Hits Back or the White Man Through Native Eyes (1937) Malinowski characterises anthropology as the science of (if not with) a sense of humour: ‘For to see ourselves as others see us is but the reverse and the counterpart of the gift to see others as they really are and as they want to be.’242 For Malinowski, with his gift for espying the nuances of colour, the anthropologist must break down the barriers of race; he has to discover the primitive in the highly sophisticated westerner but also to recognise that the threshold between savage and civilised is increasingly difficult to define. Lips’s researches for ‘native’ mimesis of mimesis take him to Altenburg, Auckland, Berlin, Breslau, Brussels, Cambridge, Essen, Edinburgh, Freiburg, Hamburg, Lisbon, Milwaukee, Moscow, Paris, Pittsburgh, Rio de Janeiro, Stockholm, Vienna, Zürich, Washington, and ‘Africa’ amongst many other places. Fleeing from the Third Reich he would subsequently publish 250 out of 600 photographs of the artworks of ‘savages hitting back’ (figure 5). As opposed to Haddon’s rather haphazard speculations on totemism in Torres Strait drawings, Lips organised his narrative into white types – soldiers, shipping labourers, missionaries, the merchant, white women, doctors and judges, teachers and explorers and all strange things about the white man. He began his narrative



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with the frightening, cone-shaped mountain ‘like the wizard-dwelling shaman’ near Lake Chibougamau, Labrador. Feared by the locals, it has supposedly been appropriated by the manager of the Hudson Bay Company, who blatantly ignored the battle of ghosts, heavy dreams and mishap which might prevail.243 For Lips, this mountain acts as a device for ruminating on his own exile from the Third Reich. Here in Labrador there is no word for Germany and no knowledge of the current atrocities. These atrocities are the culmination of the progress of a Western modernity that is bloodthirsty, ignorant and racist. An alter awareness of such a modernity Lips suggests can be espied in the artworks of ‘the other’. The purpose of The Savage Hits Back is to allow the unknown artist to have his say at last: I set to work to assemble a collection of pictures which would speak for this unknown artist…This would be his opportunity to take vengeance upon his colonizer, or to honour the white man’s mode of living and blend it with the magic of his own world of ideas …The savage hits back.244



Julius Lips, African representation of a screaming European, unidentified, from Lips, The Savage Hits Back, 1937.

Fig.5



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This mantra of hitting back performs a powerful role throughout the narrative – which is substantiated by numerous images of African figures pointing spears in the direction of the reader, who stand for the anticipated triumph of the non-white over the West. In his prophecy of decolonisation, Lips demystifies the stereotype of the ‘god-like’ European who stripped of ‘white mystery’ must be dethroned.245 Lips’ opening image and accompanying description manifest the absolute rejection of all markers of Western civilisation – no umbrella, hat and other ‘ridiculous’ things.246 Even the presence of a rifle is but a subordinate reserve arm, not the firearm of magical power. Between his feet stands a figure in European dress, possibly asking for protection: ‘Is it only a negro dressed as a European or is it actually the white man himself?’247 Representations of white men could act as amulets or symbols of defeat to act as a mirror.248 ‘Look! That is what you white men are! … Let us not fail to recognize that their first smile at the white man was at the same time their first sign of obstinacy’.249 Lips firmly believed from the visual evidence he had gathered that non-Europeans have seen through the white world to view all its weaknesses and errors. These artworks as mirrors should make whites self-aware, to recognise the hideous narcissism of their colonising actions and violence. Lips’ discussion of the evolution of ‘primitive’ art privileges local technologies and the materials at hand. Aesthetic Colour Sense whilst important, is determined by natural conditions – for instance, the soot, ochre and chalk of the South Seas.250 Red (vermilion and cinnabar) he believes plays a critical role in the art of the Labrador peninsula.251 However, he does acknowledge the complicated colour system of the Bamum, which employed six colours from royal mines that were fast, beautiful and exactly blended. And colour could act as a means of both branding the representation of a sculpture as European or through the use of white paint for the face and red for uniform, of scaring thieves or evil spirits. Representations of deformed figures, Lips conjectured, allowed sympathetic magic to be used against the white man or woman.252 Colour then stings with alterity. No one dreams of the Blue Flower any more. The bleak staring eyes of African statues of the white man (figure 5); Malinowski’s desire for coloured markers to unravel the impenetrable genealogies of Trobriand land tenure and the transference of colour out of the ethnographic field into the field hospitals and a



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new fascination with pathology and shell shock revised and perhaps in some ways revived Victorian preoccupations with the horror and the therapeutic aspects of chromatic analysis. Think of the persistent presence of colour in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological investigations of Cézanne and how these can be read against what I would see as his far more fascinating discussions of colour experiments gleaned from the pathological investigations of his contemporary scientists and physicians. Chromophobia and chromophilia share a space where they almost bleed into one another. Whilst chromophobia might not really have its opposite in chromophilia; it might be simply that chromophobia is as David Batchelor puts it, chromophilia’s weak form. At least that might be the case in the West. In the pages that follow I hope to show you just how chromophilia and chromophobia might collide, collude, cohere otherwise. Neither blue nor red, neither normality nor pathology, nomenclature, physiology nor biological racism have much of a space in these radical refashionings of colour. Perhaps in these fights for freedom which take place artistically and economically as much as politically, colour is best thought of as a potentially redemptive chromoclash which defies reciprocation.



4

Swadeshi Colour Through the Philtre/Filter of Indian Nationalism, c. 1905–c.1947

In his artistically and politically enticing work, Art and Swadeshi, the artist and political activist Ananda Coomaraswamy takes to task the famed Indian chemist P.C. Ray’s views on dyeing.1 Although Ray had been exemplary in his patient mining of ancient Sanskrit texts for their (al)chemical qualities, as far as Coomaraswamy was concerned, his celebration of modern German alizarin dyes cut against the grain of the tenets of true swadeshi (self-economy, home industry): No question is raised [by Ray] as to the desirability, or otherwise, of this revolution in the dyer’s method and resources. Let us look beneath the surface. We shall find a useful probe in one of the Platonic dialogues. In Plato’s Phaedrus, a self confident inventor (of the art of writing) appears before the King of Egypt but the inventor is not received with open arms…Will it be amiss if we should enquire of the ‘most ingenious’ scientist what amount of detriment or advantage there may be in the invention of these chemical dyes?2

In spite of his abhorrence of all foreign goods, in the case of imported dyes Coomaraswamy pauses to consider their ambivalent status as pharmakon in relation to the more prosaic trope of the balance sheet. On the debit side, modern synthetic dyes are coarse and gaudy; they fade easily making them appear even uglier; their ‘ghastly uniformity’, however, is counterbalanced to their credit by an acknowledgement of sheer quantity.3 The pharmakon has an illustrious/infamous genealogy located elsewhere of which Coomaraswamy was no doubt mindful. Plato presents writing as an occult and suspect power which, like painting, displaces and aggravates the ill. This ‘noxiousness of the pharmakon is indicted at the precise moment the entire context seems to authorise its translation by remedy rather than poison’.4 As dangerous supplement, the pharmakon ‘breaks into the very thing that would have liked to do without it yet leads itself at once to be breached, roughed up, fulfilled and replaced, 228



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completed by the very trace through which the present increases itself in the act of disappearing’.5 The pharmakon, which has no identity to be eidotic, involves leading astray whilst simultaneously being the malleable unity of the concept and its strange logic.6 In Greek, the pharmakon also means paint or pictorial colour, not natural colour but an artificial tint – a chemical dye which imitates the chromatic scale given in nature: ‘The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.’7 These graphics of supplementarity can be water, ink, perfumed dye, sperm, which in various ways are being introduced into ‘the inside’. Perhaps also there is a pharmakon to the cultural politics of Indian nationalism which requires both the philtre and the filter. For Partha Chatterjee, nationalism in early twentieth-century India was in no way modular. Rather it is structured by an intimate relationship between borrowing and difference which enables alter nationalisms to imagine themselves into new modes of political agency that privileged the inner, ‘spiritual’ space of the home against the urban trappings of the ‘abject’ space of colonial modernity. What Chatterjee terms an ideological sieve is thus the filter for sifting models of nationalism so as to formulate a vernacular domain of sovereignty which can exist even within colonial society.8 With this in mind, whilst taking a lead from Coomaraswamy’s reading of Plato’s take on Phaedrus’ suspicion of writing as a drug, I wish to consider colour as pharmakon in such a way that ‘it makes one stray from one’s general, natural, habitual paths and laws’ to be drawn along a path ‘that is properly an exodus’.9 The pharmakon is then a philtre which filters experience. I propose that as pharmakon colour in Indian nationalism can be both an ideological sieve-taken-as-a-filter, and a philtre – but a philtre of what? Introduction Taking Coomaraswamy’s playful reference to Phaedrus and Ray’s recourse to (al)chemical texts as a thread in the chromatic labyrinth of my text, this chapter examines how Indian interest in ancient Sanskrit texts on colour acted as the justification for civilisational ascendancy and how this could be pitted against the colonial state’s programme of recording ‘primitive’ colour perception. This Indian nationalist



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investment in ancient texts and the excavation of the Buddhist caves of Ajanta and Bagh did not so much privilege an archaeological approach to colour so much as stage the invention of a modern and pressingly political aesthetic. The ‘enchanted’ technologies, materiality and locality of colour became central concerns of a group of artists and their followers who have been dubbed the ‘Bengal School’. Their method for approaching colour works through the entanglement of genealogy and analogy. Even indigo could be redeemed. Coomaraswamy, while praising the indigo darkness of Mughal paintings, condemned the vernacular use of aniline dyes which he believed was destroying the art of the Indian craftsman.10 As opposed to George Birdwood’s focus on the agency of the village as the motor driving craft, for Coomaraswamy community, guilds and a deep psychic and emotional rootedness in the Hindu cosmos revealed as practices of devotion, lay at the heart of artisanal production: the craftsman was not conceived so much as an individual as a cognate in a dense universe.11 Colour can at one level be also viewed as a cognate in the nationalist cosmology. And at some point its agency coincides, collides with Coomaraswamy’s spectral figure of the artisan caught in the web of idealised, archaic practices. But colour would also be excavated, taken out of this hoary view of the world to become a powerful resource. Its ‘veiled brightness’ in the caves of Ajanta and Bagh or in neglected Sanskrit treatises, coupled with a new and intense interest in the chromatic harmony and techniques of Mughal painting transformed colour into a fascinating archive – an archive with the potential of resistance and subversion. As my genealogical line of thought has suggested so far, colour also has an unruly agency which defies human hands to dazzle and distress their eyes and even to refuse to be held in thrall to the experiments and exigency of Indian nationalist demands. Colour grafted onto the nationalist struggle to become both rhizomatic and heterotopic. My inquiry seeks to analyse the Bengal School and Gandhi’s rejection of the pedagogical agenda of colonial art school and their own multiplex attempts to forge a modern Indian aesthetic which could shape and articulate a nationalist agenda in an expansive field. There are of course many ways of negotiating such a rich, exciting and almost entirely forgotten subject. My own argument choreographs colour both close-up and in deep focus so as to narrate



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visually what I term its disjunctive and reflexive relationship with Indian nationalism. Colour could be out of sync with elite and subaltern politics; sometimes colour seemed esoteric, excessive, useless, accidental, occidental. But there is something other about colour which could not be ignored. Largely neglected by colonial art administrators (even by such figures as E. B. Havell who railed against the South Kensington curriculum) colour had so much to offer at the levels of the material, the aesthetic, the symbolic, the semiotic and through affect. Conceived of as Indian, pan-Asian or as hybrid, colour could be construed as a new cultural context. Radically novel or archaic and fundamental colour became the major preoccupation of the artists Abanindranath Tagore and Rabindranath Tagore, their ‘disciple’ Nandalal Bose and the critics Sister Nivedita and Stella Kramrisch among others. Although the history of the Bengal School has been elegantly and astutely told by Tapati Guha-Thakurta and Partha Mitter, colour continues to be an academic blind spot.12 But there is a politics of affect to colour here which needs to be addressed. Did colour make space for the creation of ‘emancipated spectators’ from across the social spectrum? How did the artwork become newly malleable and accessible – and how much of this radical status was due to the agency of colour? To pick up a theme that has been coursing through these pages, colour could also be redemptive – but in ways that are unexpected, even frightening in their cause or affect. I consider whether colour could become a source of nationalist redemption or whether it always falls short of the violence and the necessity to produce documentary images of India’s struggle in black and white. Had colour been far too tarred by the colonial brush? The Limbs of Swadeshi My foray into Bengali chromatics begins with a consideration of its place in nationalist struggles approached through a close reading of an entirely neglected, fascinating text, Abanindranath Tagore’s treatise – written 1914–15, titled Sadanga, or the Six Limbs of Painting.13 Sadanga is the culmination of Abanindranath’s exploration of the principles of rupa bheda – form and difference through a highly original, poetic method which makes acute and more impressionistic references to Yashodhara’s



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Six Canons of Painting.14 By this date Tagore had been the principal of the Calcutta Art School for nearly ten years: as is well known, he was involved in the Bengali movement for swadeshi (home industry) and swaraj (self-rule) which had been initiated in 1905 when GovernorGeneral Curzon threatened to partition Bengal thus sparking rioting, terrorism and ideological backlash against the British.15 For the nationalists, the threat of partition signified as a transparent strategy for pitting the predominantly Muslim peasantry of eastern Bengal against the middle-class land-owning Bengali Hindu professionals of western Bengal, whose political radicalism had become increasingly marked in the late colonial political field. The swadeshi movement –which produced techniques of passive resistance that formed the basis of subsequent nationalist mass mobilisations – sought to overhaul collective and individual patterns of consumption and production, to transform entrenched structures and habits of feeling and perception and to create an autonomous national space and economy. Its broad socio-economic repertoire included the reconstitution of social taste from Manchester cloth to the khadi of the handloom and the boycott of foreign commodities. The concept of India or Bharat as a bounded organic national space became the template on to which swadeshi repertoires were forged. The swadeshi movement fused the abstract of an economic collective with an idealist vision of the social body as being specifically Hindu which could occupy the autonomous space of Bharat. Against the inter-monadic relations envisioned by classical liberalism, swaraj activists sought to realise a strong form of autonomy founded on the dialectical unity of various isolated freedoms (social and individual, spiritual and material) in a perceived organic social formation which Rabindranath Tagore termed swadeshi samaj. In a famous address in July 1904, Tagore elaborated on labour practices oriented towards the accumulation of spiritual and material power – shakti – the forging of rural grassroots development projects and the institution of mass education schemes through received folk media which will make swaraj ‘more especially Hindu’.16 The famous nationalist writer/activist Bipin Pal viewed Hinduism as more than a mere system of theology and ethics. For him and other swadeshi intellectuals, the humanism of Hinduism derived from its



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notion of immanent divinity insofar as ‘man is made not out of the image, not in the image but of the substance of the Maker’.17 Building upon a distinctive philosophical-religious tradition that rejected the distinction between the concrete and abstract universal, Pal configured the relationship between the self and the national whole as an ontological unity. In the true organic conception of the whole, while actually it is revealed through its parts, logically it is equally implied not partially but fully in each one of these parts. The apprehension of the mayic or illusory sovereignty of the colonial regime required the interiorisation of the authentic reality and deeper structure of an organic national whole.18 Decrying their base instincts and worldly desires, swadeshists would be able to recognise their bodily selves and worldly environment as modalities of shakti, the monistic but self-differentiated spiritual substance that constituted at once individuality, nationality and humanity. This Hindu social order could be understood as a form of ethical life grounded in the rationality of practical activity.19 This practical activity was critically inflected by artistic practice and art writing. Working with the reactionary Sister Nivedita, his uncle Rabindranath, the artist Nandalal Bose and art administrator E. B. Havell, Abanindranath Tagore produced an image that became directly associated with the fight for self-rule – Bharat Mata – which was translated into Japanese-ink-painted banners to be used during protest marches. It became the visual accompaniment to Bipin Chandra Pal’s claims that in this case the nation as mother was not as in Europe a mere metaphor but a fundamental truth that transgressed the secular patriotism of colonial countries. Rather ‘the cult of the Mother among us … is an organic part of our ideal love of God’.20 For Pal, the concept of Bharat Mata was rooted in old, universal principles constitutive of all systems of Hindu-brahmanical philosophical thought: the structuring dynamic of purusha (the principle of changed coded as a masculine essence) and prakriti (the principle of permanence coded as feminised nature or earth).21 The relationship between these two was for Pal that of the fundamental unity of opposites that structured in common the otherwise distinct Vedantic, Vaishnava and Shaivite traditions. More crucially, it signified as a constitutive element of the phenomenology of Hinduism as lived, of the performative logic of everyday practices.22



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The critic who championed Tagore’s work in the most detail, the Irish woman Margaret Noble, alias Sister Nivedita, chose to emphasise mood, historicity, radical innovation and the importance of white in relation to his Bharat Mata: The artist has here given expression nevertheless to a purely Indian idea, in Indian form. The curving line of lotuses and the white radiance of the halo are beautiful additions to the Asiatically-conceived figure…Spirit of the motherland, giver of all good, yet eternally virgin, eternally raft from human sense in prayer and gift. The misty lotuses and the white light set Her apart from the common world… [is she not] daughter of the dawn?23

Nivedita elevated art to a spiritual level by claiming that ‘the profession of a painter must come to be regarded not simply as a means of earning a livelihood but as one the supreme ends of the highest education’.24 She reacted against Western realism to praise instead light, the shimmering and the space of suggestion in the advocacy of a new Indian art which ‘must appeal to the Indian heart in an Indian way [and] convey some feeling [that is] immediately comprehensible’.25 Nivedita mapped out a nationalistic palette for colour whereby colour can be the epidermis or worldly threshold of things: Lines take the place of nerves and arteries, and the whole is covered with the skin of colour. That he [Okakura] ignores the question of dark and light, is due to the fact that in his day all painting was still on the early Asiatic method – covering the ground with white lime and laying upon this the rock-pigments, which were accentuated and marked off from each other with strong black lines. Thus Confucius says ‘all painting is in the sequence of white.’26

For art to flourish the nation’s autonomy is absolutely essential. Art must decorate public buildings – preferably with themes from ancient history. Nivedita’s views are symptomatic of contemporary debates on the agency of colour qua art. Even the recently deceased south Indian gentleman artist Raja Ravi Varma, whose paintings were derided in Bengal by now could be redeemed as his use of colour ‘appeals to all’; ‘his love of warm and gorgeous colours are also Indian’.27 ‘Painting back’ against the agenda of colonial oil painting, Varma had deployed a heightened palette of reds and yellows, tones which also featured as the spectrum of his chromolithographs. In the



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midst of Cow Agitation in western India, 1890s, the Varma press perhaps inadvertedly drew attention to the importance of yellow. The polemical status of Indian yellow became the source of utmost contention as starving cows for their glistening urine acted as one of the focuses of Hindu nationalism. By 1908 the colonial government banned the production of Indian yellow – purree. The particular problem with purree was its imbrication in the realm of colonial labour and colonial religion: this valuable commodity posed a threat to the sacred cow.28 Jordanna Bailkin observes that with the abolition of purree the British palette changed irrecoverably as the long-standing practice of depicting Indians on canvas came into open conflict with the desire to govern them. British artists were no longer able to paint flesh in the same range of colours.29 The chemist C. A. Klein nonetheless celebrated the global sources for colour produced by the ‘wonderful story of empire’ whilst art teacher Arthur B. Allen still believed that conceptions of race were rooted in the history of paint. Oil paint he implied was logically prior to the legal and scientific systems of racial classification.30 Although as Partha Mitter demonstrates, oil painting continued to be practised by vernacular artists before and post-Independence, its status in relation to the overt political agenda of nation building became in swadeshi circles extremely contentious.31 This concern with the (taboo) materiality of art even above the issue of representation acted as a critical force for aesthetic and political reform in Bengal. Ravi Varma’s use of oil – the direct byproduct of the colonial opium trade associated with Raj artists’ overblown canvases, brought him into contention with the agenda of swadeshi.32 Rejecting the oils and chromatic scale of Varma’s palette, Abanindranath Tagore devised his own washes to forge a pale spectrum which tried to transcend what he perceived as conventional, colonial aesthetics.33 He began by pencilling in the outline on sturdy Whatman English cartridge paper before applying as many as 15 transparent washes which he allowed to dry before immersing the work in a basin of water so as to fix the colours naturally. His pupil Nandalal Bose dubbed this type of painting ‘washing out colour’ which Tagore referred to as morotai – hazy wash.34 According to Bose:



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To portray rain or mist or smoke, or bringing the heaviness and opacity to the colour areas as in tempera, transparent colours can be mixed with a little white and a wash or two of these given on the wet ground; a wash of this kind with a soft flat brush on a really wet paper can lead to beautiful effects to portray mist, cloud or rain. Sometimes touches of white from the brush tip in certain of these wet areas in a painting will spread by themselves and take the shape of clouds which by tilting and turning the workboard can be given the desired direction and movement. A wash of such white-mixed colours softens the lines and colours of a painting which when finished on the top will look like a good tempera painting… A highlight can be produced by rubbing a relatively hard brush on the painting whilst it is still slightly wet.35

Never stretching or mounting the paper, Tagore would wet it from behind to achieve an effect similar to fresco buono – a process which he repeated until the desired colours were finally reached. Although giving the impression of a misty haze, colour also conveyed an almost uncanny sense of depth and space. The painting would then be finished with either transparent or opaque colours – including the use of tempera. This added to a blurring of the background, the edges and the less focused parts of which conveyed a strange luminosity resulting from the ghostly whiteness of the paper shining through transparent washes.36 In Bose’s recall, Tagore employed a plate glass palette on which he mixed imported and locally produced pigments such as cobalt and Prussian blue, burnt sienna and carmine but which rejected ‘heavy’ vernacular earth colours in favour of ‘whatever came in the western watercolour boxes’.37 Paradoxically, given the agenda of swadeshi, foreign materials continued to hold some sway over the leader of the Calcutta School of Art. This preference for Western materials would be challenged by Bose and Jamini Roy amongst others who I discuss later.38 In his Reminiscences, Tagore downplayed his recourse to colonial or Western pigments to attribute his use of wash to the Nihonga artists Taikan and Hishida who visited Calcutta from Japan in the company of the artist-teacher-philosopher Okakura. Japan had recently defeated Russia in the Russo-Japanese War (February 1904–September 1905) and as such provided Bengal (then in the grips of Partition) with ideological inspiration to fight British colonialism.39 Advisor for the Japanese state on culture, curator of the Japanese section of the Imperial Museum of Japan and founder of Japan’s leading art magazine Kokka, Okakura became a source of inspiration for Abanindranath and Rabindranath with whom he

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established a lifelong friendship. Even today at the Tagore family home of Jorasanko, Kolkata, an installation of Japanese painting materials attests to their common aesthetic interests (figure 6).40 According to Abinandranath, ‘at a particular stage of the picture he [Taikan] would go over it with a flat brush dipped in water. I gave the whole picture a bath and discovered the effect quite pleasing. That is how the wash technique came to be naturalized in India’.41 Tagore closely observed Hishida’s ‘bricoleur’ approach to colour. He would: just roam around picking up odd bits of things and then use them for his picture making. He would rub a piece of rock until it yielded the earth colour he has set his heart upon or cajole pigment out of some leaf or flower and then apply the concoction to his picture. For charcoal he would burn the twig of a berry tree on a slow fire.42

Of his own practice Tagore records ‘when I begin to paint I dip my brush in water, in colour and then get it thoroughly immersed in my mind and only then I am ready to start my picture’.43 His first major series of paintings executed after the visit of the Nihonga artists are the illustrations to Omar Khayyam’s classic the Rubaiyat (1906–11). Like his



View of an installation dedicated to the Tagore family’s celebration of Japanese culture, in Jorasanko, Kolkata.

Fig.6



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Bharat Mata the paintings use soft out-of-focus wash to convey an aura of contemplation around the figures through a series of colours – pale, warm yellow, peach, apricot and mint which help to bring meaning to the iconography. In the Rubaiyat, the images are not so much illustrations of particular verses and more subtle mergings, literal blurring of the narrative which conveys the spirit of the poem.44 The delicacy of these tones, which are so subtle that the weft of the watercolour paper shimmers through the wash, is a radical departure from the bright pink and indigo tones of the still relatively conventionally applied watercolour of Abanindranath’s Krisna Lila narrative (1896) and the opaque finish of the Shah Jahan series.45 Colour then plays a critical role in Tagore’s intensified focus on meditation which he increasingly believed to be integral to the vital and intellectual processes of artistic creation. Tagore saw the potential of colour to be a stimulating cross-cultural phenomenon and as the means to aesthetic action as seen in his dialogues with Taikan and Hishida and his experiments with Mughal painting.46 Although he and his followers would subsequently criticise Mughal art for lacking bhava – the heightened emotion which they believed should characterise modern Bengali painting – it did act as a necessary mediating stage between what Tagore termed childish or elementary art and aesthetic excellence: ‘Mughal art with its vivid colours, elaborate grandeur and gorgeousness. From these, we find art proceeding to a higher stage in emotive appeal. Now come those creations which use but little colour but are replete with the serene simplicity of shadows cast by clouds heavy with rain.’47 Tagore criticised his pupil Nandalal Bose’s representation of Umar in contemplation of Siva because it is ‘barren of colour save for a faint overall wash of an orangeish tint. I said at once “But why exclude colour Nandalal? It sets my heart throbbing to look at this”.’48 He quickly revised his position when he realised that a certain absence of colour only heightens its power: ‘Uma appears in the stern splendour of iron determination, sacrificing all colour.’49 The decision to sacrifice colour or not later became one of Bose’s preoccupations in his relationship with Gandhi. Colour is also an implicit force in Tagore’s understanding of likeness as based on rasa – the spirit of beauty and similes. Likeness as analogous resemblance forms the basis of his ideas of should-be artistic anatomy.



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Eyebrows should resemble neem leaves; eyes should be fish shaped, lips should be smooth, moist and red, the neck should be like a conch shell, the kneecap must be curved like a crab shell and the chin should assume the form of a mango stone. Attributing his ideas to the Sukranitisara 50 for Tagore there are four stages for making a painting – dhauta, bighattita, lanchchita and ranjita – washing, analysing, drawing and colouring.51 At the third stage lanchchita mood enters in the realm of imagination where what is hidden within is now revealed with exquisite skill: All form is bound together by bonds of likeness and similarity…the world of matter does not thrive on such differentiation and apartness…the one becomes like the other and vice versa…Nowhere in the universe has there been one thing such as one sun exactly resembling another, no one tree being an exact copy of another nor one man an exact double of another. But of two wings or two petals of a flower, two leaves of a tree…the one may be a copy of the other…the one always tending towards the other.52

This doctrine of resemblances also informs the narrative of Tagore’s images which frequently superimpose Hindu iconography and Mughal compositions. During the second phase of the movement for swaraj (1915 onwards) characterised by Rabindranath Tagore’s rejection of militant nationalism, Annie Besant’s agitational politics and Gandhi’s return from South Africa to take a role in Congress politics, Abanindranath Tagore set out the principles of colour in Sadanga – a text which in part draws on the Hindu Shilpa, or Code of Art.53 For Tagore colour has a multivalent status which threads between form and difference, whilst itself being one of the limbs of painting. In effect all of the limbs of this imaginary figure are infused or animated by colour to such a degree that there can be no art and no aesthetic principles without colour. The six limbs are rupabheda – knowledge of appearances; pramanani – correct perception; bhava – action of feelings on forms; lavanya-yojanam – infusion of grace; sadrishyam – similitude; and varanikabhanga – knowledge of colour. According to Tagore these six laws of painting were laid out by Yashodhara in his commentary on Vatsayana Kamasutra (book 1, chapter three) and that there is a curious analogy with Chinese art criticism as Hsieh Ho also listed six canons. Tagore, however, does not point out the differences between the canons. Ho’s laws of painting place greater emphasis on composition and the copying of classical models than on



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the projection of emotion and the mind’s eye in Tagore’s elaboration of Yashodhara.54 In his preface to Tagore’s Sadanga, O.C. Gangoly claimed that the Indian laws of painting reached back far beyond Ho and even Yashodhara to be the very foundation of Asian artistic practice.55 According to Tagore, rupa constitutes visual and mental form whilst bheda he interprets as difference; in combination they allow us to study outward appearances. Form is touched with the organs of the five senses and it is defined by ‘the light which sees and shows forms, light waves from the planets as well as the inner light of our soul’ to reveal how form is variously shaped and coloured.56 In the Mahabharata, Santiparva, Moksadharma, chapter 184, verse 33–4, which Abanindranath cites, rupa is viewed as short, long, bulky, angular, circular, sleek, hard, feathery, slim, soft, rough, or as sukla – pure white, Krisna – black or sombre, rakta – red or radiant, pita – yellow and pallid, or as nilaruna – purple or of mixed colours.57 Critical here is how form and colour are so intimately entangled that they cannot be separated. It is not merely that forms have colour but that certain colours have forms in, beyond and above the world which must be sought out by the artist. Colour is not then a secondary – that is, Kantian – sensual attribute of the world, nor is it as for Wittgenstein an ambiguously primary aspect, but rather it becomes for Tagore a universal and fundamental element for ontological existence. The combination of rupa-bheda involves the analysis and synthesis of colour forms. The senses alone can perceive the outer appearance of things which is a far from unique experience: for Tagore their work is akin to the visual effect and development processes of a photograph. Being like a photograph, the senses alone cannot truly differentiate sensations: they give veracity but not variety of forms.58 Colour then is like a person – it has a body and a mind, an inner and an outer aspect; it is its own physiognomy. It is jnan the perceiving faculty of the mind which bestows the real diversity of outer colour forms. Each colour form contains ruchi, which literally means a beam of light or the ‘lustre of loveliness’.59 When the ruchi that is within us and the ruchi that is in objects come into agreement a colour-thing can be viewed as beautiful or pleasing. As soon as colour form is presented to sight, the search light of ruchi throws out its beam on the object and the object, whether animate or inanimate, will cast its own ruchi on to the mind’s reflector. Hence objects in the world have a kind of vitalising agency.



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Each object waits ‘for another ruchi agreeable to its own’.60 The beam of ruchi may be dull or weak in one object and bright and strong in another: ‘The practice of rupabheda in art is for the enhancement of the light-giving and light-absorbing power of the mind…to paint them with its enlightening touches – this is the law.’61 The second of Sadanga’s limbs, pramanani, addresses the laws of painting through proportion, perspective, distance, anatomy and other forms of measurement of the body and nature. Here again colour has a critical role to play but in ways that are more elusive, troublesome and perhaps less powerful than its colour-form status as red, purple, yellow or white. For Tagore: The vast blue of the ocean waves appears hopelessly immeasurable. How can we put it on a square piece of white paper measuring only a few inches or a few feet? By merely drowning the whole sheet in transparent blue or splashing it with inky and wavy strokes, we can not say this is ocean because we find our sheet looks more like a square bit of blue colour, insignificant and limited, having nothing of the deep and limitless picture spread before and beyond our sight.62

Here the ocean is almost sublime; it is not endowed with the character of nilaruna nor seemingly with ruchi; it demands a mimetic engagement, which rejects European abstraction and the demands of the colour patch (which I discuss in Chapter 3). The agency of colour has to act on and act with other substances and forces in the world; it is not autonomous nor does it have a fetish-like quality; it has nothing to do with the hermetic system of Tagore’s contemporary Munsell’s colour charts. For Tagore, our perception of the ocean and its colour has to be limited by the action of our Pramatri Chaitanya – that is, the sense of measuring which must proceed to reign in the infinite waters through their relationships with the sky and the coastline, air and the earth. This spacing between earth and air seeks out with ‘unerring exactness the difference of tone between the yellow of the sandy shore and the gold of the sun-lit sky’, their transparency and roughness as well as their vast difference in form and colour.63 The operations of these measuring sense function at the level of movement, restlessness and quietude. Our prama also tells us the exact quality and quantity of blue, black, grey, red or yellow, green and so on, to convey the expressions of idea, sentiment and the exact and proper colour of things. Such a mimetic faculty is found in varying degrees in all living creatures – the



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bird hopping in the grass, the cat stalking its prey or the insect who knows what is ‘happening on all sides’.64 Tagore, however, extends prama from the perception of the natural world to the building of the Taj Mahal which he believes has the perfect proportions; any adjustment of proportion would have entirely spoiled its structure. In relation to this proposition he quotes Panchadasi, chapter 4, verse 30, on the action of Pramatri Chaitanya in terms of the manner in which it throws itself on the seen thing and how this act of throwing makes it felt by the mind.65 In consequence the mind takes the qualities of form and form takes the qualities of mind. Prama is able to become a measure of the internal quality of things by bridging inner and outer forms and sensations: ‘Like a spider we sit surrounding ourselves with the invisible threads of this measuring faculty which are always telegraphing to our organs of senses as well as to our mind detailed and exact information as to the proportion, measure etc. of the different objects caught in its webs.’66 Akin to ruchi, constant exercises are needed to keep this mimetic faculty sharp and more than anything else, prama performs as our constant guide to sentient being in the world. This mimetic faculty then has something of mimicry about it – the ability to transform in moments of danger. Measurement as prama becomes like camouflage. Art performs as an activity charged with sentient knowing through forms which can only be known through the projection of prama. Prama is needed to make sense of and to survive out in the world as opposed to ruchi which works through limited correspondences between men and things. Together these limbs project into the world and allow objects and their inner elements to force themselves onto the mind which is like a telegraph station giving and receiving local and long-distance networks of which it is a part.67 Both prama and ruchi are mediators between the opened-out mindas-receptacle and the quivering world; they show not merely a priori intellectual activity – the world set up as a picture before the sovereign European subject but the world as a series of affective, tremulous networks few of which make themselves truly knowable at the level of the visible. It is through the tactile-optical space and affect that perception happens. This elusive connection of the idea of emotion and nature of thing is carried further in the third limb – bhava – which means suggestion. In



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art bhava is articulated by the different attitudes assumed by forms under the action of feelings not merely sensations. According to Vaishnava Aesthetics, bhava is the change in the natural disposition of the mind as caused by bibhava which is the acquaintance with the inner significance of the outer appearance of things abstract or ideal. Bhava is also the cause of bringing on bodily transformation in the three-fold division of the organs of sense: first, in the organs of perception; second, in the five organs of action (hands, feet, larynx and so on); and third, through the five internal organs (that is, manas, the mind; buddhi, the intellect; ahamkar, the ego or organ of selfishness; chitta, the heart or the organ of feeling; and the nervous system).68 Bhava is what gives the colourless and motionless mind colour and movement: all of nature is affected by bhava. Bhava is present in ‘the colours of the spring foliage…in the tremendous stirring of the ocean waves…in the knitting of the eyebrows, in the drooping of the eyelid, in the trembling of the lips, in the manner of brushing away a teardrop’.69 As its colours vary, so do the shapes and moods of bhava. Colour is a particularly apt means for articulating bhava in art because of its intimate relationship with byanga – suggestion which underlies its outward expressions. Byanga is associated with the operation of bhava on the mind so that bhava can be perceived as a double-hooded snake whereby our eyes only detect the different turns of colours ‘but the suggestive side or subtle form of bhava which represents the second hood we find hidden from our sight concealed by byanga or buried in suggestiveness’.70 To define this indefinite quality in painting is extremely difficult. In art, the action of bhava is to give to rupa their proper attitude; the action of byanga is to reveal the mind and the meaning concealed by the ever-changing veil of rupa. This entails the infusion of grace known as lavanya yojanam.71 Just as prama imposes measure on forms, lavanya controls excessive movement of forms affected by emotion. Lavanya has a certain tenderness and dignity which tempers the work of emotion on form; it is akin to a shining substance.72 Even colour proportions mean nothing without this injection of grace, purity and restraint. Lavanya has the most work to do of all the six limbs in painting but it (she) must appear to be the most unobtrusive. There is also a certain subtlety to Tagore’s intertwinement of all of the above principles with similitude or resemblance – sadrisyam. Sadrisyam is not primarily mimetic in terms of an engagement with realism or the



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outer appearance of things in the world: ‘we rarely come across things similar in form and in nature.’73 In poetry and painting, similarity of forms does not count for as much as correspondence of feelings or ideas.74 The mind flowing into the forms of things becomes the thing itself. The mind gets the mark of colour form – rupa – and becomes similar to the outward form of things. I hope to have made clear that colour flows throughout the text of Sadanga. In painting, true colour is not that as seen in photographs but that which corresponds to the mind’s perception: ‘Mere similitude of form, colour etc., such…as many insects assume for concealing their identity is rather a hindrance than a help to artistic expression.’75 The second of the limbs, pramanani, addresses the laws of painting in terms of proportion, perspective, distance, anatomy and other forms of measurement of the body or nature. Here again colour has a critical role to play but in ways that are more elusive, troublesome and perhaps less powerful than its colour-form status as red, purple, yellow or white.76 At the end of Sadanga Tagore treats colour in detail. He tries to pin down its intensity, its movement, its fundamental status. This far exceeds the technical aspects of laying in paint; the importance of the steady hand must overcome all fear of the great white mirror of the blank page; even more critically the artist must master colour which is the ‘most difficult attainment of all’.77 Abanindranath’s description of ‘the line’ is intimately linked with colour and with Japanese wash painting. Once you know colours’ real nature and meaning, the washtinged brush will unerringly make colours crystalline. According to Tagore, the tantras have ascribed spirit and soul to all lines and figures; for instance, ‘A’ possesses the ‘amazing purity of a white conch shell, having the radiance of Brahma, the blueness of Vishnu and the terrible and fierce spirit of Rudra’s self ’.78 These outlines drawn in black should in the mind’s eye be full of colours be they blue or red, hot or blazing as fire, cool or melting like the sky, clear and shining like a lovely sapphire. To underline his thesis, Tagore interprets the Natya Shastra of Bharata Muni on the significance of colours in ancient face painting and mask painting wherein knowledge can be gained of how colours can enhance form and ideas, how the scale of colours can elate the spirit and how tones can reveal or conceal form and thought. The mind thus draws ‘the seven colours of light’ and the seven colours of darkness both of which



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exceed the capabilities of the sense of sight: ‘Our eyes merely see colours but the mind [feels] the music, the perfume of colours.’79 Hence colours should convey heat, light, scent, sound and movement (rain clouds, oil lamps, flower garlands, for instance). Varnika-bhanga, the final limb of painting, holds the key to the esoteric secret of art. For Tagore, ideas are associated with feelings, emotions and sensations. They are not suprasensible nor do they necessarily have a Kantian transcendence to Nature. Ideas are filtered through to the mind in such a powerful way that the mind is described as shaped by sensations, forms and idea, like copper poured into a mould. Forms reveal forces or intensities that lie beyond sensations which draw us into becoming. The body is made up of a plurality of visible and invisible forces whose summit can be found in the sensation of colour. In relation to rupa, colours are forms and they can transmitted to the embodied mind via light waves; in prami colour needs to be measured – that is, controlled – if it is to enter the realm of representation. Colour is an aspect of bhava; it gives the mind colour and movement; lavanya adds grace to colour; like prami it performs as a kind of filter; in sadrisyam or resemblance, colour bears witness and becomes part of intimate correspondences; it demands rigorous attention. Overall, Sadanga puts forward a very different logic of sensation to Immanuel Kant’s critiques of pure reason and judgement – texts of which Tagore (D. Litt., C.I.E.) was surely well aware. In Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues that perception requires a synthesis of what appears in time and space which functions through three operations – apprehension, reproduction and recognition.80 Since everything is a multiplicity and has a multiplicity of parts, perception begins with synthesis as the act of apprehension. The proceeding parts must be reproduced when the following ones occur for a synthesis to take place. These activities of spatiotemporal synthesis – apprehension and reproduction are no longer at the level of the sensible but in the world of the imagination. The third moment required for perceptual synthesis must be related to the form of an object – and this takes the form of recognition. Perception presupposes the object form as one of its conditions which Kant gives as the formula of the object = x. The object = x is a pure form of perception, just as space-time is a pure form of sensation. The object = x will receive a concrete determination only



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when it is related to synthesised parts of a situation. But the multiplicity of sensations would never be referred to an object if we did not have at our disposal the empty form of the object = x, since there is nothing within sense experience that accounts for the operation by which I go beyond sensible diversity towards something I call an object. This object in general is the correlate of the unity of consciousness; it is an expression of the cogito. In Critique of Judgment Kant asks what constitutes a part. To determine this, the imagination must have at its disposal a constant unit of measure which is found primarily in the human body.81 Even at the level of simple perception, apprehension already implies something like a lived evaluation or ‘aesthetic contemplation’ as a unit of measure – which proceeds from the body. This is the moment of phenomenology in Kant: aesthetic contemplation presupposes the situatedness of our bodies in the world. There is in all these acts a kind of logical synthesis which is subject to constant variation. Hence aesthetic contemplation is the grasping of a rhythm with regard to both the thing to be measured and the unit of measure. The foundation of perceptual synthesis is aesthetic comprehension but the ground on which this foundation rests in the evaluation of rhythm. Therefore aesthetic comprehension is no longer seen as part of the synthesis, it is the foundation on which the synthesis rests; it is its soil. There is, however, an extraordinary variability of the ground (rhythm) and its fundamental fragility (chaos). Between the synthesis and the ground there is the constant risk that something may emerge from beneath the ground and break the synthesis and this is because of the infinite phenomena in space and time, such as the immense ocean, which risks overturning aesthetic contemplation. At the very moment the imagination discovers this impotence it makes us discover within ourselves a higher faculty – the faculty of ideas – the faculty of Reason. For Tagore, by contrast, forms reveal forces or intensities that lie beyond sensations which draw us into processes of becoming. The body is made up of a plurality of visible and invisible forces whose summit can be found in the sensation of colour. Although his critique of Kantian aesthetics is subtle and implicit, Tagore attempted to make direct comparisons between Sadanga and Chinese and Japanese aesthetics and panting by using Ho, Okakura and Henry P. Bowie’s ‘Laws of Japanese Painting’.82 He linked the law of Sei-do in Japanese art with chhanda



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– rhythm as based on the psychological principle of matter responsible to mind. He also sought analogies between Japanese and Bengali art because they both favoured ‘composition and subordination or grouping according to the hierarchy of things’.83 Abanindranath believed that the Upanishads were echoed in the Japanese art philosophy by the word ‘Sha-I’ and in painting by the importance of feeling over appearances. He also wrote that chhanda is similar to Okakura’s description of ‘the life movement of the Spirit through the Rhythm of things…The great mood of the Universe moving hither and thither amidst the harmonic laws which are Rhythm’.84 Also pramanani – proportion is ‘practically the same as the En-Kin of the Chinese art philosophy’.85 The idea of suggestiveness – byanga – Tagore believed to be the same in Japanese art. But Tagore concluded his discussion of this cultural analogy by stating that there is a want of cohesiveness in the Chinese laws of painting so that by the time of Hsieh-Ho’s canons ‘much of the art-philosophy as contained in the original six limbs of Indian painting was lost to China or only imperfectly remembered’.86 In spite of such erudition, Tagore’s book was strongly criticised by Akshay Maitreya, Ananda Coomaraswamy and Stella Kramrisch for its lack of attention to archaeological and Sanskrit sources. Maitreya wanted a closer reading of Sadanga and the Shastras by returning to Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra.87 He dwelt on the three words from which he believed Tagore had derived the concept of Sadanga – iti, chitram and sadangakam.88 He disputed the relationship between the six angas of the Vedas and the six angas of painting stating that angas cannot be automatically associated with sadangaka. The very title of Tagore’s treatise was thus misleading. A better name Maitreya suggests would be ‘the six essential requisites of painting’.89 He takes to task Tagore’s linkage of rupa-bheda which is a compound of rupam and bheda. There are 16 forms of rupam outlined in the Mahabharatam – a text Maitreya believed Tagore had consulted too briefly. Maitreya also critiqued Tagore’s ‘loose’ definition of pramanani proportions because it did not adhere to the ancient canons of art. Artists should not have the freedom to innovate; the canons stipulate exact(ing) rules and these must at all times and at all costs be followed – even by a modern artist. Maitreya claimed that Tagore had neglected the principle of foreshortening as well as the importance of kshaya (disappearance)



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and vridahi (appearance), all of which were stipulated in detail in the third part of the Vishnudharmottara.90 Again in relation to bhava Maitreya insisted that it be linked with nine specific moods rather than harnessed to individual artistic innovation. More attention should be paid to proper position, proportion, spacing, gracefulness, articulation and resemblance.91 In his eyes Tagore had also been unclear on the definition of lavanya-yojanam as grace. Lavanya should not be taken metaphorically but used exclusively as a technical term. Throughout Sadanga Maitreya believed that Tagore worked too much with suggestiveness particularly in relation to sadrisyam – which as the principal anga set out in the Vedic Panchadasi, needed to be excavated intellectually in great depth. He also criticised Tagore for too wide a usage of bhanga and for his ill-defined articulation of the relationship between varnika and bhanga. Varnika should signify variously as colour, pigment or brush whilst bhanga means breaking, application or the appropriate disposition of colour.92 Maitreya’s position reaffirms the tensions outlined by Tapati Guha-Thakurta between archaeological and aesthetic approaches towards ancient Indian art and its relationship with a modern, politically charged aesthetic.93 His views were partially endorsed by the art historian and critic Stella Kramrisch’s translation and commentary on the Vishnudharmottara, Part III, which she dedicated to Abanindranath Tagore.94 She notes that the Vishnudharmottara derives from numerous earlier sources including Bharat’s seventhcentury Natya Sastra which was contemporary with the later paintings at Ajanta. In her reading of the Vishnudharmottara, art should be public; it should have breath and movement and it should employ the five primary colours of white, yellow, black, blue and the colour of myrobalan. Alternatively, these primaries can be white, red, yellow, black and green. Kramrisch also cites the Abhlashitanatha Chintamani on the colours of conch-shell white, red lead, chalk, green arsenic and black soot, and he stresses that the mixing of colours should be left to the artist and that colours may be coated with lac and resin. She referred to the Silparatna, Chapter 46, for the grinding and washing of colours and their mixing with the exudation of the nimba tree. Nine brushes should be used – one for each colour. When the paint is dry it should be rubbed with a boar’s tusk to ensure that colouring is true to



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nature.95 Colour must be associated with the painting of emotions but the ‘ambiguity of colour in its suggestive and descriptive faculty has to be clearly kept apart’.96 In my reading of the Vishnudharmottara, Part III, I have focused on the way in which it draws on the Natya Sastra’s chapter 6, verses 42–43, to specify the colours of emotions: the erotic is blue; laughter is white; the pathetic is grey, the heroic is yellow-white; the furious is red; the fearful is black and the repulsive is blue.97 The Vishnudharmottara then goes on to detail the colouring of deities and castes. In chapter 27, verses 7–26, colours are analysed very carefully; white should be of five kinds and kings should be represented the colour of the padma. Eyes are charming when painted like the blue lotus petal with red corners and black pupils.98 Frequently in the contemporary Indian periodical press members of the Bengal School came under fire for their esoteric subject matter and even for their technique. Even Coomaraswamy who otherwise praised the Bengal School’s ‘subtlety of colour’99 condemned it: The colouring of many of the Calcutta pictures, especially the later, Japaninfluenced work of [Abanindranath] Tagore is muddy in the extreme, and the tones throughout so low as often to make the very subject of the picture hard to decipher. This is as far as possible a departure from the pure, clean colour schemes of earlier Indian art although its vagueness lends harm to the treatment of certain subjects.100

According to a review of the high-profile annual Indian Society of Oriental Art exhibition, Calcutta, April 1921, ‘the artists of Bengal with characteristic perversity still continue to cultivate an apathy to and lack of interest in contemporary life’.101 The critic G. Krishna Rao penned a particularly damning piece entitled ‘The Technique of Modern Painting’ in which he declared that: The tendency of the modern artist seems to be defective in this respect when we look at the examples of modern Indian paintings. It is wanting in that definiteness and exactitude which the old masters so assiduously practised and perfected for the correct expression of their themes. The modern Indian painters are not so bold in the creation of significant forms or so complete and satisfying in his craft. I am led to believe that he is labouring under the misapprehension that technical simplicity carried to the point of dreary vagueness or perhaps sketchiness is more suitable to lend the spiritual atmosphere to his subject.102



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What is invoked, even in such criticism, is the importance to the Bengal School of a highly individualised reflexivity of practice: art writing and painting occupy the same space of technique; they are both meditative, delicate and intuitive. It was, I contend, Tagore’s intention to blur colour and word, to merge the ancient canons with subtle free-hand innovation to create a hybrid aesthetic based on immersion. Immersion, which for Tagore was technically and materially literal as well as intellectual, underscores his painting and his writing. Writing becomes less a trace laden with the symbolic, indexical, the arbitrary or the iconic than the coloured space for infusion and layering. In this way there is a fullness of presence to art writing which is achieved through the analogous free structure of the coloured wash. Between painting and writing colour emerges, dissolves and reappears as the binding force. But given such criticism and the shifting agenda of modern Indian art how would colour be remade in the name of modernism and a more militant and nonviolent nationalism? Bauhaus, Mud House Redux: Modernism and the Material Localities of Nationalism In his powerful, reactionary article, ‘Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mud House’, postcolonial artist and writer Rasheed Araeen rails against white mainstream art history for its refusal to make any significant concessions to non-European, in particular African and South Asian, art.103 Here I take ‘Bauhaus’ in the spirit of Araeen’s sense of a collective that can exist outside of the hegemony of Western art. I use the term Bauhaus very loosely as a device for thinking through the aesthetic experiments of the Tagores, Nandalal Bose and Gandhi in the symbiosis of nationalism and colour. My use of ‘mud house’ refers not in the derogatory sense intended by Araeen in his criticism of Eurocentric disdain for modern South Asian art, but as a means of thinking about the cultural and political turn to murals, tempera, mud and fresco as part of the nationalist agenda for artistic production and display. This alter modernism invoked localism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism which at some points worked with more mainstream politics than Abanindranath Tagore’s aesthetic.104 This dialectic of mud house and



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Bauhaus also complicates our understanding of the status of art and its publics: were these publics elite and/or subaltern? Could there really be an art for the people? So as to think through these critical issues I pick up the threads of my narrative in the period between the 1910s and the 1930s when the Tagores, Nandalal Bose, Kramrisch, Annie Besant and Gandhi were beginning to reject the wash tenets of Abanindranath’s aesthetic in favour of an outreach pedagogical programme which could and sometime did accord a pivotal role for art. Very much aware of the tension between cosmopolitanism and the local, these thinkers would experiment with and intently debate the agency of painting and pedagogy. At some crucial junctures this entailed confronting European modernism and the ideological baggage of the Bauhaus. The Pan-Asianism of the earlier decades would come into conflict and/or dialogue with what can be variously called a Pan-modernism, an alter-modernism or a reactionary cosmopolitanism. In the pages that follow I hope to show how these men and women showed British colonialists that the writing, painting, was now on the wall. They did not merely argue that Europe needed to be provincialised but rather that Europe’s world view, especially in the mutated form taken by flawed British colonialism, was woefully parochial. In so doing they balanced and opposed ideas of the parochial and the local as the dual registers of contempt and integrity. The 14th annual exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art (hereafter ISOA) which opened at the Samavaya Mansion Hall in Calcutta on 23 December 1922, showcased the work of the Bauhaus – including two watercolours by Wassily Kandinsky. As is well known, Kandinsky experimented with colour theory by studying closely the ideas of the Theosophist Annie Besant who was ardently involved with the cause of swadeshi. Also showcasing the flexible language of cubism at the ISOA was Gaganendranath Tagore. Local critics celebrated his use of colour in terms of its ‘prismatic luminosity’ which they believed to be achieved by his use of crystal prisms and a kaleidoscope. His semiabstract compositions helped to open up the space for experimenting with a new style of art criticism, embodied by the writings of Gangoly and Kramrisch.105 For Kramrisch, Gaganendranath Tagore’s art may have started with objects:



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But physical nearness, expressive of psychical desire, made their bodies disappear consumed by the radiating force of attraction…The turbulent agitation of pointed shapes…Yet you cannot say whether they are birds or brush strokes. And this sky, calm and pale, which is the background of their struggle, is nothing else but a piece of white paper. So great is the vitality of these black patches that they bring to life the white intervals between them, these again reflect and mitigate the harshness of the former ones in mild half-tones and shades. Thus, black and white, the two primeval opponents, organise this composition by their separateness.106

This group of artists, political activists and art historians came to redefine the relationship between colour, colonialism and swadeshi informed by the agitational activism and writings of Annie Besant. An ardent champion of home rule in India, Theosophist Annie Besant wrote and spoke extensively on nationalism and education, women’s suffrage, the simple life, cultural revival as well as establishing the Hindu University at Varanasi and the Home Rule League. Her political agitation in favour of home rule stressed the importance of self-control centred on the training of the spirit.107 Several years earlier Besant and fellow Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater sought to define their views on the spiritual agency of colour. Together they fashioned the idea of moral colour-space: moral space was characterised by lightness and purity which opens up a zone in which colours are experienced by their auras or what they termed their ‘thought forms’.108 They argued that the body is composed of innumerable combinations of subtle matter which when in harmony with one another give rise to vibrations that elicit a marvellous play of colour. For instance, red is linked with anger, greygreen with deceit, clear brown with avarice whilst ‘pallid grey blue of fetish worship is tinged with fear up to the rich deep colour of heartfelt adoration’.109 They also referred to the importance of Buddhism and Hinduism in the evocation of thought forms during meditation. Writing in dialogue with some of the ideas of the Theosophists, Kandinsky started from the property of colours and their polar contrasts of warm and cool, light and dark or complementarity which he articulates as a set of antitheses. The values he attributed to specific colours are very similar to those of the Theosophists: note the primacy both bestowed on spiritual blue and earthly or intellectual yellow. Kandinsky’s arrangement of colours into a polar scheme demonstrates his knowledge of the theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Ewald Hering and Wilhelm Wundt.110 Far from being arcane, Kandinsky’s theory of colour engages intimately



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with these nuanced and varied suppositions, including those psychological experiments and the effects of synaesthesia put forward since the 1870s. Theosophical writers were also deeply indebted to recent discoveries in experimental psychology which Kandinsky sought to explore conjecturally in his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art.111 Here abstraction should be understood not in terms of ornamental or geometrical regularity but as a form of image-making aimed at complete non-objectivity and the capture (the captivation) of a fundamental, vitalising life rhythm. Colour could then exist within the musical lines of the lyrical which could also be dramatic when posed through the notion of the absolute sound or through the union of silence and speech present on the dematerialised plane.112 At the Bauhaus, the major themes played out in relation to Kandinsky’s curriculum included colour systems and colour sequences, the correspondence of colour and form, colour interrelationships and how colour interacts with, even makes, space.113 Aside from Kandinsky’s experiments with colour as part of an integrated human sensorium pushed to its limits, there is an alternative modernist practice analogous with Bauhaus innovations in chromatic education – the artistic practices of Abanindranath’s pupil Nandalal Bose. Like Kandinsky, Bose wrote intensely and poetically about the vagaries of colour as sentiently espied through its elusive ‘rhythm’ as a path towards ‘the spiritual’. For both men, colour could be sharp or round; colours became highly symbolic components of both their artistic practice and their challenging pedagogy. Although well aware of the Bauhaus exhibition held in Calcutta, Bose’s interaction with colour and the thought of Rabindranath Tagore rejected both European abstraction and the urban milieu of artistic activity associated with the Bengal School. In 1919 he broke with his mentor Abanindranath Tagore to join Rabindranath at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, where he introduced an arts curriculum driven by the tenets of folk and ancient art and the principle of utility. This programme involved teaching women and incorporating their domestic art – alpona – into his pedagogical ambitions.114 Given the synthetic, even palimpsestic, nature of Bose’s work, first I turn to the charismatic power of the two men with whom he would negotiate uneasily – Rabindranath Tagore and M. K. Gandhi – both of whom had outspoken views on the politicised agency of colour. During the 1910s and 1920s Rabindranath expressed his perspective



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on the role of art in education – which is in places remarkably similar to Bose’s own subsequent writings. For Tagore in his well-known work ‘The Religion of the Artist’ the pleasure and drive of art is determined by a ‘living atmosphere of superfluity’ which requires the role of an active imagination and the ‘immediate consciousness’ that should not be obscured by self-interest or utilitarian recommendation:115 ‘The world as an art is the play of the Supreme Person revelling in image making. Try to find the ingredients of the image, they elude you … For art is maya, it has no other explanation but that it seems to be what it is. It never tries to conceal its evasiveness’.116 He employed his own version of Pan-Asianism which required that in the east the search for simplicity should characterise art which can be enhanced by meditation whereby ‘things do not abstract [from] the inner vision’.117 Art must be an integral part of the education programme Tagore was then establishing at his university Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, Bengal. Visva Bharati assumed the ideological form and spatial layout of an open house which promoted ‘intellectual hospitality’.118 Tagore’s hope was that Visva Bharati would refuse to transcend colonialism’s ‘colour bar’ – that is, ‘the English men’s stubborn inalienability’ which exposes a colour prejudice as the outcome of a ‘lack of power of social adaptation’.119 In his views on education, the colour white was ousted from the sacred space championed by Nivedita to become a negative, impoverished disciplinary site. As opposed to the impersonal education of the West whose complexion is white ‘but it is the whiteness of the whitewashed classroom walls’ like ‘cold storage compartments’, education in India must seek: for its other languages, – lines and colours, sounds and movements…It is the duty of every human being to master, at least to some extent, not only the language of intellect, but also that personality which is the language of Art…We almost completely ignore the aesthetic life of man.120

This was due to colonialism’s condemnation of Indian art and aesthetics: Our people have suffered from the idea that there is no such thing as a civilized standard of Art in India all throughout her history, that it had been borrowed from European sources and that only Greece and Rome had proper expressions of art. That is the idea with which they began their studies of art. They went on laboriously copying plaster of paris models and some drawing books set before them and one could imagine the result was not very happy to say the least.121



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In contrast with this South Kensington-style curriculum and its colonial derivatives, the cooperative enthusiasm of Tagore’s university would imbibe life breath to its students; it would be inspired by the ancient tapovanas or forest schools described in the Ramayana. It also aimed to forge a common sharing of life with villagers, their crafts all of which should encourage communal welfare.122 This would foster a unity of being that like Abanindranath’s writings could operate in relation to pramanani – proportions and the emotional ideal of bhava.123 Rabindranath’s view of education not only rejected what he dubbed the ‘cold blooded utilitarianism’ of the West but also the nationalist position he had previously endorsed in relation to swadeshi. In lectures and writings from 1916 he recoiled against the agenda put forward by the first generation of swadeshi supporters to vilify the cult of the nation. He linked nationalism with personal vanity and the heavy hand of the colonial state; a narrow ideal, as a ‘great menace’ it cradled intellectual blindness which cut against the real agenda of a unified society where sociability and unselfishness must prevail.124 This, however, did not merely mean recourse to ancient ideals of village life but rather the fashioning of a critical cosmopolitanism in relation to internationalism and the fostering of a ‘true modernism’ which would stimulate freedom of mind to guard against the ‘affectation of modernism’. This affectation of modernism – that is, the superficial and dangerous Asian imitation of Western culture – had, Tagore feared, been taking hold of Japan and would inevitably spread to India unless immediately checked.125 To combat this affected imitation, a properly thought-through aesthetic experience should be at the heart of education at Visva Bharati. Tagore believed education should be embodied by the work of art not be tainted by the pedagogical, colonial laboratory.126 Gandhi, who would visit Santiniketan and correspond extensively with Tagore, also promoted education as the critical component for reforming society.127 He even once expressed a relatively positive comment on the role of art in relation to Tagore’s pedagogical system: Painting also can be of two kinds, divine and demoniac…moral and immoral… Painting is silent music. We can see from our experience of paintings which excite passion that, if a painter painted pictures which would purify us of passion, their power would be felt even by the coarsest of men…If somebody from the



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Ashram becomes such an artist, we should admire him…I don’t know how they teach painting in Santiniketan. But there is no better place in India at present for learning this art.128

Although he would write that ‘a person without art is like a beast’129 Gandhi held very different views on nationalism, society, self-governance, what should be swaraj and even what should be the space for colour in life and art.130 While Tagore increasingly rejected nationalism as a destructive outside force, stating ‘we have no word for nation’ and that ‘swaraj is not our object’,131 Gandhi viewed the linkage of swaraj and nation as being absolutely essential to the struggle for freedom. Swaraj should be tied to tradition; it is purifying in motivation. The time for swaraj is now and ‘the most potent thing is swadeshi. Every home must have the spinning wheel and every village can organise itself in less than one month and become self supporting for its cloth’;132 ‘we have nothing in the political world more important than the spinning wheel’.133 Tagore saw the spinning wheel – charkha – as producing solitary, cyborgian labour which had little to contribute to social welfare: ‘like a silkworm his activity is centred around himself. He becomes a machine, isolated, companionless.’134 In his self-iconisation Gandhi demonstrated his critical intimacy with the middle-class industrialists he needed for the financial backing of exhibitions and demonstrations.135 Gandhi and Tagore’s self-fashioning demonstrates this difference of opinion – partly in terms of colour and colour blindness. Supposedly colour blind, Tagore wore long, dark robes and in his painting and ink works he employed deep earth tones which were eulogised by his critics.136 Against the pathology surrounding art and colour blindness in contemporary Europe (see Chapter 3) Tagore seemingly delighted in his ‘affliction’. According to Romain Rolland who met Tagore in Italy in 1926, he failed to see red whilst showing an ‘immense pleasure in looking at various shades of blue and violet colours … He thought that he could differentiate even the finest hues of the “green” colour. He failed to understand how so many hues and grades of green could be bracketed under the same name “green”’.137 Even recently, scholars have attempted to identify what kind of colour blindness Tagore experienced through the somewhat dubious method of studying a mere five (relatively poor quality) reproductions of his paintings.138 They suggest that his use of dark, related tones indicate his need for



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‘compensation monochrome’ and that he was a protanope who was nonetheless a ‘daringly original colourist … [who] made throb the coloured surface with movements as of air and light’.139 I want to assert that colour is, however, a constant force in Tagore’s ink and watercolour drawings and paintings.140 He used quick-drying transparent coloured inks, crayons, pastels, fugitive vegetable colours and varnishes on paper, bamboo and wood. The colours he most frequently favoured included lemon yellow, pink, cobalt blue, dark brown and black.141 Red frequently serves as a rich, luminescent ground in Rabindranath’s portraits (plate 11) where it is juxtaposed with dark green and touches of brilliant gold or where it highlights, touches the lips, nasal bone, the frame and the eye of Mohammed Yasin. Brilliant yellows frequently form of the evening sky behind and above his wild forests of birds and indeterminate animals. Here in Yellow Animal in a Forest (plate 12), our eyes search the inky undergrowth for this elusive creature whose head, once espied, throws the scene into an entirely different scale. This strange, feline/giraffe hybrid beast stretches its throat through the undergrowth where an old man’s profile is hidden in the trees. Is this merely ink playing as light? Is to espy faciality an act of gestalt? The creature’s body morphs into the submerged figure; their mysteriously joined presence in the painting is only given away by their heads and possibly by one of the animal’s camouflaged legs striding through the darkness. Painting becomes a space of camouflage, glowing against the serpentine rhythm of the surrounding undergrowth. Perhaps the ‘firefly’ glimmers and dark spaces of the painting are the habitats of other creatures – whose presence is only indicated by colours. Paint as camouflage plays ambiguously with Wallace, Allen and Darwin’s evolutionary theories on the origins of the Colour Sense and natural selection.142 Tagore’s own supposed colour blindness also eludes Liebreich’s method for testing pathological vision. Counterintuitively bold, beautiful, experimental and often absent in his scratched-out poems and inky amorphous shapes, colour becomes a highly personal and esoteric space for experimentation.143 Freed from all rules, including Abanindranath’s techniques of meditation, colour assumes an almost-autonomous agency. In his own view, to colour is for Tagore to play with at the level of instinct or intuition (he did not clearly differentiate between the two).



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According to Stella Kramrisch, who worked as a teacher at Santiniketan where she wrote extensively on 1920s Bengali art, Tagore’s ‘luminosity of colour has a fluid aspect like water flowing in the sun, sap in the plants, blood in the veins. This is produced by a technique of dark and light flecks of different colours whose effect is that of light shimmering through the darkness or as if colour shapes are built over a case of light’.144 Her praise is symptomatic of the increased magnitude of talking about colour and rhythm in Indian art criticism in the 1920s.145 According to Benoy Kumar Sarkar, a regular contributor to Gangoly’s journal Rupam, colour becomes a highly problematic intellectual topic: ‘How can rupam be constructed out of colour? In India especially it is difficult to take colour in any other association and conceive of the mechanics of hues in any other light. Our Art History does not make us familiar with very many pure paintings.’146 Pure paintings are achieved through colour alone. The mechanism of colour construction in painting: can after all be very vaguely described in language either by the terminology of colour-chemistry or of prismatic analysis. The most minute investigation will fail to reach the processes of creative metabolism in the master’s rasa-jñāna. There is accordingly no recipe, no formula for the manipulation of beauties in colour, although their objective background is unquestionable.147

Given the move towards discrepant abstraction and the amorphous forms of Rabindranath’s work, colour becomes a driving force in critical perception and reception.148 For Nandalal Bose, a vital rhythm courses through Rabindranath’s prose-paintings – as seen in their scratchings out, their palimpsest production: Normally a work begins with an idea…But the special feature of Gurudev’s [i.e. Rabindranath’s] art is that his forms start off on paper even before an idea lands on his mind. This may lead us to think that he is just playing around with some building blocks or colours in a spirit of fun…Rabindranath was particularly fond of using the bright and glossy coloured inks that came from Germany. Our old paintings were too colour rich; they still continue to be…When Rabindranath’s paintings were first exhibited in Europe their bright and varied colours delighted and astonished the viewers; this was what they looked for in the work of an Eastern artist. Rabindranath’s taste for colours was so assured and refined, without any trace of weakness in the juxtapositions, that he could place two high-keyed colours side by side – like deep blue and dense black and by his deftness of handling make them assist the spatial design, not upset it.149



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Colour also pertains to the ornamental which is the highest form of art: this Rabindranath terms (very differently to Owen Jones): The grammar of ornament is the symbol of the ultimate…What in English is called real is in our language called sávithaka (significant)…Not that significant real things are rare, but anything that is not significant to me is not real for me because the world of reality has more extensive boundaries for the Poet and the Artist…All emotions that are more than too narrowly physical are delightful even though they may not be pleasant. They change the passing colour of a dim consciousness from its neutrality into a colourful vividness…The sign of greatness in geniuses is their enormous capacity for borrowing, very often without their knowing it in the world market of culture.150

Throughout his accounts of his painting career Tagore prided himself that he had received no formal education, that his inspiration derived from his ‘instinct for rhythm’ and that his combination of colours eluded any conventional sense of meaning.151 In a speech at Gandhi’s Satyagraha Ashram he stressed, ‘In Sanskrit there is a word which means emotion as well as colour. Emotions give colour to our consciousness…We tinge the colourless specimens of microscopic objects in order to be able to see clearly. In the same manner we need colour to see ourselves.’152 This combination of rhythm and instinct with rich, deep colours could not be more different to the pale khadi, kurta, topi and the half-dhoti and shawl donned by Gandhi. Gandhi viewed painting as a peripheral rather than central social/nationalist activity.153 For him, colourless or more accurately, shimmering white cloth pertains to the asceticism, the purity, the health and the search for Truth that ought to be the ‘embodied soul’ of the nationalist struggle. And white photographs well. Perhaps an unwanted precedent is Malinowski’s colonial get-up – that is, white shirt and pants, blanched pith helmet and boots and exposed, semi-bald head set off against the gleaming, dark bodies of his Trobriand subjects. Certainly in photographic representation his bleached-out persona is conducive of a kind of ‘spectral dizziness’ – ‘the aura of the man in white, glowing like a star in the depths of the darkness of the sorcerer, whose enchantment ignites a flame…magical…The fabulous whiteness of the man in white’.154 Gandhi, caught in the flash bulb of the American photographer Margaret Bourke-White towards the end of his life, is perhaps, although not entirely, whiteness exposed otherwise. Selffashioned as the ultimate spinner in his pristine dhoti, or else seated on a musnud, he is the modern but ascetic incarnation of a Mughal



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ruler.155 This staging of documentary photography transforms the white-clad bodies of his followers into multiple focal points. Whiteness, appropriated from the colonialists – from the pallid, sickly complexions and face powder of memsahibs’ complexions or from colonial officials’/ anthropologists’ pith helmets and linen suits, becomes a potential source of nationalist redemption. Colour is too heterogeneous, too rebellious (indigo), too traditional and (as anilines) too foreign – and what’s more it didn’t photograph effectively. Like the modern technologies of the telegraph and the microphone, Gandhi orchestrated his self-image through black-and-white photography, newspapers, film and newsreel – exemplified by Bourke-White’s assignment for Life magazine.156 Whilst by her own admittance ‘photography demands a high degree of participation’ Bourke-White was astounded that this participation meant that she was expected to spin.157 Meeting Gandhi first on a Monday, his day of silence, she was permitted three small flashbulbs to capture him reading and spinning in his dark hut. When her camera broke down she ‘threw my arms around the rebellious equipment and stumbled out into the daylight, quite unsold on the machine age. Spinning wheels could take priority over cameras anytime’.158 Gandhi lived his life in India as a well-publicised experiment with its specific iconography – the khadi, topi, half-dhoti, wooden staff, pocket watch and sandals, in a world without furniture, pictures or other incumbencies of modern life. Not only did he ‘use everything around him for its symbolic significance but ultimately he became a symbol himself … invested with more mythological meaning than he may have wanted to bear’.159 Certainly in his public rhetoric, Rabindranath stressed the importance for India of the transformation of Gandhi into Mahatma: ‘we have been waiting for the person. Such a personality as we see in Mahatma Gandhi. It is only possible in the East for such a man to become a great personality.’160 Perhaps ironically then given this vigilant, meticulous staging of the self, Gandhi urged his followers not to seek darsán from him but from khadi because it is ‘clean and wholesome’.161 Foreign cloth should be burnt or only worn in the loo. Like the soul, the colour white should shine whilst being self-effacing: ‘the outward has no meaning except in so far as it helps the inward. All true Art is thus the expression of the soul.’162 Vernacular cloth performs as the absolute other to



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colonial canvas and to mill-spun fabrics. It already had associations with the struggle for swadeshi in Calcutta where dhotis in praise of nationalist Khudiram Bose carrying verses on the importance of bombs and terrorism were sold and later anxiously censored by the colonial state.163 It was widely rumoured across India that the colours of foreign cloth were fixed with cows’ and pigs’ blood. Although Manchester fabric was in fact sealed with egg, mutton fat had long been used in the sizing process.164 Using the language of the brush, Gandhi aimed to paint swaraj on a ‘white background’.165 As sacred signifier of sovereignty and now nationalistic struggle, cloth becomes the iconic aesthetic symbol for Truth and swadeshi.166 As Gandhi is increasingly upheld as Mahatma, as a messianic semi-divine figure by his followers, white is magnified in status as the colour of the nationalist struggle. From 1921, the beginning of Non-cooperation, Gandhi rejected the bhadralok dress, which could consist of a fine-spun kurta, in favour of what would become his iconic half-dhoti, whilst urging Congress, the All India Spinners Association and the All India Khaddar Board to take a far more proactive role in boycotting foreign cloth. In 1925 and 1927 he undertook extensive khadi tours during which he urged women out of purdah to wear khadi saris and to participate in public work at cloth exhibitions. The use of lantern slides, posters and khadi flags disseminated the centrality of predominantly white cloth as the means in which the geo-body of the nation could be made imaginable. Gandhi ardently believed that spinning could raise millions of villagers out of poverty and when practised by the middle classes it could stir them from their political inertia.167 These new products were the aspirational signs of a coming political community: ‘visually khadi not only disrupted the imperial habitus by filling and marking space but also refigured the ways people visually experienced and used public space.’168 At the Sabarmati ashram Gandhi undertook significant manual labour including intensive spinning. In Congress exhibition brochures and prints (sometimes satirical), black and white over colour is the preferred medium for disseminating Non-cooperation. This also had an impact on one member of the Bengal School who otherwise embraced colour. Nandalal Bose’s woodcut Bapuji which commemorates the Dandi Salt March, 1930, shows how Gandhi literally becomes a white line, striding forth across a seemingly



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unfathomable black, infinite ‘yawning’ space of black; his body, save for its grave outlines, merges with this space for struggle and redemption (figure 7).169 As the Mahatma of History, his back turned against the wreckage piled on wreckage of the past, this virtual, resolute Figure replaces Klee’s Angel with his actual promises, programmes, exhibitions, marches for redemption.170 As Figure171 he also defies discourse; there is a certain materiality to his almost non-presence; white from and beyond the Sukranitisara text on painting, white as non-violence; white as saltthe motif for the motivation of marches. Politics then has its colours; its dirty, synthetic colonial industrial materialism and its white other.172 But Gandhi did identify a problem with the symbolics of khadi. Disenchanted by its continued commercial as opposed to moral associations, in 1944 Gandhi stipulated a new khadi philosophy which stressed that cloth should be entirely for self-consumption not for sale as part of a more strident stance on rural economic reconstruction through the empowering unit of the village. Khadi had multiple, often conflictual associations. The charisma promised from cloth could have unexpected



Fig.7

Nandalal Bose, Gandhi as Bapuji on the Salt March, 1930, linocut.



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counter effects which guised and mystified rather than clarifying the nationalist agenda. It even held immoral and subversive overtones which gave rise to a bizarre sartorial paradox: the greater the stress on the idea that clothing is an expression of integrity and moral worth, the greater the increase in its use as a form of disguise or as a mask for a person’s actual beliefs. Khadi wearing then can be viewed as an easy route to the performance of ethical values and nationalist ideals. The site of a desire for an alternative modernity, khadi continues to hold sway in Indian political performativity.173 Whilst it no longer can be directly associated with Gandhism, white khadi nonetheless has a deep-seated space in Indian democracy, as a marker against the loss of identity threatened by global capitalism. For Dipesh Chakrabarty, Gandhi’s collapse of the public and private means the eschewal of privacy in favour of the entanglement of body and politics in the name of an ethic of transparency which has totally backfired: ‘The body of the hypocritical Indian politician [acts] as a condensed statement of this tension between an untheorized and increasingly unacknowledged subject of colonial modernity to which we now apply the collective appellation Gandhi.’174 Contemporary politics in India has its own ambivalent relationship with black, white and colour.175 In contrast with the political economy of gloss and the ‘disguise’ of khadi today, the Gandhian private ‘is non-narratable and non-representable… it is beyond representation and dies with the body itself ’.176 It is not easily imitated even by Gandhi’s followers. Gandhi’s body, so central to his political struggle, performed as a recurrent site of ideological conflict. Rabindranath privately condemned Gandhi’s fasts because they played dangerously with mimetic identification and alienation on the part of the masses. Starvation for the masses is the last thing India needs: The logical consequence of your example, if followed, will be an elimination of all noble souls from the world…You have no right to say that this process of penance can only be efficacious through your own individual endeavour and for others it has no meaning. If that were true you ought to have performed it in absolute secrecy as a special mystic rite which only claims its one sacrifice beginning and ending in yourself.177

In terms of artistic representation, Gandhi is a surprisingly elusive presence. As Chris Pinney has persuasively argued, chromolithographs of Gandhi were far less common than brightly coloured images of the



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hugely popular Marxist freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. Represented in a trilby and government official’s uniform with the bomb as his ‘charka’, Singh used mimicry and violence as his weapons in the nationalist struggle.178 The bomb becomes ‘the violent analogue of amplification – the amplification of what a single voice or a single body was able to do’.179 Here anti-colonial vernacular modernism invoked a volatility of identity in order to defeat its colonial oppressors. For Gandhi, the ultimate art is the art of living. The art of living is primarily located not in portraiture and other forms of narcissistic, projected representation but in the quotidian labours of the body and ultimately in the self. This ethical, corporal project rejects the aesthetic principle as self and universal as stipulated by Tagore: ‘the human body is the universe in miniature. That which cannot be found in the body is not found in the universe.’180 According to Gandhi, manual labour and village life are central to the art of the self: ‘Why can’t you see the beauty of colours in vegetables? … but no you want to see the colours of the rainbow which is a mere optical illusion.’181 These techniques of living are bound up with but also reject the agendas of Tolstoy and Ruskin. In Gandhi’s famous text Hind Swaraj the notion of self is tied up with his interpretation of the Gita.182 The technical definition of swaraj as self-rule is now understood as the rule of the mind over itself in relation to the sthithaprajna – the man of steady mind or steady wisdom. The Gita makes the fundamental distinction between self as atman (the imperishable, eternal, spiritual substratum of being of every individual) and self as dehin (the embodied spatio-temporal self, composed of body, senses, mind and soul). The self that is directly involved in politics – in the pursuit of swaraj is the dehin. Though the dehin’s ultimate end is self-realisation it is the intermediate ends of dehin as summed up under the headings of artha (power, property and security) and kama (pleasure and avoidance of pain) that are the proper objects of active life. But to achieve these ends they must be pursued in the framework of dharma. Dehin can do so only if the mind maintains its freedom and exercises control over itself and the senses. The possession of a disciplined mind is prerequisite for the practice of satyagraha – the non-violent way of achieving home rule. Satyagraha (from satya, truth, and agraha, firmness) had to be gained by ashram observances and through suffering; suffering would be a



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powerful incentive for change and hence it performed a critical role in the doctrine of Non-cooperation.183 In his critique of political society, Gandhi targeted the abrogation of moral responsibility involved in the duality of Western notions of sovereignty and the mediation of complex legal-political institutions which distanced the rulers of society from those they were supposed to represent. It is only when politics is directly subordinated to a communal morality that divisions can be removed. This political ideal did not support consensual democracy with its investment in complete and continual participation by every member of the polity. The utopia was Ramarajya, a patriarchy in which the ruler by his moral quality and habitual adherence to truth always expressed the collective will.184 In his essay ‘Bapuji’, Nandalal Bose championed Gandhi as a guiding force for artists: From Mahatmaji’s life-style artists may find inspiration and develop their own character. Mahatmaji is indeed an artist and his creativity finds expression in the building up of his own self, in his attempt to transform himself from a man into a divine being, as also guide [sic] others in that direction…Indian artists if they want, may transform themselves by following the model of his character. Without having a strong character an artist produces work that lacks force or foundation. Machine made articles of course may be useful but they can not ever satisfy the aesthetic need. This is where Mahatmaji is a patron of artists.185

Perhaps given this assiduous care to the techniques and presentation of the self and what increasingly is seen as the ‘aesthetic’ and symbolic status of the charkha, Gandhi did come to modify his views in art in part through his reading of Tolstoy’s ‘What is Art?’ which he arranged to be translated into Gujarati. From Tolstoy he sought connections between aesthetics, symbols, ethics and political action and the belief that art ‘is not pleasure but it is a means of union among men’ which works by the ‘infection’ (that is, transmission which is like speech) of the artist’s feelings.186 For Gandhi, the experience of swaraj-like art for Tolstoy (and in a different way also for Rabindranath Tagore) must first be experienced personally and then be communicated to others. Hence art could mediate between material existence and the spiritual life; it casts violence aside and as the expression of deeply experienced feelings it is the condition of human life.187 In Hind Swaraj (where parts of ‘What is Art?’ are included as Appendix One) Gandhi underlines the importance



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of an aesthetics of the self in terms of inner experience of what swaraj means – which must be communicated to others. He adapted this view from his reading of Ruskin’s Unto This Last and A Joy Forever. Ironically, Ruskin’s anti-Indian stance now becomes a source for swaraj.188 Ruskin stipulated the idea that the good of the individual is contained in the good of all and that a life of labour is worth living. Gandhi responded by establishing the Sabarmati and Sevagram ashrams which he believed must function through Tolstoy’s and Ruskin’s principles. He also serialised a nine-part paraphrase of Unto This Last in the journal Indian Opinion whilst also including A Joy Forever in the appendix of Hind Swaraj. Nowhere do Rabindranath Tagore’s and Gandhi’s opposing ideas on art and colour converge so intensely than in Nandalal Bose’s work for Gandhi during an intense period of political activity, 1936 to 1938. Following the formation of the All India Village Industries Association (AIVIA) in 1934, Gandhi began to intensely promote the value of rural living which now looked beyond the strictures of his own existence in the colonial prison or the ashram.189 Working closely with Gandhi in the AIVIA, J. C. Kumarappa staged the medium of the exhibition as critical to adult education.190 This signalled a radical departure from the iconography and agenda of previous Congress sessions which usually convened in major cities where the designers favoured stylistic allusions to royal or religious architecture.191 What did remain crucial to the Congress sessions from the 1920s to 1940s was the prominent display of portraits of Gandhi and other past presidents and a colour symbolism of red, green and white – usually realised as khadi.192 This cult of the political leader continued alongside the increased emphasis on village reengineering as seen in the orchestration of the 1939 exhibition at Tripuri where although ‘increasing attention is now being paid to village industries’, the star attraction proved to be ‘the unique feature of this year’s procession were the photographs of Congress presidents… carried on elephants…[The] huge concourse of humanity which gathered on the way though disappointed at not finding S.C. Bose on the Presidential chariot, reverentially bowed to his portrait’.193 At the exhibitions the principal meeting area (pandal) would be frequently adorned in the colours associated with the Congress’s flag which usually flew from a central point in the complex.



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In the later 1930s Gandhi cautioned against the role of the colonialstyle museum and exhibitions which focused too much on a fetishisation of the past at the expense of an agenda geared toward present and future industry. For Gandhi, ‘museums of ancient things which have disappeared from our economic life have their use and place but not in our programme which concentrates on industries and crafts which are capable of being revived’.194 His interest in museums as spaces of revival was no doubt informed by his debate with Rabindranath Tagore. In an article addressed to Gandhi published in May 1935, Rabindranath praised his collaboration with Surendranath Kar at Santiniketan in aid of the wardha appeal. But he exhorted him not to confine his focus to village industries. If Gandhi were to establish a Village Industries Museum, as he then intended, it should be eclectic, expansive and it must include art. For Rabindranath there was an exigent need to collect art as so many great Indian works had been confiscated by the British: Perhaps one day we will have no art treasures left and we will have to go visiting museums in foreign lands to feel pride in our pasts and pain in our present. Please tell the Mahatma to consider that art is not a luxury of the well-to-do. The poor man needs it as much and employs it so much in his cottage building, his pots, his floor decorations, his clay deities and in so many other ways. Therefore do not just collect village industries but arts.195

Tagore wanted to contribute an arts section to Gandhi’s proposed Village Industries Museum, but he wrote in Advance that he had neither the resources nor the popularity of Gandhi to be able to do so.196 Gandhi swiftly replied, ‘I quite believe that we have got to take care of village art and with his assistance we shan’t neglect it.’197 From 1936–44 the Congress annual sessions would be held in village locations, often in specially designed townships with a focus on agriculture, entertainment, constructive activities, village industries, khadi and art.198 Rather than Tagore it was Nandalal Bose who collaborated with Gandhi on the question of village arts. Gandhi first enlisted Bose’s assistance in the organisation of an exhibition of Indian art for the Lucknow Congress in 1936. Bose also painted ‘patriotic frescoes’ representing Congress presidents in procession advancing towards the goal of Purna Swaraj (Complete Independence) in the temporary city Moti Nagar constructed one and a half miles from the Lucknow train station. The same year Gandhi entrusted him with the task of designing a



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model village out of local materials at the Congress session at the village of Khirdi, Tilak Nagar, close to Faizpur, Maharasthtra.199 Working with his students Mehta and Perumal, Bose designed the entire structure from local wood and bamboo which Gandhi believed ‘launched out to the villages with the eye of an artist that is his and picked up numerous things from the peasant’s household, things that never catch an ordinary eye as striking objects of art, but which his discerning eye picked up and arranged and this clothed with a new meaning’.200 These village structures can be juxtaposed with Bose’s experiments with murals across the campus at Santiniketan. Bose produced a series of murals for the Patha Bhavana (Old Library), the interior decoration of the Dinantika (Tea Circle), the mural for Cheena-Bhavana (China House) and he designed the entirety of Kalo Bari (The Black House) (figure 8). As in his book Vision and Creation (which I discuss below), Bose’s murals demonstrate a tremendous diversity of techniques and stylistic appropriation and innovation. Even in the same verandah façade of Cheena-Bhavana he plays with highly finished, matte surfaces and with Chinese painting whilst the eight scenes above the doorway are inspired by Rabindranath’s play Natir Puja and replicate his habit of sketching in

The Black House (present-day boys’ hostel) Santiniketan, designed by Nandalal Bose, 1930s.



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watercolour and ink.201 Sketchy and shimmering with touches of lead white, against vivid, pale blue and sepia cherry blossom dotted skies, these images best demonstrate Bose’s ability to use the wall as an experimental surface. Here the wall replaces the political and aesthetic importance of paper. Paper, possibly one of the last material bastions of colonialism’s artistic agenda to survive at Santiniketan, could by Bose be done away with – as could the studio. Struggling initially to find a suitable medium, in 1927 Bose invited Narsinghlal, an elderly painter from Jaipur experienced in mural painting, to Santiniketan. Together with Bose’s students, the artists worked initially on small slabs, working with materials and motifs from Persian, Ajanta and Chinese paintings.202 Bose experimented with the tempera technique from Ajanta and with the Jaipuri process, which, known as arayes, gave a glossy, mirror-like surface that he particularly favoured. As a variant of buon fresco, the plaster consisted of four layers (made from marble granules, slaked lime and yoghurt); the painting would be executed on the final layer whilst still wet. The colours were mixed with gum to produce a honey-like consistency, applied with a brush and pressed in with a trowel. Nandalal prescribed a distinct palette for mural painting which should include white chalk (kathakhadi), yellow ochre (ela), yellow orpiment (harital), Indian red (geri), red cinnabar (hingul), red lac (laksha), terra verte (hara), emerald ( jangal), indigo, lapis lazuli (rajabarta), lamp black (bhusha) and black made from dried fruits. He cautioned against mercury and copper compounds which would age badly.203 The Kala Bhavana campus became an open-air classroom and exhibition space (to some extent it still is) which reached out to a wider (if still largely elite) public.204 Built of earth, like several other campus buildings designed by him, Kalo Bari (1937) is Bose’s most dramatic, monochrome statement (figure 8).205 Now the boys’ hostel for Kala Bhavana students, the dark tar of the exterior provides unity to the diversity of artistic motifs which derive their inspiration from the art of ancient Egypt, Assyria, Barhut, Pallava and Ajanta in addition to more recent, even contemporary Bengali folk art.206 Working with tar as a protective finish and with mud as structure, Bose’s use of local materials obviously impressed Gandhi. Bose’s modernist aesthetic is by Gandhi’s exhibition briefly transformed into structures that are strongly reminiscent of an archetypical village and ashram.



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Perhaps most famously in his work with Gandhi, Bose designed over 400 posters for the Haripura Congress which were to be displayed on the main gates, pavilions and the exterior walls of the volunteers’ living quarters so as to signify as a statement of the politics of quotidian living (plate 13).207 These posters like much of Bose’s work and teaching at Santiniketan rejected Abanindranath Tagore’s wash technique in favour of a hybrid palette applied onto an equally experimental tempera made entirely from local materials.208 At a scale of 62.9 by 56 cm, the posters were painted on handmade paper then stretched on strawboard which Bose believed could simulate the effect of frescoes. The choice of rural subjects was intended to evoke a cross section of village life and to represent the targets for Congress and Gandhi’s visions for swaraj. Entirely lacking any obvious signifiers of modernity, the iconography of the posters was to be viewed alongside khadi as indicators of an idealised, aspirant nation which rejected the agenda of colonialism’s urbanism.209 Previously Gandhi had publicly stated his dislike of artworks on walls and that even walls were a hindrance to intellectual and spiritual development. Now placed on the outside Bose’s posters accrue political validity: At many places in this exhibition you will see art. I cannot describe it to you. It will strike your eye…Art is a means of bringing out the inner as well as the outer beauty of a thing. We have now amongst us our Indian artist Nand Babu from the time of the Lucknow exhibition. He showed his artistic skill then and is ever progressing. But here we have artists from Gujarat also.210

For Gandhi, the Haripura exhibition assisted in envisioning the reengineering of the Indian village through a programme directed towards health, hygiene, education and labour. According to the records of the Congress, ‘economic and social problems of our country are shown not by charts giving dull figures but by interesting pictures and sarcastic cartoons prepared by Raval, Kanu Desai and their co-workers’.211 Alongside Bose’s posters and the display of handicrafts, Gandhi called for two models of villages ‘the decaying one as is existing today and the other an improved one’. After all the aim of an exhibition ‘should not become a tamasha (sheer entertainment)…It should also teach how to make village life artistic’.212 This rejection of amusements demonstrates the radical shift in the agenda of the exhibitions which had previously included numerous stalls of modern luxuries, art pavilions and fairground



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entertainment.213 These urban diversions had to be replaced with ‘rural mindedness’. The ‘model village’ should be built of local materials, be light and well ventilated; cottages must have courtyards; no dust must be in the streets; there should be religious places for all, a cooperative dairy, schools, a village common for grazing cattle and a common meeting place.214 Here Gandhi’s rhetoric adheres very closely to the structure of the diorama, which could be conceptually inhabited by the virtual figures from Bose’s posters as the agenda of asceticism gives way to practical and intensely visual plans for the improvement of subaltern living. Art becomes a vital means of communicating to the subaltern masses. The presence of dioramas of good and bad villages became a leitmotif in Indian museums following Independence as the colonial medium of the clay ethnographic model is used against itself.215 Working with the vernacular panorama, Bose experimented with wet and dry processes, in part informed by his study of the frescoes at the Bagh caves, Gwalior, and the research he had long ago undertaken at Ajanta.216 At the Kala Bhavan Library, Santiniketan he experimented with painting on untreated clay surfaces – but without success before revising his technique to employ charcoal for the foundational drawing.217 After learning egg tempera, he turned to indigenous techniques with the assistant of Narsinglal. He also explored Nepalese wall painting and ancient treatises such as the Shilparatnam.218 Bose chose to explicate his ideas on colour and the media and techniques of art in a number of articles and lectures subsequently compiled by his pupil K. G. Subramayan as Vision and Creation.219 Throughout these series of writings he stressed the importance of the life rhythm of art objects. This life rhythm could be conveyed through the practice of sadrsya – similitude which moves from mimesis to metamorphosis whilst making reference to Okakura’s magnetic triangular combination of Tradition, Nature and Originality. Bose believed that art should have the same place as reading and writing in education which was at present drastically lacking. He noted that many university students spoke of painting in terms that are more appropriate to the idiom of photography. This absence of a sense of beauty could be attributed to their exposure to foreign colour: ‘Garish German wrappers in red, blue and purple do not stain their eyes but give them pleasure.’220 In contrast, fine art liberates the mind from the constraints and conflicts



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of everyday life ‘with a touch of magic functional art brings beauty to the objects of our daily use…our country’s economic decline has followed closely the decay of its functional art’.221 Paintings should be imitative, suggestive and rhythmic; they should be structured by a logic which privileges carefully chosen and insightful analogies. For instance, in ornamental art there is a general rhythm of the spiral which can be found in the conch shell, the whirlpool or whirlwind. Overall ‘life movement’ must not be impaired by an over-attention to detail. Life movement is a pulsation which cannot be seen alone and which must be detected through the spine of things. The artist should begin by drawing out the backbone, the line or colour of movement, its vitalism: The main stimulus for art creation is the experience of that great life force that manifests in all life forms…An artist sees the inner nature of objects…The artist knows that between the form of an object and its inner nature there is no real difference…The main thing for the artist is to get attracted by some part of this nature…The concept of abstraction may have its own uses in study and analysis when it permeates an artist’s imagination and understanding.222

Through empathy the painter morphs into the picture – a process greatly aided by colour: What should one know about using colour in painting? The green of the rice fields should appeal to you so much that you become green. Then it becomes part of your personality. After that when you sit down to work thinking of what shade of green to use, what colour will suit where you will find this without effort from your inner experience it will come by itself to the tip of your brush … What the artist learns from nature is the subtle relationships of colour and colour, their music, their deep intimacies … This can be seen in old Rajput, Mughal and Persian paintings.223

Empathy is especially valuable in mural painting; to be close to the page, to be close to the wall, is to be potentially close to the village and the villager as the space and subject for nationalist/social reform. For much of Vision and Creation Bose explores a range of media and techniques which he associated with Silpacarca – belief in a practice of art which had by the 1930s become the critical site for Indian art historical inquiry.224 He recommends fine-tipped European brushes for finishing and round or flat Chinese and Japanese brushes for broader work such as the filling in of colours. For mural painting, middle-sized brushes made from bark, twigs or green bamboo should be cut to a length



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of eight to ten inches and boiled in hot water until they become soft. For very fine work the hairs from a calf ’s ear should be clipped and thumbed with rice-husk ash. He identified yellow, red and blue as colours whilst rejecting the status of black and white. White should be made from chalk, yellow and red from ochre, green from terre verte and black from lamp soot. Bose also cites a number of treatises and artistic practices ranging from the Nepali recipe for vermilion to Jaipuri orpiment to Jagannath pats and the murals art Ajanta, commenting that ancient authors had written extensively on colouring.225 Whilst Abanindranath’s painting and writing resembles, is wash in its focus, affect, uses of sources and hazy effects, Nandalal Bose’s discussion of art sticks closely to the wall. It is as if his text is a working out of the many experiments he undertook in fresco at Santiniketan which becomes the focus of his writing. The text of Vision and Creation is the equivalent of these trials in its layering, juxtapositions, in its palimpsest character. As with Abanindranath, writing and painting collapse into one another through a preoccupation with colour. Frequently Vision and Creation moves like a series of brush strokes – virtually and actually in that it is interspersed with reproductions of Bose’s pen drawings. Much of the text is like a manual of potentiality; it reads as a series of laws for artistic technique so as to furnish a new and renewed canon for painting. Writing becomes a space for opening out – that is, the distillation and unfolding of experiments. The illustrated text, like the university and the ashram, becomes the space for experimentation. Its cerebral working out is also intensely physical: there is a labour to art and its subjects which must be accounted for. Vision and Creation validates a new gymnastics for producing painting in such a way that making art is almost as stringent as Gandhi’s proscription on village health. Every detail, ingredient and its worth must be stipulated: mural is an extension or projection of ashram observances; mural can be part of the self. The structure of the wall, its open weft also makes it akin to the spinning of khadi. This art of art is not art for art’s sake (condemned by Rabindranath and Gandhi) but an advocation of art in labour – art as labour – which deserves to be as text and as fresco, preserved in every detail. The writing is not so much on but becomes intimate with the wall. This is more than equivalence: it is what counts for the coming social practice – that is, the desire for nationalist autonomy.



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First of all, Bose advocated the use of shell or pebble lime which would dampen the wall. The fresco ground should soak colour like blotting paper – a lingering simile possibly indicative of the transference of his own practice from the wash technique to murals. The wall should not be too wet or the brush will loosen out the applied sand. You should use stone or earth colours ground with powdered lime. This serves as the light, white colours which must be applied thin and each layer must be allowed to soak into the ground. Bose warned that two square feet of wall require three to four hours of work so one should not tackle too much in one day. If you are working on mud walls as he did at Santiniketan and at Gandhi’s ashram at Wardah, apply one quarter inch of lime and sand plaster made for Italian fresco and when this is dried work over the coloured plaster. The colour area has to be built up with small fish-scale-shaped applications from the tip of the trowel so that the colour will remain bright.226 In the case of Jaipuri mural, use sieved marble dust in three layers alongside filtered lime painted in thin washes. Give five washes and then polish, using ochres so that the colours thicken like honey. This should be polished with rag and coconut oil to simulate the techniques employed long before at Amber Fort in Rajasthan. Bose’s observances are written so that you can almost feel colour breathe through, on, as the space of the mud wall. The page and the wall should partake of a certain camaraderie. At the end of Vision and Creation Bose returns to the entwinement of life force and colour. All inanimate things have a life force that is structured as a plumb line whilst all animate things have a spiral rhythm which creates an emotional impulse. His many diagrams in this section of the book attempt to convey this sensation through the repetition and unexpected appearance of limited forms in Nature (figure 9). For example, he sketched a tree upside down to convey its similarity with a mountain range. In turn, mountains resemble lotus buds.227 Here colour has a critical role to play in the articulation of form. It helps convey the nine types of line which relate to the nine fundamental emotions as set out in Swami Prajnananda’s book Feeling and Form in which Bose reproduced a number of drawings of these essences:



Aesthetic Essence Eros Delight Compassion Rage Heroism Terror Ugliness Wonder Peace



Table 3

Emotional Expression erotic pleasure, humour sorrowful angry energetic fearful disgusting astonished detached, calm

Fig.9

Nandalal Bose, rhythmic diagrams from his book Vision and Creation, Calcutta, 1956.

Colour

Deity

cloud-coloured white

Vishnu Pramatha

pigeon grey blood red pink black blue yellow jasmine, moon-coloured

Yama Rudra Mahendra Kala Mahakala Brahma Narayana

Different expressions, colours and presiding deities of nine aesthetic essences.



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With the exception of the heroic and the furious (which are switched), Bose’s essences in terms of their order of emotion (if not their colour and deity associations) follow Maitreya’s interpretation of the emotional symbolism in the Vishnudharmottara, Part III. In places, Bose’s table also adheres to Venkateswara’s symbolism on Indian art where Vedic, Upanishad and more specifically painterly colour in the Sukranitisara is set out in such a way as to divide between men and things and the shades of colours in the heavens. Here red is associated with anger, dark blue with the erotic, yellow with wonder and pigeon grey with compassion.228 Venkateswara records that the symbolism of colours of the Sukranitisara is realised through the dark Tamask, the yellow and red Rajasic and the white of the Satvic. Yellow symbolises humanity, the robes of the married couple or Vishnu’s dress; blue is equated with the firmament, Vishnu, Krishna, Rama, Durga; green represents the animal and vegetal kingdom; black is that of the yawning space. White is for Venkateswara, as it was for Sister Nivedita and Gandhi, the ultimate colour: white is bliss, purity; it is Uma, Siva and Saraswati. Venketeswara also set out an evolutionary system of colour from archaic inscriptions in red ochre, to the employment of red, crimson, black and yellow at the Jogimara cave to the more ‘advanced’ work at Ajanta and Ellora.229 After this esoteric excursus Bose admits that comprehending, rendering and engendering colour is extremely difficult because of its intimacy with taste. Colour is hot, salty, bitter or acrid, and like the sense of taste these have to be experienced directly.230 Bose believed that aggressive peoples of the globe used mainly complementary or contrasting colours whilst Indians used complementary colours in order to achieve not such harsh juxtapositions but harmonies. The right balance with colours must be achieved in a similar way to the use of spices in cooking. To achieve this harmony look for colours in nature, not for mimesis but for their equivalences – for instance, parrot green, palm-leaf green, kunch-seed red or conchshell white. These equivalences you should tabulate and record so that colour will become intuitive and automatic. Colour is anthropomorphised, made rhythmic and sharp to become discrepantly nomadic, to show an alter modernism to Kandinsky’s chromatic morphology and synaesthesia.



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To this Bose added a diagram of lotus flower proportions and an explanation of colour rhythms while also composing several ‘jingles’ on the rhythmic, sharp and complementary powers of colour:231 Colour Rhymes Three colours true Are yellow, red and blue, The rest are mixed brew… But there is one who Has no special cue, Goes without any hue. Black is used alone To play music with the tone. Agate stone, tamarind seed, Or cockroach is fed With black, blue and red… A splatter of pink On a verdant meadow, That is the colour of light and shadow.232 Contrasting Colours To see Green face to face Red’s eyes are loud with rage. Orange excites Blue with ire, ’Gainst Yellow Purple burns like fire. Let the feet of Mother Black be decked With Leaf Green, Blue and Brilliant Red.233 Sharp Contrasts In the cock-eyed glance of the kunch’s seed The red seems full of ire, As in the darkness of the night Frightful the forest fire.234 Complementaries Cranes as garland on the clouds. Clouds as boats in the sky, The black girl with a scarf of gold, The fair girl wrapt in blue, These pairs are lively to behold Firing the feeling eye.235

In Colour Rhymes Bose’s colours may seem merely to lay out the primaries of Field et al. but as his earlier nine elements and colours make clear, yellow is Brahma and wonder; red is Rudra and anger;



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blue is either loathsome associated with Mahakatala or erotic like Vishnu. Black is fearful like Kala whilst pink is heroic and thus pertains to Mahendra. Rejecting the conventional complementaries of the spectrum – red-green, orange-blue – in his later verses he works out a more poetic set of colour-form equivalences determined by blue and gold, as colour becomes part of a series of personal analogies, as the subject for poetic inscription. At the Threshold of Potentiality: Can Colour be a Redemptive Space? I suggest that in all these inquiries colour performs as a third space in relation to locality. I read locality through Arjun Appadurai’s terms as a scape for the coming together of projected and imaginary practices where long-distance, local and globalising forces collude.236 Bengali, Ajanta, Jaipuri, Chinese, Japanese, Bagh, even colonial watercolour, all participate in this production of a swadeshi colour space. But is colour at any point out of sync with both materiality and a national search for alter, even cosmopolitan modernity? If it retains a status that is in any way nomadic, colour carries nomadism through to the realm of the heterotopic – the attempted realisation of utopic aspirations, dreams and architectonic designs in lived spaces. Although in Bengal there is a certain drive towards a vernacular colour increasingly located in earthbound pigments sourced from the local, colour becomes entangled with and attached to certain globalising forces and a cosmopolitan agenda. Precisely because it is nomadic it can never be fully re-territorialised. It pertains to a learned ideal of the customary whilst also elusively and allusively moving in and out of colonial chromatics and the spaces of colouristic alterities. I want to clinch these issues by turning to a final colourist who wrote little on his own work – Jamini Roy.237 Jamini Roy acts as a catalyst for thinking about what constituted the publics for art through a certain tearing of colour between Bengali patriotism and the Gandhian ideology of the biomoral imperative of life.238 From a gentry family in the Bankura district of Bengal (a region known for indigenous, ‘folk’ art), Roy deployed a palette of earth colours which he mixed in earthenware pots to produce effects similar to that of rural and urban pats which by then was (at least in Calcutta)



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a disappearing art.239 He also spun the fabric with which to make his own canvases, thus adapting the nationalist symbol of the charkha of everyday life to folk-inspired images. He used cow dung and lime coating while the texture of his paintings often resembled that of village mud walls.240 As opposed to merely focusing on a flat application of colour, Roy experimented with woven leaves and fabrics onto which he painted subjects inspired by Byzantine mosaic. Colour should have a shimmer and three-dimensionality: it should occupy space and the spaces between the ground of art.241 However, sometimes these experiments with cloth, leaves and pigment broke down; contemporaries noted that his pictures rotted quickly.242 Nevertheless, the Bengali vernacular became implicated in the pan-national struggle for swaraj. Stella Kramrisch, in a highly emotive passage to accompany the ISOA’s exhibition of Roy’s paintings in Calcutta, 1944, locates him directly in relation to the vitalising power of the earth: A flash of lightning across Bengal’s dust-laden, brooding sky heralds release: the monsoon is near, the dry earth will be green and young again and the air clear. Such is the portent of Jamini Roy’s art…Like the pali the wooden grain measure used in this country, pure in its form and perfect in subdued symbolic design, the art of Jamini Roy serves the living Bengal: it has its place in its tradition and is capable of holding bountiful harvests.243

This exhibition championed a stridently local agenda which positioned Roy in relation to the art of the village, variously advocated by Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore. But the village is ‘singular’ or rather metonymic of Bankura district: ‘In such communities the artisan combines the function of both artist and craftsman. Unlike the art of more selfconscious peoples, folk art is never regarded by those who practise it as an activity justified for its own sake’.244 Turning the earth into the art of self also held Gandhian village hygiene associations. In his fight for the biomorality of self-rule, Gandhi advocated the importance of earth poultice as the cure for numerous ailments and inflictions including snake bite, boils and typhoid. The ingredients of the remedy were essentially a very fine-spun soft cloth and earth which should not be gathered from a manure-spread field and which should preferably be of alluvial clay. Earth in small doses could also be administered for constipation and other minor illnesses.



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Earth then as an ingredient of Roy’s paintings is not merely indexical; earth has political and Hindu cosmological ramifications of which many of his viewers would have been well aware. At one stage he used a rich red ground which either was or resembled the colour of the soil of his home area of Bankura. Here earth has a profound deep and surface sacrality which through mud walls, murals and Roy’s panels became the subject of contemporary art and the fight against colonial rule.245 From the wash metaphorics of Bharat Mata, earth is not merely metonymic of a potential coming community as deity or map, but as a critical component in health, welfare, economics, industry, self, personality and artistic production. The fullness not the wretched(ness) of the earth becomes the virtual and actual fulcrum for fighting towards a reality of freedom. There is a certain political dimension to Roy’s quest for indigenous materiality – folk ‘as the character of protest … a means of defying the upper-class ethic’.246 His practice occupied quite a different public status to either Abanindranath’s reproduced paintings or Bose’s outdoor murals. Roy set up a workshop employing numerous assistants to help at every stage of the pat paintings – akin to the labour of Kalighat patuas. The hundreds of works were then sold at reasonable prices mostly to the middle classes of Calcutta, thus giving this up and coming political group access to the possession of ‘fine art’ for the first time. The works play with competing concepts of what can be likeness and presence, Christian iconography and Hindu darsán rather than with the representation of action common to Bengali pats. His most famous paintings convey nothing of the narrative unravelling or collective performativity of the storytelling pats produced at such well-known centres as Midnapore, nor do they engage with the myriad of complex, subaltern themes such as the Muslim pir or the sexual scandal of the Mahant and Elokeshi or the triumph of the last independent nawab of Bengal Siraj ud-daula – subjects favoured by patuas. For Roy, the principle appeal of the pats is their strong pigmented lines, bright colours and their opening up of the trope of the folk as a tool for exploring a locally charged definition of what should be nationalist art which rejected the elite idioms of Ajanta, Mughal painting, fresco and the wash of the Bengal School. Colour should be, or it should at least simulate, the ‘aesthetic’ of the subaltern.



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His subjects like those of Bose are taken from everyday life, although their monumental frontality and iconicity means that they are more ambiguously infused with the sacred and with his reading of Tolstoy’s ‘What is Art?’247 Given Kalighat pats’ concern with doubling and interchanging the bodies of the gods with babus and prostitutes, Roy intermingles the profane and the sacred in ways which can be read through Bose, Gandhi or Rabindranath Tagore’s valorisation of the self and art in everyday life.248 In 1931, Roy went so far as to exhibit his work alongside Bengali pats in a series of candle-lit rooms in his north Calcutta home where perhaps it became difficult to see which was which.249 This uncanny recourse to the art of itinerant singers of the subaltern painters forced into migration to Calcutta by colonial expansion and whose work is driven by satire and social ridicule of the elite now becomes one resource for exploring the contemplative and physiological power of colour. One of Roy’s best-known works, Madonna and Child, registers – blue, bright yellow and red to produce a local-global Figure who transgresses the boundaries of the nation (plate 14). Vernacular colour had for certain factions by the early 1940s a renewed or reinvented radical bent. At a meeting, convened by Ramananda Chatterjee in 1942, which hailed the ascent of the Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Union and the Progressive Writers’ Association, Jamini Roy was praised as India’s premier, radical artist.250 Because of the proximity of his images to the work of Calcutta and Midnapore patuas, Roy was saluted by the radical Left (CPI) as inspirational. Art must be people’s art: art should unite imagination and experience, although for now this could not be. Art could not be done by the subaltern masses because the people were not free. It was still impossible to dream of a free expression of creativity. Art would be messianic: one day it would break through the bonds of History: All art is in a sense people’s art…Only real freedom can release for the people that exuberance of joy which makes creation possible. And a glowing example of its truth is the land of the Soviets…Let all who can, alone or all together spread this message to every stratum of society, particularly to our workers, by speech, song, dance and pictures. This will be art, art for the people. The real people’s art – art created by the people – will come later after the revolution.251



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But when it breaks through, to be revolutionary, will art be that of the real, the subaltern – that is, the works of Bankura, Calcutta and Midnapore patuas amongst others – or the ‘virtual’ art of Jamini Roy which mimicked to appropriate the local and the vernacular to create the category of the ‘folk’ as a standard of artistic practice? Perhaps the Left relied on a rhetorical interplay of the virtual and the actual in its hopes for the future production of a socialist real.252 After all, many of the subjects of Bengali pats related closely with bratas – the proprietations of local deities in relation to narratives of a world order under attack.253 And today a renewed patua focus on Kali Yuga subjects in relation to global events (such as the tsnuami of December 2004 and 9/11) is now proving big tourist/firangi business (plate 15).254 In spite of his political activism (his involvement with the Bengal Anti-Fascist Writers’ and Artists’ Conference), Jamini Roy’s art appealed primarily to an urban local, international and colonial elite. His meditative subjects with their combination of saintly aura, devotion and eclectic sources had very little to do with the economic and human crisis affecting eastern India – the Bengal Famine 1943– 44.255 Perhaps the most famous exhibition of his work to be staged during his lifetime at the ISOA held in 1944 in central Calcutta, took place in the middle of this crisis. Neither his works nor the catalogue by Stella Kramrisch, Bishen Dey and colonial officer John Irwin make any mention of the crisis – which by then was visible for all to see on the pavements of Calcutta. In fact the celebratory catalogue is filled with prints after Roy’s pencil and crayon depictions of ploughing, women working and other scenes of a bucolic nature whilst the colour plates of his work show a well-fed woman and child, who evoke Bengali terracotta temple sculpture in their pose and colours.256 Japanese bombing of Chittagong led to a British policy of scorching large swathes of eastern India as a deterrent against land invasion, which devastated the rural economy. This was made even worse by the cyclone that struck the coast of Bengal in October 1942.257 The starving left the wreckage of their homes in search of relief aid in Calcutta, only to be confronted with food shortages, the threat of workhouses, cholera, malaria, smallpox and social alienation.258



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Roy’s celebration of the rich earth in and as painting could not be further from the horrific food shortages and the death of five million from starvation and disease so dramatically staged by Communist Party photographer Sunil Janah and the CPI artist Chittaprosad Bhattacharya.259 Commissioned by CPI leader P. C. Joshi, Sunil Janah’s photographs, shot in Orissa in 1944, almost at the level of the soil, force the viewer either to the level of the ravaged, famished ground or to confront the remains of bodies, eaten by a dog or as bones which could not be cremated, arranged as a macabre serpentine ‘Line of Beauty’.260 Chittaprosad’s three-rupee publication Hungry Bengal (1943) tracks his journey through Midnapore district (from where many of the most eminent pat painters derived) and of his horror, anguish and anger at the spectre of death at every turn.261 It is as if his journey from Calcutta is haunted by the ghost-like figures of nomadic villagers, who seem to follow him as an exodus, desperately seeking out food aid in Calcutta before attempting to return to their destroyed lands and homes: ‘the procession of famished, helpless, living skeletons’ (figure 10).262 Following his written tour through Bengal, Chittaprosad included 21 prints after his black-ink line sketches of the suffering which fall into themes tracing their exodus from Calcutta.263 In an accompanying article, Chittaprosad describes the man’s final moments and the intrusive, perhaps unintentionally voyeuristic nature of his intrusive pencil. He records Santi as saying, ‘I am ashamed to be ill. I don’t like being sketched in my sickbed, the last place a Bolshevik should be.’264 Even more so than his many articles and Hungry Bengal, the images and their captions are replete with disgust at the neglect of the people of Midnapore who a few years earlier had rebelled so valiantly against the British.265 Clearly stating his artistic and political agenda, Chittaprosad attacked fellow artists for their sensationalist or rarefied representation of the famine which went against the CPI and Calcutta Group’s call for realism: I did not go to generalise famine in my works and did not get lost in moral or formal abstractions, nor did I go for any ineffective theatrical hysterics to mention the very unhappy weaknesses which overcame many important artists of the country those days, particularly those who could afford to avoid any direct contact with the famine victims…There were still other artists, particularly from Bengal



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who looked at national tragedy through the famine victims to performances of ghostly and ridiculous tricks to draw attention of the world. Apart from the shocking debauchery committed by these artists against the integrity of the great masses, we were alarmed by the fact that what they performed was they claimed fundamentally an expression of socialist realism and experiments with Indian national form!…If it was physically possible, I would have met and sketched each of the three million individuals who perished in that massacre. Because it was only through the sketches and reports that I could participate in their living and death struggle.266

For one artist deeply concerned with this crisis, colour did have a dramatic and deliberately unearthly agency. Muslim painter and political activist of the highest order, Zainul Abedin’s 18 black-ink sketches and series of dry point sketches show with even greater emotive power than the work of Chittaprosad, the angular, almost destroyed bodies of the famine victims (figure 10).267 First reproduced in the Calcutta daily Swadhinatra, and then feted by the CPI mouthpiece People’s War, Abedin’s sketches are painted on leftover scrap paper – which is often tinted bright yellow or orange (plate 16).268 Ruined bodies ‘crouch’



Chittaprosad, Woman and child during the Bengal Famine of 1943.

Fig.10



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dilapidated, may be dead, on the earth, but without shadow, oppressed by this empire of light. One of the most dramatic aspects of Abedin’s work is his ability to represent the sheer desperation of a boy and dog competing for food in a rubbish dump and the way in which he captures the movement, the threshold between life and death over and over again in pathetic vignettes. His brush, laden with a mixture of grey, white and black captures the horror of a mother’s final breath, her baby clutching desperately to her petrifying breast, whilst a crow perches on the shrouded corpse of a man; a dog rests like the symbol of fidelity from a medieval Christian tomb at the dead man’s left foot; finally, the shaded profile of a woman clutches a withered, tiny baby on her shoulder: again it is unclear whether the child is alive or dead. In many instances, Zainul’s works are almost mirror images or critiques of the sketches and prints of Chittaprosad. Whereas Chittaprosad represents a mother feeding her child to offer a socialist realist glimmer of hope, the skeletal bodies of Abedin are pathetic and doomed. Zainul’s visages are frequently shaded and there is a certain loss of likeness and individuality in the face of starvation. It is as if his images occupy the dramatic, middle space between Chittaprosad’s socialist realism and Janah’s photographs of death. For Abedin, the effect, the affect of colour is to provide the sense of an unforgiving ground; to be a harsh light which has an eery, apocalyptical glow. From being the celebrated red, Bankura earth of Jamini Roy’s work, colour is now the threatening, intense glow of disease, death and desperation. Colour’s paradoxically vitalising and menacing presence jars with Zainul’s rhythmic ink – his eyewitness testimony to a destroyed landscape. Although later praised for his ‘passionate closeness to the soil’, the soil is precisely what is absent in these famine images.269 Even as the ‘visual essay’ to Ela Sen’s series of allegorical stories about the famine, published in 1944 as Darkening Days, Abedin’s use of colour is heightened in its saturation and intensity as reproduction.270 Sen’s words resonate with the visual motifs and the colours of Zainul’s works.271 Both Sen’s text and Zainul’s images were censored by the British for their affective power, their potential to incite both local revolt and criticism on an international scale.272 In spite of this unique, politicised agency of colour, the stark aesthetic of black and white continues to inform the contemporary,



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postcolonial memorialisation of India’s freedom fighters – at least in institutionalised spaces where photography (and the photographing of old photographs) acts as the public form of visual memorialisation of those sacrificed to the nation.273 Both Netaji Bhavan, Kolkata, and the Cellular Jail, Port Blair, use black-and-white photography to commemorate Netaji (Subhas Chanda Bose) and the hundreds of political prisoners incarcerated by the Raj. Whilst these permanent displays are distinctly old-fashioned in their 1950s–60s style of object display (often coated with dust), photography does the work of History to stage the aura of Netaji and others alongside personal ‘relics’ such as uniforms, quotidian artefacts and letters. Or photographs act as person substitutes to be contemplated alongside horrific torture and execution instruments they had to endure. One of Kolkata’s obsolete museums, the Calcutta Panorama, housed in the old Town Hall, artfully uses colonial and Indian paintings and prints as the inspiration for narrating Bengali histories.274 In contrast with the colourful dioramas of battles, a village and a babu interior, and the use of automata (including a strangely glowing figure of Rabindranath Tagore which sings), the twentieth-century fight for freedom from colonialism was told entirely in black and white. Life-sized cardboard streets and demonstrators took their inspiration from photographs and CPI cartoons and prints whilst a black-and-white documentary recounted the brutality of colonial rule and the struggle for freedom (figure 11). Colour is dramatically absent – except as illusionistic flames ‘burning’ in one corner of this Quit India installation. Slightly cock-eyed, hanging behind a bamboo frame close to the two bronze-coloured tube station façade-installations named after him on Bose Road, in his family’s district, Calcutta’s most mysterious and famous freedom fighter Subhas Chandra Bose stands upright in military uniform, ignited by his fight for India’s freedom.275 As opposed to the original black-and-white photographs of his impassioned career against the British (as recorded in detail at his brother’s former house, the nearby Netaji Bhavan), here is Netaji against an orange-red sky which, to me, invokes the apocalyptical background colours of Abedin’s famine images.276 Orangered then is the colour of crisis and political emergency of the

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1940s, which, as public memory, is still resonant today. Political and devotional images as brightly coloured chromolithographs turned into banners and posters, are the spaces for everyday visuality in Kolkata and in much of India.277 Perhaps then there is something elitist, state-regulated, outmoded or artyfarty about the use of black-and-white photography (confined to the archive, the museum, the art show), which as a medium no longer pertains to the quotidian imagery of politics in Indian newspapers.278 As banner, poster, calendar, wall painting, graffiti, video, cinema, chromolithograph, newspaper photo and as waste, colour now wanders the public, the outside and the abject spaces of India as never before. Colour then can resonate with the ‘filth’ and the devotion of the public sphere. Precisely because it is nomadic, colour can never be fully re-territorialised. It pertains to a learned ideal of the customary whilst also elusively and allusively moving in and out of colonial chromatics and the project of Indian nationalism. In the period I have discussed in this chapter, colour became enmeshed with conflicting networks that caused it to surge through the veins



Quit India Installation in the Calcutta Panorama, Kolkata Town Hall.

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of the nation’s longing for form. In swaraj and swadeshi colour may have had the potential to become one of the ultimate spaces for nationalist redemption but it also had its limits as possibly elitist and retrograde. Post-Independence (1947), how did artist members of India’s radical Left seek out colour as the means of postcolonial redemption? And given the violence of decolonisation, Partition and the struggle for a unique form of modernity, what would be, could be, the redemption for colour in postcolonial India?







Postscript With a Rag and a Knife

Post-Independence Redemption and the Colours of Radical Magic With a rag and a knife Against the idée fixe The bull of fear Against the canvas and the void The uprising spring Blue flame of cobalt Burnt amber Greens fresh from the sea Mind’s indigo With a rag and a knife No brushes With the insomnia the rage the sun Against the blank face of the world The uprushing spring Serpentine undulation The aquatic vibration of space The triangle the Arcanum The deep ink of blood of honey With a rag and a knife The uprushing spring Network the Mexican springs Turns black The Indian Red springs The arrow stuck on the black altar The angry alphabet turns black The lips go black The black of Kali Charcoal for your eyelids We desired every night The black of Kali The yellow and its scorched beast The ochre and its underground drums The green body of the black jungle 289



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The blue body of Kali The sex of Guadalupe With a rag and a knife Against the triangle The eye bursts Fountain of signs The serpentine undulation moves Wave upon wave of imminent oppositions The canvas to body Dressed in its own naked enigma.

Octavio Paz, ‘The Painter Swaminathan’1

Paz’s lyrical exploration of the work of radical artist Jagdish Swaminathan forms the ‘redemptive’ end point of my narrative. My decision to track this collaboration is in part motivated by the beauty of Paz’s writing, the stark be(com)ing of Swaminathan’s work and the attempts of both men to formulate a postcolonial aesthetic freed from the obvious agendas of nationalism and colonialism. The rag erases the canvas; the knife cuts these two de- and re-territorialised nomads adrift from the burden of History to navigate their own creole, magical genealogy. In Western modernism, ‘dreams of a truly universal and scientific colour have been set against a sensual utopia of chromatic excess, but in reality the oppositions were never so clear-cut. The desire for a system often led to the most sensual, impure results’, just as the belief in colour’s ‘much vaunted freedom from rule-bound convention has often produced the most formulaic and exhausted of modernist experiments’.2 So does the true work of colour in the south–south also turn out to be counter-intuitive or is it something alter and labyrinthine that we really can’t define except perhaps through the vortex of the tantric and the xeno real? 3 For Octavio Paz the concept of a counter-intuitive reality is a continuous present – a labyrinth of solitude defined by nomadism-asredemptive practice: We [in the Third World] have been expelled from the center of the world and are condemned to search for it through jungles and deserts or in the underground mazes of the labyrinth. Also, there was a time when time was not succession and transition, but rather the perpetual source of a fixed present in which all times, past and future, are contained…Every moribund or sterile society attempts to save itself by creating a redemption myth.4



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If there is redemption in art it must be sought elsewhere in other spacetime continuua.Through the Mexican experience, set out in The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz turns to a combination of mimicry and camouflage as one way of approaching postcoloniality. He takes inspiration from Roger Caillois, whom he reads against evolution theory for his observation that mimicry can be nomadic and spatialising where the drama of changing appearance is an act of spreading oneself out, of blending with or more critically of ‘becoming space’:5 To simulate is to invent, or rather to counterfeit, and thus to evade our condition. Dissimulation requires greater subtlety…The Indian blends into the landscape until he is an indistinguishable part of the white wall against which he leans at twilight, of the dark earth…He disguises his human singularity to such an extent that he finally annihilates it and turns into a stone, a tree, a wall, silence, and space.6

For one South Asian artist what does it mean to transform singularity and self into a stone, wall, silence and space? Mystic, poet, ideologue and founding member of the radical art collective Group 1890, Jagdish Swaminathan collaborated with Paz (then the Mexican ambassador to India) to establish the Leftist journal Contra 66 in 1966.7 The ethic of Contra 66 hinged on rupture against pedagogy, rules and hermeneutics:8 What art deals with is perhaps not the continuity but the moment of discontinuity, the aspect of discontinuity, so in that sense there is no growth in art. It is only when you start putting things in perspective that you start discovering the contours of movement … The critical part of the creative process for me is to drop all consciously aimed at images so that whatever else is left that comes out.9

Swaminathan, who had previously been a member of the CPI in addition to working as a journalist and art critic for Leftist magazines, was instrumental in organising Group 1890’s only show – ‘Surrounded by Infinity’. Held in one of the highprofile, political hearts of state, Rabindra Bhavan, Delhi, it was inaugurated by the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, and introduced by Paz in October 1963.10 Polemical and paradoxical, Swaminathan rejected any celebration of either a national past or the unifying force of culture – ideas which he articulated in both the pages of Contra 66 and in the Marxist journal Link.11



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Swaminathan wrote the manifesto for Group 1890 which he intended as a direct attack on both what he perceived to be the vulgar naturalism and the pastoral idealism of the Bengal School and the Progressives: Art for us is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition. We do not sing of man, nor are we his messiahs. The function of art is not to interpret and annotate, comprehend or guide. Such attitudinising may seem heroic in an age when man, caught up in the mesh of his own civilization, hungers for vindication…Art is neither conformity of reality nor a flight from it. It is reality itself…The viewer has to look for communication.12

The manifesto was also intended as a statement against what Swaminathan perceived to be the hybrid mannerism of European modernism and its manifestation in India. Group 1890 condemned the direction they believed art had taken since the work of Ravi Varma, especially the misguided search for significance between tradition and contemporaneity, between representation and abstraction, between communication and expression: ‘Artists with talent misled themselves into believing that a happy compromise could be achieved by recasting native folk and miniature styles in the framework of the concept developed by the modern in the West.’13 Hence ‘the true subject of this exhibition is the confrontation of the vision of these painters with the inherited image. Contemporary Indian art, if this country is to have an art worthy of its past, cannot but be born from the violent clash.’14 Although Contra 66 only ran to four issues, like the Group’s oneweek show it has become legendary in its attempts to forge a new political and aesthetic agenda for Indian artists. The first issue of Contra 66 carried a lead essay by Philip S. Rawson on the numinous image – the self-manifesting swambhu: ‘Indian painters…always start with the idea that there is something hidden somehow behind the surface, some sort of presence that can be made to show itself…The first is an emotional reaction to the colour used and it is through our feelings that the numinous speaks to us.’15 In his own work, Swaminathan returned time and again to the tensions between the numinous, revolution and revelation: he deconstructed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Pahari painting and the works of Paul Klee to fashion a mystical vision that sought to invoke bhakti’s shared relationship between worshipper (usually a poet) and God.16 Bhakti involves epiphany – the momentary glimpse through the window of what appears to be mundane into



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the totality of things. For Swaminathan, the devotional eye takes the pictorial surface as a device for rumination on ontology: the pictorial surface offers a glimpse into the question of being qua becoming. In spite of Swaminathan’s admiration for Paul Klee, any sense of messianic time (Benjamin’s use of Klee as a gesture towards the Angel of History so critical to his idea of the messianic in relation to redemption) had to be shattered in favour of a xeno-avenging rhetoric which abhorred Western civilisation for its narcissism and violence: ‘Art for us [Group 1890] is not born out of a preoccupation with the human condition. We do not sing of man nor are we his messiahs. The function of art is not to interpret or annotate, comprehend and guide.’17 The self-proclaimed Third World artist should be a ‘creative antagonist’ in search of a primal state of creating freedom on the basis of magic.18 With a rag and a knife, here perhaps Swaminathan’s work best approximates the baroque, magic realism of Paz’s writings.19 By the time of Group 1890’s show, Swaminathan had already been experimenting with colour as the site/sight to project his political activism. Colour then becomes the implicit, unwritten agenda, the ground for the artistic politics of Group 1890. As opposed to Abanindranath’s recourse to Mughal miniatures, Swaminathan produced two series of paintings (Colour Green of Space, The Yellow Sign, both 1960) which claimed to take creative antagonist inspiration from the Mughals’ long-term rivals – the Paharis in Rajasthan. He used Indian folk and tribal culture for their magical implications which had to be refined in a quasi-alchemical fashion, to be reduced to the lotus, OM and the palm imprint which he interspersed or overlaid with graffiti or écriture. Painting then is epiphany. For Swaminathan, ‘a painting is also not a hieroglyph to be understood when the symbol is made known. It is rather a thing to be experienced’ through the creation of a shimmering, shivering space between object and observer. In his recourse to Tantric yantras, Swaminathan infused mystical significance in the ‘triangle, the square and the circle as colour [which] I find are windows on the Avyaktam, the unmanifested’.20 Tantra became a resource for a number of artists working in postIndependence India. As Rebecca M. Brown has recently argued, these ‘neo-tantric’ painters (who never formed a collective) sought out the relationship between the spiritually hidden, representation and abstraction.21 One of the critical issues about this recourse to tantra



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is that it evades precise definition and hence it was virtually ignored by theological scholars until the 1930s. Tantra constructs the universe as the concrete manifestation of the divine energy of the godhead which tantrikas (practitioners) channel through the microcosm of the human body and its energies (shakti). The interconnectedness of macro- and microcosms is critical whilst the mandala (cosmic map) and spiritual symbols such as OM connect the body to the universe. For Swaminathan, tantra is interspersed with bhakti and Vedantic terminology so as to produce a highly individualised experience of the universe which seems to be unmediated except through vision and the medium of the body. His canvases create an alternative pictorial space which divides purely conceptual landscapes into bright, abstract yet also strangely haptic zones punctuated with archetypal birds and levitating stones. When viewed through the lens of tantra and bhakti, Paz’s hybrid/ creole verse makes colours emanate from the painting, from the body to touch the universe – a thrilling, dark, vertiginous, ‘green body of the black jungle’ space of colour. This labyrinth of colour shimmers and changes its hues (like an insect/bird/plant warning or like camouflage) from the blue flare of cobalt to burnt amber, sea greens, mind’s indigo, the deep ink blood of honey, to black Mexican spring, to Indian Red arrow, to Kali, kohl eyelids, yellow beast, ochre’s underground drums, to the green body of the black jungle and the blue body of Kali. Between the canvas and the void, desire and energy quiver as an aquatic vibration of space. In his exhibition, ‘Colour Geometry’ (1967), Swaminathan made the function of colour far more explicit than in the Group 1890’s manifesto: The function of colour as geometry as distinct from its function as representation is cardinal to the approach of the new painting. To understand colours as harmony or as energy is to limit oneself to look at colours as representation…Colour as geometry is fundamental. Geometric areas of colour in juxtaposition create painting space breathing the infinite on a two-dimensional plane. The total tension between the release of the infinite and its containedness in the two-dimensional strait jacket sets into motion the psychic Noumen, the pulsating presence. Here all the rules of tonalities, of harmonies, of warm and cool colours break down. The ratio of the geometric area and its colour in relation to other areas of colour determine its function. Thus primary colours may be used to achieve introverted results and vice versa. The viewer may be drawn in or thrown back irrespective of whether colour is cool or warm.22



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Art should be a revelation of the phenomenal world: a self-forgetting through colour is the means to achieve this pure space. The following year Swaminathan began to experiment with his use of paint as an attempt to dematerialise what he now believed to be the unsatisfactory nature and status of oil pigment by using thin washes to produce a transparent consistency almost like watercolour. He then soaked the canvas and laid in spaces of colour with rags immersed in pigment which he rubbed across the picture and then lifted off, so that the cloth left its imprint on the surface. In this way colour becomes the mnemonic substance of form. But according to art critic Geeta Kapur, the unpredictability of this working method had its hazards: ‘Swaminathan paints too many paintings where the colour surfaces are patchily delivered where the tuning of colour is far from perfect, particularly when he is using red.’23 His application of paint in solid yet light application creates the sense of a void, the resultant lucidity is like that of a ‘magic lantern’.24 Once again colour is unruly, driven by chance and perhaps inevitably, by its own inherent splendour. ‘Letting Colour Unfurl Its Own Inherent Splendour’ India’s leading art critic Geeta Kapur has made it part of her lifetime’s work to navigate the space between the artwork and the void in order to forge a genealogy for an alternative modernity. Her musings on Swaminathan’s experiments with colour indicate parallels with US artists Frank Stella, Morris Louis and Jules Olitiski, whose highly finished surfaces also efface the presence of the brush. Kapur’s genealogy entirely rejects the debates surrounding racialised intuition or evolutionary instinct advocated by colonial officials, to reinforce a metaphysical comprehension of colour which transgresses and perhaps transcends the perspectivism of the West: Extant texts on the art of the painting and the evidence of still current techniques show that the fabulous daring of the Indian artist in his use of colour is not merely a matter of instinct. There is both a formal and a symbolic understanding of it at the most sophisticated level. Colour is regarded as the very substance of form: the word rupa itself has been used to signify colour in Indian aesthetic texts. Dr Niharrajan Ray suggests the Indian artist regards even the sky as a substance which makes itself visible in colour: ‘Space is this felt substance, solid and compact’… [Swaminathan is] letting colour unfurl its own inherent splendour.25



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Bound together in a jungle-like labyrinth, the postcolonial intimacy of Octavio Paz and Jagdish Swaminathan perhaps best registers what has been said in this book to be the elusive yet figural vitality that is the nomadism of colour: Mind’s indigo… Wave upon wave of imminent oppositions The canvas to body [Colour] Dressed in its own naked enigma…



Notes

Introduction 1 One legend tells the story of Krishna’s jealousy of Radha’s light-coloured skin. On advice from his mother, he threw coloured powders on her and her friends. 2 Holi lasts for two days in most parts of India, although in Mathura, Krishna’s birthplace, it is celebrated for two weeks. For details of Holi see Sujatha Menon, Celebrating Holi: A Hindu celebration of spring (New York, 2009); Dilip Kadowala, A World of Festivals: Holi the Hindu festival of colours (London, 1997). 3 I have identified nine paintings of Holi by Indian artists from as diverse locations as Tanjore, Lucknow, Murshidabad and Hyderabad. They are now held in the Prints and Drawings collection of the Asia and Africa Collections, British Library (hereafter OIOC), Add Or 66, 939, 952, 1155, 1966, 2808, 3229, 4039, J.27.6, 6633. Holi is a particularly popular subject in eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Rajasthani painting. See, for instance: Kesan Das, Maharao Ram Singh II of Kotah playing Holi, 1844; Maharana Jagat Singh playing Holi, c.1745; and Maharana Amar Singh playing Holi with his sardars, c.1708–10, reproduced in Andrew Topsfield, Paintings from Rajasthan in the National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, 1980), p.45. Several other examples of Rajasthani paintings of Holi from private collections (such as the Khandalavala collection, Bombay; the Kasturbhai collection, Ahmedabad; the V&A, London; Indian Museum, Kolkata; Archer Collection, London; Central Museum, Lahore; and Bharat Kala Bhavan, Benares) are discussed and briefly compared in W. G. Archer, Indian Paintings from the Punjab Hills, vol.1 (Delhi, 1973), p.67. One of the few colonial representations of Holi that I have found are Balthasar Solvyns’ drawing (V&A) for his stipple print in his book Les Hindous (Paris, 1808) and three photographs in the Asian and African collections of the British Library. 4 See T. Velpandian, K. Saha, A. K. Rani, S. S. Kumani, N. K. Biswas and S. Ghosh, ‘Ocular Hazards of the Colours Used During the Festivals of Holi in India’, Journal of Hazardous Materials, vol.139.2 (10 January 2007), pp.1–5 for the effects of malachite green; T. Dada, N. Sharma and A. Kumar, ‘Chemical Injury Due to Colours Used at Holi’, National Medical Journal of India, vol.10 (1997), p.256; G. Sudip, B. Debamata, C. Gobinda, S. Debabrata, ‘The Holi Dermatoses’, Indian Journal of Dermatology, vol.54.3 (2009), pp.240–42. The materials commonly used for pigment during Holi include lead oxides, copper sulfate, Prussian blue, mercury sulfate and mica dust added for sparkle. 297













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5 A. Forge, ‘Paint: A Magical Substance’, Palette, vol.9 (1962), pp.9–16. 6 The work is made from two cords, each 350 feet in length, which Gowda threaded through one needle, brought to a halfway point and doubled up. She argues that the process of threading each of the 89 needles was a performative act. The threads were then made into a flexible cord by coating them with glue and red pigment. Gowda views this as ‘pure line drawing’; ‘Sheela Gowda in conversation with Christoph Storz and Suman Gopinath’, in Drawing Space: Contemporary Indian Drawing (London, 2000), p.53. 7 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine’, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London, 2007), p.421. 8 In a series of propositions about what constitutes nomadology, Deleuze and Guattari break down ideas of the Western state by seeking to analyse forces from the outside. This takes many forms but one of their prime examples is drawn from George Dumézil’s work on Indo–European mythology which sets off the king from the jurist priests as potential sovereigns and which emphasises the power of the Hindu gods Varuna and Indra; Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna (Paris, 1948); idem, The Destiny of the Warrior (Chicago, 1970), which they read with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals amongst a free fall of sources; ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology’, ch. 12. 9 Deleuze and Guattari, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology’, pp.399, 401. 10 See C. L. Miller, ‘The Postidentitarian Predicament: The footnotes of A Thousand Plateaux, anthropology and authority’, Diacritics, vol.23.3 (1993), pp.6–35; K. Surin, ‘The Undecidable and the Fugitive: Milles Plateaux and the State form’, SubStance, vol.20.3 (1991), pp.1012–13; C. J. Stivale, ‘The Literary Element in Milles Plateaux: The new cartography of Deleuze and Guattari’, SubStance, vol.13.3–4 (1984), pp.20–34; H. Sunman, ‘Deterritorializing the Text: Flow theory and deconstruction’, MLN, vol.115.5 (2005), pp.45–56; special issue Yale French Studies, ‘Post/colonial Conditions: Exiles, migrations and nomadisms’, vol.82 (1993); Stephen Muecke, ‘The Discourse of Nomadology: Phylms in flux’, Art and Text, vol.14 (1984), pp.24–40. 11 Deleuze and Guattari use the term transhumant here; ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology’, p.452. 12 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation, vol.1 (Paris, 1981). See also Stephen Zepke, Art as Abstract Machine: Ontology and aesthetics in Deleuze and Guattari (London, 2005); Ronald Bogue, ‘Art and Territory’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol.96.3 (1997), pp.465–82; and the unpublished work of Eric Alliez on Deleuze and colour. 13 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p.78. 14 For detailed analysis of Deleuze’s views on colour see Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts (New York, 2003), ch. 6. 15 Deleuze and Guattari cite E. Laroche’s Histoire de le racine NEM en Grec ancien (Paris, 1949) in relation to puissances.



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16 Deleuze and Guattari draw upon Pierre Boulez’s metrical as opposed to nonpulsed ideas of time in music. 17 In Bergsonism, Deleuze differentiates between quantitative and qualitative multiplicities. The former is determined by cells of elements that do not change their elements; Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, 1991). 18 IPL stands for cricket’s Indian Premier League. 19 Sudeshna Banerjee, ‘Jersey Team Prays for KKR Purple Patch’, The Telegraph (Calcutta, 1 April 2010), pp. 17, 26. Banerjee interviewed Mohd Salam a seller of the jerseys ‘Team harchhey demand nei … Ke aar haara teamer jersey portey chay? – there is no demand … who wants to wear a losing team’s colours?’ Mukhtar Ahamad added that ‘ekdom ladies colour – this colour is only for women’. Store holders planned to sell the shirts in the colour of the customer’s choice. 20 Azibar Rahman, ‘Locals Demand Restoration of a Historic Neel Kuthi’, Daily Star (Dacca, 7 September 2008), p.1. Protesters made a human chain around the building. 21 Krishnandu Banyopadhyay, ‘Call to Bring Back Bengal’s Terrible Blue’, The Times of India (23 February 2010), p.2. Banyopadhyay discusses the history of the revolt but also the views of art historian Jenny Balfour Paul and M. Sanjappa, Director of the Botanical Survey of India – both of whom are in favour of the reintroduction of indigo as a sustainable crop. Balfour Paul is currently conducting research on the history of indigo planters’ homes and factories in India. The status of indigo was recently discussed at an international symposium on dye at Sutra. In Bangladesh, dye expert Ruby Ghuznani is credited with reintroducing indigo which she believes to be economically viable. In the village of Chatta Kalikapur, South 24 Parganas, West Bengal, India, a flourishing blue-jeans trade exists without the intervention of indigo. Whilst 5000 families are supported by this trade ‘prosperity has brought with it the threat of pollution. The effluents from the washing machines, which use several chemicals to bleach the jeans, have discoloured some of the canals in the village, turning them indigo’; ‘The Jeans-Makers’, in Payal Mohanka, In the Shadows: Unknown craftsmen of Bengal (Delhi, 2007), p.104. In spite of this perceived hatred for indigo, one of India’s leading airlines is named IndiGo and its planes have indigo decoration on the wings and the interior and the logo is also indigo. 22 The reference to milk drinking has complex resonances with its derivation from the cow and its association with miracles – the most famous being cases when Hindu gods really drink the milk offered them as oblation. See Denis Vidal, ‘When the Gods Drink Milk: Empiricism and belief in contemporary Hinduism’, South Asia Research, vol.18.2 (1998), pp.149–71. 23 There is a cow urine treatment and research centre in Indore.



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24 For the context-making power of things see Marilyn Strathern, ‘Artefacts of History: Events and the interpretation of history’, in J. Siikala (ed.), Culture and History in the Pacific (Helsinki, 1990), pp.24–44. 25 Light and speed and the disorientation and manipulation they involved are dealt with in depth by Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London, 1990); Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The industrialization of light in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1986); Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, streets and images in 19th-century London (New Haven, CT, 2000); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (New York, 2006). 26 Although Edward W. Said does not mention colour directly in his discussing of knowledge-power as orientalism, his argument informs many of the recent texts on the history of colour; Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). 27 Eugenia Shanklin, ‘The Profession of the Colour Bind: Sociocultural anthropology and racism in the 21st century’, American Anthropologist, vol.100.3 (1998), pp.669–79; special issue of the Art Journal, ‘Blinded by Whiteness: Art History at the limits of whiteness’, vol.60.4 (2001); Richard Dyer, White (London, 1997); K. Seshadri-Crooke, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian analysis of race (London, 2000); S. Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the structure of racism (Philadelphia, 2010); V. Ware, Out of Whiteness: Colour, politics and culture (Chicago, 2002); A. J. Lopez, Postcolonial Whiteness: A critical reader on race and empire (New York, 2005); George Yancy (ed.), What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the whiteness question (London, 2004). For an historical study relevant to the period covered in this book see Angela Rosenthal’s article ‘Visceral Culture: Blushing and the aesthetics of race in 18th-century British painting’, Art History, vol.27.4 (2004), pp.563–92. 28 The literature on this area is a culture industry in itself which need not be covered in this book. I include key studies on art and/or race. The most powerful personal and political writing on race remains Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin White Masks (London, 1967). For art and race with some mention of colour see David Bindman’s resumption of Hugh Honour’s magisterial, multi-volume project The Image of the Black in Western Art (Los Angeles, 2010–11); Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar and Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven, CT, 2008); David Dabydeen, Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of blacks in 18th-century English art (London, 1983); Kay Dian Kriz and Geoff Quilley (eds), An Economy of Colour: Visual culture and the Atlantic World (Manchester, 2003); Albert Boime, The Art of Exclusion: Representing Blacks in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1990); Jan Marsh (ed.), Black Victorians: Black people in British art, 1800–1900 (Aldershot, 2005); Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual representations of slavery in England and America (Manchester, 1995). For approaches which conflate colour with social, sexual economic and political understandings of race and which do not focus on art see Harold E. Pagliaro



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(ed.) Studies in 18th-century Culture: Racism in the 18th century (Cleveland, 1973); Douglas A. Lorimer, ‘Theoretical Racism in Late Victorian Anthropology, 1870–1900’, Victorian Studies, vol.31.3 (1988), pp.405–30; Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations of feminism and history (Cambridge, 1992). The seminal scholarship of a series of thinkers have helped to define this field; see Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation (London, 1987); idem, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and double consciousness (Cambridge, 1993); bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? Black women and feminism (London, 1982); Henry Louis Gates Jnr., “Race” Writing and Difference (Chicago, 1986); idem, Figures in Black: Words, signs and the racial self (Oxford, 1987); idem, The Signifying Monkey (New York, 1988); Sander Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of sexuality, race and madness (Ithaca, NY, 1985); Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, 1981); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, race and nature in the world of modern science (London, 1989). Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial context (London, 1995), ch. 5. McClintock, Imperial Leather; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (London, 1990). For race in relation to fetish and the stereotype see Homi K. Bhabha’s classic essay ‘The Other Question…Homi Bhabha reconsiders the stereotype and colonial discourse’, Screen, vol.24.6 (1983), pp.18–36. For India see Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse’, in Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp.85–92 and for Africa see Jean Camoroff and John Camoroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: Christianity, colonialism and consciousness in South Africa (Chicago, 1991), vol.1. Michael Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred? (Chicago, 2009), p.12. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London, 1981), p.121. David Batchelor, Chromophobia (London, 2000), p.21. Batchelor, Chromophobia, p.71. Roland Barthes, ‘Cy Twombly, Works on Paper’, in Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical essays (Oxford, 1996), p.166. Batchelor, Chromophobia, pp.32, 51. See also Howard Morphy, ‘From Dull to Brilliant: The aesthetics of spiritual power among the Yolngu’ in J. Coote and A. Shelton (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics (Oxford, 1992), pp.181–208. John Gage, ‘Good and Bad Colours: Painting, conservation and reproduction’, AIC conference paper (2009). John Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, science and symbolism (London, 2000), p.9. For basic works on colour many of which are useful bibliographical sources on the subject see M. Buckley and D. Baum, Colour Theory: A guide to information



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sources (London, 1975); M. Doran, ‘Colour Theory: Publications issued before 1900 and their later editions and reprints’, ARLIS Newsletter (March, 1974); R. L. Herbert, ‘A Colour Bibliography’, Yale University Library Gazette (1974 and 1978); Yale University and Architecture Library, Faber Birren Collection of Books on Colour: A bibliography (New Haven, CT, 1982); S. Skard, ‘The Use of Colour in Literature: A survey of research’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.90 (1949), pp.163–249; C. L. Hardin and Luisa Maffi, Colour Categories in Thought and Language (Cambridge, 1997); Robert E. Maclaury, Caline V. Paramei and Don Dedrick (eds). Anthropology of Colour (Amsterdam, 2007); Alex Byrne and David R. Hilbert (eds), Readings on Colour: The Philosophy of colour, vol.1 (Cambridge, MA, 1997); Barbara Saunders and Jaap van Brakel (eds), Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Colour: Anthropological and Historiographic Perspectives (Oxford, 2002). Some of the best studies on technical art history that also cater for a broader public interest in the history of colour include P. Ball, Bright Earth: The invention of colour (London, 2001); F. Delamere and B. Guineau, Making and Using Dyes and Pigments (London, 2000); V. Finlay, Colour: Travels through the paint box (London, 2004); François Delamare and Bernard Guineau, Colours: The story of dyes and pigments (New York, 1999); Michel Pastoureau, Blue: The history of a colour (Princeton, NJ, 2000); idem, Black (Princeton, NJ, 2009). John Gage, ‘Colour in Western Art – An Issue?’, Art Bulletin, vol.72.4 (December, 1990), pp.518–41; p.524. See also MacLaury, Paramei and Derick (eds), Anthropology of Colour; Saunders and van Brakel (eds), Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Colour. This is the position assumed by Bruno Latour’s tour de force, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (London, 1993); idem, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the reality of the social sciences (London, 1998). See D. Zellner and M. Kautz, ‘Colour Affects Odor Intensity’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol.16.2 (1990), pp. 391–97; R. D’Angrade and P. Egan, ‘The Colour of Emotion’, American Ethnologist, vol.1 (1974), pp. 49– 63; S. Baron-Cohen and J. Harion, Synaesthesia (London, 1997); Diana Young, ‘The Colours of Things: Memory, materiality and an anthropology of the senses in North West Australia’, unpublished PhD, University of London (2001), p. 244; see also her edited volume Rematerializing Colour (forthcoming); idem, ‘Mutable Things: Colours as material practice in the north west of South Western Australia’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (forthcoming); idem, ‘The Colour of Things’, in P. Spyer, C. Tilley, S. Küchler and W. Keane (eds), The Handbook of Material Culture (London, 2006), pp.173–85; Alva Noë and Susan Hurley, ‘Can Hunter Gatherers Hear Colour?’, in G. Brennen, R. Goodwin and M. Smith (eds), Common Minds: Themes from the philosophy of Philip Pettit (Oxford, 2007), pp. 45–56. Here I adapt Alfred Gell’s idea of art as a system of action. Unfortunately Gell had very little to say about colour in his seminal study Art and Agency: An



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anthropological theory (Oxford, 1998). See also Dan Sperber, Rethinking Symbolism (London, 1975); John Urry, ‘Symbolic Colour: Victor Turner reassessed’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford, vol.2 (1971), pp.9–17. An excellent sourcebook for the later nineteenth-century German material on colour is Barbara Saunders, The Debate About Colour Naming in 19th-century German Philology (Leuven, 2007). For the continued investment in the link between colour and language see E. H. Lenneberg,‘Cognition in Ethnolinguistics’, Language, vol.29 (1953), pp.469–70; E. H. Rosch, ‘Universals in Colour Naming and Memory’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol.93 (1972), pp.10–20; P. Kay and C. K. McDaniel, ‘The Linguistic Significance of the Meanings of Basic Colour Terms’, Language, vol.54 (1978), pp.610–46; Hardin and Maffi, Colour Categories; R. J. Mausfield, ‘Why Bother About Opponency? Our theoretical ideas on elementary colour coding have changed our language of experience’, Behavioural and Brain Science, vol.20.2 (1997), p.203. Berlin and Kay initially analysed 98 languages and dialects in the Los Angeles area to produce their data. Kay also worked extensively on the development of a World Colour Survey (published 1991). Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Colour Terms: Their universality and evolution (Berkeley, CA, 1969); Kay and McDaniel, ‘The Linguistic Significance’; P. Kay and W. R. Merrifield, ‘Biocultural Implications of Systems of Colour Naming’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol.1 (1991), pp. 12–25; M. Hardin, L. Maffi and W. R. Merrifield, ‘Colour Naming Across Languages’, in Hardin and Maffi, Colour Categories, pp. 21–56; Mausfield, ‘Why Bother About Opponency?. For a nuanced approach to colours and cultures see Umberto Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours we See’, in M. Blonskky (ed.), On Signs (London, 1975), pp. 157–75; Marshall Sahlins, ‘Colors and Cultures’, Semiotica, vol.16 (1976), pp. 1–22; M. Bornstein, ‘The Influence of Colour Perception on Culture’, American Anthropologist, vol.77 (1975), pp. 774–98; D. Roberson, ‘Colour Universals: A cross-cultural examination of the evidence’, unpublished PhD, University of London (1998). See also J. Lyons, ‘Colour and Language’, in T. Lamb and J. Bourriau (eds), Colour: Art and science (Cambridge, 1995), pp.194–224; Hardin and Maffi, Colour Categories; D. Dedrick, Naming the Rainbow: Colour language, colour science and culture (Dordrecht, 1998); T. Lamb and J. Bourriau (eds), Colour: Art and science (Cambridge, 1995). Saunders, Invention of Basic Colour Terms; idem, ‘What is Colour?’, British Journal of Psychology, vol.89 (1998), pp. 697–704; idem, ‘The Spectre of Colour’, Science as Culture, vol.8 (1999), pp. 473–96. Saunders has published much more on colour; for a useful bibliography see Saunders, ‘Towards a New Topology of Colour’, in MacLaury, Paramei and Dedrick, Anthropology of Colour, pp. 478–79. Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions’, p.159.



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49 Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions’, p.160; D. Turton, ‘There is No Such Beast: Cattle and colour naming among the Mursi’, Man, vol.15.2 (1980), pp.320–38. 50 Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the metaphysics of colour (Oxford, 2000), p.70. 51 John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Colour, form and reality in the theory of art (Chicago, 2006), p.19. Whilst Hyman claims that ‘there cannot be an ontological proof for the existence of colours’ he also seeks to challenge what he sees as the current philosophical trend to see colours as inert; infra, p.20. 52 Keith Allen, ‘Being Coloured and Looking Coloured’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, vol.31 (2010), pp.647–70; idem, ‘The Mind Independence of Colour’, European Journal of Philosophy, vol.15 (2007), pp.137–58; idem, ‘Locating the Unique Hues’, Rivista di Estetica, vol.43 (2010), pp.13–28. In addition to his engagement with the ‘Oxford’ view on colour, Allen provides subtle critique of Alva Noë’s work on colour in relation to phenomenal objectivism and the idea that consciousness is not internal but something that we do; Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why you are not your brain and other lessons from the biology of consciousness (New York, 2009); idem, Is the Visual World an Illusion (London, 2002); Alva Noë and Evan Thompson, Vision and the Mind (London, 2002). 53 See Jonathan Cohen, The Red and the Real: An essay on colour ontology (Cambridge, 2009). 54 J. Broackes, ‘The Autonomy of Colour’, in A. Byrne and D. Hilbert (eds), Readings on Colour (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp.421–65. See also J. Cohen and M. Matthen (eds), Color Ontology and Color Science (Cambridge, MA, 2010). 55 Deleuze sets out these ideas in his essay ‘The Concept of Difference in Bergson’, in Gilles Deleuze, Desert Island and Other Texts, trans. Michael Taormine (London, 1999). 56 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the singular and the specific (Manchester, 2001). As far as I am aware there is still little scholarly interest in colour in relation to South Asia. Important exceptions are Brenda Beck, ‘Colour and Heat in South Indian Ritual’, Man, vol.4 (1969), pp.553– 72, and the exciting current project of Sadan Jha. 57 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism, trans. Rodney Needham (London, 1964); Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols (London, 1975). Earlier studies on the symbolism of colour in anthropology include H. H. Finlayson, The Red Centre (London, 1935); H. Radcliffe-Brown, The Rainbow Serpent (London, 1930). 58 See also Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Colour: Rhetoric and painting in the French classical age (Oxford, 1993). Colour incites a ‘pleasure that exceeds discursiveness’; infra, p.194. 59 Young, ‘The Colours of Things’, p.178. 60 Young, ‘The Colours of Things’, p.174 makes the point that with the exception of artistic and art historical practices, colour has, in the period from 1870 to the present, been radically dematerialised in science both in terms of its status



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as a given or as a sensation. There is then an incessant tension between colour as quantifiable and intuitive, excessive which works against the continued investment in colour naming – made most famous and extensive by Berlin and Kay’s fieldwork in the Bay Area, San Francisco in the early 1970s; Berlin and Kay, Basic Colour Terms. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London and New York, 1962), p.211. Ananda Coomarswamy, Art and Swadeshi (Delhi, 1994), p.56. José Saramago, Blindness, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (London, 1997). Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: I.G. Farben in the Nazi era (New York, 1987). Here I am thinking in particular of Pamuk’s novel Snow (London, 2004) – its ‘photographic’ nuances throughout of black and white. Derrida, Dissemination, p.45. See William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A philosophical inquiry (Boston, 1979), and Carol Mavor, Blue Mythologies: Reflections on a colour (London, 2013).

Chapter 1 1 Satyajit Ray, Indigo (London, 2000). 2 Ray, Indigo p.10. 3 Ray, Indigo p.11. 4 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, empire and the locations of identity (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p.87. 5 P. Marshall, The Living Mirror: Images of reality in science and mysticism (London, 2006, 2nd ed.). 6 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology (Vienna, 1714); Robert Latta trans., The Mondology and Other Philosophical Writings (Oxford, 1898). 7 S. Brown, ‘Some Occult Influences on Leibniz’s Monadology’, in Allison P. Coudert (ed.), Leibniz Mysticism and Religion (London, 1998), pp. 1–21; R. Arthur, ‘The Enigma of Leibniz’s Atomism’, Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol.1 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 183–227. Leibniz edited a series of Jesuit writings on China and authored a text which sets out what he perceived to be the theological tenets of China; Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese (London, 1716). See also J. Cling and W. Utoxby, Moral Enlightenment: Leibniz and Wolff on China (London, 1997); F. Perkins, Leibniz and China (Cambridge, 2004). 8 Goethe’s concern with physiology is an attack on Newton but also on Descartes who saw colour as a secondary rather than primary sensation in the perception of the world; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. C. L. Eastlake (London, 1840). Joris Karl Huysmans thought that Turner’s pictures looked as if they had been ‘done by a Rembrandt born in India’; cited in P. Ball, Bright Earth: The invention of colour (New York, 2001), p.45. Turner used mostly new



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industrial pigments; see John Gage, Colour in Turner: Poetry and truth (London, 1969); Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: Vision and modernity in the 19th century (London, 1990); Michel Serres, La communication (Paris, 1974). Henry Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism of Colors in Shi‘ite Cosmology’, in Henry Corbin, Temple and Contemplation, trans. Phillip Sherrard (London, 1986), pp.1–55. Henry Corbin, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, trans. Nancy Parsons (New York, 1994, 3rd ed.). Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation? (Calcutta, 2007), pp.62–63. Alfred Gell, ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Jeremy Coote and Anthony Shelton (eds), Art, Aesthetics and Anthropology (Oxford, 1992), pp.159–86. Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago, 2009), pp.13–14. Sādiqī Bek, Qānūn us-Suvar (The Canons of Painting) reproduced and discussed in detail in Appendix One of The Houghton Shahnameh, trans. Stuart Carey Welch (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p.222. Bek, Qānūn us-Suvar, p.224. Moti Chandra, Technique of Mughal Painting (Lucknow, 1949). See also Bek, Qānūn us-Suvar; E. Isacco and J. Darrah, ‘The Ultraviolet Infrared Method of Analysis: A scientific approach to the study of Indian miniatures’, Artibus Asiae, vol.53 no.3–4 (1993), pp. 470–91. Yves Porter, ‘From the Theory of Two Qalams to the Seven Principles of Painting: Theory, technology and the practice of Persian classical painting’, Muqarnas, vol.17 (2000), pp.109–18; Nancy Purinton and Mark Watters, ‘A Study of the Materials Used by Medieval Persian Painters’, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, vol.30.2 (Autumn, 1991), pp.125–44. David J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: The writing of art history in sixteenthcentury Iran (Leiden, 2001), p.197. Corbin, Man of Light, p.137. S. N. Nasr, ‘The World of Imagination and the Concept of Space in the Persian Miniature’, Islamic Quarterly, vol.13 (1969), pp.129–34; p.132. Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899). See Michael A. Yonan, Empress Maria Theresa and the Politics of Hapsburg Imperial Art (Philadelphia, 2011). The paint used in Mughal miniatures is often called gouache but it is technically closer to the structure of watercolour, which I used here for want of a more precise term. John Seyller, ‘A Mughal Code of Connoisseurship’, Muqarnas, vol.17 (2000), pp.177–202. Ebba Koch, ‘The Moghuleries of the Millionenzimmer in Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna’, in R. Crill, S. Stronge and Andrew Topsfield (eds), The Arts of Mughal



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India: Essays in honour of Robert Skelton (London, 2004), pp.152–67; Josef Strzygowski and H. Glück, Die indischen Miniaturen im Schlosse Schönbrunn, Wien (Leipzig, 1923). John Frow, ‘Invidious Distinction: Waste, difference and classy stuff ’, in Gay Hawkins and Stephen Mueke (eds), Culture and Waste (London, 2002), pp. 25–38; p. 33. The right to diwani means that the English East India Company could collect the land and trade revenues of Bengal. George Willison to Ozias Humphry: ‘never meddle with any merchandise or matters and to my profession to make no drawings unless to particular considerations – to take out materials for 2 years’, Humphry Papers, British Library: Add Ms 22,951, ff.1–4. This includes a long list of materials taken to India such as linseed oils, Wedgwood tablets and portable soup. Tom Pocklington, ‘The Matter of Expediency and Mimicry: Investigating the network of materials and methods used by George Chinnery in India and Macau from 1802–1852’, unpublished MA dissertation, University College London (2007). There are few colour dealers’ records which survive from this period. Pocklington, ‘Matter’, notes that Newman’s archives are not in evidence, Reeves’ pre-1856 records were destroyed by fire and Winsor and Newton’s records only begin in 1835; p. 16. The most ambitious restoration project of colonial pictures in India at the Victoria Memorial Hall did not have permission to carry out tests on the original pigments. The logbooks of East India ships rarely include paint which being small scale could be carried as a saleable luxury at the crew’s own discretion. Anthony Pasquin, review of Zoffany’s Embassy of Hyder Beg Khan, RA 1796, p.2. The Morning Herald (1 January 1796), p.2. Some European miniaturists did use ground-up pearls to represent the skin and pearls of their sitters; see Marcia Pointon, Brilliant Effects: A cultural history of gem stones and jewelry (New Haven, CT, 2009). Polier was one of the most prolific collectors of Mughal India; he sold 215 manuscripts to Edward Pote at King’s College, Cambridge. Mir Chand adapted at least 68 copies of European paintings for Polier as seen in his correspondence in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Supp. Persian 479, ff.256–57). Bengal Inventories L/AG/34/37/24 (OIOC) 1800 estate of Claude Martin included eight Indian copies after Zoffany’s pictures. Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the world in a box to images on a screen (Los Angeles, 1999), p.34. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the nature of seeing (New York, 1996), p.71. Colonel Ironside ‘Tribunus’, ‘Account of Lucknow’, Asiatick Miscellany (1786), p.4; my emphases.



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38 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, Robert Wark (ed.) (New Haven, CT, 1981), p.68. 39 John Ruskin, Complete Works (London, 1888), vol.16, p.265. 40 Hastings to the first librarian of the English East India Company’s library/ museum – Charles Wilkins: ‘the books, whatever may have been my original purpose in collecting them, are of no use to me now, but in the pecuniary profit which I may derive from the disposal of them’, OIOC Eur Mss D 562/17 ff.23–30. Wilkins did not value each book on its own terms but estimated their value at £3. He justified this to the Company’s directors as being ‘guided by the very low price Oriental manuscripts fetch at public sales, rather than by their intrinsic value, for I am persuaded that this sum would not purchase in India one half of the splendid works included in this collection’, ibid., f.26. 41 The East India Magazine (1841), p.3. 42 Christopher Pinney, ‘Creole Europe: Reflection of a reflection’, New Zealand Journal of Literature, vol.20 (2003), pp.126–28. 43 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in L. Nelson (ed.), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London, 1985), pp.271–313; Ranajit Guha, ‘On Some Historiographical Aspects of Colonial India’, Subaltern Studies, vol.1 (Delhi, 1983), pp.1–8. 44 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (London, 1990); Bill Brown, A Sense of Things (Chicago, 2003). 45 Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater (London, 1821), p.299. 46 De Quincey, Confessions , pp.425–26 (my emphasis). 47 George Keate, Epistle to Angelica Kauffman (London, 1781), pp.26–38; 34. 48 R. D. Harley, Artists’ Pigments , c.1600–1835 (London, 1970), p.153. 49 Keate, Epistle, p.37. 50 Sally Woodcock, ‘Body Colour: The misuse of mummy’, The Conservator, vol.20 (1996), pp.87–94. 51 Anon., A Compendium of Colours (London, 1797), p.221. 52 George Field quoted in Harley, Artists’ Pigments, p.153. 53 Woodcock, ‘Body Colour’, p.91. 54 Woodcock, ‘Body Colour’, p.87. 55 Woodcock, ‘Body Colour’, p.114. 56 Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture, 1760–1838 (London, 1979), p.139 notes that Mrs Hastings wore gowns of gold thread that were worth over £200,000 in eighteenth-century money. 57 See below for the discussion of painting in relation to alchemy. Here I just want to note that the substances and processes of alchemy were often referred to as ‘marrow’. See G. Starkey, The Marrow of Alchemy being an Experimental Treatise Discovering the Secret and Most Hidden Mystery of the Philosopher’s Elixir (London, 1655).



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58 Gananath Obeyesekere, Cannibal Talk: The man-eating myth and human sacrifice in the South Seas (London, 2005). 59 See, for instance, 1763 premiums from SEAMC now housed in the archive of the Royal Society of Arts, London (hereafter RAS), which included one for Turkey or Indian Red and 1768 white copper ‘in same perfection as that brought from China or Japan’. 60 SEAMC archives at RAS; Minutes for 1768–75 PREGE/112/13/5, p.22 item 50. 61 SEAMC, at the RAS, Minutes from 1758–59 AD/MA/100/12/03 13 December 1758 records their discussion with the Company. Dr Manningham was ‘desired by the Society to communicate to the court of Directors of the Company the Society’s intention of giving the above premium and report their answer to the society’. Manningham reported back one week later that whilst the directors were ‘wee pleased’ that such a valuable article would be produced there, it would no doubt be gotten hold of by the Dutch; thus the premium must be postponed. 62 James Anderson, An Account of the Importation of American Cochineal Insects into Hindustan (Madras, 1795) and Nicola Fontana, Memoirs of the Bengal Cochineal (London, 1779); Amy Butler Greenfield, A Perfect Red (London, 2005). 63 Michael Taussig, ‘Redeeming Indigo’, Theory, Culture, Society, vol.25.3 (May, 2008), pp.1–15; idem, What Color is the Sacred?, p.139. 64 Jenny Balfour-Paul, Indigo in the Arab World (London, 1997), pp.157–65; idem, Indigo (London, 1998), idem, Indigo: A colour to dye for (Manchester and Brighton, 2007–8). 65 Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, pp.140, 152. 66 John Richner, The Artist’s Chromatic Bond Book (New York, 1850), p.67. 67 Romita Ray, ‘The Memsahib’s Brush: Anglo-Indian women and the art of the Picturesque, 1830–1880’, in J. Codell and D. MacCleod (eds), Orientalism Transposed: The impact of the colonies on British culture (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 89–116. 68 Ranajit Guha, Rule of Property for Bengal: An essay on the idea of Permanent Settlement (Delhi, 1963). 69 Anon., Treatise on Indigo (Calcutta, 1794); M. De Cossigny de Parma, Memoir Containing an Abridged Treatise on the Cultivation and Manufacture of Indigo (Calcutta, 1795). 70 Prabhat Kumar Shukla, Indigo and the Raj: Peasant Protest in Bihar, 1780–1917 (Delhi, 1993), pp.72, 92. 71 Joseph Mullins, Address to the Society of Photographers, Bengal (Calcutta, 1856). 72 Mullins, Address, p.4. 73 S. K. Mittal, Peasant Uprisings and Mahatma Gandhi in North Bihar (Meerut, 1978), p.34; Anon., ‘To the Members of the Photographic Society of Bengal in



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protest against the expulsion of one member Rajendralal Mitra for his speech against the devastation caused by indigo planters wherever they go’; pamphlet published Calcutta July 1857; pp.5–8. See Rajendralal Mitra’s seminal Antiquities of Orissa (London, 1878), 2 vols. The title page reads ‘India weeping over a lost civilization’. A. M., To the Members of the Photographic Society of Bengal (28 July 1857), p.7. Mitra was charged with grossly libelling the indigo planters in the mofussil who lived ‘above the law’. Two indigo planters were members of the Society and they were defended by Dr Mouat as being the ‘perfect pictures of English gentlemen’; infra, p.6. A. M., To the Members, p.8. A. Rao, The Blue Devil: Indigo and colonial Bengal (Delhi, 1992). Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer and Bare Life (Stanford, CA, 1998). Anonymous verse cited in Subhas Bhattacharya, ‘The Indigo Revolt of Bengal’, Social Scientist, vol.5.12 (1977), pp.13–23; p.18. Dinabandhu Mitra, Nīl Darpan or the Indigo Planting Mirror (Calcutta, 1860), p.45. Mitra, Nīl Darpan, p.45. Mitra, Nīl Darpan, p.78. This is a mid-nineteenth-century Hindustani term for red-faced Europeans in India. Ranajit Guha, ‘Neel Darpan: The image of a peasant revolt in a liberal mirror’, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol.2.1 (1974), pp.1–46. Mitra, Nīl Darpan, p.45. Colesworthy Grant, Rural Life in Bengal (Calcutta, 1866), p.5. Grant, Rural Life, p.71. Grant, Rural Life, p.128. Grant, Rural Life, p.128. Anon., Brahmins and Pariahs: An appeal by the indigo manufacturers of Bengal to the British government (London, 1861); Mr Morris’s Report on his Special Commission to the Indigo Districts (London, 1861); Delta, Indigo and its Enemies: Facts on both sides (London, 1861); Sir Ashley Eden, Evidence of Sir Ashley Eden taken before the Indigo Commission sitting in Calcutta (Calcutta, 1860); Abhijit Dutta, Christian Missionaries on the Indigo Question, 1855–61 (Calcutta, 1989). Minden Wilson, Reminiscences of Behar (Calcutta, 1887), p.33; Anon., Brahmins and Pariahs, p.2. James Fergusson, Archaeology in India written as a Response to the Works of Babu Rajendralala Mitra (London, 1884). Several leading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century collectors of British and/or Mughal art invested heavily in the indigo trade, for instance Richard Johnson and Claude Martin. Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London, 2008), p.70. Wilson, Reminiscences, pp.54–55.



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Wilson, Reminiscences, p.48. Wilson, Reminiscences, p.51. Wilson, Reminiscences, p.52. Board of Trade ‘On Improvement of Indigo Production’, BT31/4628/ 30398/100052; BT31/8154/58924/100052, Kew, Public Records Office; Prakash Kumar, ‘Plantation Science: Improving indigo in colonial India, 1860–1913’, British Journal for the History of Science, vol.40.4 (2007), pp.537–65. See Kumar’s ongoing work which includes ‘Transactional Knowledge and Colonial Indigo Plantations in South Asia’, Modern Asian Studies, forthcoming, and the soon to be published monograph The Odyssey of Indigo: Plantations and science in colonial India, 1700–1920; Anon., ‘Artificial Indigo’, Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information (Royal Gardens Kew), vol.135 (March, 1898), pp.33–35. Anon., ‘Artificial Indigo’, p.34. This is the argument put forward in René Girard’s Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patricia Gregory (Baltimore, MD, 1977). Mullins, Address, p.43. Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, p.225. See J. J. Beer, The Emergence of the German Dye Industry (Urbana, IL, 1959); F. Delamere and B. Guineau, Colors: The story of dyes and pigments (New York, 2000); E. Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature art and the chemical industry (London, 2005); A. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The origins of the synthetic dyestuffs industry in western Europe (Bethlehem, PA, 1993). Taussig, What Color is the Sacred?, p.224. Hamid Naqvi, ‘Colour Making and the Dyeing of Cotton Textiles in Medieval Hindustan’, Indian Journal of the History of Science, vol.15.1 (1980), pp. 58–70. This manuscript, now in the India Office Library London, relates 77 processes for dyeing and printing cloth and the production of 48 shades as opposed to colonial interest in fine blue and middling shades of purple, violet and copper. Reginald Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India (London, 1828), p.123. Robert Home, The Recipe Book (OIOC Ms Eur Photo Eur 141). Home, The Recipe Book, p.1. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London, 1993), p.39. Leibniz, Monadology, p.98. James Elkins, What Painting Is: How to think about oil painting using the language of alchemy (London, 1999), p.48. Qāzī Ahmad does also briefly mention cinnabar, red, verdigris, white and orpiment. All pigments should be mixed with gum arabic; each must be ground in a different way. Most of the treatise is concerned with ink and the ruling of lines in preparation for the art of calligraphy; Qāzī Ahmad, Gulistan-Hunar



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The Rose Garden of Painting, c.1596–1606, trans. V. Minorsky, Freer Gallery Occasional Papers, 3.2 (Washington, DC, 1959). Home, The Recipe Book, p.48. Home, The Recipe Book, p.27. Fisher died of smallpox but it was widely believed that this was due to her use of so much make-up. Reynolds attempted to achieve the effect of old masters by adding driers to his pigments. He used a lot of orpiment and lead white plus bleached beeswax which when combined has led to serious flaking of many of his paintings. He famously dissected a number of Venetian paintings, completely ruining them. See J. Northcote, Memoirs of an Eighteenth-century Painter (London, 1898), p.123. Neil De Marchi and Hans J. Van Miegroet, ‘Ingenuity, Preference and the Pricing of Pictures: The Smith-Reynolds connection’, History of Political Economy, vol.31 (1999), pp.379–412. Matthew Hunter is currently undertaking research on Reynolds’ artistic practice. Gay Hawkins, The Ethics of Waste: How we relate to rubbish (Oxford, 2006), p.80. Bek, Qānūn us-Suvar, p.226. Home, The Recipe Book, p.32. Home, The Recipe Book, pp.32–3. J. Emsley, The Thirteenth Element: The sordid tale of wonders, fire and phosphorous (New York, 2000). Urine was a common agent in European and Islamic alchemical practice; Elkins, What Painting Is, pp.33, 70, 82, 138, 149, 150, 179. In alchemy piss performed a critical role in processes of putrefaction; frequently stale piss was mixed with milk and semen. It also constituted a materia prima alongside the moon, Venus, the rainbow, tin, clouds, nebula and magnets. This large box includes burnt sienna, black, vermillion, yellow ochre, Indian red (cochineal), lake and carmine. I am grateful to Libby Sheldon for this information. E. B. Day, Biography of Robert Home by His Great Grand Daughter, OIOC Eur Mss Photo Eur 141, f.330. Robert Smith, Journal, vol.2, pp.603–4, V&A. Diana Young, ‘The Colour of Things’, in C. Tilly, Webb Keane, S. Küchler, M. Rowlands and P. Spyer (eds), The Handbook of Material Culture (London, 2006), pp.173–85; p.181. Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in Victorian India’, in Bernhard Cohn, An Anthropologist among the Historians (Delhi, 1987), pp.165–209; Stewart Gordon, Robes and Honour: The medieval world of investiture (Basingstoke, 2000). There is no space here to go into the details of how colour in dress, ritual or food helped to control the heat/coolness of the body (especially in Hinduism). Barbara Beck, ‘Color and Heat in South Indian Ritual’, Man, vol.4 (1969),



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pp.553–72 emphasises the importance of a balance between white (well being, equilibrium inducing) and red (vitalising but unstable without white) in South India diet, puja and divination. There is in a very different sense a balance/ dialectic of red and white in later eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century Lucknawi court portraits by Indian artists. There are two miniatures of Asaf ud-daula wearing a very deep, rich gold leaf dress in Victoria Memorial, Kolkata and National Museum of Modern Art, New Delhi. The deep gold is similar and may make reference to Akbar’s dresses in hunting scenes in at least one version of the Akbarnama (now V&A). In my own research into Indian and British portraits of nawabs, 1996–2008, these men are usually represented in white muslin dress or occasionally in rich gold, often embroidered brocade. Douglas Fordham discusses an earlier incident where the ruler of Pune seems to have disliked a preliminary sketch of a durbar which featured a figure with his back turned to the viewer; see Douglas Fordham, ‘Costume Dramas: British art at the court of the Marathas’, Representations, vol.108 (Winter, 2008), pp.57– 82; p.66. In my own research I have found that Wales like Home experimented with local colours: ‘Discovered ultramarine and another curious colour viz. a green tone burnt and also a white oker…Colours which I found for sale: natural ultramarine, greenstone, yellow ochre, black made from coconut shell, gold red, rupan, wood oil, poppy oil; James Wales, Diary, vol.2, ff.31–32; Yale Center for British Art. Augusta Deane, A Tour through the Upper Provinces of Hindustan, 1804–1814 (London, 1823), pp.102, 107–8. In the magnificent portrait genealogies of the rulers of Lucknow. c.1855 (Nasser Khalili Collection and the Husainabad Trust, Lucknow) Ghazi-uddin is unique in being presented in a yellow dress. Abū Hāmid Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Ghazālī, Kīmyā-yi Sa’ādat: The Alchemy of Happiness, trans. Claude Field (London, 1910), pp.17–18. Al-Ghazālī, Kīmyā-yi Sa’ādat, p. 24. Mir Dard quoted in Annemarie Schimmel, ‘Sacred Geography in Islam’, in Jamie Scott and Paul Simson-Housley (eds), Sacred Places and Profane Spaces (New York, 1991), pp.163–76. Henry Corbin, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’, Analytical Psychology Club of New York (New York, 1962), pp.1–19; p.10. Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, p.43. Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, p.5. The above relates to a summary of Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, with specific relevance to p.14. Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, pp.25–29. Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, pp.5–6. Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, p.27.



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143 Corbin, ‘The Realism and Symbolism’, pp.27, 43. 144 ‘The Throne of Mercy’ is 70 times brighter than the light of the firmament which is itself 70 times brighter than the light of the sun. Thus the colours we see are not present in their purity but mixed with darkness and the black colour of the Earth. The light here is ‘oriental’ and illuminating colour while colour is light in a state of density. So we perceive colours as murab, as servants of light, although we can try to contemplate their divine dimensions (rabb). Each universe upwards is 70 times more light intense than the previous one. The Highest world of intimate depths is the light of God, the next is the world of four pillars of the throne; then spirits or subtle forms; the world of souls where colours are separated according to their exterior form which takes the form of green light; next is the world of Nature where colours become accessible to the senses in the form of red light. The sixth is the world of clouds which has an ashen colour, whilst seventh is that of the mundus imaginalis – whereby images assume the form of mirrors and where colours separate through individual difference linked with material bodies. The final world is that of material bodies which we can perceive with everyday vision and this way of seeing is associated with black. Through these eight universes colour varies in its subtlety and density. 145 Roland Barthes, ‘Color’, in Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture course at the Collège de France (1977–78), trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York, 2005), pp.49–52. 146 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine’, in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London, 2007), p.421. 147 Anish Kapoor, Anish Kapoor: Hayward Gallery (London, 1994), p.11. 148 Anish Kapoor, ‘Interview with Gavin Esler’, BBC World, 2006 (available online). 149 Anish Kapoor quoted in conversation with Nicholas Baume; see Nicholas Baume (ed.), Anish Kapoor: Past, present, future (Cambridge, MA, 2008), p.70. 150 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as screenplay (New York, 2000); idem, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Firenza Woods (Dijon, 2002). 151 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p.34. 152 Gayatri Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason (London, 1999). 153 Akhbar Ali quoted in Timo Novotny’s remix of Glawogger, Megacities, 1998, Lotus Film, Vienna. The two ellipses are in the film. 154 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1999), pp.245–55; p.250. 155 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p.4. 156 Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, p.45.



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Chapter 2 1 Perhaps the choice of blue has resonances with the status of blue in the wellknown Natya Sastra, chapter VI, verses 42–43, where it is associated with repulsion. I discuss the symbolism of colours later in this chapter. 2 Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the reality of science studies, trans. Catherine Porter (London, 1998). 3 Gayatri Spivak and Ranajit Guha (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (Delhi, 1988). 4 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Dangerous Supplement’, in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore, MD, 1976), pp.141–64; p.144. 5 Derrida, ‘The Dangerous Supplement’, p.145. 6 Derrida, Of Grammatology. 7 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on widow-sacrifice’, Wedge (Winter/Spring, 1985), pp.120–30. 8 Gayatri Spivak, ‘Post-structuralism, Marginality, Postcoloniality and Value’, in P. Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory (London, 1996), pp.198– 222. 9 Cecil L. Burns, ‘The Function of Art Schools in India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol.57 (1908–9), pp.629–50; Deepali Dewan, ‘Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past: The Journal of Indian Art and Industry and the production of knowledge in the later 19th century’, in Julie Codell (ed.), Imperial Co-Histories (London, 2003), pp.29–44; idem, ‘“Crafting Knowledge” and Knowledge of Crafts: Art education, colonialism and the Madras School of Arts in South India’, unpublished PhD, University of Minnesota (2001). At the time of writing Deepali Dewan is directing a project from the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, entitled ‘Crafting Knowledge: Colonial art schools in South Asia’. 10 Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the age of its global reproducibility (New York, 2006). 11 Michael Taussig, ‘Redeeming Indigo’, Theory, Culture, Society, vol.25.3 (2008), p.11. 12 See the excellent articles by Barbara Keyser, ‘Ornament as Idea: Indirect imitation of nature: the design reform movement’, Journal of Design History, vol.11.2 (1993), pp. 127–44; David Brett, ‘The Interpretation of Ornament’, Journal of Design History, vol.1.2 (1988), pp. 103–11. Also important is Barbara Keyser’s ‘Victorian Chromatics’, unpublished PhD, University of Toronto (1992). 13 Barbara Keyser, ‘Science and Sensibility: Chemistry and the aesthetics of colour in the early 19th century’, Colour Research and Application, vol.21.3 (1996), pp.169–79. 14 Keyser, ‘Science and Sensibility’, p.170. 15 Michel Chevreul, Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (Paris, 1839), translated into English in 1854.



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16 Keyser, ‘Science and Sensibility’, p.177. 17 John Gage, George Field and his Circle: From Romanticism to the Preraphaelite Brotherhood (Cambridge, 1989). 18 George Field, Analogical Philosophy (London, 1839). For excellent discussion of Field see John Gage, ‘A Romantic Colour Man: George Field and British art’, The Walpole Society (2000–1), pp.1–73. 19 J. H. Kyan, On Elements of Light and their Identity with those of Matter, Radiant and Fixed (London, 1838). 20 George Field, Chromatography: A treatise on colours and pigments (London, 1841), p.59. 21 Field, Chromatography, p.10. 22 Field, Chromatography, p.17. 23 Field, Chromatography, p.63. 24 Field, Chromatography, p.123. 25 Field, Chromatography, p.112. 26 Field, Chromatography, p.125. 27 Field, Chromatography, p.99. 28 Field, Chromatography, p.45. 29 James Fergusson, An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty in Art (London, 1849), p.xiii. 30 For Fergusson’s agenda as picturesque see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in colonial and postcolonial India (New York, 2004), ch. 1. 31 Fergusson, Historical Inquiry, pp.109–10. 32 G. Burchill, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in governmentality (London, 1991). 33 For this use of Linnaean classification in relation to the proto-ethnography of the Pacific see Nicholas B. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, travel and government (Princeton, NJ, 1994). 34 This is evident from accounts of the Company’s Indian Museum in London; see Ray Desmond, India Museum, 1801–79 (London, 1982). 35 J. Green, Spiritual Philosophy (London, 1865). 36 David Ramsay Hay, The Principles of Beauty in Colour Systematized (London, 1845). 37 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (London, 1999). 38 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. N. M. Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London, 1911). This is also a critique of Helmholtz’s controversial theories on physiology and perception. For Bergson, Helmholtz’s unconscious inference made perception something mechanical and automatic against his own emphatic decentering of the subject. More directly in relation to colour, Bergson criticised Feré’s optical experiments which argued for a heightened response to orange and red; Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will (Paris, 1888).



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39 Benjamin reproached Bergson for circumscribing memory within the isolated framework of an individual consciousness which went against his own concern with collective historical memory particularly in relation to haunting images of the out of date which he believed had the capacity for a social reawakening. His apprehension of a present-day crisis in perception is filtered through a richly elaborate afterimage of the mid-nineteenth century. 40 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolutionism, trans. Arthur Mitchell (Paris, 1911), p.158. 41 Bergson, Creative Evolutionism, p.59. Bergson also opposed theories of vitalism as he felt that they failed to address the issue of the origin and development of the vital principle of the individual; infra, p.41. 42 Bergson, Creative Evolutionism, p.103. 43 See Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London, 2008) pp.132–33 for the correct identification of the event depicted as the execution of 49 Namdhari Sikhs in Ludhiana following anti-cow disturbances in 1872. Pinney shows that the misattribution of the event as the Uprising of 1857–58 was due to the reproduction of the painting as a print by the Germans during World War II. 44 Mr Cook quoted in Harper’s Weekly (12 January 1888), p.3. 45 Vassili Verestchagin travelled to India in 1876–77 and 1884. He defended this work in the Magazine of Art (December, 1887); see Art Institute, Chicago, Works of Vassili Verestchagin (Chicago, 1889). 46 Dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty, p.51. See also Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, streets and images in 19th-century London (New Haven, 2000); L. Davis and R. Hutterback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire (London, 1987); John Marriott, Other Empire: Metropolis, India and progress in the colonial imagination (Manchester, 2003). 47 Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, empire and the locations of identity (Princeton, NJ, 1999), p.57. 48 The culture industry on Crystal Palace is enormous; see National Art Library, Great Exhibition Extracts from contemporary newspapers, 5 vols; Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, 4 vols (London, 1851); Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852). In terms of secondary literature I include only a few recent references here: J. Auerbach and P. Hoffenberg, Britain, Empire and the World (Aldershot, 2008); L. Lutchmansingh, ‘Commodity Exhibitionism at the London Great Exhibition of 1851’, Annals of Scholarship, vol.7 (1990), pp.203–16; Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Colonial history and cultural display (Berkeley, CA, 2007); Tony Bennett, Birth of the Museum: History, theory, politics (London, 1995); Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition: A nation on display (New Haven, CT, 1999), Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London, 1996); P. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian exhibitions from



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Crystal Palace to the Great War (California, Berkeley, 2001); Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (London, 1995); H. Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition (London, 2002); Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition (London, 2009); Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, empire and the museum in Victorian culture (Durham, 2007). ‘The Bijouterie and Sculpture in the Crystal Palace’, The Crystal Palace and its Contents (22 November 1851), p.119. Charlotte Bronte quoted in Young, Globalization, p.104. See also Samuel Warren, Lily and the Bee (London, 1851), p.9: ‘object of every form and colour imaginable as far as the eye could reach, more dazzlingly intermingled.’ ‘The Light of All Nations’, The Family Herald, vol.9 (17 May 1851), pp.44–45. Mr Goggleye’s Visit to the Exhibition (London, 1852), not paginated. ‘The Exhibition of Industry – A visit’, Punch, vol.18 (1851), p.141. William Whewell, ‘The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition of 1851, p.9. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest (New York, 1995), p.40. Dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty, p.48. Also see C. Hopkins, ‘Victorian Modernity? Writing the Great Exhibition’, in G. Day (ed.), Varieties of Victorianism (London, 1998), pp.4–64; S. Johansen, ‘The Great Exhibition of 1851: A precipice in time?’, Victorian Review, vol.22 (1996), pp.59–64; J. M. Garim, Medievalism and Orientalism: Three essays on literature, architecture and cultural identity (Durham, NC, 2005). J. Forbes Royle, Official descriptive and illustrated catalogue, p.936; Carol Breckenridge, ‘The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at the world’s fairs’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.31 (1989), pp.195– 216; Paul Young, ‘Carbon Mere Carbon: The Koh-i-noor, the Crystal Palace and the mission to make sense of British India’, 19th-century Contexts, vol.29.4 (December, 2007), pp.343–58; Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A history of Western reactions to Indian art (Oxford, 1977), ch. 5; Lara Kriegel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace’, in Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851 (Manchester, 2001), pp.146–78. See Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York, 2009). See the selection of press cuttings on the Great Exhibition, 4 vols, National Art Library, London. For responses to 1851 which although informative barely touch on colour see Lara Kriegel, ‘Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851’; Young, ‘Carbon mere Carbon’; Julie Codell, ‘Vulgar India from Nabobs to Nationalism: Imperial reversals and the mediation of art’, in S. D. Bernstein and E. B. Michie (eds), Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in verbal and visual culture (London, 2009), pp.223–39.



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60 See J. Gardner Wilkinson, On Colour and the Necessity for a General Diffusion of Taste Among all Classes (London, 1858). 61 Field, Chromatography. The numerous manuscripts of his writings and experiments on colour are housed in the Winsor and Newton archives; Chevreul, Principle of Harmony and Contrast of Colours; John Gage, George Field and His Circle: From Romanticism to Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (Cambridge, 1989); Keyser, ‘Science and Sensibility’; idem, Ornament as Idea; Paul D. Shermon, Colour Vision in the 19th Century (London, 1981), A. Shapiro, Fits, Passions and Paroxysms (Cambridge, 1993); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1900 (London, 2008). 62 For Owen Jones’ letters and drawings see the V&A archives and British Museum Mss 31,322, 35,255, 45,576. 63 Dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty, p.116. 64 R. Devis, ‘The Educated Eye and the Industrial Hand’, unpublished PhD, University of London (1995); DSA, Introduction to the Drawing Book of the School of Design (London, 1854). 65 R. Middleton, ‘Hittorff ’s Polychrome Campaign’, The Beaux Arts and 19thcentury French Architecture (London, 1982), pp.174–95. I discuss the tensions between Victorian debates on evolution, colour nomenclature and material culture in Chapter 3. 66 See D. Van Zanten, The Architectural Polygamy of the 1830s (London, 1977). Following the investigations of Quatremere de Qunicy, scholars began to argue for the centrality of colour to Periclean architecture. For Gottfried Semper, painted colour constituted the dynamic element of architecture. 67 I discuss Ruskin’s views on colour below. 68 Owen Jones, ‘An Attempt to Define the Principles which Should Regulate the Employment of Colour in the Decorative Arts’, Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition, 1851, vol.2 (London, 1852), p. 268. The Illustrated London News (13 May 1851), p. 364 concluded that Jones’ design was ‘sufficiently brilliant to give lightness and purity of effect’ without providing ‘a rival polychromatic attraction’. 69 Jones, ‘An Attempt’, p.267. 70 See the Expositor (25 January 1851), p. 195 for this comment. For other views on Jones’ decoration of the Crystal Palace see Art Journal (1 December 1850), p. 383; Owen Jones ‘On the Decorations Proposed for the Exhibition Building in Hyde Park’, Illustrated London News (28 December 1850), p. 517; The Ecclesiologist, vol.11 (1851) and the Illustrated London News (17 May 1851). Jones defended his colour scheme in a speech at RIBA 29 December 1850 which was reproduced the next day in the Illustrated London News, Athenaeum, Builder, Civil Engineer and Architect’s Journal. See also ‘The Great Paint Question Covering Controversy’, The Builder (11 January 1851), p. 18.



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71 Mrs Merrifield, ‘Essay on the Harmony of Colours as Exemplified by the Exhibition’, Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition (London, 1851): ‘It is somewhat surprising to observe the harmony of colours which prevails in the production of Asiatic nations for taking into account the state of education in those countries’; p.i. Owen Jones, ‘Gleanings from the Great Exhibition of 1851’, Journal of Design and Manufactures, vol.5.28 (1851); idem, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856); idem, ‘An Attempt’. 72 Jones, Grammar of Ornament. See Stacey Sloboda, ‘The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and reform in British design’, Journal of Design History, vol.21.3 (2008), pp.223–36; C.A. Flores, Owen Jones: Design, ornament, architecture and theory in the age of transition (New York, 2006). 73 K. Ferry, ‘Printing the Alhambra: Owen Jones and chromolithography’, Architectural History, vol.46 (2003), pp.175–88. 74 Jones, ‘An Attempt’, pp.253–301. 75 Jones, ‘An Attempt’, p.256. In Britain, ‘the architect, the upholsterer, the paper stainer, the weaver, the calico printer and the potter run each their independent course, each struggles fruitlessly’; p.256. He made similar points in his earlier article in the Journal of Design History ( June, 1851). 76 Jones, ‘An Attempt’, p.267. 77 Jones, ‘An Attempt’, pp.271–72. 78 J. Forbes Royle, ‘The Arts and Manufactures of India’, in Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition, vol.1, p. 387 notes that very few instances of Indian paintings were on display the exception being miniatures on talc from Delhi and Trichinopoly which featured dresses, manners and customs and which ‘do not attract much attention’ although some from Delhi ‘are very beautiful, resemble enamels and are frequently worn in brooches and bracelets’. 79 J. Forbes Royle, in Official Catalogue to the Great Exhibition, p.936; M. Digby Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1851–53), p.553. 80 Gardner Wilkinson, On Colour, p.1. 81 Gardner Wilkinson, On Colour, pp.2–3. 82 Gardner Wilkinson, On Colour, pp.63, 147–48 (my emphasis). ‘Eastern colour may be the most perfect but there is strong evidence of its recent deterioration, especially in relation to Indian dress whose harmonies show ‘a want of judgement in their selection’; p.123. 83 These debates are well known and need not be set out here. See George Birdwood, Handbook of Indian Arts (Paris, 1878); Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters; Mathur, India by Design; Dutta, Bureaucracy of Beauty; McGowan, Crafting the Nation; Kriegel, Grand Designs. 84 John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (London, 1879 edition), vol.2, pp.158–59 (my emphasis).



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Ruskin, Stones of Venice, vol.2, pp.158–59. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, vol.3, pp.212–13. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, vol.2, p.161. Ruskin, Stones of Venice, vol.2, pp.162–63 (my emphasis). Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On vision and modernity in the 19th century (London, 1990); idem, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, spectacle and modern culture (London, 1999). Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.8, p.502. Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.8, p.502. Richard Liebreich, Turner and Mulready: The effect of certain faults of vision on painting with especial reference to their works (London, 1888). A rare work, this is available in Cambridge University Library. ‘Liebreich’s Sign’ – that is, the detection of colour blindness and pathology – in relation to the arts and Morelli’s connoisseurship on fakes and pathology I discuss in the following chapter. Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.5, p.123 (my emphases). For Gall see S. Tomlinson, Head Masters: Phrenology, secular education and 19thcentury social thought (London, 2005), pp.354–62. Franz Joseph Gall, On the Functions of the Brain and Each of its Parts, with Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities and Talents…of Men and Animals by the Configuration of the Brain and Head (London, 1835), p.123. George Combe, Essays on Phrenology (Edinburgh, 1819), p.191. Combe, Phrenology, p.235. Diana Donald and Eric Olsen, ‘Art and the Enlightened Bank: Colour and beauty out of the war of Nature’, in Diana Donald and Jane Munro (eds), Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, natural science and the visual arts (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp.101–18. Alfred Tylor, Colouration in Animals and Plants (London, 1886). Donald and Olsen, ‘Art and the Enlightened Bank’, p.110. For brief details of this incident see Retort, Afflicted Powers: Capital and spectacle in a new age of war (London, 2005). A. S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The origin of the synthetic dyestuff industry in Western Europe (London, 1993). For excellent discussion of Ruskin and empire see Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, empire and the locations of identity (Princeton, NJ, 1999), ch. 2. Also useful are R. Herrison, John Ruskin the Argument of the Eye (London, 1976); Gary Wihl, Ruskin and the Rhetoric of Infallibility (London, 1985); J. L. Spear, Dreams of an English Eden: Ruskin and his tradition in social criticism (London, 1984). John Ruskin, ‘The Two Paths’, in Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.16. The Museum was established in May 1852 at Marlborough House, London. Its collections were largely objects purchased from the Great Exhibition with the assistance of the DSA and included numerous saris, daggers, spice boxes



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and rosewater bottles. Its Catalogue stressed that Indian designs were the most important in the collection. See DPA, Catalogue of the Articles of Ornamental Art in the Museum of the Department (London, 1853); ‘The Museum of Ornamental Art’, Spectator (22 October 1853); ‘The School of Ornamental Art’, Art Journal (4 July 1852); J. Robinson, ‘The Museum of Ornamental Art’, Art Journal (May, 1855). It is worth contrasting Ruskin’s views with Owen Jones’ address to the Museum of Ornamental Art, On the True and False in the Decorative Arts: Lectures delivered at Marlborough House, June, 1852 (London, 1863). This argument is made by Patrick Brantlinger in ‘A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris and Gandhism’, Critical Inquiry, vol.22 (Spring, 1996), pp.466–85. For the after-effects of the Uprising see T. R. Metcalf, The Aftermath of the Revolt, 1857–1870 (Princeton, NJ, 1964); idem, Ideologies of the Raj (Cambridge, 1992). Ruskin, Two Paths, p.302. Ruskin, Two Paths, p.304. Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.310. Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.310. Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.261 (my emphasis). Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.262. Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.265. Ruskin, The Two Paths, p.216. John Ruskin, A Handbook of Art and Culture (London, 1873), ch. 8, ‘Colour’; p.147: ‘To colour perfectly is the rarest and most precious power an artist can possess’. Baucom, Out of Place, p.54. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London, 1999), pp.245–55; p.252. Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.10, p.99. See T. R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj (London, 1989). For Ruskin’s contradictions of thought in India see also Baucom, Out of Place; C. W. London, Bombay Gothic (London, 2002); and more broadly on the colonial Gothic; Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and labour in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 2005); Crinson, Empire Building; G. Alex Bremner, The Gothic Revival and Empire: Religious architecture and high Anglican culture in Britain and the British colonial world, 1840–1870 (forthcoming). Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.16, p.265. Ruskin, Complete Works, vol.18, p.10. Brian Massumi, ‘Too Blue: Colour patch for an expanded empiricism’, Cultural Studies, vol.14.2 (2000), pp.177–226; p.180. Tim Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum and the Mid-Victorian Moment’, in Victorian: The style of empire, selected proceedings of the 4th annual Decorative Arts Institute (Toronto, 1996).



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Mathur, India by Design; Dewan, ‘Crafting Knowledge’; idem, ‘Body at Work’. J. Lyotard, Figur/discours (Paris, 1974). Lyotard, Figur/discours, p.10. John Forbes Royle, ‘The Arts and Manufactures of India’, Lectures on the Results of the Great Exhibition (1852), vol.2, p.444. Forbes Royle, ‘The Arts and Manufactures of India’, pp.445–46. Forbes Royle, ‘The Arts and Manufactures of India’, pp.536–38. Alexander Hunter, ‘On the Defects of Indian Art’, IJASM, vol.119 ( July, 1851). Dewan, ‘Crafting Knowledge’, p.90. See Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, ch. 3. Redgrave’s ‘National Course of Instruction’ was devised and delivered in 1852 and lasted until 1987. He sent a report on art education to India at the request of the colonial state. In 1857 Hunter adopted the curriculum at the Madras Art School; Alexander Hunter, Correspondence on the Subject of the Extension of Art Education in Different Parts of India (Madras, 1867); Richard Redgrave, An Elementary Manual on Colour…Prepared for the Use of Students in the DSA (London, 1853); J. C. Bagal, History of the Government College of Art and Crafts (Calcutta, 1964); W. Jobbins, Papers Relating to the Maintenance of the School of Art as State Institutions (Lahore, 1896); M. K. Tarapor, ‘An Art Education in Imperial India: The imperial schools of art’, in K. Ballhatchet and D. Taylor (eds), Changing South Asia: City and culture (London, 1984), pp.91–98; David Thistlewood, ‘From Imperialism to Internationalism: Policy making in British art education, 1853–1944’, in K. Freedman and F. Hernandez (eds), Curriculum, Culture and Art Education: Comparative perspectives (Albany, NY, 1998), pp.133–48. Redgrave made regular contributions to the annual reports of the DPA and the DSA and Cole’s Journal of Design. He was also working with Cole, Pugin and Owen Jones on the Design Purchase Committee selecting objects from the Great Exhibition for the School of Design with the aid of a government grant. Richard Redgrave, ‘Schools in Connection with the DSA’, Second Report of the DSA (London, 1855), p.37 quoted in S. P. Casteras (ed.), Richard Redgrave (London, 1988), p.54. See John Physik, Victorian and Albert Museum (London, 1982) for Redgrave’s input into the colour scheme of the Cast Court of the South Kensington Museum. Richard Redgrave, An Elementary Manual on Colour (London, 1859, 3rd ed.), p.i. Redgrave, Elementary Manual, p.7: ‘explanations of the laws of harmony are best with many difficulties.’ He followed Field by stating that ‘to satisfy the eye and to produce harmony of colour, the presence of all the three primaries is required’; p.7. Redgrave, Elementary Manual, p.13. Redgrave, Elementary Manual, p.20.



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140 Redgrave, Elementary Manual, p.22. 141 Redgrave, Elementary Manual, p.26. Questions 39 and 40 of Section II are closely related: ‘Do these laws of simultaneous contras agree with the oriental and medieval practice?’; ‘How did the oriental, medieval artists treat gold ground in respect to colour?’ He appears to have modified his earlier view that the distribution of colours in Indian fabrics ‘sometimes have a tendency to foxiness from a large admission of warm neutrals’; Richard Redgrave, Report on Design (London, 1852), p.49. 142 In 1857 50 copies of Jones’ The Grammar of Ornament were bought up to be used in relation to instruction at schools of art in Britain and India at the reduced price of £10–12 as opposed to £17 and 10 shillings. 143 Gottfried Semper, VA-L Ms 86.N.54 p.961. See also Fifty Years of Public Work, VA-L diaries and correspondence, 1827–1882 VA-PD A.154, c, A.170. 144 Sir Trevelyan proposed the idea of art schools in India in 1853. See DSA, Instructions in Art: Directions for establishing and conducting schools of art (London, 1865); John C. L. Sparkes, Schools of Art: Their origin, history, work and influence (London, 1884); Henry Cole, ‘The Function of the Science and Art Department’, bound with his Introductory Addresses (London, 1857); DSA, Introduction to the Drawing Book of the School of Design (London, 1854). 145 Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary study and British rule in India (London, 1989). 146 Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A study of nineteenth-century British liberal thought (Chicago, 1999), p.14. 147 I discuss the dissonance of colour and race in Chapter 3. 148 For instance, William Dyce’s influential Introduction to the Drawing Book of the School of Design (London, 1842–43) even in a later edition of 1854 does not mention colour as part of his ‘inductive method’ for geometry, freehand design or the language of ornament. 149 See also R. Soden-Smith, The Titles of Several Treatises, Pamphlets and Essays on Colour and on its Industrial and Pictorial Applications (SKM now in the National Art Library) second edition, 1883; A. H. Church, Colour: An elementary manual (London, 1887). 150 See Felix Driver and Sonia Ashmore, ‘The Mobile Museum: Collecting and circulating Indian textiles in Victorian Britain’, Victorian Studies, vol.52.3 (2010), pp.353–85. 151 Sonia Ashmore at the V&A has recently undertaken research on these textiles. For details of the contents of these exhibitions which also travelled to art schools in Britain see J. C. Robinson, Catalogue of the Circulating Collection of Works of Art Selected from the Museum at South Kensington (London, 1860). 152 Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge, 1994) chs 1 and 2.



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153 Quarterly Reports (15 May 1860), p.5. 154 Alexander Hunter, Correspondence on the Subject of the Extension of Art Education in Different Parts of India (Madras, 1867), p.13. 155 Dewan, ‘Crafting Knowledge’, p. 89, notes that the Madras Art School’s influence extended to Travancore, Bangalore, Nagpur, Jubbulpur, Sri Lanka, Mooltan, Murree, Roorkee in addition to Lucknow and Lahore. She also records its influence on the crafts training in the jails at Coimbatore, Bangalore, Bombay, Surat, Mangalore, Pune, Bassimin Berar, Secundra, Assam and Vizinagram. 156 Dewan, ‘Crafting Knowledge’, p.89. After Chisholm’s retirement there were calls for the school’s closure – a request which was declined by the Government of India. 157 Dyce, Introduction to the Drawing Book, pp.vii–viii. Whilst for the artist Beauty is an individual quality, for the ornamentalist Beauty ‘with him is a quality separable from natural objects and he makes the separation in order to impress the cosmetics of nature on the productions of human industry’. 158 Dewan, ‘Crafting Knowledge’, pp.131–32. 159 Crane quoted in McGowan, Crafting the Nation, p.111. 160 Richard C. Temple, ‘Memorandum of the Hon. Sir R. C. Temple, KCSI on the Subject of Exhibitions and Schools of Art and Design in India’, 24 October 1873 as recorded in the Official Chronicle of the Mayo School of Art (Lahore, 2003, repr.), pp.142–43. 161 See, for instance, the syllabus for drawing at Lahore University, Mss Eur E 354/109, which advocated ‘very simple ornamental designs from the flat. A dozen copies to be chosen from the first grade South Kensington series’ which makes no mention of colour (not paginated). 162 See William J. Glover, Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and imagining a colonial city (Minneapolis, MN, 2008), p.88. 163 J. L. Kipling, letter of 31 January 1886 and letter of 16 March 1885, Kipling Mss Box 1, File 10, University of Sussex Library. Kipling goes on: ‘You can scarcely realize the toil of getting such a collection together, nor the tedium of invoicing, cataloguing, packing and dispatching it all. The Punjab government is poor … And surely they [South Kensington] must have done with exhibitions soon. Everybody exerts a moral influence of some kind. Lend the weight of yours that they are wrong’; letter of 31 January 1886 – as above. The international exhibitions at the SKM began in 1871 and were annual until 1874. They were overseen by the Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce (hereafter DARC) in relation with the Royal Commission. 164 J. L. Kipling in The Pioneer (3 February 1872). He followed this up with another article in The Pioneer (5 August 1873): ‘Everything is done for England and for the garrets and cellars of the India House – those dreary regions of the dead



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where all things are forgotten and partly because Government had not a very clear idea of what it wanted.’ See Henry Rivett Carnac, ‘Memorandum’ (21 July 1871), DARC, Appendix E, p.4. The Committee for Madras reported that ‘it has not been possible to forward any specimens of conspicuous merit’; Extracts from the Proceedings of the Government of Madras in the Public Department no 1760 24 November 1871, DARC, procs index 12, proc.4. The same proceedings defend the state of the arts in southern India: ‘In architecture and the forms of sculpture associated with it, there is much in southern India worthy of attention and these arts though little practised, have not died out in native methods … But sculpture in forms available for exhibition in England and painting and engraving are scarcely practised and almost exclusively so by persons in the service of native sovereigns or chiefs … Had time allowed, Trichinopoly could have sent paintings on ivory copied from photographs.’ Secretary of the State of India, DARC, May 1877, Part 13, pp.3–11. In 1875 the South Kensington Museum bought up the East India House collection of 20,000 objects. Purdon Clarke made a tour of India for the SKM in 1880–82 bringing back 3,421 objects to London. See Sonia Ashmore, ‘Casper Purson Clarke and the South Kensington Museum: Textile networks between Britain and India, 1850–1890’, Networks of Design (London, 2008) not paginated. The Central Museum Madras was based initially on collections kept in Fort St George, 1851, which were moved to a site on Pantheon Road in 1854. All but one of the six museums it was to oversee were closed by 1861. Also known as Act XVII, these four museums would come under the jurisdiction of the Public Works Department. ‘Industrial Arts, Museums and Exhibition Proceedings’, June 1872, DARC, 4 and 6. The government justified this position by stating that in addition to the Indian Museum’s own holdings, the valuable collections of the Asiatic Society of Bengal would make it truly outstanding. However, there proved to be a lack of space for the latter’s collection. When the Museum opened in 1878 only birds and archaeology were on view. Its structure already showed cracks as it was built on unstable ground. These museums were based at Lahore, Trichur, Udaipur, Bhopal, Madras (Victoria Technical Institute), Rajkot and Pune (Reay Industrial Museum). William Gray, Director of the Public Institution, Bombay, 6 April 1871, DARC, 687, no.6. This lack he believed encompassed every area of the V&A Museum, Bombay. Gray wanted a new museum at Bombay which would compare Indian and European art. J. L. Kipling, The Pioneer (24 November 1874), p.4.



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175 This petition was supported by William Morris, Walter Crane and BurneJones among others. The catalogue for the exhibition is by George Birdwood. See also the letter to Birdwood, 1 May 1879 reproduced in the Journal of the Society of Arts, vol.28 (1879). Ironically Birdwood was required by the SKM to adapt the Paris handbook for the remodelled SKM in 1880. 176 Government of India, ‘Resolution on Museums and Exhibitions’, DARC, 14 March 1883. See also JIAI, vol.1 (1886). 177 DARC, January 1884, Part B, no.199. 178 DARC, January 1884, Part B, no.199. 179 DARC, January 1884, Part B, no.198. 180 ‘Papers Relating to the Maintenance of Schools of Art in India as State Institutions’, in Selections from the Records of the Government of India: Home Department, no.356 (Calcutta, 1898). 181 DARC, January 1884, Part B, no.199. 182 Burns, Functions of Schools of Art in India, p.631. 183 Burns, Functions of Schools of Art in India, p.631. 184 Burns, Functions of Schools of Art in India, p.635. 185 Thomas Holbein Hendley, quoted in Burns, Functions of Schools of Art in India, p.649. Hendley held up the model of the Jeypore Art School. Other members of the debate included A. Chatterton, Director of Industries, Madras and Chisholm of the Madras Art School. 186 Havell quoted in Burns, Functions of Schools of Art in India, p.644. 187 E. B. Havell, ‘Art Administration in India’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, vol.58 (1910), p.56. 188 Birdwood, Handbook, p. 116 on the house of Vincent Robinson & Co.: ‘the colours introduced are not suited to the floor of a room particularly the green even if they are harmoniously blended.’ The tones are better suited for shawls. 189 Birdwood, Handbook, p.120. 190 Birdwood, ‘Note on the Symbolism of the Oriental Carpet’, in Madras Monograph Series (Madras, 1982, repr.), pp.116–21; pp.116–17. 191 Birdwood, ‘Note on the Symbolism’, p.120. 192 Birdwood, ‘Note on the Symbolism’, p.124. 193 Birdwood, ‘Note on the Symbolism’, p.124. 194 Birdwood, Handbook, pp.118–19. 195 Michael Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred? (Chicago, 2009), p.19. 196 Birdwood, Handbook, p.100. 197 Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred?, p.140. 198 Stanley B. Alpern, ‘What Africans Got for their Slaves’, History in Africa, vol.22 (1995), pp.5–43. 199 Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred?, p.136. 200 Birdwood, Handbook, pp.84–85. Lucknow was famed for its clay modelling.



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201 Miniature models of Indian labourers had featured at the 1851 world’s fair where they were met with horror due to the emaciated frames of the men and women depicted. Life-sized clay models were prominently on display at the East India House Museum and the Imperial Institute by the 1870s and a large number were ordered by the Royal Commission’s special officer for economic products, George Watt, for the India and Colonial Exhibition of 1886. They were modelled by Jadu Nath Pal from Krishnagur and replicated as a set designed for the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883. Copies of the models could be obtained on application to the Secretary of the Government of India, DARC, Calcutta, at Rs 40. See T. N. Mukherji, Art Manufactures of India (Calcutta, 1888), pp. 59–75; George Watt, Guide to the Ethnological Models and Exhibits Shown in the Imperial Court (London, 1886). For informative discussion see Claire Wintle, ‘Model Subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886’, History Workshop Journal, vol.67.1 (2009), pp. 194–207. 202 Birdwood, Handbook, pp.113–14. 203 Birdwood, Handbook, p.123. 204 Jail Birds: An exhibition of Indian carpets (London, 1987); P. Swaminathan, ‘Prison as Factory: A study of jails manufactures in the Madras Presidency’, Studies in History, vol.11.1 (1995), pp.77–100; L. H. Marshall Upshon, Manual of Jail Industries (Madras, 1931). See also the Asia and Africa Collections, BL: Judicial Files P/206/65, pp.657–58. 205 I deal with Thurston’s investment in colour, anthropometry and anthropology in the following chapter in some detail. See Edgar Thurston, ‘Monograph on the Cotton Fabric Industry of the Madras Presidency’, in Madras Presidency Monograph Series, pp.34–35. 206 Thurston, ‘Monograph on the Cotton Fabric Industry’, p.34 and Thurston, ‘The Woollen Fabric Industry of the Madras Presidency’, in Madras Presidency Monograph Series, p.67. In the cases of both jails Thurston obtained his information from their superintendents. The Madras Monograph Series also includes a ‘Note by Mr Cloney, Superintendent of the Central Jail, Vellore’ on colours and textiles, pp.77–80 and a ‘Note on the Industry of the Bangalore Central Jail Based on the Information of P. S. Achyuta Rao of the Mysore Medical Staff ’, pp.80–82. 207 Thurston, ‘Monograph on the Cotton Fabric Industry’, pp.34–35. 208 Henry T. Harris, ‘Monograph on Carpet Weaving Industry of Southern India’, in Madras Presidency Monograph Series, pp.63–134; p.67. 209 For a fascinating discussion of this case see Saloni Mathur, ‘Living Ethnological Exhibits: The case of 1886’, Cultural Anthropology, vol.15.4 (2000), pp.492–524; idem, India by Design. Several of these artisans had their portraits done (at the request of Queen Victoria) by the Austrian artist Rudolph Swoboda. See the



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little catalogue for the exhibition Portraits for the Queen held at the National Gallery, London, in 2002. Tony Bennett, Birth of the Museum: History, theory, politics (London, 1995). Michael Taussig, ‘Redeeming Indigo’, Theory, Culture, Society, vol.25.3 (2008), pp.1–17. Birdwood, Industrial Arts, vol.2, pp.69–79. Birdwood, Industrial Arts, vol.2, pp.69, 76. The use of blue as pigment and colour term as signifiers of advanced societies was already very controversial at this date. I discuss this in Chapter 3. Birdwood, Industrial Arts, vol.2, pp.78, 90, 107. Birdwood argued for a direct link between the Code of Manu and present-day village India. His viewed opposed that of Henry Maine who wrote extensively on the importance of customary law; Henry Maine, Village Communities (London, 1871). H. Baden Powell, Economic Products of the Punjab (Lahore, 1868), vol.1, p.64. He noted that most colours were mineral-based. There is a copy of this manuscript in the Allam Iqbal Library, University of Kashmir, Hazratbal Srinagar. I include a summary of Baden Powell’s interpretation of the recipe: mix mercury and silver then add old ore which should be moistened with a solution of yellow arsenic. One part of this compound should be mixed with three parts alum and sand and the whole is then ground together after which a small quantity of salt is poured over it and it is stirred with a bar of red hot copper which acts on the elements to produce green which then turns to blue; Baden Powell, Economic Products, p.66. Baden Powell, Economic Products, pp.468–69. Baden Powell, Economic Products, pp.468–69. Baden Powell, Economic Products, p.469. Baden Powell, Economic Products, p.470. H. Baden Powell, Handbook of the Manufactures and Arts of the Punjab (Lahore, 1872), p.355 quoted in Mildred Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London, 1972), p.5. I find that Archer perhaps too readily agrees: ‘These words were only too true.’ To be fair to Archer, she does stress that Indian artists were adaptable; ibid., p.5. Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (New York, 2001), chapter 3. JIAI, vol.1 (1884), pp.4–5; E. C. Buck, ‘Proceedings of the Arts and Museums Committee Held December 7, 1883’, MSA: ED 1892 v.51c.58338. According to Thomas Holbein Hedley in relation to the Jaipur Museum, ‘it is quite a common thing for artisans to go to the museum for a few minutes to study’, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883 ( Jaipur, 1883), vol.1, p.vi. The Government of India wanted to fix ‘the art of a locality by approved designs or standardized patterns’ which the officials at the 1883 conference rejected



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‘on account of the restriction which would be placed on original development by native workmen and others connected with art manufactures’. Instead of imposing standard designs directly, the colonial art officials unanimously agreed that the importance of local museums was ‘by storing up the best examples of oriental designs and processes’; Government of India, Revenue and Agriculture Department, ‘Resolution Number One’, 3 January 1884; MSA: ED 1892 v.51c.583; p.3. Dewan, ‘Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past’, p.123; P. H. Hoffenberg, ‘Promoting Traditional Indian Art at Home and Abroad, the JIAI, 1884–1917’, Victorian Periodicals Review, vol.37.2 (2004), pp.192–213. The JIAI ran between 1884 and 1917 in 136 issues in 17 volumes. In 1894 its title was changed to the Journal of Arts and Industry from the Journal of Indian Art. It had been established by Edward Charles Buck, Secretary to the Government of India, Revenue and Agriculture Department with the regular assistance of Thomas Holbein Hendley and John Lockwood Kipling of the Jaipur and Lahore art schools. An earlier journal has been produced by Alexander Hunter, Principal of the Madras Art School, entitled the Industrial Journal of Art, Science and Manufacture which ran for eight issues in 1850–51 and four issues in 1856. Hunter also produced two further issues on drawing which were intended as art school textbooks to encourage local industry in India. Its designs would also be used by private firms in Amritsar and Srinagar. Copies and patterns of 250-year old carpets from the Asar Mahal, Bijapur were sent to the Yaroada jail, Pune. See McGowan, Crafting the Nation, p.122. This interest in gazetteers followed the first All India Census of 1871. The following year Forbes Watson, the Reporter on the Products of India for the India Office called for an industrial survey of the arts and manufactures of India – as the one area lacking in colonial surveillance so far. George Watt, ‘Economic and Commercial Court’, Colonial and Indian Exhibition (London, 1886), pp.149, 171. George Watt, ‘Guide to Ethnological Models and Exhibits Shown in the Imperial Court’, Colonial and Indian Exhibition, p.245. In 1875 Thomas Wardle submitted a report to the Secretary of State calling for more information about dyeing in India. See D. McCann, Dyes and Tans of Bengal (Calcutta, 1883). In Bengal, this task was taken up the Committee of the management of the Bengal Economic Museum. By 1878 108 fabric samples were sent to the Secretary of State. In 1880 the government ordered other provincial reports and at this time J. Liotard of the DARC drew up his memorandum on dyes; Liotard, Dyes of Indian Growth and Production. Selections of DARC Dyes and Dyeing, 1888–190 OIR/V/27/600/16 vol.2 Pt 1 no.3; Products and trade: Dyestuffs IOR/V/27/624, 1848–1928. The phrase is from Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays in the reality of the social sciences, trans. Catherine Porter (London, 1998), p.6.



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234 Sumathi Ramaswamy, The Goddess and the Nation: The mapping of modern India (Durham, NC, 2010). 235 Thurston, ‘Monograph on the Cotton Fabric Industry’, pp.40–41. Whilst in favour of the reform of dyeing Thurston did prefer indigenous dyes. 236 Saiyid Muhammad Hadi, A Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in the North West Provinces and Oudh (Allahabad, 1896), pp.1–2. This is an especially detailed and informative text which includes a lot of ‘ethnographic’ information compared to the much briefer reports by officials from other districts. 237 Hadi, Monograph, pp.3, 61–66. 238 Hadi, Monograph, p.62. 239 Hadi, Monograph, p.62. 240 Hadi, Monograph, pp.63–64. 241 N. N. Banerji, Dyes and Dyeing in Bengal (Calcutta, 1896), p.36. Banerji gleaned this information from N. G. Mukerji, Sericultural Assistant of the Agriculture Department. See also Handbook of Commercial Products Calcutta, 1892–97, Dyeing IOR/V/27/600/28/6, IOR/V/27/600/29/16. Given limited space in this chapter, one cannot discuss the many monographs on dyeing published in 1896. These include Hadi, Monograph; H. G. A. Leveson, Note on Dyes and Dyeing in the South Shan States (Rangoon, 1896); Edwin Holder, Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in the Madras Presidency (Madras, 1896); W. A. Duncan, Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in Assam (Shillong, 1896); F. H. Giles, Note on Dyes and the Process of Dyeing in Karenni (Rangoon, 1896). See also Products and Trade Dyestuffs, IOR/V/27/624. 242 Banerji, Dyes and Dyeing in Bengal, p.3. He calculated the number of dyers to be 20,756 out of a total 18,284 to be based in the Patna area. 243 J. Forbes Watson, Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India (London, 1867). This text does not deal directly with the processes of dyeing although Forbes Watson is careful to note fabrics, patterns and colour combinations. He based his observations on 700 samples which he put together in 18 volumes. Twenty sets were issued – thirteen in Britain and seven in India. The project is a more ambitious version of the earlier mobile museums; J. C. Robinson, Catalogue of the Circulating Collection of Works of Art at the South Kensington Museum (London, 1863). 244 J. Forbes Watson and J. William Kaye, The Peoples of India: A series of photographic illustrations with descriptive letterpress of the races and tribes of India (Bath, 2007), p.352. 245 C. G. H.Fawcett, Dyes and Dyeing in Bombay (Bombay, 1896), p.3. 246 Fawcett, Dyes and Dyeing in Bombay, p.3. 247 Fawcett, Dyes and Dyeing in Bombay, pp.6–8. To back up his case, Fawcett included a set of figures from the Annual Statements of the Trade and Navigation of the Bombay Presidency which shows the vast expansion of aniline dyes into the region which had increased 15 times since 1886–87.



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248 W. A. Duncan, Assam Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing (Calcutta, 1896), p. 2. ‘This keeping up of dyeing customs among these tribes is of great ethnological interest’; T. N. Mukherji, Art Manufactures of India (Calcutta, 1888), p. 348. 249 J. D. Fraser, Account of Dyes and Dyeing in Burma (Calcutta, 1896), p.1. See also H. G. Leveson and F. H. Giles, Notes on the Dyes and Process of Dyeing in Karenni (Rangoon, 1896) who record the predilection for tumeric yellow amongst the Talai tribe whilst the Black Yang tribe wear only blue and black, and the Red Yang wear lac red; p.2. 250 Fawcett, Dyes and Dyeing in Bombay, p.90. 251 See also Fawcett, Dyes and Dyeing in Bombay; George Watt, ‘Notes on a Red and Yellow Dye Said to Have Been Prepared in Bombay During 1787’, Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Calcutta, 1889), pp. 53–58; J. Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India (London, 1868); H. J. R.Twigg, Monograph on the Art an Practice of Carpet Making in the Bombay Presidency (Bombay, 1907); Puran Singh, Note on the Utilization of Khair Forests in East Bengal and Assam (Calcutta, 1908). 252 Harris, Monograph on Carpet Weaving, p.68 (my emphases). See also C. Kuppusawny Iyonga Anildar, ‘Note based upon information supplied by Mr C. Kuppusawny Iyonga Anildar on bazaar carpet trade, Bangalore city’, in Madras Monograph Series, p.83: ‘The weavers say that no two people adopt the same method or use the same ingredients.’ 253 J. J. Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, in Madras Monograph Series, p.72. 254 The firm in question is Messrs. Arbuthnot & Co. who made vegetable and indigenous dyes for export. The superintendent of Vellore Jail sought their advice as to how to make this ‘Indian red’ which looks ‘like silk’. Arbuthnot & Co. responded that they could not penetrate a technology which amounted to a ‘secret handed down from generation to generation’; Thurston, ‘The Woollen Fabric Industry’, p.46. 255 Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, pp.69, 71. 256 Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, pp.71–72. 257 Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, p.72. 258 Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, p.69. 259 Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, p.72. 260 Hurrel, ‘The Dyeing of Textile Fabrics’, p.72. 261 Thurston, ‘Monograph on the Cotton Fabric Industry’, p.39. 262 Thurston, ‘Monograph on the Cotton Fabric Industry’, p.39. 263 Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The shaping of a public culture in Surat city, 1852–1928 (London, 1993); Laura Bear, Lines of the Nation: Indian railway workers, bureaucracy and the intimate historical self (New York, 2007).



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264 Thomas Wardle was president of the Silk Association of Britain and Ireland. His report Dyes and Tans of India was published in Calcutta in 1887. Wardle & Co. advocated softer, supposedly more oriental colours in their work. Over seven years at Leek he and Morris experimented with dyes sent by the Government of India. He also spent one month in India collecting for the Colonial and India Exhibition, 1886. Morris approached Wardle in 1875 for assistance in dyeing and they spent the next three years at Leek. In a correspondence which survives as 60 letters, they express their anxieties over dyeing – especially with indigo blue. See the Wardle Papers, Duke University; his Pattern Books, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the Wardle Papers, Nicholson Institute, Leek; V&A Indian and South East Asian Department Archive, 480.6; Wardle’s Report on Indian dyestuffs, Macclesfield Silk Museum Archive; the Whitworth Institute transcript of 60 letters between Wardle and Morris, 1875–96; Thomas Wardle and George Birdwood Correspondence OIOC Eur Mss F216/29. See also two recent exhibitions The Manchester India, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, 2009, and Experiments in Colour: Thomas Wardle, William Morris and the textiles of India, William Morris Museum, London, 2009–10. 265 See Brenda King, Silk and Empire (Manchester, 2005), p.155. For Morris and aniline dyes see K. D. Casselman, ‘Women in Colour: Perceptions of professionalism in natural dyeing during the Arts and Crafts period’, Textile History, vol.39.1 (May 2008), pp.16–44; p.35. See also B. Morris, ‘William Morris and South Kensington’, Victorian Poetry, vol.13.3 (London, 1975), pp.45–56; H. Batho, ‘William Morris and Dyeing’, Journal of the Society of Dyers and Colourists, vol.112.12 (1996), pp.342–46; P. H. Hoffenberg, ‘Socialist and Orientalist? William Morris and the eastern question of Indian art’, Australian Victorian Studies Journal, vol.10 (2004), pp.32–47. 266 William Morris, ‘The Art of Dyeing’, lecture sponsored by the Applied Art Section of the National Association for the Advancement of Art at the Museum of Science and Art, Edinburgh, 29 October 1889. 267 Thomas Wardle, Tissue or Textile Printing as an Art (London, 1890), p.56. 268 H. Baden Powell, ‘On Some of the Difficulties of Art Manufactures’, JIA vol.1; p.38. 269 His method of doing this went under the official premise that a duty of 45 per cent would be placed on these dyes at the frontier but in effect they were confiscated and destroyed once they entered Kasmir; Birdwood, Industrial Arts, p.78. European aniline dyes were banned in Persia. 270 For a wonderful study of chromolithography see Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The printed image and political struggle in India (London, 2004). 271 Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’, pp.112, 120–22. 272 From the 1840s through to the 1890s numerous articles on the poisonous character of anilines appear in the pages of the British Medical Journal – there are too many to list here. For a lively account of how dyes, clothes and wallpaper



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were literally killing Victorians see James C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was poisoned at home, work and play (Oxford, 2010). The Manchester Guardian quoted in Philip Ball’s Bright Earth: The invention of colour (London, 2001), p.251. Ball, Bright Earth, pp.250–51. Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred?, p.234. See also Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds: Nature, art and the chemical industry (London, 2005); Anthony S. Travis, The Rainbow Makers: The origins of the synthetic dyestuffs industry in Western Europe (Bethlehem, PA, 1993). Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred?, pp.234–35. Banerji, Dyes and Dyeing, p.22. Pandit Natesa Savstu, ‘The Decline of South Indian Arts’, JIAI, vol.3.29 (1890), p.28. Thomas Wardle had previously noted that Indian dyers were ‘not able to hold up against machine competition’; Wardle, ‘The Indian Silk Culture Court’, JIAI, vol.15 (1886), p.122. McGowan, Crafting the Nation, p.170. In 1863 Alexander Hunter called for the teaching of chemistry as a central activity for art schools’, Quarterly Reports (15 November 1863), p.47, although it does not seem to have become common practice. By 1909 dyeing was now being taught at the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, Bombay, at the Bengal Civil Engineering College at Sibpur, at a wool dyeing school in Kalimpong, at the Industrial School in Mysore and the Kala Bhavan, Varanasi. See the Directory of Technical Institutes in India (Allahabad, 1909). The Government of India established an Institute of Dyeing and Calico at Sahlera near Lahore in 1916. McGowan, Crafting the Nation, pp.182–83. Mathur, India by Design, p.50. M. K. Gandhi, ‘Village Tanning and its Possibilities’, Harijan (23 November 1934), p.43. Gandhi, ‘Village Tanning’, p. 43. I discuss Gandhi’s views on colour in Chapter 4. See for instance Fawcett’s Bombay report which quotes H. K. Taravia of the Victoria Jubilee Technical Institute, Bombay who blamed the ‘neglect of the Indian dyer’ for not using enough soap and salts to produce a longevical uniformity of colour; Fawcett, Dyes and Dyeing in Bombay, p.10. Fraser, Account of Dyes and Dyeing in Burma, p. 17. See also Leveson and Giles, Notes on the Dyes and the Processes of Dyeing in Karenni, p. 1. In their view dyeing could hardly be called an industry; p. 6: ‘Their methods are of such a primitive and elementary nature as to be incapable of any degree of development in their hands.’ ‘Papers Relating to the Maintenance of the Schools of Art’, Selections from the Records (Calcutta, 1898). Thomas Holbein Hendley, ‘Defects of Indian Art’, JIAI, vol.15.117 (1913), p.49.



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288 Dewan, ‘Body at Work’, p.129. 289 Baden Powell, ‘On Some of the Difficulties’, p.37. 290 Hendley quoted in Sonia Ashmore’s online essay, ‘Colour and Corruption: Issues in the 19th-century Anglo–Indian textile trade’, p.4. 291 Homi K. Bhabha, ‘Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of ambivalence and authority under a tree outside Delhi, May 1817’, Critical Inquiry, vol.12 (Autumn, 1985), p.153. 292 By ‘cases’ I refer to legal and medical cases. I discuss the ‘contagion’ of colour blindness in the following chapter. The Government of India drew up a series of regulations for the marine, army and civil service: Medical Board, ‘Regulations regarding defects of vision by Sir Joseph Fayner’, 16 September 1886, IOR/ L/MIL/7/15153 ‘Regulations as to the Standard of Vision Required for Candidates for Admission into the Civil and Medical Services under the Government of India, 1899’, IOR/L/MIL/7/15154. 293 Grant Allen, The Colour Sense, Its Origin and Development: An essay in comparative psychology (London, 1892). Allen corresponded with Dr W. W. Hunter, Director General of Statistics, whose letters he circulated amongst district officials as discussed in Colour Sense, p.210. 294 Allen, Colour Sense, p.210. He was especially interested in the peoples of India’s hill tribes. 295 As far I have been able to discover this is the first use of this take on the Colour Sense. 296 James W. Furrell, ‘Light from the East on the Colour Question’, The Nineteenth Century, vol.17 ( January–June, 1885), pp.321–30; p.330. 297 Allan Cunningham, ‘On the Colour Sense’, Nature, vol.32.804 (1885), pp.604– 5; p.605. 298 Cunningham, ‘On the Colour Sense’, p.605; my emphasis. 299 He is also arguing at this time that Indians have a very defective night vision due to a vegetarian diet; Cunningham, ‘Civilization and Eyesight’, Nature, vol.31.803 (1885), p.458. 300 Thomas Wardle, ‘The Indian Silk Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, JIAI, vol.1 (1886), p.118. 301 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the imagination in modern India (Delhi, 1998); Mark Elliott, ‘Behind the Scenes at the Magic House’, unpublished DPhil, Cambridge University (2003); Shaila Bhatti, ‘Exhibiting and Viewing Culture, Curiosities and the Nation at the Lahore Museum’, unpublished PhD, University of London (2006). 302 E. R. Fern, The V&A Bombay (London, 1926). This is a very different view to the triumphalist narrative set out by Tasneem Zakaria Mehta, The Restoration and Revitalisation of Dr Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (Mumbai, 2009). 303 See M. Maskiell and A. Mayor, ‘Killer Khilats Part I: Legends of poisoned robes of honor in India’, Folklore, vol.112.1 (April, 2001), pp.23–45; idem,



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‘Killer Khilats Part II: Imperial collecting of poisonous dress legends in India’, Folklore, vol.112.2 (October, 2001), pp.163–82. Although I mention indigo here for its evil eye it was widely believed to be a cure for sexual diseases, rabies and cholera. The juice from the leaf could be used against poisoning. S. C. Mitra, ‘On Some Indian Ceremonies for Disease Transference’, Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol.13 (1917), pp.13–21. William Crooke, Religion and Folklore of Northern India, 2 vols. (London, 1926), vol.1, pp.117–44. Alexander Miller, ‘The Training of the Sense of Colour’, Third International Art Congress (1908), pp.215–19. See M. Segall, The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception (London, 1966), pp.54–68. R. H. Thouless, ‘A Racial Difference in Perception’, J. Soc. Psychology, vol.4 (1933), pp.330–39; p.330. See also W. M. Beveridge, ‘Racial Differences in Phenomenal Regression’, British Journal of Psychology, vol.26 (1935), pp.57–64; idem, ‘Some Racial Differences in Perception’, British Journal of Psychology, vol.30 (1939), pp.56– 64; M. B. Shapiro, ‘The Rotation of Drawings by Illiterate Africans’, Journal of Social Psychology, vol.52 (1960), pp.17–30; W. Hudson, ‘Pictorial Depth Perception in Subcultural Groups in Africa’, Journal of Social Psychology, vol.52 (1960), pp.183–208. Henry Kirkpatrick, ‘Ophthalmologic Appearances in the Tropics’, in R. H. Elliot (ed.), Tropical Ophthalmology (London, 1920), pp.365–90; p.387. Kirkpatrick, ‘Ophthalmologic Appearances’, pp.393–94. Kirkpatrick, ‘Ophthalmologic Appearances’, p.394. C. G. Sander, Colour in Health and Disease (London, 1926), p.72. Sander, Colour in Health, p.68. Dinshah P. Ghadiali, The Spectro Chromometry Encyclopaedia (New York, 1933). He moved to the US in 1911. Richard C. Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism as a Subject for Indian Research’, Indian Antiquity, vol.52 (1923), pp.61–65. Donald MacKenzie, ‘Colour Symbolism’, Folklore, vol.32.2 (1922), pp.136–69. John Muir, Original Sanskrit Texts on the Origin and History of the People of India, Their Religion and Institutions, vol.1 (London, 1868), p.491. Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism’, p.67. Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism’, p.67. Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism’, p.63. Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism’, p.63. Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism’, p.67. This turn to a more multi-faceted European understanding of Indian colour can also be seen in the special issue on India, The Castes of Indian Dyers and Indian Colour Symbolism, CIBA Review, vol.2 (1937). Here E. Hermester links



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dyeing with the legend of the extermination of the Kshatriyas. One woman fled with her twin sons to the temple of the goddess Ambati for protection. Ambati dyed the boys’ sacred threads with betel juice which Hermester interprets as the beginning of dyeing in India; Hermester ‘The Castes of Indian Dyers’, in CIBA Review, vol.2 (1937), p.52. 325 Temple, ‘Colour Symbolism’, p.61. He makes reference to W. H. R. Rivers’ field-defining article ‘Primitive Colour Vision’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.59 (1901), pp.44–58. I discuss Rivers’ work in detail in the pages that follow. Chapter 3: Part 1 1 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Stanford, 1999). See also Eizabeth Edwards, ‘Thinking Photography Beyond the Visual?’, in J. Long, A. Noble and E. Welch (eds), Photography: Theoretical snapshots (London, 2009), pp.31–48. 2 For the nuances of the uses of experiment see Simon Schaffer, D. Gooding and T. J. Pinch (eds), The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the natural sciences (Cambridge, 1989). 3 For inscription devices see Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: An essay in the reality of social science studies, trans. Catherine Porter (London, 1998); idem, ‘Give Me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World’, in K. Cetina and M. Mulkay (eds), Science Observed (London, 1983), pp.141–70; Simon Schaffer, From Physics to Anthropology and Back Again (Cambridge, 1994); idem, ‘On Seeing Me Write: Inscription devices in the South Seas’, Representations, vol.97 (2007), pp.90– 122. For contemporary critique of the uses of experiment see E. B. Titchener, ‘On Ethnological Tests of Sensation and Perception with Special Reference to Tests of Color Vision and Tactile Discrimination Described in the Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol.55.3 (1916), pp.204–36. 4 Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, spectacle and modern culture (Cambridge, MA., 1999), p.341. 5 W. H. R. Rivers, ‘Primitive Orientation’, Folklore, vol.12.2 ( January, 1901), pp.210–12. 6 A. C. Haddon, Decorative Art of New Guinea (London, 1894), p.271. 7 This test devised by Cohn was widely used to test visual acuity. In Rivers’ case he took ten exposures at different distances; two mistakes were taken to indicate the limits of an individual’s vision. 8 The Torres Strait expedition took place April to October 1898. For the importance of psychological tests to anthropology see F. C. Bartlett, Psychology and Primitive Culture (London, 1923); R. Turner Steven, ‘Paradigms and Productivity: The case of physiological optics’, Social Studies of Science, vol.17 (1987), pp.35–68. For details of the 1898 Cambridge expedition see Anita Herle



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and Sandra Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary essays on the 1898 anthropological expedition (Cambridge, 1998); Anita Herle and Jude Philip, Torres Strait Islanders: An exhibition marking the centenary of the 1898 Cambridge Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge, 1998); idem, Custom and Creativity in the 19th-Century Collections of Torres Strait Art (Oxford, 2000); P. Bolgar, ‘Anthropology and History in Australia: The place of Arthur C. Haddon’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol.2 (1977), pp.102–6; P. Gathercole, ‘Cambridge and the Torres Straits, 1888–1920’, Cambridge Anthropology, vol.3.3 (1976), pp.22–311. There are 700 field photographs and lantern slides from the expedition in the Cambridge Museum CUMMA; see Anita Herle, R. Boast and S. Guha, Collected Sights: Photographic collections of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1860s–1930s (Cambridge, 2001); J. Coote, The Illustrated History of Colour Photography (London, 1993); David Moore, The Torres Straits Collections of A. C. Haddon (London, 1984); Henrika Kuklick, ‘Islands in the Pacific: Darwinian biogeography and British anthropology’, American Anthropologist, vol.23.3 (1996), pp.611–36; idem, Darwin’s Laboratory: Evolutionary theory and natural history in the Pacific (Honolulu, 1994); idem, The Savage Within: The social history of British anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge, 1992); Richard Slobodin, W. H. R. Rivers (New York, 1978); John Singe, The Torres Strait People and History (London, 1979); Stuart B. Kaye, The Torres Strait (The Hague, 1997); Martin M. Nakata, Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Discipline (Canberra, 2007); E. Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism (Cambridge, 1991); Joann L. Hoffman, ‘A. C. Haddon’s Original Vision: An ethnography of resistance in a colonial archive’, unpublished PhD, Fielding Graduate University (2008); Henrika Kucklick, ‘Personal Expectations: Reflections on the history of fieldwork with special reference to Sociocultural Anthropology’, Isis, vol.102–1 (2011), pp.1– 33. See also the Haddon manuscript collection, Cambridge University Library 1–999 Torres Strait material; 2000–2999 Torres Strait and New Guinea materials; 3000–3999 Haddon’s publications; 4000–4999 Haddon’s lecture notes; 1030m Haddon’s private journal of 1898; 1033 and 1034 Haddon’s sketchbooks and field notes; 1055 Haddon’s diary and drawings. Of crucial importance are W. H. R. Rivers’ Papers in the Haddon Papers, especially 12070–73 and 12080 Torres Strait field notes. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, affect, sensation (Durham, NC, 2002), p.169. David Katz, The World of Colour (London, 1935). The original German edition was published in 1911. Umberto Eco, ‘How Culture Conditions the Colours We See’, in M. Blonsky (ed.), On Signs (London, 1985), pp.157–75. Crary, Suspensions, p.359. Brian Massumi, ‘Too Blue: Color-Patch for an expanded empiricism’, Cultural Studies, vol.14.2 (2000), pp.177–226; p.195.



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14 John Frow, ‘Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia’, in John Frow, Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Postmodernity (Oxford, 1997), pp.64–101; p.71, note 14 quoting Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (New York, 1965), p.243, note 2: ‘Precisely because authenticity is not reproducible the intensive penetration of certain mechanical processes of reproduction were instrumental in differentiating and grading authenticity.’ 15 Perhaps it still is. See William H. Gass, On Being Blue: A philosophical inquiry (Manchester, 1979) and Philip Ball, Bright Earth: The invention of colour (London, 2001), ch.10. 16 For a different take on Benjamin’s waning of the Blue Flower see Miriam Hansen, ‘Benjamin, Cinema and Experience: The Blue Flower in the land of technology’, New German Critique, 40 (1987), pp.179–224. 17 Novalis, Heinrich von Ofterdingen: A romance from the German of Novalis (London, 1842), p.26. 18 Novalis to Schegel – personal letter quoted in Gaston Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire (London, 1964), p.56. 19 Barbara Saunders, ‘Revisiting Basic Colour Terms’, Science as Culture, http:// www.human-nature.com/science-as-culture/saunders.html; B. Berlin and P. Kay, Basic Color Terms: Their universality and evolution (Berkeley, CA, 1969). 20 Jordanna Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems: Work, pathology and perception in modern Britain’, International Labour and Working Class History, vol.68 (2005), pp.93–111. A classic primary text is F. A. Holmgren, ‘Colour Blindness in its Relation to Accidents by Rail and Sea’, in Annual Report of the Board of Regents (Washington, DC, 1878), pp.56–76. 21 The important exception in Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’. 22 Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, p.108. 23 Herman von Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik (Leipzig, 1867); idem, ‘The Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision’, in Popular Letters on Scientific Subjects (London, 1868). See David Cahan (ed.), Herman von Helmholtz and the Foundation of 19th-century Science (Berkeley, CA, 1994); Paul D. Sherman, Vision in the Nineteenth Century: The Young-Helmholtz-Maxwell Theory (London, 1981). 24 R. Cruz-Cole, Colour Blindness: An evolutionary approach (London, 1970). Young put forward his ideas in 1802. 25 For detailed discussion, see R. S. Turner, In the Eye’s Mind: Vision and the Helmholtz–Hering Controversy (London, 1994). 26 Henri Poincaré, La valeur de la science (Paris, 1905), p.179. 27 Jan E. Purkinje, ‘Beobachtungen und Versuche zur Physiologie der Sinne’, Opera omnia (Prague, 1819), vol.1, p.89. 28 Francis Galton’s Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development (London, 1883) includes a diagram of a coloured alphabet; for instance, A is yellow,



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E is green, O is red. He discussed colour hearing in terms of many varieties of visionary experience and colour association, but which he attempted to normalise by claiming it to be hereditary. Galton, Inquiries, p.35. See also Henry H. Donaldson, ‘A Few Practical Suggestions to Physicians in Asylums, Hospitals etc. for the Observation of Patients Suffering from Mental or Nervous Disease’, American Journal of Psychology, vol.2.3 (May, 1889), p.493. F. Schiller, Paul Broca: Founder of French Anthropology, explorer of the brain (London, 1979); J. I. Brookes III, The Eclectic Legacy: Academic philosophy and the human sciences in 19th-century France (London, c.1998–99); M. Staum, ‘Nature and Nurture in French Ethnography and Anthropology, 1859–1914’, Journal of the History of Ideas, vol.65.3 (2004), pp.475–95. Galton had been instrumental in establishing a health exhibition at the South Kensington Museum which included physical tests conducted on members of the public. See Francis Galton, ‘On the Anthropometric Laboratory at the Late Health Exhibition’, JAI, vol.14 (1885), pp.205–19; idem, ‘Some Results of the Anthropometric Laboratory’, JAI, vol.16 (1887), pp.275–87; idem, Anthropometric Laboratory, Notes and Memoirs (London, 1890). See also Francis Galton, ‘On Recent Designs for Anthropometric Instruments’, JAI, vol.16 (1887), pp.2–8 and his ‘Exhibition of Instruments for Testing Perceptions of Differences of Tint and for Determining Reaction Time’, JAI, vol.19 (1890), pp.27–29. Galton was not the only scientist concerned with measuring colour in relation to the body at this time; see John Beddoe, ‘Observations on the Natural Colour of the Skin in Certain Races’, JAI, vol.19 (1890), pp.257–64. This concern over the unreliability of coloured prints to reproduce the pigmentation of skin, eyes and hair continued into the twentieth century. See, for instance, J. Gray, ‘A New Instrument for Determining the Colour of the Hair, Eyes and Skin’, Man, vol.8 (1908), pp.54–58: ‘Attempts have also been made to reproduce the colours of locks of hair, eyes, etc., by colour lithography but these have usually been failures. I myself employed one of the best firms in this country to reproduce a series of locks of hair and a series of glass eyes by the three-colour photo-mechanical process, but the results were not of any practical value. None of these processes are apparently sufficiently advanced to reproduce shades of colour with sufficient exactness for scientific purposes, though they are capable of producing beautiful pictorial effects’; infra, p.54. Francis Galton, ‘Notes on Permanent Colour Types in Mosaic’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol.16 (1887), pp.141– 46; p.146. Galton, ‘Notes’, p.144. Galton, ‘Notes’, p.146. Galton contacted Lord Ampthill, Britain’s semi-official representative at the Papal Court, to negotiate the price which proved too much so the initial



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scheme was dropped. Galton also suggests the use of private dealers in Rome although there is no way their collections could have the scope of the Vatican’s; Galton, ‘Notes’, p.147. Diana Donald and Jan Eric Olsén, ‘Art and the Entangled Bank: Colour and beauty out of the war of nature’, in Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, natural science and the visual arts (New Haven, CT, 2009), pp.101–18. Donald and Olsén, ‘Art and the Entangled Bank’, p.110 (my emphasis). Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and travel in the 19th century (Oxford, 1979), especially chs 7 to 9 on accident, back problems and traumatic shock following accidents. Red danger signals were first introduced on the London and Manchester railways in 1834 and on board ships red and green lights came into use from 1852. Anon., ‘Tests for Colour Vision’, BMJ, vol.1.1637 (14 May 1892), pp.1032–36; p.1035. The Royal Society produced an extensive report on tests for the problem of colour vision among civil servants, marine and railway workers some of which was published as ‘Proceedings’, vol.51 (1892), pp.280–396. See also the Wellcome Institute Manuscript Collection Ms 1162 file on colour blindness, 1885–1901; Ms 5996 album on colour blindness, 1895–1912; Ms 5998 letters to Bickerton, 1884–1927; Mss 1162–65, 5996–6005, collection of Thomas Herbert Bickerton – Ophthalmological Surgeon, Liverpool, 1884–1927. Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’ and R. Cruz-Cole, Colour Blindness: An evolutionary approach (London, 1970). After a terrible railroad accident in Sweden in 1875, Holmgren was permitted to test all the workers on the Upsala–Gefte line. Out of 266 men, he found 13 to be colour blind. I discuss the means of testing colour blindness below. The regularity with which colour appears in journals of the time can be seen in a brief survey of Science, between its establishment in 1880 and December 1892 – which includes 56 articles which deal directly with colour in addition to entries on race and eugenics where colour is often implicated. In relation to colour blindness see Anon., ‘Tests for Colour Blindness’, Science, vol.2.65 (1881), p.460; Anon., ‘Colour Blindness Among Railway Employees’, Science, vol.9.204 (1887), p.41; W. B. Harlow, ‘Colour Blindness’, Science, vol.11.261 (1888), pp.57–58; A. Stevens, ‘Colour Blindness’, Science, vol.13.310 (1889), p.32; L. I. Blake and W. S. Franklin, ‘Colour Blindness as a Product of Civilization’, Science, vol.13.327 (1889), p.90. Wilson quoted in J. Ellis Jennings, Colour Vision and Colour Blindness: A practical manual for railroad surgeons (London, 1896), p. 42. Wilson had carried out pioneering work when he noticed in 1854 that some of his students were making mistakes when judging the colours of chemicals in his laboratory; George Wilson, Researches on Colour Blindness: With a supplement on the danger attending the present system of railway and marine coloured signals (Edinburgh, 1855).



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43 Justin Broackes, ‘What Do the Colour Blind See?’ and A. Byrne and D. Hilbert, ‘How do Things Look to the Colour Blind?’, both in J. Cohen and M. Matthen (eds), Colour Ontology and Colour Science (Cambridge, MA, 2010), pp.291–406; pp.259–90. See also E. G. Musselman, Nervous Conditions (New York, 2006), ch.3 for early nineteenth-century colour blindness. 44 Broackes, ‘What Do the Colour Blind See?’, p.1. 45 For more on this see Broackes, ‘What Do the Colour Blind See?’. 46 This has been the dominant view into the twenty-first century. 47 Broackes, ‘What Do the Colour Blind See?’, p.3. 48 Oliver Sacks, ‘The Case of the Colour Blind Painter’, in Oliver Sacks, An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven paradoxical tales (London, 1993) pp.5–29. 49 S. R. Koehler, ‘Colour Blindness’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.19 (1881), pp.91–99. Koehler’s article appears as one of many studies on colour blindness at this time. See, for instance, B. Joy Jeffries, The Incurability of Congenital Colour Blindness (London, 1878); idem, Colour Blindness: Its dangers and details (London, 1879); idem, Colour Blindness (London, 1881); G. S. Ryenon, Colour Blindness: Its relation to railway employees and the public (Toronto, 1889); J. Ellis Jennings, Colour Vision and Colour Blindness: A practical manual for railroad surgeons…with illustrations (London, 1896); C. I. Blake and W. S. Frankin, ‘Colour Blindness as a Product of Civilization’, Science, vol.13.317 (1889), pp.170–71; W. B. Harlow, ‘Colour Blindness’, Science, vol.11.261 (1888), pp.57–58; see also Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A political history of light and vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (London, 2008). 50 This Koehler believed had an effect on language, especially poetic description. For instance, ‘Thou rosy maiden with rich ruby lips, /And hair as golden as the sun’s bright rays’, in a colourless world would be described as ‘Thou grayish maiden with dark, jetty lips, /And hair as white as freshly fallen snow!’; ‘Colour Blindness’, p.94. 51 Wilhelm von Bezold, Theory of Colour and its Relation to Art and Art Industry (Boston, MA, 1876). 52 Von Bezold, Theory of Colour, p.131. 53 Von Bezold, Theory of Colour, p.131. 54 Von Bezold, Theory of Colour, p.131. 55 Frithioff Holmgren, De la Cécité des couleurs dans ses rapports avec les chemins de fer et la marine (Stockholm, 1877), p.113. See also Anon., Form Vision, Colour Vision and Colour Ignorance Tests: An appendix to the regulations to the examinations of masters and mates in the mercantile marine (London, 1894). 56 Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’, p.96. 57 G. H. Taylor, ‘Colour Green Colour Blindness’, BMJ (20 August 1910), p.457. 58 Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’, p.97. 59 Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’, p.97.



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60 Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’, p.98. This inquiry was followed by the 1892 Blue Book by the Royal Society Committee on Colour-Vision. 61 J. Herbert Parsons, An Introduction to the Study of Colour Vision (Cambridge, 1915), p.62. 62 M. Hiteshbhai, ‘Sorting Coloured Wools when Blindfolded’, Science, vol.12.298 (19 October 1888), p.192. 63 See, for instance, A. Rudolf Galloway, ‘Notes on an Interesting Case of Colour Blindness’, BMJ, vol.1.2678 (27 April 1912), pp.950–60, which records the case of a very experienced mariner whose colour vision at sea was considered excellent. After undertaking K. Scott’s asbestos chimney over an Argand burner test which involved the identification of coloured glasses, Edridge’s wools and glasses and Holmgren’s wools, and seeing the spectrum in daylight through a small spectroscope, it was concluded that although he had done reasonably well there were errors: ‘this man is unfit to be entrusted with the care of life at sea; it is also evident that something more than the ordinary Holmgren tests in the hands of the laymen is required to test colour deficiency’; infra, p.950. 64 Report of the Royal Society, p.386. 65 Bailkin, ‘Colour Problems’, p.105. 66 Initially issued in the Proceedings of the Royal Institute, 8 March 1872, these lectures were published separately as Turner and Mulready: The effect of certain faults of vision on painting with especial reference to their works (London, 1888). For Liebreich’s career see J. G. Ravin and C. Kenyon, ‘From Van Graefe’s Clinic to the Ecole des Beaux Arts: The meteoric career of Richard Liebreich’, Survey of Ophthalmology, 37.3 (1992), pp.221–28. Liebreich had a deep commitment to colour and he personally organised 63 ambitious plates for his masterpiece Atlas of Ophthalmology. 67 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.5. 68 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.6. 69 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, pp.8–9. 70 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.14. 71 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.17. 72 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.17. 73 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.17. 74 Liebreich, Turner and Mulready, p.18. 75 James Sully, Sensation and Intuition (London, 1874). Influenced by Darwin’s ideas of natural and sexual selection, Sully placed a new emphasis on the physiology of vision and on purely sensory responses to colour which was materialist in tendency and which excluded the moral and religious dimension of art. 76 James Sully, ‘Harmony of Colours’, Mind, vol.4.14 (1879), pp.172–91. Sully, Sensation and Intuition, pointed out the tremendous colour diversity in Owen Jones’ illustrations to The Grammar of Ornament whilst suggesting that painters



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by half closing their eyes blurred tints into one another as seen in the ‘finely modulated pictures of Mr Burne Jones’; infra, pp.174, 180. See Jane Munro, ‘More Like a Work of Art Than Nature: Darwin, beauty and sexual selection’, in Endless Forms, pp.253–92; p.268. Giovanni Morelli first published his essays under the acronymic pseudonym ‘Ivan Lermolieff ’; these were translated into German by one ‘Johannes Schwarze’ (German for Giovanni Morelli) and published in the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst between 1874 and 1876. At the time Liebreich was contemplating the status of the colour-blind artist. Morelli’s first work to be translated into English was Italian Masters in German Galleries: A critical essay on the Italian pictures in the galleries of Munich, Dresden and Berlin (London, 1883). His method works at three levels – first, the general characteristics of a school; second, individual characteristics revealed by ears, fingers, and so on; and third, mannerisms introduced unintentionally. For instance, the overly fleshy fingers painted by Titian which copyists and fakers avoided; Italian Masters, p.174. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’ (1914), in Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers (New York, 1959), vol.4, pp.260–95; pp.270–71, which refers directly to Morelli’s method. See also Arnold Hauser, ‘The Method of Morelli and its Relation to Freudian Psychoanalysis’, Diogenes, vol.66 (1969), pp.63–83; C. Gibson-Wood, Studies in the Theory of Connoisseurship from Vasari to Morelli (London, 1988). There was a lot of opposition to Morelli’s method which soon fell into disrepute. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm’, in Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD, 1989), pp.96–125. One instance in Italian Masters where colour verifies the identity of an artist is Morelli’s discussion of Titian’s Scourging of Christ, in the Munich Art Gallery: ‘Here he has limited his palette to white, black, red and orange, the colours said to have been exclusively used by the earliest painters of ancient Greece. The aged Titian’s example was afterwards followed now and then by Rubens and Van Dyck, but most brilliantly by the old Frans Hals in his two celebrated portrait pictures in the Haarlem Gallery’; p.43. Morelli, Italian Masters, p.93. Morelli, Italian Masters, p.95. Morelli had a medical degree. He met Conan Doyle (who was the director of the National Gallery in Dublin) and he used his method to reattribute several works there; Ginzburg, Clues, p. 202, note 10. Francis Galton, Finger Prints (London, 1892). For the link between medicine and historical knowledge see Michel Foucault, Microfisica del potere: Interventi politici (Turin, 1977), p. 45. C. S. Peirce, ‘Deduction, Induction and Hypothesis’, in C. S. Pierce, Chance, Love and Logic (New York, 1956), pp.131–58 as well as his lecture delivered



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at the National Academy of Science in April 1902, ‘The Colour System’. See also C. M. Smith, ‘The Aesthetics of C. S. Peirce’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.31.1 (Autumn, 1972), pp.21–29; A. W. Levi, ‘Peirce and Painting’, Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, vol.23.1 (1962), pp.23– 36; J. L. Caivano, ‘Colour and Semiotics: A two-way street’, Colour Research and Application, vol.23.6 (1999), pp.390–401; S. F. Johnston, A History of Light and Colour Measurement: Science in the shadows (London, 2002). C. S. Peirce, ‘On the Sensation of Colour’, American Journal of Science and Arts, vol.76 (1877), pp.247–52. Peirce, ‘On the Sensation of Colour’, p.248. Red appears scarlet, green yellowish, blue greenish and violet blue. C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, vol.1 (New York, 1922), p.312. He hazarded a guess that ‘from the chemical oscillations set up by this colour in the observer will be found to resemble that of the sound waves of a trumpet’s blare’; p.312. Peirce, Collected Works, p.156. Peirce, Collected Works, p.154. ‘We cannot disassociate space from colour. I call this mode of separation prescission’; infra, p.180. J. Stilling, Tafeln zur Bestimmung der Rot-grün-Blindheit (Kassel, 1977). His pseudo-isochromatic tests used plates whose colours were designed to be seen as interchangeable by the colour blind. The famous ophthalmologist F. W. Edridge-Green made patients make copies of paintings in either daylight or by gaslight. Their mistakes he records in some detail in his book Colour Blindness and Colour Perception (London, 1891). His chapter 9 explains how these painting tests should be conducted. Ophthalmic Yearbook, vol.6, p.38 (my emphasis). See also Anon., ‘Science and Art’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.40.49 (April, 1892), p.234 for praise of Liebreich’s ability to detect Turner’s optical defects: ‘It would have been easy for a modern oculist to protect him from this fault by properly fitted glasses. Colour blindness, known of old but only thoroughly studied in our own age is another very frequent defect of our vision to which corresponds the ear and inability to distinguish between tones. A colour blind painter is perhaps not so incapable as a musician without hearing. It might not be practicable to define the limits beyond which optical science can do no more good to the artist.’ J. Ellis Jennings, ‘The practical advantage of colour blindness’, pp.49–50. ‘It is thus seen that the colour blind are peculiarly fitted to excel in the art of engraving’; infra, p.50. Arnaldo Angelucci, ‘Les peintures Daltoniens’, Recueil d’Ophthalmologie, vol.30 (1908), pp.1–18 describes and analyses six paintings from his collection. See also Arnaldo Angelucci, L’Occhio nella pittura (Siena, 1893) for his discussion of the work of Luca Signorelli, who used, he believed, too much reddish brown and orange. P. Trevor Roper, The World Through Blunted Sight (London, 1970).



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Angelucci was professor of ophthalmology at Naples University, 1905–29, and wrote over 40 monographs. Two important works involve the relationship between art and vision, his La visione nell’arte e l’arte nei meccanismi della vita (Naples, 1923) and Psicoanalisie sublimazione nell’arte – Michelangelo, Wagner, Berlioz, Schubert, D’Annunzio, Tolstei (Naples, 1929). Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities of Colour Vision upon Art’, BMJ, vol.1.2469 (25 April 1908), pp.1006–7; p.1007. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, BMJ, vol.2.3417 (3 July 1926), p.17. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. This also refers to the detailed criticism of Munnings’ pictures. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘Daltonism and the Arts’, p.17. Anon., ‘The Influence of Abnormalities’, p.1007. Edgar Wind renewed interest in Morelli’s method by viewing them as a way of reading modern art that privileges the detail as opposed to the whole and which privileged artistic spontaneity; see Edgar Wind, Art and Anarchy (Evanston, IL, 1985, 3rd ed.). D. Keller, ‘The Application of the Physiology of Colour Vision in Modern Art’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.83 (1913), p.450; M. M. Gyan, ‘Are Art and Science Antagonistic?’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.25 (1884), pp.357–65. Art and ophthalmology are still popular topics for art historians and scientists – see Philippe Lanthony, Art and Ophthalmology: The impact of eye diseases on painters (London, 2009); idem, Les yeux des peintres (Lausanne, 1999); James G. Ravin, ‘The Visual Difficulties of Selected Artists and Limitations of Ophthalmological Care during the 19th and early 20th Centuries’, Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society, vol.106 (2008), pp.402–25. Keller, ‘The Application of the Physiology’, p.123. See also R. D. Rusk, ‘Optics and Modern Painting’, Science Monthly, vol.38.5 (1934), p.90. Endless Forms, p. 272. See also Joris-Karl Huysmans, L’Art moderne (Paris, 1880).



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120 Jane Stafford, ‘Cockeyed Art’, The Science Newsletter, vol.31.826 (February, 1937), pp.90–93. 121 Stafford, ‘Cockeyed Art’, p.90. Dr Mills himself had compound nearsighted astigmatism. 122 Stafford, ‘Cockeyed Art’, p.93. 123 See Anon., ‘Eccentricities in Art Blamed on Eye Defects’, The Science Newsletter, vol.30.814 (November, 1936), pp.309–10 for the argument made by Mills that Cézanne, Renoir, George Grosz, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Sargen, Degas, Monet, Pissarro and Turner all had problems with their visual ‘which accounts for the eccentricities’ of their work; infra, p.310. For more on Mills’ ‘findings’ see Stafford, ‘Cockeyed Art’. 124 For the power of blue in alternative contexts see W. Jacobs and V. Jacobs, ‘The Colour Blue: Its use as metaphor and symbol’, American Speech, vol.33 (1958), pp.29–46; Michel Pastoreau, Blue: History of a colour (Princeton, NJ, 2001). 125 My study of the journal Science between 1880 and 1893 shows that red and to a lesser sense blue (in relation to sky colour) were the colours which most preoccupied this forum of leading scientists. For red, see W. Upton, ‘The Red Skies’, Science, vol.3.49 (1884); E. Whymper, ‘Coloured Skies after an Eruption of Cotopai’, Science, vol.3.51 (1884); A. Hague, ‘Red Skies in China Five Years Ago’, Science, vol.3.52 (1884); G. J. Symes, ‘The Red Skies’, Science, vol.3.53 (1884); S. E. Bishop, ‘Red Skies in the Pacific’, Science, vol.3.54 (1884); G. Karsten, ‘Red Skies a Century Ago’, Science, vol.3.54 (1884); W. H. Howard, ‘Red Sunsets and Precipitation’, Science, vol.3.58 (1884); W. H. Pickering, ‘The Colour of the Sky’, Science, vol.6.140 (1885). 126 H. Lang, ‘Colour Vision Theories in 19th-century Germany between Idealism and Empiricism’, Colour Research and Application (1987), pp.270–81. 127 C. S. Peirce, ‘Notes on the Sensation of Colour’, American Journal of Science and the Arts, vol.13 (1877), pp.247–51. 128 Fregé is discussed in relation to this in Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York, 2007), pp.281–83. 129 Gladstone was prime minister: 1868–74, 1880–85, February to July 1886 and 1892–94. 130 There is a sizeable literature on colour nomenclature in the nineteenth century. See Faber Birren, ‘Colour Identification and Nomenclature: A history’, Colour Research and Application, vol.4 (1979), pp. 14–18; J. Gage, A. Jones, R. Bradley, K. Spence, J. W. Barber and P. S. C. Tacon, ‘What Meaning had Colour in Early Societies?’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal, vol.9.1 (1999) pp. 109–26. 131 Lazarus Geiger, ‘On Colour Sense in Primitive Times and its Development’, lecture delivered on 24 September 1867, which was subsequently published as part of his Contributions to the History of the Development of the Human Race, trans. D. Asher (London, 1880), pp.48–63. See also Lazarus Geiger,



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Ueber den Farbensinn der Urzeit und seine Entwicklung, in Lazarus Geiger, Zur Entwickelungsgeschichte der Menschheit: Vorträge (Stuttgart, 1871). For Gladstone see N. P. Hickenson, ‘Gladstone’s Ethnolinguistics: The language of experience in the 19th century’, Journal of Anthropological Research, vol.39 (1983), pp.26–41; idem., ‘Two Studies of Colours: Implications for crosscultural compatibility of semantic categories’, in Linguistics and Anthropology in Honor of C. F. Voeglin (Lisse, 1975); Elizabeth Bellmer, ‘The Statesman and the Ophthalmologist: Gladstone and Magnus on the evolution of the human colour vision, one small episode in 19th-century Darwinian debate’, Annals of Science, vol.56 (1999), pp.25–48. William E. Gladstone, Studies in Homer and the Homeric Age, vol.3 (London, 1858). See also his ‘The Colour Sense’, Nineteenth Century, vol.2 (1877), pp. 366–88 and R. Smith, The Colour Sense of the Greeks’, Nature, vol.17 (1877), p. 100. The fascination with ancient Greek colour in relation to nomenclature and material culture has carried through to the present day. See H. Osborne, ‘Colour Concepts of the Ancient Greeks’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol.8 (1968), pp. 269–83; Christopher Rowe, ‘Conceptions of Colour and Colour Symbolism in the Ancient World’, Eranos Yearbook, vol.41 (1972), pp. 327–64; J. Baines, ‘Colour Terminology and Colour Classification: Ancient Egyptian colour terminology’, American Anthropology, vol.87.2 (1985), pp. 282–97. Gladstone, Studies in Homer, p.480. Gladstone, Studies in Homer, pp.487–88. For support and the belief that ‘we must look to the onward march of progressive development for new power’, see R. Gyan, ‘Are Art and Science Antagonistic?’, References for Literary Workers, p.194: ‘The sense of colour has ever grown since antiquity. The Greeks were without words to describe a considerable number of colours which we distinguish and their artists had certainly not as fine perceptions of colour as Turner or Delacroix. Mankind seems to have been all the time growing more sensible to the language of tints.’ Barbara Saunders, The Debate About Colour Naming in 19th-century German Philology (Leuven, 2007). From 1875 to 1879 a number of scientists began debating the tenets of the Colour Sense as can be seen from their experiments, observations and discussions in academic journals and monographs. The writings and coloured wool tests of the Swedish scientist F. Holmgren attest to this; Holmgren, ‘Zur Entdeckung der Farbenblindheit bei Massenuntersuchungen’, Centralblatt für praktische Augenheilkunde, 182 (1878). See also Grant Allen, ‘Development of the Sense of Colour’, Mind, vol.3 (1878), pp.129–32; idem, The Colour Sense: Its origin and development (London, 1879); R. Andree, ‘Über den Farbensinn der Naturvölker’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol.10 (1878), pp.323–34; R. Cohn, ‘Sehschärfe und Farbensinn der Nubier’, Schlesische Zeitung, vol.331 (1879); Dor,



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‘Zur geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes’, Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheilkunde, vol.120 (1878); A. S. Gatschett, ‘Adjectives of Colour in Indian Languages’, American Naturalist, vol.13 (1879), pp.475–85; Alfred Kirchhoff, ‘Über Farbensinn und Farbenbezeichnung der Nubier’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol.11 (1879), pp.397–402; E. Krause, ‘Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Farbensinnes’, Kosmos, vol.1 (1877), pp.264–75; idem, ‘Vertheidigung des ablehnenden Standpunktes’, Kosmos, vol.1 (1877), pp.428– 33; Hugo Magnus, Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Farbensinnes (Leipzig, 1877); idem, ‘Zur Entwickelung des Farbensinnes. Mit einer Nachschrift von Prof. Dr. Zehender’, Klinische Monatsblätter für Augenheilkunde, vol.120 (1878); idem, Die methodische Erziehung des Farbensinnes (Breslau, 1879); idem, Untersuchungen über den Farbensinn der Naturvölker ( Jena, 1880); H. Marty, Die Frage nach der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes (Vienna, 1879); G. Nachtigal, Supplementary Pages to Sahara und Sudan (Berlin, 1879); J. Pole, ‘Colour Blindness in Relation to the Homeric Expressions for Colour’, Nature, vol.676 (1878); C. Schroeder, ‘Die Entwicklung des Farbensinnes am menschlichen Auge’, Berliner Klinische Wochenschrift (September, 1879); Stein, ‘Einiges Interessante von den Nubiern’, Frankfurter Zeitung, vol.213 (1879); R. Virchow, ‘In Berlin anwesende Nubier’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol.10 (1878), pp.333–56; idem, ‘Nubier’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol.11 (1879); A. von Strauss and V. Torney, ‘Bezeichnung der Farben blau und grün im chinesischen Alterthum’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 33 (1879), pp.502–9; O. Weise, ‘Die Farbenbezeichnungen der Indogermanen’, Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen, vol.2 (1878), pp.273–90. 139 For Magnus see R. Schonteg, B. Schafer-Prieß, ‘Colour Term Research of Hugo Magnus’, in MacLaury et al., Anthropology of Colour, pp. 107–22. Magnus’ work on colour vision is extensive. See his Geschichte des Grauen Stares (Leipzig, 1876); Das Auge in seinen ästhetischen und culturegeschichtlichen Beziehungen: Fünf Vorlesungen (Breslau, 1876); Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Farbensinnes (Leipzig, 1877); Die Entwickelung des Farbensinnes ( Jena, 1877); ‘Zur Entwickelung des Farbensinnes’, Kosmos, vol.1 (August, 1877); ‘Die Erziehung des Farbensinns’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol.10 (1878); Untersuchungen über den Farbensinn; Farben und Schöpfung: Acht Vorlesungen über die Beziehungen der Farben zum Menschen und zur Natur (Breslau, 1881); Über ethnologische Untersuchungen des Farbensinnes (Berlin, 1883); Ophthalmology of the Ancients (Oostende, 1998). 140 His emphasis on red is quite different to its status in one of the leading works on art harmonies – George Field’s Chromatography – where it is seen as an intermediate colour mediating between blue and yellow (which is the brightest colour). 141 Magnus did not, however, link his work with the experiments with physiological conditions of the sensation of colour in Germany – for example, the research of



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Young and Helmholtz whereby the perception of different colours was linked to different nerve endings. Magnus’ reading of the Rg. Veda is slightly different to Geiger’s who saw the dominance of black, red and gold. See also M. Platnauer, ‘Greek Colourperception’, Classical Quarterly, 15.3–4 (1921), pp.153–62; P. G. MaxwellStuart, Studies in Greek Colour Terminology, vol.1 (Leiden, 1981); Thomas R. Price, ‘The Colour System of Virgil’, American Journal of Philology, vol.4.1 (1883), pp.1–20; W. E. Mead, ‘Colour in Old English Poetry’, PMLA, vol.14.2 (1899), pp.169–206. Rajendralal Mitra became president of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1885. He wrote over 50 books. Rajendralal Mitra, Antiquities of Orissa, 2 vols (London, 1878), vol.1, p.120. Edward W. Hopkins, ‘Words for Color in the Rg Veda’, American Journal of Philosophy, vol.4 (1883), pp.166–91; p.183. See also R. W. Casson, ‘Russet, Rose and Raspberry: The development of English secondary colour terms’, Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, vol.4 (1994), pp.5–22; idem, ‘Colour Shift: Evolution of English colour terms from brightness to hue’ in C. L. Hardin and L. Maffi (eds), Colour Categories in Thought and Language (Cambridge, 1997), pp.224–39. Hopkins, ‘Words for Color’, p.191. See also A. Cunningham, ‘On Colour Sense’, Nature, vol.32.804 (1885), pp.604–5 as discussed in Chapter 2. The editor of Nature notes in the same issue that Professor Robertson Smith had written a letter to the journal making a similar case that there is a passage from Atheneaus, Deipnos xiii, 81 which proves that the ancient Greeks were perfectly aware of the looseness of their poetic vocabulary of colour. Hugo Magnus’ Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Farbensinnes and his Die Entwicklung des Farbensinnes, both of 1877, were also reviewed in this issue of Nature. Magnus had the support of the Ethnological Museum, Leipzig, in this project. His work was preempted by Kirchhoff, ‘Über Farbensinn’; Gustav Nachtigal, Sahara und Sudan (Berlin, 1879), Rudolf Virchow, ‘Lappen’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, vol.11 (1879). Hugo Magnus, Untersuchungen über den Farbensinn, p.34. For recent discussions of colour nomenclature as a cultural investigative tool see W. Backhaus, G. K. Reinald Kliegel and John S. Werner (eds), Colour Vision: Perspective from different disciplines (Berlin, 1998); Heinrich Zollinger, Colour: A multidisciplinary approach (Zürich, 1999); Robert E. MacLaury, ‘Colour Terms’, in M. Haspelmath, E. König, W. Oesterreicher and W. Raible (eds), Language Typology and Language Universals: An international handbook, vol.2 (London, 2001). Magnus, Untersuchungen über den Farbensinn, pp.48–49; idem, Farben und Schöpfung, pp.161–62.



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152 G. S. Hall, ‘Colour Perception’, Proceedings of the American Academy, vol.28 (1877), pp. 402–13; Havelock Ellis, ‘The Colour Sense in Literature’, Contemporary Review (1896), p. 176. This also informed ideas of race; see R. S. Woodworth, ‘Colour Sense in Different Races of Mankind’, Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology, vol.3 (1905), pp. 24–26 and the work of W. H. R. Rivers which I discuss below. Grant Allen was a tremendously prolific writer. His works include Evolution in Italian Art (London, 1908), which is decidedly anti-Morellian in its outlook. See also Grant Allen, The Colour of Flowers (London, 1882); idem, The Evolution of the Idea of God (London, 1903); idem, The Evolutionist at Large (London, 1884); idem, Physiological Aesthetics (London, 1877) and his Charles Darwin (London, 1885). Allen also collaborated with W. W. Hunter in the ambitious Gazetteer of India project of the early 1880s. For an overview of Allen’s work see P. Morton, The Busiest Man in England (London, 2005) and David Cowie, ‘The Evolutionist at Large: Grant Allen, scientific naturalism in Victorian culture’, unpublished PhD, University of Kent (2000). 153 Grant Allen, The Colour Sense, p.10. 154 Allen, The Colour Sense, p. vii. Darwin’s own field notes show his keen sense of colour which borrows extensively from Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours. See Robert M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s place in Victorian culture (Cambridge, 1985); Michael Ruse, The Darwinian Revolution? Science red in tooth and claw (Chicago, 2004); Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (London, 2006) and the collection of essays in Endless Forms. 155 In the later nineteenth century, physiology and psychology were used interchangeably in relation to aesthetics; see J. Wechsler (ed.), On Aesthetics and Science (Cambridge, MA, 1978). Throughout his writings on colour, Allen maintained a certain rivalry with James Sully’s opposing ideas on what constituted the aesthetic sense. Grant Allen, ‘Mr Sully on Physiological Aesthetics’, Mind, vol.2.8 (1877), pp.574–78; idem, ‘Aesthetic Evolution in Man’, Mind, vol.5.20 (1880), pp.445–64; James Sully, ‘History of Colours’, Mind, vol.4.14 (1879), pp.172–91; idem, Sensation and Intuition: Studies in psychology and aesthetics (London, 2004). 156 Allen, The Colour Sense, ‘I’m not myself an excessive devotee of fine art in any form. But on the whole I count this as gain in attempting the psychological analysis of aesthetics’, p.viii. 157 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.xi. 158 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.44–45. 159 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.169, 176–77. 160 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.204. 161 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.153. 162 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.145.



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163 This sense of fatigue can be seen at regimental, Masonic or highland events where the ‘varied mass of unrelieved colour heightened by the glare of glass has a somewhat barbaric extravagance’; Allen, The Colour Sense, p.166. 164 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.78. 165 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.157. 166 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.157. 167 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.204. 168 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.159. 169 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.229–32. 170 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.243. 171 Darwin’s views on the role of colour in relation to natural and sexual selection have been dealt with in detail by scholars. James A. Secord, Charles Darwin: Evolutionary writings (Oxford, 2004); R. M. Young, Darwin’s Metaphor: Nature’s place in Victorian culture (Cambridge, 1985); Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (London, 1983); L. Nochlin and M. Lucy, ‘The Darwin Effect: Evolution and 19th-century visual culture’, Nineteenth-century Art Worldwide, vol.2.2 (2003), online, not paginated; J. Krosner, The Entangled Eye: Visual perception and the representation of nature in Post-Darwinian narrative (New York, 1992). 172 Arthur Wallace, Contributions to Natural Selection in Tropical Nature (London, 1871), p.52. 173 Wallace, Natural Selection in Tropical Nature, p.93. 174 Animal colouration became a huge topic of debate at this time. See Frank E. Beddard, Animal Colouration (London, 1895); Alfred Tylor, Colouration in Animals and Plants (London, 1886). 175 Wallace, Natural Selection in Tropical Nature, p.372. 176 Wallace, Natural Selection in Tropical Nature, pp.411–12. 177 Wallace, Natural Selection in Tropical Nature, pp.367–68. 178 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.9. 179 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.8, 19. 180 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.21. 181 Here Allen refers to Darwin’s Descent of Man on birds’ colour perception, vol.2, p.110 and Wallace’s essay ‘Mimicry and other Protective Resemblances Among Animals’, in Natural Selection in Tropical Nature, p.21. 182 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.127–28. 183 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London, 1871), p.4. 184 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.148. 185 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.281–82. 186 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.39. 187 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.205. 188 Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.205–6. 189 Allen also records the response of a ‘lady’ whose investigations amongst African bushmen revealed that they could perceive all the major primaries and



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secondaries plus light purple, mauve, grey and brownish green; The Colour Sense, p.210. This is the most detailed colour selection and may also have to do with gender – women’s fashion exposed them to the nuances of colour far more than their male counterparts. So in spite of Allen’s questionnaire there were no standard test conditions which could be enforced. Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.218–22. Allen, The Colour Sense, p.189. Flowers and fruits are prized for their immediate beauty; shells and feathers are for exchange; jewels and metals are indestructible and rare. They have been vulgarised in our present-day economy; Allen, The Colour Sense, p.242. Allen, The Colour Sense, p.243. Allen, The Colour Sense, p.243. Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.255, 250. Allen, The Colour Sense, p.281. Allen, The Colour Sense, pp.222–223; 249. Red excites a vivid passage: ‘The central African is bribed with yards of red calico; the West Indian negress adorns herself in a red turban; the baby in its cradle jumps at a bunch of red rags; the London servant maid trims her cap with scarlet ribbons and admires the soldier’s coat as the most beautiful of human costumes’; Allen, The Colour Sense, p.229. Allen, The Colour Sense, p.234. Allen, The Colour Sense, p.258. Ellis wrote over 50 books, mostly to do with sex and criminality. Havelock Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Red’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.57 (1900), pp.365, 517–30. Ellis notes that a man with delusions of persecution becomes rational in a red room. In contrast a violent maniac will become calm in a room with blue glass windows; Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Red’, p.521. For the importance of red ochre in ancient cultures see E. E. Wrescher, ‘Red Ochre and Human Evolution: A case for discussion’, Current Anthropology, vol.21 (1980), pp. 631–44; R. Bolton, ‘Black, White and Red All Over: The riddle of colour terms salience’, Ethnology, vol.17.3 (1978), pp. 287–311. Ellis notes that the Kurmis mix blood and lac dye and that girls put vermilion in their hair; p.522. Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Red’, p.522. M. Hiteshbhai, ‘Sorting Coloured Wools when Blindfolded’, Science, vol.12.298 (19 October 1888), p.192 notes that ‘Professor Vitus Graber has shown that so thick-skinned an animal as the cockroach re-acts to colours when his antennae have been removed and his head has been covered with a thick coating of black sealing-wax’. Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Red’, p.522. Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Red’, p.525.



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209 Ellis, ‘The Psychology of Red’, p.524. 210 This phrase refers to English folklore when there is a patch of blue sky just enough to make a cat a pair of trousers. 211 Allen, The Colour Sense, p.19. Chapter 3: Part 2 1 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Generally Known as the Blue and Brown Books (Oxford, 1958), p. 4. See also Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schätte (Oxford, 1992). 2 Wittgenstein, Preliminary Studies, p.15. 3 See Jonathan Westphal, Colour: Some Philosophical Problems from Wittgenstein (Oxford, 1987); C. L. Hardin, Colour for Philosophers (London, 1988); Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius (New York, 1990); C. A. Riley II, Colour Codes (London, 1995). 4 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, p.23. 5 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, p.21. 6 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, p.19. 7 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, p.21. 8 Wittgenstein, Remarks on Colour, p.43. 9 Rivers lectured on physiology and the sense organs at Cambridge from 1893. He wrote extensively on colour – see his entry on ‘Vision’, in E. A. Schaffer (ed.), Textbook of Physiology, vol.1 (London, 1898), pp.45–56; ‘Colour Vision of the Eskimaux’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, vol.11 (1901), pp.143–49; ‘Primitive Colour Vision’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.59.1 (1901), pp.44–58; (with Edgar Thurston) ‘Observations on the Vision of the Uralis and Sholagas’, Madras Government Museum Bulletin, vol.5 (1903), pp.1–16; ‘The Colour Vision of the Natives of Upper Egypt’, JRAI, vol.31 (1901), pp.229– 47; ‘Observations on the Senses of the Todas’, British Journal of Psychology, vol.1 (1905), pp.321–96; ‘Colour Vision: Review of Holden and Bosse’s Order of Development of Colour Perception and of Colour Preference in the Child’, Man, vol.10 (1901), pp.402–4; ‘Welsh Words for Colour’, Atheneaum (1902), p.119; ‘Investigations of the Comparative Visual Acuity of Savages and of Civilized People’, BMJ, vol.2 (1904), p.1027. 10 For Rivers’ notes and manuscripts on colour see the Rivers Collection in the Haddon Papers, Cambridge University Library, Ms 12034 which contains relatively summary notes on an impressive array of previous publications on colour. 11 Herbert Spencer, ‘The Comparative Psychology of Man’, Popular Science Monthly, vol.8 (1876), pp.301–16. Rivers was a founding member of the British Psychological Society.











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12 Rivers would also accompany Haddon to Melanesia in 1914. 13 The other scientists included William MacDougall, a physician from St Thomas’s Hospital, London, concerned with sensations, especially tactility; Charles Myers, a doctor from Cambridge University specialising in music; and Charles Seligmann also from St Thomas’s who had expertise in native medicine. Rivers, Myers and MacDougall were all founding members of the British Psychological Society (est. 1901). The expedition spent one month on Mabuiag and five months on Mer before travelling to Sarawak. 14 Rivers Papers, Cambridge University Library 12304 ‘Colour Perception’. These papers include publications from the 1840s through to 1912 including the findings of R. S. Woodworth, Holmgren, Virchow and Cohn, amongst others. The focus of his interest seems to be non-European and includes references to articles on Nubia, Australia, North America, Congo, Madagascar, Polynesia, the Philippines, Siberia, New Zealand, Arabia, China, Japan, South America and Lapland. Specifically with regards to India, Rivers refers to Kolélmann in J.d.E, vol.16 (1884), p. 164, an article which referred to tests on 23 Sinhalese and three Hindus none of whom turned out to be colour blind. He also made notes on colour terms in Tamil in the journal Indian Antiquity, vol.3 (1874), as well as noting the terms for blue in Bihar (asmani, kāgī and lila) from P. A. Grieson, Bihar Peasant Life (Calcutta, 1885) as well as referring to the prevalence of terms for black, red, yellow, green and white with reference to articles in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol.18 (1849) and vol.75 (1857) and the Journal of the Asiatic Institute of Bengal, vol.62 (1872). He also referred to nil and nila from the Rg. Veda which he believed to refer to the blue of lotus and water but which was not used to describe the sky. 15 See Herle and Philip, Torres Strait Islanders; Herle and Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait; Jeremy Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders: Custom and colonialism (Cambridge, 1987); M. Laurie, Myths and Legends of the Torres Strait (St Lucia, 1970); D. Moore, The Torres Strait Collections of Arthur C. Haddon (London, 1984). See also Arthur C. Haddon, Head Hunters: Black, White and Brown (London, 1901) for a lively, personal account and succinct summary of the expedition’s activities. 16 Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders, p.47. 17 Beckett, Torres Strait Islanders, p.112. 18 A. C. Haddon, ‘The Saving of Vanishing Knowledge’, Nature, vol.55 (1897), pp.305–6. 19 Joseph Jastrow, ‘Review of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Straits’, Science, vol.15.384 (9 May 1902), pp.742–44. 20 E. B. Titchener, ‘The Equipment of a Psychological Laboratory’, American Journal of Psychology, vol.11.2 ( Jane, 1900), pp.251–65. On the ground floor there should be an auditorium and a museum room and a room for instruments;



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on the second floor there should be two laboratories for optics while the attic should be reserved for photography and storage. See, for example, the instances of colour blindness discussed in L. I. Blake and W. S. Franklin, ‘Colour Blindness as a Product of Civilization’, Science, vol.13.317 (1 March 1889), p.171, which argues that men were more prone to colour blindness because of their consumption of tobacco. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.56. These objects would be donated to CUMMA. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.49. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.55. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.53. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.55. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.55. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.63. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.55. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, pp.67–68. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, pp.67–68. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, pp.94–95. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, pp.94–95. Galton noted that some people named colours after days of the week, Inquiries, p.123. For the tintometer see Colour Tests by Means of Lovibond’s Tintometer, F. E. Loriband (New York, 1926). This test should be performed in daylight. It was used to test dyers, chemists, printers and to test colour blindness. See Joseph Williams Lovibond, Introduction to the Study of Colour Phenomena Explaining a New Theory of Colour (London, 1905). Lovibond wrote extensively on colour testing; see his Measurement of Light and Colour (London, 1893); idem, The Genesis of Colour (Salisbury, 1915), idem, Light and Colour Theories and Their Relation to Light and Colour Standardization (London, 1915). Loribond’s tintometer was subsequently adapted as the Pigmentation Meter to test pigment in hair, eyes and skin. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.90. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.51. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.89. W. H. R. Rivers, Medicine, Magic and Religion (London, 1924), p.56. See also his lecture given at the Rylands Library 1919, ‘Mind and Medicine’ which draws on Freud’s work on hysteria to study the mental factor in disease and the role of emotions in relation to the self. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.56. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.87. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.70. ‘Mair was red ochre and mairmair was apparently an old word for red although very rarely used now’; Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.56.











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45 Brian Massumi, ‘Too-Blue: Color-Patch for an Expanded Empiricism.’ Cultural Studies, vol.14, no.2 (2000), pp. 253–302. 46 See Erwin Straus, The Primary World of the Senses (London, 1935) for this distinction of perception and sensation; Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation (New York, 1981). 47 Massumi, ‘Too Blue’; idem, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, affect, sensation (Durham, NC, 2002). 48 F. M. Adams and C. E. Osgood, ‘A Cross-cultural Study of the Affective Meanings of Colour’, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, vol.4 (1973), pp. 134–55; R. D’Andrade and M. Egan, ‘The Colors of Emotion’, American Ethnologist, vol.1 (1974), pp.49–63. 49 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.210. 50 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.212. 51 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p.213. 52 Many of these drawings are in the Rivers and Haddon Papers, CUL – Mss 1019, 1020, 1021, 1026, 1034, 1041, 1043, 2019, 2045, 12014, 12080. 53 The interest in the relationship between art and evolution was a longstanding concern of Haddon’s. He published Evolution in Art: As illustrated by the life histories of design in London, 1895. This work takes inspiration from Henry Balfour’s The Evolution of Decorative Art (London, 1893) and from H. Stolpe’s ‘Evolution in the Ornamental Art of Savage Peoples’, in Transactions of the Rochdale Literature and Science Society (1891) and H. Colley March, ‘The Meaning of Ornament or its Archaeology and its Psychology’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society (1889). 54 Schaffer, From Physics to Anthropology, p.33. 55 A. C. Haddon, ‘Review’, of Yrjö Hirn’s The Origins of Art (1900), Mind, vol.10.40 (October, 1901), pp. 541–45. 56 Haddon, ‘Review’, p.542. 57 Haddon, ‘Review’, p.545. 58 See A. C. Haddon, ‘The Science of Art’, Nature, vol.56 (1897), p.45. 59 Anon., ‘Review of Haddon’s Evolution of Art ’, Folklore, vol.7.2 ( June, 1896), pp.194–96; 196. See also H. Colley March, ‘Evolution in Art’, Mind, vol.5.18 (April, 1896), pp.261–65. 60 Haddon, Evolution in Art, p.27. 61 Haddon, Evolution in Art, pp.31–32. 62 Haddon, Evolution in Art, pp.131, 123–24. Here Haddon goes on to discuss the use of colour by Pueblo Indians for whom red is the colour of the south, yellow the west, blue the north and white the east. Winds also have colours for these people; pp.123–24. Here he also considers the colours associated with Javanese deities. 63 A. C. Haddon, ‘The Ethnography of the Western Tribes of the Torres Straits’, reprint from JAI (February, 1890), p.374.



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Haddon, Decorative Art, p.499. Hume Nisbet quoted in Haddon, Decorative Art, p.499. Haddon, Decorative Art, p.499. Haddon, Ms 2045, f.253. For this fascinating collection of drawings see the Haddon Papers (CUL) 1020, 1041, 1043, 2012, 2019, 2027, 2045 and 2046 and the Rivers collection in the Haddon Papers 12014, 12015, 12038, 12080. In addition to commissioning drawings, Haddon took rubbings of decorated objects. A. C. Haddon, ‘New Guinea: Native drawings’, Man, vol.4 (1904), pp.33–36; p.33. Haddon, Ms 2045, not paginated. Haddon, Evolution in Art, p.33. Haddon, Evolution in Art, pp.33, 34. This was a method he had previously employed in Decorative Art where he analysed a large number of different art forms from an evolutionary standpoint (masks, pipes, rubbings, drawings, and so on) which seems to have not taken their materiality into consideration. Haddon, Evolution in Art, p.235. Haddon, Decorative Art, p. 21 argues that evolutionary discontinuity could be explained through totemism. He believes that the western tribes represented such totemic animals as dogs, dugongs, crocodiles, snakes, turtles, sharks and sting rays; p. 22. These sometimes appeared as tattoos on their backs. Haddon explains what he meant by totem in his book Evolution in Art ‘as distinguished from a fetish, a totem is never an isolated individual but always a class of objects’; p. 250. He draws directly on J. Frazer’s Totemism (London, 1887). Frazer in turn would later use Haddon’s studies in his revised work on totemism. See the note below. J. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy (London, 1910), vol.1, p.53. Frazer, Totemism pp.24–25, note 4: ‘In a few cases colours are totems, thus red is a Omaha totem, red paint and blue are Cherokee totems…This perhaps explains the aversion which some tribes exhibit for certain colours. Thus red is forbidden in one district of Mangavia (in the South Pacific) because it is thought to be offensive to the gods…The Yezidis abominate blue.’ A. C. Haddon, ‘Presidential Address to the Anthropological Section’, Reports of the 72nd Meeting of the British Association (1902), p.738. See also Haddon, Reports, vol.5, pp.153–93 for detailed discussion of totemism,. For succinct summary of some of the key points made by Frazer and Haddon on totemism see Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo (London, 1960). Haddon, Reports, vol.5, p.35. Rivers, Reports, vol.2, pp.44–45. This is a recurrent theme in Haddon’s diary during the expedition; see Haddon, Ms 1030, f.244.















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82 Haddon, Ms 1030, ff.252–53. In more uncomfortable terms Haddon gave a speech at one of the LMS Sunday services where he declared that ancient Britons had their totems how they painted ‘our bodies blue’ and ‘made magic with wooden figures of men and we stuck pins into clay ones then missionaries came to England and taught us…just as missionaries’ have come to the Torres Strait; Haddon, Ms 1030, ff.234–37. 83 Artists frequently used the rainbow as a device for explaining colour harmonies. See Hume Nisbet, Lessons in Art (London, 1891), p.57. For alternative cultural histories of the rainbow see Lee Raymond, The Rainbow Bridge: Rainbows in art, myth and science (Philadelphia, 2001). 84 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.70. 85 A. Shrukel, ‘At the Australian-Papuan Linguistic Boundary: Sidney Ray’s classification of Torres Strait languages’, in Herle and Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait. Ray wrote extensively on Torres Strait languages in vol.3 of the official Reports as well as publishing ‘The Linguistic Results of the Cambridge Expedition’ in BAAS Reports (1899). Ray also proved invaluable in assisting Rivers in his genealogical investigations. 86 Ray, Reports, vol.3, p.160. 87 Rivers would later write about the rainbow in relation to medicine and magic; see his Medicine, Magic and Religion, p.34: ‘In addition to their belief in the production of disease by the ghosts who watch over tabooed trees, the natives of Eddystone Island also believe in a number of beings with special names such as Mateana, Sea, Ilongo, Paro, Mbimbigo to whom the power of producing disease is ascribed. These beings are personifications of natural phenomena such as thunderbolts, shooting stars and the rainbow and most of them have special haunts often associated with the presence of shrines. Intrusion on these haunts is one of the causes to which disease is ascribed; but these beings are believed to inflict disease quite apart from any offence on the part of the victim. The most frequent mechanism however by which they are believed to produce sickness is through the breaking of a taboo.’ 88 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.70. 89 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.82. 90 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.63. 91 According to Haddon the disused mission house on Mabuiag had holes in the roof and that to make it habitable for himself, Rivers and Ray, they had taken the backdrops used for making photographs to serve as a makeshift flooring; Haddon, Ms 1030, ff.233–34. The hut nonetheless served as a storehouse for ‘curios’. When local people were invited they were asked to pick out objects from this stock pile and to reenact rituals so as to provide a ‘glimmer of the old ceremonies’; Haddon, Ms 1030, f.204. 92 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.84. 93 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.45.











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94 J. Richards, ‘Getting a Result: The expedition’s psychological research, 1898– 1913’, in Herle and Rouse, Cambridge and the Torres Strait, pp.136–57, 167. 95 The importance of testing colour was also being endorsed by E. B. Titchener in vol.1 of his book Experimental Psychology (London, 1902). Henry RadcliffeBrown took full equipment for experimental psychology to the Andaman Islands in 1906 whilst Seligmann worked with similar tests in Sri Lanka in 1907. Seligman (he dropped the second n from his name c.1910) published his results as The Veddas (Cambridge, 1911). Rejecting physical anthropology he aimed to test the Veddas’ senses using the Müller-Lyer illusion, colour aftereffects and Cohn’s E to see that the average distance was 14 metres which was 2.33 times the European norm. He tested colour blindness with Holmgren’s wools whilst using Rothe’s coloured papers to classify colour nomenclature. He noted the indigenous names for colours whilst noting that few men used Sinhalese names for colour and that they linked colours with specific objects – for instance, the colours of flowers and leaves; infra, p.400. 96 Seligman, Veddas, pp.400–1. 97 Seligman, Veddas, p.400. 98 Rivers, Reports, vol.2, p.74. 99 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A particular history of the senses (New York, 1993), p.203. ‘Orchid’ as mistranslation of Blue Flower in Benjamin’s Artwork essay as noted above. 100 Edgar Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India (Madras, 1909), 7 vols.; p.385. 101 A. C. Haddon, ‘Indian Ethnography’, Nature, vol.1108.43 (22 January 1891), pp.270–73. See also his receipt of a letter from the DSA dated 14 February 1891 Haddon Papers HP Env.23. 102 Haddon, ‘Indian Ethnography’, p.270. See also A. C. Haddon, ‘Ethnographic Museums’, Nature, vol.61 (1899); idem, ‘Anthropology, its Position and its Needs’, JAI, vol.33 (1903), pp.11–23. Haddon helped organise the collections of the Horniman Museum. 103 Haddon, ‘Indian Ethnography’, p.273. Haddon quoted in George Stocking, The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison, WI, 1992), p.217. Haddon supported the formation of an Imperial Bureau of Ethnology; see his ‘A Plea for a Bureau of Ethnology for the British Empire’, Nature, vol.56 (1893), pp.574–75. 104 For India see the Rivers Papers 12,040 (The Todas) and 12,042 (India) which included notes on folk songs from eastern India and a list of instructions for recording field data – for instance, language, caste, the status of the panchayat, marriage, who they ate with, as well as details of the Madras Census of 1891 and 1901 as well as the nasal height, width and index of the Nagas and the Todas. The Rivers Papers also include a number of articles and brief references to authorities on the Todas – including S. M. Natesa Sastri, ‘A New Study on



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the Todas’, Madras Mail (28 August 1894), J. Shortt, ‘An Account of the Hill Tribes of the Nilgiris’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society, vol.56 (1869). For an evaluation of Rivers in India see R. L. Rooksby, ‘Rivers and the Todas’, South Asia, vol.1 (1971), pp.109–21. The argument in favour of the ‘ethnographic state’ in India is made by Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (New York, 2003). Thurston and Rivers travelled to the Nilgiri Hills together and on Rivers’ return to Britain they would continue to exchange ideas and papers. See Rivers Papers 12,040 CUL for their correspondence. Thurston sent a letter dated 15 June 1905 to Rivers concerning an article by Shams-ul-ulama Jivari Jamshedji Modi: ‘A Few Notes on the Todas’, published in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, vol.7.1 (1904). In a letter dated 28 May 1905 Thurston asked Rivers for a reprint of his essay on visual acuity which Rivers had read the year before at Basel and at the British Medical Association; ‘I remember you showing me a list in which you and a Kota villager showed no sign of red-green colour blindness.’ He was intrigued by Rivers’ findings that their names were often linked with colours. For anthropology in south India at this time see O. Salemirk and Peter Pels (eds), Colonial Subjects: Essays on the practical history of anthropology (Ann Arbor, MI, 1991); Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (London, 1997); David Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule in Madras (London, 1986) and, most importantly, Dirks, Castes of Mind. Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘The Crimes of Colonialism: Anthropology and the textualization of India’, in Salemirk and Pels (eds), Colonial Subjects, pp. 153–79. In 1889 the Madras Museum Bulletin published Thurston’s syllabus on practical anthropology; Thurston, ‘Syllabus of a Course of Demonstrations as Practical Anthropology Given at the Museum, October 1898’, unpublished lecture. Edgar Thurston, ‘The Madras Museum as an Aid to General and Technical Education’, nos. 454, 455, Educational Department 1 August 1896, OIOC Appendix E, and in the same papers ‘Anthropology in Madras’, Appendix F. The Central Madras Government Museum grew out of the Museum of Geology which had been established in 1851. In 1878 E. George Bidie, the museum’s superintendent, made ethnology one of the subjects which should be studied in relation to the museum’s collections. In 1895 anthropology became a subject of study at Madras University. See A. Aiyappan, ‘One Hundred Years of the Madras Government Museum’, Madras Museum Centennial Bulletin (Madras, 1951), pp.165–90. Lord Ampthill quoted in Aiyappan, ‘One Hundred Years’, p.184. The first edition of Notes and Queries was issued in 1874 although as early as 1839 the British Association for the Advancement of Science established a committee to look into means of investigating different races. The first edition of Notes and Queries examined physical anthropology, culture and miscellaneous



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information. For details see John Urry, Before Social Anthropology: Essays on the history of British anthropology (Reading, 1993). Haddon and Rivers worked on the fourth edition of Notes and Queries, published in 1912, which had been under the process of revision since 1907. By this time Notes and Queries contained far less information on physical anthropology as this had become available separately in the ‘Report of the Committee on Anthropometric Investigation’, published in 1908 by the Royal Anthropological Institute. Instead the sections were more concerned with technology, sociology, arts and sciences. Haddon and Seligmann had initially classified the peoples of the Torres Strait into three different racial groups; A. C. Haddon, ‘Studies in the Anthropogeography of British New Guinea’, Geographical Journal, vol.16.3 (1900), pp. 265–91; Geographical Journal, vol.16.4 (1900), pp. 414–40; C. Seligmann and C. Ray, ‘Studies in Anthropogeography of British Papua New Guinea’, Geographical Journal, vol.16.4 (1900), pp. 440–41. Culturally, Haddon divided the Torres Strait into six regions each of which was ‘characterized by a particular style of design and ornamentation’, Decorative Art, p. 7. Although the published results on physical anthropology only amounted to a few pages, Haddon devoted much time in 1898 to collecting this data. See the Haddon Papers 12,074 for his use of standardised body measurement charts issue by A. Thorn & Co. for skin, eyes and hair. See also his field notes on skin colour 1039; 1042 physical anthropology and craniology; 2001 anthropometric tables; 2003 and 2004 physical anthropology; 2063 notes on the cephalic index. See also Rivers Papers 12074–12075 on physical anthropology. Long after the 1898 expedition Haddon kept up his interest in physical anthropology. His papers include or make reference to W. L. H. Duckworth’s International Agreements for Craniometric and Cephalometric Measurements to be Made of the Living Subject (London, 1913); Anthropometric Investigation of the British Isles (London, 1906) as well as referring to Alphonse Bertillon’s measurements of the ear. W. H. R. Rivers, ‘The Ethnological Analysis of Culture’, BAAS Reports (1911); idem, ‘The Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics’, JAI, vol.30 (1900). See also John Urry, ‘A History of Fieldwork Methods’, in R. Ellen (ed.), Ethnographic Research (London, 1984). Haddon, Reports, vol.1, pp.281, 284. Haddon published his physical findings in Rivista di Antropologia, vol.20 (1916). The nasal index is the breadth x 100/ height of the nose. Haddon, Reports, vol.1, p.3. Urry, Before Social Anthropology, p.115. Herbert Risley, ‘The Study of Ethnology in India’, JAI, vol.20 (1890–91), pp.235–63. Risley, ‘The Study of Ethnology’, p.238. Notes and Queries, p.2.



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119 Christopher A. Morton and Elizabeth Edwards (eds), Photography, Anthropology, History (Aldershot, 2009); Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Straightforward and Ordered: Amateur photographic surveys and scientific aspiration, 1885–1914’, Photography and Culture, vol.1.2 (2008), pp.185–210; Christopher Pinney, ‘Camera Work as Technical Practice in Colonial India’, in Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural studies, history and the material turn (London, 2010), pp.145–70. 120 The project of Notes and Queries involved many of the most famous scientists of the day: Darwin wrote on physiognomy, as well as Galton and Tylor. In the 1874 edition John Beddoe wrote Section VI on colour – which draws on Broca and which reproduces 20 of his eye shades in colour. Beddoe, p.8, did note that the frequency of colour is likely to be overestimated. According to Broca, the iris is blue, grey, green, dull, violet or orange. Each shade needs to be divided into five tones. The problem with this method according to Beddoe is that the iris is not uniform in tone. The colour of hair should be judged in moderate shadow. In all instances of corporeal colour, climate, disease and age must be taken into account. The anthropologist should ask (p.10), ‘is any particular colour more highly esteemed or disliked?’ Is there abnormal colour? In the 1892 edition of Notes and Queries colour is no longer listed in the contents as a separate topic although it does feature in ‘Descriptive characters on eyes and skin’ and it is given similar attention to the 1874 edition which suggests a shift towards experimental psychology where colour had to be noted in relation to a ‘synaesthetic’ or at least sentient approach that aligned it with tactility. While Broca’s tests for skin were still upheld, his tests for hair colour were now replaced with Topinard’s streamlined classification for hair colour. Skin colour is best tested by taking a visual swatch from the upper arm. Specifically, the question becomes whether castes differ in colour (p.17) which indicates the shift towards travel/anthropological investigation in India since 1874. Topinard’s system for eye classification was now favoured over Broca. The 1899 edition of Notes and Queries referred directly to the Colour Sense as a category for inquiry as well to visual acuity which should be defined in relation to Haken’s letter E test (at six metres) and Holmgren’s wools; pp.41–44. Following Holmgren, the test for light green should be the first test carried out. 121 Colour tests for eyes, skin and hair were the only coloured plates in the pre1912 editions of Notes and Queries. 122 Notes and Queries, p.43. 123 Specimens should be preserved in formalin or whisky whilst skin and hair should be prepared with arsenic. 124 Eye colour should be noted in a good light but not direct sunlight. The colour of the iris should be seen at ½ yard to obtain the general effect. Dark includes all browns and black; light includes pure blue, light grey and palest green; neutral comprises light hazel, yellow and most shades of green, dark and brownish greys and all uncertain colours’; Notes and Queries, p.44.



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125 Herbert Risley, Tribes and Castes of Bengal: Anthropometric data (Calcutta, 1891), 2 vols. 126 In 1898 the British association for the advancement of science established a committee for the collection, preservation and systematic registration of photographs of anthropological interest. Haddon contributed a chapter on photography in the 1899 edition of Notes and Queries. 127 Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Performing Science: Still photography and the Torres Strait expedition’, in Herle and Rouse (eds), Cambridge and the Torres Strait, pp.106–35; p.116. 128 Edwards, ‘Performing Science’, p.130. 129 For these cameras see Haddon Papers HP Env. 4020. Half-plate negatives were used for portraits and ritual sites due to slower emulsion and short focal length. 130 Edwards, ‘Performing Science’, p.116. 131 ‘Ethnographic Survey of India in connection with the Census of 1901’, Man, vol.2 (1901), pp.137–41. This is basically an extract from nos.3219–3932 of the Proceedings of the Government of India in the Home Department Public, Simla, 23 May 1901, together with the letter from Sir Michael Foster, President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 132 For an extensive advocacy of the use of photography in relation to anthropology see M. V. Portman, ‘Photography for Anthropologists’, JAIGB&I, vol.25 (1896), pp.75–87 which acted as a direct critique of the paucity of photography in the earlier editions of Notes and Queries. 133 E. F. im Thurn, ‘Anthropological Uses of the Camera’, Nature, vol.47.1223 (1893), pp.548–51; p.550. 134 Im Thurn, ‘Anthropological Uses’, pp.548–49. 135 John L. Myers, ‘The Evil Eye and the Camera’, Man, vol.5 (1905), p.12. 136 Thurston’s photographs were also reproduced in J. Deniker’s The Races of Man (New York, 1906) which also included an appendix of Risley’s measurements. 137 Herbert Risley, People of India (London, 1908) p.13. 138 Risley, People of India, p.13. 139 Risley, People of India, pp.14–15 (my emphasis). 140 Risley, People of India, p.15. 141 Risley, People of India, p.17. 142 J. Arthur H. Hatt, The Colourist: Designed to correct the commonly held theory that red, yellow and blue are the primary colours and to supply the much needed easy method of determining colour harmony (London, 1908), p.2. 143 Hatt, The Colourist, p.57. 144 See Jordanna Bailkin, ‘Indian Yellow: Making and breaking the imperial palette’, Journal of Material Culture, 10 (2005), pp.197–214 for discussion of Oliver Olds’ book Trinity of Colour. 145 Hume Nisbet, Lessons in Art, p.80.



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146 Magnus quoted in Saunders and van Brakel, Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities of Color, pp.138–39. 147 Richard C. Temple, ‘The Value of a Training in Anthropology for the Administrator’, Man, vol.14 (1914), pp.34–36. 148 Thurston was instrumental in founding and filling the pages of the Madras Museum Bulletin. He wrote numerous articles on diverse subjects as pearl fisheries, the Dravidian head, marriage customs, punishment and anthropology; see vols 1–5. 149 Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘The Policing of Tradition: Colonialism and Anthropology in south India’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol.39.1 (1997), pp.182–212; p.205. 150 Mullaly was appointed in 1893. The year before he published Notes on Criminal Classes of the Madras Presidency (Madras, 1892). This concern with criminality was officially formalised by the passing of the Criminal Tribes Act in 1871. 151 In the early 1890s the Bertillon system was adopted in Bengal, followed by Madras in an attempt to identify habitual criminals who moved from place to place. 152 Judicial Department Madras, G.O. 1838, 9–9–93. By 1895 police officers were being trained in anthropometry on a regular basis. 153 Judicial Department, Madras, G.O. 1838, 9–9–93. See also Aiyyapan, ‘One Hundred Years’, p.186. 154 This survey was financed for a period of five years, then extended by the government to eight years with an annual allotment of Rs 5000; this included Rs 2000 for monographs and questionnaires. See W. Francis, Report on the Census (Madras, 1901). 155 Edgar Thurston’s Castes and Tribes of Southern India was published by the Government Press, Madras. Its publication date coincided with Anantha Krishna Iyer’s Cochin Tribes and Castes (Madras, 1909). Thurston’s previous monograph on the topic, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India is based on a series of essays, several of which had appeared in the Madras Museum Bulletin. Dirks notes that if the caste-by-caste entries in Castes and Tribes focused on the social, in Ethnographic Notes the essays hone in on the body; Dirks, Policing of Tradition, p.207. 156 The entries on each caste or tribe vary from a sentence to 75 pages and include occupation, folklore, kinship structure, marriage and funerary rites, dress and decoration. The state of Mysore was excluded in the ethnography but included in the anthropometry discussion. 157 A. T. W. Penn of Ootacamund also took photographs of the Todas, Kurumbas and Badagas. Thurston also relied on Anantha Krishna Iyer for the survey in Cochin and on N. Subramani Iyer, Superintendent of Travancore. He also acknowledged C. Hayavadana Rao who was engaged in the preparation of the District Gazetteers; Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xi. 158 ‘One advantage possessed by modern investigators over their predecessors and one which may be held to compensate them in part for the above mentioned loss of material, is the use of modern means of record, such as photography,



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phonography, anthropometry and so on, which are invaluable aids in the study of races such as those just referred to…Anthropometry, especially the facial, nasal and cranial indices provided by it has fallen somewhat into discredit there owing to the exaggerated superstructure of theory impulsively set up on a narrow and unstable base of restricted observations. Dr Thurston’s work in this line is not open to this imputation’, Thurston, ‘South Indian Ethnology’, Geographical Journal, vol.36.6 (1910), pp.719–21; p.721. Shridhar V. Ketkar, ‘Review of Castes and Tribes of Southern India by Edgar Thurston’, American Anthropologist, vol.12.3 (1910), pp.451–54. Ketkar, ‘Review’, p.454. Ketkar, ‘Review’, p.454. In the Introduction to Castes and Tribes Thurston set out his scholarly credentials by quoting from leading European authorities such as Topinard’s Anthropology, translated into English in 1894. According to Topinard, the Hindu type divides the population of India into the Black, Mongolian and the Aryan. Herbert Risley, The People of India (Calcutta, 1908) divided the Dravidians of southern India into two types – the Dravidians and the Scytho-Dravidians, the latter having much broader heads; p.xxxvii. Thurston also explores Huxley’s thesis in Anatomy of Vertebrated Animals (London, 1871), that Dravidians and Australians are of the same racial group; pp.xxvii–xxviii. The other accounts he turns to in relation to possible racial origins and migration in southern India are: Haeckel, History of Creation; Wallace, History of the Malay Archipelago (1890); Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Archipelago (1906); A. H. Keane, Ethnology (1896); Breeks, Primitive Tribes and Monuments of the Nilgiris; W. Francis, Report on the Census (Madras, 1901); Eur Ms E/101 Ethnographical Papers. William Turner wrote extensively on the craniology of the people of India – for a detailed bibliography see S. Zukerman, ‘The Adichanallur Skulls’, Madras Museum Bulletin (2000, repr.). William Turner, ‘The Aborigines of Chuta Nagpur and the Central Provinces, the People of Orissa, Veddhas and Negritos’, Part II of his Contributions to the Craniology of the People of the Empire of India (London, 1900). Turner argued that both Aborigines and Dravidians have dark skins, black hair, dark eyes, low nose with wide nostrils and thick lips; cited in Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xxxv. Turner quoted in Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xxxv. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xxxvii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xlxvi. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xxvi. Rea worked for the Archaeological Department at the Madras Museum. Thurston took measurements of the six preserved skulls from Aditanallur. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.17, p.122; ibid, ‘some of the young women with their raven-black hair dressed in glossy ringlets and bright, glistening eyes are



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distinctly good-looking…but they speedily degenerate into uncomely hags’; infra, p.122. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.2, p.373. Thurston goes on to suggest that the name Irula means darkness or blackness – but he is unclear whether this relates to skin colour or to the dark jungles where the Irula dwell; p.373. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.x. He also complained that ‘routine work at headquarters unhappily keeps me a close prisoner in the office chair for nine months of the year’; Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xiv. See also J.A.B., review, ‘South Indian Ethnology’, Geographical Journal, vol.36.6 (1910), pp.716–20: ‘The field of investigation at first hand of the facts forming the basis of the scientific study of ethnography grows narrower every generation. This is essentially the case with India where the wilder life of the jungle, isolated by centuries of mistrust and inaccessibility has been made acquainted during the last 40 or 50 years with the civilization of the great plains’; p.719. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, pp.xiv–xv. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xv. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.119. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xv. He also noted the use of red European cloth at a Toda funerary procession; Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.123 and that Irulas wore gaudy Manchester piece cloth; Castes and Tribes, vol.2, p.383. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.139. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.144. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.140. Thurston had an obsession with the evil eye – see his book Omens and Superstitions of Southern India (London, 1912), esp. pp.109–20 Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvi. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.2, p.373. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvi. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.2, p.373. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvi. Thurston was particularly interested in the evil eye in southern Indian culture and wrote on this subject in his Ethnographic Notes which he connected with animals and votive offerings and the forcible removal of the teeth of the sorcerer in order to counteract the evil effects of his spells and the custom of calling in members of lower castes or tribes to commit crimes of violence. Magical powers were by Thurston accorded to the ‘aboriginal’ hill tribes. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, pp.xvii–xviii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, pp.xvi–xvii.



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Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.158. Dirks, Policing of Tradition, p.165. Thurston, cited in Dirks, Policing of Tradition, p.165. Compare this with the toned-down version: ‘The Paniyan women of the Wynaad believed that I was going to have the finest specimens among them stuffed for the Madras Museum’, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvi. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xvii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.379. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xviii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xviii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.117. Thurston in the Madras Government Museum Bulletin, vol.4 p.187. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.2, pp.272–73. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xviii. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, vol.1, p.xviii. Thurston did record that at a Toda funeral the corpse was decorated with brass rings, jaggery, a scroll of paper adorned with cowry shells, snuff, tobacco, coconuts, biscuits, grain, ghee, honey, a tin-framed looking glass and an Arcot rupee of the East India Company tied close to the feet; Castes and Tribes, vol.7, p.156. Rivers, ‘Observations on the Vision’, p.3. Rivers examined 65 Uralis and 18 Sholagas for colour vision. Rivers, ‘Observations on the Senses of the Todas’, p.322. See Stocking, Ethnographer’s Magic, p.36. This is the argument made by Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity. As in the Torres Strait, Rivers spent six months in southern India – thus indicating what he perceived to be the judicious time frame for sufficient fieldwork. He spent most of his time investigating the Todas of the Nilgiri Hills. Thurston no doubt advised Rivers on his choice of individuals to be tested. From his own experience, Thurston wrote favourably of those men who had previously experienced contact with Europeans: ‘I came across one Toda who with several other members of the tribe was selected on account of fine physique for exhibition at Barnum’s show in Europe, America and Australia some years ago, and still retained a smattering of English, talking fondly of Shumbu (the elephant jumbo). For some time after his return to his hill abode, a tall white hat was the admiration of his fellow tribesmen. To this man finger-prints came as no novelty since his impressions were recorded both in England and America’, Castes and Tribes, vol.7, pp.119–20. Edgar Thurston, ‘Observations on the Vision’, p.3. The test included 65 Uralis and 18 Sholagas. Rivers, ‘Observations on the Senses of the Todas’, p.239. Rivers, Report on the Psychology and Sociology of the Todas, p.239.



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212 ‘There was perfectly definite nomenclature for red, less definite nomenclature for yellow, a definite term for green which was however also used for brown and grey and sometimes for black. Light blue was sometimes given the same name as green but was usually called black while the darker indigo was almost unanimously given the same name as black. The common Indian word for blue nil or nila was very little used and just as often for black as for blue… corresponding to the defective nomenclature for blue there was the same high threshold for this colour in the tintometer test which I found in Murray Island and Upper Egypt’; Rivers, ‘Primitive Colour Vision’, p.10. 213 Rivers, Report on the Psychology and Sociology of the Todas, pp.239–40. 214 Rivers perceived this decay in visual acuity to be most acute in Torres Strait people 35 to 40 years of age whilst in south India the jungle conditions meant there was less light exposure. 215 Rivers, Report on the Psychology and Sociology of the Todas, p.240. 216 Rivers, Report on the Psychology and Sociology of the Todas, p.239. 217 Rivers, ‘Observations on the Senses of the Todas’, p.335. 218 Rivers, ‘Observations on the Senses of the Todas’, p.328 (my emphasis). 219 Rivers, Report on the Psychology and Sociology of the Todas, p.331. 220 Only the Uralis used Tamil words: ‘The majority of the Uralis and all the Sholagas applied to red and a crimson-purple the Canarese term kempu while the minority of the Uralis used the Tamil term sikapu. Those who used Tamil words called orange and yellow manjal; some others used the Canarese term for green and either called ornage kempu or could not give it a name. No one used the Tamil word pachai for green but nearly all called it haseru while some called this colour masalai used otherwise for grey and brown. A few called green kangu. The others called blue haesru, kala or karupu. Indigo was almost unanimously called kala, kara or karupu (black). Violet was usually called either haseru or karaupu; one man called this colour kaka after the crow and three men called it kempu. A very large number of names were applied to brown papers and wools, including kempu, manjal, haseru, kururpu, mila and masalai, while several called brown puthi, ash-colour or kangu used otherwise for green. White was unanimously called vellapu. Black was usually named karupur, more rearly kala, haseru, masalai or mila. Greys were usually called veliapu if light karaou, haseru, masalai or nela if dark’; see Rivers, ‘Observations on the Vision’, pp.9–10. 221 Rivers tested 55 Uralis and 16 Sholagas with letter E. 222 The Sholagas tested were under 45 years old; see Rivers, ‘Observations on the Vision’, p. 4. As an endnote to this article, Thurston included his use of Cohn’s E which he had used on his recent tour of the Mysore Province. He tested 30 brahmins and 39 non-brahmins with the same size E that Rivers had used – he found that his results were close to Rivers’ tests among 55 Uralis; p. 18.



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223 Rivers, ‘Observations on the Vision’, p.4. 224 Simon Schaffer, ‘On Seeing me Write: Inscription devices in the South Seas’, Representations, vol.97.1 (2008), pp.90–122. 225 Rivers, ‘Primitive Orientation’, p.209. 226 To test colour vision in Egypt Rivers tried to get individuals to differentiate between two patches of light by using left or right. Instead they used colloquial terms for north and south. He also noted that the Sanskrit dakshina referred to both right and south; Rivers, ‘Primitive Orientation’, pp.210–11. 227 Rivers, ‘Primitive Orientation’, p.210. 228 Haddon, ‘The Ethnography of the Western Tribes’, p.318. 229 Haddon, Reports, vol.5, p.356. 230 Haddon, ‘The Ethnography of the Western Tribes’, pp.401–2. 231 Haddon, Reports, vol.5, p.356. 232 Haddon, Reports, vol.5, p.356. 233 Haddon, Reports, vol.5, p.356. For the ‘aurality’ of photography see Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Photography and the Sound of History’, Visual Anthropological Review, vol.21.1 (2006), pp.27–46. 234 Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in a Strict Sense of the Term (London, 1967), p.248. 235 Malinowski, A Diary, p.65. 236 Malinowski, A Diary, p.257. 237 Malinowski, A Diary, p.85. There are important precedents for his lyricism in relation to jungle and sea. See for instance Hume Nisbet, A Colonial Tramp (London, 1896) which is filled with the artist’s colour notes and his love of colour: ‘In the morning we saw the dawn effect of Indian yellow and white with purple clouds, the surface of the ocean oily…square of prismatic yellow, green, red blue and silver white’; p.54. 238 Malinowski, A Diary, p.64. 239 Taussig, What Colour is the Sacred?, p.83. 240 Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and their Magic (London, 1935), p.377. 241 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922), pp. 517–18 (author’s emphasis). 242 Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Preface’, to Julius Lips, The Savage Hits Back, or the White Man through Native Eyes (New Haven, CT, 1937), p.i. 243 Malinowski, ‘Preface’, p.xix. 244 Malinowski, ‘Preface’, p.xxi. 245 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.26. 246 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.28. 247 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.28. 248 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.58. 249 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.58. Lips discusses several figures of British governor-generals of India produced by Indian artists in relation to the



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representation of the Uprising of 1857–58 now in the Lahore Museum in addition to statues of Queen Alexandria, wife of Edward VII and Colonel Stewart and his wife in a temple at Cawnpore; infra, pp.52–53. 250 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.48. 251 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, p.49. 252 Lips, The Savage Hits Back, pp.105, 113. Chapter 4 1 P. C. Ray, History of Hindu Chemistry (Calcutta, 1902), vol.1. 2 Ananda Coomarswamy, ‘The International Congress of Applied Chemistry 1901: and aniline dyes’, in Ananda Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi (Madras, 1909), pp.36–43; pp.36–37. 3 Coomaraswamy, ‘The International Congress’, p.38. 4 Jacques Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, in Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (London, 1981), pp.20–128; p.121. 5 Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p.110. 6 Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p.71. 7 Socrates quoted in Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p.100. Plato’s Republic calls painters’ colours pharmaka. 8 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories (Princeton, NJ, 1993). 9 Derrida, ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’, p.70. 10 Coomaraswamy, Art and Swadeshi, p.123. 11 See also Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York, 2009), p.85. 12 Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a ‘New’ Indian Art: Artists, aesthetics and nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 (Cambridge, 1992); Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922: Occidental orientations (London, 1994). 13 For Abanindranath Tagore see Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a ‘New’ Indian Art; Mitter, Art and Nationalism; Debashish Banerji, ‘Locating Abanindranath Tagore: Local, regional and transanational concerns in turn of the century Indian artist’, unpublished Ph.D, University of California, Berkeley (2005); idem, The Alternate Nation of Abanindranath Tagore (Delhi, 2010); P. Sundar, ‘Art and Swadeshi’, in Patrons and Philistines: Arts and the state in British India, 1773–1947 (London, 1995). I term colour swadeshi so as to avoid the conflicts in the division of elite and subaltern ideas on colour. The artists and political thinkers I discuss were all members of the indigenous elite. Their relationship with subaltern art and politics is extremely problematic – I discuss this in the conclusion to this chapter. 14 Abanindranath Tagore, Sadanga: Six limbs of painting (Calcutta, 1916). It was previously published in the journal Bharati in 1914; O. C. Gangoly published



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this work also as a booklet in 1921. See also Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of art in colonial and postcolonial India (New York, 2004). See below for contemporary criticism of Sadanga’s sources. For swadeshi see Ranajit Guha, ‘Discipline and Mobilise’, in Ranajit Guha, Dominance Without Hegemony: History and colonialism in India (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp.100–50; S. Sarkar, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal (Delhi, 1973); Haridas Mukerjee and Uma Mukherjee, India’s Fight For Freedom or the Swadeshi Movement, 1905–1906 (Calcutta, 1958); S. P. Basu, Swadeshi Movement in Bengal and Freedom Struggle in India (Delhi, 2004); Manu Goswami, Producing India: From colonial economy to national space (New York, 2004); Andrew Sartori, ‘The Categorical Logic of a Colonial Nationalism: Swadeshi Bengal, 1904– 1908’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol.23.1 (2003), pp.271–85; S. Deshpande, ‘The Imagined Economies: Styles of nation building in 20th-century India’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, vol.25–26 (1993), pp.5–35. Rabindranath Tagore, Greater India (Calcutta, 1921). Bipin Chanda Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj (Calcutta, 1907), p.256. Goswami, Producing India, p.257. See Andrew Sartori, Bengal in Global Concept History: Culturalism in the age of capital (Chicago, 2008). Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj, p.108. Pal, Swadeshi and Swaraj, pp.87–88. Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Body Politic(s): Maps and Mother Goddesses in modern India’, in Richard Davis (ed.), Picturing the Nation: Iconographies of modern India (Delhi, 2007), pp. 32–50; idem, ‘Visualizing India’s Geobody’, in Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond Appearances? Visual practices and ideologies in modern India (Delhi, 2003), pp. 157–95; idem, ‘Maps and Mother Goddesses in Modern India’, Imago Mundi, vol. 53 (2001), pp. 32– 50; idem, The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping modern India (Durham, NC, 2010); Christopher Pinney, ‘Photos of the Gods’: The printed image and political struggle in India (London, 2004). Ramila processions in Agra and Allahabad juxtaposed Hindu deities with nationalist figures and superimposed images of female deities on the map of colonial India to figure Bharat Mata. These representations of Bharat Mata were placed on platforms or paraded through the streets. A similar iconography appears on coins and medals which acted as legal tender in swadeshi shops or as charm lockets of success, as prizes at schools and as national badges. The front of some of these coins was inscribed with Lakshmi who appeared on the back of many of the medals along with a prayer for national wealth. Sister Nivedita, ‘Bharat Mata’, Prabasi, in Sister Nivedita, Works, vol.3 (Calcutta, 1906; repr. 1967). Nivedita cited in Mitter, Art and Nationalism, p.255.



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Sister Nivedita, Works, vol.6, p.7. Sister Nivedita, Works, vol.6, p.12. ‘Ravi Varma’, Modern Review, vol.2 (1907), pp.85–90; p.87. See the excellent article by Jordanna Bailkin, ‘Indian Yellow: Making and breaking the imperial palette’, Journal of Material Culture, vol.10.2 (2005), pp.197–214. Bailkin notes that according to the Indian Penal Code of 1860 cows were not considered sacred and thus they were not covered by section 295 of the Code – the section against destroying places of worship or objects held sacred; infra, p.207. Bailkin, ‘Indian Yellow’, p.208. See Bailkin, ‘Indian Yellow’, p.208 for these issues. Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s artists and the avant-garde, 1922–1947 (London, 2007), ch. 3. For the contentious medium of oil see Saloni Mathur, ‘Art and Empire: On oil, antiquities and the war in Iraq’, New Formations, vol.65.1 (November, 2008), pp.119–35. Abanindranath Tagore’s first major work in miniature is the Krishna Lila series of 23 paintings dating from 1896. For Tagore’s work see the collections at Visva Bharati and Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan; The Museum of Modern Art, Delhi; the Indian Museum, Kolkata; Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. See also the archives at Rabindra Bharati Society, 5, Dwarkanath Tagore Lane, Kolkata; Kala Bhavan and Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan. Tagore’s writings are collected in Abindra Rachanabali, 4 vols (Calcutta, 1979); Abanindranath Tagore, Apon Katha: My Story (Chennai, 2004) and Uma Dasgupta, ‘Letters: Abanindranath to Havell’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.46.1–4 (1980–81). For his work, see Rani Chando, Shilpiguru Abanindranath (Calcutta, 1972); B. Choudhury, Lipir Shilpi Abanindranath (Calcutta, 1973); Alokendranath Tagore, Abanindranath Tagore (Delhi, 1989); Banerji, The Alternate Nation. Nandalal Bose, Vision and Creation (Calcutta, 1989), p.129. Bose, Vision and Creation, pp.132–33. Jaya Appasamy, Abanindranath Tagore and the Art of his Times (Calcutta, 1968), p.21. Tagore had been trained in oils, watercolour and pastels by the professional artists O. Gilhardhi and C. L. Palmers although like his wash paintings his pastels were primarily articulated through the blurring or juxtaposition of colours. See Alokendranath Tagore, Abindranath Tagore; B. Mukherjee, ‘The Art of Abanindranath Tagore’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.8 (1942); J. P. Gangoly, ‘Early Reminiscences’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.7 (1942). Bose, Vision and Creation, p.130. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.134. By the time Bose was writing he cited an opinion of Tagore’s successors that they found his paintings ‘flat and monotonous like damp rice crispies’, even being seen as clumsy and hard. Bose



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saw the technical difficulties involved in Tagore’s work – this wash technique required that the painting be kept wet for long periods of time. Tenshin Okakura, The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (London, 1904); D. Kowshik, Okakura: The rising sun of Japanese renaissance (Delhi, 1988); Ashish Nandy, ‘A New Cosmopolitanism: Towards a dialogue of Asian civilizations’, in Kuan-Hsing Chen (ed.), Trajectories (London, 1998), pp.142–49; Rustom Bharucha, Another Asia: Rabindranath Tagore and Okakura Tenshin (Delhi, 2006). As part of the museum display of Rabindranath’s life at Jorasanko, there is a whole series of rooms dedicated to Japan. Abanindranath Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, translated by Kshitrs Ray from Joransankor Dhave, reproduced in Indian Society of Oriental Art, Abanindranath Tagore (Calcutta, 1961), pp. 42–43. Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, pp.42–43. For Okakura and the Nihong artists see Shigemi Inaga, ‘Cognitive Gaps in the Recognition of Masters and Masterpieces in the Formative Years of Japanese Art History, 1880–1900: Historiography in conflict’, in Japanese Hermeneutics: Current debates on aesthetics and interpretation (Honolulu, 2002), pp.115–26. Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, p.85. By 1909 Nihonga artists had abandoned the wash technique. See E. P. Conant, J. Rimer and S. Owyoung, Nihonga: Transcending the past in Japanese-style painting, 1868–1968 (Tokyo, 1995). Tagore used Fitzgerald’s translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and 12 of his paintings were published in London in 1910 – thus indicating that Tagore was attempting to appeal to several audiences. Fitzgerald took liberties with the arrangement of the verses. See R. Siva Kumar, ‘Abanindranath’s Paintings Based on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam’, Lavanya: A journal of the Chandigarh Lalit Kala Akademi, vol.1.3 (1995). I say ‘relatively conventional’ because the experimentation with watercolour does vary in the Krisna Lila series. Compare, for instance, Akrur Samvad, which apart from the sky, keeps the pigment within the bounds of the architecture and the figures with the wonderful almost Gauguin-esque landscape of Ras where the trees are suggested by bold strokes of blue wash and where a large strand of gold leaf is rhythmically applied as the border of one the dancing maid’s sari. These paintings are in the collection of Rabindra Bharati Society, Kolkata and reproduced as plates 1.4 and 1.5 in Banerji, Alternative Nation. Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, p.42. Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, p.89. Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, p.89. Tagore, ‘Reminiscences’, p.89. Abanindranath Tagore, Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy (Calcutta, 1914). Abanindranath Tagore, ‘Likeness’, in Abanindranath Tagore, p.10.









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52 Tagore, ‘Likeness’, pp.10–11. 53 Abanindranath Tagore wrote extensively on art. See, for instance, his ‘The Three Forms of Art’, Modern Review, vol.1.2 (1907); ‘Ki o Keno’, Prabasi, vol.32.7; ‘Shilpe Tridhara’, Bharati, vol.33.3; Some Notes on Artistic Anatomy; Bharat Shilpa (Calcutta, 1909); Bageshwari Lectures, delivered at Calcutta University, 1941–48 (Calcutta, 1999); and his turn to folk traditions in Banglar Brata (Calcutta, 1919). 54 Ho’s six laws of Chinese painting are: spiritual tone and life movement; manner of brushwork; form; colours; composition and grouping; copying of classical models. 55 O. C. Gangoly, in Sadanga, pp.i–ii. 56 Abanindranath Tagore, Sadanga, p.3. 57 Tagore, Sadanga, p.4. 58 Tagore, Sadanga, p.6. 59 Tagore, Sadanga, pp.7–8. 60 Tagore, Sadanga, p.8. 61 Tagore, Sadanga, p.9. 62 Tagore, Sadanga, p.12. 63 Tagore, Sadanga, p.13. 64 Tagore, Sadanga, p.14. 65 Tagore, Sadanga, p. 14. 66 Tagore, Sadanga, p.15. 67 Tagore, Sadanga, p.16. 68 Tagore, Sadanga, p.17. 69 Tagore, Sadanga, p.17. 70 Tagore, Sadanga, p.18. 71 Tagore, Sadanga, p.19. 72 Tagore, Sadanga, p.20. 73 Tagore, Sadanga, p.21. 74 An artist in carving the lotus-feet of a goddess would never model the feet exactly similar to the flower or make the lotus resemble the feet of the goddess. He would rather place the lotus near the feet and the feet as near the lotus as he can, knowing full well that if his foot resembles the lotus and the lotus resembles the foot, they will mean nothing. Both will miss conveying the similarity of impression carried to the mind when looking at them. So we see that the proper similitude is that of feelings and not of forms’; Tagore, Sadanga, p. 13. 75 Tagore, Sadanga, p.21. 76 Tagore, Sadanga, p.12. 77 Tagore, Sadanga, p.22. 78 Tagore, Sadanga, p.22. 79 Tagore, Sadanga, p.22.



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80 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London, 2001). As what follows is a summary of his ideas I have not included page numbers. 81 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (London, 2003). Again I am summarising the argument so what follows in the discussion is not paginated. 82 Tagore, Sadanga, pp.23–25. See C. Leicester, ‘Keys to the Understanding of Indian and Chinese Painting: The six limbs of Yashodhara and the Six Principles of Hsieh Ho’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol.11.2 (1952). 83 Tagore, Sadanga, p.23. 84 Tagore, Sadanga, p.24. 85 Tagore, Sadanga, p.25. 86 Tagore, Sadanga, p.25. 87 Akshay Maitreya, ‘Bharat Chitra-Charcha’, Bharatbarsha (Ashrin, 1922). 88 Akshay Maitreya, signed as ‘A.M.’, ‘Principles of Indian painting: A review’, Rupam, vol.17 ( January, 1924), pp.130–33. See also his ‘Aims and Methods of Painting in Ancient India’, Rupam, vol.16 (December, 1923); pp.120–23. 89 Maitreya, ‘Principles’, p.130. 90 Vishnudharmottara, Part III was translated into English and published in Bombay, 1912 and later republished and discussed by Stella Kramrisch (2nd edition, 1928). The preface is by Akshay Maitreya. 91 Maitreya, ‘Principles’, p.132. 92 Maitreya, ‘Principles’, pp.132–33. 93 This argument is made by Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, ch.5. 94 Kramrisch’s Visnudharmottara is based on the publication of one Sanskrit version of the text published in 1912 and edited by Pandit Madhusudana. Here I keep to her reading of the text when revised in 1928 as it is contemporary with Tagore’s writings and a growing interest in ancient Sanskrit sources. There have been subsequent editions of the Visnudharmottara which are somewhat critical of her reliance on this published source; C. Sivivaramamurti, The Citrasutra of the Visnudhamottara (Delhi, 1978); P. D. Mukherji, The Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana (Delhi, 2001). In relation to her translation and the new interest in publishing Sanskrit sources on painting, see Kramrisch, ‘A Treatise on Indian Painting’, Journal of the Department of the Letters, vol.2 (Calcutta, 1924), pp. 1–56; idem, ‘The Expressiveness of Indian Art’, Calcutta Review, vols 1–2 (1922), pp. 4–10; idem, ‘The Influence of Race on Early Indian Art’, Rupam, vol.18 (1924), pp. 34–39; Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘The Visnudharmottara, Chapter XII’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol.52 (1933), pp. 13–21; idem, ‘The Painter’s Art in Ancient India, Ajanta’, Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, vol.1 (1933), pp. 26–29; idem, ‘A Connection Between Indian Aesthetics and Philosophy’, Rupam, vols 27–28 (1926); K. P. Jayaswal, ‘A Hindu Text on Painting’, Journal of Bihar and Orissa Research Society, vol.9 (1923); S. Sama, ‘Methods of Plastering Walls for Painting’, Indian Historical Quarterly, vol.3 (1927); V. Shasti (ed.),





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Kamasutra of Vatsyayana with Commentary by Yashodhara (Varanasi, 1929); R. Shasti (ed.), Kavyaprakasa of Mammota (Calcutta, 1926); N. Banhati (ed.), Kavyaprakasa of Mammota (Calcutta, 1917); M. R. Kari (ed.), Natyasasta (Baroda, 1926). Here Kramrisch, Visnudhamottara, cites K. P. Jayaswal, ‘A Hindu Treatise on Painting’, Modern Review, vol.33 (1921), p.23. Kramrisch, Visnudhamottara, p.18. Kramrisch, Visnudhamottara, p.23. Kramrisch, Visnudhamottara, p.25. Coomarswamy, Art and Swadeshi, p.130. Coomarswamy, Art and Swadeshi, p.131. Review of the ISOA exhibition in Rupam, vol.6 (April, 1921), p. 43. See also R. K. Mukherji, ‘The Art of the People’, in the same issue, on the need for more fluidity in art and communalist schemes. This had become a common theme in Rupam; see C. R. Ashbee, ‘The Place of the Art of Painting in Modern Life’, 5 January 1921, pp. 15–17; G. Krishna Rao, ‘The Technique of Modern Painting’, in the same issue; and A. K. Haldar, ‘The Subject Matter of Art’, and ‘Mr Aurobindo Ghose on Modern Indian Painting’, both in this issue, pp. 43–57. Rao, ‘The Technique of Modern Painting’, p.18. Rasheed Araeen, ‘Our Bauhaus, Others’ Mud House’, Third Text, vol.3.6 (1989), pp.3–14. For the artists I discuss below, see albeit with a different focus, Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism. Also of relevance are Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism: Essays on contemporary cultural practice in India (Delhi, 2000); S. K. Panikkar, P. Nair and A. Das Gupta, ‘Art, Subjectivity and Ideology in Colonial and Post-Independence India’, Nandan, vol.18 (1997), pp.1–4; Karin Zitzewitz, ‘The Aesthetics of Secularism: Modernist art and visual culture in India’, unpublished PhD, Columbia University, New York (2006). For the nationalist and the cosmopolitan in relation to Muslim South Asian art which I do not discuss in this chapter, see the excellent new book, Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel Hill, NC, 2010). See also Andreas Huyssen, ‘Geographies of Modernism in a Globalizing World’, New German Critique, vol.10 (2007), pp.189–207; D. P. Gaenker (ed.), ‘Alter/ Native Modernities’, special issue of Public Culture, vol.11.1 (1999). See Debashish Banerji, ‘The Hybridity of Colonial Art: G. Tagore’s cubism’, Nandan, vol.23 (2003), pp.45–57. Stella Kramrisch, ‘An Indian Cubist’, Rupam, vol.11 ( July, 1922), pp. 107–9. Gangoly praised Tagore’s ‘architectonic invention, happily crowned with a rich and plastic imagination. Even from the most fantastic arabesques of cubes and parallels, Tagore always succeeds in spelling out a subject’; Gangoly in Rupam quoted in G. Venkatachalam, Contemporary Indian Painters (Delhi, 1948), pp. 25–26.



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107 Annie Besant’s key writings are Home Rule (London, 1916); The Future of Young India (London, 1916); The Birth of New India (London, 1917); England and India (London, 1913); Coercion and Resistance (London, 1919). 108 Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater, Thought Forms (London, 1961 ed.; 1905 1st ed.). 109 Besant and Leadbeater, Thought Forms, pp.33–34. 110 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Culture (London, 1810); E. Hering, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne (1878); Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie (1902). Like Hering, Kandinsky stressed the tensions between black and white, red and green, blue and yellow. 111 Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular (London, 1947). 112 These points are put forward in his work Point and Line to Plane (New York, 1979). 113 Clark Poling, Kandinsky, Russian and Bauhaus Years, 1915–1933 (New York, 1983); idem, ‘Colour Theories of the Bauhaus Artists’, unpublished PhD, Columbia University, New York (1973); idem, ‘Bauhaus Colour’, The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, 1976; idem, Kandinsky’s Teaching at the Bauhaus (New York, 1982); N. G. Parris, ‘Adolf Hölzel’s Structural and Colour Theory and its Relationship to the Development of the Basic Course at the Bauhaus’, unpublished PhD, University of Pennsylvania (1979); F. Daftari, The Influence of Persian Art on Gauguin, Matisse and Kandinsky (New York, 1991); Laxsmi P. Sihare, ‘Oriental Influences on Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, 1909–1917’, unpublished PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York (1967). 114 By this date Abanindranath Tagore had also turned to alpona as the source of artistic inspiration. He wrote a treatise, L’alpona, published in Paris in 1921. 115 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Religion of the Artist’, in The Tagore Reader (Delhi, 2005), pp. 230–40; p. 231; K. Ray, Tagore’s Concept of Art: Essentialism and freedom (Delhi, 2005); Rabindranath Tagore, The Meaning of Art (Calcutta, 1926). 116 Tagore, ‘The Religion of the Artist’, p.233. See also Rabindranath Tagore, On Art and Aesthetics (Calcutta, 1961); W. Cenker, ‘Tagore and the Aesthetic Man’, International Philosophical Quarterly, vol.13.2 (1973). 117 ‘What is Art?’, in Rabindranath Tagore, Personality: Lectures delivered in the United States (London, 1918), pp. 3–40; p. 25. Here Tagore sets out Eastern versus Western art: ‘we have begun to ask ourselves whether creations of art should not be judged either according to their fitness to be universally understood or their philosophical interpretation of life of their usefulness for solving the problems of the day or their giving expression to something which is peculiar to the genius of the people to which the artist belongs’; infra, p. 6. See P. Neogy, Rabindranath Tagore on Art and Aesthetics (Delhi, 1961); L. H. Tenghe, Rabindranath Tagore and His View of Art (London, 1961); K.



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K. Sharma, Tagore’s Aesthetics (London, 1988); M. Anand, The Volcano: Some comments on the development of Tagore’s aesthetic theories and artistic practice (Baroda, 1967); P. Chaudhury, Tagore on Literature and Aesthetics (Calcutta, 1965); S. Ghose, ‘Angel of Surplus: A note on Tagore’s aesthetics’, in M. K. Naik, S. K. Desai and G. S. Amur (eds), Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English (Madras, 1977), pp. 391–401. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘An Eastern University’, in Rabindranath Tagore, Creative Unity (London, 1926), pp.167–203; p.178. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Colour Bar’, The Spectator (9 May 1931), Tagore Files, 246 (ixii), Manuscript archive, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan (hereafter MAVB). Tagore, ‘An Eastern University’, p.178. Although rejecting the agenda of the Calcutta Art School, Tagore continued to have tremendous respect for the work and legacy of E. B. Havell, even planning a Havell Memorial at Kala Bhavan. See Havell Manuscripts 148 MS housed in MAVB. Tagore also wrote an essay in typed form: 110 Ms ‘E. B. Havell’, MAVB. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Some Thoughts on Modern Art in India’, 1934, Tagore File, 206 MAVB. Uma Dasgupta, ‘Santiniketan: School of a poet’, in M. Hasan (ed.), Knowledge, Power and Politics: Educational institutions in India (Delhi, 1998), pp.258–303; N. Tuli, ‘Depth and Growth: Tagore’s Santiniketan’, in The Flamed Mosaic: Indian contemporary painting (Ahmedabad, 1997), pp.183–289; R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: The making of a contextual modernism (Santiniketan, 1997). Tagore, Creative Unity, p.32. Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (Calcutta, 1918) p.133; Tagore, Creative unity, pp.146–48; idem, The Centre of Indian Culture (Madras, 1919), with vignettes by Nandalal Bose. See Ashish Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism: Rabindranath Tagore and the politics of the self (Delhi, 1994); K. Mukherjee, Rabindranath Tagore’s Nationalism: Concepts of state, nation and nationalism (Calcutta, 2003); K. N. Mukerjee, Political Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (Delhi, 1982). Tagore, Nationalism, pp.94, 93. ‘Modernism is not in the dress of the Europeans or in the hideous structures where their children are interned when they take their lessons…These are not modern just European’; pp.93–93. See also S. N. Hay, Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and his critics in Japan, China and India (Cambridge, MA, 1970). Rabindranath Tagore, ‘A Poet’s School’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.4 (1926); idem, ‘My School’, Modern Review, vol.36.4 (1926); B. Mukherjee, Education for Fullness (Calcutta, 1962). Their correspondence is kept in MAVB. See Kshitis Roy and Mohit Kumar Mazumdar, A Gandhi-Tagore Chronicle (Kolkata, 2001) for brief selections. M. K. Gandhi, Complete Works (Delhi, 1965), vol.54, pp.243–44.



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129 Gandhi’s speech ‘Art for Millions’, in Y. P. Anand, Gandhi and Art (Delhi, 2003). See also A. J. Parel, ‘Aesthetics and Creation in Gandhi’s Political Philosophy’, Indian Horizons (Delhi, 1994). 130 Mool Chand, Nationalism and Internationalism of Gandhi, Nehru and Tagore (Delhi, 1989); R. S. Mani, Tagore and Gandhi, Educational Ideals (Delhi, 1995); M. K. Gandhi, My Views on Education (Delhi, 1970); idem, Ashram Observances in Action (Delhi, 1955); S. H. Patil, Gandhi and Swaraj (Delhi, 1983). 131 See David W. Atkinson, Gandhi and Tagore: Visionaries of modern India (Hong Kong, 1989); S. Bhattacharya, The Mahatma and the Poet: Letters and debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915–1941 (Delhi, 1997); J. P. Chander, Tagore and Gandhi Argue (Delhi, 1945). 132 M. K. Gandhi, ‘The Conditions of Swaraj’, Young India (23 February 1921), p.43. 133 M. K. Gandhi, ‘The Way of Swaraj’, Young India (8 April 1926), p.42. 134 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Striving for Swadeshi’, Modern Review, vol.34 (20 November 1924). See Gandhi’s response, ‘The Poet and the Charkha’, Young India (5 November 1925), p. 5: ‘The poet thinks that the charkha is calculated to bring about a death-like sameness in the nation … The truth is the charkha is intended to realize the essential and living oneness of interest amongst India’s myriads.’ 135 Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the age of its global reproducibility (London, 2006), p.260: Gandhi the ‘spinning cyborg can be described as the conceptual bridge for the twin movements of nationalism and competitive native capitalism’. 136 For Tagore’s colour blindness see K. K. Dyson, Ronger Rabindranath: Rabindranather sahityae o chitrakalay ronger vyavyhar (Calcutta, 1997); Stella Kramrisch, ‘Form Elements in the Work of Rabindranath Tagore’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, vol.2 (December, 1962), p.38; Numal Kumani Mahalanobis, Baishe Sravana (Calcutta, 1966); Ranee Chandra, Gurudeva (Calcutta, 1980); Miscellaneous Papers, Tagore’s Paintings and Exhibitions, 110 (15) MS, MAVB and Handlist of Paintings at Kala Bhavan 001 Tagore, MAVB. Kala Bhavan is currently digitalising many of Tagore’s works. 137 Rolland quoted in R. W. Pickford and J. Bose, ‘Colour Vision and Aesthetic Problems in Pictures by Rabindranath Tagore’, British Journal of Aesthetics, vol.27.1 (Winter, 1987), pp.70–75; p.70. 138 Pickford and Bose, ‘Colour Vision’, whilst stating that there are 1,573 paintings and sketches by Tagore in the Rabindra Bhavana Collection at Santiniketan alone, rely on this mode of analysis. 139 Kramrisch quoted in Pickford and Bose, ‘Colour Vision’, p.73. 140 Rabindranath Tagore only took up painting in 1924, aged 64. His first experiment was ink sketches to accompany his book of poems Purāvi (the manuscript is in Rabindra Bhavana). Until 1934 he continued to use monochrome pen and ink, then took up two- and three-toned drawings before moving into multiple



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colours. See B. B. Mukerjee, ‘Evolution of Rabindranath’s Art’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.12 (1946); idem, ‘The Artistic Inspiration Behind Rabindranath’s Paintings’, Rupalekha, vol.23 (1952). See Jayanta Chakrabarti, ‘Drawings and Paintings of Rabindranath’, in Jayanta Chakrabarti (ed.), Drawings and Paintings of Rabindranath in the Collection of the Nandan Museum (Santiniketan, 1988), p.11. See Chapter 3. I base my observations on Tagore’s use of colour from his paintings in the Nandan Museum, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan; the British Museum, London; the India Office Prints and Drawings Collection, British Library, London; Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata; and the Fine Arts Academy, Kolkata. The largest collection of his work is held at Rabindra Bhavana, Santiniketan. Kramrisch quoted in the insightful study by Andrew Robinson: The Art of Rabindranath Tagore (Calcutta, 1989). See also Mitra quoted by Robinson: ‘he produced such powerful ingredients and innovations that a piece of coloured surface acquired a luminous glow, an intense and pulsating brilliance never before experienced. He applied stain upon stain … leaving open spaces instead of white paint which forced themselves through layers of colour and gave them as wonderful shimmer. He thus set colour in its rightful place’; infra, p. 109. For the reception of Tagore’s work at this time see Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, ch.1; idem, ‘Tagore’s Generation Views his Art’, in Rabindranath Tagore in Perspective (Santiniketan, 1990); Abanindranath Tagore, ‘On Rabindranath Tagore’s Art’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.34 (1996). See also the Mukul Dey Archive, Chitralekha House, Santiniketan, Folder No. 003 Documents relating to Tagore’s 1930 and 1932 exhibitions. See, for instance, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘Tendencies of Modern Indian Art’, Rupam, vol.12 (1926). Benoy Kumar Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, Rupam, vol.9 (1922), pp.8–24; p.20. Sarkar, ‘The Aesthetics of Young India’, p.24. See Agastya’s and Kramrisch’s responses in the same issue of Rupam. See also Bose, Vision and Creation, pp.228–30 and Mukul Dey Archives, Santiniketan, Folder 003/01 ‘Paintings of Tagore: Foreign Comments, c.1930– 31’. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘My Pictures’ in Neogy, Rabindranath Tagore on Art, pp.87–94. ‘My pleasure is harmonious combination of lines and colours’; infra, p.92. Bose, Vision and Creation, pp.228–30. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘The Principle of Literature’, Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol.5 ( July, 1927), hand-annotated copy – notes by the author, p.19 Kala Bhavan Archives, Santiniketan; Tagore, ‘Principles of Art’, second draft Ms 34 (b), Kala Bhavan Archives, Santiniketan. However, Tagore also warns that ‘our modern mind [is] a hasty tourist in its rush over the miscellaneous, ransacks



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cheap markets of curios’; infra p.13. See also Tagore’s typed manuscript ‘The Principles of Art’, Ms 342 (4), Kala Bhavan Archives. Rabindranath Tagore, Chitralipi (Calcutta, 1962), ‘Preface’ published in 1930, p. 1. Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Comments on Tagore’s Drawings’, Boston Evening Transcript (22 October 1930) praises Tagore’s work along similar lines at the MFA Boston exhibition: ‘It would be a great mistake to search them for hidden spiritual symbolisms’; Rabindranath Tagore Files, 70 (i), Archives, Santiniketan. Rabindranath Tagore, speech at the Satygraha Ashram, 4 December 1922, Tagore files, 206 – Lectures, MAVB. Bose: ‘Only Tagore has given artistic practice due place in education’, Vision and Creation, p.12. Michael Taussig, What Color is the Sacred? (Chicago, 2009), pp.81–82. Here Bourke-White shows Gandhi from the side seated on a Mughal-style cushion throne as she evokes the profile miniature portraits of pre-colonial rulers in India. Gandhi charged her ten rupees for his signature on two of her own photographs of him; Margaret Bourke-White, Half Way to Freedom: A report on the new India in the words and photographs of Margaret Bourke-White (New York, 1949), p.123. Bourke-White found many of Gandhi’s ideas on industry and agriculture difficult to reconcile with her own views: ‘This conviction of Gandhi’s that machinery was intrinsically evil particularly disturbed me because of my love of the machine and my belief what it could do for man’; Margaret Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself (London, 1964), p. 273. She felt uncomfortable that Gandhi preached against the machine but used a microphone and drove to and from his evening ‘durbars’ in Mr Birla’s white Packard car, pp. 278–79. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p.273. Bourke-White, Portrait of Myself, p.275. ‘Whenever I appeared at the scene with the camera and flashbulbs he would say, “There’s the torturer again”’; infra, p.278. S. Balaram, ‘Product Symbolism of Gandhi and its Connection with Indian Mythology’, Design Issues, vol.5.2 (1989), pp.68–85; p.70. Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Gandhiji’s Spiritual Power’, New York Address, 1 December 1930, Tagore Files, 128. Gandhi, Complete Works, vol.33, p.101; vol.22, p.151. M. K. Gandhi, ‘Art, Beauty and Truth’, Young India (20 November 1924). For Rabindranath Tagore and rhythm see ‘Tagore’s Drawings: Poet as artist’ for his rhythmic significance of form, and Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Drawings by Tagore’, both in Rupam, vols 42–44 (April to October, 1930). Christopher Pinney, ‘How Indian Nationalism Made Itself Irrefutable’, in Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond Appearances, pp.113–50; p.135. Pinney draws



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attention to the surreal debate whether these dhotis could be considered to be documents under Section 2 (6) of the India Press Act of 1910. Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and identity in India (Chicago, 1996), p.95. Gandhi, Complete Works, vol.20, p.451. C. A. Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi’, in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp.285–321. Tarlo, Clothing Matters; Susan Bean, ‘Gandhi and Khadi: The fabric of independence’, in Annette Weiner and Jane Schneider (eds), Cloth and Human Experience (Washington, 1989), pp. 356–82; Bayly, ‘The Origins of Swadeshi’; Rebecca M. Brown, Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and the Making of India (New York, 2010); G. Dasgupta, ‘M. K. Gandhi: The White Robe of Simpleness’, Performing Arts Journal, vol.6.1 (1981), pp. 84–90; A. Parel, ‘Symbolism in Gandhi’s Politics’, Canadian Journal of Political Science, vol.2.4 (1969), pp. 513–27. Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and modern India (Bloomington, 2007), p.147. I discuss black as a ‘yawning space’ below. Klee’s Angel is of course directly associated with Walter Benjamin’s messianic time; Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London, 1999), p.188. J. F. Lyotard, Discours / figur (Paris, 1971). Possibly the use of white by Gandhi and Congress is not only a response to colonialism’s industrial colours but also to the Muslim Tanzim movement’s use of green badges and flags. R. Ramagundam, Gandhi’s Khadi: A history of contention and conciliation (Delhi, 2008). Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Clothing the Political Man: A reading of the use of khadi and white in Indian public life’, Journal of Human Values, vol.5.1 (1999), pp. 3–15. See Christopher Pinney, ‘The Political Economy of Gloss’, Bidoun, vol.8 (2005), pp.87–89 which contrasts the BJP’s election campaign of India Shining with its bright-coloured images and the adoption by Congress of a far more sombre and critical view of poverty and middle-class struggles which were produced as black-and-white images. Glossiness and shininess failed to win the election. Political noire also works within the genealogy of monochrome politics associated with 1920s and 1930s Congress and Gandhism. Chakrabarty, ‘Clothing the Political Man’, p.11. Rabindranath Tagore to M. K. Gandhi, 11 May 1933, Tagore Files, 128 MAVB. Neeti Nair, ‘Bhagat Singh as Satyagraha: The limits of nonviolence in late colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.43.3 (2009), pp.649–81.



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179 Christopher Pinney, ‘The Body and the Bomb in Colonial India’, in Davis (ed.), Picturing the Nation, pp.51–64; p.52. 180 M. K. Gandhi, Key to Health (Delhi, 1992), p.2; idem, The Art of Living (Delhi, 1961). 181 Gandhi, Complete Works, vol.83, p.265. 182 What follows is a summary of the key aspects of the argument in Gandhi’s book Hind Swaraj (Delhi, 1990). 183 M. K. Gandhi, Non Violent Resistance (New York, 1961); idem, Ashram Observances in Action (Ahmedabad, 1955); S. Malik, Satyagraha and the Contemporary World (Delhi, 1985). 184 Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p.92. 185 Nandalal Bose, ‘Bapuji’ (written 1 December 1940), in Bose, Vision and Creation, pp.236–37. For Gandhi’s transformation into Mahatma see S. Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, in Subaltern Studies, vol.3 (1983), pp.1–61. 186 Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (New York, 1960), p.51. Towards the end of What is Art? at pp.176 and 178, Tolstoy maps out his vision for art of the future, which can be seen to have resonance for Gandhi’s exhibitions and engagement with Bose: ‘The artist of the future will live the common live of an, earning his subsistence by some kind of labour…And in the same way, that realm of subject matter for the art of the future which relates to the simplest feelings of common life open to all will not be narrowed but widened.’ See also A. J. Parel, Gandhi’s Philosophy and the Quest for Harmony (Cambridge, 2006). 187 Gandhi, Complete Works, vol.63, p.416. In an address to the Gujarati Literary Society he expressed the importance of art. 188 Patrick Brantlinger, ‘A Postindustrial Prelude to Postcolonialism: John Ruskin, William Morris and Gandhism’, Critical Inquiry, vol.22.3 (1996), pp.466–85. 189 In 1934 Gandhi retired from the INC in favour of rural reconstructive programmes. The resolutions of the Bombay session of the INC October 1934 announced the formation of the All India Village Industries Association whose agenda was to promote village industries. It took over the Reception Committee’s responsibility for organising the annual exhibitions. 190 J. C. Kumarappa, ‘Our Exhibition’, Harijan (21 December 1935), p.2. 191 At the Gaya session, 1922, the main gate (the usual focus along with the pandal for architectural experiment) assumed the form of the Buddhist gate at Sanchi with a round pillar in the middle with a lion on its capital which was intended to imitate Ashoka’s pillars of which there were many in the region. At the 1923 session at Cocanada, near Madras, the main gate of the Congress pavilion assumed the form of the Gopura of a Hindu temple with the minarets of a mosque on either side. The following session at Belgaum, the main gate was designed by the young artist Shrinivas and which made reference to the temple of Shri Virupax of Hampi, the capital of the Vijayanagar Empire.



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192 At the Karachi session, 1931, an open-air stadium was constructed with a cloth floor in the colours of red, green and white with light green pillars, posts and platforms. From 1923–26 Congress decided to save expenses and to promote khadi by ordering a permanent tent which would be used at the annual exhibition. This measured 300 by 220 feet and was made locally in 1923 close to Cocanada, near Madras, where the exhibition was to be held. It would house 12,000 people and was made for the Reception Committee by A. N. Mukherji and purchased for Rs 37,000. At earlier exhibitions portraits of the British king and queen were put on display in the pandal. See, for instance, the session at Lucknow, 1916: ‘The pavilion itself is gorgeously decorated, the two most prominent features of the decoration being the flags of the Allies and His Majesty’s portrait overlooking the great audience from the ceiling above the Chairman’s seat. Loyalty to the British crown and devotion to the motherland found prominent mention in numerous mottoes decorating various parts of the hall’; Reports of the Proceedings of the INC, p.23. At Amristar, 1919, portraits of the king and queen were displayed at both ends of the pandal; p. 43. However, two years later at the Ahmedabad session the oval-shaped pandal was decorated with flowers, photographs, leaves, paintings of Congress leaders and a bust of President-elect Deshbandhu C. R. Das and a bust of the late Lokmanya. At Gaya the following year portraits of Congress leaders by the firm of Goras studio of Benares and Mr Mahulikar of Ahmedabad were put on display in the flag and khadi-decked pandal. A life-sized portrait of Gandhi painted by C. Nageshwar Rao and a likeness of Rana Pratap Singh were hung on the platform. At Cocanada in 1923 the front of the mandap was adorned with portraits of the former INC presidents and national leaders whilst the place of honor was again a life-sized portrait of Gandhi painted by Nageshwarao. 193 Reports of the Proceedings of the INC, p.46. 194 M. K. Gandhi, quoted in M. Desai, ‘Our Conferences and Exhibitions’, Harijan (7 March 1936), p.21. 195 Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Village Industries Museum – What it Ought to Contain: Poet suggests to Mahatma’, Advance (15 May 1935), p.43. 196 Tagore, ‘Village Industries Museum’, p.43. 197 M. K. Gandhi, ‘Reply’, Advance (24 May 1935), p.65. 198 Spinning competitions were a regular feature of the INC exhibitions in the 1920s and 1930s. 199 Gandhi called for ‘a miniature edition of village India at Khirdi’ which ‘should be an object lesson for both the villager and the townsfolk’; see M. K. Gandhi, ‘India in a Village’, Harijan (6 June 1936), p.2. A year later Gandhi also pledged Rs 10,000 for Nandalal’s building projects at Santiniketan and Rs 800 for the Art School; 6 November 1937, Tagore Files 128. 200 M. K. Gandhi, ‘A Villagers’ Exhibition’, Harijan (2 January 1937), p.2.



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201 Bose’s first murals were executed at Dwarik (the building that housed Kala Bhavan) is loosely based on Ajanta which he had visited in 1909. He was unhappy with the technical aspect – the colours were not properly fixed. He spent the next few years working with the scholar Haridas Mitra trying to work with ancient techniques as described in the silpa shastras. His next work was a mural on the inner walls of the Patha Bhavan office which was then part of the library, executed in 1923. This scroll is painted with a pastel palette. The murals at Cheena Bhavan occupied all the students and faculty of Kala Bhavan in April 1942. Bose had planned the murals in monochrome and his working method would be with rags – both of which were compromised; see Jayanta Chakravarti, R. Siva Kumar and Arun K. Nag (eds), Santiniketan Murals (Calcutta, 1995), p. 49. See also Kanai Samanta, Silpiguru Nandalal (Santiniketan, 1988); B. Bose, ‘Chronology of the Works of Acharya Nandalal Bose’, World Window, vol. 1.5 (1961); P. Mandal, Bharatsilpi Nandalal (Bolpur, 1982); J. Parikh, ‘Fresco Painting and Santiniketan’, Visva-Bharati News, vol.2.1 ( July, 1933); Nandalal Bose: A collection of essays (Delhi, 1983); Acharya Nandalal Bose Memorial Lectures, 1984 (Varanasai, 1984); Jayanta Chakravarti (ed.), Nandan, vol.5 (1982); Kanchan Chakravarti, ‘Murals in Santiniketan’, Lalit Kala Contemporary, vol.14 (1972); S. Chaudhury, Nandalal (Calcutta, 1988). 202 After this period of training the students and staff of Kala Bhavan decorated all the inner walls of Santoshalaya (the junior school dormitory) with 40 panels of birds, flora and fauna. In 1933 Narsinghlal helped Bose decorate the murals of the ground floor of the verandah of Patha Bhavan. 203 Arun K. Nag, ‘The Painted Murals of Santiniketan: A note on their techniques’, in Chakravarti, Kumar and Nag (eds), Santiniketan Murals, pp.79–84; p.82. 204 Although there is a small town adjoining Santiniketan (Bholpur) the campus is relatively isolated from other towns and villages – with the exception of Sriniketan which promoted crafts in relation to the university. See also the importance of Amar Kutir on the road to Suri. Amar Kutir was established by the young revolutionary freedom fighter Susen Mukhopadhyay who founded a commune for prisoners freed from jail which would enable them to produce cloth and leather work. It became the nerve centre of the peasants’ movement for freedom before being declared illegal by the British in 1938. It is now a Cottage Industry Training Centre. 205 Bose played an instrumental role in designing and decorating Rabindranath Tagore’s house Shayamali in 1934–35. Its roof and walls are of dried earth with statues of female santhals at the gateway by Ramkinder Baij. Bose created the horse on the eastern wall. He also designed the Chaiti – a mud and tar cottage which is now used for exhibitions. 206 It has 36 reliefs, two of which are nearly in the round and which fall into three groups: the first with dancers and musicians covers the outer face of



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the massive pillars on the south verandah; the second group on the walls of the verandah include 11 panels based on the Marriage of Shiva mural in the Mattancherry Palace at Cochin and a figure based on Aihole sculpture. The reliefs on the north side are borrowed from Egyptian, Assyrian, Indus and Pallava art. Bose painted 84 of the posters; the rest were done by students and his assistants. They were painted at Santiniketan and a set of copies were made by Bose’s students. See Sisir Ghose, Amar Pavay Santiniketan (Santiniketan, 1986). These copies are now in the tribal museum of the Gujarat Vidyapith. See Nandalal Bose and Six Haripura Posters (Delhi, no date); M. Guha, ‘Gandhiji o Nandalal’, Desh Binodam (1989); idem, ‘Postar Shilpa o Nandalal’, Desh Binodan (1989). In this case Bose was out of his comfort zone of Bengal when sourcing the local. This use of affordable, vernacular materials Gandhi also encouraged at his ashram commune at Wardah as the space of the ashram, village and exhibition collapse into one another. M. K. Gandhi, Complete Works, vol.66; pp.357, 359. Bose designed the whole complex on a plot of c.400 acres on the banks of the River Tapty which was to house over 17,000 delegates as well as a villagers’ camp for over 20,000 people. The site was six times larger than all previous sites for the sessions. In addition to the display of village industries such as tanning, bullock and oil mills, Bose designed the Art Court which included ancient Gujarati art collected by Rajendra Surkantha of Surat and Rabishanker Ravel. Pandre of Khamgaum National School and his students made clay statues on the spot. At this time Gandhi invited a graduate from Santiniketan, Devi Prasad, for six months as art teacher in the school he had established in the ashram at Sevagram. Prasad would experiment with child art, spend many years at the ashram and write extensively on his educational system. Devi Prasad, Art: The Basis of Education (Delhi, 1998). Gandhi also sat for his portrait several times in 1918, 1928 and 1945 to the artist Mukul Dey; see Mukul Dey, Portraits of Gandhi (Santiniketan, 1948). He also gave his blessing to Dey’s request that he be the patron of Dey’s scheme for a National Art Gallery – a scheme that Dey was unable to realise. Activities included folk songs and games so that ‘the whole exhibition is from the point of view of popular education, a wonderful object lesson showing how our village life can be made happier and richer’. This was endorsed by Dr Profulla Chandra Ghose in his speech on day two of the meet: ‘education should be so arranged as to centre round a handicraft.’ M. K. Gandhi, Village Industries (Delhi, 1962), pp.37–39. See, for instance, the Catalogue of the I.N.C Exhibition (Madras, 1927) which details the entertainments on offer; they include a merry-go-round, an aerial rope walkway, a fencing arena and a European-style restaurant. M. K. Gandhi, The Village Reconstructed (Bombay, 1966), pp.111–12.



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215 Miniature clay models from Kishnagur representing individual types of artisans had been on display at the Crystal Palace exhibition in 1851. Their scrawny frames horrified exhibition-goers otherwise enchanted by Indian luxuries; see Laura Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, empire and the museum in Victorian culture (Durham, NC, 2007). The miniature and life-sized clay model became a standard feature of world’s fairs and the display in the India Museum, London. By the 1920s Congress was also using models in its exhibitions; for example, at the Madras exhibition in 1927 two wax models on display included one of Gandhi shown during his operation for appendicitis; see the Catalogue of the I.N.C Exhibition, p.67. More directly related to Gandhi’s agenda are the good and bad village models on display as part of the national/ethnological models at the Dr Bau Dajji Lad Museum, Mumbai. These probably date from the 1950s; they were recently restored. The Presidential Address to representatives of the major Indian museums in 1948 stressed that ‘the most important as a means of popular demonstration is the diorama or scenic model. The uses of this medium are infinite…it is essential’. See the ‘Presidential Address’, Journal of Indian Museums, vols 3–6 (1947–50), pp.11–12. It should represent landscapes, arts and crafts and historical incidents. 216 He also used his supervisor at Ajanta Lady Herringham’s translation of Cennino Cennini and tried out her egg tempera method on sand-treated walls. During this time Abanindranath Tagore also shifted his focus towards folk art; see his text L’alpona. Bose’s student Benodebehari Mukherjee also wrote on murals; see Benodebehari Mukherjee, ‘Fresco’, Prabasi, vol.12 (1931). 217 Nag, ‘The Painted Murals of Santiniketan’, p.45. 218 Bose’s bibliography in Vision and Creation consists of Cennini, Deshi Rang, Acharya Prafullachandra Ray, Maxwell Ashfield’s A Manual of Tempera Painting, O. Nandmall’s Fresco Painting, A. P. Laurie Sedey’s The Painter’s Methods and Materials, and T. Goodwin’s The Art of Mural Decoration. 219 The key texts of Vision and Creation are Silpakatha – The Speaking of Art, Silpacarca, The Practice of Art, essays on Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, personal letters and conversations recorded by Kanai Samanta. See also the Nandalal Bose Album, Folder No.025 Mukul Dey Archives, Santiniketan. 220 Bose, Vision and Creation, p.2. 221 Bose, Vision and Creation, p.3. 222 Bose, Vision and Creation, pp.32–33. 223 Bose, Vision and Creation, p.43. 224 See, for instance, Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘The Technique and Theory of Indian Painting’, Technical Studies, vol.3 (October, 1934), pp.75–77; idem, ‘Vishnudharmottara’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol.52 (1932), pp.13–21; idem, translation of ‘Citralaksana Silparatna ch.64’, in Sir Asutosh Memorial Volume (Patna, 1926–28); idem, ‘One Hundred References to Indian Painting’ and ‘Further References to Painting in India’, both in Artibus Asiae,



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vol.4 (1930–32), pp.41–57; pp.126–29; Sivaramamuti, ‘A Passage on Painting’, Journal of Oriental Research, vol.6 (1932); R. Raghavan, ‘Some Sanskrit Texts on Painting’, Indian Historical Quarterly, vol.9 (1933). The texts Bose cites are Shilpa Ratua, Abhilashtantha Chinntarmanis or Jaina Citra Kalpdruma, and, more recently, Lady Herringham’s translation of Cennini and her work at Ajanta. For all of the above see Bose, Vision and Creation, pp.94–95. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.166: ‘As it is always moving, a wave is hard to see. So to visualise it clearly you will have to take recourse to some equivalent or simile like the 1000-headed Anantanag or the scales of the fish, the claws of the dragon, the flight or horses or combed or curly hair…On the crest of breaking waves one can get a glimpse of tongues of fire or the claws of a dragon. To catch this in a picture is in a sense attempting the impossible.’ S. V. Venkateswara, ‘Symbolism in Indian Art’, Rupam, vol.30 (1927), pp.38–47. Venkateswara, ‘Symbolism’, p.43. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.198. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.203: ‘These are jingles not poetry or literature… These are just some straight, simple statements.’ Bose, Vision and Creation, p.204. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.205. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.205. Bose, Vision and Creation, p.205. Arjun Appadurai, ‘Production of Locality’ in his book Modernity at Large: Cultural dimensions of globalization (Minneapolis, MN, 1996), pp.191–210. Roy did, however, give interviews on Bengali pat art; Roy, ‘The Patua Art of Bengal’, trans. D. Chattopadhyaya, reprinted in Jamini Roy (Delhi, 1987). For Jamini Roy see A. Mukhopadhyaya (ed.), Jamini Roy: Seminar papers in the context of Indian folk sensibility and his impact on modern art (Delhi, 1992); S. Suhrwardy, A Short Note on the Art of Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1937); The Art of Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1987); Bishen Dey and John Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy (Calcutta, 1944); A. K. Dutta, Jamini Roy (Delhi, 1983); Daniel Herwitz, ‘Reclaiming the Past and Early Modern Indian Art’, Third Text, vol.18.3 (2004), pp.214–28; idem, ‘The Idea of an Art Historical Shape’, English Studies in Africa, vol.44.1 (2001), pp.59–82; A. S. Chakravarty, ‘Primitivism Redux: The other face of Indian modernism’, Third Text, vol.23.2 (2009), pp.209–11; Jamini Roy: The Grand Patma (Delhi, 1991); Jamini Roy in the Context of Indian Folk Sensibility and his Impact on Modern Art (Delhi, 1992); Sipra Chakravarti, ‘Paintings of Jamini Roy in Indian Museum’, Indian Museum Bulletin, vol.22 (1987), pp.45–56; Jamini Roy: Seminar Papers, Lalit Kala Akademi (Delhi, 1992); Prasanta Daw, Rupatapas Jamini Roy (Calcutta, no date). There are 34 paintings by Roy in the Indian Museum, Kolkata. A recent show of his work,



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‘Jamini Roy: A painter’s journey’ was held at the Chitrakoot Gallery, Gariahat Road, Kolkata, April, 2010. These colours are Indian red, yellow ochre, cadmium green, vermilion (used by women for worship), charcoal grey, cobalt blue and white, all made from organic matter such as rock-dust, tamarind seed, mercury powder, alluvial mud, chalk and indigo. See Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, pp.22–23. This point is made by Geeta Kapur, ‘Jamini Roy’, in Six Indian Painters (Delhi, 1982), pp.22–25; p.44. What I mean by the spaces are the gaps in the weave of his cloth and leaf grounds. These failed experiments have a parallel with Gandhi’s own practices of ashram health. Against Joseph Alter, Gandhi’s Body: Sex, diet and the politics of nationalism (Philadelphia, 2000), which stresses his strident rhetoric on health, Judith Brown shows that Gandhi was frequently ill, that his body broke down under the duress of his own projected reforms. Judith Brown, Gandhi, Prisoner of Hope (New Haven, CT, 1991). Stella Kramrisch writing the foreword to Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p.1. She also praised his ‘compact colours’ and the way in which his art ‘cut through the confusion of contemporary thought’; p.1. Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p.10. A theme of the exhibition is that Bengali art is pure art. In the 1940s Roy turned to making small clay sculptures and toys. Dey and Irwin, The Art of Jamini Roy, p.9. This link to Tolstoy is noted by Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, p.245, note 98. Jyotindra Jain, Kalighat Painting: Images from a changing world (Woodbridge, 1999); Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and popular culture in nineteenth-century Calcutta (Kolkata, 1998). Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, p.106. Ratnabali Chatterjee, ‘The Original Jamini Roy: A study on the consumerism of art’, Social Scientist, vol.15.1 (1987), pp.3–18. Manoranjan Bhattacharya, ‘People’s Art’, quoted in Sudhi Pradhan (ed.), The Marxist-Cultural Movement in India: Chronicles and Documents (1936–47) (Calcutta, 1979), vol.1, pp.187, 189, 190–91 (my emphasis). Aside from this voluminous work, Pradhan also edited an edition of Mitra’s Nīl Darpan in 1958. See also Ahmad Ali, ‘Progressive View of Art’; ‘Bengal’s Writers and Artists’, in Pradhan (ed.), Marxist-Cultural Movement in India, vol.1, pp.67–83, 107–11. See the current project of Sanjukta Sunderason. This agenda in no way should be confused with a social realism. See A. S. Z. Haque, ‘The Use of Folklore in National Movements and Liberation Struggles’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, vol.12 (1975), pp.45–56. This emphasis on crisis was not a popular subject of the urban Calcutta ‘Kalighat pats’ of the nineteenth century; W. G. Archer, Bazaar Paintings of Calcutta: The



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style of Kalighat (London, 1953); Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets; David McCrutchion, Patuas and Patua Art in Bengal (London, 1988); R. N. Ganguli, ‘Patas and Patuas of Bengal’, Indian Folklore (Calcutta, 1956). Kavita Singh, ‘The Content of the Form: Stylistic differences and narrative choices in Bengali pata paintings’, in Indian Art: Forms, concerns and developments in historical perspective (Delhi, 2003), pp.12–22; F. J. Korom, Village of Painters: Narrative Scrolls from West Bengal (New Mexico, 2006); P. Ghosh, ‘The Story of the Storyteller’s Scroll’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, vol.37 (2000), pp.166– 85. For studies of the representation of 9/11 in pat see Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay, ‘Dream Kitsch: Folk art, indigenous media and 9/11. The work of pat in the era of electronic transmission’, Journal of Material Culture, vol.13.1 (2008), pp.5–24, and Roma Chatterji, ‘Global Events and Local Narratives: 9/11 and the picture storytellers of Bengal’, Indian Folklore Research Journal, vol.9 (2009), pp.1–26. There is now a Society for the Advancement of the Chitrakanas of Bengal (Bangiya Chitrakar Unnayan Samiti), a museum of folk art and an archive of folk art at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, based in Kolkata. This context is ignored by Dey and Irwin in their essays to accompany a show of Roy’s work in Calcutta 1944. Likewise E. M. Mitford makes no mention of the famine in ‘A Modern Primitive’, Horizon (London, 1944). See S. Mallik, Responses in the Art of Bengal to the 1943 Famine and the Tebhaga Movement (Delhi, 1997). The lack of artistic response to this crisis is voiced by T. K. Dutt in his book Hungry Bengal (Calcutta, 1944), pp. 7–8: ‘The poets and artists may beautify Bengal with the colours of their imagination and paint her in the eyes of the world as a paradise of green fields, silver streams, golden soil … But she looms large as the sorriest picture when we turn to the human world. [The people] are living and dying more wretchedly than even the brutes and the animals in the wilderness.’ L. Brennan, ‘Government Famine Relief in Bengal, 1943’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 47.3 (August, 1988), pp.541–56; W. P. Fitzner, ‘The Unknown Famine Holocaust: About the causes of mass starvation’, The Revisionist, vol.1.1 (2003), pp.56–87; Tarakchandra Das, Bengal Famine (Calcutta, 1949); J. N. Uppal, Bengal Famine of 1943 (Delhi, 1984); T. G. Narayan, Famine over Bengal (Calcutta, 1944); Indian Famine Inquiry over Bengal (Delhi, 1944); Srimanjari, Through War and Famine, Bengal, 1939–45 (Delhi, 2009). The government’s appalling response to the famine went completely against the agenda of its recently revised Famine Manual for Bengal in 1941. The starving arrived en masse in Calcutta, July 1943. There the government refused to give the destitute what state policy had previously deemed to be their food and aid entitlement. Chittaprosad, Hungry Bengal: A tour through Midnapore District, November, 1943 (Calcutta, 1944). His drawings and reports were commissioned by CPI leader



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P. C. Joshi who had been impressed by the artists’ political posters produced in Chittagong. He also illustrated Joshi’s All India Kishan Subha and several issues of the CPI’s People’s War, 1943–44, in which he also wrote a series of articles. Alongside Sunil Janah his work features the most prominently of the ‘famine artists’ in People’s War. His work also played a role in the CPI’s Janajuddha. As a member of the CPI, Chittaprosad writes with empathy and frustration that no meetings could be organised between the CPI and the government to discuss action in the food crisis. See A. Mukhopadhyay, Chittaprosad (Delhi, 1983). In 1948 he became disaffected with the CPI and moved to Bombay. The idea of the ‘Line of Beauty’ derives from the work of the eighteenthcentury English painter, William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (London, 1753). This arrangement of bones has its precedent in the Uprising 1857–58 photographs of Felice Beato; see my Chapter 2 and Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London, 2008). For Joshi’s cultural politics see Bipin Chandra, ‘P. C. Joshi and National Politics’, Studies in History, vol.24 (2008), pp.245–64. Midnapore had been struck by three tidal waves, 16 October 1942. The price for Hungry Bengal’s three rupees is much less than that of Jamini Roy’s paintings which he sold for between 40 and 50 rupees. He continued to ask over Rs 1,000 for his works in oil – a practice and value marker he had worked with from the 1920s, before his turn to the ‘folk’. Chittaprosad, Hungry Bengal, p.1. The themes of Hungry Bengal include the ‘Trek back’; ‘Calcutta pavement’, ‘Deserted villages’, ‘Humanity dehumanized’ and ‘Withered buds’. This is quite different to the ‘welfare’ narrative of his images for People’s War which focused on ‘from the pavement to the relief hospital’, which follows a similar pattern to Janah’s photographs in the same issue; 21 November 1943. By the beginning of 1944, his images are much darker. In his ‘Midnapore as I saw it’, he represents a body being eaten by dogs. Chittaprosad continues: ‘sketching him and listening to him I caught the spirit that makes Chittagong the land of heroes’; ‘Help Chittagong’, People’s War (27 August 1943), p.2. B. Chakrabarty, ‘Political Mobilization in the Localities: The 1942 Quit India Movement in Midnapore’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.26.4 (1992), pp.791–814. Chittaprosad quoted in Prodyot Ghosh, Chittaprosad: A doyen of the art world (Calcutta, 1995), pp. 9, 11. In 1935 at the conference of the Progressive Writers Association, the question of realism as a resource for artists and writers was raised; see Chilka Ghosh, ‘The sight/site of woman in the art of the 40s: Reality, realism and representation’, Social Science, vol.28.3–4 (2000) for details. Other artists who represented the famine of 1943 include Atul Bose, Sudhir Khastagir, Gabardan Aash and Somnath Hore. Hore’s work appeared in People’s War.



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267 These works were never sold and remain in the Abedin family. They were, however, the subject of several exhibitions and are magnificently reproduced at almost A1 scale in Zainul Abedin, 2 vols (Dacca, 1978). In the no-named author’s brief introduction, Abedin is praised for his ‘deft handling of brush strokes, sensitivity to colour and an immense companion for the struggling and suffering people’; infra p.1. Abedin helped to establish the Art Institute, Dacca, and the Folk Museum at Sonargaon, Bangladesh. He died in 1976. 268 People’s War (21 January 1945) also reproduced three of the sketches. Although not in the CPI, he was member of the Anti-Fascist Writers and Artists’ Association of Bengal. For Zainul Abedin’s work see S. M. Islam, Zainul Abdein (Dacca, 1977); B. K. Jahangir, Quest of Zainul Abedin (Dacca, 1993); S. M. Islam, ‘From Bengal School to Bangladesh Art’, Art of the Islamic World, vol.34 (1999), pp.78–89; Nercam, Peindre au Bengal (Paris, 2005), pp. 129– 35; S. Mallik, ‘Impulses in the 1940s’, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Indian Art, an Overview (Delhi, 2003); M. Zaman, ‘Artist of the People’s Struggle’, Daily Star (Dacca, 12 April 2004); Dadi, Modernism, ch.2. 269 Aziz Ahmad, ‘Cultural and Intellectual Trends in Pakistan’, Middle Eastern Journal, vol.19.1 (1965), p.123. Abedin left for Eastern Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) in 1947 to work in Normal School, Dacca. 270 Ela Sen, Darkening Days: Being a narrative of famine-stricken Bengal (Calcutta, 1944). 271 Sen, Darkening Days, p.102: ‘the red gold afternoon shed its benison’ on starving villagers. 272 In spite of this, Abedin held an extremely successful exhibition of his famine drawings in Calcutta in 1944. 273 Unfortunately there is not enough space in my own discussion here to go into detail on the postcolonial processes of public memorialisation in art in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan. I hope to address this in my current research into the concept and thresholds of the museum in South Asia. Bronze statues in outdoor spaces I suggest, accompany photographs (or photographs of photographs) in the interior of museums as the most common form of memorialisation of the nation’s heroes. The use of black and white and the monochrome and weighty material of bronze has helped to create a coherent, national, if monochrome pantheon. See the repeated broadcast on Indian TV of India’s national heroes – all who are represented by bronze statues (author’s viewing in Kolkata, March to May, 2010). 274 The Calcutta Panorama opened in 2002. It recently closed (May 2010) to be remodelled due to public criticism of its ‘gimmicky’ displays and ‘over use’ of automata. 275 As an aside, the political iconography and use of colour on the façades of Calcutta’s tube stations is fascinating. I am currently conducting a small study of this in relation to ideas of locality in the city.



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276 Nearly opposite this banner of Netaji at the corner of Debendra Ghosh Road, Kolkata, is a much bigger banner of superstar cricketer Sachin Tendulkar (based on a colour photograph, spring 2010). 277 There are two truly wonderful studies of chromolithographs and the ways in which they occupy the economics and politics of colonial and postcolonial India: Pinney, Photos of the Gods and Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: Economies of Indian calendar art (Durham, NC, 2007). 278 These newspaper images at least in the cities are largely in colour. Chris Pinney makes the argument that photography in India is not a ‘public medium’; ‘Indian Portraiture’ conference, National Portrait Gallery and SOAS, London, May 2010. Postscript 1 Published in Octavio Paz, Configurations, New Directions (New York, 1966), p.46. 2 Briony Fer, Color Chart: Reinventing color 1950 to today (New York, 2008), p.28. 3 Fer, Color Chart, p.28. 4 Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life through Mexican eyes, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York, 1961), pp.196, 199. 5 Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, p.35. 6 Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, pp.54–55. 7 Founded in August 1962, ‘Group 1890’ takes its name from the number of the house of Jayant and Jyoti Pandya at Bharnagar where the group met. Many participants in Group 1890 were members or former card-carriers of the Communist Party of India. 8 Members of Group 1890 were Jyoti Bhatt, Himmat Shah, Jeram Patel, Rajesh Mehra, Ghulam Sheikh, Ambadas, Balkrishna Patel, Eric Browen and Reddappa Naidu. 9 Swaminathan interview with Neville Tuli, October 1993, in Neville Tuli, Osians: Masterpieces and museum quality Indian modern and contemporary painting (Mumbai, 2008), p.181. 10 The show was only open for one week. Born in Simla, 1928, Swaminathan had some training at the Delhi Polytechnic and won a scholarship to study printmaking at Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1957–58 where he spent the next three years. He was a member of the CPI from 1948 until 1954. He would go on to have 31 solo shows and to spend much of his later career at Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal. 11 Parts of Link were republished in a special issue of Lalit Kala Contemporary devoted to Swaminathan, vol.40 (March, 1995). There is still very little scholarship on Swaminathan although his own writings make for fascinating



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reading – Jagdish Swaminathan, The Perceiving Fingers: Catalogue of the collection of folk and adivasi art from Madhya Pradesh (Bhopal, 1987). See Geeta Kapur ‘Jagdish Swaminathan, Wings of a Metaphor’, in Contemporary Indian Artists (Delhi, 1978); Rebecca M. Brown, ‘The Group 1890’, in Partha Mitter and Parul Dave Mukherji (eds), 20th-century Indian Art (forthcoming); Badar Jahan, Abstraction in Indian Painting in the Post-Independence Era (Delhi, 2008). Swaminathan quoted in Badar Jahan, Abstraction in Indian Painting, p.16. Group 1890 Manifesto (Delhi, 1963), not paginated. Group 1890 Manifesto (my emphasis). Philip Rawson quoted in ‘Form, Contemporaneity, Me’, vol.1.1 Contra 66 (October, 1966) p.10. The word bhakti comes from the verbal root bhaj which means to apportion or share. The desire to find gods leads devotional poets on constant pilgrimages. Group 1890 Manifesto. Jagdish Swaminathan, ‘Reality of the Image’, Contra 66, vol.2 (November, 1966). In his The Perceiving Fingers Swaminathan refers to redemption as one way of approaching art – ‘Time: the mythological redemption’ and ‘Time: the wings of art’, pp.19–27. Swaminathan in the catalogue of an exhibition held at Kunika-Chemould Art Centre, Delhi, March, 1966, quoted in Kapur, ‘Jagdish Swaminathan’, p.10. These artists include G. R. Santosh, S. H. Raza, Biren De and P. T. Reddy and they experimented with tantra in the 1960s and 1970s. See Rebecca M. Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (Durham, NC, 2009). Swaminathan, ‘Colour Geometry’, exhibition catalogue reprinted in Lalit Kala Contemporary, 40 (1995), p.22. One year later he was awarded the Nehru Fellowship to work on the project ‘The significance of the traditional noumen in contemporary art’. He also became a member of the International Jury of the São Paulo Biennal and he was on the board of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and a trustee of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts. Kapur, ‘Jagdish Swaminathan’, p.212. Kapur, ‘Jagdish Swaminathan’, p.211. Kapur, ‘Jagdish Swaminathan’, pp.210–11, citing An Approach to Indian Art (Delhi, 1974), p.180 (my emphasis).



Plate 1

Poras Chaudhary, Photograph of Holi celebrations, c.2008.



Plate 2

Mughal artist working at the court of Lucknow, Nawab Asaf ud-daula Playing Holi, c.1780.



Plate 3

Sheela Gowda, And Tell Him of Your Pain, 1998/2001/2007, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.



Plate 4

View of the Millionenzimmer, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, 1760s.



Plate 5

Johann Zoffany, Prince Jawan Bakht receiving Warren Hastings at Lucknow, 1784, oil on canvas.



Plate 6

Robert Home, Ghazi-ud-din Hyder, King of Awadh, receiving Tribute, c.1820, oil on canvas.



Plate 7

Mazkhar Ali Khan, Self Portrait, c. 1820, gouache on paper.



Plate 8

Anon. ‘Company School’ artist, View of Taj Mahal, c .1800, watercolour on paper.



Plate 9

John Absolon, View of the Interior of the Crystal Palace, 1851, watercolour on paper.



Plate 10

Owen Jones, two pages of Indian ornament from his book The Grammar of Ornament, 1856, lithograph on paper.



Plate 11

Rabindranath Tagore, Portrait of Muhammad Yasin, c. 1930, watercolour on paper.



Plate 12

Rabindranath Tagore, Yellow Animal in a Forest, c.1930, watercolour on paper.



Plate 13

Nandalal Bose, poster for the Congress meeting at Haripura, 1937.



Plate 14

View of the entrance way to Kolkata Town Hall, with a print after Jamini Roy’s Madonna and Child.



Plate 15

Anon. Bengali artist, 9/11, c. 2004, synthetic pigment on cloth and paper.



Plate 16

Zainul Abedin, Woman and Child Seeking out Food During the Bengal Famine of 1943.



Index

Abedin, Zainul 284–6 affect 93, 137–9, 143, 181, 189, 190–1, 215, 231, 242, see Massumi, Brian Afghanistan 48 Africa 9, 35, 109, 164–5, 185 Ajanta 230, 248, 269, 273, 278, 280 Akhbar Ali 63–4, see also Dharavi; Megacities alchemy 15, 32, 35–6, 47–8, 51 Allen, Grant 127, 141, 168–77 angel of colour 59 Angel of History 6, 64, 293, see also Benjamin, Walter; Klee, Paul Angelucci, Arnaldo 159–61 Appadurai, Arjun 278 Araeen, Rasheed 250 arcades 8, 75, see Benjamin, Walter architecture and colour 80–2 Aristotle 21 arsenic 48 artisans 69, 95, 113, 125 Arts and Museums Committee, meeting at Lahore (1894) 115, 121 Asaf ud-daula 26, 28, 46, 53–4 Asiatic Mode of Production 69, see also Marx, Karl Asiatic Society of Bengal 208 Bachchan, Amitabh 65–6 Bachelard, Gaston 140–1, 177 Baden Powell, Henry 111–2, 123

Bagh (caves) 230, 278 Bahador Shah Zafar 89 Bailkin, Jordanna 153, 235 Balkastan 48, see also blue; lapis lazuli Banerji, N. N. 116–17 Bankura (Bengal) 278–9, 282, 285, see also Roy, Jamini bare life 39, see also indigo Barthes, Roland 10 Bataille, Georges 24 Batchelor, David 10, 27, 227 Bauhaus 249–50, 252, see also Araeen, Rasheed Beato, Felice 89, see also Indian Mutiny; photography Bengal Famine 282–5 Benjamin, Walter 64, 75–6, 93, 140–1, 293 Bennett, Tony 110 Bergson, Henri 12, 76, 136, 141 Berlin, Brent 11, 141 Besant, Annie 250–1 Bezold, Wilhelm von 152, 172 Bhabha, Homi, K. 61 bhakti (devotional practice) 18, 292–4 Bharat Mata (Mother India) 148, 233–4, 280 Bhattacharya, Chittaprosad 283–5 Bhowani 118, see also Thugs Bible 161, 166 Birdwood, George 106–9, 133, 230

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398

colour, art and empire

black 59–60, 107, 130, 133–4, 248–9, 252, 269, 273, 275–6, see also Black Light of Sufism Black Light of Sufism 57, 61 blue 15, 17, 50, 140–1, 150–2, 154–6, 162, 165–8, 174–8, 184–9, 193–4, 196–9, 236, 241, 244, 249, 252, 256, 269, 273, 275–6, see also Blue Flower; Indian Mutiny; indigo; red Blue Flower 17, 140, 162, 189, 200, 226, see also Benjamin, Walter; Novalis; Rivers, W. H. R.; Seligmann, Charles Bombay Art School 68, 97, 102–3 Borges, Jorge Luis 61 Bose, Khudiram 261 Bose, Nandalal 17, 235–6, 238, 250, 253, 258, 260–1, 265–78, 280–1 Bourke-White, Margaret 259–60, see also Gandhi, M. K.; photography British Association for the Advancement of Science 204 British Museum 166 Broca, Paul 146–8, 203, 205, 209 Brown, Rebecca M. 293–4 bull’s blood 50, 55 Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information 43–4 Burns, Cecil 106, see also colonial art schools Caillois, Roger 291 Calcutta Art School 68, 97, 101, 107, 232, 236 Calcutta Panorama 286 Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait (1898) 135–200 camera obscura 85, see also Crary, Jonathan

Cellular Jail, Port Blair, Andaman Islands 286 Cézanne, Paul 139, 161, 227 Chakravarty, Dipesh 263 ‘Chambers of Horrors, The’ 89–91 Chatterjee, Partha 229 Chevreul, Michel 70, 83, 98, 99, 206 Chinnery, George 27 chromoscope 71 chromosomes 123–4 Cole, Henry 97 Colonial and Indian Exhibition (1886) 104, 110, 114 colonial art schools 17, 26, 68–9, 96–7, 99, 102–4, 106, 108, 112, 117, 126, 127, 130, see also Bombay Art School; Calcutta Art School; Jaipur Art School; Lahore Art School; Madras Art School colonial museums in India 69, 104–5, 111, 113, 122, 129, 267 colour, see also entries for individual colours abstraction 69–75, 99, 146 butterfly 178, 206 ‘chaos of tints’ 206–7 depth 72 earth as colour 278–81, 285 geometry 72–3, 99, 294 heat 25, 60, 71, 244, 276 harmony and its limits 2, 15, 18, 24, 71, 82, 84, 90, 116, 276 hummingbird, in relation to 178 as an impossible object of inquiry 5 invisible colour 59, 137 as life force 274–6 memory of 19, 196–7 in/as mirror, see mirror



colour continued nomenclature 11, 12, 41, 44, 138–9, 141, see also Berlin, Brent; Kay, Paul poetry and colour 26, 277, 289–90, 295 primary colours 18, 71, 72, 82, 186, see also Kramrisch, Stella ‘prismatic fringe’ 71, see also Field, George; colour, thresholds of purity of, and pure colour 56–60, 71, 198, 258, see also pure painting; Sufism rhythm 258, see also Bose, Nandalal space of 3, 4, 14–17, 19, 22–30, 72, 188, 295 spectres of 19–22, 43 thresholds of 61, 71, 93, 137, 186 trichromatic theory of 150–1, see also Field, George colour blindness 16, 142, 149–64 Colour Sense 17, 93, 128–34 Combe, George 86–7 commodity racism 8–9, see also indigo; McClintock, Anne Communist Party of India 281–6, 291 Congress Party of India 266–9 contagion 50–2, 64, 88, 123, 126, 129–33, 141–2 Contra 66 291–3 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 16, 228, 230, 247, 249 Corbin, Henri 57–60 Cow Agitation 6, 7, 8, 235, see also Bailkin, Jordanna; Indian yellow Crary, Jonathan 85, 139 Crimson 88, see also Ruskin, John Crooke, William 130, 177 Crystal Palace 4, 15, 68–75, 78–82, 85, 90, 96 Cunningham, Allan 128–9, 131, 144, 166

index

399

Dacoit 65, see also Bachchan, Amitabh; Bhowani; Sholay; Thugs Dalton, John 153, see also Daltonism Daltonism 159, 161 Dandi Salt March 261–2, see also Bose, Nandalal; Gandhi, M. K. Darsán 54–5, 260, 280 Darwin, Charles 76, 81, 83–5, 127, 144, 156, 158, 168–9, 171–3, 257, 266, see also Allen, Grant; Wallace, Arthur De Quincey, Thomas 31–2, 43 Deleuze, Gilles 3, 4, 12–13, 190 Department of Science and Arts/ Department of Practical Art 80, 98, 122, see also South Kensington Museum; Cole, Henry; Jones, Owen; Redgrave, Richard; (for opposition) Ruskin, John Devi 117 Dewan, Deepali 95–6, 102 Dharavi 63, see also Akhbar Ali; Megacities Digby Wyatt, Matthew 83 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 222 Dutta, Arindam 68 dyeing 112–29 dyer, the (including figure of ) 69, 94, 96, 125, see also Lyotard, Jean-François E (Cohn’s test for visual acuity) 135–6, 143, 216, 219–31 Edwards, Elizabeth 204 Egypt 30, 32–5, 82, 111, 169, 171, 228, 269 Ellis, Havelock 177–8, see also red ennui 41–5, see also indigo epiphany in relation to colour 51, see also alchemy; Reynolds, Joshua



400

colour, art and empire

ersatz gold 45–55 Evil Eye (nazar) 5, 15, 108, 123, 141, 129–34, 204, 211–12, 215 Fanon, Frantz 6, 8 Fauves 161 Fawcett, John 118 Fergusson, James 42, 72–3, 166 Field, George 11, 18, 30, 70–2, 74, 83, 88, 98–9 finger-printing 208 First War of Indian Independence see Indian Mutiny Fisher, Kitty 50, see also Pearls; Reynolds, Joshua; whiteness Forbes Royle, John 83, 96, 101 Forbes Watson, John 117–8 Frazer, James 195 Gage, John 10, 11 Gall, Franz Joseph 86–8 Galton, Francis 141, 146–7, 149, 157, 181–3, 189–90 Gandhi, Indira 66 Gandhi, M. K. ‘Mahatma’ 125, 230, 239, 250, 253, 255, 259–67, 270, 273, 279, 281, 286, see also Bose, Nandalal; Tagore, Rabindranath Gardner Wilkinson, J. 83–4 Gazetteers of Colour 115–20, see also monographs on dyeing geometry of colour 72–3, 99 Ghadiali Dinshah, P. 132–3 Al-Ghazālī 56 Ghazi-uddin Haidar 15, 46–55 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 21, 74, 252 gold 23, 34, 46, 55, 117, 222, 278, see also ersatz gold

gold leaf 45, 52–4 Gowda, Sheela 3, 14 green 41, 53, 99, 107, 123, 127, 142, 145, 150–1, 155, 159–60, 167, 169–70, 176–7, 184, 187–8 ‘Group 1890’ 291–4, see also Paz, Octavio; Swaminathan, Jagdish Guadalupe, Madonna of 290, see also Paz, Octavio; Swaminathan, Jagdish Guattari, Felix 3, 4 Guha-Thakurta, Tapati 248 guns, see shooting and colour Haddon, A. C. 135–7, 143, 183–4, 186, 200, 202, 204, 220–1, 223–4 Haidi, Sayyid Muhammad 116 Haripura Congress 270–1, see also Bose, Nandalal; Gandhi, M. K. Havell, E. B. 106–7, 231, 233 Hay, David 75, 98 Helmholtz, Hermann von 87–8, 136, 144–5, 150 Hendley, Thomas Holbein 113–14, 126 Henry, George 154 Hering, Ewald 143, 252 Hirn, Yrjö 191 Hittorff, Jacques Ignace 80 Ho, Hsieh 239–40 Hogarth, William 83 Holi 1, 2, 65–6 Holmes, Sherlock 157 Holmgren, Frithioff 152–4, 181, 183, 196, 203, 213, 215–16, see also railway Home, Robert 15, 30, 45–55, see also Ghazi-uddin Haidar; Lucknow Homer 163–7 Hopkins, Edward 166 Humphry, Ozias 27, 45–6



Hunter, William 97, 101 Hurrel, J. 94, 121 Hutchisson, William Henry Florio 41–2 Imperial Museum, Tokyo, Japan 236 Indian Museum, Calcutta 104 Indian Mutiny 77–8, 88–94 Indian Society for Oriental Art 251 Indian yellow 52–3, 55, see also Bailkin, Jordanna; Cow Agitation indifference to colour 83–4 indigo 1, 5, 6–7, 9, 15, 19, 29, 34–46, 53, 55, 61, 67, 70, 109, 116, 132, 185, 196, 218, 289, 294, 296, see also Taussig, Michael Iraq War 88, see also Paton, Joseph; Picasso, Pablo; Ruskin, John jails in India 102, 109–14, 119–22, 126, 208, see also Cellular Jail, Port Blair Jaipur Art School 102 Jama Masjid, Delhi 92 Janah, Sunil 283, 285 Japan 235, 255, 278, 282, see also Jorasanko; Okakura, Tenshin Japanese invasion of Bengal 282, see also Bengal Famine Jones, Owen 18, 70, 80–3, 94, 96, 99–100, 113, 164, 166, 259 Jorasanko 236–7 Joshi, P. C. 283, see also Communist Party of India Journal of Indian Arts and Industry 113–14, 125 Kali 133 Kali Yuga 282, 289–90, 294 Kalighat 280–1

index

401

Kandinsky, Wassily 251–3, 276 Kant, Immanuel 76, 240, 245–6 Kapoor, Anish 61–3 Kapur, Geeta 295 Katz, David 138–9 Kauffmann, Angelica 32–4 Kay, Paul 11, 141 Keate, George 32–3 khadi 232, 259, 266, 270, 273 khil’at (robes of honour) 53–4 Kibu 220–1 Kim (Rudyard Kipling) 20 Kipling, John Lockwood 103–4, 112, 213 Klee, Paul 6, 262, 292–3 Kramrisch, Stella 248, 258, 279, 282 Lahore Art School 68, 97, 102, 113 lal monkey 40 lapis lazuli 23, 48–9, 111, 164, 269 Laws of Manu 116 lead poisoning 50 Liberty’s 122 Liebreich 154–60, 162, see also Angelucci, Arnaldo; colour blindness; Turner, J. M. W. Lilejefors, Bruno 149 Lips, Julius 17, 224–8 Locke, John 101 London Missionary Society 182 Lucknow 2, 15, 27–30, 39, 90, 102, 109, 116 lustre 175 Lyotard, Jean-François 96 Madras Art School 68, 97, 101, 104, 121 magic 5, 11, 35, 44, 123, 130, 134, 188, 191, 195, 215, 223, 289–96 Magnus, Hugo 163, 165–8, 172, 176, 181



402

colour, art and empire

Maitreya, A., 247–8 Malinowski, Branislau 17, 143, 222–4, 226, 259 mari 220–1 Maria Theresa 14, 19, 24–5, 63 Marx, Karl 44, 68, 88, 124, see also Asiatic Mode of Production; Indian Mutiny Massumi, Brian 94, 138, 189–90 Mathur, Saloni 95 Matisse, Henri 161 mauve 88, see also violet Mazhar Ali Khan 55–6, 60 McClintock, Anne 8–9, see commodity racism; soap; whiteness Megacities 63–4, see also Akhbar Ali; post-production; recycling of colour Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 135, 219–31 Merrifield, Mrs 81 Mill, James Stuart 96–7 Mir Chand 26 Mir Dard 20, 56–7 mirror (in relation to colour) 1, 6, 10, 16, 19, 21, 22–30, 28, 39–41, 47–8, 55–7, 61–2, 93, 138, 168, 197, 224, 226 Mitra, Dinabandhu 39–40 Mitra, Rajendralal 39, 42, 166 Mitter, Partha 235 mnemonics of colour 53 mobile museums 101 monad 20, 47–8 monographs on dyeing (India, 1896) 115–20 Morelli, Giovanni 17, 156–7, 161 morotai (wash painting) 235–6, see also Tagore, Abanindranath Morris, William 122 mosaic 149–50

Mullens, Joseph 38–9 Mulready, William 154–5, 158 mummy brown 30–4 Munnings, Alfred 160–1 Munsell’s colour system 16, 130 Muraqqa’ 24–5 Murshidabad (city/court in Bengal) 41 Museum of Ornamental Art, Marlborough House 89–91 Museums in India 104–6, 115, 121 Najim Kobrā 21 nasal index 203–4, see Risley, Herbert; Thurston, Edgar National Gallery, London 50 Nehru, Jawaharlal 291, see ‘Group 1890’; Swaminathan, Jagdish Netaji (S. C. Bose) 266, 286–7 Netaji Bhavan (museum, Kolkata) 286 Nīl Darpan 39–40 Nilgiri Hills 210–12, see also Rivers, W. H. R.; Thurston, Edgar Nisbet, Hume 194 Nivedita, Sister (aka Margaret Noble) 233–4, 254 ‘non-colour’ 72, 81 Notes and Queries On Anthropology 201–9, 214, see also Haddon, A. C.; Rivers, W. H. R. Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrch Freiherr von Hardenberg) 140–1, see also Benjamin, Walter; Blue Flower; Rivers, W. H. R.; Seligmann, Charles Obeyesekere, Gananath 34 objectivity 136, 139, 142, 144–50, 159, 163 Okakura, Tenshin 235–6, 246–7, 271 Olds, Oliver 206–7



index

403

opium 41, 50, 235, see also De Quincey, Thomas; indigo Oriental Repository 29

Qāzi Ahmad 48–50 Quit India 286 Qur’an 163

Pal, Bipin 232–3 Pamuk, Orhan 18 Pandit Natesa Savstu 124 Paris Exhibition of 1878 (Exposition Universelle) 105, 107–9 Partition of India (1947) 288 Paton, Joseph 89–90, see also Indian Mutiny; Picasso, Pablo; Ruskin, John Paz, Octavio 17, 18, 289–96 pearls 34, 49, 170 People’s War 284 Perkin, J. 123 Pharmakon 9, 123, 133, 228–9, see also Coomaraswamy, Ananda Photographic Society of Bengal 38–9 photography as method, 1, 2, 89, 135–6, 181, 202–5, 208, 210, 214, 221–2, 259–60, 284, 286–7 as series of snapshots 1–18 plant specimen 73–5, see also Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Picasso, Pablo 88–9, 161 picturesque, the 41–2 Pinney, Christopher 263–4 picture sense 144–62 The Pioneer 103–4 Poincaré, Henri 145–6 Pollaiulo, Antonio 157 porcelain 23, 56 post-production 63–4, see also Akhbar Ali; Bourriaud, Nicholas; Dharavi; recycling of colour pure painting, act of 258

race 162–7 railway 150–1, 164–5 rainbow 177, 183, 196–8, 264 Ramaswamy, Sumathi 115, 122 Rangachari, K., 209 Rao, G. Krisna 249 Ray, P. C. 228–9 Ray, Satyajit 19 Ray, Sydney 194, 197 recycling of colour 63–4, see also Akhbar Ali; Dharavai red 1, 3, 18, 49, 57–64, 90–1, 112, 116, 121, 123, 131–3, 142, 145, 150–2, 155, 157, 159–60, 162–4, 166–70, 184, 187–9, 194, 196–9, 201, 216, 218, 226, 269, 273, 275–8, 289, 294–5 Red Flower 162–78 red hyacinth 57–61 Redgrave, Richard 70, 98–9, 100–1, 107 Rembrandt van Rijn 24 Resolutions on Museums and Exhibitions 105 Reynolds, Joshua 26, 29, 50 Rg. Veda 163, 165 Risley, Herbert 201–8 Rivers, W. H. R., 134–7, 143, 181, 202, 214–20, 223 Roy, Jamini 17, 278–84 Royal Society on Colour Vision 150, 153 Ruskin, John 18, 29, 75, 81, 83–95, 158, 168–9, 172, 266 Sacks, Oliver 151 Sādīqī Bek 22–3, 49, 52 safflower 116–17



404

colour, art and empire

saffron 34, 55, 116 Santhals 38 Saramago, José 16 sati (widow burning) 68 Sarkar, Benoy Kumar 258 Schaffer, Simon 219 Seligmann, Charles 135, 199, 200, see also Blue Flower; Rivers, W. H. R. self-made image 51, 292 shakti (divine energy) 233 Shaykh Muhammad Karim-Khan Kirmani, see red hyacinth shimmer 18, 55–61, 279 Sholay 65–6 shooting and colour 2, 19, 65 see also Sholay silver 25 Singh, Bhagat 264 Smith, Adam 51 Smith, Robert 53 soap 48, see also commodity racism; McClintock, Anne Society for the Encouragement of Art, Manufactures and Commerce (SEAMC) 34–5 South Kensington Museum 15, 17, 97, 100–4, 114, 119, 125, 130, 148–9, 155–6, 193–4, 200–1, 255 spectro-therapy 132 Spivak, Gayatri 30, 63–4 Suez Canal 106 Sufism 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 23, 24, 35, 55–61 supplement 67–8, 70, 107 swadeshi 228–50, 255, 261, 278, 288 Swaminathan, Jagdish 5, 17, 18, 289–96 swaraj 232–50, 256, 288 swatch (of colour) 138, 139, 142, 144–62 syphilis 44, 131–2, 211

Tagore Abanindranath 17, 231–50, 252, 253, 280, 281 Tagore, Gaganendranath 251–2 Tagore, Rabindranath 17, 232–3, 239, 253–60, 263, 265–7, 286 tanning, process of 125 tantra 3, 18, 244, 293 tasvir rowghani (oily painting) 54 tattoos, tattooing 135–7, 174, 176, 196, 218, 220 Taussig, Michael 9, 10, 45, 69, 109, 124, 215, 223 Temple, Richard C. 133–4 thermodynamics 21 Thouless, Richard 131 Thugs 109–10, see also Bhowani; Birdwood, George Thurston, Edgar 110, 122, 212–18 tintometer 138, 183–4, 186, 200, 213, 215, 218, see also colour, thresholds of Titchener, E. B. 183 Tolstoy, Leo 265–6, 281 Topinard, Paul 146, 203, 205, 209 Torres Strait Image Making 192–7, see also Cambridge Expedition totem 1, 7, 138, see also rainbow in relation to and Haddon 196, 204 totemic mimesis 189–200 Turner, J. M. W. 21, 154–5, 158 Turner, Victor 21 Tylor, E. B. 195 urine of cow, see Indian yellow of human 52, 54–5



Varma, Ravi 234–5, 292 Vatican 147–9 Verestchagin, Wassily 77 Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata 52–3 Village Industries Museum (plan for) 267, see also Gandhi, M. K.; Tagore, Rabindranath violet 184–5, 200, 256 Vishnudharmottara, Part III 248–9, 276, see also Coomaraswamy, Ananda; Tagore, Abanindranath; Kramrisch, Stella Visva-Bharati University 254–6, see also Bose, Nandalal; Tagore, Rabindranath Wallace, Arthur 171–2 waste (including rubbish) 1, 2, 6, 16, 23–4, 44, 50–1, 64–5, 287 water pistols, see shooting and colour

index

405

wax 49, 55, 178 Wells, H. G. 200 white 18, 53, 59, 71–2, 90–1, 133, 193, 235, 241, 252, 248–9, 254, 259–61, 269, see also shimmer whiteness 8, 50, 143, 235, 254, 259–61 Wilson, Minden 42–4 winds (Torres Strait) 135–8, 220–1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 163, 179–81, 198–200, 240 yellow 72, 99, 132–3, 157, 169–70, 184, 186–7, 235, 269, 273, 275–8, 289, 294 Young, Diana 14 Young, Thomas 144, 157 Zendavasta 163 Zoffany, Johann 15, 19, 26–8, 32, 53–4