Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (British Art and Visual Culture since 1750 New Readings) 075463681X, 9780754636816

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Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect

of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second — Indian — Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D’Oyly,

William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery. Hermione de Almeida is the Pauline McFarlin Walter Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa, USA. She has published widely on all aspects of Romanticism, including Byron and Joyce through Homer: ‘Don Juan’ and ‘Ulysses’ (Columbia and Macmillan, 1981) and Romantic Medicine and John Keats

(Oxford, 1991). She was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award for lifetime achievement of the KeatsShelley Association of America in 2003.

George H. Gilpin is Professor of English at the University of Tulsa, USA and Scholar-in-Residence of McFarlin Library Special Collections. He is the author of The Art of Contemporary English Culture (Macmillan, 1991), as well as essays on British Romanticism and is currently annotating the papers of the V. S. Naipaul Archive.

Front jacket illustration: William Hodges, Tomb and Distant View of the RajmahalHills,

c.1781, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London Back jacket illustrations: (top) James Wales, View from the Island of Elephanta,

Colored Etching, 1791-2, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 12, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art; (bottom) Johan Zoffany, Sacrifice of an Hindoo Widow Upon the

Funeral Pile of Her Husband, c.1795, Oil Painting, Giles Eyre Esq. and Charles Greig Esq.

Jacket design by Paul McAlinden

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation -

https://archive.org/details/indianrenaissancO000deal

_

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect ofIndia x

Ni

BRITISH ART AND VISUAL CULTURE SINCE 1750 NEW READINGS

General Editor: David Peters Corbett, University of York, UK This series examines the social and cultural history of British visual culture, including the interpretation of individual works of art, and perspectives on reception, consumption and display. In the same series:

British Artists and the Modernist Landscape

Ysanne Holt Modern Architecture and the End of Empire Mark Crinson Representations of G. F. Watts

Art Making in Victorian Culture

Edited by Colin Trodd and Stephanie Brown Purchasing Power Representing Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Popular Print Culture

Sophie Carter Reassessing Nikolaus Pevsner

Edited by Peter Draper English Accents Interactions with British Art c. 1776-1855 Edited by Christiana Payne and William Vaughan Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain c. 1880-1930

Edited by David J. Getsy Time Present and Time Past

The Art of John Everett Millais Paul Barlow

A Shared Legacy Essays on Irish and Scottish Art and Visual Culture

Edited by Fintan Cullen and John Morrison

Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

ASHGATE

© Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. The authors have asserted their moral rights. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited

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England Ashgate website: http://www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data De Almeida, Hermione, 1950-

Indian Renaissance : British Romantic art and the prospect

of India. - (British art and visual culture since 1750 : new readings) 1. Painting, British — 18th century 2. Painting, British — 19th century 3. Romanticism in art — Great Britain 4. Imperialism in art 5. Orientalism in art — Great Britain 6. Romanticism — Great Britain 7. British — India — History

8. India — In art I. Title II. Gilpin, George H. 759.9'954 ISBN-10 075463681X

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2005048273 LC Class # N6766.D36 2005 ISBN 0 7546 3681 X

Designed by Paul McAlinden Printed in Singapore by Kyodo Printing Company Pte Ltd

Contents Foreword

Vii

List of Illustrations

xi

Color Plates Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

|-32

33

I. Tigers of All Stripes

35

2 . The Great Banyan Tree of India

40

3 . The Cave-Temple of Elephanta: Eroticism and Art

47

4. The Indian Prospect in English Romantic Art and Literature

55

5 . Sanskrit Translations for an Indian Renaissance

Sy/

6 . The Ideal of India: Ancient India as the Uroffenbarung of the Romantic Era

60

Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

65

. Tilly Kettle’s Theater of India . The Dancing Girl of Faizabad . Artists and Traders at Oudh . Edenic Nights and Everyday Living . The Paradise of the Nayars Dnon NY bw —. Natural Paradise and Natural History

67

English Romantic Art and the Indian Prospect

74 75 80 89 92: 101

. The Royal Academy and the Prospect of India

103

. Patronage of Learning — By a Governor-General

108

. Hodges’ Indian Sublime . Temple Gloom and Rural Complexity . Conversations in Calcutta and Oudh DN RW nn —. The Legacy of Clive and Hastings

114

Storming Seringapatam: The Drama and Romance of Empire

145

|. Little Boys Lost 2 . Romantic, Revolutionary Mysore

147

3 . Storming Seringapatam 4 . Imperial Vision: The Progress from Cornwallis to Wellesley

158

5 . The View from the Hill-forts

176

126 132 141

154 167

vi

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

Part Five Thomas Daniell and the Picturesque Possession of India

. . . . . .

‘Times are Changed’: Early and Late Views of Calcutta Travel and Picturesque Possession Oriental Scenery: From Bengal to Madras, 1795-7 Twelve ‘Singular’ Antiquities of India, 1799-1800 Objects and Scenes of Conquest, 1801-1803 Twenty-Four Landscapes Composed Too Perfectly, 1804-1805

NO ow eh Oh SO — . Singular

India, 1808

183 189 194 200 203 205 208

Part Six Dark Prospects in the Light of Empire

Part Seven

18]

213

. ‘Something New’ - The Freaks of Gold . Devolution of an Indian Prospect . Missionaries of Empire . The Imperial Sublime of James Baillie Fraser . Savage Forms and Natural Landscapes for the Imperial Traveler FR — Oau WN . Charles D’Oyly — The View from an Elephant’s Back

215

Elegies to an Indian Renaissance

265

. Empire Follows Art: The Retrospections of Hodges and Zoffany . Blake’s Prophecies Against Empire . Blake’s ‘Indian’ Epic . Turner and the Dragons of Empire . George Chinnery: The Last Romantic Artist of India bh — Dan WN . The Prospect from a Distance

267

Notes

305

Selected Bibliography Index

—

224 228 234 245 257

27 280 286 295 302

327 333

Vii

Foreword Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of

India concerns itself first with the English artists who traveled east to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries,

impressions

artists

whose

of the subcontinent

first-hand

came

and

original

to profoundly

influence and, later, be absorbed into and modified by the

prevailing cultural and political movements of the period. These artists — only a few of whom are now well-known — include James Forbes, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, James Wales, Thomas Daniell, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, Robert Home,

Edward Moor, Robert Hyde Colebrooke, and Alexander Allan; and, after 1800, Charles Gold, Henry Salt, James Moffat, William Daniell, James Baillie Fraser, Charles

D’Oyly, and George Chinnery. The prospect of India, visual and conceptual, and recorded in ever-shifting forms by these traveler-artists, found a recurrent place in the imaginative inquiries of the Romantic Movement in England, in

writers from Frances Burney to Walter Scott, in poets from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to John Keats, and in artists from William Blake to J.M.W. Turner. Between 1776 and 1836, in

an interlude of extraordinary creative endeavor, intellectual ferment, political action, and geographic exploration (a period of conflicting energies and geopolitical flux that preceded the official era of the Raj), Britain saw — among a host

of stimuli both positive and negative — revolutionary conflicts in North and South America, France, and the West Indies, the establishment of humanistic societies to foster

visual culture at home and antiquarian study abroad (the Royal Academy in London and the Asiatick Society in Calcutta), and territorial acquisitions overseas that were the basis for its seachange in political and economic status from colonial trader to residential empire in India. The artists who recorded the first English prospects of India from individual on-site experience thus did so in the very coincidence and confluence of Romantic vision and imperial intention. The novelty of subject and vista which

the earliest of these artists contributed to the ferment of Romantic art and culture, and the fascination with which

these original images and impressions of India were received by viewers and audiences in England, are patent, renascent, and incomparable. Equally remarkable and fraught with cultural import are the adaptations of the initial images and ideas of India by subsequent Romantic artists of India who sketched and painted the subcontinent in response to the shifting interests of patronage and the imperatives of empire. Indeed, in the prospects of India drawn, painted, engraved, and exhibited between the 1770s

and the 1830s — a visual culture drawn from travel actual and vicarious and expressive of generational shifts in perspective and attitude — can be traced the very passage from English Romanticism to British Imperialism. Imperial appropriation follows artistic vision, and empire follows art. The full portfolio of English Romantic portraits and views of India reveals both the visual occasions and the conceptual signposts through which an initial and transnational movement of creative inquiry and imaginative endeavor was first adapted, then harnessed, and finally transformed out of itself to meet and express the prerogatives of a British India. Our claim of an Indian Renaissance in British Romantic art and culture, born of the original images and actual experiences of the first English artists and intellectuals who traveled to the subcontinent in the 1770s and 1780s,

is a very large claim by any measure. It is one we make with reckless abandon, despite the widely-held ongoing assumption that India has always been — and deliberately so — peripheral to British cultural concerns: Yet in spite of the high degree of British exposure to India [by the end of the eighteenth century, and certainly thereafter], it is difficult to argue that India, from the earliest contacts to 1947 and beyond, has been other than peripheral to the main body of British cultural concerns. The

Viii

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

limited nature of the British response to India, that was to last throughout the Raj, revealed itself early.’

Decades of substantial empire and Victorian national identity have nurtured what is described here as the always limited British response to India. But for a brief and vibrant period near the turn of the nineteenth century this was not the case. The first English Romantic artists of India did not respond with deliberate limitation and distance for what they saw but, rather, with delight and fascination for the new

subjects, new vistas, new ideas, and new inspirations.

The energy of their original vision of the prospect of India was more than well received — and it became the visual impetus and the cultural fuel for an Indian Renaissance in the art and culture of Romantic Britain. Our book tells with visual illustrations the story of that inspiration and the history of those pioneering artists whose achievement was subsumed and then eclipsed, and whose bright images were shadowed, by the complacencies and assumptions of later generations.

The term ‘prospect’ in our title and narrative is broadly cast. It encompasses at once the visual meanings technical to art history, the implicit suggestions of the term in philosophical discourse, and the practical assumptions of tangible acquisition. ‘Prospect’ in our narrative evokes, ini-

tially and variously, the artist’s first encompassing glance or triomphe de I’cil, the broad vista of the triptych or panorama, the grand spectacle or commanding sight, the visual insight or determination, the visualization or opening to view of an unknown entity, the visionary possibility of something new, the visual anticipation of discovery, and the conceptual expectation of recovery. The term can also address the visually-derived topographical perspectives of the colonial or imperial prospector: the acquisitive expectation of valuable discoveries, the appropriate survey of pending real acquisitions, and the ruthless exposure to view of acquired possessions and conquered territories. Slippage between the possibilities of the term illustrates how the Indian

Renaissance

began, grew,

evolved, devolved,

and

then dissipated in the shadows of an unromantic British Raj. The prospect of India in British Romantic art and culture is limited only by the assumptions of those who would not see. Our focus on India and on the Indian prospect in British Romantic art became necessary and inevitable once we recognized the sizeable number of independent English artists painting in India in the period, and the extraordinary volume and currency of the images — including popular and accessible printed images — generated and then disseminated at home by these artists. Individual artists taken on Cook’s voyages to the Pacific islands clearly only anticipated what was to become the actual imaginative revolution occasioned by the prospects of India. Nineteenth-century British artists of coastal China, the Malaya peninsula and archipelago, and Africa, also arrived there by way of India — both literally and figuratively — to follow in chronology and in pattern the experiences of their predecessors

in India. Over the course of the nineteenth century (and certainly by its end), India became a synonym for Britain’s Raj; it was the keystone of the empire’s foundation, and the bright jewel in the imperial crewn. But empire followed art, and the popular British perception of the last century that India was both paradigm and synecdoche of the empire was long preceded by the visual brightness and dynamic images of the Romantic artistic encounter with the subcontinent. We wish to thank the following institutions and their curators, archivists, and librarians who have provided invaluable assistance to us over the decade that we have worked on this book. In Great Britain: the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, for generous support toward publication; the British Library, especially Patricia Kattenhorn, Rod Hamilton, and J.P. Losty of the India Office Collections; the Victoria and Albert Museum; Tate

Britain; the Royal College of Surgeons; and the National Army Museum. In the United States: the Yale Center for British Art, especially Elizabeth Fairman and the Department of Prints and Drawings; the Beineke Library at Yale University; the Houghton Library at Harvard University; the New York Public Library; the Pierpont Morgan Library; the Library of Congress; the National Gallery; the Smithsonian Institution and its collections; and the Peabody Museum. At The University of Tulsa: the Interlibrary Loan and Special Collections staffs of McFarlin Library; and our friends in the College of Arts and Science, especially Tom Benediktson and Sandy Vice. Mildred Archer’s descriptive catalogs of British artists of India served as an invaluable resource for our study. Two London galleries, Martyn Gregory and Bernard Shapero, deserve mention also for their conservation work in the field of British artists of India and the Far East.

For fulsome assistance in getting our book to press, we thank Pamela Edwardes, for her keen energy and superlative professionalism, David Peters Corbett, for his enthusiasm as editor of the series ‘British Art and Visual Culture since 1750: New Readings’, Lucinda Lax, Becki Candotti and Russell Parton for their highly competent management of a vast project, and Paul McAlinden for his elegant design work. We also wish to thank the following individuals for their help and friendship: Sharon Bell, who has always believed in our work; Vidia Naipaul, who urged us to write about the ‘idea of India’; Gillian Malpass, for her early interest and always generous advice; Josie and Tom Winter,

and Cheryl and Richard Groenendyke, for their cheerful endurance; Lavina and Mark Davenport, for their affection;

Ronald Paulson for his exemplary linking of art and literature; San Woodring, whose kind dignity we miss immeasurably; and Carl Woodring who, from the time we first

met, has always been willing to read with kindness and acuity everything that we send him.

Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin Venice, Florida 2005

To Hermione Estella and William Carl, who have lived with the Indian Renaissance all their lives

xi

List of Illustrations Color Plates

. James Forbes, The Royal Tiger, c.1765—-8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

. Zayn-al-Din, A Painted Stork, 1782, Watercolor Drawing, Ehrenfeld Collection, San Francisco

. James Forbes, Indian Burr or Banyan Tree, 1770, Watercolor

. William Hodges, A View of the West Side of the Fortress of Chunargarh on the Ganges, c.1785, Oil Painting, Wolverhampton

Drawing, Yale Center for British Art . James Wales, View of Cubbeer Burr, the Celebrated Banyan Tree,

1789, Engraving after Wales’s painting, by James Phillips, 1790, India Office Collections, British Library, London

. James Wales, Interior View of the principal Excavated Temple on the Island of Elephanta, 1785, Engraving after Wales’s painting, by James Phillips, 1790, India Office Collections, British Library, London . Tilly Kettle, Shah Alam, Mughal Emperor, reviewing the 3rd Brigade of the East India Company's troops at Allahabad, c.1781, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

. Tilly Kettle, Dancing-girl, 1772, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art . James Wales, Madhu Rao Narayan, the Maratha Peshwa with Nana Fadnavis and Attendants, 1792, Oil Painting, Royal Asiatic

Society, London

. Thomas Hickey, Indian lady, perhaps ‘Jemdanee’, bibi of William Hickey, 1787, Oil Painting, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin . Francesco Renaldi, Muslim lady with a hookah, 1787, Oil Painting, Private Collection

. Francesco Renaldi, Muslim lady reclining, 1789, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

. James Forbes, Malabars of the highest Casts of Nairs and Brahmins, in the Queen ofAttinga’s Dominion, 1772, Watercolor

Drawing, Yale Center for British Art . James Forbes, A Woman of the Highest Cast of Brahmins ... on the Coast of Malabar, 1772, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for

British Art . James Forbes, Nymphea Lotos, Blue Water-Lily of Guzaret, 1772,

Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

Art Gallery 20. William Hodges, The Ghats of Benares, 1787, Oil Painting,

The Royal Academy, London 7a\ James Wales, View of the Breach Causeway, Colored Etching, 1791-2, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 5, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art 27). James Wales, View from Sion Fort, Colored Etching, 1791-2, for

Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 11, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art 23% James Wales, View from the Island of Elephanta, Colored Etching, 1791-2, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 12, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art

24. William Hodges, Tomb and Distant View of the Rajmahal Hills, c.1781, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

Pay. Johan Zoffany, Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hastings, 1783-7, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

26. Johan Zoffany, Warren Hastings meeting with Jawan Bakht, 1784, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta Die Johan Zoffany, Colonel Antoine Polier with his friends Claud Martin, John Wombwell and the artist, 1786-7, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

28. Robert Home, Lord Cornwallis receiving the sons of Tipu Sultan, 1793-4, Oil Painting, National Army Museum, London

29. Sir David Wilkie, General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Sahib after Having Captured Seringapatam on the 4th May 1799, 1839, Oil Painting, National Gallery of Scotland,

Edinburgh 30. Robert H. Colebrooke, North view of Sewandroog shewing the

. James Forbes, Hazardasitaun, the Bird of a Thousand Songs — the

attack in December 1791, 1794, Aquatint after Colebrooke, India Office Collections, British Library, London Sil Alexander Allan, Sewandroog, 1794, Aquatint after Allan, India Office Collections, British Library, London

Bulbul, or Indian Nightingale, on a Branch of the Seeta-Phool, or

S25 William Daniell, Madras, or Fort St. George in the Bay of Bengal —

. James Forbes, Sketch of the Lower Part of a Jac (Durian, or Jack-

fruit), c.1765-8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

Custard Apple, c.1765-8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art . James Forbes, The Sultana: or Hoopoo, at Bombay, on a Sprig of the Citron Tree, c.1765—8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art . James Forbes, A Small Bloodsucker, 1768, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

A Squall Passing Off, 1833, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

33 Thomas Daniell, The New Buildings at Chouringhee, 1787, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta, Plate 7, Yale Center for British Art 34. Thomas Daniell, The Mountain of Ellora, 1803, Triptych Aquatint after James Wales, Hindoo Excavations in the Mountain of Ellora, Plates 1-3, Yale Center for British Art

x =_—

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India 30: Thomas Daniell, Hindoo Temples at Bindrabund, East Indies, 1797,

Oil Painting, Royal Academy, London 36. Thomas Daniell, Composition: Hindu and Moslem Architecture, 1799, Oil Painting, Private Collection

37. Thomas and William Daniell, Cape Comorin, taken near Calcad,

1804, Aquatint, Twenty-Four Landscapes, Plate 1, Yale Center for British Art 38. Thomas and William Daniell, Buddell, opposite Bilkate in the Mountains of Sirinagur, 1804, Aquatint, Twenty-Four Landscapes, Plate 19, Yale Center for British Art

39) Charles Gold, Snake Men, with Serpents Dancing to Music, 1806,

. Commemorative Gold Medal designed by Matthew Bolton and Conrad Heinrich Kiichler, 1799, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

. William Blake, The Tyger, 1794, Colored Etching, Beinecke

Library, Yale University . Edward Moor, Mahadeva and Parvati, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University . Edward Moor, Mahadeva-Panchamukhi, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The HindusPantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 24, Yale Center for

. Edward Moor, Siva and Parvati conjoined, called then Arddha-Nari,

British Art

Baillie Fraser, A View of the Botanic Garden House and

1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University . James Forbes, Calicut, on the Coast of Malabar, 1774, Engraving after Forbes’s Drawing, for Oriental Memoirs, 1813, Yale Center for British Art

Reach, 1824-6, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta and its environs, no. 4,

. James Forbes, The Grand Altar-Piece ... in the Excavations at the

40. Johan of Her Greig All: James

Zoffany, Sacrifice of an Hindoo Widow Upon the Funeral Pile Husband, c.1795, Oil Painting, Giles Eyre Esq. and Charles Esq.

Yale Center for British Art A2n James Baillie Fraser, Old Court House Street, c.1819, Oil Painting, India Office Collections, British Library, London

43. James Baillie Fraser, The House of Rana of Cote Gooroo, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. 6, Yale Center for British Art

. James Baillie Fraser, Gungotree the Holy Shrine of Mahadeo, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. 11, Yale Center for

British Art 45. Henry Salt, A View at Lucknow, 1809, Aquatint, Twenty-four Views Taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia, and Egypt, India Office Collections, British Library, London

46. James Moffat, View of the Large Pagoda at Nuddea, 1810, Aquatint, India Office Collections, British Library

Isle of Elephanta, 1774, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art . Frontispiece for Oriental Memoirs (1813), James Forbes Esq,

ER.S,,£.A.S, &c., 1811, T.W. Dean from a drawing by Murphy, Yale Center for British Art . Edward Moor, Trimurti the Hindu Triad, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University . James Forbes, Scene in the Garden at Vezelpoor, near Baroche, 1778, Engraving after Forbes’s Drawing for Oriental Memoirs,

1813, Yale Center for British Art . Thomas Daniell, Hindoo Temples at Agouree, on the River Soane,

Bahar, 1796, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery I, Plate 19, Yale Center for British Art

AT. Charles D’Oyly, Female Attendants, 1830, Colored Lithograph, Costumes of India, Yale Center for British Art 48. Charles D’Oyly, A Samporea or Snake Catcher, 1830, Colored

. James Wales, Six Armed Shiva, Elephanta No. 1, c.1791, Drawing,

Lithograph, Costumes of India, Yale Center for British Art

Temple at Salsette, 1775, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

49. Charles D’Oyly, Town and Port of Calcutta, c.1835, Colored

Lithograph, Views of Calcutta and its Environs, Yale Center for British Art

50. Charles D’Oyly, The Bodhi Tree at the Bodh Gaya Temple, c.1830. Oil Painting, Camellia Plc Collection

Blk William Hodges, Mrs. Hastings and the Rocks of Colgong, 1790, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

52) Johan Zoffany, Embassy of Haidar Beg Khan to Lord Cornwallis, c.1795, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calentta

53. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 25, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University Bae J.M.W. Turner, The Siege of Seringapatam, c.1800, Watercolor, Tate Britain, London

SD: J.M.W. Turner, The Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides, Detail, c.1806,

Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

56. J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, Detail, 1818, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

Sie George Chinnery, William and Catherine Aurora, children of Lieutenant-Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, c.1805, Oil

Yale Center for British Art . James Forbes, The Entrance of the Grand Excavation, or principal

. James Forbes, The Vestibule of the Great Temple, in the Excavations

at Salsette, 1775, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art . James Forbes, The Inside of the Large Temple, or the principal Excavation, at Salsette, 1775, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center

for British Art . Erotic fragment from Elephanta in Towneley Collection, reproduced by Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the

Ancients, 1786, Beinecke Library, Yale University . Rohilla Temple in Towneley Collection, reproduced by Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, 1786, Beinecke Library, Yale University

. Edward Moor, Pujartha Dravyani, Sacrificial Implements &c., 1810, Details, Rohilla Temple, Towneley Collection, Drawing by

M. Haughton after Moor, engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University 20. Edward Moor, Devi, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor,

Painting, Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation,

engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale

Hongkong

University

58. George Chinnery, Indian Landscape with Temple, 1815,

Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Aft shy). George Chinnery, Bathers and Tomb at Dusk, c.1820, Watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London 60. George Chinnery, Self-portrait, c.1840, Oil Painting, National Portrait Gallery, London

Black and White Figures Part One. The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

. Tippoo’s Man-Tiger Organ, c.1795, Painted Wood and Metal, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Part Two. Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects 21. Tilly Kettle, Mahammad Ali Khan, 1770, Oil Painting, Victoria

and Albert Museum, London 22. Tilly Kettle, Shuja-ud-daula, Nawab of Oudh, and four sons with General Barker and military officers, 1772, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

23. Tilly Kettle, Sati scene, c.1770-71, Oil Painting, Private Coll. 24. William Hodges, View of a House Built by Col, Claude Martin at

Lucknow, Bengal, 1790, Engraving after Hodges, Beinecke Library, Yale University

List of Illustrations

25; Anonymous Indian Artist, John Wombwell, c. late 1780s,

1786, Engraving after Hodges, India Office Collections, British

Gouache, Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan 26. Tilly Kettle, Colonel Antoine Polier watching a nautch, c.1780, Gouache after Kettle, Private Coll. 27. James Wales, Beebee Amber Kooer, bibi of Sir Charles Warre Malet, 1792, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

28. James Wales, Susanna Wales, 1795, Oil Painting, Sir Edward Malet 29; Charles Smith, Indian lady, perhaps the bibi of John Wombwell, 1786, Oil Painting, David Cotton, Esq. 30. Francesco Renaldi, Boulone, bibi of Colonel Claud Martin, fishing with Martin's adopted son, James Martin, c.1794—5, Oil Painting,

La Martiniere College, Lucknow 31. Johan Zoffany (formerly attributed to Francesco Renaldi), The Palmer family, 1786, Oil Painting, India Office Collections,

British Library, London 32 Francesco Renaldi, A European and his family, c.1794-5,

Oil Painting, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta

Library, London

a

William Hodges, A View of the Great Pagoda at Tanjore, 1787, Aquatint, Yale Center for British Art 54. William Hodges, A View of the Fort at Agra on the Jumna River, 1786, Aquatint, Yale Center for British Art

ey James Wales, View of Bombay Harbour, 1791-2, Colored Etching,

for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 1, London, 1800, Yale Center for British Art 56. James Wales, View of Bombay Harbour, 1791-2, Colored Etching,

for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 2, London, 1800, Yale Center for British Art Die James Wales, View from Belmont, 1791-2, Colored Etching, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 9, London, 1800, Yale Center for British Art 58. James Wales, View from Belmont, 1791-2, Colored Etching, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 7, London, 1800,

Navel to perform it, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale

Yale Center for British Art DY: James Wales, View from Sion Fort, 1791-2, Colored Etching, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 10, London, 1800, Yale Center for British Art . Johan Zoffany, Charles Towneley’s Library in Park Street, 1781-3,

University 34. James Forbes, Hibiscus Mutabilis, the Changeable Rose, c.1765-8,

Oil Painting, Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museums, Burnley . Johan Zoffany, Mrs. Hastings, 1783-4, Oil Painting, Victoria

SS Edward Moor, Vishnu and Lakshmi on Sesha or Ananta contemplating the Creation, with Brahma springing on a lotos from his

Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

3D: James Forbes, Fruit of Bombay, c.1765-8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art 36. James Forbes, The Patterah, or Crested Long-tailed Pye, (shown) on a Branch of the Mango Tree, c.1765—8, Watercolor Drawing,

Yale Center for British Art B7e James Forbes, Bulbul, or Indian Nightingale, on a Sprig of the Custard Apple Tree, 1768, Color Engraving after Forbes’s Drawing, for Oriental Memoirs, 1813, Yale Center for British Art 38. James Forbes, Cobra de Capello (Pair), 1772, Watercolor Drawing,

Memorial Museum, Calcutta

. Johan Zoffany, The Impey family listening to strolling musicians, c.1783-4, Oil Painting, Private Collection . Johan Zoffany, Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, 1784-6, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London . Arthur William Devis, Warren Hastings, 1784-5, Oil Painting,

Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi 65. Benjamin West, Lord Clive Receiving the Grant of the Diwani, c.1818, from earlier version, c.1774-95, Oil painting, India Office

Collections, British Library, London

Yale Center for British Art Shp. James Forbes, The Large Indian Bat; whose wings extend upwards of six feet, 1768, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

40. Anonymous Indian Company Artist, White Lotus, c.1800,

Watercolor Drawing, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Part Four. Storming Seringapatam: The Drama and Romance of Empire

66. John Smart, The Hostage Princes — Abdul Khaliq and Muza-ud-din, 1792, Drawing, India Office Collections, British Library, London

67. Henry Singleton, Lord Cornwallis receiving the sons of Tipu Sultan as hostages, 1793, Oil Painting, Sotheby’s, 23 November 1977

Part Three. English Romantic Art and the Indian Prospect Al. Spiridone Roma, The East Offering its Riches to Brittania, 1778,

Ceiling Painting, British Library, London 42. Joshua Reynolds, Captain John Foote, 1765, Oil Painting, York City Art Gallery 43, Edward Penny, Lord Clive receiving the Nawab of Bengal Mir

44,

1793, Engraving after Singleton, India Office Collections, British Library, London 69. Mather Brown, Marquis Cornwallis Receiving the Sons of Tippoo

Sultan as Hostages, 1793, Engraving after Brown, India Office Collections, British Library, London

Jaffar’s Grant of Money to establish a Charity Fund, 1772, Oil Painting, India Office Collections, British Library, London Francis Hayman, Lord Clive meeting Mir Jafar Nawab of Murshidabad after the Battle of Plassey, c.1761-2, Oil Painting,

70. Thomas Stothard, The hostage princes leaving the zenana, c.1799,

National Portrait Gallery, London

ip. Throne of the late Tippoo Sultaun, 1855, Engraving, from G. Mohammed's History of Hyder Ali and Tippoo Sultan, India

45. Tilly Kettle, Warren Hastings, c.1775, Oil Painting, Asiatic

Society of Bengal, Calcutta 46. Joshua Reynolds, Warren Hastings, c.1768—9, Oil Painting,

National Portrait Gallery, London 47.

68. Henry Singleton, The Sons of Tippoo Sultan Leaving their Father,

Arthur William Devis, Sir William Jones, c.1793, Oil Painting,

India Office Collections, British Library, London 48. William Hodges, A Farmyard in the Kingdom of Bengal, 1786,

Aquatint, Yale Center for British Art 49. William Hodges, Brahmins Before the Temple of Vis Visha, c.1781,

Oil Painting, Mr. Dallas Pratt

vA Charles Gold, Tomb of Hyder Ali and Tippoo Sultan, 1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 50, Yale Center for British Art

Office Collections, British Library, London 73. Robert Ker Porter, The Storming of Seringapatam, c.1801,

Triptych Engraving after Porter’s Panorama, India Office Collections, British Library, London 74. Henry Singleton, The Last Effort and Fall of Tippoo Sultaun,

c.1800, Engraving after Singleton, India Office Collections, British Library, London Usk Henry Singleton, The Body of Tippoo Sultaun Recognised by his

Drawing, Yale Center for British Art 50. William Hodges, Natives drawing Water from a Pond With Warren

Family, c.1800. Engraving after Singleton, India Office Collections, British Library, London

Hastings’ House at Alipur in the Distance, 1781, Oil Painting,

76. Robert Ker Porter, The Finding of the Body of Tippoo Sultaun,

Private Collection

c.1800, Engraving after Porter, India Office Collections, British Library, London Tf Thomas Rowlandson, The Death of Tippoo, or Besieging the Harem, 1800, Color Engraving, Private Coll.

Bile William Hodges, A Column taken from the Temple of Vis Visha at Benares, 1793, Engraving after Hodges for Travels in India,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 52. William Hodges, The Mausoleum of Sher Shah at Sarsaram, Bihar,

78. Charles Gold, A Gentoo Fortress Situated at Vellore, in the

xiv

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India Carnatic, 1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 3, Yale Center for British Art 79. Robert Home, Charles Cornwallis, 2nd Earl (later 1st Marquess),

1792, Oil Painting, Formerly Banqueting Hall, Madras 80. Robert Home, Richard Colley Wellesley, 2nd Lord Mornington

(later 1st Marquess Wellesley), c.1801, Oil Painting, Stratfield Saye House 81. Thomas Hickey, Purniya, Chief Minister of Mysore, c.1801,

Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art 82. Robert H. Colebrooke, South West View of Ootra-Durgam, 1794,

Aquatint after Colebrooke, India Office Collections, British Library, London 83. Alexander Allan, Ryacottah, 1794, Aquatint after Allan, India

105. Thomas and William Daniell, Near Atoor,in the Dindigul District, 1804, Aquatint, Twenty-Four Landscapes, Plate 6, Yale Center for British Art 106. Thomas Daniell, Entrance to a Hindoo Temple, near Bangalore, 1808, Aquatint, Antiquities ofIndia II, Plate 18, Yale Center for British Art 107. Thomas Daniell, Interior of the Temple of Mandeswara near

Chaynpore, Bahar, 1808, Aquatint, Antiquities of India II, Plate 22, Yale Center for British Art 108. Thomas Daniell, A Minar at Gour, 1808, Aquatint, Antiquities of India Il, Plate 23, Yale Center for British Art 109. Thomas Daniell, The Cuttub Minar, near Delhi, 1808, Aquatint, Antiquities of India II, Plate 24, Yale Center for British Art

Office Collections, British Library, London

84. Thomas Daniell, South East view of Fort St. George, Madras, 1797, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery Il, Plate 7, Yale Center for British Art

85.

86. 87.

88. 89.

Part Five. Thomas Daniell and the Picturesque Possession of India Thomas Daniell, The Old Fort, the Playhouse, Holwell’s Monument, 1786, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta, Plate 1, Yale Center for British Art Thomas Daniell, Gentoo Pagoda and House, 1787, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta, Plate 4, Yale Center for British Art Thomas Daniell, The Old Fort Ghaut, 1787, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta, Plate 6, Yale Center for British Art Thomas Daniell, Old Government House, 1788, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta, Plate 10, Yale Center for British Art Thomas Daniell, St. John’s Church, 1788, Aquatint, Views of

Calcutta, Plate 12, Yale Center for British Art 90. Thomas Daniell, Govinda Ram Mittee’s Pagoda, Calcutta, 1798, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery II, Plate 5, Yale Center for British Art Dl Thomas Daniell, Eastern Gate of the Jummah Musjid at Delhi, 1798, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery I, Plate 1, Yale Center for

British Art 92. William Hodges, A View of the Gate of the Tomb of the Emperor

Akbar, at Secundrii, 1786, Engraving after Hodges, India Office Collections, British Library, London

93; Thomas Daniell, Gate of the Tomb of the Emperor Akbar at Secundra, 1795, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery 1, Plate 9, Yale Center for British Art 94. Thomas Daniell, Hindoo Temples at Bindrabund on the River Jumna, 1795, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery I, Plate 2, Yale Center for British Art 95. Thomas Daniell, N. W. View of Rotas Ghur, Bahar, 1796, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery 1, Plate 20, Yale Center for British Art 96. Thomas Daniell, The Rock of Tritchinopoly, taken on the River Cauvery, 1797, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery II, Plate 19, Yale Center for British Art 97. Thomas Daniell, Ruins of the Palace, Madura, 1798, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery II, Plate 17, Yale Center for British Art 98. Thomas Daniell, The Great Bull, an Hindoo Idol, at Tanjore, 1798,

Aquatint, Oriental Scenery II, Plate 22, Yale Center for British Art

oF: Thomas Daniell, Trichengodu, 1792, Drawing, Private Coll. 100. Thomas Daniell, The Entrance of an Excavated Hindoo Temple, at Mavalipuram, 1799, Aquatint, Antiquities of India I, Plate 2,

Yale Center for British Art 101. Thomas Daniell, Part of the Interior of the Elephanta, 1800,

Aquatint, Antiquities of India I, Plate 8, Yale Center for British Art & 102. Thomas and William Daniell, Near the Fort of Currah, on the River Ganges, 1801, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery III, Plate 1,

Yale Center for British Art 103. Thomas and William Daniell, Verapadroog, in the Barramah'l, 1802, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery III, Plate 13, Yale Center for

British Art 104. Thomas and William Daniell, The Waterfall at Courtallum, in the Tinnevelly District, 1804, Aquatint, Twenty-Four Landscapes,

Plate 3, Yale Center for British Art

Part Six. Dark Prospects in the Light of Empire 110. Charles Gold, A Dubash, 1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 2, Yale Center for British Art Charles Gold, Female Brahmins, Carrying Water from a Well,

1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 11, Yale Center for British Art 112. Charles Gold, A Gentoo Zealot, 1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 4, Yale Center for British Art

113. Charles Gold, A Female Devotee of the Gentoo Cast, 1806, Colored

Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 7, Yale Center for British Art 114. Charles Gold, A Lame Beggar, And His Family, 1806, Colored

Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 40, Yale Center for British Art tS: Charles Gold, Hanuman, King of the Apes, 1806, Colored

Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 32, Yale Center for British Art 116. Charles Gold, Barbarous Ceremony: in honour of Maviatale, Goddess of the Smallpox, 1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 35, Yale Center for British Art

NFA, Anonymous, The Marvels of the East, 1547, Woodcut, illustration to Libro de las Maravillas de! mundo llamado Selva deleytosa (Mandeville’s Travels), British Library, London 118. Charles Gold, Flying Foxes and Banyan Tree, 1806, Colored

Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 39, Yale Center for British Art 119. William Heath, A Pair of Broad Bottoms, 1810, Etching, British Museum, London 120. Captain Robert Elliott, Skeletal Group in the Rameswur, 1834, Engraving, Views in India, China, and on the Shores of the Red

Sea, British Library, London 121. Thomas Rowlandson, Missionary Influence or How to Make

Converts, 1815, Engraving, India Office Collections, British Library, London

122. Thomas Rowlandson, The Burning System, 1815, Engraving,

India Office Collections, British Library, London 123. Anonymous, Frontispiece to James Peggs’s India’s Cries to British Humanity, 1832, Etching, British Library, London

124. Thomas Hickey, Dancing Girls, Madras, c.1805, Oil Painting, Private Coll. 125. James Baillie Fraser, A View of Government House from the Eastward, 1824-6, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta and its environs, no. 3, Yale Center for British Art 126. James Baillie Fraser, A View of Esplanade Row, from the Reservoir at Chandpal Ghat, 1824-6, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta and its

environs, no. 5, Yale Center for British Art

127. James Baillie Fraser, A View of Writers’ Buildings, from the Monument at the West End, 1824-6, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta and its environs, no. 6, Yale Center for British Art

128. James Baillie Fraser, A View in the Bazaar, leading to the Chitpore Road, 1824-6, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta and its environs, no. 24,

Yale Center for British Art 129: William Hodges, Calcutta, A View from Fort William, c.1781, Oil Painting, Private Coll.

130. James Baillie Fraser, The Ridge and Fort of Jytock, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. 4, Yale Center for British Art

131. James Baillie Fraser, Assemblage of Hillmen, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. 12, Yale Center for British Art

List of Illustrations

132. James Baillie Fraser, Bhyramghattee, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. 19, Yale Center for British Art

133. Henry Salt, A View Within the Fort of Monghyr, 1809, Aquatint, Twenty-four Views Taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon,

Abyssinia, and Egypt, India Office Collections, British Library, London 134. Henry Salt, Pagoda at Ramiseram, 1809, Aquatint, Twenty-four Views Taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia, and Egypt, India Office Collections, British Library, London

135. James Moffat, Ruins of the Palace of Sultan Shuja at Rajmahal,

c.1810, Engraving, A Series of Ten Views in India and China, Yale Center for British Art 136. James Moffat, Gate of Sultan Shah Hussein's Tomb at Gaur, 1808, Aquatint, India Office Collections, British Library, London sve James Moffat, View of a Mosque at Moorshedabad with Representation of a Bazar or Indian Market, c.1810-1815,

Aquatint, India Office Collections, British Library, London 138. James Moffat, Chamcutta Mosque at Gaur, So Called From a Tribe of Fakirs Who Wound Themselves, c.1810, Engraving, A Series of

Ten Views in India and China, Yale Center for British Art

139. Robert Grindlay, Portico of a Hindoo Temple, with Other Hindoo and Mohametan Buildings, c.1830, Aquatint, Scenery, Costumes

and Architecture, Chiefly on the Western Side of India, 1826-30, Yale Center for British Art 140. Robert Grindlay, Vignette for Title Page of Scenery, Costumes and Architecture, Chiefly on the Western Side of India, 1826-30,

c.1830, Engraving, Yale Center for British Art 141. William Daniell, Frontispiece to Hobart Caunter’s Oriental Annual, 1834, Engraving, British Library, London 142. Charles D’Oyly, Tom Raw in Danger (Detail), 1828, Aquatint, Tom Raw, the Griffin, Yale Center for British Art 143. Charles D’Oyly, A Dancing Woman of Bengal Exhibiting Before an European Family, 1813, Colored Lithograph, The European in India and The Costumes and Customs of India, Yale Center for British Art

144. Charles D’Oyly, A Dancing Woman of Lucknow Exhibiting Before

an European Family, 1813, Colored Lithograph, The European in India and The Costumes and Customs of India, Yale Center for British Art 145. Charles D’Oyly, Tom Raw Hiring a Palanquin on the Esplanade, c.1818, Pen and pencil drawing with watercolor, Ehrenfeld Collection, San Francisco

146. Kalighat Painting (Anon.), An Englishman on an Elephant

of Salsette (Detail), 1799, Aquatint, Antiquities of India I, Plate 4, Yale Center for British Art 157. William Blake, Behemoth and Leviathan, c.1805-1806, Pen

Drawing with Watercolor, Twenty-one Illustrations to the Book of Job: The Butts Set, The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York 158. Edward Moor, Vishnu with Lakshmi & Satyvama on Ananta Naga,

(eternity), 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor, engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University 159. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 85, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 160. Edward Moor, Vishnu and Lakshmi on Garuda, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor, engraved for The Hindu Pantheon,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 161. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 28, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 162. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 53, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 163. Edward Moor, Devi, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor,

engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University

164. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 78, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 165. Edward Moor, Crucifixion, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after

Moor, engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University 166. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 76, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 167. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 99, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University 168. J.M.W. Turner, The Temple of Minerva Medica, 1811, Etching, Liber Studiorum, Plate 23, Yale Center for British Art 169. J.M.W. Turner, Scene in the Campagna (The Tall Tree), 1812, Etching, Liber Studiorum, Plate 38, Yale Center for British Art 170. J.M.W. Turner, Jason, c.1805-1807, Drawing, Liber Studiorum, Plate 6, Yale Center for British Art

I71. J.M.W. Turner, Apollo and Python, 1811, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London 172. J.M.W. Turner, The Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden of the Hesperides, c.1806, Oil Painting,

Tate Britain, London

173. J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, 1812, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

174. Johan Zoffany, A Hindu brought to the Ganges to die, Ghazipur, 1788, Chalk Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

Shooting a Tiger, c.1830, Watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

175. George Chinnery, Attention, c.1801, Oil Painting, Royal Dublin

Part Seven. Elegies to an Indian Renaissance

176. George Chinnery, William and Mary Prinsep, c.1821,

Society, Dublin

[47 Johan Zoffany, Tiger Hunting in the East Indies, c.1795, Mezzotint Engraving after Zoffany’s The Death of the Royal Tiger, India Office Collections, British Library, London

148. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 23, c.1804-20, Colored Etching,

Beinecke Library, Yale University [49: William Blake, The First Book of Urizen, Plate 8, 1795, Colored

Etching, Beinecke Library, Yale University 150. William Blake, The Four Zoas (Vala), Manuscript Page 4, c.1797-1807, Pencil and Ink Drawing with Watercolor, British

Library, London ISI. William Blake, The Four Zoas (Vala), Manuscript Page 70, c.1797-1807, Pencil Drawing with Watercolor, British Library,

London 52. William Blake, Europe a Prophecy, Plate 2, 1794 Colored Etching,

Glasgow University Library 153. William Blake, Nebuchadnezzer, 1795, Color Print finished in Pen and Watercolor, Tate Britain, London

154. William Blake, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan, c.1805-1809, Tempera Painting, Tate Britain, London 155. William Blake, The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth, c.1805-1809, Tempera Painting, Tate Britain, London 156. Thomas Daniell, The Portico of an Excavated Temple on the Island

Oil Painting, Hongkong and Shanghai Hongkong 177. George Chinnery, George Siddons with Oil Painting, Hongkong and Shanghai Hongkong 178. George Chinnery, View in South India,

Banking Corporation, his hookah, c.1820, Banking Corporation, with a Warrior Outside,

1812, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

179. Thomas Daniell, A Rock-Cut Temple, Kanheri, Near Bombay, 1827, Oil Painting, Bankfield Museum, Halifax, Yorkshire

180. Charles D’/Oyly, Tom Raw Sits for his Portrait, 1828, Aquatint,

Tom Raw, the Griffin, Yale Center for British Art

XV

Color Plates

Color Plates

I. James Forbes, The Royal Tiger, c.|765—68, Watercolor

Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

|

2

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

ix

a

—

ea

3. James Wales, View of Cubbeer Burr, the Celebrated Banyan Tree, 1789, Engraving after Wales’s painting, by James Phillips, 1790, India Office Collections, British Library, London

Color Plates

3

4. James Wales, Interior View of the principal Excavated Temple on the Island of Elephanta, 1785, Engraving after Wales’s painting, by James Phillips, 1790, India Office Collections, British Library, London

4

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

5. Tilly Kettle, Shah Alam, Mughal Emperor, reviewing the 3rd Brigade of the East India Company’s troops at Allahabad, c.1781, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

Color Plates

6. Tilly Kettle, Dancing-girl, 1772, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

5

7. James Wales, Madhu Rao Narayan, the Maratha Peshwa with Nana Fadnavis andAttendants, 1792, Oil Painting, Royal Asiatic Society, London

6

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

9. Francesco Renaldi, Muslim lady with a hookah, 1787, Oil Painting, Private Collection

Bee

Eye

10. Francesco Renaldi, Muslim lady reclining, 1789, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

Color Plates

II. James Forbes, Malabars of the highest Casts of Nairs and Brahmins, in the Queen of Attinga’s Dominion, 1772, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

12. James Forbes, AWoman of the Highest Cast of Brahmins ... on the Coast of Malabar, 1772, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

7

8

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

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13. James Forbes, Nymphea Lotos, Blue Water-Lily of Guzaret, 1772, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

14. James Forbes, Sketch of the Lower Part of a Jac (Durian, or Jack-fruit), c.!765—-8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

Color Plates

;

/ POM

5 LAP

ATI

Port

Sytaniaxe

a

ATEN

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«Neer Sarerr age

15. James Forbes, Hazardasitaun, the Bird of aThousand Songs

16. James Forbes, The Sultana: or Hoopoo, at Bombay, on a Sprig

— the Bulbul, or Indian Nightingale, on a Branch of the Seeta-Phool, or

of the Citron Tree, c.1765—8,

5 Apple, c.1765-8, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

British Art

Watercolor

Drawing, Yale Center for

17. James Forbes, A Small Bloodsucker, |768, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

18. Zayn-al-Din,A Painted Stork, 1782, Watercolor Drawing, Ehrenfeld Collection, San Francisco

9

10

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

ee

si,

Sed

—

19. William Hodges,A View of the West Side of the Fortress of Chunargarh on the Ganges, c.1785, Oil Painting, Wolverhampton Art Gallery |

zy

z

Gi

20. William Hodges, The Ghats of Benares, 1787, Oil Painting, The Royal Academy, London

Color Plates

21. James Wales, View of the Breach Causeway, Colored Etching, 1791-2, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 5, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art

22. James Wales, View from Sion Fort, Colored Etching, 1791-2, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 11, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art

II

12

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

23. James Wales, View from the Island of Elephanta, Colored Etching, 1791-2, for Twelve Views of Bombay and Its Vicinity, Plate 12, 1800, London, Yale Center for British Art

24. William Hodges, Tomb and Distant View of the Rajmahal Hills, c.1781, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

Color Plates

25. Johan Zoffany, Mr. and Mrs. Warren Hastings, |783—7, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

13

14

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

26. Johan Zoffany, Warren Hastings meeting with Jawan Bakht, 1784, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

27. Johan Zoffany, Colonel Antoine Polier with his friends Claud Martin, John Wombwell and the artist, |786—7, Oil Painting,

Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

Color Plates

LAF

aati

*

28. Robert Home, Lord Cornwallis receiving the sons of Tipu Sultan, 1793-4, Oil Painting, National Army Museum, London

29. Sir David Wilkie, General Sir David Baird Discovering the Body of Sultan Tippoo Sahib after Having Captured Seringapatam on the 4th May 1799, 1839, Oil Painting, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh

15

16

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

2

bo Ree

a=

30. Robert H. Colebrooke, North view of Sewandroog shewing the attack in December |791, 1794,Aquatint after Colebrooke, India Office Collections, British Library, London

mt

shasy, aR

31. Alexander Allan, Sewandroog, 1794, Aquatint after Allan, India Office Collections, British Library, London

Color Plates

as

a

=

~

ie

——

32. William Daniell, Madras, or Fort St. George in the Bay of Bengal —A Squall Passing Off, 1833, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

17

18

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

33. Thomas Daniell, The New Buildings at Chouringhee, |787,Aquatint, Views of Calcutta, Plate 7, Yale Center for British Art

34. Thomas Daniell, The Mountain of Ellora, 1803, Triptych Aquatint after James Wales, Hindoo Excavations in the Mountain of Ellora, Plates |—3,Yale Center for British Art

Color Plates

19

20

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

35. Thomas Daniell, Hindoo Temples at Bindrabund, East Indies, 1797, Oil Painting, Royal Academy, London

36. Thomas Daniell, Composition: Hindu and Moslem Architecture, 1799, Oil Painting, Private Collection

Color Plates

Srtar,

aye

37. Thomas and William Daniell, Cape Comorin, taken near Calcad, 1804, Aquatint, Twenty-Four Landscapes, Plate |, Yale Center for British Art

38. Thomas and William Daniell, Buddell, opposite Bilkate in the Mountains of Sirinagur, |804, Aquatint, Twenty-Four Landscapes, Plate 19, Yale Center for British Art

21

22

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

ergtias name

i

si

40. Johan Zoffany, Sacrifice of an Hindoo Widow Upon the Funeral Pile of Her Husband, c.1795, Oil Painting, Giles Eyre Esq. and Charles Greig Esq.

Color Plates

23

41. James Baillie Fraser, AView of the Botanic Garden House and Reach, 1824-6, Aquatint, Views of Calcutta and its environs, no. 4, Yale Center for British Art

39. Charles Gold, Snake Men, with Serpent

Dancing to Music, 1806, Colored Engraving, Oriental Drawings, no. 24, Yale Center for British Art

42. James Baillie Fraser, Old Court House Street, c.1819, Oil Painting, India Office Collections, British Library, London

24

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

43. James Baillie Fraser, The House of Rana of Cote Gooroo, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. 6,

Yale Center for British Art

44. James Baillie Fraser, Gungotree the Holy Shrine of Mahadeo, 1820, Aquatint, Views in the Himala Mountains, no. ||, Yale Center for British Art

Color Plates

ne =

45. Henry Salt, A View at Lucknow, 1809, Aquatint, Twenty-four Views Taken in St. Helena, the Cape, India, Ceylon, Abyssinia, and Egypt, India Office Collections, British Library, London

46. James Moffat, View of the Large Pagoda at Nuddea, 1810,Aquatint, India Office Collections, British Library

25

26

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

,

47. Charles D’Oyly, Female Attendants, |830, Colored Lithograph, Costumes of India, Yale Center for

48. Charles D’Oyly, A Samporea or Snake Catcher, |830, Colored Lithograph, Costumes of India, Yale Center for

British Art

British Art

49. Charles D’Oyly, Town and Port of Calcutta, c.1835, Colored Lithograph, Views of Calcutta and its Environs, Yale Center for British Art

Color Plates

50. Charles D’Oyly, The Bodhi Tree at the Bodh Gaya Temple, c.1830, Oil Painting, Camellia Plc Collection

27

28

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

is

51. William Hodges, Mrs. Hastings and the Rocks of Colgong, 1790, Oil Painting, YaleCenter for British Art

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52. Johan Zoffany, Embassy of Haidar Beg Khan to Lord Cornwallis, c.1795, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

53. William Blake, Jerusalem, Plate 25, c.1804—20, Colored Etching, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Color Plates

am

4

54. J.M.W. Turner, The Siege of Seringapatam, c.180 , Watercolor, Tate Britain, London

55. J.M.W. Turner, The Goddess of Discord choosing the Apple of Contention in the Garden ofthe Hesperides, Detail, c.1806, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

29

30

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India

56. J.M.W. Turner, Snowstorm: Hannibal and his Army crossing the Alps, Detail, 1818, Oil Painting, Tate Britain, London

57. George Chinnery, William and Catherine Aurora, children of Lieutenant-Colonel James Achilles Kirkpatrick, c.1805, Oil Painting, Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Hongkong

Color Plates

58. George Chinnery, Indian Landscape with Temple, 1815, Oil Painting, Yale Center for British Art

59. George Chinnery, Bathers and Tomb at Dusk, c.1820, Watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

31

32

Indian Renaissance:

60. George Chinner

British Romantic Art and the Pr

Part One

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

34

1. Tippoo’s Man-Tiger Organ, c.1795, Painted Wood and Metal, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

35

l. Tigers of All Stripes In early May 1799 when Tipu Sultan, the revolutionary ruler of Mysore, was defeated by British troops at the Battle of Seringapatam, there was plenty of booty to carry away and ship home to England. Mysore had been a prosperous and thriving kingdom for more than four decades; it had become the dominant power in India as the Moghul empire dissolved, and it had endured as the last effective

contestant of British expansion in south-central India. The fort and palaces of Seringapatam, and the city itself, were first prospects for the taking of spoils of war. Almost three million pounds in gold coin and bullion from the palace treasury and fort coffers fell into the hands of the British Crown and the East India Company and was dispatched immediately by man-of-war to London. A token percentage of this sum was used to pay off the British allies in the

manuscripts — poetry, history, theology, science, mathematics, and jurisprudence — was shipped overland to British headquarters in Calcutta, where it became part of the library of Fort William College, the institution which was now to be used exclusively for the training of British civil

servants. Plenty yet remained in Seringapatam to be seized and taken home by the 21,000 British troops present at the battle. British soldiers, ‘without much ceremony, possessed themselves in a very few hours after entering the town, of very valuable effects in gold and jewels: the houses of the

Along with the bulk of the gold coin went Tipu Sultan’s gold tiger throne decorations (destined for Windsor

chief sudars, as well as the merchants and shroffs (bankers) being completely pillaged, while the women, naturally alarmed for their personal safety, compounded the apparent danger by emptying their coffers and bringing forth whatever jewels they possessed.’ The two days following the two and a half hour battle were spent in an orgy of greed — with British troops gathering armfuls of gold, silver, jewelry, weaponry, furniture, cups, platters, carpets,

Castle), his silver howdah, his crown jewels, his jeweled

shawls, etc., until, as Arthur Wellesley (later, the Duke of

gold matchlocks, his gold and jeweled hookah, and carpets and silks from the main palace. The Governor-General of India, Richard Wellesley (the second Earl of Mornington and soon to be first Marquess Wellesley), acquired the star diamond aigrette from Tipu’s turban, the size of a peach, as well as the sword Tipu had used before he died in battle;

Wellington) described it, there was so much booty to take away that ‘every soldier had to relieve himself of the burden by throwing away a portion of it ...’.' Singular and curious among the spoils of war sent home to England was a large, almost life-size, wood sculpture of a Bengal tiger ravaging an English gentleman. The sculpture had been Tipu Sultan’s favorite joke display for

war, the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Peshwa of the Marathas, for their treachery against a fellow Indian ruler.

Wellesley’s two brothers, Arthur and Henry, took two of

Tipu’s jeweled sporting guns, Tipu’s ceremonial gold and emerald sword and his distinctive gold dagger or katar with its lethal v-shaped design (both now on display at Apsley House), a collection of Persian miniatures, and the harem

jewels; Tipu’s war helmet and one of his jeweled swords

visitors to the Mysore court, and it now took first place

among British exhibits from the victory over the Sultan of Mysore. Governor-General Wellesley had wanted the tiger sculpture placed on exhibition in the Tower of London. But, placed in the foyer of the East India House in Leadenhall

were sent to the former Governor-General of India, Lord

Street, the sculpture was a far more arresting — and useful

Charles Cornwallis; another jeweled sword of Tipu’s was presented by General Harris to Tipu’s old enemy and former prisoner, General Sir David Baird. The palace library,

— prospect than the Tower menagerie of monkeys, pythons, and two starving and flea-bitten tigers. Admission to see the Tower menagerie was three pence or the body of a dead cat, but there was no charge to see Tipu’s tiger because it

some 2,000 volumes of Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, and Urdu

36

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

served the propaganda campaign to support the East India Company’s territorial expansion into western and southern

India, and the pending full control of the Indian subcontinent by the British Crown. Stories about the sculpture had long preceded its arrival in London. Its notoriety increased with the circulation of lurid stories of Tipu’s atrocities involving tigers and Englishmen until, in 1801, to satisfy ‘public’ demand, the Company and the government at Whitehall resolved to put it on permanent display as the centerpiece of the newly created East India House Museum. Londoners, countryfolk from the villages, and European visitors now flocked to see the remarkable object popularly dubbed ‘Tippoo’s Man-Tiger Organ’. The sculpture, which still survives in modified and repaired form (and on permanent display at the Victoria and Albert Museum), was in fact both a miniature organ and a mechanical toy. (Fig. |) The frame of the sculpture is of brightly colored carved wood: the tiger striped and spotted, with a lashing tail and huge, ferocious eyes and teeth; the man in a red coat decorated with roses, wearing a low

black hat. The tiger straddles the prone Englishman, the underside of their bodies touching and face to face (‘missionary position’ some would say for, seen from one angle and in its original pose, the tiger seems to be squatting on the man’s groin, with its mouth over the man’s mouth).

Both the tiger and the man appear to be smiling, the former presumably in delight, the latter presumably in pain. A trap door on the side of the animal opens to reveal the mechanics of the sculptured toy: there is a keyboard for playing music, with subsidiary pipes connected to a handle which, when turned, caused the man’s arm to move to the

realistic sounds of bestial growls and human moans. The macabre man-tiger organ was a joint project by Indian artisans, French toy mechanics and Dutch organ makers. It had

been commissioned at great cost in 1793 by Tipu Sultan, immediately after he was forced (by Cornwallis) to give up half his kingdom and half his treasury to the British, and to

send his two young sons as hostages to the English settlement in Madras. The very composition

of Tipu’s ‘Man-Tiger

mirrored the intense rivalry between

Organ’

English, French,

Dutch, and Portuguese traders over the possession of India,

a rivalry which had been encouraged by the Indian rulers of the preceding century, the Moghuls, and by Tipu and his father, Hyder Ali. The finished sculpture represented — as much to the defiant Tipu as to the victorious British — the unforgivable alliance between the kingdom of Mysore and revolutionary France, one of England’s traditional enemies now led by Napoleon Bonaparte. When Tipu actually commissioned

the creation

of the sculpture-toy,

he had a

specific event and a specific commemoration in mind: the recent hideous death of Sir Hector Munro’s son. Young Munro, a civilian visiting India on a junket arranged by his eminent father, went deer-hunting with two East India Company men on Sangor Island in the Sunderban wetlands of Bengal. He left the campfire after

supper to go into the bushes to relieve himself and, while he squatted, was pounced on by a large Bengal tiger. Stories of the mauling of young Munro spread across British India, to Bombay and the Maratha capital of Poona, and from there to Tipu Sultan’s court. At home in England the story of the death of young Munro received much play.. The month of July 1793 alone saw published accounts in the Times as well as in provincial newspapers like the York Herald,

the Whitehall

Evening Post, the Northhampton

Mercury, and the Bath Chronicle (which described it as a

‘marvellous story’). The Gentleman’s Magazine published an eyewitness account by one of Munro’s Company companions on the excursion, published first in the Calcutta Gazette in January. The account told with sentiment and ghastly detail of the young man’s mangled body, his virtually disengaged skull, his pitiful moans,

his removal

by

boat on the Indiaman Valentine, his lingering death after twenty-four hours of torture — and of the ferocious male tiger ‘with a head as large as an ox’s’ and ‘eyes darting fire’ that had attacked him and was shot, and of the tigress who ‘raging mad almost’ stood on the river bank and roared as the boat carrying her mate’s body and the hapless Munro sailed away.’ The account in the Gentleman's Magazine did not mention the human needs that had sent Munro into the bushes and away from his companions and the safety of the campfire when the tiger found him. But those in India who had hunted in the watery darkness and natural isolation of the Sunderbans would have understood. Tipu Sultan had his reasons for gloating over the circumstances of young Munro’s death — and for his gleefully extravagant (albeit low art) commemoration of it. Sir Hector Munro had been the field commander in the Second Anglo-Mysore War in 1780-82, during which Hyder Ali, Tipu’s father, had been fatally injured. The British campaign, once Hyder Ali was out of the fray and the young Tipu remained as sole commander of the Mysore army, became ferocious and wantonly cruel. Hector Munro, the military commander who had defeated Shuja-ud-daula of Oudh in 1763 at Buxhar, and the French at Pondicherry in

1778, was known for his military ruthlessness — even toward his own sepoys (he used twenty-four mutinous Indian soldiers under his command as live cannon shot just before Buxhar). In Mysore

in 1782, Hector Munro

was

joined by General Stuart from Calcutta and General Matthews from Bombay. Their combined forces were charged with the task of dismantling Hyder Ali’s kingdom and family with efficiency, taking no prisoners. James Mill, in his imperial History of British India (1817-35), written to please Company sponsors, writes blandly of this charge: ‘Orders were given to shed the blood of every [Indian] man who was taken under arms; and some of the officers were reprimanded for not seeing those orders were rigidly exe-

cuted.” An eyewitness account of the carnage by Matthew’s troops, given by John Charles Sheen, a Scottish ensign who was present, is more direct: ‘the slaughter at Anantapur Fort was indiscriminate and wanton .. all the

Tigers of All Stripes

inhabitants were put to death and their bodies thrown into tanks in the fort. Even the women were not spared .... Four hundred beautiful women, all bleeding with wounds from the bayonet, and either dead or expiring in each other’s arms, while the common soldiers, casting off all obedience

to their officers, were stripping them of their jewels and committing every outrage on their bodies. Many of the women,

rather than be torn from their relatives, threw

themselves into a large tank and were drowned.” The iconography of the man-tiger organ sculpture was particularly fitting to Tipu Sultan because it encapsulated everything he had ever felt about tigers, Englishmen — and his own prowess. The Bengal tiger was Tipu’s namesake, emblem, and obsession. His name, in Canarese, meant the

one who controls (Sultan) the king of the forest (Tipu), the one who conquers or overcomes the life or ferocious passions of other living things. Tipu liked tigers and other big cats, and he actively cultivated the nickname his British enemies had given him: ‘The Tiger of Mysore.’ French and German guests to Mysore were told by Tipu that he would rather live two days as a tiger than two hundred days as a lamb. The tiger was Tipu’s personal emblem, the emblem of his military might, and the emblem of his India: he kept a private zoo of tigers and other big cats from Asia — leop-

zenana (women’s quarters) more wives and womenfolk sequestered from masculine and English treaty emissaries where some of Tipu’s trained

where the eight hundred or of Tipu and his sons were eyes. European ambassadors were taken to this anteroom, tigers were also chained along

the walls, and amid the scent of raw and rotting flesh,

shown the mechanical toy as it growled in delight and took — as food or sexual object — the young English gentleman. Honored to be brought so close to the women’s sanctuary, the ferenghees were also reminded of their own subservience and of the implied high male potency of Tipu and his sons symbolized by the man-tiger organ. Beyond the trappings of hospitality and courtesy, the symbols and iconography were clear. This was what the tigers of Mysore and India could and should be doing to the European interlopers. The symbolism of extreme violence — and savage sexual violence — of Tipu’s man-tiger organ was not lost on the English soldiers who laid seige to Seringapatam, the Company directors in London who authorized the siege, the officials at Whitehall, and the Crown that received the

and the uniforms of his troops bore tiger stripes, as did his

trophy. A gold medal designed by Matthew Bolton and Conrad Heinrich Kuchler and struck at the Birmingham mint in 1799 to commemorate the Battle of Seringapatam portrays a sizeable British lion vanquishing a smaller Indian tiger. (Fig. 2) (This medal, on loan from the

rifle barrels and swords; the safety catches, sights, and cocks

Cornwallis family, can be seen at the Victoria and Albert

ards, cheetahs, panthers, and mountain lions; his clothing

of his hunting rifles were in the shape of tigers; his bronze cannons and mortars were cast in the shape of seated tigers; his standard, bearing the slogan ‘The Tiger is God’, rolled up to form the face of a tiger; and his magnificent gold throne, studded with jewels and pearls, was borne upon a room-size tiger form (Fig. 72).° The purpose of Tipu Sultan’s pervasive and obsessive tiger iconography was twofold. It evoked the cintemani emblem of Ottoman power, a well-recognized symbol of Asian might and energy marked by an abstract pattern of

three concentric circles and two wavy lines (representing the leopard’s spots and the tiger’s stripes). It also elicited, more simply and directly, extraordinary fear and an overwhelming sense of alien ferocity in those ‘ferenghees’ or infidels from outside India who came with designs on Mysore’s riches. Visitors to the court at Seringapatam were

treated with high courtesy and hospitality even as they were told how enemy prisoners were treated — torn to pieces by tigers, or castrated and then sodomized in the brothels. Murals on the walls of houses in the main streets of Seringapatam depicted tigers chasing ferenghees (often in English military garb), seizing the cowering men, tearing off their limbs, feasting on their innards, and biting off their heads or sexual organs. Other murals in the receiving halls of the palace showed inebriated Englishmen lounging with dancing girls amid clouds of opium while, in the next room and separated from them by only a thin matting, hungry tigers waited to consume them. Tipu’s man-tiger organ was kept in the anteroom adjacent to the palace

2. Commemorative Gold Medal designed by Matthew Bolton and Conrad Heinrich Kiichler, 1799, Victoria and Albert Museum, London

37

38

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

Museum, in the cabinet adjacent to the man-tiger organ.) After 1799 and the fall of Seringapatam, the propaganda of British colonial expansion assumed the tiger and big cat iconography of Asiatic potency and military might, compounded and reversed its meaning, incorporated it into the image of the British lion, and then popularized it among the people at home. As Tipu and his tigers would take for food and sexual objects the foreigners and Englishmen who ventured into their domain, so too had the British soldiers

and Company men taken Tipu, his men, his goods, his kingdom of Mysore, and his French allies, and so too would they take an India ready and waiting to be taken. Rape and cannibalism, and feral feline behavior, could and would be

made incestuously British. In 1803, when workmen setting sewers for the new building for the India Museum unearthed a Roman tessellated pavement piece depicting Bacchus riding a tiger, the artifact was taken as a heaven sent sign (albeit by way of Ancient Rome) of Britain’s rightful might abroad. The ambiguous, whimsical hybridity of the man-tiger organ — at once toy and instrument, silly and fierce, a cross between an organ grinder and a player piano, a piece of fine artisanship but hardly an aesthetic object by any standard, an emblem of high ferocity that was undermined by its own absurdly cruel conceptual origins — remained to captivate those who first encountered it. Artists like William Blake in his illuminated poem, ‘The Tyger’ (composed just after stories of the man-tiger organ reached London), could perhaps read the sculpture’s ambiguous iconography in its

rudely carried off by one of Tipu’s Mysore tigers. Stories of young Munro’s noble sacrifice, and*of the India House sculpture that depicted ‘a Royal Tiger in the act of devouring a prostrate European officer’, joined other stories circulated in chapbooks, missionary pamphlets and penny broadsides which told lurid stories of young British children at play and English brides on their honeymoons. carried off by always hungry tigers in a dark and savage land.° India, symbolized by the tigers of Mysore that the British had vanquished at Seringapatam in 1799, was a murky, violent, dangerous place filled with ferocious animals where the fiend in the form of a three-headed tiger was worshiped. The carefully cultivated reputation for savagery and sexual prowess of Tipu’s Mysore translated readymade into the propaganda of imperialists seeking to demonize and possess India as a whole. India would have to be ridden of its violent energies in the years to come: its tigers had to be corralled and killed, its inhabitants and their rampant sexuality had to be tamed, and its terrifyingly beautiful landscapes (where tigers and demonic things lurked)

.

Englishmen,

were

sold as

souvenirs

of the Battle

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most elevated sense, as expressing the sublime terror or

fearful symmetry of nature: an Indian tiger smiling and powerful, symmetrical and proportionate, created simultaneously with and by the English lamb. (Fig. 3) Others, like John Keats in The Jealousies (1819), saw the man-tiger organ as the best low image of British politicians from Castlereagh to the Prince Regent: the sculpture is ‘a plaything of the Emperor’s choice’, the ‘prettiest of his toys’ — and an occasion to be feared more than ‘nightmare Gorgon’, when the Emperor ‘play’d on his Man-TigerOrgan’.® The fearsome toy’s symbolism of a singular and powerful living sexual energy was not lost on Keats and Blake; nor was the tie of whimsical wanton cruelty that connected tyrants of all stripe. The orthodoxy of British propaganda, at once imperial and unctuous, dominated the common and popular conception of the man-tiger organ. Staffordshire china chimney pieces depicting the death of Sir Hector Munro’s noble son, and board and dice games based on the patriotic pursuit and capture of ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’ before it ate any more

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Seringapatam. The potter Obadiah Sherratt’s pearlware piece, ‘The Death of Munro’ (1820), with its very large tiger and very small officer, is typical of commemorative low art valued for its gory patriotism.’ Young Munro, no longer a civilian, was now depicted in military uniform, as a good British soldier doing his duty for his country when

3. William Blake, The Tyger, 1794, Colored Etching, Beinecke Library, Yale University

216 ETS

had to be domesticated to the nice forms of an English suburban garden. After Seringapatam the British offered a bounty of ten Indian rupees for every tiger killed and, in 1801 alone, paid over one and a half lakhs of rupees in tiger bounties. The wholesale slaughter of tigers in the decades that followed was extraordinary. For centuries in India humans and tigers

had existed together in relative harmony, not peaceably so much as by avoiding one another ina land large and forested enough to allow this. Not well known because they were

OL Mil

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learned from Indian pundits and Asiatick Society scholars, were compiled in a later publication of 1810 called The Hindu Pantheon.” Notes to the drawings of the major Hindu deities with their respective vahans (animal vehicles) or nandi (animal spirits) in Moor’s work describe how Indra is often depicted with an elephant, Brahma often pictured riding a swan, and Vishnu often shown borne aloft by an eagle or giant bat; Siva and Parvati, meanwhile,

the

divine couple who represent creative energy in the uni-

nocturnal, solitary and feral, tigers maintained their myth-

ical reputation described in the early Indian folktales of the Sunderbans. They were creatures who came out of the magical Sunderbans of coastal Bengal — an enchanted forest, part land and part water, lit by an eerie blue light and full of strange beasts, spirits and echoes — to make all of India their home. At once real, mysterious, and strangely

connected to the earliest earth-spirit mythologies of India, the Bengal tiger had spread westward to the Malabar coast wetlands and the Gujerat forests, and to the caves of the Bombay islands, including the cave-temples at Elephanta and Salsette, accruing stories and symbolic significance as it spread until it became the legendary royal tiger of India and the sacred vehicle of a Hindu deity. The Royal Tiger, a watercolor drawing done in Malabar in the early 1770s by James Forbes (1749-1819), a Company writer and draughtsman, captures both the contained feral energy of the real creature and the idyllic ease of its legendary domain.’ (PI. |) Forbes’s tiger stretches luxuriously on a riverbank beneath the shade of a great banyan tree, amid long grasses and blue wildflowers; the gnarled trunk and hanging air roots of the mythical Indian

4. Edward Moor, Mahadeva and Parvati, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University

tree rise behind it; a placid blue river, and a coastline with

palm trees, can be seen in the distance. The creature, painted in thick and brilliant colors of burnished orange, black, gold, and white, so that one can sense the texture of its fur,

seems alert but contented and at ease — and in full control of its peaceable kingdom. There are no signs of human life in Forbes’s drawing, although the fabled Malabar coastline does suggest, implicitly, a harmonious coexistence of man and tiger. Like Blake’s tiger, Forbes’s elegant cat also wears what appears to be an enigmatic smile, but there is no symbolic suggestion beyond this, and our focus remains captured by the painted texture of a drawing that can present the soft whiteness of the tiger’s underbelly and muzzle, its fluid markings, and its twitching whiskers. Edward Moor (1771-1848), another English Romantic artist in India, who was a Company recruit like Forbes and a near contemporary of his, provides drawings and images of the royal Indian tiger’s mythological place in the pantheon of Hinduism. Moor studied and sketched the ancient sculptures at Elephanta and other temples in southwest India from the time of his initial appointment at the age of 12 in 1783 until he left in 1805. His collection of twentytwo years of on-site sketches, casts taken from actual artifacts (and sent to East India House), and information

5. Edward Moor, Mahadeva-Panchamukhi, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University

40

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

verse and sexual passion (whether manifest or contained) in nature, are often depicted with their vahan symbols of

bull and tiger. (Figs 4,5, 6) In these three drawings, the goddess Parvati rides a tiger that is benign but also noticeably larger than her counterpart’s bull-vehicle, Siva-trimurti (in his three-faced manifestation) wears a tiger skin to mark the ungendered and contained energy that he shares with Parvati," and the androgynous and dual-gendered deity of Siva and Parvati conjoined, Arddha-nari (Ardhanarisvara), is depicted as held aloft by bull and tiger spirits. In the goddess Parvati’s tiger iconography, clearly, the royal Indian tiger carries a pedigree far older and more suggestive — and considerably more sexually complex — than the symbol of manly prowess appropriated from a feral animal of ancient India by Tipu Sultan (and the Ottoman emperors before him), which the British lion subsequently vanquished and assumed as part of its emblem of military and colonial might in 1799. The demythologizing of the Indian tiger from majestic creature of the Bengal Sunderbans and spiritual symbol of early Hinduism to an image of amoral and vicious cruelty transpired slowly and by way of a sport that turned the animal into mere prey. The sport of hunting tigers evolved first in the decadent Moghul courts of central India, and it was carried out with spears, nets and traps. The advent of the European musket made this sport at once easier and less dangerous, and it soon became a field sport with little ritual, few attendants, and an almost certain kill. British

plans for settlement and residency in India in the 1790s radically changed what had become the pursuit of a ‘magnificent’ quarry in the only sport ‘worthy of gentle-

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British. ‘Ten rupees are paid for the head of a full grown tiger, and five for a leopard, or tiger’s cub’, Lord Valentia noted in 1809. ‘The premiums have already amounted to upwards a lack and a half of rupees [Rs. 100,000], and must be considered as money well spent.’” 113 The royal Indian tiger, once engendered in the Sunderban wetlands of Bengal long before recorded time and associated in prePuranic spiritual histories with the enchanted forests of the Ganges and the sacred vehicles of the Hindu deities, which had mutated in sub-species across India and Asia, as far north as Siberia and as far south as Sumatra, became at the

ordered settlement of humans now required that tigers (and other dangerous ‘wild’ beasts like the hippopotamus!) had to be eradicated as scourges to humanity and productivity under British rule. The destruction of the animal

start of the nineteenth century the imperial quarry of British India with a price of ten rupees on its head. It became a mark — to be acquired for its associative magnificence to heroic society and then slaughtered as a demon of the enchanted, un-Christian, and irrational for-

could now

est, wherever Britain ruled and was to rule.

men’ in the East.”* Land safe for agriculture, tillage, and the

be presented as practical, humanitarian,

and

2. The Great Banyan Tree of India James Forbes was the first-English Romantic artist to visit India, view its dazzling prospects, and leave a substantial record of on-site sketches and descriptions of what he saw during his seventeen years of residence and travel in western India. Between 1765 and 1784, Forbes worked for the East India Company as a trader, topographer, diplomat, and revenue administrator serving the Bombay Presidency; his various posts took him to places along the length of western India, to Surat and Baroche in Gujerat, to Poona and the Maratha territories inland as far as Agra, to the out-

ee

6. Edward Moor, Siva and Parvati conjoined, called then Arddha-Nari, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University

lying islands of Bombay, Elephanta and Salsette, to the Malabar coast, to Dubhoy, and to Anjengo in the far south. The Bombay Presidency was the oldest of the English presidencies in India (Madras and Bengal were the other two), and it was the second largest territorial and trading region of the Company. Surat, above Bombay, had been the first Indian factory site and settlement that the Company had acquired from the Moghul rulers, and when Portugal ceded the Bombay islands and harbor to the English in 1662 (as part of the marriage settlement of Catherine of Braganza to

Charles II), the way was paved for an English Presidency on the west coast of India. Forbes was proud of his selfacclaimed and real status as the first English Romantic artist of India — ‘India formerly was not the resort of artists; when there I had little to excite emulation, and no other instruction than a few friendly hints from Sir Archibald Campbell; who, during a short residence at Bombay ... encouraged my juvenile [artistic] pursuits.’ Barely

sixteen

when

he first arrived

in India, Forbes

lamented that his training in draughting and watercolor painting was limited given the dazzling prospects available and his aspirations to be an artist of India. But he was also proud of the uninhibited innocence of his artistic vision, and of his self-taught abilities and use of local artists’ materials and colors. On his first journey inland from Bombay harbor in 1765, the youthful Forbes describes an India ‘still

... in the same state as when the Greek historians recorded the invasion of Alexander’ with the breathless wonder (and considerable purple prose) of a new-born and artistic Adam viewing Paradise before him: ‘As these hills approach the

Deccan mountains, the scenery assumes a sublime the landscape is varied by stupendous heights, glens, dark woods, and impenetrable jungles...’ The ‘sublime aspect’ of James Forbes’s first view

site sketches for its engraved illustrations. For the most part, Forbes’s Memoirs are arranged and written so as to not offend the national values and new imperial agenda of its age.”

Two images from sketches made in India by Forbes early in the 1770s — of the cave-temple of Elephanta and of a great banyan tree community — did reach a wide audience of English artists and intellectuals in London during the 1780s. Forbes’s drawing of the Indian banyan tree and its community,

Indian Burr, or Banian Tree, was done in 1770

while picnicking on the banks of a Nerbuddha River tributary inland. (Pl. 2) His drawing of the front vista of Elephanta, The Grand Altar Piece, Fronting the Principal Entrance, in the Excavation at the Isle of Elephanta, was done

in 1774, during a mapping visit to Elephanta and Salsette just after the islands had been formally acquired by the Company. (Fig. 8) On a visit home in the mid-1770s Forbes sought out an artist friend and fellow Scot named James

aspect: narrow (Fig. 7) of the

Indian landscape was to recur, time after time, as he trav-

eled through the regions of southwest India. For seventeen years Forbes recorded his artist’s perspective of India in over five hundred on-site sketches and over five thousand descriptive letters to his family. Excerpts of some of his written observations were published in Company pamphlets and selectively disseminated among London political circles; some of his sketches, meanwhile,

were circulated among members of the Royal Society and the Society of Artists and, subsequently, among intellectuals and artists in London. Upon his return to England in 1784, Forbes began work on a magnificent collection of his

best first-hand visual and verbal impressions of India; his folio-sized manuscript in thirteen volumes was completed in 1796, just before he left for a six-year stay in Europe, and it served as the basis for his election to the Royal Society. This manuscript, which he described as ‘the principal recreations of my life’, was never published. After his return from Europe in 1804 (which included a year’s detention in France), Forbes published instead a politic and careful four-volume narrative memoir of his ‘journeys’ in India which selectively used the materials of the manuscript and included a modest number of engravings from his original sketches.

This

last effort, titled Oriental

Memoirs,

7. James Forbes, Calicut, on the Coast of Malabar, 1774, Engraving after Forbes’s Drawing, for Oriental Memoirs, |813,Yale Center for British Art

Sa

SSS s

was

finished in 1812 and published in 1813, over forty-five years after the young artist first saw India, and over twenty-five years after he returned to England with plans for disseminating the ‘sublime aspects’ that he had seen and sketched there. Quite distinct from the original manuscript and, no doubt, from his original letters, Oriental Memoirs captures the immediacy of the original observations only occasionally, and it uses only a small percentage of the on-

8. James Forbes, The Grand Altar-Piece ... in the Excavations at the Isle of Elephanta, 1774, Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

42

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

Wales (1747-95), a trained landscape painter who was attempting to make his way as a portrait painter in London.

as by the clarity of the original drawings — they were more accessible than Kettle’s alien fantasies and Hodges’ intel-

Forbes showed Wales his sketches, and then commissioned

lectual complexities and, as such, more easily absorbed as

him to compose and paint views of the Indian tree and temple based on his on-site drawings. It is not clear whether Forbes made this commission because of his ‘amateur’ status as an artist in oils, or because he did not have the time to execute the paintings himself given his imminent posting to Dubhoy as Master of Customs. (Forbes returned to India with his sister in 1777, and was appointed Collector and Resident of Dubhoy in 1780.) In 1784, at the age of thirty-five, he returned home for good. The two paintings of India that he had commissioned were exhibited in London shortly after his return. James Wales’s paintings after Forbes’s drawings were exhibited at the annual showings of the Royal Academy at

Indian prospects or representations of the new idea of India in the popular imagination. Jn time, rather like the compounding and devolving impression of the royal Indian tiger, these two images of India popularized by Forbes and Wales came to be seen as the expected sights of a peculiar and conquered landscape. But for Forbes. the ‘sublime aspect’ of the charged images remained, and remained uniquely meaningful, to the India that he knew as a young Romantic artist. In 1811, when sitting for a portrait for the

Somerset House: The Temple of Elephanta in 1785 and Cubeer Bur, the Great Banyan Tree in 1787." Engravings of

these two paintings were also made by James Phillips, and published in June 1790 as a pair, with letterpress in French and English. Wales’s paintings after Forbes at the Summer Exhibitions would have been seen during the five-week showings by 2000 or more daily visitors, and their unusual subjects and alien prospects would have served well in the competition for viewers’ attention that landscape paintings faced against sensational history paintings and portraits of well-known figures.’’ Furthermore, the popular engravings after Wales by Phillips would have ensured wide and popular dissemination of the two images carefully chosen by Forbes to show an India that he knew to be at once

organic, natural, associative, spiritual, ancient, and

sublimely Romantic. Forbes’ prospects of the Indian banyan tree and Hindu cave-temple, as these came to be seen in Wales’s polished and carefully composed oil paintings and in their engravings, largely coincided with the exhibition in London of paintings by two other English Romantic artists of India, Tilly Kettle (1735-86) and William Hodges (1744-97). Between 1771 and 1776, Tilly Kettle, working out of Madras and Calcutta on the east coast, exhibited fantastical

Indian portraits at the Society of Artists. Between 1785 and 1794, William Hodges, who had also worked out of Calcutta on the east coast, exhibited complex views of idea!

Indian landscapes in the north and west of Bengal and Oudh at the annual Royal Academy shows. With the paintings Forbes had commissioned

from James Wales, he no

doubt intended to contribute to the artistic ferment over the idea of India in London, and to influence this new subject for artists with his own perspective of novel prospects in an unexplored, western India, a place of special appeal to artists of the new Romantic era, Forbes believed, because it was simultaneously pastoral, idyllic, monumental, sublime, and implicitly and naturally spiritual. Because Forbes’ banyan tree and Elephanta temple were highly unusual specific and recognizable images — and rendered as such by the compressed impression of Wales’s compositions, as well

frontispiece of Oriental Memoirs, Forbes directed that he be

pictured with the images of an Indian banyan tree in full foliage behind him and the three-faced carving of the Mahesamurti at Elephanta at his right elbow. (Fig. 9) Edward Moor, on one of his frequent prospecting visits to Elephanta, had picked up a small version of the Mahesamurti from one of the subsidiary temples and carried it back to East India House; this bust was probably

used as a model for the sculpture in Forbes’s portrait because it matches the drawing of it that Moor included in his mythology.” (Fig. 10) The Indian banyan tree or ficus bengalis began and evolved, as Forbes well knew, in the same region (albeit

eons before it) as the Bengal tiger: the Sunderban islands and estuaries of the Bay of Bengal which were also the legendary enchanted forest of pre-Aryan Indian folklore. The tree embodies the teeming fertility of its original place, the watery virgin forest where (at least according to the original inhabitants) the river Ganges ended its long journey from the cold Himalayas and, in celebration of journey’s end, engendered first life in a secret and sacred place of warmth and darkness. Banyans are magnificent and singularly droll trees with thick trunks, rubbery twisted branches, dense high foliage crowns, and air roots that grow down into the ground to start new trunks and new trees; a single tree can quickly spread over acres of land to form a natural cathedral of interconnected

trees and high-arched, shady

places. Banyan trees proliferated across India from the Bengal coast by ‘walking’ with their root-branches, following the river valleys from coast to coast until they, quite literally, criss-crossed the Indian subcontinent. On the Malabar coast in southwest India, the place of special and idyllic prospect for James Forbes, the banyan tree proliferated in new and vigorous subspecies, to colonize the brackish estuaries of the coast and create there a new and better home for itself than it had in the Bengali Sunderbans. European travelers to India from the Renaissance onward never failed to be awed by the Indian banyan tree,

the forest life it nurtured beneath its ciative connections to an original described it, sketched, and brought (most did not survive, but one could deformed,

in Bishop

Morton’s

canopies, and its assoearth religion. They home sprigs to plant be found, stunted and

walled

garden

of exotic

plants in seventeenth-century Winchester). Forbes’s early

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tility and self-sufficiency, and an organic and living community of plant, animal and human that carried spiritual associations of a natural and original earth religion. ‘The Hindoos are peculiarly fond of this tree; they consider its long duration, its out-stretching arms, and over-shadowing beneficence, as emblems of the Deity, and almost pay it divine honours. The Brahmins, who thus “find a fane in

every sacred grove”, spend much of their time in religious solitude under the shade of the banian-tree; they plant it near the dewals, or Hindoo temples, ... and in those villages

9. Frontispiece for Oriental Memoirs (1813), James Forbes Esq, FR.S., FAS. &c., 1811, T.W. Dean from a drawing by Murphy, Yale Center for British Art

where there is no structure for public worship, they place an image [of universal fecundity] under one of these trees, and there perform a morning and evening sacrifice.’ The ‘fanes and sacred groves’ of English and Scottish ‘Druids, and pagan priests’ are, according to Forbes, but a modest parallel to the great Indian banyan, whose ‘awful gloomy shade ... naturally inspires religious reflections’ in traveling artists such as himself.” The banyan tree that Forbes sketched in 1770 was real and expansive — it stretched over five acres on the Nerbuddah

river banks above the Malabar coast, with a

central trunked circumference of over two thousand feet; it housed an entire village and sheltered an entire sect of Nayar ascetics, and it was known affectionately as the haunt of a Nayar holy man named ‘Cubeer-bur’. In a comment on his original drawing, Forbes lamented that he had captured only ‘about a sixteenth part of that beautiful production....° The composition of the painting after it by James Wales did, however, encompass more of what Forbes

felt about the tree as an expression of the communal India he knew. (Pl. 3) In the engraving after Wales’s painting there is no peripheral view: the great banyan frames the entire picture with its twisted trunks and canopy of dense foliage; overhanging air roots shape and focus this frame further so as to form a cathedral of two overlapping circles of light-filled middle ground. In the lower left of the first circle, a trio of Brahmin priests stand, clothed in white, and

10. Edward Moor, Trimurti the Hindu Triad, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor engraved for The Hindu Pantheon,

Beinecke Library, Yale University

letters home from India are filled with references to the tree as natural wonder and exotic paradise: ‘A banian tree, with many trunks, forms the most beautiful walks, vistas, and cool recesses, that can be imagined. The leaves are

large, soft, and of a lively green; the fruit is a small fig, when ripe of a bright scarlet; affording sustenance to mon-

keys, squirrels, peacocks, and birds of various kinds, which dwell among its branches.’ Forbes finds these ‘curious and beautiful’ trees to be ‘exempted from decay’, with ‘each tree ... in itself a grove’ and eco-system of interactive fer-

holding staves, awaiting consultations from the villagers. Behind these spiritual advisers is a dark recess where, presumably, the fecundity shrine or wombed lingam (an aniconic form representing the male and female organs of generation, symbolic of natural and divine creativity) is located though hidden from view. In the lower right of the second circle, a group of Indian entertainers pour forth from woods toward the empty center-stage of the painting. The group is led by two dancing girls dressed in elaborate and brightly-colored costumes like those of the musicians that follow them; arms outstretched in welcome, pipes and drums raised high, and beaming smiles compose the group into a complex of energy and gaiety. Birds hang in the tree’s foliage, monkeys and small animals wreath through the branches, and fruit trees like the custard apple grow between the tree trunks. The central foreground of the scene, however, is without action except that of the implied imminent growth of a densely populated forest floor of prehistoric ferns, and, perhaps, the implied presence of the

BAA

44

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

titulary earth-spirit of the place. (In a diary note made after he had actually seen the site of Forbes’s original drawing, James Wales declares that Nerbuddha or ‘Kubber-burr’ was

a figure of myth, an earth-spirit in the form of ‘a fat man ... holding bags of gold ... representing the fullness of desire’ at once physical and spiritual.)"* The center of Wales’s composition is a horizontal oval of brilliant shimmering light: we see through an opening in the canopy of the banyan as if through a telescope, to a scene of Claude Lorrain tranquillity — a coastal idyll of glistening water, wooden boats, wading cattle, flying seabirds, and waving palm trees. A group of English gentlemen are shown picnicking in the low right foreground of the scene. They appear as an afterthought — or an addition — to the idyllic and fulsome communal life of the banyan tree. (In the original sketch by Forbes, only Indian figures are shown within the banyan community.) Seated in carved armchairs and waited on by Indian valets and bearers, the Englishmen appear relaxed and content; their eyes are directed at the dancing girls and musicians, and they appear to exchange glances and smiles, and then look, past the entertainers, to the coastal scene

framed by the tree canopy’s opening; the Brahmin priests and sacred grove form but shadowy shapes to their left peripheral vision. Behind the English group is a large embroidered silk tent from which servants hurry forth. And we have Forbes’s own description of the high luxury of these Company ‘rural excursions’: The chief was extremely fond of field diversions, and used

to encamp under [the celebrated Cubber Burr tree] in a magnificent style; having a saloon, dining-room, drawingroom, bed chambers, bath, kitchen, and every other accommodation, all in separate tents; yet did this noble tree cover the whole; together with his carriages, horses, camels, guards, and attendants. While its spreading

branches afforded shady spots for the tents of his friends, with their servants and cattle.

Another, much later sketch by Forbes of an Indian commu-

nity under a banyan tree depicts the dancing girls and musicians at center-stage, the women are fine featured and have exposed breasts (which designates them as skilled courtesans), but there is no visible audience of English officials. And a much later note to this sketch describes only how ‘useful’ the spreading tree was for sheltering British armies during military expeditions, with one tree providing cover for 7,000 to 10,000 men in the Gujerat wars.” The Indian banyan tree as first portrayed and described by artists like Forbes and Wales would seem to provide one clear impression of the sublime as this concept had evolved by way of Longinus from Shaftsbury to Edmund Burke in eighteenth-century aesthetics. Longinus had proposed that the artistic object should inspire not just a sense of beauty but a sense of transport and overwhelming or sublime awe. Shaftsbury embraced Longinus’s concept of the sublime in aesthetics and connected it with a prospect of the awesome

and powerful but submerged energies of nature. To Shaftsbury’s notion of the natural sublime as something so vast that it defied full comprehension by the human mind, Joseph Addison added another characteristic, that of an uncommon or unusual aspect in the art object. Edmund Burke, in 1757, completed the definition of the natural sub-

lime when he said that the sublime was on the same level as the beautiful in aesthetic criteria — that its primary characteristic was an obscurity (or exoticism) of subject that aroused fear born of ignorance, and terror induced by the vision of magnitude and latent natural power;-and that the purpose of the sublime vision was to create an expansion of perception or consciousness in the viewer. Ann Radcliffe, in her essay ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’ (1826), provided a popular — and popularly Gothic -- transcription of what Burke meant by his aesthetics of the sublime: Terror, she said, ‘expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree’ whereas mere horror ‘contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them’.” Awesome, exotic, overwhelmingly various and infinitely fecund, the ficus bengalis of the Indian landscape met and surpassed the evolving definition of the sublime prospect in European aesthetics and art criticism of the late eighteenth century. The addition to its depiction (by Forbes and artists after him) of human domestic scenes and the rituals of folk religion and unknown spiritualities as these might occur beneath the tree’s cathedral canopy contributed, meanwhile, to the new Romantic requirement of a true sublimity in the aesthetic prospect that encompassed both the magnificent and the minute in nature. In essays written in

the 1780s, William Gilpin had discussed the selection of natural and human scenes that were emotionally moving and inserted this element (which he called ‘picturesque’, or like a picture, in eliciting a response in the viewer) into pre-

vailing definitions of the beautiful and the sublime in the aesthetic prospect. But Richard Payne Knight, in his poem The Landscape (1794), refuted the need for a ‘picturesque’ element in the aesthetic prospect and instead called for a thoroughly Romantic expansion of Burke’s notion of the terror of the sublime to include ‘sympathy’ or the ‘quiet sublime’: Tis not the giant of unwieldy size, / Piling up hills on hills to scale the skies, / That gives an image of the true sublime ... But nature’s common works, ... Where sympathy with terror is combin’d, / To move, to melt, to

elevate the mind.’ This poem, along with Payne Knight's 1786 essay on Indian erotic art (Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connections with the Mystic Theology of the

Ancients), formed part of his evolving definition of Romantic sublimity in art, where the prospect not only expanded but stimulated the mind to create its own feelings of individually experienced sublimity, so as to combine the external physical and internal spiritual in a complex structure of awesome interiority replete with latent spiritual energies and unknowable presences. When creative visionaries like William Blake spoke of the need for the artist to envision a heaven in a wildflower, and infinity in a

grain of sand, or like Wordsworth spoke of an ‘aspect more sublime’ and independent of physical vastness and roughness, and a ‘sense sublime, / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns ... and in the mind of man’, they partook of the age’s evolving definition of Romantic sublimity.* This new or Romantic prospect of the sublime, which incorporated the immediate appeal of the ‘rude’ natural and ‘ordinary’ human with the challenge of ‘primitive’ spiritual latencies and mysteries located within an alien and primordial environment, was to become the mode of vision for the new century. William Hodges painted the great banyan at the entrance of the town of Bauglepoor for his patron, Warren Hastings, and may have exhibited it at the Royal Academy show in 1786; and when he published his prospects of the ideal sublime — or Romantic sublime — of India (Travels in India, 1793), he included among the engravings of his paintings one of the venerable Indian banyan. His comments accompanying the plate emphasize the tree’s power in evoking feelings of awe, natural community, and alien spirituality: the tree was ‘one of those curious productions of nature which cannot fail to excite the attention of the traveler .... These trees ... cover such an extent of ground, that hundreds of people may take shelter under one of ;/ the entire district presented such a complex them prospect of infinite fecundity and exotic coherence that the

a

eA

is

ER

tree seemed the very image of ‘a perfect paradise” (Fig. 50). Scene in the Garden at Vezelpoor, near Baroche, a 1778 draw-

ing by Forbes also captures the sense of a natural and sublime paradise to be found beneath the canopy of the Indian banyan. (Fig. 11) Forbes’s garden flourishes with a wealth of tropical plants and animals growing and living beneath the spreading branches of a banyan; and in the foreground two human figures beside a forest shrine celebrate the fecundity of their idyllic and peaceful region. To complete the picture of a tropical paradise, we see a pair of smiling cobras curved beside the humans; the snakes are benign and peaceable in this kingdom, and they seem to join in the homage to the natural scene (Fig. 38). To Thomas Daniell, another English artist of the Romantic prospects of India, the banyan tree presented an image of ‘such an Eden’ or earthly paradise to view that it evoked — and pre-empted — Milton’s fig tree in Paradise Lost. Daniell’s expansive description of the Indian banyan formalizes the tree’s place in the evolving iconography of Romantic art: The banyan is a symbol of pastoral peace and patriarchal longevity: it is the asylum of animals totally dissimilar in habits and dispositions, who subsist on its fruits and are

protected by its foliage. The peacock here unfolds his splendid plumage; doves nestle in the topmost boughs, and

\e

‘

z3

y

on tes

Sey

YW

11. James Forbes, Scene in the Garden at Vezelpoor, near Baroche, 1778, Engraving after Forbes’s Drawing for Oriental Memoirs, 1813, Yale Center for British Art

46

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

tribes of monkeys leap and chatter among the branches. Beneath its shade the herdsman watches his flock; the manufacturer plies his loom; the musician touches his pipe; whilst the Brahmin, abstracted from all sublunary

is a pleasing and discreet one; and the prose describe its circumstance is conventional and turesque: ‘The banion is sacred [to the natives], ally to be found near the Pagodas. I have seen

objects, performs his solitary though not silent devotions.

walk round it in token of respect, with their hands joined,

Powerfully present (albeit not always actually represented) as an integral part of the tree’s edenic image would be the fecundity shrine of the linga-yoni located in a central recess of the tree’s multiple trunk. (Fig. 12) Daniell’s nephew and assistant, William, tells in his diary of a splen-

did prospect of a linga-yoni, ‘the best piece of Indian sculpture we have seen in this Country’, enclosed within the

innermost trunk of a banyan tree at the village of Narrainpour: the ‘strong and sinewy arms’ of the tree ‘lifted the sculpture from the pedestal’ and held it aloft, as if nature and human art joined to present a composite symbol of fecund and erotic community.” When Maria Graham (later Lady Callcott) traveled to western India in a more imperial decade (between 1809 and 1811 in the company of her father, Rear-Admiral George Dundas) to draw and send home a personal ‘woman’s view’ of the Indian landscape, with ‘picturesque figures’ situated within it, she demonstrated the extent to which the Indian

banyan had already become a popular — and popularly Romantic — image for art. Her drawing of the banyan tree

12. Thomas

she uses to largely picand is usuthe natives,

and their eyes fixed on the ground.’” There is no mention of the erotic forms within the banyan shrine. Nor is there any suggestion of a powerful but alien spirituality and sublimity radiating from within its core outward and beyond the circle of ‘native’ worshipers. : Sacred and profane (or domestic) attributes: of the Indian banyan recur when William Wordsworth (in 1815) describes an English yew tree as ‘single, in the midst / Of its own darkness ... Of vast circumference and gloom profound ... too magnificent / To be destroyed ... each particular trunk a growth / Of intertwisted fibres serpentine .... Nor uninformed with Phantasy, and looks / That threaten the profane ... a pillared shade ... a natural temple.” For the poet Wordsworth in a patriotic mood, his English yew tree can assume and co-opt into familiar and national form aspects of India’s tree until it is no longer exotic. And years later, in an even more imperial age, William Daniell was to lament that the picturesque aspect and Romantic nature of the Indian banyan tree were desecrated by the alien presence of a ‘Priapus which the Hindoos worship’ at the heart of the banyan.” Daniell’s Anglican distress was prompted,

Daniell, Hindoo Temples at Agouree, on the River Soane, Bahar, 1796, Aquatint, Oriental Scenery |, Plate 19, Yale Center

for British Art

perhaps, by a remembrance of Milton’s very female fig tree in Paradise Lost (‘Branching so broad and long, that in the ground / The bended twigs take root. And daughters grow / About the mother tree,’) and the clear associations made by Milton between the fig tree of life and an Eve created to sin. But his late and pious morality also belongs with the British political consciousness after the Battle of

Seringapatam that inspired a devolution of the tree’s significance into an emblem (albeit still of India) that suggested female wantonness, shameful prolixity, and the unnatural growth of a fertility gone mad on superstitious excess. But that story, of the deliberate diminishment of an ancient but living Indian entity and timeless Romantic prospect, belongs in another and later discussion.

3. The Cave-Temple of Elephanta: Eroticism and Art The cave-temple of Elephanta seen and drawn first by James Forbes in 1774 became the other primary image of Romantic sublimity in the Indian prospect. Like the Indian banyan tree, Elephanta was commonly understood to have located, in the gloom at its very heart or innermost shrine, graven images at once primitive and profound of human sexuality and divine fecundity. James Wales’s painting of The Temple of Elephanta after Forbes’s sketch, was executed and shown at the Summer Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1785, two years before his painting of the great banyan tree. (PI. 4) Even in its engraved version, it is a dark and solemn composition, framed by the carved stone pillars of the temple, and it shows not the entire entrance (as in

Forbes’s drawing) but the interior of the temple only. A tripartite structure made up of three rectangular sections intensifies the sense of interiority and infinite or everreceding depth: the concentric rectangles focus attention ever inward and into the sculptured cavern, even as the ultimate spiritual point within the temple telescopes out to encompass the viewer. The central rectangular ground is framed by massive, receding pillars and beams enclosing chambers which tier inward to a central lighted room containing the huge sculptured bust of Siva Mahesamurti, the three-faced and opaque-eyed symbol that represents universal creation in Hinduism. The rectangulared space of the right section of the composition, also framed by pillars and beams that enclose and focus perspective, shows three large sculptured figures representing the three manifestations of Siva: largest and central is the figure of Siva Andhakasuravadha

or Siva the Destroyer, with six arms,

two of which hold up the temple beams; on either side are the Siva Ardhanarisvara, an androgynous figure with sword and exposed right breast, and the slender cosmic dancer form of Siva Nataraja-Tandava. A solitary Indian worshiper, dwarfed by the size of the three Sivas, stands below them, looking up. And at the edge of the central pillared section of the painting leading to the three-headed Siva Mahesamurti are two more small human figures, peripheral to its solemnity, pointing with awe at the prospect of the Mahesamurti. A distant human figure close

to the left side of the Mahesamurti bust and no bigger than one of its ears, marks the scale of the sculpture. The third rectangulared section of the drawing is also dominated by a view of massive pillars and beams that delineate receding spaces and chambers. But here there are no sculptured forms, no human figures, and no carvings — only lighted spaces that seem to lead out and away. At their center is a very dark square-arched doorway leading to some invisible innermost space.

The artist of the painting seems fully conscious that he is presenting a view of sculptures and architecture that have been created under aesthetic rules different and distinct from his own traditions. The composition is respectful but abstracted, and the perspective is both long and fully cognizant that there can be no interpretation or embellishment of its comprehensive but incomprehensible subject. There are no English figures in Wales’s scene to disturb the alien spiritual otherness of the temple of Elephanta (in contrast to the English group that Wales added to his composition

of Forbes’s

banyan

tree

drawings).

Instead,

the

immediate foreground of the painting is dark with the shadow of ferns, primordial forest floor vegetation, and the broken masonry and stones of a Poussin landscape. Foliage growing on the upper level of the mountain droops over the temple entrance to increase the gloom and awful solemnity of the interior, and to reiterate the mysterious symbiosis between nature and ancient spirituality present everywhere in the temple. The overall impression of Elephanta, as seen through the double artistic lens of Forbes and Wales, is one of silence, magnitude, and incon-

ceivable antiquity; of spaces lit by an unknown light source and symbolic forms seemingly human but vast and incomprehensible. When James Forbes first saw the terrain surrounding the temples of Elephanta, Salsette and Ellora in 1774, he was overwhelmed by the expanse and layered depth of the mountain ranges that enclosed the temples, and by the ‘city-sized’ spaces that had been carved into the mountainous caverns for the shrines and meditation chambers. ‘The whole appearance of this excavated mountain indicates it to

48

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

have had a city hewn in its rocky sides capable of containing many thousand inhabitants: the largest temple was doubtless their principal place of worship; the smaller, on the same plan, inferior dewals [temples]’; the rest of the carved chambers were dwellings for the inhabitants of the religious city, probably ‘the abode[s] of religious brahmins and their pupils, [at a time] when India was the muse of art and science, and the nations of Europe were involved in ignorance and barbarism’.” Sir Charles Malet, Resident at

Poona and artistic patron of Forbes and, later, Wales, also

remarked on the extraordinary mixture of natural formation and architectural carving that characterized the cavetemples: Whether we consider the design, or contemplate the execution of these extraordinary works, we are lost in wonder

at the idea of forming a vast mountain into almost eternal mansions: the mythological symbols and figures throughout the whole, leave no room to doubt their owing their existence to religious zeal, the most powerful and most universal agitator of the human mind.”

Elephanta or Gharipuri had been named after the large granite sculpture (or natural formation) of an elephant with a tiger on its back that was located just outside the main portico of the temple. (This statue, which had not survived intact, even in Forbes’s time, was moved in 1864 to Victoria Gardens, Bombay.) On an island five miles in cir-

cumference located in the inlet between the mainland and the outer islands of Bombay, Elephanta was the smallest but also purportedly the oldest of the cave-temples of western India.” Because of its remoteness, its stark and natural

rock outcroppings, its undeniable ‘greater antiquity’ and ‘richer sculptures’ when compared with the other cavetemples at Kanheri on Salsette island and at Ellora inland,

and the general sense of a rich sublimity of spiritual feeling, Elephanta was a favorite not only of Forbes but of the other English artists who followed him like Wales and Moor. For Forbes, Elephanta represented a high civilization that preceded by centuries that of ancient Greece, Egypt and Babylon: the Elephanta sculptures excited ‘more extraordinary sensations’ than ‘the most striking objects of art in Italy and Greece’, and he believed that ‘the striking resemblance’ between the cave-temple and ‘the sculptured grottos in Egypt’ suggested that ‘the Egyptians copied from the Hindoos’.” Forbes visited Elephanta repeatedly while he was stationed in Bombay and western India, and he once

spent four full days camping within the temple so as to make extensive drawings of the interiors. He noted, in par-

ticular and with fascination, the eerie and mysterious blue light that seemed to emanate from the dark stone walls to selectively light up the sculptured Sivas and the erotic depictions in the innermost shrine, and he associated this ‘blueness of the light, or rather gloom’ with an earlier primeval India of the Sunderban folktales and with an ancient

earth

inscrutable.”

religion,

at

once

transcendent

and

The enthusiasm for Elephanta and other cave-temples in India among artists like Forbes anticipated, and no doubt also inspired, what was to become a characteristic fascina-

tion with the geology of caves during the Romantic period. No less than the high and mysterious mountain peaks of Europe (say, Mount Snowdon

or Mont Blanc), caves and

other subterranean spaces both at home and abroad exerted profound appeal — as much for their fossil-strewn recesses that told of primordial history, as for the spiritual echoes they held of the original rituals and beliefs of the earth’s first inhabitants. (Novalis’s 1802 novel, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, for example, is a spiritual bildungsroman set in a cave; it celebrates the history and meaning to be found in the underground places of the primeval earth.)” William Hodges, painting in eastern India between 1780 and 1783 (who, as artist on Captain Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific, 1772-5, encountered the coastal grottos and caves

of New Zealand), commented directly on the spiritual latency of caves and on the architectural prototype they provided for human houses of worship: There is ‘the almost universal tradition which characterizes rocks and caverns as the haunts and sacred habitations of the Gods; and in consequence of which the form and gloom of such caverns have been universally imitated in the oldest temples. Their external form and appearance is the spiry rock, the towering cliff, and the mountain in its immense extent: How various! how grand!’

On 2 May 1783 James Forbes and Charles Malet visited the English settlement at Fort Gwalior for three days whilst on their way to Agra to negotiate a treaty with the Maratha Peshwa Scindia. On the same day William Hodges also arrived at Fort Gwalior for a ten-day stay arranged by the Company agent Anderson who was also the diplomatic liaison at Scindia’s encampment.” Undoubtedly, Hodges and Forbes (and Malet) met during their overlapping stays at Fort Gwalior — Hodges no doubt heard of the remarkable cave-temple prospects of western India from Forbes and Malet, and of the extraordinary vistas of Forbes’s special place, the idyllic Malabar coast. Indeed, right after his visit to Gwalior Hodges laments that he was not able to visit Surat and Bombay, or see the geological and archaeological monuments

of ‘ancient India’ in the Deccan, or view the

natural sublimity of ‘the whole Malabar coast [which] possesses ... beauty equal to any country on earth’.* Hodges goes on to recommend that future Romantic artists of India seek out the profoundly sublime prospects of southwestern India. James Wales, fully converted by Forbes to the high originality of the cave-temple prospects in southwestern India, responded with enthusiasm to the novel complexity of nature and art that they promised. He traveled to India in 1791 to see for himself, and with the idealism of a com-

mitted Romantic chose the isolated Bombay Presidency (and especially Poona and the Bombay islands) as his artistic locale over the lucrative areas of patronage on the east-

ern side of the subcontinent. Entries in his manuscript diary and notebooks record Wales’s initial and continuing astonishment at the spiritual magnificence and intense eroticism to be encountered at Elephanta in particular, beginning with ‘the statue of the Elephant’ near the entrance, ‘a very rude piece of sculpture’ of energy contained and imprisoned within black granite, to the interior chamber containing the linga-yoni ‘of the Mahadeo — of a very enormous size’. He describes the aniconic fertility form of the Mahadeo as ‘similar to the Priapus or Phallus of the ancients’ but dual-gendered because of its place in the marriage temple of Siva and Parvati, as a complex emblem ‘worshiped to obtain fecundity’. Some of the expansive notes on the symbolism of the sculptures at Elephanta have been torn out from the diary, perhaps in a later censorship of their erotic subject matter. Sketches that would have accompanied these notes are also missing, perhaps for the same reason. We do know that Wales did numerous sketches of both the prospect of the Elephanta mountains and of the interior of the temple chambers. But only one of these interior views survives: a finely drawn portrait of the central Siva figure, Siva Andhakasuravadha or Siva the Destroyer. (Fig. 13) In Wales’s depiction, Siva is a magnificent figure of active destructive fury and contained creative energy: two of his massive arms hold up the temple roof, while his other four arms grasp various emblems of his wrath; his face is wrathful, and his naked

body muscular and explicitly potent. Along the top of the drawing are a series of male and female figures, called Maithuna,

and we

have Wales’s own

words to describe

these conjoined figures: ‘I discovered a very uncommon Frieze’ which once covered ‘the whole length of the temple’ at Elephanta; ‘this Frieze represents naked human Figures standing in a row, in various and not ungraceful attitudes [of sexual union]’.”

13. James Wales, Six Armed Shiva, Elephanta No. I, c.1791, Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

Inspired by the alien art and novel sublimity that he saw at Elephanta, Wales went on to do numerous sketches of sculptures and architecture at the cave-temples at Ellora inland, and at Kanheri on Salsette island, as well as other

monuments and temple frescos in southwest India, and he made plans for an ongoing series of more than seventy etchings (to be accomplished when he returned to England) that would depict the entire range of inspiring artistic sublimities to be found among the antiquities of India. Wales did not live long enough to transform any of these drawings into finished work, although a few of his drawings of Ellora did find their way as engravings into Thomas Daniell’s late volume of Oriental Scenery (Hindoo Excavations, 1803 — see discussion, Part V). Wales’s death in

1795 was premature and tragic, as much for his family (he left five orphaned daughters) as for the Indian Renaissance in British Romantic art and culture: as one of his assistants wrote, ‘with him I fear will be lost some valuable informa-

tion which his investigating turn of mind, and very able Talents ... would have enabled him to add to the correct drawings, and measurements, he was about to publish of those monuments of early genius, and human labour’. Wales’s fascination with the seminal forms and high originality of the sculptures and vista at Elephanta endured through his five years in India; when he contracted his fatal fever he was on his way from the Kanheri temple on Salsette to one last sketching excursion at Elephanta. Edward

Moor,

who

followed

Wales

as the artist

and

recorder of India’s cave-temples, and who had access to some of Wales's original sketches by way of their shared patron, Charles Malet, also focused with fascination on

Elephanta: My visitings to [Elephanta] ... have been frequent — beginning with 1784 and ending, I think, in 1804. I have wandered socially and alone, through every part of the cave, and pored and pondered on every subject. I have painfully circumambulated the island at the water’s brink; and, as I believe, found excavations on which no European eye had before rested. I have, within the cave, written descriptions of each group, and almost every figure.”

Moor’s sentiments here concerning Elephanta could be Wales’s own. His sense that Elephanta represented a virtual pantheon of early Indian beliefs, and that it was an encapsulation of all the forms and meanings that could be found in monuments of antiquity across India, was also one that he shared with Wales. The descriptions and drawings of Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (1810) must serve by default as a substitute for the compendium of views of the Indian antiquities that Wales had hoped to make. The earliest English drawings of Elephanta were done in 1712 by a military cartographer of the East India Company named Willliam Pyke. Pyke visited the island covertly — the Company was in the midst of an expanding military campaign against the Maratha kingdom over the control of west-central India — and his drawings and meas-

YU

The Idea of India: liger, Iree, and Cave

urements of Elephanta (sculptures, columns, porticos and ground plans), done at nightfall and by candlelight, bear all the marks

of haste, surreptition, and baffled wonder

at

what he saw. In 1780, almost sixty years later and as the first sign of significant English antiquarian interest in Elephanta, Pyke’s on-site work was recovered and presented in summary form to the Society of Antiquaries in London by Alexander Dalrymple. The Society and its Indian studies branch, which was to later evolve into the

Asiatick Society of Bengal under the leadership of Willliam Jones, thereafter showed considerable interest in stories

describing Elephanta and other Indian cave-temples. In 1785 a full version of Pyke’s Elephanta drawings and notes was published in the Society’s journal, Archaeologia, along with the text of a paper that William Hunter, the eminent surgeon and Professor of Anatomy of the Royal Academy, had presented to the Society in 1780 on Elephanta and other ‘artificial caverns’. Hunter had praised the Elephanta sculptures for their anatomical accuracy: ‘The people, whoever they were, who carved these statues have accurately

observed and expressed successfully the form of the limbs, and the alteration that [the limb] undergoes from muscular action or external impulse.’ He had also noted the remarkable ‘delineation of emotion’ to be seen at Elephanta, and commended the Indian sculptors’ success ‘in a much more difficult part of the statuary’s art ... that which represents the effect of mental sensations on the human

countenance’.

Hunter’s influential comments

on

the novel precedence of the Elephanta sculptures find a curious echo, almost forty years later, in William Hazlitt’s assertions on the exemplary uniqueness of the Elgin Marbles — imperceptibly showing ‘muscles under the skin’ — for Western art. Hector Macneil’s letter describing his visit to the temples of Elephanta, Kanheri and Amboli in 1783 echoed Hunter in describing the triple-faced Siva Mahesamurti as ‘an object not only of sublimity but of terror’,

and

one

of several

monuments

of ‘genius’

at

Elephanta and Salsette that set a new aesthetic standard: Macneil found the entire region of the Bombay islands to be a ‘spot as singular for the production of art, as for the lonely romantic scenes of nature that surround it’; and in

the cave-temples he found himself ‘filled with new wonder at every step: palaces, statues, giants, monsters, and deities seemed as if starting up from the bowels of the earth to open day ... a scene more like enchantment than reality’. Macneil’s letter was revived in 1786 and both read to and published by the Society.” When the topographer Richard Gough, who was also Director of the Society, published a cumulative and comparative study of English and French descriptions to date of the Indian cave-temples near Bombay, his 1785 work, no less than Wales’s painting of Elephanta and a parallel 1785 account of the temple sculptures in the Gentleman’s Magazine, marked the remarkable

currency of the subject of Indian cave-temples among English artistic and intellectual circles of the 1780s. Willliam Pyke’s drawing of an abstract sculptured

shape in the innermost shrine at Elephanta was the focus of particular fascination among the English antiquarians. Pyke described the venerated object as a ‘large polished stone of a cylindrical form standing on its base, but the top was round or convex. The gentoos call this stone a Mahody,

and consider it an emblem of the Supreme Being.” In Pyke’s ‘Mahody’ (Mahadeo-or Mahadeva) English antiquarians recognized immediately an Indian — and seemingly prior — version of the obelisk and basin symbols of the Egyptians, and the phallic and priapic forms of Greek.and pre-Hellenic cults. All of the accounts of Elephanta available popularly in the 1780s made specific reference to the erotic and sexual symbolism of its sculptures — and in fact it was impossible not to do so, at least obliquely. The central Siva figure at Elephanta, Siva Andhakasuravadha, sports (in addition to his six arms) a sizeable erect penis — shown clearly in the Danish antiquarian Carsten Niebuhr’s well-known 1778 depiction of the sculpture. The androgenous

Siva Ardhanarisvara,

with exposed full breast and

rounded hips, is an unmistakable representation of the pregendered sexuality of Siva and Parvati conjoined, which is present also in the dual-sexed Amazonian figure of the Hindu deity Rudra. And the innermost sanctuary, the garbha-griha or ‘womb house’, at Elephanta containing the large abstract or aniconic form of penis and vulva (represented in Wales’s painting as a shadowed doorway into darkness) is in fact an entire shrine celebrating the physical union of Siva and Parvati, with numerous large sculptures and wall friezes of Maithuna — naked figures engaged in erotic play and united in desire. The entire shrine celebrates the divinity of creative union, the potency of the male and female principles, sat and sakhti, and the connection between sacred and profane love. The

central

feature

or focus

of the womb

shrine,

whether at Elephanta or at other Hindu temples, is of course the large abstracted form of the lingam-lotus or the linga-yoni (Pyke’s ‘Mahody’). Three 1775 drawings by Forbes of this monumental form within the temple of Kanheri on Salsette island provide examples of the prospect of monumentality, the focal use of architectural planes, and

the composition of vastness and infinity given to the symbol in all the major cave-temples of India. In the first drawing, an entrance to the temple, the linga-yoni can be seen in the distance at the center of a darkened room within the interior, with successive frames of roof-layers, arches, sup-

port-beams, and outer columns; bright sunlight outside the temple emphasizes the location of the fertility symbol at the point of darkness seemingly in infinity. (Fig. 14) The second drawing moves further into the temple, to the vestibule, where we see the linga-yoni at closer range, still in the center of the scene but also still separated by doorways, arches, sculptural friezes, and columns. (Fig. 15) The third drawing, a close-up titled discreetly, The Inside of the Large Temple, includes the cryptic notation: ‘the large stone in the center is 19 feet high and 48 [feet] in circumference’. (Fig. 16) The monumental form is indeed massive, neither

14. James Forbes, The Entrance of the Grand Excavation, or principal Temple at Salsette, 1775, Watercolor

Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

b,

]

15. James Forbes, The Vestibule of the Great Temple, in the Excavations at Salsette, 1775,

16. James Forbes, The Inside of the Large Temple, or the

Watercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

principal Excavation, at Salsette, |775,Vatercolor Drawing, Yale Center for British Art

52 = The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

human nor animal it rises out of a pool of darkness and nothing (not even the broken masonry scattered in the foreground in the manner of a Piranesi composition) can detract from its abstracted and disassociated but nevertheless overwhelming expression of monumental and divine fecundity. Among English artistic and intellectual circles in the 1780s in London, the very mention of Elephanta or Kanheri or Ellora conjured up images of the erotic art and sexual forms of ancient religious iconography in India. Travelers told of how the sculptured forms of male and female generative organs could be found not just in ancient spiritual monuments but in every Hindu temple, banyan community, or wayside village shrine. In 1788 William Jones contributed to the impression of sacred and profane love everywhere in India and its culture by publishing his Sanskrit hymns on the union of Siva and Parvati — poems that were closely inspired by his reading in the early Sanskrit originals of Kalidasa’s Sakuntala and Jayadeva’s Gita Govinda, and which celebrate a sacred but also graphically sexual divine union. Jones’s ‘sacred’ poems ‘taken from the Sanskrit’ were popular among artists and intellectuals in England and Europe, and their reputed subject confirmed popular notions that Hinduism was a religion of

Hector Munro and General Matthews in the second AngloMysore war against Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, brought back on his ship several sculptural pieces from Elephanta as well as an entire Hindu temple from the Rohilla hill district in northeast India. (Pl. 31; Fig. 83) Charles Townley, a wealthy antiquarian and art patron who collected Greek and Roman sculpture and erotic pieces, purchased several of the Elephanta pieces as well as the Rohilla temple from Allan for his personal museum. These pieces soon formed the core of Townley’s Indian antiquities as he expanded his collection with the help of his protégé, . Pierre. Hughes d’Hancarville, a friend of the painter Johan Zoffany who in turn approached the antiquarian collectors Claude Martin and Antoine Polier in Lucknow on their behalf. (Fig. 60; Pl. 27) Soon, Townley’s ‘Indian erotic group’ became well

transcendent

Townley’s ‘Indian erotic group’ and Rohilla temple in 1785. Overwhelmed by what he saw, and by the connections he perceived between what he saw and what he knew of the fertility cult origins of some Western art, Knight published

eroticism, and that Elephanta was the first

and foremost of many elaborate expressions of Hinduism’s sexual symbolism. It is some comparative ... praise to the Hindus, that the emblems, under which they exhibit the elements and

operations of nature, are not externally indecorous. Unlike the abominable realities of Egypt and Greece, we see the phallic emblem in the Hindu Pantheon without offense; and know not, until the information be extorted, that we

are contemplating a symbol whose prototype is indelicate. The plates of my book may be turned and examined, over and over, and the uninformed observer will not be aware that in several of them he has viewed the typical representation of the generative organs or powers of humanity. The external decency of the symbols, and the difficulty with which their recondite allusions are discovered, both

offer evidence favourable to the moral delicacy of the Hindu character.*

Edward Moor’s defense of the erotic content of his subject and of the art depicted in his Hindu Pantheon was written for a later imperial and moralistic generation. But it is a summary, also, of the exuberant fascination felt by his generation of Romantic artists, antiquarians, and intellectuals,

for the novel and erotic art of ancient Hinduism. Literary and artistic representations — and“defenses — of the erotic art of Elephanta and other monuments of Hindu culture in London in the 1780s soon found tangible embodiment for their images in the war booty brought home to England from India. In 1784 Captain Alexander Allan, a military artist and cartographer, and commander of the man-of-war Cumberland, who had helped provide naval support to

known, and invitations to see the new additions to his col-

lection were much sought after by London artists and intellectuals familiar with the new subjects of the Indian Renaissance.

Richard Payne Knight, the antiquarian who later wrote important definitions of the sublime requirements of Romantic art (The Landscape, 1794, and An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 1805), who was himself a collector

of Greek

erotic

sculpture,

saw

and

studied

his findings in 1786 as A Discourse on the Worship of

Priapus. Payne Knight's Discourse was a learned and serious (albeit soon notorious) book intended to promote a comprehensive understanding of the sexual symbols of ancient art and the transcendental beliefs and expressions of sublimity upon which these were based. Payne Knight saw profound connections between the sexual symbols of Greek, Celtic and Egyptian deities and those of the ‘Townley erotic group’ which, in his opinion, were the best and most ‘complete representation of the symbol’ of transcendent, divine fecundity. The ‘curious Oriental fragment lately brought from the sacred caverns of Elephanta’ was ‘finished in a style very different’ and singularly beautiful: It contains several figures, in very high relief; the principal of which are a man and woman, in an attitude which I shall not venture to describe, but only observe, that the action, which I have supposed to be a symbol of refreshment and invigoration, is mutually applied by both to their respective organs of generation, the emblems of the active and passive powers of procreation, which mutually cherish and invigorate each other. (Fig. 17)

Payne Knight balanced the exuberant energy and graphic eroticism of the Elephanta group sculpture with a parallel discussion of the equivalent sublimity of the stark and forbidding sculptured form of the linga-yoni in the center of Townley’s Rohilla temple: ‘The Hindoos still represent the creative powers of the deity by these ancient

symbols, the male and female organs of generation ... the

panei

union of the male and female organs of generation, which,

Waa

under the title of the Lingam, still occupies the central and most interior recesses of their temples or pagodas.’ (Fig. 18) The Rohilla lingam composition, appears mounted on a pedestal, in the midst of a square area, sunk in a block of white alabaster. Round the pedestal is a serpent, the emblem of life .... From under the body of the serpent springs the lotus or water lily ... [which] productive of itself, and vegetating from its own matrice . [is] naturally adopted as the symbol of the productive power of the waters, upon which the active spirit of the creator operated in giving life and vegetation to matter .... The upper part of the base of the Lingam also consists of this flower, blended and composed with the female organ of generation which supports it.*

A variant to the abstract form of the linga-yoni of the Rohilla temple was, as Payne Knight also noted, a phallic form which revealed in cross-section within its interior the full form of the female body. Payne Knight included careful and detailed sketches of the Elephanta and Rohilla 17. Erotic fragment from Elephanta in Towneley Collection reproduced by Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, 1786, Beinecke Library, Yale University

sculptures he had studied, and he invoked Lucretius and the

contemporary French syncretic mythologizers like Bernard Picart,

Pierre-Sylvain

Marechal,

Charles

Dupuis,

and

d’Hancarville, to advance his theories of the exuberantly divine natural body, and of the transgendered connections between Pan, Osiris, and the Indian Ganesh, of the hermaphroditic connections between Hercules, Bacchus, and

the Indian Siva, and of the androgynous ties between Isis, Minerva, and the Indian Rudra and Kali.

Contemporary accounts of the ‘Townley group’ and of the sculptures and architecture of Elephanta and other Hindu temples in magazines and popular journals often concluded with the skeptical query as to whether sculptures based on such ‘grotesque and fanciful principles’ could be admired at all — given the standards of Western taste — and whether the extraordinary change in aesthetic norms and tastes that the sculptures demanded with their ‘proportions and forms, so different from Grecian rules’ could ever transpire.” Richard Payne Knight took up these issues directly in his treatise and concluded that a change in European aesthetic standards could and should occur. He also sought, deliberately, to deflect gross misreadings of the erotic art of Hinduism and to derail vicarious misuse of the temple symbols. In the century before, for example, travel pornographers like Sir Thomas Herbert (A Relation of Some Years Travaile, 1634) described the Hindu temple forms as phallic instruments used to deflower virgin brides before marriage, an image at once gross, humorous and pious, and a salacious libertine prospect of virgins raped by the sexual implements of a fiendish pagan religion. Payne Knight hoped his study would emphasize the natural substance and metaphysical foundation of Indian religious art, and the essential sublimity of this art, so as to prevent or

perhaps end its enlistment in the crude and voyeuristic

PLATE XII.

18. Rohilla Temple in Towneley Collection reproduced by Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients, |786, Beinecke Library, Yale University

sub-culture of eighteenth-century pornography. Ironically, his own Discourse was enlisted in the religious and nascent imperial conservatism of critics like T.J. Mathias, who called

for a public burning of the book, along with Matthew Lewis’s

The Monk,

in his alarmist

satire, The Pursuit of

Literature (1798).” And, in a later more imperial age, the misperceptions of Hindu temple art would continue: in his volumes of the Oriental Annual William Daniell repeatedly

54

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

declared Hindu temple sculpture to be beneath representation because indecent and full of priapic excess; and the Reverend Carwitten pointedly connected the sculptures of Elephanta with the ‘licentious rites’ and burning wickers of Woden.* Payne Knight's treatise nevertheless survives as a

pioneering attempt to rescue an ancient art grounded in the religious symbols of transcendant sexuality from contemporary and future boorishness, and to revive its charged and metaphysical symbols for a new Romantic art, inspired by a renaissance of ancient Indian images and scenes, that would be naturally spiritual and sublimely interior. Like the ficus bengalis of the Indian landscape, Elephanta met, challenged, and surpassed the evolving definition of the naturally divine sublime prospect in English and European aesthetics. ‘I confess that I never felt such a sensation of astonishment as when the cavern opened upon me’ — Maria Graham’s reaction upon first see-

ing Elephanta was a common one.” The temple locale and its sculptures had panoramic scope, awesome magnitude, transporting exoticism, spiritual intimations, and an antiq-

uity that defied prevailing notions of civilized human time. With their multiple symbols of a transcendant and metaphysical sexuality, and their multiple expressions of what William

Blake

called

‘the

human

form

divine’,

the

Elephanta sculptures represented not just the natural sublime but the passionate prospects of the natural sublime.

When the antiquarian Hector Macneil noted the sublimity and terror he felt at first sight of the Siva Mahesamurti he went on to remark that all the sculptures at Elephanta, including those of animals and abstract forms, expressed passion — whether overt or latent. Macneil was taken in particular by a minor sculpture of ‘a tiger, a horse, and two men, executed in so masterly a manner’ that a complex of passion or sublime terror unites the group, and travels outward to the spectator, ‘the tiger is couchant, and just ready

to seize his prey; but the terror and attitude of the horse [and men] is equal to anything’ ever seen or felt.” The very interiority of Elephanta, with its receding spaces, darkened doorways and enclosing chambers that are captured so well in James Wales’s composition of the prospect, suggests a containment of passion and a latent immensity of power that is mirrored, specifically, in the abstract form of the

lingam or linga-yoni within its ‘womb house’. Payne Knight’s depiction and description of this form clearly emphasizes that it is a representation of the creative power principles of Siv and Sakti (male and female) as they might be seen in union from within the interior of the female body.

Edward Moor’s illustrations of the individual components of Townley’s Rohilla temple make even more graphic the aspects of dual gender and interiority. (Fig. 19) And his depiction of an actual garbha-griha (a temple womb house which he personally brought back to East India House),

19. Edward Moor, Pujartha Dravyani, Sacrificial Implements &c.,

20. Edward Moor, Devi, 1810, Drawing by M. Haughton

1810, Details, Rohilla Temple, Towneley Collection, Drawing by M. Haughton after Moor, engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library, Yale University

Yale University

after Moor, engraved for The Hindu Pantheon, Beinecke Library,

with the linga-lotus contained within it and the full female form of Parvati contained within the shaft of the linga, is

an exuberant ing meaning of Elephanta, both the rise

summary of the symbols and their telescopof infinite inwardness. (Fig. 20) The linga-yoni Rohilla, and other Hindu temples, represents and the containment of passion. It represents

an illumination of creative power from within, a kind of

internal sight (like William Blake’s ‘four-fold’ vision) or imaginative vision beneath surfaces, or a prophetic seeing through the body to forbidden mysteries of the natural and the divine. This prophetic vision within or into the secret

workings of the natural object, this holding up of a lamp to nature, and the transcendent experience of an interiority without boundaries, were to become the characteristics of

sublimity of the new and evolving Romantic art of transcendence — of the divine within nature and the human,

and of the natural that encircled and illuminated the divine. The cultural freight signified and borne by the images of the Indian banyan tree and the Elephanta sculptures contributed immensely to the Indian — or as it would later be called, Oriental — aspect and prospect of English and European Romanticism.

4. The Indian Prospect in English Romantic Art and Literature The Indian (initially as a generic Eastern or Oriental) prospect in English art and literature appeared early in the eighteenth century. Indeed, it was largely coincident with the rise and growth of the East India Company, and increasing news of their trading places in the popular press in England. Prior to the expansion of the East India Company, Asia in the literary imagination of Europe was the place depicted in the Bible and ancient Greco-Roman accounts, an Asia that was alternately made up of Israel, Canaan

and

Egypt,

or Troy

Persia,

and Alexander’s

Himalayas. Two literary prospects of the East from the mid eighteenth century were of particular and peculiar influence on the imminent Romantic era in England. The first of these was the English version of Arabian Nights in 1712, translated from Antoine Galland’s French version of 1704, in a Grub Street edition with crude illustrations.

Ultimately derived in subject from early Indian and Persian folklore, the tales of the Arabian Nights bore, nevertheless,

the milieu and trappings of an Asiatic and Islamic culture. Despite their diverse origin — or perhaps because of it — the stories of the Arabian Nights stimulated an overwhelming fascination with an exotic and mythical ‘Arabic’ place called Samarkand located somewhere east of Europe. William Beckford’s notorious and popular ‘French’ fantasy of sadism and necromancy, The History of Caliph Vathek (1786), was set in the timeless and imaginary world of the Arabian Nights, as were numerous copycat (albeit somewhat milder) Gothic fantasies of the period. Soon, despite the Princess Sheherazade’s precarious and hardly proper situation — in a negligee, in a harem boudoir, telling bedroom tales to save her life after sexual

union with the king — the thousand and one tales were transformed into good family reading in England. By the end of the eighteenth century there were at least eighteen English editions of Arabian Nights; the tales were excerpted in children’s fairytale collections and chapbooks, and

generally regarded as either harmless fantasy or useful negative example for Christian teaching. William Godwin in Political Justice (1793) recommended the tales, along with Mother Goose and Robinson Crusoe, as perfectly appropriate texts to ‘excite the imagination’ and ‘quicken the apprehension’ of children. And, in 1806-11, Jonathan Scott, a

military officer from Madras, published a popular six-volume edition of Arabian Nights for children which included Bengali folktales that he had collected. Most of the major Romantic poets — Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats — and most of the major Romantic novelists — Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, Hays, Austen, Mary Shelley —

acknowledge reading the Arabian Nights with fascination, often as children. Coleridge recounts how his father burned his siblings’ copy of the tales — and then goes on to assert that Arabian Nights helped him become ‘habituated to the Vast’ and that the book was the best ‘way of giving the mind a love of “the Great” and “the Whole”’.”’ The heroine of Mary Hay’s Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) is

read the tales by her aunt when she is four years old, and from them she learns her first lessons in romance and female conduct! Sheherazade’s fabulous tales spawned a fashionable Romantic penchant for armchair travel to an exotic and imaginary place that bore some faint resemblance to Turkey, Arabia, Persia, and India. Byron’s first Oriental tale, The Tale of Calil (1816), for example, is set in

a place called Samarkand that has few resemblances to an actual Central Asia past or present just as the culture of the tale is only vaguely Arabic or Persian; the political plot of the story, meanwhile, can be traced to contemporary accounts of decadent Moghul princes in India, and to Timur, their Mongol ancestor.

When Lady Mary Wortley Montagu arranged for the publication (posthumously, in 1763) of her Turkish Embassy Letters, her first purpose was to counter prevailing notions of the East as either dangerously un-Christian or fabulous-

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

ly strange and sexual with an actual and first-hand description of a real Turkish court. The Turkish Embassy Letters included accounts of Montagu’s visits to the royal harems and the women’s baths, places that were beyond the ken of most European visitors, who were usually men, and hence the subjects of feverish erotic speculation. Montagu’s accounts of the Turkish women removed their veil of anonymous sexuality to portray them as human, dignified, accomplished and courteous — and more like their Western counterparts than anyone in the West could have imagined. As a pendant to the message of her letters from Turkey, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had herself painted twice (by Charles Jervis and Jean-Baptiste Vanmour) in Turkish costume — turban, draped garments, curved-toe slippers, with Turkish

musicians,

palanquins,

and

the

minarets

of

Constantinople in the background.” Her purpose in ‘going native’ on canvas was to show her connection with her subject (rather like the scholars shown with their books, or the

artisans with the tools of their trade). Montagu was to be identified with her first-hand knowledge of Turkey — and the Turkish women she knew — that others might better comprehend the ties between seemingly different human

Susan Ferrier’s two brothers, James and William, were military men in India who died there in 1804; her brother-in-

law, Major-General Sir Archibald Campbell, was stationed in Madras and was, briefly, Governor of the Presidency of Madras; and her youngest brother, Lorn, died in Guiana in 1801. Jane Austen’s brother, Francis, served in the Royal Navy in India; her other brother, Charles, was stationed in

the West Indies and Egypt. Caroline Bowles’s father was a wealthy East India Company trader in Bengal; he fathered an illegitimate son with his Indian wife, who later helped support Caroline. John Keats considered enlisting as a surgeon on an Indiaman; his friend and protector, Leigh Hunt, was a Creole whose father came from Barbados. Percy Shelley in 1822 dreamed of serving at the court of an Indian prince only to be told that the new British policies prohibited service with Indians. The subject of India, and a passing familiarity with Indian subjects, is also evident everywhere in any survey of English Romantic writers. Coleridge and Shelley were fully familiar with William Jones’s translations of Sanskrit and

Persian literature, and with his published studies of Hindu theology and social law; evidence of their familiarity with

civilizations. The Turkish Letters were popular, and grew in

Jones’s translation of the works of Kalidasa can be found in

popularity, among intellectuals and artists as a rival to the Arabian Nights as the eighteenth century proceeded; their prospect into the Turkish court and inside the women’s

popular poems like Kubla Khan, Epipsychidion, The Witch of

quarters appealed to an emerging

Romantic

perspective

that sought to know, sympathetically, fully and from the inside, human cultures and human places other than those

familiar ones of Europe. Robert Clive’s lucrative acquisition of the Diwani (revenue or tax proceeds) of Bengal for the East India Company in 1767 resulted in not just greater prosperity and prospects for the Company, but greater access for English artists and travelers to the cultures and places of India. Soon, partly because of these artistic depictions and travel accounts, India became known as a real but exotic place to escape to, live in, and make one’s fortune in — and a cultur-

al entity that could be conjured up in writing or conversation. The reality of India, of course, far exceeded the fantasy of the Arabian Nights. A random survey of British writers of the Romantic period reveals the extent to which India (and sometimes the West Indies) was both a real destination and a fashionable subject. Coleridge had two brothers who served in British campaigns against Mysore, one of whom died at the Battle of Seringapatam, and he himself considered emigrating to the West Indies. Charlotte Smith had two sons who were civil servants in Bengal, a third son who served in the British military in Surinam, and a fourth son who diedin a military campaign in Barbados. William Wordsworth’s brother, John, was the captain of an East Indiaman. Matthew Lewis, heir to two Jamaican

sugar

plantations,

traveled

twice

to the West

Indies. Charles Lamb and Thomas Love Peacock were both employees of the East India Company in London. Robert Southey’s brother, Tom, was a sailor in the West Indies.

Atlas, and Prometheus Unbound, and in their evocations of

androgyny and transgendered sexuality.” Thomas Maurice’s multi-volume History of Hindoostan (1775-78) was a popular work, and one used by Coleridge for the ‘caves of ice’ in Kubla Khan (from a depiction by Maurice of a vale in Kashmir). Robert Orme’s History of Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan (1763-78) was

so legendary (especially because of its author’s close trading partnership with the famous Lord Robert Clive) that it is described as a ‘romantic book’ by the villain of Walter Scott’s The Surgeon’s Daughter (1818), a novel set partly at

Tipu Sultan’s court; Scott’s villain speaks of the romance of being British in India: ‘officers and privates ... are like Homer’s demigods among the warring mortals. Men like Clive aid Cailliaud influenced great events like Jove himself.* Elsewhere, Scott writes with historical consciousness about Tipu Sultan as a revolutionary and popular leader seeking to save his country and his culture from the English infidels. Mary Wollstonecraft declared in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that the Enlightenment ‘education’ of women, as according to libertine needs left them comparable to the inmates of ‘Mohammedan seraglios’, confined and controlled for the explicit purposes of masculine desire because they were purportedly born without souls (like the eight hundred wives of Tipu Sultan described in popular accounts). Wollstonecraft’s solution to the social inequities of her time was, of course, an egalitarian matriarchal society modeled on that of the Nayars of Malabar, in India. Percy Shelley’s Alastor begins his story as the beloved of an Arab maiden, and journeys through Arabia and Persia to the ‘vale of Cashmire’ to experience a vision of aesthetic truth;

his Revolt of Islam (1818) uses a Moghul locale as the ideal setting for what the French Revolution should have been; and in Prometheus Unbound the female figure of imaginative healing, ‘Asia’, resides in ‘a lovely Vale in the Indian

Caucasus’. Mary Shelley made the character of Safie in Frankenstein (1818) a runaway from a seraglio; her anticolonial play, Midas (1820), which is partly based on the legend of Tipu Sultan, has a protagonist who proclaims, ‘I can buy Empires: — India shall be mine!’; and her drama Proserpine is a tacit allegory of the rape of a country like India by the minions of Pluto. Elizabeth Hamilton wrote an extraordinarily popular novel, Translation of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796, which she dedicated to Warren Hastings), which is cast as an exchange of letters between an Indian Rajah visiting London and his best friend back in India. Elizabeth Inchbald wrote five plays set in India or involving Anglo-Indian careerists; the most interesting of these plays, The Moghul Tale: or, the Descent of the Balloon (1793), a popular success at the Haymarket, was partly

about the India of Warren Hastings (whose nickname was ‘The Great Moghul’). Matthew Lewis, the owner of over

700 slaves on his Jamaica estates, notably placed a revolutionary Moorish slave in his immensely popular play, The Castle Spectre (1798). Josephy Priestley wrote a treatise, A Comparison of the Institutions of Moses With Those of the Hindoos and Other Ancient Nations (1799), that was read by poets like Blake and Wordsworth. Charlotte Dacre’s Zafloya, or the Moor (1806), is a Gothic psychosexual drama

about an illicit liason between a white woman and a Moor from India. Byron, author of too many oriental tales, considered making the arduous overland journey to India and described his favorite city, Venice, with its associations of

republicanism and personal liberty, as a mere ‘Gateway to India’

(Marino

Faliero,

1821). Thomas

Moore,

in Lalla

Rookh (1817), provides a splendid description of Delhi and of the Hindu festival, Diwali, which he calls ‘The Scattering

of the Roses’. Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) recreated an Indian environment complete with banyan tree and natives in The Missionary (1811). Maria Graham described Elephanta and other temples and showed her sketches to John Flaxman and his circle.* John Keats in Endymion (1816) described young lovers sleeping in each others arms in a crystalline underwater cavern that bears unmistakable resemblance to descriptions of the Siva and Parvati wedding chamber at Elephanta. Thomas Medwin, Shelley’s friend and second cousin, who served in Cawnpore from 1813 to 1818, wrote a long narrative poem on tiger-hunt-

ing in India (Sketches in Hindoostan, 1821) as well as a detailed and learned article on the temples at Ellora.* Robert Southey, shortly before he was made poet laureate, wrote his epic The Curse of Kehama (1810) for the nascent imperial age: told by William Taylor that ‘the taking of Serringapatam is a good subject for you epo-poets’, Southey went on to use the machinery of Hindu mythology and the scenery of India’s banyan trees and cave-temples to glorify British possessions, titillate and repel popular curiosity with ‘Brahmin’ monstrosities.” And Edward Moor’s

Hindu

Pantheon

(1810),

with

its ‘over

2,000’

mythological figures, became the encyclopedic, illustrated reference book on Hindu mythology throughout the nineteenth century, and served as a popular source for lectures on Indian art by artists and critics from John Flaxman to John Ruskin. But it is to the English Romantic artists who traveled to India first, well before any of these literary works were conceived or written, who experienced and brought home the very images and ideas of the subcontinent that would fuel an Indian Renaissance in British Romantic culture, that first credit belongs.

B. Sanskrit Translations for an Indian Renaissance The prospect of India changed everything for Britain. Once this prospect was given substance — and ever increasing substance — by visual and tangible evidence of India’s wealth, India’s landscape, and India’s cultures, English perspectives of the late Enlightenment period and the Romantic era expanded and adapted to meet the British expectations of more substance. These perspectives became, finally, the imperial prospect of world empire of Victorian Britain. The prospect of India and the evolution of the prospect involved, first, an actual movement in perspective both in geography and in time. There was movement farther east, past a fabled and vaguely ‘Mohammedan’ Turkey

and Arabia and past an unspecified ‘Levant’ or ‘Orient’ where the sun rose first and where all pagans were the same, to a real India of places and peoples. There was also and more importantly an archaeological movement back in time to a very old India, an ancient culture that seemed original and to have existed before Rome, before Greece,

before Egypt, before Babylon — and certainly before Arabia ~a‘Hindoo culture’ that ‘the ancients’ revered by contemporary Western man had, quite literally, ‘copied from’, both in form and in expression.* The Romantic artist and writer James Forbes dates the intellectual sea-change wrought by the new prospect of India — and one that he knew first hand

26 ~~ [he Idea of Inala: liger, lree, and Cave

— to the accession of Warren Hastings in 1774: After the appointment of Mr. Hastings to the supreme government of India, in 1774, a new scene opened to the

intellectual view; his enlightened mind, corresponding with his exalted station and powerful influence, exerted every means for the acquisition of knowledge, not only in the dominions immediately under his jurisdiction, but in foreign countries; his researches into remote, and hitherto

unexplored regions, were rewarded by a rich increase from their treasures of literature, art, and science. In these pursuits the governor-general was assisted by many eminent characters; above all, by that bright oriental luminary, Sir

another, and more original, renaissance for English (and European) art and culture — an Oriental as opposed to Occidental or, more specifically, an Indian Renaissance. As he said: From that memorable epoch in Anglo-Asiatic history, new sources of oriental knowledge flowed to Europe; the stores of

brahminical learning were no longer concealed; their sacred books, for ages veiled in inpenetrable secrecy, were brought to light; their poetry, drama, history, astronomy, art and science, have been translated by able hands into our own language; and the English are now, perhaps, better acquainted with the ancient and modern history of

William Jones, whose name alone it is sufficient to men-

Hindostan, than with that of many contiguous nations in

tion, and whose loss is irretrievable.”

Europe.”

In India between 1765 and 1784, Forbes experienced the intellectual climate fostered by Hastings first hand, and he felt with immediacy the heady atmosphere and ferment of knowledge surrounding Jones and his group of European scholars and Indian pundits. Hastings’ cultivation of Indian cultures had included a direct invitation to Hindu, Jain and

Buddhist priests and scholars across India to come to Bengal with their sacred texts and secret inherited knowledge. As guests at Hastings’ court at Calcutta, and members

of the new Fort William College for Indian studies (founded in 1783, the year of Jones’s arrival in India), the Indian

pundits participated in the scholarship of the Asiatick Society, which

had been

founded

with the open-ended

intellectual mission of ‘enquiring into the History, civil and natural, the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature of

Asia’; the Indian scholars assumed primary roles in teaching and instructing Jones and his fellow European scholars as the latter sought to preserve ancient documents of philosophy, poetry, and law and translate them into the language of a new era. Ancient India thus discovered and recovered by Hastings’ diplomacy and Jones’s linguistic skill became the catalyst or fermenting agent for an unprecedented new inquiry and creativity. Calcutta was the equivalent of Medici Florence during the sixteenth century. Jones was an ‘oriental luminary’ as Forbes described him not because of his race or locale but because of the unknown and ‘unexplored regions’ of human knowledge that he studied for their own sake. The Asiatick Society in Bengal formed a vanguard of scholars similar to those who left Constantinople and fled to Europe in 1453, to inaugurate a new age in Western civilization. And India, most of all, was the real Orient or luminous Levant, the original

place of inspiration in the East, as much for the multiple cultures represented within it as for the cultures of ‘foreign countries’ to its west, south, and fa? east (Arabia, Malaya,

China, and Japan) whose incipient cultures it had seeded with Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, and Persian lore, and for whom

it served as cultural and spiritual ‘Gateway’.” Forbes felt that he and other English artists and travelers of the late eighteenth century, who had seen and recorded the first prospect of India, had participated in

Forbes was not the only English Romantic artist of India who felt this renaissance of vibrant images, limitless ideas,

and unending inquiry born of multiple ways of knowing. The artist Robert Home, in 1794, remarked as much: ‘Now

indeed Science [knowledge] hails the claim of a more propitious era. Asia holds in its bosom natives of Britain, who feel more gratification from an increase in knowledge, than an increase in wealth; and from whom therefore we may hope the amplest additions to the general store.’”

The extent and influence of this Indian Renaissance on British art and culture of the late Enlightenment and Romantic period has been acknowledged but only on a piecemeal basis by intellectual historians, and especially British intellectual historians, of the past two centuries. The reasons for this, as we shall see in the course of this book,

lie deeply embedded in the story of the British empire, its rise simultaneous with the full flowering of British Romanticism, and its possessive adaptation, manipulation

(through patronage), and subsequent full appropriation of the original Romantic prospects of India. In 1950 the French historian, Raymond Schwab, was the first contem-

porary historian to delineate the large cultural consequences of eastern travel and trade in the eighteenth century, and to echo Forbes’s very concept and words in describing an ‘Oriental or Indian Renaissance’ in Europe

that was fully coincident with the rise of Romanticism: ‘a second Renaissance’ similar in energy and novelty to the first, but also different in content and scope. ‘The expression and the theme [of rediscovery and recovery or rebirth] are familiar to Romantic writers ...:[they refer to] the revival of an atmosphere in the [early] nineteenth century brought about by the arrival of Sanskrit texts in Europe, which produced an effect equal to that produced by the arrival of Greek manuscripts and Byzantine commentators after the fall of Constantinople.’ ‘Oriental’ languages before 1770 were largely understood to be the Semitic languages of Hebrew and Arabic. Then, antiquarians of the 1770s and 1780s promoted ancient India as an older Orient and originary human culture, and in 1786, in his Third Anniversary Address to the Asiatick Society, William Jones asserted the linguistic ascendancy of ancient Sanskrit: ‘The

Sanscrit language, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more

copious than the Latin, and more

exquisitely refined than either yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident ...’. Schwab’s ‘Renaissance orientale’ follows Jones’s assertion: it is linguistic in origin, one occasioned by the European ‘discovery’ of original or new languages and, from there, new prospects, new cultures and new peoples. The new or recovered languages — Persian, Ancient Egyptian, and most of all Sanskrit — and the access to these languages made possible by the translations and commentaries of A.H. Anguetil-Duperron, Pierre Sonnerat, William Jones, and Friedrich Schlegel, along with the 1799

discovery (by one of Napoleon’s engineers) of the Rosetta Stone in the Nile delta, ensured the sweeping cultural revolution of the Romantic era. The ability to decipher unknown alphabets, acquired in Europe after 1750, had one incalculable effect, the discovery that there had been other Europes. Thus, in that progressive era, the West perceived it was not the sole posses-

sor of an admirable intellectual past. This singular event occurred during a period when everything else was likewise new, unprecedented, extraordinary. The advent of oriental studies during a Romantic period abounding in geniuses and accomplishments, in great appetites and abundant nourishment, is one of history’s most astonishing coincidences.

tion, and that the antiquities of Elephanta made India the best claimant to the role of first or original civilization. Sonnerat

also asserted,

as James

Forbes

had, that the

Egyptians had ‘copied’ their architecture and pyramids from the Indians.* In 1789, one year after his hymns from the Sanskrit on the union of Siva and Parvati appeared and four years after Charles Wilkins’ landmark translation of the Bhagavid-Gita was published, William Jones did a translation of Kalidasa’s sacred drama and love story, Sakuntala.

The

translation

went

into five editions, was

retranslated into several European languages, and was generally presumed, by intellectuals of the period, to be the oldest religious text known to European man. In 1792 Jones translated and published two other sacred Sanskrit texts, the Gita Govinda, a mystical poem on cosmic love, and the Ritusamhara, a poem about the seasons. The Laws of Manu,

Jones’s magisterial compilation of Hindu ethics and justice, appeared in London and Calcutta in 1794 (posthumously); widely reprinted in England and Europe, it quickly became a reference text on Indian custom and philosophy. The Sanskrit translations by William Jones, and the transactions of the scholars at the Asiatick Society of Bengal, came

‘home’ to English artists and intellectuals

directly, in the multiple editions published in Calcutta and London, and in the numerous

recapitulations and sum-

maries in popular English periodicals. But there were also indirect and long term-conduits. The influence of Jones’s Sanskrit translations on European — and specifically German — Romantic poets and philosophers was incalcula-

The impact of these ancient writings, once deciphered and

ble, and readily transferred back to English intellectual cir-

translated, upon ‘a Europe sprung from Romanticism’ was

profound and different according to Schwab: ‘It made the

cles by way of artists like Johan Zoffany and Henri Fuseli, poets like Coleridge and Crabb Robinson, and translators

world, for the first time in human history, a whole ... and

like J.G. Lockhart. Herder read Jones’s version of Sakuntala

an entirely new meaning was introduced for the word “mankind”. Suddenly the partial humanism of the classics became the integral humanism that today seems natural to us.” In the decade before the founding of the Asiatick Society, two French scholars, A.H. Anquetil-Duperron and Pierre Sonnerat, had envisioned and predicted an Indian Renaissance for Europe. The former arrived in India in

and used it to justify his notion of an Indian fatherland for

1754, and translated the Zend-Avesta in 1771 and the Upanishads in 1786; he also wrote and drew an icono-

graphic survey of the temples at Elephanta and Ellora and, specifically, the sculptures of the Kaliasa temple because of their significance in depicting the Hindu mythology of the Sanskrit texts he had translated. Anquetil’s study of Hindu linguistic antiquities led him to conclude that ‘We stand, in

relation to Sanskrit, where Europe stood in relation to Greek at the time of the fall of Constantinople and to Hebrew at the time of Luther’s Reformation’.” Sonnerat,

in 1782 (just one year before William Jones arrived in Bengal and set himself to become the ‘Justinian of India’), wrote an elaborate account of Hindu mythology and art called Voyages aux Indes Orientales; in it Sonnerat asserted that India was the cradle of humanity and human civiliza-

the human race; Goethe, in 1791, declared ‘When I mention

Sakontala everything is said’; Schiller adapted a passage from

the

Meghaduta

for

his

drama,

Maria

Stuart;

Schopenhauer, in his 1818 preface to The World as Will and Idea, said that ‘Sanskrit literature will be no less influential

for our time than Greek literature was in the fifteenth century for the Renaissance’; and Wilhelm von Humboldt in

1828 thanked his God that he had been permitted to live long enough to know the Bhagavid-Gita.” Among German intellectual conduits of Sanskrit texts and Indian antiquities, the three Schlegel brothers, Karl August, August Wilhelm, and Friedrich, must receive special notice because of their close association with the founding of the ‘Romantic School’ or movement, and with the very coinage and definition of Romantic art. Karl August von Schlegel (1761-89), the oldest of the three, traveled to Bengal to join the German intellectuals and adventurers in Warren Hastings’ circle (Mrs Hastings was German-born). A member of the East India Company, Karl

August served both as an emissary and as a geographer, and he traveled widely through English and French India as well as into the indigenously controlled interior of the

60

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

country. He died in Madras while working on an extensive ‘study of the country, the literature and the genius of the Indian people’ based on his journeys ‘into the country’ to study architectural antiquities first hand and to know Indian philosophy through direct ‘intercourse with the natives’. Karl August’s unfinished manuscript, papers, and notes on Sanskrit and contemporary Indian languages and cultures were passed on to his two younger brothers, August Wilhelm and Friedrich. August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845) is most widely known for his philological study of Sanskrit and the origins of the IndoEuropean family of languages; he wrote an important

manifesto

on

the

German

Romantic

School

called

Characteristics of Art, with his younger brother Friedrich;

and after 1818 he devoted himself exclusively to Indian studies, to the journal

he founded,

Indische

Bibliothek

(1823-30), and to his translation of Sanskrit texts like the Bhagavid-Gita and the Ramayana from contemporary German and English into Latin (1823-9).” It has been customary to acknowledge the inspiration of the German Naturphilosophen on British Romantic art. To this must be added the priority of influence of Indian art and philosophy on German Romanticism.

6. The Ideal of India: Ancient India as the Uroffenbarung of the Romantic Era Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829), the youngest of the Schlegel brothers, has a significant role in defining the visionary prospect of India for his generation. Friedrich combined his brother August Wilhelm’s theoretical study of Sanskrit with his brother Karl August’s first-hand knowledge of Indian culture, when he formulated his sem-

inal work on the formal and philosophical connections between the rise of Romanticism in Europe in the 1790s and the European (and specifically English) ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit texts and Indian antiquities. Like William Jones, Friedrich Schlegel’s intellectual influence on the new nineteenth century went well beyond his syncretic mythologizing and translations of Sanskrit texts, and far deeper than his research into the originary cultures of India. Schlegel coined the term ‘Romantic’ to describe the spirit of inquiry that characterized the revolutionary art and philosophy of the new era. He was the first to theorize about the conceptual and aesthetic stance, which he called ‘Romantic Irony’, that governed the philosophy and style of the new art.” He was also the first to propose a new discipline for intellectual inquiry, a ‘universal science’ called ‘the Philosophy of History’ that would connect the history of human civilization with occasions of spiritual revelation. The influence of Schlegel’s Indian studies on his philosophical formulations for the new Romantic century was ongoing and incalculable. 7 ‘Would that the treasures of the orient were as accessible to us as those of [Western] antiquity! What new sources of poetry might flow from India,’ Schlegel exclaimed in 1798, just after he had read Jones’s translation of The Laws of Manu on Hindu ethics and philosophy, and while he was apparently still occupied in tracing the primary example of classical Greece and Rome in the history

of contemporary European culture. Resolved to follow the sources of Greco-Roman art and philosophy to their origins, Schlegel found first the example of Egyptian antiquity and then, inevitably he felt, the primary exemplar of language, philosophy and culture in ancient India: ‘Here is the actual source of all languages, of all thoughts and poems of the human spirit ... everything, everything originates from India without exception.”’ More than any other Romantic intellectual, Schlegel was preoccupied with the origins of human endeavor — in language, art, philosophy — and he felt he was on the trail to find that original human society that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had first posited. Overwhelmed by what he believed he had found in Wilkins’ and Jones’s translations and in his brother Karl’s travel notes, Schlegel suspended his work on the Western classical tradition in 1802 and, the following year, traveled

to Paris to study for himself the Sanskrit manuscripts and antiquarian documents on India in the Imperial Library collections of the Bibliotheque Nationale. Resolving to be fluent in the language of the documents, Schlegel asked Alexander Hanulton to be his private tutor in Sanskrit. Hamilton, who was to hold the Sanskrit and Indian Languages chair at London, had come to Paris with his Bengali wife to catalogue the Sanskrit texts in the Imperial Library. Hamilton had been an English naval officer and Company official, he had studied Sanskrit with the Brahmin scholars at Benares and Fort William, and had

assisted Jones in compiling translations for Asiatick Researches; he had also known Karl August Schlegel at the Asiatick Society of Bengal in the 1780s. Schlegel’s first-hand experience of reading Hindu spiritual documents in the original script convinced him that ‘the Sanscrit or Indian language [was] of a higher antiqui-

The Ideal of India: Ancient India as the Uroffenbarung of the Romantic Era

ty than the Greek or Latin, not to mention the German or Persian’. Soon, he declared India to be the true and original

East or Orient of Western antiquity. He then proposed that ‘the study of Indian literature’ and culture should be ‘embraced by such [contemporary] students and patrons as [those who] in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries suddenly kindled in Italy and Germany an ardent appreciation of the beauty of classical learning, and ... invested it with such prevailing importance, that the form of all wisdom and science, and almost of the world itself, was changed and

renovated’. Schlegel went on ‘to predict that the Indian study, if embraced with equal energy, will prove no less grand and universal in its operation, and have no less influence on the sphere of European intelligence.’ Romantic Europe for Schlegel, like Medici Florence and Renaissance Europe, could and would experience another

for Schlegel, managed to approximate a late version of ‘Oriental grandeur of style and diction’. ‘It is in the [exemplary and renascent] Orient that we must seek the highest Romanticism’,

he said.“ And, of course,

India was

the

Orient for Schlegel in 1800 — and it was the source of a misnamed ‘oriental’ example in all European art and thought. Everywhere in the Sanskrit texts Schlegel saw examples not just of imaginative superiority and high artistic originality — but what seemed to be ‘miraculous’ occasions of an anticipation

of contemporary

European

(German)

philosophical thought. Schlegel’s letters written from Paris between 1803 and 1804, and his lectures at Cologne given between 1805 and 1806, brim over with his enthusiasm and

of a far more ancient tradition of art and wisdom. It was

astonishment at the prospect of ancient India. They convey with breathless immediacy the full weight of what Schlegel found exemplary and renascent in Indian art and Sanskrit tradition. In Hindu philosophy and its theories of divine

this Indian Renaissance that would, in time, become syn-

emanation, the immortality of the soul, transmigration,

called movement the European with onymous Romanticism.” In the early Sanskrit poetry fragments Schlegel found echoes of ancient Greek poetry and then, his respect for antiquity coming full circle, the priority of example. Kalidasa’s sacred dramas and the ‘earliest poetry’ of the Hindu religion, with their ‘wild and gigantic creations’, expressed ‘a richness and vigour of ancient superstition ... still in vital operation, and [a] belief in the gods [that] had not yet evaporated’ that was utterly reminiscent of early Greek poetic fragments. When these ‘powerful’, ‘rude fables’ were cast in the imaginative ‘light of a softer, holier inspiration’, as in the poetry of the Ramayana or the Bhagavid-Gita, they became parallel examples to what could be found in the ‘blending of ... originally wild and gigantic power with softer and sweeter impulses ... in Homer, as well as in Aeschylus, in Pindar, as in Sophocles’. All were examples of ‘true poetry’ because they shared the same wellspring of inspiration, and all carried ‘the original germ’ of the divine essence. The Indian examples, however, held the edge both in grandeur and in their greater immediacy to the divine:

and universal spiritual animation, Schlegel found origin and parallels to the ideas of contemporary German ideal-

renaissance, but one involving the recovery and inspiration

Indian poetry, in this its peculiar essence was not so very different to the ancient Greek, except that the former, if I may so speak, is designed on far greater proportions, the original ground work of the fables being generally more strange and wild, but softened down in later times into a

spiritual loveliness, which is in form even more morally and intellectually beautiful than the grace of Pindar and

Sophocles.”

ism and transcendentalism and, specifically, to the meta-

physical notions on the evolution of nature and the unfolding of the Spirit of his fellow Naturphilosophen. In the sacred dualism and ‘oneness of conflicting principles’ depicted in the Sanskrit poems of cosmic love and epic contest, and in the antiquarian drawings of Indian temple artifacts (like those at Elephanta) representing ‘the physical strength and vigour of nature’ at play, Schlegel saw, moreover, further image and philosophical support for his earlier (but now ever-evolving) definition of the art of Romantic irony as an endlessly creative and paradoxical cosmic play or ‘transcendental buffoonery’ between physical and metaphysical polarities. The depth and complexity of the ties that Schlegel drew between Indian philosophy and German Romantic thought —and the influence of the former on the latter — cannot be overestimated (or undermined by his later Catholic conservatism). We know, for example, that Goethe read Schlegel’s 1808 magnum opus on Indian philosophy and language just after it first appeared. And we find Goethe writing to August Schlegel in 1824: I have been following your work on the literature of India with great interest .... | cannot appreciate Indian art

aright; it distracts and confuses the [my] imagination instead of concentrating and controlling it. But I am one of the most sincere and faithful admirers of Indian literature; it leads us in a truly wonderful way from the most abstruse regions of the mind through every stage of thought and the outward sense, and so deserves our high-

When Schlegel invoked the example of Greek poetry he intended, in fact, to highlight the example to Greek poetry of the ‘peculiar ... mingling [of] wildness and tenderness of Indian poetry’. ‘Indian Orientalism’ could be traced behind ‘the obscurity of Aeschylus’ and in ‘the lyric boldness of

When Schlegel published his Uber die Sprache und Weisheit

the similes and allusions of Pindar’; Dante, among moderns

sources. He curbed the enthusiasm and astonishment he

est admiration.”

der Indier in 1808 he intended the work to serve as a delib-

erate and irrefutable summary of his findings in Sanskrit

6l

62

The Idea of India: Tiger, Tree, and Cave

felt at the prospect of ancient India and wrote, instead, a

careful language study of the ‘Weisheit’ of India in which he traced the passage of Indian thought westwards to Europe, by means of a linguistic transmission via Sanskrit and through the Indo-European tree of languages; he then appended his own fluent translations of Sakuntala and the Ramayana to illustrate this conceptual and artistic journey.” Later lectures and philosophical histories, although equally measured as Uber die Sprache, returned with insistence to earlier notions of the primacy of ancient Indian art and culture, and the revelatory immediacy of early Hindu philosophy. And the ‘wisdom’ of ancient India endured, in all of Schlegel’s later writing, as an actual and verifiable ‘spiritual event’ in the history of humankind and human consciousness.

Schlegel called this ancient Indian ‘spiritual event’ an Uroffenbarung: a visionary prospect or moment of revelatory insight; an original clarity, enlightenment, or intimation of the divine; a conceptual, historical and philosophical breakthrough in the universal history of human spiritual consciousness. Indian philosophy was, quite simply as he said first in his Cologne lectures, ‘the first system that steps into the place of truth’. It was the first intimation or human remembrance of an original divine source of creation, a first

comprehension of the self as it related to the divine: as he said in Uber die Sprache,

it cannot be denied that the early Indians possessed a knowledge of the true God: all their writings are replete with sentiments and expressions, noble, clear, and severely

grand, as deeply conceived and reverentially expressed as in any human language in which men have spoken of their God .... We have, then, ample reason to conclude,

from the historical evidence alone, as well upon far higher grounds, that the same glorious Being by whom man was so majestically formed and highly gifted, vouchsafed to the newly created [Indian] one [first] glance, into the mysterious depth of his own existence ... [and] some lingering traces of a holier origin .... The Indian mythology and philosophy is [therefore] the first system which was substituted for the [otherwise inaccessible] pure light of truth.”

Not only did humankind evolve first on some warm Indian shore,

as

Romantic

evolutionists

like

Georges

Cuvier,

Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck asserted, but the first human consciousness of the divine or spiritual realm occurred in an ancient India and found first expression in ancient India’s religious poetry and sculptural art. In the long section on Hindu philosophy in his documentary ‘universal philosophy’ of the history of human consciousness

(Vorlesungen zur Philosophie der Geschichte,

1829), Schlegel described what the Indian moment or originary Uroffenbarung meant in its own time, and what it would mean in its recognition or rediscovery in the ‘new’

and renascent future of nineteenth-century Europe. ‘For never yet has something truly new arisen that has not been

incited and called forth in part by the old, instructed by its spirit, nourished on and cultivated by its strength.’ Rediscovered and recovered by antiquarians and universal philosophers like himself, ancient Indian thought and art would serve as a catalyst or fermenting agent for the European spirit, with profound and ever-creative implications for the ‘new’ Romantic art and culture of Europe.” Once original and now originary, the Indian cultural moment or Uroffenbarung was a visionary prospect of the past that would recreate the vision of the present. It would be a distinct and different renaissance, at once ancient and

contemporary,

Oriental

and

European,

Indian

and

Romantic.

When Edward Said in 1978 dismissed Friedrich Schlegel’s Sanskrit endeavor as a mere exercise in knighterrantry or, worse, a feeble attempt to acquire and ‘use’ an older and holier cultural past for Europe, and when he declared that he saw no difference between William Jones’s

knowledge of ancient India and the British empire’s power over late nineteenth-century India,” he set in motion a dia-

logue among scholars on the ‘orientalism’ of writers (and artists) who traveled — metaphorically or in fact — east from Europe. The conceptual journey whereby a largely disinterested Romantic spirit of inquiry and aesthetic vision could come to be seen in retrospect as either a utilitarian quest or one complicit with imperial authority is a complex one. It is complex because of the numerous philosophical and ideological subjects at issue, but also because of the sheer numbers of personnel and perspectives involved — between the years of Hastings’ India and the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 over one hundred and fifty million people were brought under British rule. Particular focus for this conceptual journey can be found in the prospects of India portrayed by British artists of the Romantic period, and in the ways in which these individual prospects of India were first envisioned, then undermined, then appropriated, and finally transformed, to serve an imminent empire of Victorian rule and economy. In this, ‘Empire follows Art and Not Vice Versa as Englishmen suppose’, as William Blake asserted. In recent years scholars of Romantic literature have attempted to chart this movement: by defining an anti-imperial or Romantic

respect for the autonomy

or

‘otherness’ of other cultures; by noting the anxieties and instabilities within Romantic orientalism that came to foster imperialism; and by tracing the full complicity between late Romanticism and political imperialism evident at the very roots of twentieth-century modernism.” Just how the Romantic prospect of India, and just how the most liberal and free-thinking aspects of the late Enlightenment, became accomplices in the transformation

of Romanticism, turning it into a Janus-faced handmaid to British imperial authority, is a process both fraught and fascinating. Enlightenment humanism and antiquarian syncretic mythologizing combined, first, with the Romantic fascination with the novel, the sublime, and the

individual, in the reception of the originary culture of

The Ideal of India: Ancient India as the Uroffenbarung of the Romantic Era

India. The preoccupation with the uniqueness and otherness of India for itself, evolved into a wish to comprehend India on its own terms and in its entirety. This wish, in turn, evolved into that most Romantic of all attributes, a

wish to find kinship with what was only seemingly unknown and strange. The prospect of India, seen from the outside, became thus a wish to know India from the inside, to find kinship with it, with its traditions and antiquities,

and to lament that its contemporaneity did not measure up to its past, much as contemporary Britain and Europe did not measure up to their, newly discovered, ancient past of Indian origin. Too much kinship perceived between a contemporary India and a contemporary England led, inevitably, into the wish to know and order India from the outside, that it might be a better example to the West, and

more comprehensible because more like the European culture of ‘ourselves’. The final step, effortless in retrospect, was the need to colonize the landscape of India, possess all its riches, appropriate its products, improve its productivity, condemn Indian beliefs, and, coming full circle, convert

its arts into the recognizable forms and patterns of British imperialism. The giant pagan sea-monster, Adamastor, of The Lusiads, Cam6es’ epic poem about Vasco da Gama’s journey

to India, had dark advice and prophetic warnings of punishment, real and self-inflicted for those who would cross

the Cape (of Good Hope) and desecrate the Indian Ocean's forbidden passage. His advice applies as well to the Romantic artists of the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s, who trav-

eled in search of the prospects of India — as to the British governing imperialists and their illustrators who completed both the process and the prospecting in the 1800s. Because you have desecrated nature’s Secrets and the mysteries of the deep, Where no human, however noble Or immortal his worth, should trespass,

Hear from me now what retribution Fate prescribes for your insolence,

Whether ocean-borne, or along the shores You will subjugate with your dreadful wars.” Shipwreck, internal war, the external wars born of com-

merce (or greed), grief greater than the risks taken in the travel to unknown regions, a knowledge of the place sought that turns the region into a ‘demonic home’, and a fearsome repossession and transformation of the prospectors and possessors by the very land possessed — these are the punishments for trespass and the acquisition of others’ secrets prophesied by Adamastor. Vasco da Gama and his men, great and fearless explorers, and visionary travelers of a new world, were also skilled pirates, soulless desecrators

and greedy prospectors to later generations. Metaphorically, but also in fact, Camées’ 1572 Renaissance epic of commerce and colonialism was relevant and current for Romantic Britain during its Indian Renaissance: The Lusiads was translated into English by William Mickle in

the revolutionary year of 1776, and again in 1818 in an abreviated form by Felicia Hemans.* When Camées wrote in his epic about those who would possess India, he used the story of Vasco da Gama’s naval prospecting and discovery to reflect back and tell the story of Renaissance Portugal in unsettling self-reflection; the story of the journey out from Portugal became in CamGes’ reflective narration a disturbing revelation of a journey into and within the national psyche. The English Romantic artists and writers who traveled East to see and portray the visionary prospects of India, their artistic successors who worked to record the transformation

of Britain

in India, and the

administering imperialists who followed to order and possess an increasingly tangible and fully-known India, were well warned of what their aspirations and ambitions would mean for the contemporary story of Britain.

63

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Part Two

Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

67

I. Tilly Kettle’s Theater of India The first English artists who traveled to India in the eighteenth century arrived well primed to see the world that they found there as if it were the fabulous setting of an oriental tale. Established European — and particularly French — attitudes to the East dating back to the Renaissance had made it inevitable that India in the popular English imagination be a place at once strange, mysterious, unreal, and

startlingly theatrical. As the trade Company expanded, fascination with fictionalized accounts of actual travels ceding centuries increased in England. such as the translations from the

of the East India well-known, partly to India of the preThese travel books, French of Francois

Bernier, who wrote of his visit to the Moghul Empire in the 1660s, and of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, who made six voy-

ages to the East during the seventeenth century, futher sensationalized the kind of exoticizing of the East first found in the stories of Marco Polo. Most influential in creating the English view of an Eastern setting that included India was the literary fashion, which endured throughout the eighteenth century, for reading oriental fables and tales. The anonymous 1712 ‘Grub Street’ translation into English of Galland’s French version of the Arabian Nights launched the fashion, and the end of the century saw eighteen editions or more of the tales of a fantastical East. The tales of Scheherazade spawned a fad in England for writing (and reading) homegrown versions of the popular tales, stories written to amuse, to titillate, and, sometimes, to instruct. The figure of

an innocent Asian naively observing English life, for example, became a conventional vehicle for satiric commentary in journals of the early century like Addison and Steele’s The Spectator and The Guardian. Moreover, the framework

of the oriental tale later provided a convenient and easily recognizable venue for the terror and eroticism of Gothic fiction, from William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) to Maria Edgeworth’s Murad the Unlucky (1804) and Matthew Lewis’s Romantic Tales (1808).' The radical feminist Mary

Hays described in 1796 the extraordinary experience of hearing these tales as bedtime stories read to her by an elderly aunt when she was a very young child: Stories from the Arabian Nights, Turkish Tales, and other works of like marvellous import. She recited them circumstantially, and these I listened to with ever new delight: the more they excited vivid emotions, the more wonderful they were, the greater was my transport: they became my favorite amusement, and produced, in my young mind a strong desire of learning to read the books which contained such enchanting stories of entertainment.’

The ‘English Galland’, as the Arabian Nights was known, itself became a kind of travel guide for the English who would go forth and go East, or who imagined themselves going forth and East, in search of real scenes reminiscent of the nightly tales of the erotic and the supernatural: James Clapper’s Observations

on the Passage to India through

Egypt (1783) advised with all sincerity that just as ‘it is presumed no man of genius or taste would think of making the tour of that country [Spain] without previously reading the works

of Cervantes’,

so too the traveler to an

inspecific and generic ‘East’ must read the Arabian Nights because the tales ‘are in the same estimation all over Asia,

that the adventures of Don Quixote are in Spain’.’ The Indian Renaissance of British Romantic art begins, thus, with an eighteenth-century English public expecting to see paintings of India that would offer images that satisfied their preconceived notions of a strange and exotic place like the fabled East of Arabian Nights. And the artistic pioneer of this earliest form of the Indian Renaissance was someone particularly well prepared to envision India as the fabled world expected by the English public. Tilly Kettle, the first professional painter to travel and work in India with East India Company approval, made his initial reputation in London in the 1760s as a specialized painter in a new and lucrative sub-genre of portraiture — theatrical

68

Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

portraits. For these portraits, Kettle posed English actresses in the elaborate and exotic costumes of their most famous roles, for example Mrs. Yates as Mandane in the Orphan of China (1765), or Anne Elliot in the character of Juno (1767).

Paintings like these were commissioned by theater managers as a form of advertisement, and they were placed on public exhibit to call attention to a play just before and during the time of its performance. Their purpose was to create a sensation, and to titillate and draw comment from the

viewing public: the costumes were far more colorful and the poses far more provocative than any that could be found in conventional portraits, and the actresses portrayed captivated the public as much with their recognizable features and remembered roles as with the novelty of their new dramatic assignments. The dramatic force of these theatrical portraits was reinforced further by the implied scandal associated with the lifestyle, and purported lifestyles, of the actresses. Tilly Kettle’s theatrical portraits proved to be ideal preparation for the artist who planned to depict the India of his travels as a theater of scenes and roles that verified, but even

more

from the new Governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, and his inner circle in Calcutta. Kettle was elected to the Society of Artists in his absence in 1771. Because of his extraordinary financial success in India, Kettle could afford the considerable expense of shipping his paintings back to London for exhibition at the Society of Artists, where, he hoped, the

Indian paintings would make his reputation. These carefully chosen works are significant because they are the first paintings shipped home and formally exhibited paintings done in India by a professional British artist, and because their images mark the beginning of the prospect of India as an aesthetic concept and potentially popular subject in Europe. Kettle’s Indian inspired exhibits in London showed partly fantasized scenes that fulfilled English expectations, founded largely on rumor, concerning the spectacular

fabulously, the well-established

fantasies of oriental narratives. Kettle decided, shrewdly, to journey to India to radical-

ly energize his career. He was skilled and accomplished; but, as a painter of theatrical portraits in London, he could not match the success of his contemporary Johan Zoffany, who had the patronage of the prolific actor and producer David Garrick. He was also in fierce competition for regular portrait commissions with renowned and fashionable painters like Joshua Reynolds, Allan Ramsey and George Romney. Unable to achieve the monetary success and popular reputation he desired, disappointed at not being chosen as one of the founding members of the new Royal Academy, Kettle quite literally looked east for a new territory in which to distinguish himself. In 1768, with the entrepreneurial spirit of a born adventurer, Kettle applied to Laurence Sullivan, Director of the East India Company, and with his support received permission to become the first portrait painter to practice his profession in India. Kettle went to India fully intending to paint portraits and scenes of an oriental splendor like that he had imagined for the London stage and that were described in the popular travel books and tales. He also hoped to prosper fabulously on the oriental-style fees he would garner not only from the wealthy English traders, but from the Indian potentates that he would promote, advertise and immortalize like theatrical subjects, amid the anticipated and imagined — but seemingly actual — exotic settings of their roles. Kettle sailed to India in 1769 and painted in Madras, Faizabad,

and Calcutta

until 1776.

Once

there, Kettle’s

expectations were met and surpassed. His early years, spent in Madras and Calcutta painting portraits of Company officials and influential independent traders, provided Kettle with a substantial income, but in his later years he made a remarkable fortune on commissions from the Nawab and European traders of the kingdom of Oudh and

: A SSSSSSSSS

21. Tilly Kettle, Mahammad Ali Khan, 1770, Oil Painting, Victoria and Albert Mus eum, London

Tilly Kettle’s Theater of India

wealth,

explicit

eroticism,

entrepreneurial

maneuvers,

high-level diplomacy, sophisticated military tactics and alien local customs of the new English locations in India. In four paintings exhibited at the Society of Artists in the 1770s, and then in one more painted after he returned and

showed at the Royal Academy in 1781, Kettle gave London cultural circles their first detailed and striking representations of an India that was at once both an imagined land and a real and lucrative entity. Kettle’s audience for these paintings were the visitors to the exhibitions; and, although no popular engravings were made, his work, theatrical in conception and preconceived in representation, nevertheless fascinated all — and especially the London artists — who saw it. Kettle’s India was a sensation. It was also a sensational subject matter for the English artists who followed him to India over the next several decades in order to see Indian prospects for themselves and to visualize and sketch their own views of India. In the decades that followed Kettle’s exhibitions artistic interest in India became the impetus and the occasion for a full-scale Indian Renaissance in British art, literature and culture.

The first of Kettle’s paintings to arrive for exhibition in London in 1771 was a group portrait of Muhammad Ali Khan, Nawab of Arcot, and his five sons.’ (Fig. 21) The Nawab, robed in layers of fine silk, wearing strings of pearls and other jewels, holds his great sword in his right hand and stares directly out of the painting; he seemed to embody, for English viewers of his portrait, the majesty, power, substance and, specifically, the wealth of Indian roy-

alty. Kettle’s portrait of the Nawab with deadly but also decorative sword in his hand is drawn to confirm the idea of a venerated but violent and despotic Eastern potentate — the image of the ‘Great Mogul’ that the English had long come to expect from reading descriptions in travel accounts of the Moghul dynasty, and from seeing the figure of the Asiatic

emperor

stereotyped

in

drama

ever

since

Christopher Marlowe's two-part Tamburlaine the Great (1587, 1590). For the eighteenth-century audience the stage image of the Moghul as despotic ruler in the tradition of Marlowe’s Tamburlane had been reinforced by John Dryden’s popular play, Aureng-Zebe, which was performed on and off throughout the century.’ Dryden’s 1675 play, moreover, was based on Francois Bernier’s stylized and fictionalized account of his travels in India, Histoire de la derniére revolution des états du Grand Mogul, AD 1656-1668.

Because of interest at the time in the Company’s growing trade with the Moghul empire, Bernier’s account had been translated into English in the 1670s. The Frenchman’s historical tale of brutal war between powerful and decadent Moghul princes for the control of a rich and complex Indian empire was an orientalized version of the tragedy of King Lear, at once more extravagant but also familiar because conventionally exotic. Dryden and his audience found the story, as Bernier told it, compelling: I found ... that this king of the world, Shah Jahan, of

above seventy years of age, had four sons ...; that some years since he had made these four sons vice-kings or governors of four of his most considerable provinces or kingdoms; that it was almost a year that he was fallen into a

great sickness, whence it was believed he would never recover: which had occasioned a great division among these four brothers (all laying claim to the empire), and had kindled among them a war which had lasted five years.”

At the time that Kettle painted him, the Nawab of Arcot

had already cut his ties to the Moghul court in Delhi; already a puppet of the Company and financer of Company troops in Arcot, he was enjoying the fruits of his divested labors in high style (along with his sons) under the loose protection of the Company. The cost of this protection was substantial, but it allowed the Nawab to claim that he had

his own army and was independent of the Moghul empire. In his composition Kettle sought simultaneously to flatter the Nawab, to sensationalize his royal subject for those who knew little of his situation as Company puppet, and to capitalize on the greedy expectations of those English aware of the protection subsidies given to the Company by Nawabs like Arcot. Bernier’s story of the treachery and patricide of the Emperor Shah Jahan’s sons, and Dryden’s dramatization of the life of the cruelly successful surviving son, Aurengzeb,

provided a more

than sufficient back-

ground against which the London viewers of Kettle’s picture could set his Nawab of Arcot in the company of his sons and see them as generic example of what they knew of Asiatic despots and great Moghuls, and of the bloody feuds and magnificent cruelty beneath the seeming majesty and wealth of royalty in India. The second painting Kettle sent to London was Dancing Girls, shown at the Society of Artists in 1772. With its dis-

play, English viewers were introduced to an equally sensational, but now also tantalizing, scene of seductive nautch

girls or dancers performing in a Madras street. In the painting, two dancers in elaborate costumes beckon the viewer toward them; their eyes and bodies are posed suggestively, at once coy, available and distant. The women are circled closely by a group of watching Indian men and the presence of this audience makes them kindred of the English actresses in Kettle’s theatrical portraits: they are public objects of desire who exist to stimulate fantasies and expectations in their viewers. The setting for their dance is the facade of a temple, an unlikely stage for an actual dance group but certainly appropriate to an artist like Kettle seeking to pack as many exotic images and unmet desires as possible into a single composition. By selecting such a titillating subject for display in London, Kettle, again, was appealing to and capitalizing on established notions of female

entertainers

at the Moghul

courts.

Bernier,

for

example, had graphically described the dancing girls that Shah Jahan invited to participate in the orgiastic festivities of the royal seraglio:

69

70

Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects Chah-Jehan was fond of the sex .... He certainly trans-

gressed the bounds of decency in admitting at those times

into the seraglio singing and dancing girls called Kenchens (the gilded, the blooming), and in keeping them there for that purpose the whole night; they were not indeed the prostitutes seen in bazaars, but those of a more private and respectable class, who attend the grand weddings of Omrahs and Mansebdars, for the purpose of singing and dancing. Most of these Kenchens are handsome and well dressed, and sing to perfection; and their limbs being extremely supple, they dance with wonderful agility, and are always correct in regard to time.’ The Kenchens of Bernier’s Shah Jahan, unavailable them-

selves, existed to stimulate sexual fantasy and activity in others, much as Kettle’s portrayal of dancing girls existed to titillate and substantiate the sexual fantasies of their audience at home and abroad. In 1775, Kettle sent back a third painting for exhibition,

one whose composition stressed the peaceful and friendly relationship that the English — twenty years after the Battle of Plassey — had now established with wealthy rulers in India. Kettle had done the painting for General Robert Barker in Faizabad in 1772, and it portrays Barker in his

role as commander-in-chief of the East India Company at the very moment when he has completed a treaty of alliance with the Nawab of Oudh. (Fig. 22) The Nawab, Shuja-ud-daula, holds Barker’s hand in a sign of friendship as both stand together facing directly outward. They are at the center of a group that includes four of the Nawab’s sons — including the eldest, the porcine Asaf-ud-daula who would succeed his father as Nawab and as Kettle’s patron,

22. Tilly Kettle, Shuja-ud-daula, Nawab of Oudh, and four sons with General Barker and military officers, 1772, Oil Painting, Victoria Memorial Museum, Calcutta

the nawab’s vizier, and a group of recognizable Englishmen, including Barker’s interpreter and two of his aides-decamp. Kettle may well have actually witnessed the darbar at which the treaty was celebrated, but in Kettle’s theatrical fashion, all the figures are elaborately costumed for their roles and are posed stiffly as if they are about to take

late herself upon her husband’s funeral pyre. (Fig. 23) Bernier had described the religious ritual at some length and with gruesome details — yelling priests beating drums around the fire, the use of buckets of butter and oil to ignite

a bow before an audience. The Nawab, his sons, and vizier

then customs and burned alive.* In Kettle’s painting, how-

are dressed to be seen in oriental splendor — in atchkins and great coats made of the decorative embroidered silk with the floral designs for which Oudh was known; all are wearing lamb’s wool Afghan caps, except the vizier who wears a turban and bears a sword as signs of his position as chief advisor to the Nawab. The general is in the full dress uniform of his rank with a scarlet military coat and gold-braided waistcoat; he wears a gold-braided tricorne hat and a

sword at his side; his officers too are in their dress uniforms. To the English viewers, the painting is both edifying and gratifying in its suggestions of English accomplishment and Indian substance. Kettle’s fourth painting, exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1776, The Ceremony of a Gentoo Woman

taking

Leave of her Relations, represents Kettle’s sentimentalized and sensationalized version of the original Hindu ritual known as sati, in which a Hindu widow chooses to immo-

the flanies, and beautiful young widows sacrificed to heaever, not an actual sacrifice but the emotional and dramatic

preparation for one is portrayed. We see not the gruesome climax of Bernier’s account but the melodramatic preparations for a climax that all know will be gruesome. The widow stands discarding her gemstone-studded gold jewelry and personal ornaments. Her draped garments, unlike those of the other female figures, emphasize her rounded breasts and elegantly narrow waist. She is an object of admiration to the men and women

crowded around her,

and an object of adoration to the praying relatives gathered at her knees. Several figures bow down before her and her pose of surprise at their homage is moving but also strangely Western and coy. For an age that promoted female sensibility and the proper shedding of tears on appropriate occasions, Kettle obligingly exploits the sentiment of the scene to the fullest — as well as the emotional contrast that it will make with the event that is to follow.

Tilly Kettle’s Theater of India

23. Tilly Kettle, Sati scene, c.1770—71, Oil Painting, Private Coll.

In addition to the nobly posed widow who has renounced earthly goods and who performs her last rites with modesty and serenity in an unctuous final act of fidelity to her husband, we also see two of the woman’s children with their backs bowed in grief and another child, a baby held by one of the attendant women, who reaches out toward its fascinated but also removed from this ultimate act of a good wife educated according to the most strict prescriptions written for faithful wives by the European libertines. It is most unlikely that Kettle was depicting a sati ceremony that he had witnessed first hand in this painting.

of a dutiful and self-sacrificing albeit pagan wife. The poem was titled appropriately Bedukah or the Self-devoted: an Indian Pastoral.’ Its message was that even pagan wives — or perhaps especially pagan wives — know the joys and heroism of duty and fidelity. Indeed, the melodramatic treatment of the ceremony of sati in Irwin’s poem and in Kettle’s painting recalls, and could well be derived in part from, the well-known and sensational climactic scene of Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe. The play ends with the death on stage of Aureng-Zebe’s cruel and libertine older brother Morat, who, among his many treacheries in the play, has also been unfaithful to his wife. The innocent and loyal

Indeed, there is no indication that he ever saw the ceremo-

wife, Melesinda, then enters dressed in white and followed

ny, and, given the secrecy of Hindu funerary rituals of the time, unlikely that any Western visitor would easily be admitted to them. Rather, Kettle presents an imagined, sentimental and dramatic scene that takes full advantage of the English viewers’ shocked but otherwise vague knowledge of a reportedly ghastly ritual among pagan Indians. In conjunction with the 1776 display of the painting at the Society of Artists, a Company trader named Eyles Irwin

by a procession of priests in preparation for her sati. In a farewell speech before she leaves the assembled court of the new Moghul emperor, Aureng-Zebe, to go to her death on Morat’s funeral pyre, Melesinda declares her duty and love toward her husband in spite of his infidelities:

mother. A crowd of Indians in the shadows watch the scene,

who was one of Kettle’s Madras acquaintances, published in

London an instructive poem with the parallel presentation

My love was such it needed no return,

Rich in itself, like elemental fire,

Whose pureness does no ailment require. In vain you would bereave me of my lord,

7I

1p

Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

For I will die. Die is too base a word; I'll seek his breast, and kindling by his side, Adorned with flames, Ill mount a glorious bride.”

itary man reviewing his troops for the pleasure of the Moghul emperor. The center of the scene is an elaborately draped and ornamented tent. Emperor Shah Alam is depicted in an informal attitude and an effeminate pose: he

The gesturing woman in white at the center of Kettle’s painting, a staged image at once erotic and virginal, could well be a recapitulation in paint of the melodramatic image of Dryden’s Melesinda in the triumphant nobility - and orgasmic sexual fidelity — of her final deathly appearance. In the instant before her sacrificial act of fidelity, Kettle’s ‘Gentoo’ widow also recalls the delectable female figure in

reclines on a low throne, soft-bodied, with the mouthpiece of his hookah in his hand; he is draped in luxurious silks

Thomas Herbert’s well-known, and titillating, seventeeth-

Barker confronting the Emperor face to face from what a Western audience would take to be a superior position; he stands erect, in formal pose and full dress uniform, with sword and black tricorne hat, as he points out to a scene that is intended to instruct and contains a message that combines overt respect with implicit might. Colonel Barker in Kettle’s painting is diplomatically, affably, and pointedly directing attention to the military might and power of the Company troops amassed in a respectful parade in front of the Moghul emperor's tent. The pose, a clear representation of English military and diplomatic superiority over the Eastern potentate and his numerous vassals, would have been a gratifying prospect for a patriotic English audience. Kettle knew his patron’s needs, and he thoroughly understood how he and his patron could capitalize on the political moment of 1781. His retrospective painting shows Barker as he stands surrounded by a throng of high-ranking, powerful members of the Emperor’s court. Colonel Barker is accompanied by a single sepoy or Indian soldier.

century travel book: ‘She roabs her tender body with a transparent Lawne, her arms, leggs, and thighs, are fettered with wanton chaines of love ...’ as she mounts the flames to embrace her husband's body with enduring — or implied necrophiliac — desire.”’ Lost in the sensational effects of play, poem, travelogues, and painting are the improbabilities of the scene: the sati ceremony is a Hindu ritual, and the Moghul dynasty, being Muslim, buried or entombed their dead. The culmination of Kettle’s attempt to stimulate prevailing oriental fantasies in English viewers and to capitalize on popular sensational notions of India was a fifth painting that he executed after he returned to England and which he exhibited at the Royal Academy show in 1781. The painting was a commission from his old patron from India, Sir Robert Barker, whom Kettle had first met at the

court of Oudh. Barker had returned to England as a fully fledged member of the English nabob class; he was now retired and comfortably situated in a palatial home in the English countryside. The new commission was to be a companion piece of the same size and with a similar theme to the portrait of Barker concluding a treaty of alliance with the Nawab of Oudh that Kettle had painted in Faizabad nearly a decade earlier and shown at the Society of Artists in 1775. The composition of this 1781 painting was intended to celebrate Sir Robert Barker in his role as loyal diplomat of Company and Crown attending to Shaw Allum, the present Mogul of Hindostan, reviewing the 3rd Brigade of East India Company troops, from the state tent on the plains of Allahabad. (PI. 5)

Presentations in this period of the English in India commissioned by officers like General Barker (or sponsored by the Company itself) typically show the diplomatic nuances of the Company’s role in India itself. Consequently, Kettle’s painting does not take as its subject a battle or victory scene, even though Barker had fought against the French in the Carnatic and against the Marathas in the Deccan, and had even served (from 1770 to

1774) as commander-in-chief of Company forces in Bengal.

Rather, the scene chosen for the painting shows a standing and seemingly suppliant Barker, at a much earlier time in his career and well before he acquired the title of general. He is shown as Colonel of Infantry of the Third Brigade between 1765-70, an apparently humble and gracious mil-

and richly jeweled. In attendance is Shuja-ud-daula, the Nawab of Oudh, and other members of his court — all rich-

ly and softly dressed, like the emperor. Shah Alam’s seated position would be one of superiority — to an Eastern audience. But Kettle, counting on Western perceptions, presents

The

composition

of the painting

proposes

a contrast

between the decadent ease of the Indian court watching in a mass of disarray and the official formality of the British officer standing virtually alone to represent his country and do his duty. The painting extols English duty and military discipline in Barker even as it implicitly calls attention to where the real power in Bengal lies, with the East India Coinpany, its English officers and loyal Indian troops, and its possession of all the taxation revenues of Bengal (granted to the Company by Shah Alam himself after the Battle of Plassey). During his stay in Oudh, Kettle never even saw the Emperor Shah Alam. His scene is a form of official fiction: it serves the desire of the artist’s patron, the English nabob, to have himself presented in the patriotic but powerful role of a diplomatic yet unyielding representative of England — while still just a mere colonel — at the court of the Great Moghul of India. Kettle’s painting is an apotheosis to the English nabob class as it declared its own and very different pedigree, its exotic theater of action and its revenue-collection for England, and its version of the vital new set of meanings and symbols for an England soon to become the heart of an empire. Like its 1772 companion, this 1781 painting of Barker

standing before the Indian Emperor and Shuja-ud-daula of Oudh also commemorates Barker’s role, not as an independent trader and collector of taxes, but as a keeper of the

Tilly Kettle’s Theater of India

peace in India and as a representative of the Company

negotiating treaties with the Nawab. In the foreground of the painting sits a figure from the Emperor's entourage, turning the pages of a document written in Latin script. The document may represent a peace treaty, a guarantee of revenue and the right to levy taxes, a guarantee of protection, a outright grant of land, a gold legacy, or a recognition of superior might. No matter which of these it is, we and

the English audience of the time are to understand that what it represents is legal, established, codified, certain, and

written down. Each of Tilly Kettle’s five London exhibits on Indian subjects, shown during the decade, 1771-81, pose their principle figures in a theatrical grouping: they are conceived of as actors on stage as they play to a crowded audience; they perform framed by watching figures who are pointedly included in the portrayed scene. This form of dramatic composition increases the opportunity for the artist to include a host of exotic details in the scenes, while

at the same time creating in the London audience for which they were designed a sense of distance or separation as they viewed

these

elements,

familiarized

through

travelers’

tales, of a sensationalized alien world. An Eastern potentate with sword and jewels, seductive Indian women dancers, a cordial meeting between Company officers and a notoriously wealthy Nawab, a noble ‘pagan’ wife preparing to sacrifice

herself out of love for her dead husband,

an

English officer standing alone before the ruler of the great Moghul Empire — these five dramatic views, authenticated as they were for their English audience by Tilly Kettle’s bona fide journeys through Madras, Calcutta, and the kingdom of Oudh, essentially represent the first prospects of India popularized in England by the earliest artistic exploration of the country. In these earliest prospects India was a spectacle or theatrical performance, something seen from the outside and made up of set scenes made familiar by travel books and mercantile propaganda, more exotic than any oriental tale, distant and removed from ordinary English life. In his slick adaptations, Tilly Kettle played his role as the foremost guide to these fantasized and fantastic prospects of the Indian East. He would soon be followed to India by other English Romantic artists whose views of India adapted, modified, and frequently denied, the prospect that he had dramatized so well. If Kettle is to be blamed for this first prospect of a fabled and fabulous India that seemed to be a substantiated fantasy lifted right out of the popular oriental tales, then he is also to be credited for stimulating artistic interest in the fabulous but also real prospects of India. As Kettle’s paintings began to be exhibited in London, other artists — as well as his fashionable audience there — heard gossip about the vast fortune that the painter was amassing in India. When Kettle returned to England, he displayed his wealth by living like a lavish English nabob. The artists who followed

Devis, Francisco Renaldi, Thomas Daniell — did so armed

with Kettle’s conceptions of a fabulous land and of the new and real artistic prospects it might provide, but they were also drawn by Kettle’s depictions of oriental high living and by the reports of the fantastic but realizable prospects of wealth for artists in India. Indeed, the appeal of India and its wealthy patrons became a joking matter among artists in London circles: in 1783 the painter Paul Sandby writes sarcastically to the Dublin architect and fellow member of the Royal Academy James Gandon, ‘A dinner was given to Zoffani on his departure for the East, where he anticipates to roll in gold dust. Hodges has already made a fortune by his art, not so much by painting, for the natives there don’t like his pictures, but prefer the smiles and fine bows he makes.’” Kettle’s own career faltered once he returned to England in 1776 at the age of 41. Unlike his situation in India, competition for portraits in the London artistic circle was keen, and the Society of Artists to which Kettle had been elected in 1771 and where he had sent his paintings to be exhibited while he was abroad, had been supplanted in professional esteem by the newly established Royal Academy. Kettle failed in his efforts to be elected to the new institution, even though his painting of General Barker at the Moghul court and a few other portraits had been accepted for its annual shows. Kettle’s reputation rested primarily on Indian set scenes and portraits of Indian nawabs and English nabobs; his patrons and supporters were confined to the nouveau rich India-returned and the self-aggrandizing English nabob circles. Kettle could not attract a sufficient number of other English patrons to commission paintings that would support the lifestyle to which his Indian wealth had accustomed him. Married with two children, Kettle soon squandered his fortune trying to maintain the trappings of a nabob’s life in London among the people who knew his India. He abandoned his struggle to re-establish his career in London and moved to Dublin (probably in 1785) in an effort to build a practice there among Anglo-Irish nabobs who had returned to Ireland.” Quite literally for Kettle, nothing in his English life compared with his fabulous years in India. And, indeed, during the last decade of Kettle’s life, the attraction of India returned with ironic intensity. Though he now had a wife and young children, Kettle sought to arrange passage back to India. He traveled to London in 1786 and, acknowledg-

Kettle to India — William Hodges, Johan Zoffany, Ozias

ing the risk of the adventure he was about to undertake at the age of 51, drew up a will. Then, because he lacked formal East India Company permission (by then Hodges, Zoffany, Devis, and Humphry, were painting in India under Company auspices) and perhaps because he could not afford the cost for the passage on an Indiaman, Kettle recklessly started out on the hazardous, but shorter, journey overland. He painted portraits along the way to pay his costs, and one, a portrait of the Turkish Janissary of the English Factory in Aleppo, has survived." Then, some-

Humphry, Charles Smith, James Wales, Arthur William

where in the deserts of Turkey late in 1786, Tilly Kettle

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Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

died of unknown causes and was buried in an unmarked grave. In the failure of his reputation in England and tragic last days, Kettle suffered the fate of a pioneer who had arrived too soon at a new artistic and cultural frontier.” What was the strange appeal of India that could drive Tilly Kettle to make this reckless and tragic effort to return? Perhaps the answer may be that he had found in

India a world even more fantastic and extraordinarily appealing than anything he had dared display to his London audience. This was a world that the cautious Kettle depicted only in the paintings that he had left behind in India, paintings intended to be seen only by those who knew this world first hand.

2. The Dancing Girl of Faizabad This real prospect of Tilly Kettle’s Indian world takes first shape and substantial vision in the portrait of a dancing girl that Kettle completed in Faizabad in the kingdom of Oudh in 1772. (PI. 6) Indian dancers usually perform together as a group, and they are typically described and pictured this way. Kettle’s paintings of dancers, like the one sent back to England for display at the Society of Artists in 1772, fulfill this convention by showing several female figures very stiffly posed in a conventional stage group; they are shown performing in a street with temple backdrops and an audience of Indian men for their frame. (In fact, Indian temple dancers did not perform in the streets, nor would they be able to execute their moves with an audience crowded as close to them as portrayed.) But, in this other painting, Kettle shows a single enticing dancing girl, captured at full length and in close detail, at the passionate climax of her dance. She is in a palace and is seemingly alone. Instead of a stiffly posed form, there is a sense of fluidity and charged energy to her body. She is dressed in a sari of red and gold diaphanous silk, and her face and upper body are framed by intricate gold jewelry; her hands and feet are bare, but circled with many gold bracelets and ankle bells. In one hand the dancer holds out the serpentine mouthpiece of a hookah, with its promise of narcotically enhanced sensuous charms; with the other hand she gestures enticingly toward an appreciative audience not shown in the painting but implied by her intense gaze and the slight bow of her body. Her gesturing arm also calls the viewer’s attention to two more dancing girls in the background who are seen through an archway of the palace where they sit waiting their turn to perform; their forms seem quite languid compared to the arrested energy of the girl who has just finished her performance. The painting is not theatrical in composition, and in tone and import it is quite unlike those that were sent home to England for exhibition in London. The background is simple and composed so as not to distract the eye of the viewer from the central figure captured in the stilled moment at the end of the dance. The dancer is shown close up and focused, and with what seems like personal but inexpressible knowledge of her finely featured

face and delicately shaped body. There is no audience visible in the composition to distance and mitigate the immediate and intriguing effect of the held intensity of the figure. Kettle’s depiction of this single dancer was clearly a labor of love, one that expressed his own enchantment with

India. For Kettle, the intensely focused figure captured at a still-point, and her complex mysterious appeal, is the embodiment of the rich, real India that he and other visiting English artists lived in and knew. Tilly Kettle was not the first European in India to be captivated by the ‘nautch’ or dancing of these Indian entertainers. Trained in their art in the Hindu temples, the dancing girls were a favorite and much cultivated form of entertainment for the Indian aristocracy, and they became as much for the Europeans who lived in India in the late eighteenth century. The Indian nautch or classical dance was a sophisticated and ancient art that mixed symmetry of appearance, abstracted sexuality, and a high degree of physical training. It had its origins in the mixture of creative artistry and sexual symbolism found everywhere in Hindu mythology: Siva, in one of his forms, is Lord of the Dance, and his divine consorts, Parvati and Sita, often assume the form of nautch girls. Dancers like the woman Kettle portrays here achieved celebrity for their art and were prized as wives among the lesser nobility. Others, once they had aged, chose to make their way as highly paid royal courtesans. Donald Campbell, the English naval officer who was taken prisoner by Tipu Sultan’s father in 1783, describes seeing the nautch girls perform when he was a young prisoner in Seringapatam and finding himself spellbound. And in later life he wrote to his son of the experience with a mixture of continuing awe and retrospective disapproval: It would be difficult to give you an adequate impression of those dancing girls. Trained up from their infancy to a practice of the most graceful motions, the most artful display of personal symmetry, and the most wanton allurements, they dance in such a style, and twine their limbs and bodies in such postures, as bewitch the senses, and extort applause and admiration where in strictness disap-

The Dancing Girl of Faizabad

probation is done ... they dance, most wonderfully adapting their step to the perpetual change of the tune, accompanying it with amorous songs, while the correspondent action of their body and limbs, the wanton palpitation and heaving of their exquisitely formed bosoms, and the amorous, or rather lascivious expression of their countenance, excite in the spectators emotions not very

favourable to chastity. Thus they continue to act, till, by the warmth of exercise and imagination, they become seemingly frantic with ecstasy, and, sinking down motionless with fatigue, throw themselves into the most alluring attitudes that ingenious vice and voluptuousness can possibly devise."

The painter James Forbes describes how far superior in skill and enticement these nautch girls are when compared to other female entertainers: Many of the dancing-girls are extremely delicate in their persons, soft and regular in their features, with a form of

perfect symmetry; and, although dedicated from infancy to this profession, they in general preserve a decency and modesty in their demeanor, which is more likely to allure,

than the shameless effrontery of similar characters in other countries.”

Dancing girls portrayed in the Romantic paintings of the late eighteenth century — by Kettle here as well as other painters after him — endure as figures of elegance and mystery: captured in the motion of the dance or in the charged stillness of its climax, they embody the real appeal of India, and whether they are shown alone or in company, standing or dancing barefoot, they always entice the viewer forward and into the painting and its action with their poses, gestures and eyes. Paintings such as these have no need for the appeal of fantasy and exotic properties. They are the products, like Campbell’s and Forbes’s awestruck accounts, of

first-hand experience in India.

3. Artists and Traders at Oudh Tilly Kettle’s vision of the dancing girl at Faizabad emerges from the historic coincidence that drew English artists like Kettle and others of his generation to the kingdom of Oudh to the northwest of Bengal, where they experienced, as Europeans, the most extravagant of Indian lifestyles. Tilly Kettle arrived in Oudh in 1772 at an economic and cultural high moment for the kingdom late in the reign of Nawab Shuja-ud-daula. Over the course of his reign (1754-75), the Nawab had become a reliable trading ally of the English; he had initially resisted the English presence in his kingdom but, after suffering several defeats by Company troops, he resolved to use their broad protection and goodwill to foster his own ever-expanding cultural ambitions for Oudh. For the English, the two major cities of Oudh, located on tributaries of the fertile upper river basin of the Ganges, Faizabad on the Gogra River and Lucknow on the Gumti River, became rich trading places: posts to these cities were considered very desirable and profitable by Company traders. Indeed, significant London connections were essential for Company appointments to Faizabad and Lucknow. European, and specifically English, associations with Oudh extended well beyond trade to the cultural and social realms of the kingdom. As Company influence and revenue administration extended through Bengal after Clive’s victory at Plassey, and as the Calcutta Presidency grew in power and achieved administrative ascendancy over the other two Presidencies of Madras and Bombay, and as the city of Calcutta expanded to become an English city with

English residents and government buildings, Oudh in the nearby northwest became the most accessible ‘Indian’ kingdom and a compelling destination for all visitors to Calcutta. English and European traders, military dignitaries and official visitors to the Calcutta Presidency, adventurers and artists — all found their way to a welcome at Oudh and,

as the number of residents and visitors to English Calcutta increased, so also did the interest and fascination with Oudh. Faizabad first, and then Lucknow, thus became the

primary places sought by visiting English artists seeking extravagant Indian patronage and the lifestyle that went with it. In contrast to the new English city of Calcutta, Oudh’s ancient cities and royal courts, to European visitors, seemed

an environment and atmosphere plucked right out of the Arabian Nights. Oudh was located about six hundred miles up river from Calcutta, it had several thriving cities of complex architecture, inhabitants with sophisticated tastes, and a centuries long history of cultural attainment. Oudh was rich in antiquities, in Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts, and

it had an established tradition of painting and sculpture. From the sixteenth century onward, Oudh had been one of

the practicing destinations for artists and artisans from Vijayanagar, the ancient cultural capital of the Brahmani kingdom of southwest India (1336-1565). The Nawabs of Oudh were renowed across India and the Far East for their patronage of artists — and for the wealth that they freely bestowed on those who pleased them. Tilly Kettle, for

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Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

example, did numerous portraits of the Nawab and his associates, the European traders and entrepreneurs. One shows Shuja-ud-daula with a bow in hand, as the canopied pavilions in the elaborate garden of his palace stretch luxuriously into the background. Other Kettle paintings show the formidable Nawab surrounded, perhaps as a sign of vigor at this age, by his ten sons, with his eldest son, Asafud-daula (also a patron of Kettle), placed next to his father, in the position of heir-apparent and future Nawab. Kettle’s commissions in gold coin from the Nawab and his eldest son alone exceeded some of the largest fortunes in England. Shuja-ud-daula established his court at Faizabad; his

shrewd diplomacy and his urbane encouragement of the arts attracted poets, painters, and sculptors from the declining Moghul courts, as well as European adventurers and antiquarians to his cultured capital and to his lucrative employment. Unlike weaker and less wealthy Nawabs such as

Najim-ud-daula)

who

resided

down

river

in

Murshidabad, capital of the kingdom of Bihar, Shuja-uddaula kept his territory moderately independent of English control and, but for a disbursement for protection to them,

retained control of his treasury; he maintained his own well-trained palace troops under French officers; and he fostered artistic circles and a cultural ferment that gave Oudh a reputation for social freedom and a sophistication that combined the best of European and Indian tastes. Oudh became a center for the production of illustrated manuscripts and miniature paintings and calligraphy even as it expanded its reputation as a center of entertainment.

In the 1760s and 1770s well before the arrival of Tilly Kettle, local circles of artists like Mir Kalan Khan and Mir

The palace of the Nabob is on a high bank, near to the river, and commanding an extensive view both of the

Goomty and the country on the eastern side .... It has ... been greatly extended by the current prince, who has erected large courts within the walls, and a durbar, where he receives publickly all persons that are presented. This durbar is a range of three arcades, parallel to each other, and supported by columns in the Moorish style: the ceiling, and the whole of this, is beautifully gilt, and painted with ornaments and flowers. It is ascended by steps from a flower garden, laid out in the same manner as we see in Indian paintings, which are all in square plats, in which are planted flowers of the strongest scent; so strong, indeed, as to be offensive at first to the nerves of a European.”

Hodges painted the palace from a distant perspective so as to show the enormous size and variety of architectural elements of the extensive complex of buildings; he showed the new mosque and other grand new buildings of Lucknow in the background. He was so impressed by the extravagant buildings at Lucknow that he included an engraving taken from his painting in his published account of his travels in India. Oudh’s appeal as a place of high culture and higher living continued well after the time that Kettle returned to England, although, after the death of Shuja-ud-daula in 1775, it also began to acquire a reputation for excess and decadence. When Asaf-ud-daula succeeded his father, one report to Warren Hastings described the self-indulgent prince, who liked to dress up as an English admiral and, sometimes, an English clergyman, as ‘one of those Characters which dishonour human Nature. His person extremely disagreeable, and his mind depraved beyond description.’ The new Nawab, in one of his first acts as ruler, gave up full political and military control to the English so as to give imself over to a life of pleasure, art and indulgence; Company trade and influence soon expanded broadly and peacefully through Oudh as it already had in Bengal and Bihar. To make way for the political change and the arrival of English officials and their buildings, Asaf-ud-

Chand experienced their own version of a renaissance as they assimilated into their work influences from Asian capitals outside India. Their refined and highly decorative style in the depiction of birds and other natural history subjects show Far Eastern influence from the work of Chinese artists recruited by Moghul princes in earlier decades. Equally influential on these Oudh artists was the access to European prints and paintings in the collections acquired by the Nawab. Works in gouache on paper produced by these local artists in Kettle’s time — called muragqas and kept in portfolios — portray realistic Western-style scenes of Indian life instead of the traditional abstracted subjects, and they appear to employ Western conventions in perspective and lighting for landscapes and portraits. Some of the Oudh watercolors of the period also show Westernized subjects and depict women, sailors, and hunters in European dress." With European expertise in building made available through agents of the Company, fine new palaces for the

capital of the kingdom, and he encouraged the colony of Indian and foreign artists in Faizabad to follow his court there. During Asaf-ud-daula’s flamboyant and pleasure seeking ‘reign’ in Lucknow, patronage of the arts reached new, expansive, eccentric and perhaps decadent, heights. The Nawab court at Lucknow, and the Europeans who frequented it, pursued an array of field sports, hunting the usual game (deer, quail, and partridge) but also, of course, shooting tigers while mounted on the backs of elephants.

Nawab and his court, new mosques, and other monumen-

One of the resident Europeans, Colonel John Mordaunt,

tal buildings were constructed in the cities of Oudh. When the English landscape and architectural painter William Hodges visited Lucknow in 1783, he commented with awe on the splendid prospect of the new Nawab, Asaf-uddaula’s abode:

the natural son of the Earl of Peterborough, was employed as commander of the Nawab’s bodyguard, and one of his duties was to arrange for bird and animal hunts, and fights, to entertain the prince and his Indian and European guests. Tournaments were staged, with full panoply, between exot-

daula moved his court further west to Lucknow, the ancient

Artists and Traders at Oudh

ic beasts — tigers, cheetahs, leopards, elephants, camels and

even rhinoceroses. The animals, usually, were pitted against their own kind but on some occasions, for more curious entertainment, the animals were mixed in combat: rhinoc-

eroses, for instance, were pitted against elephants, or tigers or leopards just to see what happened. Bird fights were a staple entertainment: there were quail-fights, partridgefights, and, especially, cock-fights. Shuja-ud-daula had a particular interest in cock-fighting and his son Asaf-uddaula was especially fond of laying wagers in gold on the fights.” For the cock-fights, which were always treated as court occasions by the Nawab, Colonel Mordaunt imported English birds to fight Indian ones, and these sporting scenes were immortalized in a painting by Johan Zoffany commissioned by Warren Hastings, Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Fight (see Fig. 63). The dangers of being in service to a foreign potentate and subject to the whim of a wealthy but alien personage brought a certain thrill to English and European appointees to the court at Oudh. One wealthy European

resident, Claude

Martin, says as much

about

Colonel Mordaunt’s situation in a letter written in 1789 to the painter Ozias Humphry: Colonel Mordaunt is now at the viziers Court, hunting,

fighting Cocks and doing all he can to please the Nabob in expectation of being paid the large sums due to him by that Prince, but I fear much of his success, as the Vizier is

not much willing to pay his debt particularly to Europeans for what I know of his character I think it such that if one could read in his heart he would perceive it loaded with many dark and sinister intentions, and as you know those who compose his court you then ought to know what man he is. A man that delight in Elephant and Cocks fighting would delight in something worse if he feared nothing.”

In Asaf-ud-daula’s Lucknow the fantasies and the fears of European tales of the Orient could be cultivated and experienced in fact by the most reckless and enterprising of Europeans seeking royal service and patronage. The capitals of Oudh, moreover, attracted a band of freewheeling adventurers and, especially, antiquarian prospectors from the West who became patrons of the arts in their own right. Claude Martin, who when he died in

1800 was thought to be the wealthiest European in India, went there in 1752 as a dragoon in the French East India Company; he deserted at Pondicherry in 1760 to the English East India Company army for which he formed a ‘Free French Brigade’. Martin went to Oudh as a revenue collector for the Company; he then stayed on there as a surveyor and cartographic draughtsman for James Rennell’s elaborate survey of Bengal. In 1775, when Asafud-daula relinquished military control to the English, Martin became superintendent of the arsenal at Lucknow with an appointment at the rank of major. During the Third Anglo-Mysore War in 1792-3, Martin was promoted to the rank of General; he served as aide-de-camp to Charles Cornwallis and personally witnessed the seizure of Tipu

Sultan’s two young sons as hostages by Cornwallis. Concurrent with his appointments, and perhaps because of them, Martin

built an immense

fortune in Lucknow

as

much from the acquisition of property in the rapidly expanding city as from independent trading in indigo and other much sought-after substances. On the Gomti River, Martin built what he referred to

as his ‘town house’ — a palace later named ‘Farhat Baksh’, or ‘Pleasure Giving’. In residence in the palace with Martin were his Indian bibi (princess-wife), several orphaned children, a large Indian staff that included two eunuchs and a

transvestite, and several Europeans who were employed either in his trading business or to oversee the kitchen and wine cellar, and to arrange entertainment like fireworks and field sports for Martin’s frequent guests.” Martin was an amateur painter and architect, and his design for Farhat Baksh was exceptional because it took advantage of the cooling effects of the river breezes and used both European and Indian architectural elements to provide comfort in the subtropical climate: he built a great hall for gatherings out over the river, placed pavilions on the roof to provide shade and protection for those who wanted to take the air there,

and excavated subterranean chambers in which to take refuge from the stifling heat during the dry season. Two exemplary views of Martin’s house, engraved from drawings done by William Hodges, appeared in the European Magazine in 1790.* (Fig. 24) When in 1797 Governor-

24. William Hodges, View of a House Built by Col. Claude Martin at Lucknow, Bengal, 1790, Engraving after Hodges, Beinecke Library, Yale University

General Sir John Shore was feted with a dinner party for forty guests at Farhat Baksh, his aide-de-camp George Cornish wrote with astonishment of the parallels to Versailles in the setting of Martin’s pleasure palace: ‘Walls covered with the largest mirrors I ever saw, and from the ceiling as many lustres as could be disposed of with elegance all of the best and most splendid kind that our manufacturers have produced.’ The entertainment provided was equally spectacular: ‘A very beautiful display of fire works was let off immediately opposite on the bank of the river, and in the middle, at the conclusion after the repre-

sentation of a splendid temple, a boat was placed from whence issued an immense fountain of fire. This country is

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Oriental Fantasies and Indian Prospects

the Etna of fire works .... This fete ended by a ball and a supper.” In India Martin had both the leisure and the wealth to gratify his intellectual curiosity in the manner of European aristocrats of earlier centuries — and with even greater excess. He experimented with electricity and air pumps to create vacuums; he imported steam engines to pump water on his estate; he demonstrated hot air balloons that could

carry men aloft in 1785, just two years after they became a phenomenon in Paris; he studied astronomy from one of his roof pavilions with telescopes made by William Herschel of the Royal Astronomical Society. He studied natural history, employing local artists to sketch specimens of Indian flora and fauna; he acquired contemporary paintings as well as Sanskrit and Persian manuscripts; he devel-

oped a library with over five hundred antiquarian Persian manuscripts and over five thousand books in English and French, a collection that eventually became the core of the Fort William College library in Calcutta — and he became a generous patron and host to visiting English and European painters. Martin’s palace was described to Warren Hastings

Persian and Sanskrit manuscripts and.Indian miniatures, and he possessed a complete collection of the Vedas. He assembled albums of muragqqas, the popular gouache on paper paintings of Indian life that were being created by Indian artists in Oudh to gratify Western tastes. Polier was dismissed from the service of the Nawab of Oudh in 1782. Warren Hastings, who was in the process of assembling his circle of scholars of Indian culture, asked Polier to remain in Lucknow as an appointee of the Company with the honorary rank of Lieutenant-Colonel; Polier’s library of Indian

manuscripts, and his knowledge of the literary and artistic artifacts of Oudh, were deemed essential to Company interests. After thirty-two years in India, Polier left in 1787, shortly after Hastings had returned to England, and he settled in France where he was murdered in a robbery in 1795. Polier’s copy of the Vedas was presented to Oxford University, and manuscripts and miniatures from his collection were acquired by William Beckford, author of the oriental romance, Vathek.

as a ‘perfect Museum’ to offer ‘infinite Amusement’ and, when Martin’s estate was inventoried after his death, the eS

SS

list included, beyond the extensive library and the scientific equipment, a French puppet theater, moulds for striking coins and medals, a printing press, an English pipe organ, a billiard table, a suit of armor,

a magic lantern, guitars,

Chinese fishing rods, and myriad collections of fossils, shells, minerals, stuffed animals and birds, and European watches. The chandeliers from Farhat Baksh that George Cornish had so admired were purchased from the estate and installed in the Throne Room of Richard Wellesley’s New Government House in Calcutta. Martin’s epitaph on his tomb in Lucknow reads, fittingly: ‘Here lies the body of Claude Martine, who came to India a Common Soldier; and

died a Major General. Pray for his soul!’ Colonel Antoine Polier, a Swiss surveyor and architect,

was a friend of Martin and a member of his circle. Polier had gone to London from Lausanne in 1756 to join the Company, and the following year at the age of fifteen he was posted to India. By 1762, he had become Chief Engineer of the Bengal Army in Calcutta and had begun work as a planner on the design and construction of the new Fort William; he rose to the rank of major and took command of the Fort garrison.” Like Martin, Polier was first sent to Oudh as a surveyor for Rennell, but once there Warren Hastings recommended to Shuja-ud-daula that he be made the chief architect for the kingdom of Oudh — and be the eyes and ears of the Company at the Nawab’s court. Polier became wealthy from his commissions for court buildings as well as, like his friend Martin, from private trading, and he too built a fine pleasure palace in Lucknow that he called ‘Polierganj’ or ‘Polier’s Dream-Potion’. The Persian architectural style of Polierganj attracted the attention of artists like Tilly Kettle and, later, Johan Zoffany,

both of whom

were guests there. Polier also collected

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