CONTENTS W
~4~
Preface
6
Introduction
7
Introduction to Company Painting
15
The Catalogue
23
Notes
194
Bibliography
197
CONTENTS W
~4~
Preface
6
Introduction
7
Introduction to Company Painting
15
The Catalogue
23
Notes
194
Bibliography
197
Introduction
Preface
BY JOHN KEAY
W
W
e began collecting Company paintings in the 1980s. These watercolours were drawn by Indian hands for British eyes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Often depicted with a great attention to detail, these works captured the everyday life that officers of the East India Company, their wives, soldiers and casual travellers saw around their homes or in the streets and bazaars of India. Here was familiar Indian imagery, but one that would appear highly exotic to their English friends and family back home. As collectors of Company paintings, our interest was focused narrowly on the ordinary people of India, not on its flora-fauna or architectural monuments. Two hundred years after the paintings were executed, the livelihoods and milieu of the common people that were the subjects of the paintings, are all but vanishing from our sight. The paintings we gravitated towards were of people of diverse castes, trades and occupations – goldsmiths and mendicants, cooks, clerks and cobblers, shoemakers, sepoys and sadhus, itinerant merchants and munshis, rope-walkers and puppeteers. Some of these do have their modern-day Indian counterparts, but gone are the ‘asabardars’, silver stick bearers, the ‘chobdars’, silver mace bearers or the ‘sheristidars’, native court officers. Gone with them are their delightful costumes and accoutrements. The Company School paintings furnish a remarkable record of a period before photography evolved to provide such authentic information. Whereas miniature paintings
W
depicted mostly courtly and formal subjects, not common folk, artisans or craftspeople, Company paintings illuminated these aspects with accuracy and charm. These Company School paintings present a delightful prism of indigenous attire, local customs, occupations and pastimes. It was a time when each caste or social group donned its own distinct attire – upper and lower garments, shoulder wrap, girdle, sash or turban – functionally suited to the climate of the region and conforming to the identity of the social group and economic status of the wearer. These paintings reveal that clothes worn by people of the very same profession – be they carpenters, weavers, dyers, ironsmiths – could vary greatly across the length and breadth of India. The group of works showing different professions and craftspeople, for example, cast into sharp relief the similarity of tools and techniques used by members of the same occupation, while highlighting the remarkable differences and diversity of regional clothing styles and accoutrements. Today, when Western-style shirts and trousers have increasingly become the norm for Indian men in urban and rural areas of India, and kurtis, jeans and tees are rapidly replacing sarees as women’s wear, we need to remind ourselves of our past, of the ‘way we once were’. It has been a singularly gratifying experience to have Jerry Losty and John Keay collaborate on this project with us.
~6~
Shilpa & Praful Shah TAPI Collection
U
ntil the mid-twentieth century, paintings and drawings like those in the Shah collection had no recognized identity. They were not much sought after in the sale-room and had yet to be dignified by accreditation to a distinct school of painting. Critics often dismissed them as Indo-European hybrids. Executed by Indian artists who might be unfamiliar with the Western conventions of shading and perspective, they were purchased by souvenir-seeking merchants and military men who supposedly lacked the taste or funds to commission a European artist. As Praful and Shilpa Shah discovered when they began their collection, examples of such paintings were still, in the 1980s, as likely to be found among the bric-a-brac in a flea-market as in the cabinets of a reputable art dealer or antiquarian book-seller. Nor were the Shahs themselves exactly connoisseurs. At the time they were interested in the subject-matter of the paintings rather than their technical or aesthetic merit. Praful, with a family background in textiles, and Shilpa, with a passion for history and a Berkeley degree, were sourcing traditional fabrics for a textile design centre – research that eventually led to the foundation of TAPI, the acronym for their now world famous collection of the ‘Textiles and Art of the People of India’. When it came to paintings they therefore chose those whose subjects best exemplified the costumes and materials that interested them. But at least the Shahs knew what to ask for; by the 1980s the provenance of these ‘hybrid’ paintings had been explored and a generic name given them. Produced by Indian artists in
the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and influenced by the conventions of contemporary British art to appeal to servants of the already dominant London East India Company, they had come to be known as ‘Company Paintings’. By staunching the outflow of such paintings and amassing India’s largest collection of them, Praful and Shilpa Shah would be complementing TAPI’s role in exciting interest in the history of India’s visual arts. It was another husband and wife team who had been responsible for designating them as ‘Company Paintings’ and orchestrating the surge of interest that followed. Back in 1934 the 27-year old William (‘Bill’) Archer, a liberally inclined member of Britain’s prestigious Indian Civil Service, had married Mildred Agnes Bell, a recent history graduate from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. Bill had been posted to Bihar, and there, in various rural districts as well as the capital of Patna, the Archers spent their first twelve years together. They raised a family, shunned club society, winced over the heavyhanded treatment being meted out to ‘Quit India’ nationalists, and formed close friendships with the leading Patna barrister P.C. Manuk and other connoisseurs of the city’s artistic output. Manuk introduced the Archers to his collection of Patna paintings, directed them to other collections and encouraged them to purchase. He also arranged for them to meet descendants of the artists of the 1790s onwards who had been responsible for the paintings. In a monograph published in 1943 Manuk may even have been the first to adopt the term
~7~
Introduction
Preface
BY JOHN KEAY
W
W
e began collecting Company paintings in the 1980s. These watercolours were drawn by Indian hands for British eyes in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Often depicted with a great attention to detail, these works captured the everyday life that officers of the East India Company, their wives, soldiers and casual travellers saw around their homes or in the streets and bazaars of India. Here was familiar Indian imagery, but one that would appear highly exotic to their English friends and family back home. As collectors of Company paintings, our interest was focused narrowly on the ordinary people of India, not on its flora-fauna or architectural monuments. Two hundred years after the paintings were executed, the livelihoods and milieu of the common people that were the subjects of the paintings, are all but vanishing from our sight. The paintings we gravitated towards were of people of diverse castes, trades and occupations – goldsmiths and mendicants, cooks, clerks and cobblers, shoemakers, sepoys and sadhus, itinerant merchants and munshis, rope-walkers and puppeteers. Some of these do have their modern-day Indian counterparts, but gone are the ‘asabardars’, silver stick bearers, the ‘chobdars’, silver mace bearers or the ‘sheristidars’, native court officers. Gone with them are their delightful costumes and accoutrements. The Company School paintings furnish a remarkable record of a period before photography evolved to provide such authentic information. Whereas miniature paintings
W
depicted mostly courtly and formal subjects, not common folk, artisans or craftspeople, Company paintings illuminated these aspects with accuracy and charm. These Company School paintings present a delightful prism of indigenous attire, local customs, occupations and pastimes. It was a time when each caste or social group donned its own distinct attire – upper and lower garments, shoulder wrap, girdle, sash or turban – functionally suited to the climate of the region and conforming to the identity of the social group and economic status of the wearer. These paintings reveal that clothes worn by people of the very same profession – be they carpenters, weavers, dyers, ironsmiths – could vary greatly across the length and breadth of India. The group of works showing different professions and craftspeople, for example, cast into sharp relief the similarity of tools and techniques used by members of the same occupation, while highlighting the remarkable differences and diversity of regional clothing styles and accoutrements. Today, when Western-style shirts and trousers have increasingly become the norm for Indian men in urban and rural areas of India, and kurtis, jeans and tees are rapidly replacing sarees as women’s wear, we need to remind ourselves of our past, of the ‘way we once were’. It has been a singularly gratifying experience to have Jerry Losty and John Keay collaborate on this project with us.
~6~
Shilpa & Praful Shah TAPI Collection
U
ntil the mid-twentieth century, paintings and drawings like those in the Shah collection had no recognized identity. They were not much sought after in the sale-room and had yet to be dignified by accreditation to a distinct school of painting. Critics often dismissed them as Indo-European hybrids. Executed by Indian artists who might be unfamiliar with the Western conventions of shading and perspective, they were purchased by souvenir-seeking merchants and military men who supposedly lacked the taste or funds to commission a European artist. As Praful and Shilpa Shah discovered when they began their collection, examples of such paintings were still, in the 1980s, as likely to be found among the bric-a-brac in a flea-market as in the cabinets of a reputable art dealer or antiquarian book-seller. Nor were the Shahs themselves exactly connoisseurs. At the time they were interested in the subject-matter of the paintings rather than their technical or aesthetic merit. Praful, with a family background in textiles, and Shilpa, with a passion for history and a Berkeley degree, were sourcing traditional fabrics for a textile design centre – research that eventually led to the foundation of TAPI, the acronym for their now world famous collection of the ‘Textiles and Art of the People of India’. When it came to paintings they therefore chose those whose subjects best exemplified the costumes and materials that interested them. But at least the Shahs knew what to ask for; by the 1980s the provenance of these ‘hybrid’ paintings had been explored and a generic name given them. Produced by Indian artists in
the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and influenced by the conventions of contemporary British art to appeal to servants of the already dominant London East India Company, they had come to be known as ‘Company Paintings’. By staunching the outflow of such paintings and amassing India’s largest collection of them, Praful and Shilpa Shah would be complementing TAPI’s role in exciting interest in the history of India’s visual arts. It was another husband and wife team who had been responsible for designating them as ‘Company Paintings’ and orchestrating the surge of interest that followed. Back in 1934 the 27-year old William (‘Bill’) Archer, a liberally inclined member of Britain’s prestigious Indian Civil Service, had married Mildred Agnes Bell, a recent history graduate from St. Hilda’s College, Oxford. Bill had been posted to Bihar, and there, in various rural districts as well as the capital of Patna, the Archers spent their first twelve years together. They raised a family, shunned club society, winced over the heavyhanded treatment being meted out to ‘Quit India’ nationalists, and formed close friendships with the leading Patna barrister P.C. Manuk and other connoisseurs of the city’s artistic output. Manuk introduced the Archers to his collection of Patna paintings, directed them to other collections and encouraged them to purchase. He also arranged for them to meet descendants of the artists of the 1790s onwards who had been responsible for the paintings. In a monograph published in 1943 Manuk may even have been the first to adopt the term
~7~
‘Company Paintings’. Mildred, however, would hint at two other possibilities. In her first published study, Patna Painting (1947), she credited ‘scholar and art historian’ Rai Krishna Das of Benares with ‘the term “Company” or “Farangi” art’.1 Half a century later, in her Company Paintings, a catalogue of the collection in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum she awarded the credit to Ishwari Prasad, a grandson of Shiva Lal, the foremost Patna artist of the mid-nineteenth century: It was from the elderly Ishwari Prasad of Patna in 1940 that I first heard of the paintings he described as being in kampani qalam [“Company style”].2
Hence, whoever came up with the term first, ‘Company Paintings’ were clearly acknowledged as such in the Patna of the 1940s. But it was not until the 1950s, by when the Archers had returned to Britain, that the ubiquity of the ‘Company’ style was appreciated, and not until 20 years later that ‘Company Painting’ entered common usage. Appointed Keeper of the India section of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 1949, Bill Archer found himself responsible for a collection that included art and artefacts from all over the Orient. Much the same went for Mildred, when in 1954 she began cataloguing the prints and drawings in the India Office Library (IOL). Dedication and impeccable timing meant that, between them, the Archers would be curating the artistic legacy accumulated during 200 years of British rule. Bill’s collection in the V&A came from the defunct India Museum, which had once housed the great assembly of artefacts and productions forwarded to the London headquarters of the East India Company by its servants in the East. Mildred’s IOL was the depository for all the paperwork, including maps, sketches and paintings, relevant to the records of both the
Company and the India Office (this latter being the governmental leviathan that took over when the Company was wound up in 1858). The discoveries that awaited the Archers in their respective archives were an eye-opener. Bill saw his task as ‘building up the Museum’s collection of [Indian] paintings and attempting to identify the different schools’.3 Manuk bequeathed part of his collection to the museum, Ishwari Prasad’s collection was purchased, and several other collections were donated. Bill managed to produce Indian Painting in the Punjab Hills (1952) but his cataloguing left little time for anything else. When the IOL put in a request for his help, he suggested Mildred. Across town in the IOL (then in Whitehall, subsequently in Waterloo and now part of the British Library in Euston Road) Mildred was installed in a tiny pantry where the staff made tea. ‘I was given a stool and set to work cataloguing the paintings on the draining board.’ They were a miscellaneous assortment depicting ‘the castes and tribes of India and their occupations’, in other words typical subject matter of what she was coming to recognize as ‘Company’ art. The IOL assignment was supposed to take her a few weeks. It actually lasted 25 years. Wherever she ‘poked and prowled’, as she put it, more prints and drawings were discovered. One cache of sketches was found stuffed up a chimney to halt the fall of soot. Twenty-seven volumes of flora and fauna drawings sent home by Governor-General Richard Wellesley in 1798–1805 were found languishing in the ‘Iron Room’, which was so called because its moveable iron shelving was suspended from iron tracking beneath the ceiling. ‘If the [repository staff ] set the racks careering along the rails, I was in danger of being squashed,’ recalled Mildred. She asked for advance warning, after which ‘a cry would go up: “Are you inside Mrs. Archer?”’4 The first fruits of all this research were evident in Indian Painting for the British, a
~8~
ground-breaking collaboration by Bill and Mildred that appeared in 1955. Curiously, though concerned almost entirely with ‘Company Painting’, the term is not to be found in the book. With commendable caution the Archers still shied away from conflating Patna’s ‘Company style’ classification into an all-India genre. Instead they used the term ‘Indian– British’, the artists being Indian and their customers British. The Archers would write extensively on other subjects – Bill, for instance, went on to publish his monumental Indian Painting in the Punjab Hills in 1973 as well as write on tribal and modern art, and Mildred (or ‘Tim’ as she was to friends) on the traditional Rajput and Mughal schools of Indian art as well as other catalogues of the extensive IOL collections. But it was Mildred’s authorship of the published catalogues of Company paintings for both of the London collections that proved seminal. Her Company Drawings in the India Office Library appeared in 1972, and after William’s sudden death in 1979, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period (on the V&A’s collection) in 1992. Here at long last the term ‘Company Paintings’ entered official parlance. Subsequent art historians have endorsed it. For defining and rewriting an almost forgotten chapter in the history of Indian art, the art world remains deeply indebted to the Archers. Why Indian artists had deviated from their own artistic traditions to produce paintings in a foreign idiom was something that intrigued the Archers. So, too, did the uneven geographical distribution of these Company artists, their choice of materials – usually watercolours on paper but also on mica (or talc) and ivory – and above all their choice of subject matter. In each case the explanation lay, of course, with the market. Patrons influenced artists as much as artists relied on patrons. Yet European tastes and Indian skills were not obviously compatible.
As J.H. Stocqueler, a literary jack-of-all-trades, put it in his 1844 The Handbook to India, Indian artists were wont to ‘set at defiance form, perspective, light, shade and harmony’, which were the very features that European connoisseurs esteemed.5 The Archers, on the other hand, detected a kind of trade-off: what they called Indian ‘adaptability’ had been the price of European acceptance; thus Indian artists had increasingly embraced European techniques, like shading, in response to European recognition of Indian proficiency in, for instance, the faithful rendering of detail. This Indian willingness to respond to foreign tastes had a long history, especially on the Coromandel Coast of southern India. There a string of anchorages affording access to the region’s production of fine chintz textiles had attracted some of the earliest European trading settlements. The Portuguese had been established at San Thomé since the 1500s, the Danes acquired Tranquebar in 1621, the English followed suit at Madras in 1639, the Dutch at Negapatnam soon after, and the French at Pondicherry in 1674. With the exception of the Portuguese, all these nations were represented by their own East India companies. (Briefly there would also be Swedish, Ostend and Imperial [Hapsburg] East India companies, though these latter served mainly as flags of convenience for English shipping interests keen to circumvent the London company’s chartered monopoly.) Quite logically, then, the term ‘Company Painting’ was extended to Indian productions acquired by servants of these other companies or offered for sale in their settlements. An early set of drawings in the IOL’s collection depicting modes of transport and other ‘manners and customs’ was evidently commissioned by a German or Danish patron. Earlier still is a set of paintings commissioned c. 1700 in Madras by the Italian adventurer Niccolao Manucci and now in Venice’s Biblioteca di San Marco. Their
~9~
‘Company Paintings’. Mildred, however, would hint at two other possibilities. In her first published study, Patna Painting (1947), she credited ‘scholar and art historian’ Rai Krishna Das of Benares with ‘the term “Company” or “Farangi” art’.1 Half a century later, in her Company Paintings, a catalogue of the collection in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum she awarded the credit to Ishwari Prasad, a grandson of Shiva Lal, the foremost Patna artist of the mid-nineteenth century: It was from the elderly Ishwari Prasad of Patna in 1940 that I first heard of the paintings he described as being in kampani qalam [“Company style”].2
Hence, whoever came up with the term first, ‘Company Paintings’ were clearly acknowledged as such in the Patna of the 1940s. But it was not until the 1950s, by when the Archers had returned to Britain, that the ubiquity of the ‘Company’ style was appreciated, and not until 20 years later that ‘Company Painting’ entered common usage. Appointed Keeper of the India section of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 1949, Bill Archer found himself responsible for a collection that included art and artefacts from all over the Orient. Much the same went for Mildred, when in 1954 she began cataloguing the prints and drawings in the India Office Library (IOL). Dedication and impeccable timing meant that, between them, the Archers would be curating the artistic legacy accumulated during 200 years of British rule. Bill’s collection in the V&A came from the defunct India Museum, which had once housed the great assembly of artefacts and productions forwarded to the London headquarters of the East India Company by its servants in the East. Mildred’s IOL was the depository for all the paperwork, including maps, sketches and paintings, relevant to the records of both the
Company and the India Office (this latter being the governmental leviathan that took over when the Company was wound up in 1858). The discoveries that awaited the Archers in their respective archives were an eye-opener. Bill saw his task as ‘building up the Museum’s collection of [Indian] paintings and attempting to identify the different schools’.3 Manuk bequeathed part of his collection to the museum, Ishwari Prasad’s collection was purchased, and several other collections were donated. Bill managed to produce Indian Painting in the Punjab Hills (1952) but his cataloguing left little time for anything else. When the IOL put in a request for his help, he suggested Mildred. Across town in the IOL (then in Whitehall, subsequently in Waterloo and now part of the British Library in Euston Road) Mildred was installed in a tiny pantry where the staff made tea. ‘I was given a stool and set to work cataloguing the paintings on the draining board.’ They were a miscellaneous assortment depicting ‘the castes and tribes of India and their occupations’, in other words typical subject matter of what she was coming to recognize as ‘Company’ art. The IOL assignment was supposed to take her a few weeks. It actually lasted 25 years. Wherever she ‘poked and prowled’, as she put it, more prints and drawings were discovered. One cache of sketches was found stuffed up a chimney to halt the fall of soot. Twenty-seven volumes of flora and fauna drawings sent home by Governor-General Richard Wellesley in 1798–1805 were found languishing in the ‘Iron Room’, which was so called because its moveable iron shelving was suspended from iron tracking beneath the ceiling. ‘If the [repository staff ] set the racks careering along the rails, I was in danger of being squashed,’ recalled Mildred. She asked for advance warning, after which ‘a cry would go up: “Are you inside Mrs. Archer?”’4 The first fruits of all this research were evident in Indian Painting for the British, a
~8~
ground-breaking collaboration by Bill and Mildred that appeared in 1955. Curiously, though concerned almost entirely with ‘Company Painting’, the term is not to be found in the book. With commendable caution the Archers still shied away from conflating Patna’s ‘Company style’ classification into an all-India genre. Instead they used the term ‘Indian– British’, the artists being Indian and their customers British. The Archers would write extensively on other subjects – Bill, for instance, went on to publish his monumental Indian Painting in the Punjab Hills in 1973 as well as write on tribal and modern art, and Mildred (or ‘Tim’ as she was to friends) on the traditional Rajput and Mughal schools of Indian art as well as other catalogues of the extensive IOL collections. But it was Mildred’s authorship of the published catalogues of Company paintings for both of the London collections that proved seminal. Her Company Drawings in the India Office Library appeared in 1972, and after William’s sudden death in 1979, Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period (on the V&A’s collection) in 1992. Here at long last the term ‘Company Paintings’ entered official parlance. Subsequent art historians have endorsed it. For defining and rewriting an almost forgotten chapter in the history of Indian art, the art world remains deeply indebted to the Archers. Why Indian artists had deviated from their own artistic traditions to produce paintings in a foreign idiom was something that intrigued the Archers. So, too, did the uneven geographical distribution of these Company artists, their choice of materials – usually watercolours on paper but also on mica (or talc) and ivory – and above all their choice of subject matter. In each case the explanation lay, of course, with the market. Patrons influenced artists as much as artists relied on patrons. Yet European tastes and Indian skills were not obviously compatible.
As J.H. Stocqueler, a literary jack-of-all-trades, put it in his 1844 The Handbook to India, Indian artists were wont to ‘set at defiance form, perspective, light, shade and harmony’, which were the very features that European connoisseurs esteemed.5 The Archers, on the other hand, detected a kind of trade-off: what they called Indian ‘adaptability’ had been the price of European acceptance; thus Indian artists had increasingly embraced European techniques, like shading, in response to European recognition of Indian proficiency in, for instance, the faithful rendering of detail. This Indian willingness to respond to foreign tastes had a long history, especially on the Coromandel Coast of southern India. There a string of anchorages affording access to the region’s production of fine chintz textiles had attracted some of the earliest European trading settlements. The Portuguese had been established at San Thomé since the 1500s, the Danes acquired Tranquebar in 1621, the English followed suit at Madras in 1639, the Dutch at Negapatnam soon after, and the French at Pondicherry in 1674. With the exception of the Portuguese, all these nations were represented by their own East India companies. (Briefly there would also be Swedish, Ostend and Imperial [Hapsburg] East India companies, though these latter served mainly as flags of convenience for English shipping interests keen to circumvent the London company’s chartered monopoly.) Quite logically, then, the term ‘Company Painting’ was extended to Indian productions acquired by servants of these other companies or offered for sale in their settlements. An early set of drawings in the IOL’s collection depicting modes of transport and other ‘manners and customs’ was evidently commissioned by a German or Danish patron. Earlier still is a set of paintings commissioned c. 1700 in Madras by the Italian adventurer Niccolao Manucci and now in Venice’s Biblioteca di San Marco. Their
~9~
subject matter – deities, ceremonies, castes etc. – and certain characteristic flourishes suggest that the painter(s) responsible had learnt their trade at Golconda. Yet for both of these commissions, the paintings are on paper and in the sombre watercolours preferred by Europeans rather than in the vivid gouache in favour with Indian patrons. It was also in the south that the English company first dipped a toe in the ocean of future dominion and began to engage in what has been called the late Mughal market for entrepreneurial services. ‘By acting as an Indian merchant, fiscal entrepreneur and mercenary band leader writ large, the Company was able to suborn and conquer India.’6 When it got the better of its French rivals (in the so-called Carnatic Wars, 1744–63) and then of its most formidable neighbour (in the Mysore Wars, 1767–99), artists in the employ of local rulers encountered potential British patrons in the field or were drawn to Madras to seek them out. In effect the market for Company painting was following the flag. It would continue to do so throughout the decades of conquest that followed. Princely states which never came under direct British rule produced little Company art; important production centres like Delhi and Agra only became so after the British arrived there in the early 1800s. While stationed in the area, connoisseurs like William and James Baillie Fraser commissioned or purchased views of Delhi’s monuments and portraits of its inhabitants from named artists formerly in Mughal employ, like Ghulam Ali Khan. When Sind and Punjab completed the sequence of conquest in mid-century, the victors deemed paintings of Lahore and its former Sikh rulers to be suitable souvenirs. The results, often copied from earlier Sikh miniatures, which were never intended for European buyers, could be disappointing. ‘These horrible pictures are the result of an order by me to paint Jyepoor [Jaipur] costumes,’ wrote a Grenadier
guardsman on one of a series commissioned from an Amritsar painter.7 Occasionally, instead of following the flag, Company painting leap-frogged it. On a visit to the Cauvery delta in 1804, George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, had been delighted to find that Rajah Sarabhoji of Tanjore not only spoke English but shared Valentia’s taste in art. The rajah’s drawing-room was literally just that – his drawing room; it was ‘covered with prints and pictures of every possible kind’ and ‘of considerable merit’. Portraits of the rajah’s Maratha ancestors hung on the walls in ‘handsome gilt frames’ and the tables were spread with ‘paper, colours and implements of drawing’.8 The rajah had been tutored by a Danish missionary and had himself ‘learnt to draw in the European manner’, explains Mildred Archer, ‘He was in the habit of presenting sets of paintings, made under his supervision, to his guests and to British Residents.’9 Spanning nearly a century, Tanjore’s output, together with that of nearby Trichinopoly, well exhibits the progressive adoption of European techniques and conventions. It also embraces the usual wide range of subjects. These include notable monuments and architecture, troupes of dancers and musicians, natural history specimens (especially birds), processions and conveyances (from elephants to carriages and palanquins), ceremonies and festivals (a favourite being the rite of flying devotees likes kites known as hook-swinging), and of course individual figures from India’s inexhaustible variety of ethnic, caste and occupational communities. But the Tanjore sets of these ‘characters’ also exhibit a novel feature and one that recommended them to Shilpa and Praful Shah. For, possibly in recognition of the more prominent part played by women in south India’s society, possibly because the artists were accustomed to ornithological work in which the male and female of each species appeared on the same sheet, the Tanjore paintings frequently
~ 10 ~
feature two figures, one being, say, a cobbler and the other the cobbler’s wife. Just as Madras attracted artists from Golconda and Tanjore, so Company towns in eastern and northern India drew on the artistic skills and traditions of Mughal successor courts in Bengal and what is now Uttar Pradesh. The painters whose work the Archers had encountered in Patna in the 1940s had nearly all moved there from Murshidabad and Benares in the late 1700s. ‘With a certain despairing urgency [they] entered the British zones and began exploring foreign needs.’10 Murshidabad, today in West Bengal, was the capital of Bengal’s ruling nawabs. The East India Company had long been represented there; it had a factory in neighbouring Kasimbazar and would establish barracks at Berhampore. Its officials were already familiar with the local production of miniatures, and mostly featuring the Bengal nawabs or their Mughal superiors. Warren Hastings, an admirer of India’s art and literature who would become the Company’s first governor-general, had ample time to commission such a set. He was among those detained in Murshidabad for the six months in 1756 during which time the new nawab, Siraj al-Daula, assaulted and occupied Calcutta. Robert Clive famously exacted revenge by sailing to the rescue with troops from Madras and a squadron of the Royal Navy. But when Clive made Calcutta’s recapture the launch-pad for an outrageous grab for dominion in Bengal, it was at the expense of Murshidabad and its nawabs. The city quickly felt the effect. As the court, plus what was left of its wealth after the British had helped themselves, gravitated to Calcutta, Murshidabad slid into decline. To artists and their dependants, a nawab devoid of power and largesse and subject to arbitrary deposition made an unattractive patron; they too moved elsewhere, following the money to Calcutta and to the Company’s upriver hub of Patna.
Since the Ganges served as the main commercial thoroughfare between what was now British Bengal and the rest of upper India, the portal city of Patna was flourishing. By 1800 it was being described as ‘next to Benares, the richest place in India’.11 Handsome pillared residences lined the river bank. On the river itself the sail-assisted budgerows that served travellers as houseboats manoeuvred among the tow-ropes of even more cumbrous craft wallowing downstream laden with the sugar and saltpetre (for gunpowder manufacture), the cottons, indigo and opium which made up the Company’s homeward-bound ‘investment’ from Bengal. Sewak Ram, a painter who had arrived in Patna from Murshidabad, already presided over ‘a flourishing shop that specialized in pictures of costumes and trades as well as larger and more ambitious pictures of festivals’.12 By 1820 he faced competition from Shiva Lal and Shiva Dayal Lal, relatives also from Murshidabad but who nevertheless favoured very different palettes. They too had studios from which they sallied forth to display their stock to Patna’s resident British community and solicit commissions from over-nighting travellers moored at the riverside. Business was brisk; and it was the same downstream where the waters of the Ganges took a short-cut to Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal by way of the Hughli River. In a repeat of the cosmopolitan Coromandel Coast, the banks of the Hughli were lined with European settlements. At Barrackpore some of the English Company’s most sought-after real estate looked across the river to Serampore of the Danish Company, with Chandernagar of the French Compagnie des Indes and Chinsura of The Netherlands’ Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie just upstream. Rare was the passing budgerow that ran the gauntlet of these riverside stations and came away without a few unbound but carefully wrapped sets of Company Paintings.
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subject matter – deities, ceremonies, castes etc. – and certain characteristic flourishes suggest that the painter(s) responsible had learnt their trade at Golconda. Yet for both of these commissions, the paintings are on paper and in the sombre watercolours preferred by Europeans rather than in the vivid gouache in favour with Indian patrons. It was also in the south that the English company first dipped a toe in the ocean of future dominion and began to engage in what has been called the late Mughal market for entrepreneurial services. ‘By acting as an Indian merchant, fiscal entrepreneur and mercenary band leader writ large, the Company was able to suborn and conquer India.’6 When it got the better of its French rivals (in the so-called Carnatic Wars, 1744–63) and then of its most formidable neighbour (in the Mysore Wars, 1767–99), artists in the employ of local rulers encountered potential British patrons in the field or were drawn to Madras to seek them out. In effect the market for Company painting was following the flag. It would continue to do so throughout the decades of conquest that followed. Princely states which never came under direct British rule produced little Company art; important production centres like Delhi and Agra only became so after the British arrived there in the early 1800s. While stationed in the area, connoisseurs like William and James Baillie Fraser commissioned or purchased views of Delhi’s monuments and portraits of its inhabitants from named artists formerly in Mughal employ, like Ghulam Ali Khan. When Sind and Punjab completed the sequence of conquest in mid-century, the victors deemed paintings of Lahore and its former Sikh rulers to be suitable souvenirs. The results, often copied from earlier Sikh miniatures, which were never intended for European buyers, could be disappointing. ‘These horrible pictures are the result of an order by me to paint Jyepoor [Jaipur] costumes,’ wrote a Grenadier
guardsman on one of a series commissioned from an Amritsar painter.7 Occasionally, instead of following the flag, Company painting leap-frogged it. On a visit to the Cauvery delta in 1804, George Annesley, Viscount Valentia, had been delighted to find that Rajah Sarabhoji of Tanjore not only spoke English but shared Valentia’s taste in art. The rajah’s drawing-room was literally just that – his drawing room; it was ‘covered with prints and pictures of every possible kind’ and ‘of considerable merit’. Portraits of the rajah’s Maratha ancestors hung on the walls in ‘handsome gilt frames’ and the tables were spread with ‘paper, colours and implements of drawing’.8 The rajah had been tutored by a Danish missionary and had himself ‘learnt to draw in the European manner’, explains Mildred Archer, ‘He was in the habit of presenting sets of paintings, made under his supervision, to his guests and to British Residents.’9 Spanning nearly a century, Tanjore’s output, together with that of nearby Trichinopoly, well exhibits the progressive adoption of European techniques and conventions. It also embraces the usual wide range of subjects. These include notable monuments and architecture, troupes of dancers and musicians, natural history specimens (especially birds), processions and conveyances (from elephants to carriages and palanquins), ceremonies and festivals (a favourite being the rite of flying devotees likes kites known as hook-swinging), and of course individual figures from India’s inexhaustible variety of ethnic, caste and occupational communities. But the Tanjore sets of these ‘characters’ also exhibit a novel feature and one that recommended them to Shilpa and Praful Shah. For, possibly in recognition of the more prominent part played by women in south India’s society, possibly because the artists were accustomed to ornithological work in which the male and female of each species appeared on the same sheet, the Tanjore paintings frequently
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feature two figures, one being, say, a cobbler and the other the cobbler’s wife. Just as Madras attracted artists from Golconda and Tanjore, so Company towns in eastern and northern India drew on the artistic skills and traditions of Mughal successor courts in Bengal and what is now Uttar Pradesh. The painters whose work the Archers had encountered in Patna in the 1940s had nearly all moved there from Murshidabad and Benares in the late 1700s. ‘With a certain despairing urgency [they] entered the British zones and began exploring foreign needs.’10 Murshidabad, today in West Bengal, was the capital of Bengal’s ruling nawabs. The East India Company had long been represented there; it had a factory in neighbouring Kasimbazar and would establish barracks at Berhampore. Its officials were already familiar with the local production of miniatures, and mostly featuring the Bengal nawabs or their Mughal superiors. Warren Hastings, an admirer of India’s art and literature who would become the Company’s first governor-general, had ample time to commission such a set. He was among those detained in Murshidabad for the six months in 1756 during which time the new nawab, Siraj al-Daula, assaulted and occupied Calcutta. Robert Clive famously exacted revenge by sailing to the rescue with troops from Madras and a squadron of the Royal Navy. But when Clive made Calcutta’s recapture the launch-pad for an outrageous grab for dominion in Bengal, it was at the expense of Murshidabad and its nawabs. The city quickly felt the effect. As the court, plus what was left of its wealth after the British had helped themselves, gravitated to Calcutta, Murshidabad slid into decline. To artists and their dependants, a nawab devoid of power and largesse and subject to arbitrary deposition made an unattractive patron; they too moved elsewhere, following the money to Calcutta and to the Company’s upriver hub of Patna.
Since the Ganges served as the main commercial thoroughfare between what was now British Bengal and the rest of upper India, the portal city of Patna was flourishing. By 1800 it was being described as ‘next to Benares, the richest place in India’.11 Handsome pillared residences lined the river bank. On the river itself the sail-assisted budgerows that served travellers as houseboats manoeuvred among the tow-ropes of even more cumbrous craft wallowing downstream laden with the sugar and saltpetre (for gunpowder manufacture), the cottons, indigo and opium which made up the Company’s homeward-bound ‘investment’ from Bengal. Sewak Ram, a painter who had arrived in Patna from Murshidabad, already presided over ‘a flourishing shop that specialized in pictures of costumes and trades as well as larger and more ambitious pictures of festivals’.12 By 1820 he faced competition from Shiva Lal and Shiva Dayal Lal, relatives also from Murshidabad but who nevertheless favoured very different palettes. They too had studios from which they sallied forth to display their stock to Patna’s resident British community and solicit commissions from over-nighting travellers moored at the riverside. Business was brisk; and it was the same downstream where the waters of the Ganges took a short-cut to Calcutta and the Bay of Bengal by way of the Hughli River. In a repeat of the cosmopolitan Coromandel Coast, the banks of the Hughli were lined with European settlements. At Barrackpore some of the English Company’s most sought-after real estate looked across the river to Serampore of the Danish Company, with Chandernagar of the French Compagnie des Indes and Chinsura of The Netherlands’ Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie just upstream. Rare was the passing budgerow that ran the gauntlet of these riverside stations and came away without a few unbound but carefully wrapped sets of Company Paintings.
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TWO INDIVIDUAL PAINTINGS ON MICA The style of turban in the nautch scene suggests that this one at least was copied from a Lucknow painting.
| 21 | Nobleman and his entourage watching a nautch (top)
| 22 | A wedding procession (bottom) Patna, c. 1840–60 |14.5 x 19 cm | A 99.2122(17)
Patna, c. 1840–60 | 19 x 24cm | A 99.2122(16) The nobleman and his principal attendants are seated on a rug while others stand behind holding a morchhal, a white cloth, and a box of sweetmeats. The nawab is smoking from a hookah. One seated attendant holds a second sleeve to the hookah, while another holds a crutch in case the nobleman should become tired. A favoured concubine sits alongside also smoking from her own smaller hookah with an attendant beside her. They are watching a nautch, a dancer rotates while men play the sarangi and the tabla and a woman holds the clappers and perhaps sings. The scene is taking place on a brilliantly coloured striped durrie under a red canopy supported by white poles. All the men are dressed in white with brightly coloured paijama, cummerbunds and Lucknow-style turbans, while the women by contrast are dressed in brilliantly coloured flared sharara, kameez and dupattas.
The bridegroom on a white horse is being led in a baraat to the bride’s house, preceded by men on elephants and on foot waving flags and pennants and by musicians playing various drums, a trumpet and of course the shehnai. Around the bridegroom men hold up flower wands and large stylized leaves, whisks and flowers and a lantern.
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TWO INDIVIDUAL PAINTINGS ON MICA The style of turban in the nautch scene suggests that this one at least was copied from a Lucknow painting.
| 21 | Nobleman and his entourage watching a nautch (top)
| 22 | A wedding procession (bottom) Patna, c. 1840–60 |14.5 x 19 cm | A 99.2122(17)
Patna, c. 1840–60 | 19 x 24cm | A 99.2122(16) The nobleman and his principal attendants are seated on a rug while others stand behind holding a morchhal, a white cloth, and a box of sweetmeats. The nawab is smoking from a hookah. One seated attendant holds a second sleeve to the hookah, while another holds a crutch in case the nobleman should become tired. A favoured concubine sits alongside also smoking from her own smaller hookah with an attendant beside her. They are watching a nautch, a dancer rotates while men play the sarangi and the tabla and a woman holds the clappers and perhaps sings. The scene is taking place on a brilliantly coloured striped durrie under a red canopy supported by white poles. All the men are dressed in white with brightly coloured paijama, cummerbunds and Lucknow-style turbans, while the women by contrast are dressed in brilliantly coloured flared sharara, kameez and dupattas.
The bridegroom on a white horse is being led in a baraat to the bride’s house, preceded by men on elephants and on foot waving flags and pennants and by musicians playing various drums, a trumpet and of course the shehnai. Around the bridegroom men hold up flower wands and large stylized leaves, whisks and flowers and a lantern.
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This catalogue is published in conjunction with the Exhibition INDIAN LIFE AND PEOPLE IN THE 19TH CENTURY: COMPANY PAINTINGS IN THE TAPI & CSMVS COLLECTIONS at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Mumbai, December 6, 2018 to January 7, 2019 @Tapi Collection A Private Collection of Praful & Shilpa Shah
Dr. Amichand Shah’s Wadi, Rampura Tunki Surat – 395 003, Gujarat, India www.tapicollection.com Email: info@tapicollection.com
W All rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted or reproduced in any form or by any means without prior permission from the publisher. © Roli Books 2019 Published in India by Roli Books M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi-110 048, India Ph: ++91-11-4068 2000, E-mail: info@rolibooks.com Website: www.rolibooks.com ISBN: 978-81-938608-1-6 Editor: Neelam Narula Design: Sneha Pamneja Pre-press: Jyoti Dey Production: Yuvraj Singh Printed and bound in Nutech Print Services, India
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