Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India 9781526139634
Light was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire, even beyond its role as a symbol of know
690 71 16MB
English Pages 284 [256] Year 2019
Polecaj historie
Table of contents :
1
Title Pages
Niharika Dinkar
Title Pages
Niharika Dinkar
(p.i) Empires of light (p.ii) (p.iii) Empires of light
Title Pages
Title Pages
2
(p.vi) Plates
Niharika Dinkar
(p.vi) Plates
Niharika Dinkar
(p.vi) Plates
3
(p.viii) Figures
Niharika Dinkar
(p.viii) Figures
Niharika Dinkar
(p.viii) Figures
(p.viii) Figures
4
(p.xii) Acknowledgements
Niharika Dinkar
(p.xii) Acknowledgements
Niharika Dinkar
(p.xii) Acknowledgements
5
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Niharika Dinkar
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Colonial darkness
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Urban chiaroscuro
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Writing with light
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
(p.22) Photo-graphic archives from colonial India
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Notes:
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
6
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Niharika Dinkar
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
(p.45) The phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Encounters with the East in the cave
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Notes:
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
7
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Niharika Dinkar
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Act 1: unveiling the Eastern bride
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Act 2: war and the colonial vision machine
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Act 3: the conquering empire of light and reason
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Act 4: seeing too much
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Epilogue
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Notes:
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
8
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Niharika Dinkar
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
(p.116) The theatrical apparatus: staging technologies
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
The reality effect: theatre and the curtain
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Ravi Varma and the theatrical tableau
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Melodrama and its discontents
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
(p.134) Disguise and subterfuge
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Contesting visual genealogies
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Notes:
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
9
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Niharika Dinkar
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Reproductive technologies and the threat of exposure
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Shameful nakedness and the violated body
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
The naked and the nude
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Ornamentation and the nude
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Draping the female body
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Attired in virtue
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Cloth, commerce and Christianity
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Notes:
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
10
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Niharika Dinkar
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Darkness and interiority
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Interior spaces
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
(p.201) Phallic solitude
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
The home and the world
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
The antarmahal: interiority and subjectivity
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Notes:
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
11
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Niharika Dinkar
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Shadowlines
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
(p.225) Portraits of the artist
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Craftsman portraits: the labouring body
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Mythologies of the artist
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Notes:
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
12
Postscript
Niharika Dinkar
Postscript
Niharika Dinkar
Abstract and Keywords
Postscript
Postscript
Notes:
13
(p.253) Bibliography
Niharika Dinkar
(p.253) Bibliography
Niharika Dinkar
Secondary sources: books and monographs
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
Articles in edited collections and journals
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
Unpublished dissertations
Journal special issues
Catalogues and exhibitions
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
Published primary sources: books and monographs
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
Primary sources: articles in journals and edited volumes
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.253) Bibliography
Archival and unpublished material
British Library: India Office Collections
Baroda State Archives
(p.253) Bibliography
(p.281) Mysore Archives
Kerala State Archives
Journals
Archives and collections
(p.253) Bibliography
14
(p.282) Index
Niharika Dinkar
(p.282) Index
(p.282) Index
(p.282) Index
(p.282) Index
(p.282) Index
Citation preview
Title Pages
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Title Pages Niharika Dinkar
(p.i) Empires of light
(p.ii) (p.iii) Empires of light
SERIES EDITORS Amelia G. Jones, Marsha Meskimmon Rethinking Art’s Histories aims to open out art history from its most basic structures by foregrounding work that challenges the conventional periodisation and geographical subfields of traditional art history, and addressing a wide range of visual cultural forms from the early modern period to the present. These books will acknowledge the impact of recent scholarship on our understanding of the complex temporalities and cartographies that have emerged through centuries of world-wide trade, political colonisation and the diasporic movement of people and ideas across national and continental borders. Also available in the series Colouring the Caribbean: Race and the art of Agostino Brunias Mia L. Bagneris Performance art in Eastern Europe since 1960 Amy Bryzgel Page 1 of 3 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Title Pages Art, museums and touch Fiona Candlin Travelling images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture Anna Dahlgren The ‘do-it-yourself’ artwork: Participation from fluxus to relational aesthetics Anna Dezeuze (ed.) Fleshing out surfaces: Skin in French art and medicine, 1650–1850 Mechthild Fend The political aesthetics of the Armenian avant-garde: The journey of the ‘painterly real’, 1987– 2004 Angela Harutyunyan The matter of miracles: Neapolitan baroque sanctity and architecture Helen Hills The face of medicine: Visualising medical masculinities in late nineteenth-century Paris Mary Hunter Glorious catastrophe: Jack Smith, performance and visual culture Dominic Johnson Otherwise: Imagining queer feminist art histories Amelia Jones and Erin Silver (eds) Addressing the other woman: Textual correspondences in feminist art and writing Kimberly Lamm Above sea: Contemporary art, urban culture, and the fashioning of global Shanghai Jenny Lin Photography and documentary film in the making of modern Brazil Luciana Martins After the event: New perspectives in art history Charles Merewether and John Potts (eds) Women, the arts and globalization: Eccentric experience Marsha Meskimmon and Dorothy C. Rowe (eds) Flesh cinema: The corporeal turn in American avant-garde film Ara Osterweil The ecological eye: Assembling an ecocritical art history Andrew Patrizio After-affects|after-images: Trauma and aesthetic transformation in the virtual Feminist museum Griselda Pollock Migration into art: Transcultural identities and art-making in a globalised world Anne Ring Petersen Vertiginous mirrors: The animation of the visual image and early modern travel Rose Marie San Juan The synthetic proposition: Conceptualism and the political referent in contemporary art Nizan Shaked The paradox of body, building and motion in seventeenth-century England Kimberley Skelton The newspaper clipping: A modern paper object Anke Te Heesen, translated by Lori Lantz
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Title Pages Screen/space: The projected image in contemporary art Tamara Trodd (ed.) Art and human rights: Contemporary Asian contexts Caroline Turner and Jen Webb Timed out: Art and the transnational Caribbean Leon Wainwright Performative monuments: Performance, photography, and the rematerialisation of public art Mechtild Widrich Manchester University Press (p.iv) Copyright © Niharika Dinkar 2019 The right of Niharika Dinkar to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Publication made possible in part by generous contributions from Boise State University Department of The Arts, College of The Arts and Sciences, and Division of Research and Economic Development.
ISBN 978 1 5261 3963 4 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or any third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
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Plates
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
(p.vi) Plates Niharika Dinkar
Plates appear between pages 114 and 115 1 Gaganendranath Tagore, Madane Theatre, c. 1921. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 2 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘A New Map of India from the Latest Authority’, frontispiece, The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan: A Hudibrastic Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz, 1816. Aquatint with hand colouring, 24cm x 14.7cm. Courtesy of Posner Memorial Collection, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 3 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Phantasmagoria, A View in Elephanta’, The Grand Master of the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan: A Hudibrastic Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz, 1816. Aquatint with hand colouring, 24cm x 14.7cm. Courtesy of Posner Memorial Collection, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 4 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Hindoo Incantations, A View in Elephanta’, The Grand Master of the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan: A Hudibrastic Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz, 1816. Aquatint with hand colouring, 24cm x 14.7cm. Courtesy of Posner Memorial Collection, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 5 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘An Extraordinary Eclipse’, The Grand Master of the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan: A Hudibrastic Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz, 1816. Aquatint with hand colouring, 24cm x 14.7cm. Courtesy of Posner Memorial Collection Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 6 Philip Mercier, Sense of Sight, 1744–47. Oil on canvas, 132.1cm x 153.7cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 7 Joseph Wright of Derby, Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors, 1772. Oil on canvas, 127cm x 101.6cm. Derby Museum and Art Gallery. (p.vii) 8 William Hodges, A View Taken in the Bay of Otaheiti Peha, 1773. Oil on canvas, 91.5cm x 137.1cm. Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (The National Trust). 9 William Hodges, Tahiti Revisited, 1776. Oil on canvas, 92.7cm x 138.4cm. National Maritime Museum, London. 10 Sita Ram, View of the Illuminations at the Palace of Furruk Bukhsh, 1814. Watercolour on paper, 38cm x 50cm. © The British Library Board, Add.Or.4760.
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Plates 11 Ravi Varma, Arjun and Subhadra, 1890. Oil on canvas. Maharaja Fatehsingh Museum, Baroda. 12 Ravi Varma, Draupadi in Disguise Being Induced to Take a Jar of liquor to Kichaka by Sudeshna n.d. Chromolithograph, Ravi Varma Press, Karla Lonavla. Wellcome Library no. 26622i (CC BY 4.0). 13 Ravi Varma, Draupadi at the Court of Viraat, 1897. Oil on canvas. Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum. 14 Ravi Varma, Story of Purūravas and Urvashi: Urvashi flying off to heaven while Purūravas tries to stop her, 1896. Chromolithograph, F.A.L. Press, Bombay. Wellcome Library, London (CC BY 4.0). 15 Ravi Varma, At the Bath, c. 1902. Oil on canvas. Private Collection, Trivandrum. 16 Ravi Varma, Shakuntala Patralekhan, 1911. Half tone reprint from oil painting, reproduced in S.N. Joshi, Half Tone Reprints of the Renowned Pictures of the Late Raja Ravi Velma (Pune: Chitrashala Press), Wellcome Library, London. 17 Ravi Varma, The Student, c. 1901. Oil on canvas. Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum. 18 Ravi Varma, Man Reading a Newspaper, c. 1904. Oil on canvas. Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum. 19 C. Raja Raja Varma, Ravi Varma in Mourning, c. 1901. Oil on canvas. Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum. 20 Pestonjee Bomanjee, At Rest, c. 1900. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. 21 Ravi Varma, There Comes Papa, c. 1893. Oil on canvas. Private Collection, Trivandrum. 22 Anonymous, An Artist Seated at a Table Painting a Picture, 1815–20. © The British Library Board, Add.Or.347/D40095-34.
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Figures
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
(p.viii) Figures Niharika Dinkar
0.1 Benoît Louis Prévost after Charles Nicolas Cochin the younger, ‘Science’, frontispiece to the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 1772. Etching and engraving, 33.5cm x 21.7cm. Wellcome Library/creative commons (CC BY 4.0). 3 0.2 M.V. Dhurandhar, ‘An Opium Club’, in S.M. Edwardes, By-ways of Bombay (Bombay: D.P. Taraporevala and Sons, American Libraries, 1912). 14 0.3 Lamp advertisements from The Statesman, Calcutta, 1891–1906. © The British Library Board, Asia, Pacific & Africa X 855. 15 0.4 Advertisement from The Electrician, London, 17 June 1882. New York Public Library. 15 0.5 Advertisements from John Murray, Bradshaw’s Handbook for the Bombay Presidency and Northwestern Provinces of India (London: W.J. Adams, 1864). 19 0.6 Edward Moor, frontispiece, Hindu Pantheon, 1810. British Museum 1940,0713,0.253 (www.britishmuseum.org/collection). © Trustees of the British Museum. 23 0.7 Theatre advertisements from The Statesman, Calcutta, 1875–1915, © The British Library Board, Asia, Pacific & Africa X 855. 26 1.1 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Strange Figures near the Cave of Elephanta’, The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan: A Hudibrastic. Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz, 1816. Aquatint with hand colouring, 24cm x 14.7cm. Courtesy of Posner Memorial Collection, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. 47 1.2 James Gillray, ‘Camera-Obscura’, 1788. Aquatint, 15.7cm x 14.44cm. British Museum 1851,0901.403 (www.britishmuseum.org/collection). © Trustees of the British Museum. 50 1.3 James Sayers, ‘Galante Show’, 1788. Aquatint, 16.35cm x 14.9cm. British Museum 1851,0901.404 (www.britishmuseum.org/collection). © Trustees of the British Museum. 51 (p.ix) 1.4 Fritz Lang, still from Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb), 1959. Kindly supported by Beta Film GmbH. 59 2.1 T.H. Pitt, title vignette from H.H. Wilson ed., The Oriental Portfolio (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1841). Sketch based on a drawing by Lieutenant Thomas Bacon, 1838, 21 3/4 inches x 14 7/8 inches. © The British Library Board, X724(1). 70
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Figures 2.2 T.C. Dibdin, ‘Ancient Gateway at Deig’, plate 1 from H.H. Wilson ed., The Oriental Portfolio, London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1841. Sketch based on a drawing by Lieutenant Thomas Bacon, 1838, 21 3/4 inches x 14 7/8 inches. © The British Library Board, X724(6); Item number: 6. 75 2.3 ‘A Nautch in the Palace of the Ameer of Sind’, plate 2 from H.H. Wilson ed., The Oriental Portfolio (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1841). Drawings made by Captain Grindlay in 1808, painted by Stephanoff, on stone by L. Haghe, 1838, 21 3/4 inches x 14 7/8 inches. © The British Library Board, X724(4). 76 2.4 Isaac Pyke, frontispiece to The Stringers Journall, 1713. Ink on paper. MSS 2390; Eugene Fairfield McPike (1870–1946) Collection; L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. 79 2.5 John Bacon, Memorial to William Jones, 1799. Courtesy of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. 85 2.6 John Bacon, base of the Memorial to William Jones, 1799. Courtesy of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. 86 2.7 John Bacon, detail of the base of the Memorial to William Jones, 1799. Courtesy of St Paul’s Cathedral, London. 88 2.8 Thomas Maurice, ‘Courma Avatar’, plate 9 from History of Hindostan, Vol. 1 (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1795). University of California Libraries. 89 2.9 William Skelton, ‘A View of the Inside of a Zananah’, engraving based on a painting in the possession of William Hodges, plate 4 of William Hodges, Travels in India, during the years 1780, 1781, 1782, 1781, 1782, & 1783 (London: Printed for the Author and sold by J. Edwards Pall Mall, 1793). © The British Library Board, W2126(4) vi, p. 156. 100 3.1 Thomas Daniell, ‘Old Fort’, from Play House and Holwell’s Monument from Views of Calcutta, 1786. Coloured etching with aquatint. P88. © The British Library Board, Item number: 88. 118 3.2 Ravi Varma, Raja Harischandra, Chandramati and their son Rohitasva, 1896. Oil on canvas, 28 inches x 39 inches. Collection of Ritu and P. Alak Gajapati Raju. 128 (p.x) 3.3 Ravi Varma, Harishchandra and Taramati, 1898. Oil on canvas. Maharaja Fatehsingh Museum, Baroda. 129 3.4 Ravi Varma, Sita Bhoomipravesh, 1880. Oil on canvas. Maharaja Fatehsingh Museum, Baroda. 136 4.1 Ravi Varma, Draupadi Vastraharan, c. 1888–89. Oil on canvas. Maharaja Fatehsingh Museum, Baroda. 157 4.2 Calcutta Art Studio, ‘Nala and Damayanti’, c. 1895. Coloured lithograph. India Office Collection. © The British Library Board, Add Or 5317. 159 4.3 M.V. Durandhar, Steps to Devotion, c. 1907. Watercolour. Collection of P&S. Mitter. 171 5.1 Advertising images of lighting technologies, Indian Industries and Power, vol. 10, 1912–13. New York Public Library. 191 5.2 Unknown photographer, ‘Listening to a Purana Recitation’, c. 1890s. Reproduced in N. Balakrishnan Nair, Raja Ravi Varma: Ora jeevitha charitram [Raja Ravi Varma: A Biography] (Thiruvananthapuram: Kamalalaya Book Depot, 1953). Photo: author. 195 5.3 Lala Deen Dayal, ‘A drawing room in the Bashir Bagh Palace in Hyderabad’, c. 1880s. Photograph. Curzon Collection: ‘Views of HH the Nizam’s Dominions, Hyderabad, Deccan, 1892’. Alkazi Collection © The British Library Board, Photo 430/6(17). 196 5.4 Ravi Varma, Reclining Nair Lady, 1902. Oil on canvas. Private Collection, Cochin. 206 6.1 Still from D.G. Phalke’s, How Films Are Made, 1917 (indiancine.ma). 219
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Figures 6.2 ‘An Indian Portrait Painter’, Illustrated Times, 28 September 1861. Columbia University. 226 6.3 M.V. Dhurandhar, ‘Artist Portrait’, Modern Review, 1907. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Signature Ad 5945. 228 6.4 Ravi Varma painting a portrait of the Nizam, c. 1902. Photograph. Kilimanoor Palace, Kilimanoor. 230 6.5 Ravi Varma and Raja Varma at their Girgaum studio, 1894. Photograph. Kilimanoor Palace, Kilimanoor. 232 6.6 ‘Indian Loom’, from Illustrated Exhibitor, 1851. Hathi Trust, Seattle Public Library. 235 6.7 Lockwood Kipling, Woodcarver, 1870. Victoria and Albert Museum, 0929:56/(IS). 238 (p.xi) Note: The title and dates of the paintings of Ravi Varma are often uncertain, with titles sometimes appended retrospectively. The above list reflects careful judgements from a variety of secondary sources as well as close consultation with the primary sources and conversations with museum professionals and art historians who have worked on Ravi Varma.
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Acknowledgements
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
(p.xii) Acknowledgements Niharika Dinkar
This book began as a dissertation at SUNY Stony Brook and bears the marks of the interdisciplinary conversations fostered there, on the disgruntled edges of the New York art community. I am grateful to the members of my committee who have supported my research through the years, in particular Zainab Bahrani and Nick Mirzoeff. Zainab has been particularly generous, reading drafts and offering invaluable advice through the publication process. Nick’s comments have been insightful in encouraging me to foreground questions of empire. No words are enough to thank R. Nandakumar, who has been extremely generous with his time and knowledge of Kerala modernity and whose work on Ravi Varma has been crucial to my own ideas. His help with image permissions and Trivandrum resources has been invaluable and this research would have been truly impossible without his inputs. Gyan Prakash has been a constant source of encouragement throughout the process from its earliest days at Stony Brook and I owe him a deep debt of gratitude. I have benefitted from conversations with Kajri Jain, Geeta Kapur, Iftikhar Dadi, Rupika Chawla, Phillip Zarrilli, J. Devika, Ranjani Mazumdar, Ranita Chatterjee, Jim Rubin, Milind Wakankar, M.G. Ramachandran and Jyotindra Jain, all of whom have helped to clarify my thoughts on the subject at various stages of this process. In Berlin I was lucky to have generous interlocutors in my colleagues at the Forum Transregionale, particularly Priyani Roy Chowdhury, Sugata Ray and Atreyee Gupta. In Boise, Kathleen Keys was crucial in pushing the project through the many hoops for subvention funding. I am indebted to Ampady Kaimal, Dr Venu Vasudevan, Rohit and Rebecca Joseph, Sabitha Satchi, George Jose, Purshottam Dhumal, Dr Rathindranath Mukherjee, Suresh Jayaram and Rahaab Allana, who have all generously extended their resources to me. My friends from Delhi with whom I began this intellectual journey have supported this research in many ways – coming to my talks, hosting me and even stepping in with laptops when mine died! I am thankful to Nikhil Govind, Rahul Govind, Srila Roy, Mishta Roy, Nishad Patnaik, Prashant (p.xiii) Keshavamurthy and Anirban Datta. In Montreal, Sandeep Banerjee and Katie Zien were helpful in seeing this project through. Tom Williams and Gedas Gasparavicius have always provided honest feedback and great companionship, for which I remain thankful.
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Acknowledgements I was lucky to receive the support of several institutions during the research and writing process, including Asia Society, India Foundation for the Arts, Forum Transregionale Studien and Boise State University and I extend my gratitude for this support. I am grateful to Cambridge Scholars Publications for granting me permission to reprint parts of Chapter 2, which was published in an edited volume under their imprint, Light in a Sociocultural Perspective, edited by Ruth Lubashevsky and Ronit Milano. Chapter 5 was published in an earlier version in Art History, Vol. 37, No. 3, 2014 and I am grateful for permission to republish. I could not have asked for a more supportive editor than Amelia Jones and I am grateful to the editorial team at Manchester University Press including Emma Brennan and Alun Richards for guiding me through the process. Shawn Edrington was indispensable in the final stages, processing copyright permissions and payments and I owe him much gratitude. My extended family in San Francisco and New Jersey has provided me with a home away from home. My brother Nimesh has been the person I have turned to at every crisis, so a big thanks there. My family in Delhi and Patna have been patient and supportive through this process. Kat Wright’s help with childcare made writing and travel possible. Meghant has been part of this project from its earliest days and his companionship and critique have shaped it in many meaningful ways. Zaira’s arrival midway through the writing process was the most welcome break I could have imagined and her joyous presence has kept me going. My parents, Dinkar and Deepa have shown me the light in their own distinctive ways. This book is for my father, who opened up new worlds of imagination to me and whose unstinting support for all my endeavours was crucial in helping me forge independent thought, something I value more and more each day. (p.xiv)
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00006
Abstract and Keywords The introduction examines the empire of light formulated at the intersection of industrial and imperial visual technologies during the era of the industrialisation of light. It argues that this had a profound impact on public life and practices of seeing, instituting new regimes of visibility. It asks how this was a legacy of Enlightenment ideas of light and evaluates its reception and negotiation by Indian artists. Keywords: Empire, Light, Visual technologies, Industrialisation, Enlightenment, Visibility, Indian artists
In his well-known reflections on the revolution in France, Edmund Burke pointed to the emergence of a ‘new conquering empire of light’. Associating it with the liberatory rhetoric of Enlightenment thought, he took aim at its central metaphor – the empire of light and reason and its vision of a naked truth: But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.1 One does not have to endorse Burke’s critique to note his use of the language of light to express truth, and indeed it had been used to great effect by his predecessors, including Locke and Bacon.2 Visual imagery had registered the era’s opposing concepts of the lumières and ténèbres in paintings, allegorical frontispieces or political tracts and journalism, giving material form to abstract concepts like liberty and knowledge.3 What is interesting in Burke’s characterisation of light as a new, conquering empire aligned with reason is that the intellectual foundation of
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire Enlightenment thought is imagined not just in enlightened discourse between philosophes that had a wider public and historical resonance, but includes a powerful visual dimension. Burke’s protean phrase nods towards the empire of light formed by developments in artificial illumination that accompanied the industrialisation of light, its new role in economic and industrial activity, its place in urban public life and spectacle and its transformation of the home and individual interiors, and its instrumentalisation through an industry of representation (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting etc.). Wolfgang Schivelbusch has chronicled how a modern consciousness was forged amid these dramatic (p.2) transformations that sought to banish the night.4 So much so that Jonathan Crary views late capitalism as ushering in an era of permanent illumination, a 24/7 where the distinction between night and day is rendered irrelevant.5 Sean Cubitt extends this to a wider ‘practice of light’ where visual media and its production of an aesthetics of dominance are seen as the latest episode in humanity’s struggle to control light.6 Burke’s conquering empire of light not only evokes such an industrial empire based on lighting technologies, but also points to the political circumstance of empire. Burke was, after all, writing in the middle of the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, conducted between 1787 and 1795, in which he played a major role. Light had regularly been invoked in Enlightenment iconographies of vision and knowledge (Figure 0.1), with torch-bearing messengers removing the blindfold of error from the eyes of nations, truth opening the eyes of the blind, clouds parting to shower light upon superstition or the extinguishing of false light by means of the candlesnuffer.7 In the context of empire, these visual allegories of knowledge were appended to an imperial optics that equated darkened lands and colonial subjects with the blind. The discovery of new lands, the unveiling of Oriental mysteries and the civilising light of empire functioned as technologies of illumination, bringing darkened lands and peoples into view and within the domain of the knowable, affirming Jean Louis Comolli’s famous assertion of the ‘frenzy of the visible’ in the nineteenth century.8 Alongside an industrial empire of light, Burke’s vision of a conquering empire therefore summons the light of empire, as light assumes a significant place within an imperial optics and its engagement with the colonial world. Even as light featured as a symbol of knowledge and progress in post-Enlightenment narratives, it was central to the visual politics and imaginative geographies of empire. Geographical spaces were mapped in terms of ‘cities of light’ and ‘hearts of darkness’, and ‘the civilising mission’ employed iconographies of torches or the lifting of the veil to indicate a passage into enlightened rationality. These were not merely discursive constructs but were supported by a material infrastructure of lighting and representational technologies that drew colonial subjects into its ambit. Imperial cartographies reproduced a world divided both temporally and spatially between zones of light and darkness where acts of seeing and technologies of making visible were invested with incredible power. Nicholas Dirks notes that ‘colonialism provided a critical theatre for the Enlightenment project, the grand laboratory that linked discovery and reason’.9 Tasked with bringing light into the benighted corners of the world, the civilising mission of the British Empire cast its glare upon Indian epistemology, denouncing indigenous knowledge as superstitious darkness. Gayatri Spivak’s notion of an epistemic violence has cast this problem in the register (p.3)
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (p.4) of language and speech, where the erasure of local knowledge was viewed as an archival silencing of the subaltern voice.10 Burke’s empire of light and reason draws attention to this as a visual model at the heart of Enlightenment thought where light, truth and reason are bound together in a powerful matrix with its promises of freedom. Tied to empire, it postulates a visual regime garnered around light and reason that emerged as a potent instrument of subjection in the colony, producing new cartographies of visibility. This study examines the terrain produced by a regime of light and visibility drawn from Enlightenment thought and its intersection with industrial and imperial technologies of light in colonial India. The industrialisation of light through the course of the nineteenth century and its circulation across the imperial economy effected a dramatic transformation of spaces and subjectivities as viewing and living arrangements were determined through new patterns of visibility. This account examines the 0.1 Benoît Louis Prévost after Charles contours of colonial subjects shaped by the Nicolas Cochin the younger, ‘Science’, light of empire, the demands for visibility frontispiece to the Encyclopedie of Diderot and d’Alembert, 1772 through technologies of illumination and their inscription within an imperial regime of light and vision. It asks in what ways an imperial vision machine made visible colonial subjects and how subjectivity was engendered by the visibilities thus produced. Through the course of the nineteenth century light and darkness had evolved into persistent metaphors endorsing an ideology of progress between an imperial centre that dazzled with the lights of civilisation and the primitive darkness of the peripheral colony. New technologies of light and spectacle reproduced a triumphant narrative of Western modernity – from the christening of Paris as the City of Light to what has continued in contemporary times in the displays of the dazzling ‘shock and awe’ tactics of war technologies. Meanwhile, hearts of darkness persist. The characterisations of the ‘dark continent’ or the ‘dark ages’ have evolved into the black holes of sub-Saharan Africa or rural Bihar, proffered as examples of a dark, prehistoric past that must make its way to the illuminated spectacles of modernity. Recent scholarship has revaluated clair-obscur (chiaroscuro) as a more appropriate epistemological metaphor for the Enlightenment, rather than the common valorisations of light.11 The classic account of pictorial chiaroscuro comes from Roger de Piles’ Couers de peinture par principles (1708), a work that had a wide influence across western Europe and aligned chiaroscuro with the expressive qualities of colour rather than the intellectual aspects of
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire line. Chiaroscuro was used in two distinct senses in the eighteenth century, as the arrangement of light and shade in pictures as well as in a wider understanding of the phenomenal workings of light and shade in the world.12 Its technical usage by painters and artists was soon surpassed by its entry into worldly spheres of discussion, so much so that by the mid-eighteenth century it had become one of the ‘figures of speech current among polite people’.13 Its (p.5) central motif of clarity and obscurity extended not only from the painterly to the rhetorical but across the cultural landscape to involve music, opera, dance and theatre within its ambit.14 As such, clair-obscur provided a visual metaphor for a wider epistemological pattern and practice, where darkness and shadows were either seen as obstructions to the clarity and immediacy of the truth or valorised for provoking the imagination beyond the rational. Mark Darlow and Marion Lafogue credit the rapid diffusion of the term clairobscur and its widespread usage across the eighteenth century as a response to the new space-time of the night as chronicled in accounts by Alain Cabantou (Histoire de la Nuit, 2009) and Wolfgang Schivelbusch (Disenchanted Night, 1983) and the conquest of the night by urban lighting projects that had wideranging social, economic, psychological and legal implications.15 Dominant art-historical accounts of light have, on the other hand, viewed the passage to modernity as an emergence from the confines of the studio (and ‘tradition’), with its production of chiaroscurist canvases, to the freedoms of plein-air painting that allowed the artist to confront natural phenomena anew. The emergence of plein-air painting has been linked to the growing importance of Romantic science and scientific experiments with light, reflected in the wider tonal range and an immediacy of engagement signalling an artistic authenticity, which correspondingly saw academic painting and its reliance upon chiaroscuro as artifice.16 Despite this significance of light in narratives of modernity, it has rarely been explored in relationship to Oriental light, a trope that figures significantly in artists’ travel writings and reflections.17 Although portable paints and canvas were noted as tools crucial to the production of the immediacy of plein-air painting, the promise of an unmediated inscription of natural light has driven the Romantic vision that undergirds this narrative of modernism. Hollis Clayson’s study of the significance of artificial illumination in Paris that led to its christening as the City of Light points instead to the cultural preoccupation with artificial lighting technologies that impelled artists to seek novel techniques of accommodating the new sources of light in their paintings. She recounts the inclusion of multiple artificial sources of light in painting, and the wider conversation and enthusiasm generated by progressively newer lighting technologies denaturalising the discourse around plein-air painting to cast it as a conscious, selective choice.18 A number of exhibitions have recognised the emerging scholarship on the urban night, to signal a new direction in understanding the import of nineteenth-century painting.19 Meanwhile, the darkened interiors of chiaroscuro painting made way for an extraordinary new range of black drawing materials and innovative printmaking that conveyed the fascination with the urban night in studies of dimly lit interiors.20 Beyond painting, Krista Thompson’s study of the economy of light in contemporary video and (p.6) photographic cultures of African diasporic communities reinterprets the logic of Enlightenment light in contemporary culture.21 Thompson posits an aesthetics of shine, shimmer and splendour that signifies a visual excess transcending rational vision, and she describes the retinal absorption of such practices of light as ‘afterimages’. What did such an imperial discourse on light and modernity mean for colonial India?
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire Colonial darkness In early twentieth-century India an explicit romantic cultural investment in light and shadow presented itself in the work of a number of artists, poets and filmmakers who drew upon the language of light to evolve an aesthetic idiom that countered dominant ideas of visibility. The literary movement that called itself Chhayavaad (Of the Shadows) was one prominent example that took refuge in the darkness. A romantic movement in modern Hindi poetry that emerged in the mid-1920s, it employed imagery of candlelight and lamps amid obscure shadows. The poet Mahadevi Varma included the recurrent motif of a lamp, often featured with the waiting woman, the virahini separated from her lover. Varma, who had been trained as a painter in ‘the realistic Ravi Varma style’ but emulated the fluid linearity of the Bengal School artists in her adulthood, included sketches along with her poetry.22 In her collection Dip-sikha (1942) the lamp figures as a surrogate for the creative self who lights the way but is consumed by her passions in the process. Another significant example was Rabindranath Tagore’s play King of the Dark Chamber (1914), later reinterpreted in a powerful mural by K.G. Subramanyan (1963), which posed questions of truth around light and visibility. The allegorical play explicitly questioned the order of visibility within which meaning is formulated, featuring a protagonist (the king) who cannot be seen. If Foucault’s study of Las Meninas indicated a representational mode that organised visual subjects from the position of the sovereign, Tagore’s visual scheme posed one that still revolved around the king, but now invisible and thus unverifiable. King of the Dark Chamber asked questions about the limits of vision and its relationship to truth – questions that were pursued by philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was intrigued enough to translate the play.23 Meanwhile, Rabindranath’s nephew, Gaganendranath Tagore, embarked upon a series of ‘nocturnes’ between 1915 and 1920, in paintings that at first explored vast shadows using Japanese ink-wash techniques and then took to portraying the landscape by night, including processions, temples and theatres lit up by flickering lights. The metaphysical implications of light have had a long history in Indian thought, ranging from Rajput rituals around the sun and fire to Zoroastrian (p.7) rites or the Sufi belief in fana (annihilation) when faced with the brilliant light of god. The notable presence of the Suhrawardi (illuminationist) school of thought in the Mughal courts proposed an ontology of light where all existence was a reflection of god’s light, and that the ontological significance of all beings depended upon the degree of its illumination. The emperor emerged as an embodiment of divine light.24 As Abu’l Fazl writes in the Akbarnama: Royalty is a light emanating from God, a ray from the sun, the illuminator of the universe … Modern language calls this light farr-i īzidī (the divine light) and the tongue of antiquity calls this light kiyān khwarah (the sublime halo). It is communicated by God to kings, without the intermediate assistance of anyone, and men, in the presence of it, bend the forehead of praise towards the ground of submission … Many excellent qualities flow from this light.25 Painters like Abdur Rehman Chugtai (1897–1975), associated for some time with the Bengal School, sought to draw upon this heritage, claiming to represent a Muslim aesthetics in illuminated watercolours that included allusions to a mystic light as a specific point of difference against the darkness of the Hindu temple.26 Beyond Muslim aesthetics, the imagery of light was central to Christian missionary proselytisation practices in the colonial world, indicating the passage of the heathen from the darkness into the light of Christ – Holman Hunt’s Light of the World (1853), for example, was paraded around the imperial colonies between 1905 and 1908, Page 5 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire drawing as many as seven million viewers.27 Edwin Arnold’s life of Buddha in Light of Asia (1879), later adapted for cinema by Franz Osten and Himanshu Rai in 1928, represented efforts to reinscribe the powerful vocabulary of light within an Eastern mysticism. The cinematic collaboration marked a long engagement with German technicians in the Bombay film industry and the production of a poetics of light and shadow that interpreted the aesthetics of film noir, marking an era of transnational collaboration in lighting technologies and practices.28 As the cursory examples above indicate, there is a rich archive of representational practices from early twentieth-century India using the visual language of light and dark to counter dominant practices of seeing. Why and how did light become a potent tool for these artists and poets? This study looks back to the long nineteenth century for an archaeology of such visual practices which confronted the role of light in modernity, not only in its ideological forms but also in its material manifestations in the increasing role of lighting and representational technologies in public life and entertainment. It argues that the empire of light formulated at the intersection of industrial and imperial visual technologies had a profound impact on public life and practices of seeing, instituting new regimes of visibility. The following chapters evolve an argument for the drama of vision in its encounter with the opacity of Oriental lands. The book follows the trajectory (p.8) of a gendered visual regime based on light and reason and its attempts to unveil an Oriental darkness typically figured as feminine. An eroticised theatre of revelation and concealment structures this visual economy and its pursuit of Enlightenment notions of a ‘naked truth’. Rather than positing a distinction between natural light and artificial light, the endeavour here is to consider how light was instrumentalised to achieve certain ends. As such, this study views iconographies of unveiling as strategic technologies of illumination consonant with the lighting technologies of the day, to describe how colonial bodies and spaces were subjected to an imperial vision. The inscription of bodies within such an architectonics of light and visibility produces what Foucault has called ‘subjection by illumination’.29 Rather than a nostalgic recovery of the life of shadows proposed by the Chhayavaadis, this account argues that the Indian response to the aesthetics of illumination both adapted and elaborated the mechanics of the imperial gaze as complex affiliations between colonial perceptions and indigenous interests reformulated the terms of the discourse. Taking the case of the celebrated artist Ravi Varma (1848–1906) as exemplifying this model that sought to both approximate colonial visual paradigms as well as to contest them, it evaluates how his works negotiated an imperial architectonics of light and visibility. Ravi Varma has stood as a sign of the modern in narratives of Indian art, alternately valorised in the popular imagination as the pioneering ‘painter prince’ who equalled the colonial master, or denounced, as after his death, as imitative of European practices. In adapting the visual language of the coloniser, his works exemplify the contradictions of colonial modernity and afford us an opportunity to reconsider the legacy of Europeanised visual technologies in practices like oil painting in India. I step away from arguments on realism and perspective that have remained the dominant tropes for describing the impact of colonial visuality and Ravi Varma’s interventions, to view his contributions as visual experiments that embraced technologies of illusionism from oil painting, proscenium theatre and printmaking that were in conversation with technologies of light and vision within imperial networks. Rather than a biographical interest in Ravi Varma, this study employs his figure as a leitmotif that connects visual practices across India (given his professional engagements across the country) and
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire contextualises his work with that of his contemporaries in Bombay and Calcutta who professed a similar admiration for academic painting. While Ravi Varma’s prints have received a fair amount of scholarly attention, particularly the circulation of a devotional gaze within the networks of print capitalism, his paintings tend to be read through the lens of connoisseurship – either appreciative or dismissive – as a ‘bourgeois philistinism’ (the response by modernist painters including M.F. Husain and Tyeb Mehta to his retrospective exhibition in 1993).30 Their importance, moreover, has (p.9) coalesced around the Pauranik paintings and their visual rendition of a mythological heritage that acquired significance in the nationalist imagination of a common past. This focus has prompted a visual genealogy, extending from his paintings to calendar prints and the early cinema of D.G. Phalke, to form a story of origins drawn from Hindu mythology and devotional practices like darsan to acquire the status of a national canon. This project, however, asserts that Ravi Varma was equally invested in genres associated with trompe l’oeil painting and embraced portraiture and genre painting, which employed radically different visual modes that cannot be subsumed under the sacred and relate more properly to the globalisation of popular visual technologies. Rosie Thomas, in a similar vein, has claimed an alternative genealogy for the origins of cinema, proposing the dominance of the qissa or the Persianised fantasy tale, with Alibaba and the Forty Thieves as possibly the first film. Displacing the Brahmanic Hindu origins of cinema with the stunt film, full of gimmicks and visual sensation, she turns to Tom Gunning’s model of the ‘cinema of attractions’ to indicate a pre-narrative heterogeneous visual arena enthralled by the deceptions and illusions of new media technologies.31 It is to these modes of spectatorship from cinema and theatre, circulated within imperial visual networks and forged through the representational infrastructure authorised by light, that this study directs its attentions. Taking Varma’s work as a paradigmatic example, I ask how viewing practices aligned with lighting technologies implicated colonial subjects. Ravi Varma’s works are an example of the new visual language spoken by the elite male subject that frames the dominant narrative of the modern nation. Even as it acknowledges and adopts the dynamics of imperial visuality in its adoption of ideas of light and darkness, it is nevertheless haunted by its shaded past. As Varma marks his distance from the European, the pre-modern and the subaltern, he cannot but produce a mode of visibility that both registers its conditions of production and seeks to exceed them, ambivalently and uncertainly. The articulation of a new mode of visibility in the colony was thus necessarily embattled and unstable, haunted by the ghost of its excluded others who needed to be erased.
Urban chiaroscuro Discussions of light in modernity have revolved predominantly around questions of time and the prolongation of the day through lighting technologies that aided unhindered industrial activity.32 Joseph Wright of Derby’s rendition of Richard Awkright’s cotton mills at Cromford (Awkright’s Mill in Moonlight, 1783) is proffered as an example of the industrialisation of light, portraying the factory lit up at night, humming with activity even as the countryside sleeps.33 Yet light was equally significant in ‘producing space’, (p.10) as the transformation of the picturesque countryside in Wright’s painting reveals; and Schivelbusch suggests that a significant impact of gas lighting was its transformations of distance.34 While one can imagine the production of space through light in discrete structures like rooms, or even the landscape presented in Wright’s painting, how might we consider more expansive geographies between empire and colony, for example, or complex architectures like city spaces produced by light? Henri Lefebvre’s ideas about the production of space tie it into processes related to industrial Page 7 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire capitalism, and indeed the industrialisation of light and its international infrastructural distribution through a wide range of products and practices present a particularly useful mode of thinking about the production of space as lighting technologies territorialise space to shape a network of places in modernity – of the theatre, the factory, public spaces in the city, of homes and interiors and of the routes and passages between them.35 Significant among the spaces produced by the conquering empires of light were new relationships between empire and colony. Take for instance Babylon Electrified (1890), an early work of science fiction from the late nineteenth century that presents the promises of technologies of light appended to the civilising mission. A British exploration mission led by a rich baronet, Badger, including scientists and technicians, venture into Babylon in a bid to gain control of the trade routes with Europe. Identified for its ‘tyrannical sun’ and barbarous populations, Babylon is sought to be transformed by the superior technical knowledge of the British scientific team, a concrete example of the alliance between light, reason and freedom envisaged by Burke. The empire of light which it imagines is appended to both imperial ambition and industrial progress, as it is proposed that Babylon’s abundant sunlight would produce electricity that could fuel the railways and be transmitted back to Europe through giant cables. At the heart of this great game lies a utopian dream of establishing an all-electric city upon the site of the ancient empire in Babylon – to be named Liberty, where science and the powers of reason would prevail and transform the population into the most civilised people on earth. In this cannily prescient narrative light inflects both bodies and spaces, juxtaposing stereotypes of the primitive East with its tyrannical sun and natural light, with British technological expertise in harnessing its powers. Badger’s daughter, Nelly ‘the blond incarnation of the mists of the north’, befriends and rescues Fatma, ‘the creation of the burning sun of Asia’, tempering imperial ambition with liberal redemption.36 When Liberty is finally illuminated, it provides a strange and wonderful spectacle that brings to light treasures from the Babylonian past – stones with inscriptions, statuettes and foundations of old palaces, all the while embodying the modern promise of technology in the elimination of labour as it facilitates innovations like the electric tilling of the land, electrical cooking and heating, even assisting in medical surgeries. (p.11) It leaves its viewers ‘intoxicated with light and astonishment as they bask in the festive atmosphere’.37 However, the festivities are short lived, as, stirred by a religious fanaticism, the local population comes to view the electrical experiments as diabolical and rises up against the foreigners. Badger, who is, tellingly, blinded by his injuries, retreats to London, reasoning that local populations need to be more involved in grand projects like his. In its imagination of a utopian city revived by electricity, Babylon Electrified reflected the promise of light as an imperial agent of social good. Despite its tyrannical sun, Babylon could be rescued from its darkened fate under the Turks only by a scientific application of the technologies of light, bequeathed by the industrious British. At stake is an ambitious geopolitical restructuring of the region through an urban space that writes over the past by presenting a technocratic dream of transparent, illuminated spaces. As Liberty casts new light upon Babylon’s ancient ruins, exposing hidden treasures, it provides a safe space for women and children to venture into the streets at night and permits unveiled women to enjoy the night-time sky from their terraces at home. Imperial and industrial ambitions align to imagine a new city, new spaces and new publics through light. This dream for Babylon did not of course exist in isolation; it was in fact a response to the transformations in urban space as it grappled with the changing character of the night as
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire lighting projects impacted on crime and commerce, law and order – but it also played a significant role in shaping the visual poetics of the city by night. Lynda Nead portrays London as a ‘Victorian Babylon’ that constantly looked back to the Assyrian capital as a model as gas lighting transformed the London streets into a stage, creating patches of light amid pools of darkness. Unlike electric light that annihilated the night, the ‘poetics of gas’, she suggests, illuminated the night but did not destroy it.38 The emergence of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century was in no small part because of its spectacular lighting technologies that illuminated the city’s arcades stocked with luxury silks and crystals, its boulevards, cafes, restaurants and theatres all brightly lit by gaslight.39 Walter Benjamin’s evoca9tive description of the labyrinthine spaces of the city revives an archaic topography, imagining the new city as a tricky maze that deliberately defies the unobstructed views of Haussmann’s planned Parisian boulevards. A discrepant topography of the city emerged, where luxurious neighbourhoods dazzled while the larger part of the city remained dark, employing candlelight within its domestic interiors. Light produced these new topographies of the city between the enchantments of light and the inky shadows, instituting what some consider the very foundation of the nineteenth-century visual regime and its spectacle of the modern night.40 The chiaroscuric production of urban space was best articulated in guidebooks of New York City that employed the metaphor of sunshine and (p.12) shadows to map its spaces into symbolic zones for rich and poor. Matthew Hale Smith’s Sunshine and Shadow in New York (1868) and James Henry McCabe’s Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872) both portrayed the contrasting life-styles of rich and poor, assigning them with respective moral qualities and instructing viewers about the qualitative spaces and social types that populated the city.41 Winslow Homer’s woodcut engraving Thanksgiving Day 1860 presented the elite subjects lounging in the brightly lit interiors on the left-hand side, labelling them as ‘Those who have more dinners than appetite’. They are waited upon by servants whose faces, unlike the wellilluminated elite subjects, bear shadows tying them with the heavily shadowed characters on the right-hand side, scrounging in dingy rooms and captioned ‘Those with more appetite than dinners’. This chiaroscuric picture of the city produced what social commentator George Foster called a ‘moral geography’ that readers could use to navigate the highly stratified regions of the city.42 Foster’s nightly rambles as a reporter for the New York Tribune chronicled ‘the festivities of prostitution, the orgies of pauperism, the haunts of theft and murder … the underground story – of life in New York!’43 Foster set the stage for the birth of a genre of journalism that sought to expose and sensationalise urban realities and would find its best-known exponent in the exposure photography of Jacob Riis, whose innovative use of flash literally shone a light upon the underbelly of the city.44 The uneven production of spaces through chiaroscuro lends itself particularly well to the Trotskyite discussion of ‘combined and uneven development’ that undoes the traditional centreand-periphery model of imperial studies with a geographical approach that proffers an uneven spatial patchwork to understand how everyday capitalism is lived.45 In India the colonial city was similarly divided between the Black town of the natives and the White town of its European residents, mapped along racial and class divisions.46 Mark Twain presented Bombay as a city rife with pestilence and thugees, with dimly lit native quarters where rats scurried against sleeping bodies sprawled on the streets at night. Yet, in the midst of this darkness lay glittering displays of festivity. Wedding celebrations using gas lighting in the homes of the wealthy were presented as Oriental fantasy: a ‘conflagration of illuminations – mainly gas-work designs gotten
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire up specially for the occasion. Within was abundance of brilliancy – flames, costumes, colours, decorations, mirrors – it was another Aladdin show.’ This festivity soon melted into the dark, deep silence of the city with its scurrying rats and ‘counterfeit corpses sleeping motionless in the flicker of the counterfeit death lamps’.47 Rudyard Kipling extended this geography of the colonial city into a phantasmagoric realm with his short story and book, both titled City of Dreadful Night.48 Taking its title from James Thomson’s feverish poem of London, Kipling addressed both Lahore and Calcutta in the two versions of the story, which presented the (p.13) writer as a nocturnal flâneur visiting brothels and graveyards in the light of a sickly moon where waters flashed like ‘heliographic signals’. S.M. Edwardes’s Byways of Bombay (1912) similarly portrayed the seedy underbelly of the city populated by courtesans and opium eaters in cavernlike spaces dimly lit with oil lamps. The second edition of the book was illustrated by the Bombay-based painter M.V. Dhurandhar and included sketches of opium dens and spirit possessions (Figure 0.2). Twain’s report persisted in Orientalist fantasies of Aladdin, even as lighting technologies were making inroads into social and cultural life. The proliferation of lighting technologies through the nineteenth century effected a dramatic transformation of spaces, both public and private, in colonial India, tied closely to developments in industrial and retail technologies (Figures 0.3 and 0.4) in Europe. Using imperial networks, lighting technologies formed an important part of infrastructural projects in colonial India, along with railways, roads, telegraph, irrigation and hydroelectric projects which created an infrastructural grid that shaped public and private spaces.49 This new space of technics gradually bridged the divide between early practices of illumination forged around community and festivity and the new infrastructure of the modern city – the lighting of its ports, lighthouses, recreational spaces and the industries it supported, including mills and printing presses.50 Perceptions of novelty and entertainment continued with public lighting projects, which were sporadic and often sponsored by private interests until the early decades of the twentieth century;51 however, the infrastructural grid established was central to the project of urban modernisation – the 400km of underground pipelines laid by the Bombay Gas Company in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, are today being repurposed for fibre optic cables.52 Although electric light was introduced in Calcutta and Bombay in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, gas lighting had made its way there as early as 1834, powered at first by oil and then by coal. The shipbuilder and engineer Ardaseer Cursetjee is credited with the first gas project, illuminating his house and garden at his own expense. It drew many visitors who travelled several hundred miles to see the house lit up, which he opened for public inspection for several months.53 The private lighting projects (both gas and electric) that followed fuelled a steady supply of generation equipment for wealthy homes and ostentatious wedding celebrations, creating a community of practitioners – electrical engineers and ingenious mistris, educational journals and magazines, public lectures on the effects of electrical discharge and university degree programmes in electrical engineering. However, the perception of electricity as a luxury persisted. When the Madras Municipal Corporation considered lighting the city with electric bulbs, some viewed it as a wasteful expense that would be better devoted to ‘more dust bins, more sewage, rubbish carts and the energetic flushing of drains’.54 (p.14)
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (p.15)
0.2 M.V. Dhurandhar, ‘An Opium Club’, 1912
0.3 Lamp advertisements from The Statesman, Calcutta, 1891–1906
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire At the same time, public lighting projects initiated new recreational spaces and facilitated industrial uses. Amongst the first places to exploit the uses of hydroelectric power were the Kolar gold fields, which involved high transmission lines over 92km, making the project amongst the largest in the British (p.16) Empire.55 In Calcutta the Oriental Gas Company was awarded a contract to light fifty-five lamps from Bow Bazaar to Harrington Street in 1857, and reports acknowledged the thronging crowds that greeted the arrival of the lights, often running along with the lamplighter as he
0.4 Advertisement from The Electrician, 1882
sprinted along.56 To see fashionable Calcutta one could go to the Maidan at the close of day, where the place was lit brilliantly with lights and a military band played as the wealthy residents of the city participated in festivities.57 In 1875 there were 3,502 public lights and 37,301 private lights maintained by the Oriental Gas Company, including at important buildings like the Imperial Museum, the Hooghly bridge, clubs, jetties, wharves and the railway station. By 1890 places like the Esplanade were entirely lit up with gas; however, electric lighting could not be introduced by the Calcutta Municipality because the contract with the gas company ran until the end of the century.58 In 1899 agents of the Crompton Company installed dynamos in the first generating station at Emambagh Lane and inaugurated thermal power generation in India. Street lighting for Bombay was first proposed in 1833, and by 1853 it employed fifty oil lamps lit from dusk to midnight.59 The Bombay Gas Company, formed in 1862, was involved in the distribution of gas lighting, using gas produced from coal imported from England, and included 5,000–6,000 consumers, amongst them the Bombay Municipal Company for lighting streets and public structures.60 There were problems with the spread of gas lighting in Bombay due to the great distances between the houses of the wealthy, with their large compounds, which raised the cost of individual supply. Lower-class homes were generally single-room ‘chawls’ that used coconut-oil lamps, given the low wages that could scarcely afford better. Electric light had a small presence in Malabar Hill, and by 1894 was limited to small areas like the yacht club, and a series of flats erected near it by the Sirdar of the Nizam.61 Early public lighting projects were not limited to colonial capitals but extended to smaller outposts, including Simla, Darjeeling, Mysore, Indore and Travancore.
Writing with light Our best machines are made of sunshine … (Donna Haraway, The Cyborg Manifesto) As photography moves from light-based processes to digital measures of inscription, the workings of light, which seemed an obvious and transparent modality in an earlier era, acquire a new texture.62 Instead of a medium that seamlessly links seeing and knowing, light is shown up as having a material and ideological presence that inflects bodies and spaces.63 This is indicated in the recent spate of scholarship on the social and material cultures of light, its (p.17) embedded infrastructures, anthropologies of luminosity and geographies of darkness that have evaluated relationships between its material forms and its symbolic valences.64 In what follows I Page 12 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire use photography as paradigmatic of a practice of writing with light, of inscribing material surfaces with technologies or practices of light that had correlations with developments in optical and lighting technologies. This participates in an argument about the heterogeneous origins of photography to draw attention to that aspect of the history of photography – its characterisation as a ‘writing with light’, so prominent in early nomenclatures for the process such as ‘sun painting’ or heliography.65 This literal understanding of photo-graphy has receded in the contemporary imagination, existing either as a banal fact in an era of electronic and digital processes or in discussions about the truth-claims of indexicality.66 My intervention is concerned not with the desire for referentiality that structures discussions of the latter but with the immanent logic of light impressions upon a photosensitive medium. Writing with light finds new meaning in attempts from science studies and broader materialist scholarship that explore relationships between materiality and writing, foregrounding the role of inscription technologies in the production of texts.67 The camera exists as an example of such a writing machine, inscribing light upon a chemically charged surface and presenting a visible trace, but the body too presents itself as a charged medium, a site written upon by various technologies of power, including light. Could one, then, conceive of a more complex machine, in the manner that Deleuze and Guattari present the machine as an assemblage of multiple entities, institutions and practices that refracts and imprints the qualities of light upon photosensitive material, objects and bodies? The industrialisation of light in modernity summons the vast material culture associated with light, not just lighting technologies but also the commercial industry of representation (photography, film, magic lanterns, theatrical lighting etc.) that inscribes light through an infrastructural network upon an array of surfaces – film and screens, but also bodies, now bound together in new patterns of viewership determined by the distribution of light and darkness. As technologies of light shaped spaces, they also inscribed bodies. Journals, magazines, technical and mechanic manuals attest to the wide range of industries fostered by the commercial instrumentalisation of light in the nineteenth century – from retail equipment involving meters and lanterns, to servicing the coal industry, to mechanical parts like valves and engines, to piping and hydraulic machinery – all of which coalesced around the emerging industrial applications of light.68 Photography itself saw the growth of an industry revolving around studios, cartes de visite, newspapers and publishing, manufacturing of photographic equipment and supplies, as well as the growth of related devices like stereographs and dioramas.69 The arrival of photography in India was largely through these commercial (p. 18) networks that introduced circuits of mobility between European manufacturers and Indian markets and consumers (Figure 0.5), that presented the camera as a scientific amusement and a novelty that was advertised alongside other imported consumer goods like cutlery, magic lanterns and pocket-knives.70 Here too, the daguerreotype camera was advertised as making possible ‘the new art of sun drawing’, and photogenic boxes were presented for ‘copying objects by means of the sun’.71 If the technologies, institutions and practices that accompanied the industrialisation of light granted a new materiality and texture to light, forming one crucial cog in an imperial vision machine, the veil was another visual device for controlling light in an imperial optics. Although the iconography of unveiling had a long, hallowed tradition, it acquired new valence in its exposures of Oriental worlds and subjects, claiming to illuminate the darkness that lay behind the veil so as to offer a view into its hidden secrets, often aided by torches that mark a passage into the light. The veil structures new cartographies of visibility in an imperial optics, consonant
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire with the extended invasive vision of optical technologies which promised to reveal the unseen and expand visual horizons, granting a new legitimacy to the visible.72 To view the veil as a visual device is to see how it stood as an obstruction to this field of the visible, where a panoptic desire to ‘see all’ reflected the legacy of Enlightenment attitudes to visibility and transparency.73 The stubborn opacity of the veil is particularly relevant to the colonial experience as a denial of the inquisitorial demand for a narrative made upon the colonial subject, in the production of what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘calculable individual’.74 The Indian response, he suggests, was a ‘sly civility’ that spoke with a forked tongue at the instantiation of the colonial master. Edouard Glissant has supported a ‘right to opacity’ against imperial demands for transparency, proposing opacity not as a hermeneutic challenge to unveil into the light, but as a sign of an irreducible singularity, necessary for a generative politics of relation.75 Beyond imperial politics, visibility has remained an important indicator of power in queer theory, from its early formulations of an epistemology of the closet to later strategic plays of ‘hide and seek’, and most recently in considerations of the figure of the ‘trapdoor’ and the protocols of visibility that it enables.76 Scholarship on race, too, has grappled with the question of visibility beyond the epidermal logic that has traditionally defined it, to face the invisibility of DNA coding.77 Judith Butler extends the principle of transparency to questions of selfhood, rejecting an imagined transparent access to the self to propose a subjective opacity as the source of an ethical relationship to others.78 In viewing eighteenth-century iconographies of unveiling as technologies of illumination aligned with more modern lighting devices, the aim here is to work with an expanded understanding of visual technologies as encompassing (p.19)
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (p.20) both practices of seeing and the optical and lighting technologies commonly understood by the term. In that vein, rather than posing an opposition between natural light and artificial light, this study instead considers the instrumentalisation of light and the technologies and practices of seeing which it enabled in specific instances. Technology as techne veers between its roles as technique and tool, between practices (of viewing) and the technical apparatus, so that the machine is not simply a technical device and apparatus but a social arrangement of technical, bodily and intellectual components. For Deleuze this notion of the machine as social organism was linked to the visual: ‘A machine does not have to be optical; but it is an assembly of organs and functions that makes something visible and conspicuous.’79 Deleuze mused that the panopticon was a system of light before it was a figure of stone, a luminous arrangement of gazes that fashioned a visual assemblage of power between what is seen and who sees.80 As a ‘seeing machine’, the panopticon enabled an all-encompassing vision that provided a model for the efficient exercise of power through the gaze.81 The prison apparatus, like any other apparatus, was premised upon visibility, a visibility that could not 0.5 Advertisements from John Murray, necessarily be traced back to a source of Bradshaw’s Handbook for the Bombay light but to ‘lines of light’ which formed Presidency, 1864 variable shapes, which were inseparable from the apparatus: ‘Each apparatus has its way of structuring light, the way in which it falls, blurs and disperses, distributing the visible and the invisible, giving birth to objects which are dependent on it for their existence, and causing them to disappear.’82 Visibilities, therefore, are neither the acts of a seeing subject nor perceptible matter, but conditions engendered by the play of light and dark, transparency and opacity, the seen and the not-seen. What Deleuze proposes here is an ontology of light where objects (and subjects) are born through light, suggesting that if we are to conceive of apparatuses historically at all, we need to consider them in terms of regimes of light. Foucault, importantly, viewed the panopticon as analogous to the political and moral order of the Enlightenment – Bentham as the complement to Rousseau, in their common vision of the equivalences between an optical and political transparency.83 Each presented
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire a dream of a transparent society, visible and legible in each of its parts, the dream of there no longer existing any zones of darkness, zones established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation, zones of disorder. It was the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men’s hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each.84 Despite the current fatigue with panopticism, given its indiscriminate application to a wide range of surveillance studies that have reproduced a (p.21) simplistic idea of centralised repressive power, its diagrammatic architecture remains a powerful model for visual subjectification, particularly the asymmetries of the gaze between empire and colony.85 Moreover, state surveillance, now allied with a consumer industry, has re-emerged as a powerful mechanism for producing routine knowledge of subjects. Rather than this aspect of surveillance, however, I am more interested in how the panopticon relies upon an instrumentalisation of light to produce a certain space and a visual subject inscribed by such light. The panopticon authorises a visual subject formed at the interstices of the discourse on light, knowledge and power. Light functions as an instrument of power, such that seeing and knowing fashion being. Yet the panopticon is only one example of the arrangement of discourses of light and its implication of bodies, as pointed out in studies of the limitations of focusing on the panopticon. Imperial architectonics and the material infrastructures of lighting technologies presented other visual arrangements of the visible and the invisible to produce regimes of light that impacted upon bodies. Foucault poses the idea of ‘subjection by illumination’, envisioning a pattern of visibilities produced by the assemblage within which bodies are enmeshed, bringing up the idea of a photo-graphy of sorts – of bodies inscribed by regimes of light.86 To study the material effects of light as power, therefore, is to study how bodies were subjected to discourses of visibility, examining regimes of light and how they in turn shaped viewing subjects. How might we locate the colonial body within such architectures of light as power? Akira Lippit has characterised the ideal of complete visibility associated with Western Enlightenment as a ‘catastrophic light’.87 Identifying within its irradiant structure a totalitarianism that culminates in the ‘atomic light’ of Hiroshima, Lippit seeks to evaluate an Oriental response to the tyranny of its luminosity through a reading of Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, and its offering of an Oriental preference for a darker aesthetics: ‘Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.’88 In his tract, Tanizaki deals with the practical problems associated with living with processes of modernisation that displace older forms, particularly the new lighting technologies transforming homes, inciting a polemic between Western and Japanese architectural spaces, luminosity and opacity, darkness and visibility. Based on Tanizaki’s experiences, Lippit proceeds to draw out a topology of the body constituted between these spaces, inscribed by the violent light of the new architectonics. In a consideration of an inscription of the Oriental body within a discourse of light and illumination, Lippit acknowledges a photo-graphic archive that is thus constituted of bodies indelibly marked by light. The following chapters of this book, by example, take photo-graphy as emblematic of a process of the material inscription of light to explore an Indian terrain of spaces and bodies impressed by the light of an imperial optics.
(p.22) Photo-graphic archives from colonial India In a wonderful example of the impact of colonial perspectival norms on Indian art and iconographic practices, Christopher Pinney notes the displacements made by Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (1810), which included a collection of reproductions of Hindu gods and Page 16 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire goddesses. The frontispiece of Moor’s narrative is an image of Ganesh (Figure 0.6), the elephantheaded son of Siva and Parvati, commonly invoked as a sacred figure at inaugurations. The image turns on its axis such that it reveals a three-dimensionality that points to its location within the rules of single-point perspective. The slight rotation, Pinney suggests, displaces the sculpture into the space of a European representational system, indicative of the changes that were wrought in Indian art with the onslaught of colonialism.89 The flat, hieratic signifier of divinity is now invoked within the mathematically ordered space of European representational practice, a template of the displacements ushered into visual practice with colonialism. Perspective has remained the dominant trope for evaluating the impact of colonial visuality in South Asian art history, a response no doubt to the significance of perspective within the larger narrative of art history itself. However, Edward Moor’s frontispiece of Ganesh posits another aspect of the colonial vision machine that is overlooked in Pinney’s analysis: the brilliant burst of light that crowns the sculpture to endow it with the reverence accorded to a sacred object. It casts a diffuse shadow in the background and a more defined shadow at the foot of the sculpture, violating a central premise of Hindu belief – that the gods, unlike humans, cast no shadows.90 This is because the gods are made of light and their gaze is, moreover, transcendent (they do not blink); but Moor’s slight rotation and its shadows cast Ganesh clearly as a figurine, not a god, drawing it simultaneously within a spatial order where light and shadow accord new values to gods and humans alike. What was this new order of representation, which abrogated the sacral authority of the gods to draw them into the realm of the human? The following chapters explore this visual regime of light and shadow, taking for its beginning the apparent obscurity of the Indian nation in late eighteenth-century England – what Sara Suleri has referred to as the ‘representational difficulty of colonial India’ – and its subsequent emergence into vision and visibility.91 The first two chapters of the book address the hermeneutic problem in envisioning India and the visual strategies employed to illuminate its hidden interiorities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Metaphors of darkness abounded in descriptions and visual documentation of India, whether of the sprawling shade of its banyan trees, the unspeakable horrors of the Black Hole tragedy or the riddle of the laborious energies invested in its ‘gloomy’ caves. (p.23)
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (p.24) Chapter 1 looks at how Elephanta emerged as a powerful cipher in this darkened landscape, haunting the imagination of viewers and leaving a lasting imprint on how the nation would be viewed, as caves served to define the Indian landscape in accounts as long lasting as E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) or Fritz Lang’s The Indian Tomb (1959). As a sign of a hermeneutic impasse, darkness presented a challenge to make visible, and the first chapter examines how a complex visual and discursive matrix wove itself around the caves, claiming to unravel the mysteries of their ghostly interiors and monstrous iconography and to illuminate their hidden secrets, only to produce ghostly visions that made claims to the real. An example of this haunting is exemplified in Thomas Rowlandson’s satirical prints of Elephanta published in The Grand Master, or Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan (1816). The prints enlist a range of optical devices, including the magic lantern and the 0.6 Edward Moor, frontispiece, Hindu kaleidoscope, that mock the antiquarian Pantheon, 1810 interest directed at the caves to emphasise instead their phantasmagorical character. Rather than aiding vision, Rowlandson presents the optical devices as magical technologies consonant with practices of the occult associated with Hindu ritual, promising a clairvoyant ‘view of futurity’. This ghostly character of the caves persisted, going on to feed a fantastical visual archive of the caves (and, by extension, the Indian landscape) in German cinema of the early twentieth century, including three films (from 1921, 1938 and 1959) based on Thea von Harbou’s novel Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1918). How, then, was this darkness dispelled? Chapter 2 examines various technologies for illuminating the darkness, featuring a recurrent iconography of unveiling that characterised the emergence of the Indian nation into view for the Western viewer. Pierre Hadot has identified the motif of unveiling nature as an antique trope with roots in the pre-Socratic idea that ‘nature loves to hide’, proposing that it found renewed popularity in Enlightenment Europe as the ‘veil of Isis’ and expressed the promises of science to expose the secrets of nature.92 It was widely adopted by figures of the German Romantic tradition such as Schiller (Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais, 1795) and Novalis (Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 1798–99), and by artists including William Hogarth (Boys Peeping at Nature, 1731) and Benjamin West (The Graces Unveiling Nature, 1779). The veiled Isis figures as a prototype for a mysterious feminised Orient conflated with nature, and the iconography of unveiling enacts the drama of sight in its quest to illuminate her secret interiorities. Remarking upon the currency of this feminised unveiling of Oriental mystique, Edward Said noted how ‘The cultural, temporal and geographic distance [between the Occident Page 18 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire and the Orient] was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise: phrases like “the veil of an Eastern Bride” or the “inscrutable Orient” passed into the common language’.93 The secrets of a feminised Orient organised (p.25) a visual economy of knowledge and concealment where acts of unveiling mobilised a desire to see and to know, promising the disclosure of hidden secrets. For instance, The Oriental Portfolio (1839), a lavishly produced travel portfolio featuring lithographs of India featured a frontispiece of the Graces unveiling an image of the Indian landscape, with subsequent pages leading the eye into the heartland and culminating in the disclosure of veiled interior spaces like the harem, typically closed off to the outside eye. Such technologies of illuminating the darkness of the Indian landscape colluded with tropes of the civilising mission, which sought to introduce the light of civilisation into the ‘benighted darkness’. A statue of the noted Oriental scholar William Jones features a roundel (see Figure 2.6) displaying heroic Greco-Roman figures drawing aside the veil that shrouds a nation steeped in the ‘monstrous’ Pauranik deities and illuminating the ‘superstitious’ mythological stories of its Puranas with radiant torches. Chapter 3 turns to the introduction of the veil as the curtain in the representational apparatus of Parsi proscenium theatre, and the drama of revealing and concealing that it introduces into the fluid spaces of folk and processional performance. As an early site for organised entertainment in urban India, theatres experimented both with lighting technologies for its spectacle and with strategic use of the curtain or the purdah in its stage practices. While Parsi theatre has largely been presented as a performative development of a literary culture, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of experiments with visual technologies and cultures in urban India as illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes presented sensational stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world (Figure 0.7). Exploring the links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, it proposes melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that resonated with viewers and relied upon visual tricks, and argues that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks.94 Theatre was amongst the earliest institutions to experiment with lighting technologies, a fact made relevant to Indian experiments through the scope and dimension of travelling theatre companies and the circulation of industrial technologies and professionals.95 As such, theatre represented a key site in the intersection between industrial and imperial technologies of light, creating an infrastructure for public entertainments based on lighting technologies that would migrate to cinema in the early decades of the twentieth century. Gaganendranath Tagore’s rendition of Madane Theatre (Plate 1) attests to its place in the urban night-time landscape, portraying it as bathed in light, with people milling around. Instituted by the Parsi entrepreneur J.F. Madan (1856–1923), an erstwhile actor with the Elphinstone Theatre Company, Madan Theatres was an entertainment business that at one time (p.26)
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (p.27) employed up to 1,000 people, with branches in Darjeeling, Lucknow and Bombay, among others. The Madan enterprise graduated from owning theatre companies, including the Elphinstone, Khatau-Alfred and the Corinthian theatre in Calcutta, to showing films in theatres, thus displaying the symbiotic relationship that developed between theatre and cinema. Madan established the first permanent site for film screenings in South Asia in 1902 in the Maidan in Calcutta, going on to build the Elphinstone Picture Palace in Calcutta (1907) and produce a large number of feature films in Bengali, Hindi and Urdu. Their films, like academic paintings and prints, relied upon grand theatrical sets and the Europeanised tastes of elite society. As noted in this review of Nal Damayanti: ‘the settings around the pauranic characters are the marble statues of Omkarmal Jethia’s bungalow, the Venetian fountains of Raja Rajendra Mullick’s Marble Palace, and huge Corinthian pillars. Nal and Damayanti looked rather incongruous in these
0.7 Theatre advertisements from The Statesman, Calcutta, 1875–1915
surroundings’.96 If theatre formed the ‘connective tissue of images, tastes, and values’ that bound nineteenth-century visual culture, according to Kathryn Hansen, the stories which it told foregrounded the threatened female body.97 Chapter 4 examines emerging nationalist anxieties about veiling and unveiling the female body, juxtaposing Ravi Varma’s investment in dress and the fashioning of an identity for the New Woman alongside his experiments with the nude. Introduced 1 Gaganendranath Tagore, Madane Theatre, c. 1921 through European prints and sculpture and taught at the Britishrun academic art schools in India, the nude was displayed in the houses and palaces of the elite as a symbol of good taste. The nude is presented in Victorian imagery and art-historical writing as the naked body ‘clothed’ in art. Lynda Nead has pointed to the fallacy in this assumption – that of the naked body as ‘natural’ and prior to representation and the clothing of the body in its social and cultural guises as a secondary order of representation from this ideal self.98 However, if one disavows the primacy of the unalienated naked body as standing outside representation, nakedness may be seen as intricately woven into the social fabric, its place defined equally through cultural practice, much like the nude. The chapter investigates how a valorisation of the ‘naked truth’ inflects discussions of the nude body Page 21 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire and rubs up against the centrality of adornment in Indian imagery and social practice, where the purely naked body is disavowed as inauspicious. Consequently, the female body becomes a charged site of both erotic investment and a threatening sexuality in nineteenth-century Indian pictorial practice, premised upon such a mechanism of veiling and unveiling. Chapters 5 and 6 examine two small paintings of men reading, by Ravi Varma, that use chiaroscuro to examine the subjective fashioning of masculine identities within the new economies of light sponsored by technological innovation. Chiaroscuro was a newly learned device for Indian painters in the early twentieth century and its treatment of pictorial space appeared ‘modern’ (p.28) to Indian artists in that it presented illusionist space. The symbolic qualities of light and dark allow Ravi Varma to make claims of subjecthood for the elite Indian man, challenging the dominant paradigm of anthropological portraiture within which Indian identity was typically represented. Transcending the frontal visibility of the anthropological portrait, the suggestion of a buried self (shown reading) allows for a transition to the fiction of an assured subjectivity. Chapter 5 explores the subjective fashioning of interiority upon the masculine subject and its relationship to artistic selfhood, arguing for bourgeois precedents in the imagination of the private self. And yet, it throws up the question of who is granted such subjecthood. Chapter 6 examines the painting The Student (Plate 17), where we witness an anonymous waiting servant relegated to the shadows while the reading subject glows in the light of a kerosene lamp. The arrangement of subjects within the pictorial space and their exposure to the light determines the coordinates of the new patterns of visibility. There is a differential inscription of the colonial body that emerges as a result of the encounter with imperial technologies of vision – elite artists and subalterns rendered visible in different degrees in the imperial visual economy. In a telling analogy, a monograph on Ravi Varma compared his prints to ‘the ubiquitous Dietz lantern’ in creating ‘a taste for decoration in the Indian home’.99 The inclusion of devices like the kerosene lamp in the scholar paintings draws attention to this significant transformation of public and private spaces and to the perceptions of lighting technologies as agents of modernisation. Retaining the more expansive definition of chiaroscuro as the use of light and dark to describe space, it is possible to counter the familiar relegation of chiaroscuro to Europeanised histories of the Baroque and the subsequent characterisation of such painting as the product of a belated, non-Western modernity. Instead, Indian painters’ adoption of chiaroscuro both drew from contemporary experiences with lighting technologies and borrowed from European art-historical prints in a non-linear fashion that corresponded more closely to the mobility and circulation of prints rather than to temporal progression.100 A more appropriate comparison emerges with film noir that has resituated the pictorial language of chiaroscuro within industrial modernity and the urban experience.101 This intervention in the emerging scholarship on the material and visual cultures of light in modernity engages with the fact of empire in art-historical discourse through its representational infrastructures and the visual regimes which it engendered. In its delineation of a pattern of visibilities produced by imperial technologies of vision, it traces transnational relationships between empire and colony beyond questions of influence and mimicry, to understand their mutual imbrication in the production of spaces and subjectivities. As such, it extends methodologies largely employed in cinema, (p.29) photography and design scholarship to art-historical material by adopting a Foucauldian approach to the study of the material effects of light as power and the place of visual technologies in imperial networks. Although recent
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire critiques of the Foucauldian power/knowledge paradigm in postcolonial studies have pointed to its shortcomings in thinking the practice of power primarily through rationality and governmentality (leaving other acts of violence unaddressed) and resurrecting an ‘anthropological effigy of the subaltern’, such critique based on textual paradigms hold less water in art-historical studies, where Foucauldian visibilities and surveillance studies have increasing political relevance today.102 Moreover, rather than seeking to rescue subaltern agency, as implied in this critique, much postcolonial analysis relying upon Foucault has shown the mutual imbrication of elite and subaltern discourses, an interdependence between the empire and colony that acquires its own logic.103 Ravi Varma stands in ‘an age of optimism’, as Partha Mitter called it, when Enlightenment ideas were both endorsed and actively negotiated, and as such represents an exemplar for the assimilation and contestation of trajectories of light, vision and power in the imperial economy.104 As an exemplary colonial subject Ravi Varma remained what David Scott has called a ‘conscript of modernity’, bound to the Enlightenment project not out of choice, but circumscribed by its conditions of possibility for action and imagination because of the history of empire. In his tragic account of the postcolonial legacy of the Enlightenment, Scott renounces the ‘conventional romance of revolutionary overcoming’ in anti-colonial narratives, proposing that we seek freedom in ‘the very technologies, conceptual languages and institutional formations in which modernity’s rationality’ sought our oppression.105 This is, admittedly, unpopular in an intellectual and social climate where Enlightenment values have been systematically eroded and questioned, not only by a wider popular culture but by a rising tide of decolonial scholarship as well. To recall the legacy of the Enlightenment here is not to nostalgically seek to restore its universal liberal values or to investigate in what ways these were in fact compromised by their colonial policies – grounds well trodden. Foucault has cautioned against the ‘intellectual blackmail of being for or against the Enlightenment’, and the aim here is to unravel entangled material and visual histories indelibly inscribed by the light of empire and of the shaping of spaces and subjects through technologies of light.106 Notes: (1) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France and on the Proceedings in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event: In a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris (London: J. Dodsley, 1790), p. 114. (2) A good overview of Enlightenment attitudes to light and reason is offered in David Bates, ‘Idols and Insight: An Enlightenment Topography of Knowledge’, Representations, Vol. 73, No. 1 (Winter 2001), pp. 1–23. (3) See Rolf Reichardt’s wonderful essay on images of light and darkness associated with the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Rolf Reichardt and Deborah Louise Cohen, ‘Light against Darkness: The Visual Representations of a Central Enlightenment Concept’, Representations, No. 61, Special Issue: Practices of Enlightenment (Winter, 1998), pp. 95–148. Further accounts are included in the exhibition catalogue, Light! The Industrial Age 1750–1900, ed. Andreas Bluhm and Louise Lippincott (The Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam and The Carnegie Museum Pittsburgh, 2000). (4) Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Angela Davis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (5) Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London and New York: Verso, 2013). (6) Sean Cubitt, A Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technologies from Prints to Pixels (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014). (7) James Schmidt, ‘“This New Conquering Empire of Light and Reason”: Edmund Burke, James Gillray and the Dangers of Enlightenment’, Diametros, No. 40 (2014), pp. 126–148. (8) Jean Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 121–150. (9) Nicholas B. Dirks, ‘Guiltless Spoliations: Picturesque Beauty, Colonial Knowledge, and Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of India’, in Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf (eds), Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., 1994), pp. 211–232. (10) Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313. (11) See the interdisciplinary collection of essays on the widespread application of the clairobscur in eighteenth-century France edited by Mark Darlow and Marion Lafogue, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 2014). (12) Michael Baxandall, Shadows and Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 76. (13) Père Bouhours, Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugène [1671], second ‘entretien’, ‘La langue française’ (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003), p. 135. Cited in Mark Darlow and Marion Lafogue, ‘Introduction’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 2014), p. 431. (14) See the special issue on clair-obscur edited by Mark Darlow and Marion Lafogue, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 37, No. 4 (December 2014). (15) This research on the changing character of the night has in fact sparked off an interdisciplinary collective interest in the ‘anthropology of the night’ studying transformations in cultural experiences of the night. See J. Galinier, A.M. Becquelin et al., ‘Anthropology of the Night: Cross-Disciplinary Investigations’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 51, No. 6 (2010), pp. 819– 847. It is a broad, multipronged effort that describes itself as a new field of enquiry extending from the early modern world and across several ethnographic communities to study what it calls ‘nocturnity’, including sleep patterns, memory, dreams and myths about the night. While the turn to conceiving the night not merely in terms of an absence is a welcome step, their approach of treating myths of tribal societies like the Mayans and the Inuits as an unchanging reality preserved in time fails to examine how these communities participated in the disenchantment of the night signalled by modern lighting technologies. (16) Anthea Callen, The Work of Art: Plein Air Painting and Artistic Identity in Nineteenth Century France (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), pp. 11–12. She interestingly links the emergence of plein-air painting to military topographical drawings, proposing it a markedly
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire masculine enterprise that conveyed the artist’s mastery of nature (qua feminised nature) through appropriation and inscription of authority by signature. (17) One exception is Marc Gotlieb, ‘Figures of Sublimity in Orientalist Painting’, in Elizabeth Cropper (ed.), Dialogues in Art History, from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 317–342. (18) Hollis Clayson, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Epoque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). (19) A number of recent exhibitions have explored this aspect of lighting in the nineteenth century, including Electric Paris (The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA, 17 February–21 April 2013); Degas: A Strange New Beauty (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2016); Noir: The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2016); The Darker Side of Light: The Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, Peter Parshall (ed. & curator) (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2009). Leuchtende Bauten: Architektur der Nacht / Luminous Buildings: Architecture of the Night, Marion Ackermann and Dietrich Neumann (eds) (Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany, 2006). (20) See the exhibitions (and accompanying catalogues), Degas: A Strange New Beauty (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2016); Noir: The Romance of Black in 19th-Century French Drawings and Prints (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016); The Darker Side of Light: The Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, Peter Parshall (ed. & curator) (Washington, DC: The National Gallery of Art, 2009). (21) Krista Thompson, Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). Zahid Chaudhary also relies upon the notion of an ‘afterimage’ to assert the phenomenological presence of the photograph in colonial India beyond its indexical properties. See Zahid Chaudhary, Afterimage of Empire: Photography in Nineteenth Century India (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). (22) Karine Schomer, Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 163. (23) See Ray Monk, ‘Seeing in the Dark: Wittgenstein and Tagore’, in Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson (eds), Purabi: A Miscellany in Memory of Rabindranath Tagore 1941–1991 (London: The Tagore Centre, 1991), pp. 142–144. (24) Catherine Asher, ‘A Ray from the Sun: Mughal Ideology and the Visual Construction of the Divine’, in Mathhew Kapstein (ed.), The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), pp. 161–194. (25) Cited in Asher, ‘A Ray from the Sun’, p. 170. (26) See Iftikhar Dadi, ‘Abdur Rahman Chugtai: Cosmopolitan Mughal Aesthetic in the Age of Print’, in Derryl N. MacLean and Sikeena Karmali Ahmed (eds), Cosmopolitanisms in Muslim Contexts: Perspectives from the Past (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 127– 155.
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (27) There were three versions of the Light of the World; the first and the third copies were the ones that had an impact upon colonial audiences. See Eleanor Fraser Stansbie, ‘Christianity, Masculinity, Imperialism: The Light of the World and Colonial Contexts of Display’, in Serena Trowbridge and Amelia Yeates (eds), Pre-Raphaelite Masculinities: Constructions of Masculinity in Art and Literature (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 189–211. (28) On lighting practices in the Bombay film industry see Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Cameramen in the Shadows of Hindi Cinema’, in Ajay Sinha and Raminder Kaur (eds), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), pp. 118–140. On lighting practices in German cinema see Frances Guerin, A Culture of Light: Cinema and Technology in 1920s Germany (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). (29) Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, in Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 154. (30) For perspectives on Ravi Varma’s prints see Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007) and Chris Pinney, Photos of the Gods (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004). For an approach that evaluates Ravi Varma from the tradition of connoisseurship, see Rupika Chawla, Raja Ravi Varma (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2010). (31) Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015). (32) See Brian Bowers, Lengthening the Day: A History of Lighting Technology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) and Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). (33) See the discussion around Richard Arkwright’s mills in Light! The Industrial Age 1750– 1900, p. 32 for example. (34) Schivelbusch, Disenchanted Night, p. 44. (35) Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). (36) A. Bleunard, Babylon Electrified: The History of an Expedition Undertaken to Restore Ancient Babylon by the Power of Electricity and How it Resulted, trans. Frank Weitenkampf (Philadelphia: Gebbie, 1889), p. 83. (37) Bleunard, Babylon Electrified, p. 222. (38) Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven and New York: Yale University Press, 2000). (39) Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Perspecta, Vol. 12 (1969), pp. 163–172. (40) Martin Bressani, ‘Light into Darkness: Gaslight in Nineteenth Century Paris’, in Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty and Dietrich Neumann (eds), Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination (New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 28–36. (41) See also, Joshua Brown, Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of Gilded-Age America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 151. Page 26 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (42) George Foster, New York in Slices (New York: W.F. Burgess, 1850), p. 120. (43) George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light and Other Urban Sketches, ed. Stuart M. Blumin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). (44) Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007). (45) See the Trotskyite thesis revived by the Warwick Research Collective in Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). (46) A good collection of essays that looks at the aesthetics of darkness in urban culture through a dystopian lens is Gyan Prakash (ed.), Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of the Modern Global City (Oxford and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). (47) Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey around the World (Hartford, CT: The American Publishing Company, 1897), pp. 386–389. (48) The book was a collection of eight articles by Kipling describing Calcutta, originally published in the Pioneer in 1887–88, and later as The City of Dreadful Night and Other Sketches (Allahabad: A.H. Wheeler, 1890). A story with the same title about Lahore was first published in the Civil and Military Gazette of 10 September 1885. (49) Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). (50) Sita Ram, a painter who accompanied the viceroy, Lord Hastings, on a journey across upper India between 1814 and 1815, included several watercolours of festive illuminations, including fireworks, and illuminated transparencies in his albums. They featured events celebrating the reception of the party and also important events like military victories or monarchical anniversaries. Fireworks had featured prominently in paintings even earlier, the most notable amongst which are paintings of the wedding procession of Dara Shikoh (1633), where illuminations functioned as important aspects of the pomp and ceremony of royal celebrations. (51) Illuminations had always figured as significant for weddings and festive occasions, where the most favoured form comprised ‘lines and arches of gas piping, with burners and opal globes about eight inches apart, sometimes a “Welcome”, in small jets over the doorway forming a centre piece’. Henry O’Connor, ‘The Gas Manager Abroad, Bombay Part 1’, The Gas World, 8 December 1894, pp. 679–680. (52) Promit Mukherjee, ‘The Resurgence of Bombay Gas’, Live Mint, 11 January, 2016. www.livemint.com/Industry/CJECX0ogKOqSQ2B2dMF4uI/The-resurgence-of-Bombay-Gas.html. [Accessed 20 January 2016] (53) Mr. Ardaseer Cursetjee, Iron: An Illustrated Weekly Journal for Iron and Steel, Vol. 33 (London, 1840), p. 285.
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (54) V.R. Muraleedharan cited in Srinivasa Rao and John Lourdusamy, ‘Colonialism and the Development of Electricity: The Case of Madras Presidency, 1900–47’, Science, Technology and Society, Vol. 15, No.1 (2010), p. 39. (55) T.D. Chatterjee, ‘Hydroelectric Progress in Mysore’, Students Quarterly Journal, March 1935, pp. 119–122. (56) ‘Gas Lighting in Calcutta’, Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol. 5, 11 September 1857, pp. 590–591. (57) Mary Cate Smith, ‘Life in Asia’, in Larkin Dunton (ed.), The World and Its People Book 6 (New York, Boston, Chicago: Silver Burdett and Co., 1897), p. 84. (58) ‘The City of Calcutta and its Municipal Corporation’, The Calcutta Review, Vol. 70 (1880), p. 490. (59) ‘Lighting’, in The History of the Municipal Corporation of the City of Bombay Compiled by L.W. Michael (Bombay: Union Press, 1902), pp. 47–63. (60) ‘Gas in Foreign Countries’, Report by H.E. Bode, Vice Consul, United States Consulate, 2 May 1890. Published in Special Consular Reports, Vol. 6, p. 118, Published by Department of State, Washington, 1891 and 1892. (61) Henry O’Connor, ‘The Gas Manager Abroad – Bombay Part 2’, The Gas World, 22 December 1894, pp. 738–740. (62) For scholarship that examines this transition see Sean Cubbit, Daniel Palmer and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Digital Light (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015). (63) For a contestation of light as a transparent medium see Cathryn Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau Ponty (New York: Routledge, 1998). (64) See, for instance, the special issue edited by Tim Edensor, ‘Geographies of Darkness’, Cultural Geography, Vol. 22, No. 4 (2015); Mikkel Bille and T. Sorensen, ‘An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 263–84; Tim Edensor (ed.), Sensing and Perceiving with Light and Dark, Special Issue: The Senses and Society, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2015); U. Hassenhorl, K. Krause, J. Meier and M. Pottharst (eds), The Bright Side of Night: Perceptions, Costs and the Governance of Urban Lighting and Light Pollution (London: Routledge, 2014); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Sean Cubitt, ‘Electric Light and Electricity’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 30, No. 7/8 (2013), pp. 309–323; Noam Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Mark Hall, ‘Longing for the Light: Darkness, Dislocation and Spaces of Exile’, in Merle Tonnies and Heike Buschmann (eds), Spatial Representations of British Identities (Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag, 2012) pp. 33–46. (65) Geoffrey Batchen provides an excellent discussion of the paradoxical character of writing with light in ‘The Naming of Photography’, History of Photography, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1993), pp. 22– 32.
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (66) For a collection of interventions on photographic indexicality see Mary Ann Doane (ed.), ‘Indexicality, Trace and Sign’, differences, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2007). (67) Friedrich Kittler’s work on notation systems in the nineteenth century has been extremely influential in expanding the discussion on writing to technological media. See Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Meteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). Also see Timothy Lenoir (ed.), Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) and Sean Prior and David Trotter (eds), Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016). (68) The advertisements in industry-specific journals like The Journal of Gas Lighting, Water Supply and Sanitary Improvement (London) or The Gas World (London) provide good examples of the range of applications made possible by new lighting technologies. (69) See Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848– 1871 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994). (70) Sudhir Mahadevan, ‘Archives and Origins: The Material and Vernacular Cultures of Photography in India’, TransAsia Photography Review, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2013), n.p. [Accessed 8 December 2015] (71) Bengal Hurkaru, 25 January 1841. Cited in Mahadevan, ‘Archives and Origins’. (72) Barbara Stafford presents this argument in Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). (73) For a good account of the relationships between optical and political transparencies, see Theresa Levitt, The Shadow of Enlightenment: Optical and Political Transparency in France 1789–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). (74) Homi Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 71–80. (75) Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010). (76) See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990); Jonathan D. Katz and David C. Ward, Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture (Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 2010); Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley and Johanna Burton (eds), Trap Door: Transcultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018). (77) Wendy Hui Kyong Chun provides a good summary in the introduction to the special issue on ‘Race and/as Technology’, Camera Obscura, ed. Lynne Joyrich and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, No. 70 (2009), pp. 7–34. (78) Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). A vibrant related philosophical discussion on epistemic transparency, interestingly termed the ‘question of luminosity’, has continued this debate about whether we do indeed have access to self-knowledge. See Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (79) Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (1986), trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), p. 58. (80) Deleuze, Foucault, p. 57. (81) Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage Books, 1979). (82) Gilles Deleuze, ‘What Is a Dispositive’, Michel Foucault: Philosopher, trans. Timothy J. Armstrong (New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 159–168. (83) Montesquieu’s celebrated text of the European Enlightenment offered the Orient as a dark, opaque space in disarray – Persian Letters (1721), trans. C.J. Betts (New York: Penguin Books, 1973). Jean Starobinski has explored the analogies between political and optical transparency vis-à-vis Rousseau most imaginatively in Transparency and Obstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) and The Invention of Liberty (Geneva: Albert Skirra, 1964). (84) Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, p. 152. (85) Chris Otter argues that it over-determines the role of the state in subject formation without adequate consideration of either individual agency or the exigencies of material infrastructure. Moreover, in his opinion, the very dream of a perfect transparent vision of society was idealistic and by that very virtue elusive, impossible and hence practically unrealisable. Bentham himself acknowledged its limitations in proposing screens for defecating prisoners. See Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). (86) Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, p. 154. (87) Akira Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). (88) Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, trans. Thomas J. Harper and Edward G. Seidensticker (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), p. 30. (89) Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 18. (90) See Charles Malamoud, ‘The Gods Have No Shadows: Reflections on the Secret Language of the Gods in Ancient India’, in Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 195–206. Consider also the discussion on the shadow in Wendy Doniger, Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 64–77. (91) Sara Suleri, ‘Reading the Trial of Warren Hastings’, in The Rhetoric of English India (London and Chicago: Chicago University Press 1992), p. 50. (92) Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). (93) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 222.
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Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (94) Amy Holzapfel draws similar conclusions in her study of nineteenth-century realist drama in Europe suggesting scenography produced a modern optical space and theatre democratised the experience of seeing. Art, Vision, and Nineteenth-Century Realist Drama: Acts of Seeing (New York: Routledge, 2014). (95) See Harry Miner (ed.), American Dramatic Directory for the Season 1884–85 (New York: Wolf and Palmer Dramatic Publishing Company, 1884) for a directory of theatres worldwide that formed a route around the world that could be taken by travelling theatres. It includes several cities in India and information on their facilities, including stage design, scenery, lighting, newspaper advertising, musicians and stage hands. An excellent source for the circulation and production of early cinematic films based on the Madan theatres is Ranita Chatterjee’s unpublished dissertation ‘Journeys in and Beyond the City: Cinema in Calcutta 1897–1939’, University of Westminster, 2011. (96) Cited in Chatterjee, ‘Journeys in and Beyond the City’, pp. 89–90. (97) Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Migration of a Text: The Indar Sabha in Print and Performance’, Sangeet Natak, No. 127–128 (1998), p. 4. (98) Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). (99) K.P. Padmanabhan Tampy, Ravi Varma: A Monograph (Trivandrum: Kripon & Co., 1934), p. 1. (100) See Monica Juneja on circulatory practices and their production of nonlinear temporalities and disjointed spatialities, ‘Circulation and Beyond – the Trajectories of Vision in Early Modern Eurasia’, in Thomas Dacosta Kauffman, Catherine Dossan and Beatrice Joyeaux Prunel (eds), Circulations in the Global History of Art (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. 59–78. (101) See, for example, Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). (102) Arindam Dutta presents this critique in The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Global Reproducibility (New York and London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 9–13. (103) Although Dutta’s example in The Bureaucracy of Beauty addresses a visual topic: Gyan Prakash’s study of the museum in Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), it poses a misreading of Prakash’s ‘second sight’ as a nativist resistance to Enlightenment reason whereas Prakash presents it as: ‘Signifying neither a superstitious eye nor a scientific gaze, it was a vision re-formed by its encounter with science’s representation as wondrous and useful Western knowledge. Equipped with such a vision, Western educated Indians surfaced as modern subjects who could claim to represent and act upon the subaltern masses from whom they distinguished themselves.’ Prakash, Another Reason, p. 34. (104) Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 27–215. (105) David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 168. Page 31 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Introduction: writing photo-graphic histories of empire (106) Michel Foucault ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York: Penguin, 1984), p. 45.
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00008
Abstract and Keywords As a symbol of opaque darkness, the mysterious subterranean caves of Elephanta haunted the imagination of writers and painters ranging from John Ruskin to Flaubert and were notably memorialised in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India. This chapter examines the recruitment of optical devices like the camera obscura and the magic lantern, aimed at solving the caves’ mysteries, suggesting that these instead exaggerated the ghostly character of the caves, undermining the claims of a rational vision in apprehending their complex iconography and architecture, going on to feed a fantastical visual archive of the caves (and, by extension, the Indian landscape) in German cinema of the early twentieth century. Keywords: Phantasmagoria, Darkness, Caves, Elephanta, Optical devices, Magic lantern
To the eighteenth-century European imagination the Indian landscape appeared wrought in darkness. The haunting depths of the subterranean caves, the sprawling shaded retreat of the banyan tree and the unspeakable terrors of the ‘Black Hole’ tragedy all conspired to paint an image of a land shrouded in mystery and horror. These indelible images of the darkened landscape recalled its wild, untamed character but, amongst the earliest images of an unseen land gradually emerging into public visibility, they also pointed to anxieties about seeing and a fascination with the limits of the visible that have been identified as central to Romantic visuality.1 If visibility, spectacle and display dominated eighteenth-century Britain, introducing a culture of visuality for the first time, how did images of the hidden Indian lands brought to a public viewership figure within this emerging visual culture?2 The darkness served as a hermeneutic barrier that withheld the unfamiliar spaces from the European eye and presented a challenge to making them visible, both textually and visually. Explaining his impulse to document his impressions of his travels in India between 1780 and 1783, the painter William Hodges wrote, ‘It is only matter of surprize, that, of a country so nearly allied to us, so little should be known’. Aiming to rectify the ‘hiatus in the topographical department of literature’, Hodges intended to record ‘the idea of that first impression which that
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta very curious country makes upon an entire stranger’. This consisted ‘of a few plain observations, noted down on the spot, in the simple garb of truth, without the smallest embellishment from fiction, or from fancy’.3 And yet, when Thomas and William Daniell visited North India between 1788 and 1791 armed with a camera obscura and ‘a firm attachment to truth’, they privately complained about Hodges’ inaccurate and fanciful interpretations of the Indian landscape.4 As each successive account claimed to render it more truthfully, multiple narratives emerged, never quite dispelling the darkness for the European viewer but, shadow-like, clouding the glass, as it were. Writing from Calcutta, William Jones the philologist explained: ‘In Europe you see India through a glass darkly; here we are in a strong light; and (p.42) a thousand little nuances are perceptible to us, which are not visible through your best telescopes, and which could not be explained without writing volumes.’5 What is underlined in these accounts is the desire to marshal text and image to overcome the hermeneutic challenge posed by the land. My analysis in what follows is not to chart the progressive accuracy within which accounts of the Indian landscape were rendered nor to show how the darkness was unveiled to reveal a glorious, ancient civilisation in the past. Rather, I wish to indicate how the darkness itself encouraged the production of a fantastical visual and literary archive that made claims to the real, in part assisted by optical technologies. The most prominent symbols of the darkened Indian landscape were the rock-cut caves of Elephanta near Bombay whose forbidding interiors and gargantuan sculptures haunted the imagination of visitors and lingered as a symbol of arcane Hindu practices in European visual culture as late as the mid-twentieth century. The caves inspired a great deal of interest from artists, writers and natural historians, who mapped their interiors, speculated about their origins, forwarded hypotheses regarding the iconography of their sculptural programme and visualised their gloomy interiors in paintings, drawings, prints and travel writing. Darkness and gloom appeared to be the most distinguishing features of the caves, repeated in several descriptions. Articulating a view that resonated for much of the nineteenth century, the Reverend William Tenant drew parallels between the darkness and the state of the arts: ‘Their caves in Elephanta and Salsette are standing monuments of their original gloomy state of their superstition, and the imperfection of their arts, particularly that of architecture, which is perhaps the most intricate and laborious of any.’6 Elephanta is an island ten kilometres to the east of Mumbai with a series of caves, of which the primary one, built around the sixth century CE by the Kalacuri dynasty, is dedicated to Siva. Locally referred to as Gharapuri, literally ‘city of caves’, the island was named Elephanta by the Portuguese after a large stone sculpture of an elephant that had stood near the main landing and that is now in disrepair. Elephanta was the earliest of the Indian caves to be ‘discovered’ by European visitors and it was followed by forays into the nearby cave sites of Salsette and Kanheri, also on the western coast. Much of the early interest in Elephanta was because of its Portuguese occupation until its conquest by the Marathas between 1737 and 1739 and its subsequent acquisition by the British in 1774. In the seventeenth century the discovery by the French traveller Jean Thevenot of the rock-cut temple at Ellora suggested that Elephanta was not an isolated example and that the skills of rock-cut architecture had been well honed in India, leading Thevenot to conclude that ‘the Men have not been altogether Barbarous, though the Architecture and Sculpture be not so delicate as with us’.7 In 1819 the discovery of the Ajanta (p.43) caves by British army officers revealed yet another facet of cave dwellings in India – fresco paintings that generated a great deal of excitement amongst historians and artists.
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta Caves were central to the way that India was imagined in the colonial period and had a longlasting effect on the visual culture associated with the country. The young Gustave Flaubert likened himself to an Indian forest where ‘mysterious and grotesque gods are hidden in the depths of caverns’.8 Over a century later, André Malraux would write about the metaphysical import of his visit to Elephanta, where the sacred darkness of the caves ‘closed on the flow of time’.9 The caves’ ancient origins served to underline the primitive antiquity of the Indian civilisation, and in the late eighteenth century the paucity of historical records or the tools to translate them preserved the air of mystery that surrounded them.10 Caves acquired a significance as the earliest habitation of man in popular evolutionary schemes of architecture that drew a progression from the primitive ‘darkness of caves and forests, through the gloom of Gothic structures to the airy elegance of Grecian architecture’.11 The identification of the Indian landscape with ancient caves made it the home of primitive architecture.12 In 1845 the Scottish architectural historian James Fergusson explained this interest in the preface to Illustrations of the Rock Cut Temples of India: ‘“the Caves” are almost the only object of antiquity in India, to which the learned in Europe have turned their attention, or of which travellers have thought it worth while to furnish descriptions, or whose history they have attempted to elucidate; and they therefore possess, to a European public, an interest which it would be difficult to excite for other works’.13 Fergusson, who went on to establish a distinguished career in architectural history, chose the rock-cut temples for his first venture because, despite their popularity, no satisfactory studies of them existed and many discordant opinions prevailed, ‘for all in India is darkness and uncertainty’.14 The repeated references to darkness were an invitation to plumb its mysterious depths, and at Elephanta the creative production of speculative literature and imagery dovetailed with a Romantic belief in the generative powers of nature in India. The darkened interiorities of the cave ascribed to it a mysterious feminine quality and in the gendered Romantic landscape, where the ‘prospect’ was the purview of the masculine viewing subject surveying the lands and the ‘bower’ proffered a partial view that related to a feminised viewer, the caves were a darkened crypt to be deciphered by an authoritative gaze that mapped, surveyed and offered interpretations.15 This Oriental fertility was affirmed by the French writer Pierre Sonnerat: ‘India alone shows the traces of primitive fecundity: the barrenness of the other parts of the globe has been conquered by industry …’16 The recesses of the Indian cave with its overwhelming and often erotic sculpture served as an (p.44) archetype of feminine mystique and a model for exploring subterranean hidden truths. The feminisation of the colonial landscape has long been accepted as an attribute of imperial power, but in this case it also resonated with the Hindu designation of the cave as a sacred space which enshrined the gods.17 The caves carved deep within the womb of the mountains were thus fertile ground for both Hindu ritual and the Romantic mind, to whom they asserted the natural abundance of the tropical world.18 Elephanta was amongst the earliest Indian sites to capture the Romantic imagination. At the age of nineteen John Ruskin wrote a poem on Salsette and Elephanta, painting a picture of a dark, savage land held hostage by its gods. Ruskin portrays the islands lying across the dark sands of majestic Dharavee on a shadowy night, ‘each hollow cave, Darkling as death, voiceless as the grave’. Beasts of blood like tigers, lizards and deadly snakes haunt the island where the ‘ghastly idols fall not, nor decay’.19 Ruskin’s poem won the Newdigate Prize at Oxford in a competition where the judges decided upon the topic set for the contestants – for 1839, it was Salsette and
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta Elephanta, attesting to the fact that the caves were alive in the British imagination as a symbol of Indian antiquity. By the late nineteenth century Elephanta had lost much of the ‘gloomy disposition’ that earlier writers had pointed to but remained an important site on the traveller’s itinerary. In 1875 it hosted a luncheon for the visiting Prince of Wales within its large, columned hall. The prominent pillars loomed over the dining guests as the hall was festooned with glittering lights, dispelling with pomp and festivity the terrible images that Ruskin had alluded to. Even without its characteristic gloom, Elephanta remained in the public eye. By the end of the nineteenth century the caves had acquired the status of an emblem of the Indian landscape. ‘Very Indian these islands’, remarked the poet Edward Carpenter on his visit to Elephanta and Salsette, in an account that would inspire E.M. Forster’s famous encounter between the East and the West in the murky depths of the Marabar caves in A Passage to India (1924).20 The Elephanta caves posed a hermeneutic problem about how to represent India, and their European reception through the course of the long nineteenth century sought to come to terms with the phantasms produced by the darkened Indian landscape. Even as textual and visual reconstructions promised to represent Elephanta in accurate detail, the caves resolutely resisted translation, producing instead a range of phantasmagorical images of enormous, lasting power that would undo the gaze of scientific mastery involved in their documentation. The following sections examine the contested visions at stake in the representation of India to the British viewer, acknowledging both the centrality of visual documentation in asserting a ‘view’ and the ghostly traces that leave their mark upon it.
(p.45) The phantasmagoria of Elephanta Sara Suleri has remarked upon the ‘representational difficulty of colonial India’ in her discussion of the famous impeachment trial of Governor General Warren Hastings between 1788 and 1795 – which coincided with the growing popularity of Elephanta – noting that how to see India was a question of great political import.21 Finbarr Flood dubbed the trial a ‘battle of the lenses’, noting the optical metaphors that permeated the debates, with remarks on prosthetic eyes or faulty vision that were referenced in satirical prints through the camera obscura and the magic lantern.22 Elephanta was not only drawn into the impeachment debates, as I show below, but deeply implicated in similar questions on representation, emerging as a paradigmatic example of Oriental mystique and its obdurate resistance to intellectual enquiry. Optical technologies were invoked in representations of Elephanta not to differentiate between truth and fiction, as had been the case in the Hastings impeachment trial, but to underline their illusory possibilities vis-à-vis the phantasmagoria of Elephanta. Instead of the fidelity of representations claimed by the camera obscura, satirical prints drew upon devices like the magic lantern or the kaleidoscope with their propensity for visual tricks, producing a wondrous site of oracles and bloody rituals that catered to new appetites for visual sensation. Jonathan Crary has presented the camera obscura as structuring the dominant scopic regime of rational vision until the nineteenth century, when it was displaced by the popularity of other technologies, including the stereoscope and the kaleidoscope, that introduced elements of deception into the projected image.23 In this formulation, as Jill Casid has argued, fantasy is displaced onto a shadowy phantasmagorical domain that coexists alongside the normative empirical vision incarnated through the camera obscura. However, rather than splitting the subject of modernity into the rational self and his phantom other, Casid proposes complex relationships of continuities between the two based on a psychological haunting of affects, Page 4 of 22 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta deliriums and somatic passions.24 I argue below that the phantasmagoria of Elephanta haunts the European viewer’s representations of India, its ghostly presence leaving visible traces. Accounts of the Elephanta caves in western India had made their way into histories penned by Jesuit missionaries and Portuguese travellers as early as the sixteenth century, following the Portuguese occupation of western India. Partha Mitter has described how the early response to the caves attempted to grapple with the complex iconography of the massive Hindu statuary within its interiors and saw it as idolatrous and monstrous.25 Indeed, the statuary so offended the sentiments of some soldiers that there are reports of their (p.46) defacing some sculptures by using them for target practice.26 Despite the discomfort with the unusual iconography, European visitors to the caves were struck by the massive scale and forbidding interiors of the so-called ‘pagodas’, and even the earliest responses acknowledged an admiration for their workmanship, prompting wild speculation both as to their origins as well as to the legendary virtuosity of their builders. Such speculation ranged from the caves being the product of Chinese sculptors to anachronistic accounts that saw them as a Roman temple built by Alexander to mark the end of his Indian military campaigns.27 Wildly exaggerated reports about the marvels and horrors of the Elephanta caves made their way back to Europe, so much so that even Leonardo da Vinci, who was interested in subterranean caves and formations, was said to be fascinated by a ‘map of Elephanta in India’.28 The Portuguese historian Diogo do Couto described the Kanheri caves near Elephanta as one of the wonders of the world and reported (incorrectly) on a subterranean passage that went all the way to Agra. Interestingly, he describes the caves as radiant, with their interiors covered with a coat of lime and bitumen that ‘made the Pagoda so bright’.29 A sudden spurt of interest in Elephanta announced itself within intellectual and cultural circles in England in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, prompted partly by the acquisition of the island by the British in 1774 and the discovery of an account of the caves by the East India Company tradesman Isaac Pyke, who visited India in 1712 and went on to become the Governor of St Helena. Pyke was the captain of the galley Stringer, and the ship’s logs contain his account of the journey from Bombay to England in 1712–13 illustrated with pen and ink drawings.30 From Elephanta these included a floor plan of the main shrine and drawings of the columns, figures and pillared porticos.31 Pyke’s descriptions of Elephanta were recovered and presented to the Society of Antiquaries in London in 1780 by Alexander Dalrymple, a Scottish hydrographer who had been stationed at Madras as an employee of the East India Company. In 1785 the journal of the Society of Antiquaries, Archaeologia, published Alexander Dalrymple’s excerpts from Pyke’s journals that he had acquired from the East India Company and included a short bibliography of references to Elephanta in European travel writing.32 Dalrymple also included in his article some drawings of heads and sculptural fragments from the collection of Sir Ashton Lever, a well-known collector of natural history, which were drawn by the antiquarian engraver John Carter.33 The same issue of the journal included another article on Elephanta and Salsette that had been presented to the Society of Antiquaries in 1784 by William Hunter, a surgeon in the East Indies. Hunter later published his findings separately as part of a longer narrative about his travels in western India in 1799. A third, brief article on the nearby caves at Salsette was penned by the antiquarian Smart Lethieullier based on the (p.47)
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta papers of Charles Boon, the Governor of Bombay between 1715 and 1722, and together the three articles presented the hidden world of Indian caves to a wider public. Thomas Rowlandson’s satirical print of Elephanta from 1816 (Figure 1.1) mocks the elite circle associated with the eighteenthcentury rediscovery of Elephanta in an aquatint that features three friezes in relief, 1.1 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Strange Figures echoing the fragments from Elephanta near the Cave of Elephanta’, The Grand published in Archaeologia. The engraving Master of the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan, 1816 features portraits of British East India Company officials, with the text identifying them as ‘Strange figures near the cave of Elephanta – 1814’. Rowlandson portrays these wizened old men as monstrous relics in their own right – some with devil-like ears – and a Janus-faced man that recalls the Trimurti at Elephanta. The top left frieze depicts the Governor of Bombay, Sir Evan Nepean, as a gaunt old man who sits cross-legged on the ground between two members of his Council. The top right frieze depicts half-length portraits and busts, the only identifiable figure amongst this group being Col. Lionel Smith with two ass’s ears.34 Smith was a military officer with the 65th Regiment stationed at Bombay and was singled out for attack in Rowlandson’s caricatures, along with Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Governor General of India from 1813 to 1823.35 The bottom frieze features a sundry collection of British officers and tradesmen. The motto of the British East India Company, ‘Auspicio Regis et Senatus Angliae’, declaring allegiance to the king and Parliament of England, presides over the print, underlining the nefarious activities sanctioned by the Company. (p.48) Rowlandson’s print was included as the sixteenth plate in The Grand Master, or Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan (1816), illustrating satirical poetry by the anonymous Quiz, identified as William Combe (1742–1823). The Grand Master was a burlesque story that related the adventures of Qui Hi (pronounced Koi Hai), a soldier with the East India Company, to lampoon the figure of the griffin, the young man in a foreign land embarking upon a career. It implicates in its narration the much-reviled figure of the ‘nabob’, whose ill-begotten riches from his tenure in India had become a symbol of the corruptions associated with the East India Company’s imperial ambitions.36 Three of Rowlandson’s twenty-eight prints from The Grand Master referred to Elephanta, and Combe devoted a substantial canto to Qui Hi’s visit to the caves. Elephanta is first mentioned in a dream as Qui Hi imagines the wealth that will fall to him on his Indian sojourns and a figure rising from the grave in Elephanta directs him towards a heavily laden elephant carrying ‘casks of rupees, and debts, and charters’ and decked with diamonds. ‘Observe FUTURITY, and fear!’ commands the clairvoyant spirit of Elephanta, touching one of the caskets that then explodes, shaking the foundations of Britain’s Indian empire.37 Rowlandson’s image (Plate 2) follows Combe’s descriptions in showing the elephant, led by ‘Ambition’ and ‘Monopoly’ and tethered between the ‘Board of Control’ and the ‘House of Commons’, with a howdah seating the Governor General. A barrel labelled ‘Combustible Vox Populi’ leaks ‘Indignation’ as a lighted wick held in the hand of a severed arm bearing the word ‘Independence’ on its sleeve threatens to engulf it in flames.
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta This story of the descent of the nabob was beholden to the model popularised by William Hogarth in his series on The Rake’s Progress (1732–33); the nabob likewise followed his decline into a penniless dissolution, unravelling the promises of wealth and bounty that a career in the East symbolised. The Grand Master himself was the ‘Burra Sahib’, the colonial master, and Qui Hi was the common refrain addressed by him to servants, ‘Koi Hai?’ or ‘Is anybody there?’ and the story consistently plays upon the gains of the master at the expense of the subaltern. The genre was a popular one, inspiring Charles O’Doyly’s burlesque poem with sketches based on the adventures of the cadet Tom Raw, the Griffin (1828), depicting the life of ennui and idleness that comprised the typical soldier’s life
2 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘A New Map of India from the Latest Authority’, frontispiece, The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan: A Hudibrastic Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz, 1816
as he sat for portraits, participated in dances or
went hunting.38 However, Rowlandson’s depictions of Elephanta are invested in another set of issues beyond the critique of the East India Company officials and the dubious adventures of Qui Hi in India, associating Elephanta’s ghostly presence with those produced by new optical technologies and underlining the slippages between vision and knowledge as they related to the representation of India. In a print titled ‘Phantasmagoria a View in Elephanta’ (Plate 3), Rowlandson depicts a magic lantern show within the darkened interior (p.49) of a room. A horned devil holds up a crouching figure (identified as Lionel Smith) wearing a belt titled ‘Vice’ in front of the lamp as two gentlemen, a civilian labelled ‘Misery’ and a military man tagged ‘Avarice’, look on. Representatives of the British East India Company, they watch the transformation of the corrupt deeds performed behind their backs into the genial picture of commendation projected onto the wall. Here a man, likely Lionel Smith himself, holds a citation as he is congratulated by a muse. He bears an elephant head, an allusion to his stint in India, so that he is recalled as the elephantheaded god Ganesh. In the accompanying text Combe had drawn attention to Rowlandson’s caricature of Company officials, describing them as ‘petty tyrants’ reaping the reward of an unjust system while treading on the ‘neck of meek distress’, and called upon Lady Justice to: Let her expose the asses’ ears Of all the groups, Judges or Peers Let her, in just consideration, Alter the people’s situation; Let her examine and she will find That certain people are inclin’d To give rewards where none are due, Unto a servile stupid crew39
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta The magic lantern is tagged to produce 3 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Phantasmagoria, A View in Elephanta’, The Grand Master of the ‘Liberality’ and ‘Retrospection’, while the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan, 1816 wily figure manning the device promises ‘Fidelity’, and yet it produces genial images of salutation that are belied by the violent deed committed behind the seated Company gentlemen. It is fitting that this show takes place in a room with intellectual pretensions, crowded with paintings on the walls and books piled on the floor, amid which the classically inspired image is projected.40 The framed painting directly above the image is labelled Dungaree, recalling Qui Hi’s drunken nocturnal revelry with fellow soldiers amid the brothels of Dangidi, recorded in Rowlandson’s print ‘Pays a Nocturnal Visit to Dungaree’. Rowlandson frames the corruptions of the Company officials in the optical illusions produced by the magic lantern, following the common perception of its ability to exaggerate and deceive the viewer with insubstantial phantasmagorical images that had little to do with reality.41 Given the hoary stories about the caves that made their way back to Europe, Elephanta emerged as a particularly opportune site to address the slippages between vision and knowledge associated with the magic lantern. Its eerie darkness mimicked the traditional setting for magic lantern shows and its ‘monstrous’ deities with their multiple arms and heads were fitting examples of the exaggerations and distortions of the phantasmagoric image. Rowlandson’s graphic satire accentuated these exaggerations, as the very genre of caricature and the magic lantern shared an in interest in the (p.50) grotesque.42 Graphic satire had recalled the magic lantern and its deceptive character in an earlier instance of the representation of India in Britain, that of the impeachment trial of Governor General Warren Hastings between 1788 and 1795, which coincided with the first burst of interest in Elephanta. Here, James Gillray had presented the camera obscura as a corrective device to the unreliable phantasms of the magic lantern (Figure 1.2).43 James Sayers’s Galante Show had portrayed Edmund Burke manning a magic lantern that exaggerated the events in India, making mountains out of molehills (Figure 1.3). Gillray responded with his own print showing Warren Hastings as an Indian nabob behind a camera obscura which returned the objects to
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta (p.51) their original states. Rowlandson, on the other hand, introduces an optical device akin to the newly discovered kaleidoscope, which produced multiple reflecting images that further undermined the veracity of the image, to align it instead with the exotic, superstitious tales associated with Hindu belief.44 In Combe’s narrative, Qui Hi’s visit to Elephanta takes place in the presence of a Brahmin guide who, with tales traditional and old, alerts him to the supernatural happenings in the cave. Handing him a picture titled ‘Hindoo incantations’ (which is the title of Rowlandson’s print – Plate 4), he tells him a story of an unbeliever who asked a Brahmin to show him a view of the future. (p.52) Standing under ‘Brahma’s triple head’ (trimurti) at Elephanta, the Brahmin was set to reveal his powers to the trembling unbeliever by applying his eyes to a magic glass, when the thundering voice of Brahma ordered him to await his fate and hurled him out by his hair into the Hooghly river, the subject of another print by
1.2 James Gillray, ‘Camera-Obscura’, 1788
Rowlandson.45
1.3 James Sayers, ‘Galante Show’, 1788
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta A previous mention of Elephanta had portrayed a similar oracular pronouncement by the gods at Elephanta, made in the context of Combe’s denouncement of the Christian missionary practices of proselytisation. Combe mocks the shortsightedness of British views on India by drawing attention to the antiquity of Elephanta, making the claim that Brahma was worshipped in India long before the British lands were formed. Directing the reader to Rowlandson’s illustration of the trimurti for a better picture, Combe portrays the displeasure of the deity as:
4 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Hindoo Incantations, A View in Elephanta’, The Grand Master of the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan, 1816
The Mighty Elephanta shook And, lo! the triple headed God Frowned horribly, and gave a nod A Brahmin priest directs the poor Christian to an eyeglass: … Christian, arise! And to this glass affix your eyes: In it I’ll let you plainly see A scene of dread futurity! Mark! Too, whose pow’r you dare disown: ’Tis Brama’s and this work’s his own, Therefore, beware! lest you are led To draw his vengeance on your head. Depart! Ere yet your soul has felt The consequence of crime and guilt! The frightened Christian flees the scene but Combe notes that The vision always haunts his mind, Whenever he’s to sleep inclin’d; Nor would the world be able To make him think it was a fable.46 Rowlandson’s image corresponding to this scene features scenes of retribution viewed through an optical device resembling the newly discovered kaleidoscope. Against the towering sculpture of the trimurti, the Governor General, Rawdon-Hastings, peers through an eyeglass; a long tube leads to a kaleidoscopic set of medallions bearing scenes of retribution, an apparent attempt to depict convergences between a Hindu karmic belief and the punishments that were due to Rawdon-Hastings for the corruptions of his (p.53) administration in India. The central medallion, featuring the queen, presides over these punishments, including the execution of Rawdon-Hastings in two different scenes, the burning of the cities of Bombay and Calcutta, the castingout of Lionel Smith from the army and a judgment on a concurrent case involving the marine officer John Douglas and his wife.47 Rowlandson’s placement of the queen in the central medallion, presiding over the retributions, conjured Combe’s appeal to Lady Justice to deliver Page 10 of 22 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta judgment on the corruptions that plagued the East India Company, but also invoked the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s powerful closing arguments in Warren Hastings’ trial, widely regarded as amongst the most notable oratorical performances. Sheridan specifically juxtaposed the monstrous Hindu cave statuary against the sweet countenance of British justice: Is this the character of British justice? Are these her features? Is this her countenance? Is this her gait or her mien? No: I think even now I hear you calling upon me to turn from this vile libel – this base caricature – this Indian pagod – this vile idol – hewn from some rock – blasted in some unhallow grave – formed by the hand of guilty and knavish tyranny to dupe the heart of ignorance – to turn from this deformed idol to the true majesty of justice here. Here I see a different form enthroned by the sovereign hand of Freedom and adorned by the hand of Mercy – awful without severity – commanding without pride – vigilant and active without restlessness and suspicion … and in its loveliest attitude when bending to uplift its suppliant at its feet.48 Graphic artists’ recruitment of optical devices like the magic lantern and the kaleidoscope into political debates indicates the primacy of vision in public life, and points to how questions on vision and optics took on a wider social role beyond scientific experimentation. The camera obscura has been regarded as an ‘epistemology engine’, a device that was embedded in a larger organisation of vision and knowledge between a knowing subject and the external world.49 It presented a widely used model for explaining vision that saw the mind as an enclosed space illuminated by the calculable light of reason that imprinted upon it truthful observations about the world.50 However, the magic lantern introduces another element of projection into these debates on vision, an externalisation that produced the subject of modernity not as an interiorised self but as what Jill Casid calls ‘the phantom subject of discarnate reason, transporting bodily vulnerability, superstition, and susceptibility by a casting displacement that fixes the subject’s antitypes, the “others” of empire at home and abroad’.51 Sheridan’s reference to the sculptures of Elephanta, while presenting his argument for a ‘British justice’, is therefore entirely consonant with the phantasmagoria of Elephanta conjured in text and image, producing the imperial subject of reason and justice by projecting shadows onto the reviled monstrous deities of Elephanta. (p.54) Combe continues to use optical metaphors as he chronicles Qui Hi’s journey into India, mocking his naïveté in thinking that it was only ‘Europe’s vivifying sun’ that brought knowledge of geometry and astronomy, or of calculating the seasons and eclipses, into the darkened Indian lands. However, Qui Hi is informed by a native that astronomical knowledge has existed for many thousands of years, and that in Banaras there existed magnifying glasses that could surpass Herschel’s telescopes. As the English pundits ascended the observatory at Banaras, they were surprised to find malignant comets, and a flashing meteor that bore danger to Hindostan’s safety. It blaz’d awhile; but ’twas foretold. Its borrowed rays would soon be cold: And so it was – a darker sphere Over its disk did now appear Eclisps’d the ‘Jack-a-lanthorn’s’ light, And sent it to eternal night!52
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta Rowlandson’s accompanying print (Plate 5) shows the meteor of Governor General RawdonHastings (represented by his Star of the Garter) being eclipsed by a shadowy planet of ‘Public Disapprobation’ as a cluster of military and civilian officers stand by bearing telescopes and a geometric compass to map its exact position. Representing the scheming, courtly elite plotting Rawdon-Hasting’s fall, they watch him fall from the heights above Fort William as he crashes into the Dead Sea below.53 The sky directly above them includes a blazing flash of lightning titled ‘Vengeance’, and the theme of retribution for vice and corruption is extended further as the clairvoyant Banaras observatory engineers a karmic vision of justice that eludes the simple optics of the telescope. The mention of telegraphy in the conversations of the scheming men signals the new technology (discovered in 1795) that appeared to magically transport information across great distances and whose association with the occult ties it to the superior magnifying lenses of the Banaras observatory.54 James Gillray had presented the camera obscura as rectifying the deficient vision of the magic lantern; but Rowlandson’s suggestion of the kaleidoscope recalls the popularity of that device, as 200,000 kaleidoscopes were sold in London within three months of its introduction in 1815. Its inventor, David Brewer, had proposed it as a machine for the reformation of art using principles of symmetry in design: ‘It will create in an hour what a thousand artists
5 Thomas Rowlandson, ‘An Extraordinary could not invent in the course of a year.’55 Eclipse’, The Grand Master of the Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan, 1816 He saw the symmetrical patterns which it produced as the basis of beauty in nature, claiming that it was not just an amusement but a general philosophic instrument useful for the creation of symmetrical ornament in architectural decorations like Gothic windows, ornamental painting or designs for carpets.56 (p.55) In Rowlandson’s ‘Hindoo Incantations’, instead of the single image of the future requested by the disbelieving Hindu at Elephanta, Rowlandson presents six. Although later Marxist accounts would view it with distrust as being entirely composed of reflections, the kaleidoscope embodies a multiplicity that Baudelaire would associate with the fluid desires of the flâneur, who was, in his iconic text, ‘a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness’, presenting ‘a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity’.57 For Baudelaire, kaleidoscopic vision ruptures the unitary subjectivity of the viewer as he celebrates the fragmentary contingency of modernity.58 In transcending the circumscription to the single body and vision of the rational subject, the kaleidoscope allowed affinities with spiritualist discourses proposed by the multiple-headed gods of Hindu belief that stand in the background of Rowlandson’s kaleidoscope. If the multiple perspectives of the kaleidoscope reflected the transience of urban experience, they also lent themselves to a multiplicity implied in the Hindu belief in rebirth and karmic retribution, popularised in Orientalist accounts. Yet, the parodic character of the engravings kept alive the distrust of the image by associating it with occult practices and clairvoyance. Examinations of post-Enlightenment technology and the nature of spectacle have observed the alliance between the occult and media technologies, arguing that the ghostly presence is not accidental but is in fact constitutive of the very power of such specular technologies.59 In
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta Haunted Media, Jeffrey Sconce recalls the double sense of the word ‘medium’, in both the trance mediums of the occult as well as the wireless messages of telegraphy, arguing that their simultaneous development in the mid-nineteenth century was more than a coincidence.60 Technologies of projection, like the phantasmagoria which dwelt in what Tom Gunning calls ‘the space between the Enlightenment and superstition’, were imbued with an otherworldly presence that made them a credible home to the incredible stories and exotic lore popularised in Oriental tales like Lalla Rookh (1817) or The Curse of Kehama (1810).61 The miraculous transmission of images across space – images that dematerialised the object into two-dimensional shapes of light and colour – were linked to a cultural discourse on clairvoyance inasmuch as they transcended commonly understood principles of space, allowing a disembodied view of objects drawn from other places.62 Rowlandson presses into service all sorts of optical devices to unravel the mysterious darkness that was so characteristic of Elephanta and extended across to representations of India itself. If the problems in representing India had been brought to attention during the impeachment trial of Warren Hastings, where graphic satirists included optical devices like the magic lantern and the camera obscura to point to truth and exaggeration in representation, Rowlandson’s caricatures of Elephanta make little attempt to ground the architectural site in realism. He employs an array of visual techniques, (p.56) from the phantasmagoria of the magic lantern to the dazzling multiplicity of the kaleidoscope and the parodic gaze of antiquarian connoisseurship, all of which undermine rational vision and its claims to truth. Instead, the visual technologies indicate a propensity for a vision that goes beyond the eye to dabble in the occult, indicating that a rational vision was not the only means for apprehending the complex phantasmagorical darkness of Elephanta. Optical technologies that broke common boundaries of time, space and the body were invoked as the most effective mediums to convey the haunted stories of Elephanta’s ghostly interiors.
Encounters with the East in the cave At the heart of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924) lie the Marabar caves. Seemingly modelled upon the Barabar caves in north Bihar, they portend the dark mysteries that await the European visitor in the Indian subcontinent.63 Forster describes the caves as empty – no sculpture or painting distinguishes their walls and the smooth polished surfaces echo every sound that is uttered within their womb. ‘They are dark caves. Even when they open towards the sun, very little light penetrates down the entrance tunnel into the circular chamber. There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match.’64 In the book, the section on the caves is sandwiched between chapters on the Mosque and the Temple, and the caves describe the primeval spaces that connect the more recent cultural history of the nation to an older natural history, more fascinating and complex than those indicated by its long-standing religions. In leaving the caves’ walls bereft of sculpture or painting, Forster resisted the impulse to decode their iconographic mysteries, which by then, had become all too familiar to scholars and visitors. Forster insists that there is nothing to see here, it is merely an unremarkable black hole: ‘Nothing is inside them, they were sealed up before the creation of pestilence or treasure; if mankind grew curious and excavated, nothing, nothing would be added to the sum of good or evil.’65 And yet, the caves haunt the narrative with their inexorable draw, thwarting the meeting between the East and the West with their silent presence. Their bare walls recall a geological antiquity of India that stands outside of historical time: ‘They are older than anything in the world.’
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta While the symbol of the cave had inspired philosophical rumination since Plato, the encounter between scientific thought and the Romantic imagination found expression in multiple references to cave imagery in the late eighteenth century. The cave served as the very interface between nature and culture and was a point of interest to both the poet and the geologist. The heyday of Romanticism between 1770 and 1830 coincided with the golden age of British geology and saw the rediscovery of the cave as a motif of public, (p.57) scientific and artistic interest. Geology was so popular in Britain around the turn of the eighteenth century that it was alternately described as ‘the most idolised of [the] sciences’ and one that provided ‘an introduction to the highest circles of fashion’.66 Around the study of the discipline coalesced a host of contemporary passions including travel, fossil hunting (which supplied collectors and museums) and a desire to unravel the mysteries of man’s earliest origins deep within the bowels of the Earth. The cave figured as a mysterious natural world to be explored at a time when ideas of nature itself were being redefined. Rosalind Williams writes that excavation began to be seen during the Enlightenment and thereafter as a ‘modern version of the mythological quest to find truth in the hidden regions of the underworld … [becoming] a central metaphor for intellectual inquiry in the modern age’.67 Elephanta was not the only cave to gain widespread popularity in Romantic literature and art. British Romantic poetry made frequent reference to caves, particularly Fingal’s Cave, off the Scottish island of Staffa. Keats and Wordsworth wrote odes to this ‘Cathedral of the Sea’, as did natural scientists and philosophers including Erasmus Darwin and Humphry Davy. However, it was German Romanticism that made explicit connections between the cave explorations of the eighteenth century and Indian mysticism. German Romanticism shared an interest in organic fossils and minerals as archival evidence for a prehistoric world with its invocation of a Naturalphilosophie. The poet Novalis (1772–1801) situated much of his early novel fragment Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802) within a cave where a mysterious blue flower led him in his quest for truth, a symbol that would go on to become one of the pre-eminent motifs of German Romanticism. Novalis had studied at the Mining Academy of Freiburg, where he was deeply impressed by the lectures on mineralogy and stratigraphy, and this is evident in his romanticisation of mining and the exploration of caves in his writings. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen the caves serve as a source of mystical wisdom, pointing back to a golden past when harmony reigned, which was now preserved within its subterranean depths. The novel includes several Oriental motifs, including an encounter with Zulima, a Muslim woman who has been enslaved by crusaders and teaches Heinrich the technique of reading hieroglyphic writing. Although Novalis does not mention Elephanta in his writings, he would probably have been familiar with the writings of the German explorer Carsten Niebuhr, whose account of Elephanta was published in 1778, accompanied by sketches of the major sculptural objects within the caves. Given Novalis’s own interest in Indian philosophy, some have speculated the hieroglyphic language that Heinrich encounters within the cave to be Sanskrit and the blue flower as the blue lotus, held as auspicious in Indian mythology.68 In the context of the widespread German enthusiasm for the (p.58) antiquity of Indian civilisation through the study of Sanskrit language and literature, the exploration of the subterranean world of caves yielded truths that pointed back to India as the ur civilisation.69 The French traveller Pierre Sonnerat concurred, stating that the antiquities of Salsette and Ellora made India the best claimant to the role of the first
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta civilisation: ‘India, in its splendor, gave religions and laws to other nations; Egypt and Greece are indebted to the Indians both for their fables and their philosophy.’70 German interest in Eastern mysticism endured beyond its early eighteenth-century Romantic roots and the cave figured prominently in representations of India until the mid-twentieth century. Thea von Harbou’s novel Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb, 1918) has spawned at least three different German films (from 1921, 1938 and 1959) that have enjoyed great popularity with audiences as a regular part of German holiday television screenings.71 Although each film is slightly different in the details of the plot, all involve a despotic Indian ruler who invites a visiting Western architect to build a tomb in which to bury his queen alive because she has spurned his advances. Much of the action takes place in subterranean chambers that serve as secret passageways and accommodate a large temple with colossal sculpture, very reminiscent of the statuary at Elephanta. The obvious Orientalist motifs of India as an exotic land of despotic rulers and beautiful princesses, within which the European heroes are caught and must make their way out, make the film a precursor to the Indiana Jones formula; but what makes the film interesting for our purposes is its architectural theme. The Western hero is not only a famed architect who has been sought out by the ruler to build his evil tomb but also one who has unravelled the mysteries of the labyrinthine underground passages known only to the Indians. In unlocking the secret hieroglyphic codes within which Oriental mystique is formulated (and rescuing the captured princess) Western mastery is restored, while the association of the Indian landscape with cave architecture is given a new lease of life. In the 1959 film, directed by Fritz Lang, an erotic dance within the secret chambers of an underground cave brings together many of the exotic excesses and fantasies associated with representations of India. In the first of two sensual dances that take place within a secret cave temple that is explicitly closed off to foreigners, a voluptuous Sitha (Debra Paget) dances for the king in front of a massive statue of a heavy-bosomed goddess (Figure 1.4). As she descends into the darkened chamber where black-faced German actors as Brahmin priests sit along with the king, she bows before the yoni of the goddess to begin her dance. Music plays and she writhes upon the outstretched palm of the goddess on the floor of the cave, retreating repeatedly to the sheltered spot between her legs. Lang’s camera shifts the gaze from Sitha’s audience in the cave temple to the benevolent gaze of the goddess looking down upon (p.59) the small figure supplicating before her. Meanwhile, her intrepid architect hero has found a path into the secret temple through the rocky impasse and naively peers down upon the exotic spectacle below. Sitha catches a glimpse of him and instinctively looks at the goddess, whereupon a shade falls across the dimly lit cave and appears to turn the benevolent gaze of the goddess into stone. The statue that had appeared to come alive in the presence of its supplicating devotee retreats into its stone shell, and the alarmed eyes of the Brahmin priests portend an evil omen.
1.4 Fritz Lang, still from Das Indische Grabmal (The Indian Tomb), 1959
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta The film offers a wonderful example of the place of vision in constructing meaning, highlighting a confrontation between the gaze of darsan and the investigative rational gaze of the architect, set amid the drama of the viewers of the dance, both within the frame and outside it. In the relay of gazes between the illicit view of the Western architect, the anxiety of the dancer and the Brahmin priests and the displeasure of the reigning deity, the Western audience find their place as illegitimate voyeurs chancing upon a secret ritual buried deep within the bowels of the earth. The shadow of the erotic that had coloured the narratives of the Indian cave is made explicit in the overt offering of the seductive dance to the collective gaze of the audience, and the darkened spaces that so impeded the vision of the eighteenth-century viewer (p.60) are traversed by a series of gazes that seek to lay bare the mysteries of the cave, transforming it into exotic spectacle. Lang’s spectacular excesses set within the Indian cave celebrated a wider fascination with the generic motif of the Oriental cave as a place of hidden treasures and secret rituals. By the late nineteenth century, adventures set amid the Oriental cave had found wide audiences in theatrical performances of Aladdin and Alibaba and the Forty Thieves, not only in Europe but in India as well. Rosie Thomas traces these performances as stemming from the craze that followed Antoine Galland’s first European translation of the Arabian Nights between 1704 and 1717. In India these performances carried over the Orientalist baggage, so that the Empress Victoria Theatrical Company, for example, toured an Urdu Ali Baba aur Chalis Chor in the 1870s, performing in Chinese costumes and Chinese-style sets, over a five-month stay in Lahore in 1878 – a performance that would be memorialised in Helen Richardson Khan’s Mera Naam Chin Chin Chu from Howrah Bridge (1958). Thomas examines the popularity of the story of Alibaba as a key example of what she deems an Islamicate Orientalist genre, with its magical transformations, masquerades and fantasy costumes undo the claims of the Hindu mythological origins of cinema formulated around D.G. Phalke’s Raja Harischandra (1913). Citing reports on Calcutta-based film pioneer Hiralal Sen’s fulllength film based on Alibaba, screened at the Classic Theatre in 1903/4 (ten years prior to Phalke’s claims for the ‘first film’), Thomas assembles a wide body of evidence to claim the prominence of the fantasy film with stunts and visual tricks, undermining the singular attention granted to the devotional film.72 While the motif of the Oriental cave in stories from the Arabian Nights deserves a separate study, how might we consider the reception of Elephanta, as outlined above, in such stories about the origins of cinema? In studies of optical media from the long nineteenth century phantasmagoria shows have been posited as a significant moment in the development of a protocinematic audience for theatre and film. Phantasmagoria was instrumental in the genealogy of cinema, not only for the projecting mechanism of its apparatus but also for the production of a darkened space of viewership that manipulated the senses. Beyond phantasmagoria, Noam Elcott draws attention to the production of an ‘artificial darkness’ through black screens, darkened theatres and photographic dark-rooms that functioned as a shadow history of modern art practices.73 The simultaneous discussion of the black box of cinema has continued this conversation about the infrastructures that accompanied representational technologies associated with cinema and the production of visual subjects through an apparatus of darkness.74 Yet, this discussion has ignored the historical fact of empire and its production of darkness, a dominant trope through the course of the nineteenth (p.61) century. How did colonial darkness figure within the new infrastructural architectures of representation? Colonial darkness would likely be viewed as metaphorical in these material histories, where the colony exists as an object
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta of representation, without problematising the question of representation itself or its role in the production of visual subjects. However, as my discussion of Elephanta above demonstrates, such practices of darkness were not solely a result of technological experimentation, but a darkness produced actively in relation with the colonial world. Nor was this darkness merely metaphorical as has been commonly posited, but it had a material basis in the exploration of cave structures and the hidden truths which it sought to unearth. In the archaeology of visual practices outlined above, the Oriental cave was an archaic black box within which experiments of seeing were conducted, where the prosthetic vision of camera obscuras and magic lanterns prefigured the film cameras of the twentieth century. Even as optical technologies were harnessed to apprehend the obscure object of desire, Elephanta remained opaque, haunting viewers even from the spectacular excesses of Lang’s sets. The caves emerged as a paradigmatic example of a darkened space, undermining the claims of a rational vision in apprehending their complex iconography while weaving a phantasmagorical narrative within their deep interiors, to expose unexpected alliances between the occult and media technologies. As an icon of the Indian landscape, the darkness invited revelation. The following chapter will consider the iconography of unveiling as a crucial technology of illumination that sought to expose hidden mysteries. Notes: (1) The relationship between the visible and the invisible has been examined in a wide range of scholarship on Romanticism and visuality. See, for instance, Sophie Thomas, Romanticism and Visuality: Fragments, History, Spectacle (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), William Galperin, The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993) and Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). (2) Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). (3) William Hodges, Travels in India [1793] (Calcutta: Bibhash Gupta, 1987), p. iii. (4) Thomas Sutton, The Daniells Artists and Travellers (London: Bodley Head, 1954), pp. 33–37. (5) (15) August 1787 in The Letters of Sir William Jones, vol. 2, ed. Garland Cannon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), p. 749. (6) Rev. William Tennant, Indian Recreations, vol. 1 (London: Printed by C. Stewart, Edinburgh for Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, London and John Anderson, Edinburgh, 1804), p. 6. (7) Cited in Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 42. (8) Cited in Jean Seznec, ‘Flaubert and India’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 4, No. 3/4 (April 1941–July 1942), p. 141. (9) Bettina L. Knapp, ‘The Dance of Siva: Malraux, Motion and Multiplicity’, Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Autumn, 1978), pp. 358–371.
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta (10) The task of translation of inscriptions gained ground only by the second quarter of the nineteenth century. James Princep’s contributions between 1830 and 1840 and Dr James Bird’s Caves of Western India (1847) were some of the early attempts. A later important contribution by James Burgess in consultation with Pandit Bhagwanlal Indraji, Inscriptions from the Cave Temples of Western India (1881), developed these accounts further. (11) Lt. Col. Barry, ‘Account of the Caves on the Island of Elephanta Island, near Bombay’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 1785, pp. 89–91. (12) See William Hodges, Dissertation on the Prototypes of Architecture, Hindoo, Moorish and Gothic (1787), where he proposes caves as the origin of Oriental architecture that would go on to inspire Gothic architecture. Hodges questioned the veneration of Greek architecture to place ‘the majesty, boldness, and magnificence of the Egyptian, Hindoo, Moorish, and Gothic, as admirable wonders of architecture’. Hodges, Travels in India [1793], p. 64. (13) James Fergusson, Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples of India, Text to Accompany the Folio Volume of Plates (London: John Weale, 1845), p. vi. (14) Fergusson, Illustrations of the Rock-Cut Temples of India, p. 1. (15) See Jacqueline Labbe, Romantic Visualities: Landscape, Gender and Romanticism (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). (16) Pierre Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East-Indies and China; performed by order of Lewis XV between the years 1774 and 1781. Translated from the French of Monsieur Sonnerat, Commissary of the Marine, &c. &c. by Francis Magnus (Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1788), vol. 1, p. ii. (17) See Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York and London: Routledge, 1995). (18) Jonardan Ganeri proposes that the metaphor of the cave is in fact crucial to an understanding of the hidden self that permeates ancient Hindu and Buddhist thought. Jonardan Ganeri, The Concealed Art of the Soul: Theories of Self and Practices of Truth in Indian Ethics and Epistemology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). (19) John Ruskin, The Complete Works of John Ruskin Vol. 2 (London: George Allen, 1903), pp. 90–100. (20) Edward Carpenter, From Adam’s Peak to Elephanta; Sketches in Ceylon and India (London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1892), p. 310. (21) Sara Suleri, ‘Reading the Trial of Warren Hastings’, in Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (London and Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 50. (22) Finbarr Barry Flood ‘Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines: Envisioning India at the Trial of Warren Hastings’, Art History, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2006, p. 57. (23) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1992).
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta (24) Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). (25) Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters. (26) The story of Portuguese vandalism is repeated in many eighteenth-century British accounts, mostly with a purpose of differentiating between Portuguese attitudes to Indian antiques and the British objective to ‘study and protect’ Indian antique objects despite the frequent passage of many of those objects back to Britain. (27) Partha Mitter provides a wonderful account of the sixteenth-century reception of Elephanta in Much Maligned Monsters, pp. 34–40. (28) Donald Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. 2, Bk 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1970), p. 37. The map was said to belong to ‘Antonello, the merchant’, but the Florentine explorer Andrea Corsali who travelled with Portuguese missions also makes mention of ancient temples on an island near Goa in his letter to the Duke, Giuliano de’ Medici. Corsali goes on to compare Leonardo da Vinci’s vegetarian habits to the Gujaratis in his letters. E. McCurdy, The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci (New York: Dodd, Mead and Co., 1939), p. 78. (29) Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, pp. 38–39. (30) Pyke’s journal and log book aboard the Stringer were donated by Alexander Dalrymple to the British Library; however, an extensive collection of his later years (as Governor of St Helena) and a facsimile copy of the journal is part of the Eugene Fairfield McPike Collections at Brigham Young University. (31) Pyke mentions a Captain Baker who also made some drawings of the Elephanta sculptures as well as of the Salsette caves, but it is unclear whether they have been used in his journals or survived. (32) A good account of the antiquarian reception of Elephanta is included in C.J. Wright, ‘An Eastern Perspective: The Society of Antiquaries and Indian Antiquities in the 1780s’, The Antiquaries Journal, Vol. 91 (2011), pp. 195–210. (33) According to an account on the noted chemist Henry Cavendish, he contributed some drawings of Elephanta to Alexander Dalrymple’s presentation of Pyke’s piece in Archaeologia through their common association with the Society for Antiquaries. Christa Jungnickel and Russell McCormmach (eds), Cavendish: The Experimental Life (Lewisberg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999), p. 271. (34) These identifications have been made by M. Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires: Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1949). (35) Col. Lionel Smith was the son of Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) the Romantic poetess and radical intellectual, and died as the Governor of Mauritius in 1840. See Charles Rathbone Low, History of the Indian Navy: (1613–1863), Vol. 1 (London: Richard Bentley and Sons, 1877), pp. 383–384. Lionel Smith has been identified in George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, pp. 640–641. Lionel Smith’s grandfather was Richard Smith, a nabob described by Macaulay as ‘dissolute, ungenerous and tyrannical’. Sudipta Sen, ‘Colonial Aversions and Domestic Desires: Page 19 of 22 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta Blood, Race, Sex and the Decline of Intimacy in Early British India’, South Asia, Vol. 24, Special Issue (2001): 29. (36) Although the text focuses its attention on the dissolute nabob, the obvious example of the wasteful extravagance of the Prince Regent, George IV could not have been far from reader’s minds. (37) Quiz (William Combe), ‘The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi? In Hindostan’ A Hudibrastic Poem in Eight Cantos by Quiz. Illustrated with Engravings by Rowlandson (London: Thomas Tegg, 1816), p. 15. (38) For an excellent account of The Grand Master as a parable on the progress of the figure of the nabob, see Christina Smylitopoulos, A Nabob’s Progress: Rowlandson and Combe’s The Grand Master, A Tale of British Imperial Excess, 1770–1830, unpublished dissertation, McGill University, Montreal, 2010. (39) (William Combe) Quiz, ‘The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi?’, pp. 60–61. (40) Among the books is one by Charlotte Smith, Lionel Smith’s poetess mother, strengthening the conclusions that the central figure is indeed Lionel Smith. (41) There is a wide body of literature on the phantasmagoria as an illusory projection technology that prefigures cinema. Some notable studies include Tom Gunning, ‘The Long and the Short of It: Centuries of Projecting Shadows, from Natural Magic to the Avant Garde’, in Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon (eds), Art of Projection (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2009), pp. 23–35; Tom Gunning, ‘To Scan a Ghost: The Ontology of Mediated Vision’, Grey Room, Vol. 26 (Winter 2007), pp. 94–127; Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Terry Castle ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Autumn 1988), pp. 26–61. (42) Finbarr Barry Flood points to an exhibition of political caricatures titled The Magick Lantern that was held in London in 1775, ‘Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines’, p. 51. (43) See Flood ‘Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines’, p. 53. (44) Flood, ‘Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines’, examines the relationship between these two images in greater detail. (45) Quiz (William Combe), ‘The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi?’, pp. 194–195. (46) Quiz (William Combe), ‘The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi?’, pp. 70–72. (47) Christina Smylitopoulos includes a detailed identification and examination of the figures in these roundels in A Nabob’s Progress, pp. 95–96. (48) E.A. Bond (ed.), Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longman’s & Roberts, 1859), pp. 727–728. (49) Don Ihde, ‘Epistemology Engines’, Nature, Vol. 406, No. 6791, 6 July 2000, p. 21.
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Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta (50) Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (London and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001) pp. 38–43. (51) Jill H. Casid, Scenes of Projection: Recasting the Enlightenment Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 19. (52) Quiz (William Combe), ‘The Grand Master or the Adventures of Qui Hi?’, p. 73. (53) For an insightful account of the political intrigue within which Rawdon-Hastings was embroiled vis-à-vis the print of the eclipse see Smylitopoulos, A Nabob’s Progress, pp. 85–90. (54) On telegraphy and the occult, see Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). (55) David Brewster, The Kaleidoscope: Its History, Theory and Construction (London: J. Murray, 1858), p. 136. (56) David Brewster, A Treatise on the Kaleidoscope (Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constant & Co. Edinburgh; and Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown; and Hurst, Robinson & Co. London, 1819), p. 73. (57) Charles Baudelaire, ‘Painter of Modern Life’ (1863) in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E. Charvet (New York: Viking, 1972), pp. 395–422. (58) On kaleidoscopic vision see Tom Gunning, ‘From the Kaleidoscope to the X-Ray: Urban Spectatorship, Poe, Benjamin, and Traffic in Souls (1913)’, Wide Angle, Vol. 19, No. 4 (October 1997), pp. 25–61 and Helen Groth, ‘Kaleidoscopic Vision in Late Victorian Bohemia: George Sims’s Social Kaleidoscope’, in Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (eds), Media, Technology and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 91–106. (59) See Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 229; Tom Gunning, ‘Illusions Past and Future: The Phantasmagoria and Its Specters’, Refresh! The First International Conference on the Histories of Art, Science and Technology (2004), http://hdl.handle.net/10002/296.5. (60) Jeffrey Sconce, Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), pp. 21–58. (61) Gunning, ‘Illusions Past and Future’, p. 5. (62) On clairvoyance and technology, see Martha Blassnigg, ‘Clairvoyance, Cinema and Consciousness’, Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt, Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 105–122 and Stefan Andriopoulos, Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel and Optical Media (New York: Zone Books, 2013), particularly Chapter 5, ‘Psychic Television’, pp. 139–157. (63) Forster travelled to India in 1914 and then again in the early 1920s when he is known to have stayed in Patna, a city about 100 km north of the Barabar caves. (64) E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt, 1984), p. 137. (65) Forster, A Passage to India, p. 138. Page 21 of 22 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Through the glass darkly: the phantasmagoria of Elephanta (66) Michael Shortland, ‘Darkness Visible: Underground Culture in the Golden Age of Geology’, History of Science, Vol. 32 (1994), pp. 1–61. (67) Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society and the Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 23. (68) Kamakshi P. Murti, India: The Seductive and Seduced ‘Other’ of German Orientalism (Westport, CT and London: Greenwood Publishing, 2001). (69) See Douglas T. McGetchin, Indology, Indomania, and Orientalism: Ancient India’s Rebirth in Modern Germany (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009). (70) Pierre Sonnerat, A Voyage to the East-Indies and China; performed by order of Lewis XV between the years 1774 and 1781. Translated from the French of Monsieur Sonnerat, Commissary of the Marine, &c. &c. by Francis Magnus (Calcutta: Stuart and Cooper, 1788) vol. 1, pp. vi and 109. (71) A good account of the three versions is the essay by Meenakshi Shedde and Vinzenz Hediger, ‘“Come On, Baby, Be My Tiger: Inventing India on the German Screen”, Der Tiger von Eschnapur and Das indische Grabmal’, in M. Dutta, A. Fitz, M. Kröge, A. Schneider and D. Wenner (eds), Import/Export: Cultural Transfer between India and Germany (Berlin: Parthas, 2005). (72) Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). (73) Noam Elcott, Artificial Darkness: An Obscure History of Modern Art and Media (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016). (74) See Ute Holl, Cinema, Trance and Cybernetics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017).
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00009
Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the emergence of the Indian landscape into the visibility of the Western world, drawing upon the iconography of unveiling as consonant with the trope of ‘discovery’. In the context of the civilising mission of empire, such acts of unveiling served as technologies of illumination, bringing light into benighted lands. The images examined foreground not only epistemological issues where visibility implies a transcendence of the darkness of Oriental mystique but are equally invested in aestheticising landscapes, so that exotic lands emerge as sites of visual pleasure. The ritual of unveiling dramatises the act of seeing, holding out the promise of an unmediated vision and the revelation of buried secrets and hidden pleasures. Keywords: Acts of seeing, Veil, Illumination, Visibility, Unveiling, Discovery, Empire, Light, Oriental
Much has been written about the enhancement of vision through imaging technologies, but the place of empire in redefining the visual horizon has received less attention. Yet the discovery of foreign lands for trade and exploration played an essential role in extending visual frontiers, as geographical limits were redefined by voyages of discovery and commercial maritime activity. An extensive visualisation of the globe followed as the product of these journeys, making visible places hitherto hidden from the view. Philip Mercier’s Sense of Sight (1744–47) (Plate 6) presents vision not only through an array of optical technologies that herald an overcoming of visual limits, including a magnifying glass, a telescope and reflecting instruments like the mirror, but also through a map.1 If telescopes brought the heavens into closer view and microscopes visualised an invisible array of organisms, the promise of the sights of new lands pressed into service a host of technologies including maps, surveys and topographical drawings that claimed to render in precise detail the landscapes unveiled.2 Maps presented a standardised view of the lands that could be harnessed to the project of empire building, homogenising spatial knowledge within a ‘house of certainty’.3 Each participated in a redefinition of the landscape of the visible.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Devices like the telescope and the microscope had widened the empirical horizon to a sub-visible world – a ‘new’ world of the visible not unlike the vistas opened up by the voyages of discovery.4 Meanwhile, in the heroic narratives of the Scientific Revolution the intellectual journey itself was cast as the voyages of discovery, traversing uncharted territory and lighting the path in a quest for truth.5 If empire was a force driving this vision, so was gender. Here men look on authoritatively, commanding the science of cartography, and women are taught to see.6 Mercier’s painting documents the 6 Philip Mercier, Sense of Sight, 1744–47 importance of vision and visibility in eighteenth-century England, where sites like the Vauxhall gardens or the theatre became places to see and be seen, such that the act of seeing formed the basis of a new sociability.7 In addition, the eighteenth-century spectator took part in a number of visual spectacles including public hangings, scientific (p.68) demonstrations, fireworks, masquerades, art exhibitions, all of which produced a culture of visuality, where a metaphorics of the eye guided ways of seeing.8 Yet, Nicholas Mirzoeff historicises visuality to claim that it as not merely the sum total of visual mechanics involving viewers and the view, but a mode of claiming authority by assembling information, images and ideas into a coherent visual history. A key moment in this history is what he identifies as ‘the imperial complex’, where a racialised paradigm between the ‘primitive’ and the ‘civilised’ institutes a supremacist vision vis-à-vis the colonial subject, what in another context Mary Louise Pratt has called ‘the relation of mastery predicated between seer and seen’.9 This chapter examines four acts of seeing embedded within such an imperial complex of visibility and power. Although the scenes are not offered as a historical progression, each features the well-recognised iconography of unveiling that ‘remediates’ older modes of visualisation while relaying new concerns about the role of sight in its encounters with an unknown Other.10 I argue that these acts of unveiling function as the visual equivalents of the trope of discovery that guided European explorations demystifying terra incognitae, while also setting the terms within which the colonial vision machine would engage with India. In the context of the Enlightenment, such acts of unveiling functioned as visual tropes for dispelling the darkness of ignorance with the light of reason – and indeed, a series of frontispieces by prominent philosophers invoked this visual metaphor.11 Appended to empire, such acts of unveiling serve as technologies of illumination, bringing light into benighted lands. The following scenes not only foreground epistemological issues where visibility implies a transcendence of the darkness of Oriental mystique, but also inscribe the colonial subject into an imperial visual regime characterised by light and reason, what Michel Foucault has in another context called ‘subjection by illumination’.12 Finally, this chapter argues that these acts of unveiling mobilise a desire, so that the darkness typically figured as feminine discloses bodies and sites that emerge as sources of visual pleasure.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination The act of unveiling was a crucial technology of sight associated with the visual drives of colonialism, in much the same way as the ‘aerial view’, which paraded as the god’s-eye perspective and was harnessed in the services of war.13 Both performed a desire to extend visual boundaries through a strategic exercise of power through vision. Although the act of unveiling held out the promise of an unmediated vision where the obstructive veil was removed to offer a supposedly transparent view, it was nevertheless framed by an elaborate ritualised drawing apart of the curtain. In this visual dramaturgy, seeing is itself dramatised, drawing attention to the act in a gesture that appears self-reflexive. In staging the act of representation, it acknowledges the mediations inherent in the production of the image, a feature lost in the (p. 69) post-photographic nineteenth-century production of the Oriental world in exhibitions, where it was presented as a seamless object of representation for the observing subject.14 The four scenes below examine the drama of vision in its encounter with an unknown other to consider the desires driving this vision.
Act 1: unveiling the Eastern bride The title vignette of The Oriental Portfolio (Figure 2.1), a lavishly produced manuscript from 1838, reproduces a motif that dramatised the act of seeing and had acquired much currency since the late eighteenth century. Two allegorical figures representing Literature and the Arts on the one side, and the goddess of war on the other, lift a veil to offer a view of the Indian landscape. Holding aloft the curtain, they bring into view for the Western audience an image of India replete with elephants and camels and dominated by the stupendous architecture that had intrigued travellers and artists. Significantly, the scene presents the seat of the Mughal Empire in Delhi, claiming to show the view from a window of the emperor’s palace, and it was the realm under his gaze that the artist sought to capture. The Indian world is framed as picture, underlining the role of art and literature in the creation of an image of India, so that the ‘outside’ allegorical figures are rendered in the plastic sculpturesque model while the ‘inside’ image is typically two-dimensional. Significantly, one allegorical figure is seated next to an open book and a palette, underlining the associations with literature and art, whereas the other figure stands next to a shield and the hilt of a sword and an axe are visible as her accompanying attributes. The weaponry is allied with art and literature in revealing the Indian landscape unto the world; both perform the exercise of unveiling an area hitherto shrouded in darkness. The originary gesture of unveiling brought the landscape into the visual field of the Western viewer, exposing its hidden mysteries to curious eyes. Writing in the preface to their travelogue of India and China, the artists Thomas and William Daniell employed a similar metaphor to describe their efforts: ‘Curiosity has penetrated the veil of mystery that so long enveloped their civil and religious systems; and their pompous pretensions to antiquity, their venerable laws and institutions are now exposed to the sacrilegious scrutiny of strangers.’15 Although the Daniells’ acknowledge their curious gaze to be disruptive and profane, they would go on to absolve the arts of any desire for avarice or power. Yet, their pictorial documentation of the Indian landscape appears inextricably linked to the visual drives of colonialism. The Daniells’ extensive travels and the resultant prints and travelogues participated in the commercial success of a newly emerging publishing industry centred on ‘Views’ of exotic (p.70)
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (p.71) places. The Oriental Portfolio, like the Daniells’ images, presented the lands as pictures, primarily for visual consumption and made available to enthusiastic audiences in metropolitan Europe. The aestheticised appropriation of the Indian landscape was a function of both technological advances in printing technologies as well as a new mobility that made possible the objectification of spaces, which could now be transported and consumed from a distance.16 The portfolio illustrated the dynamics of this mobile image comprising rapid, disconnected drawings of life and landscape that were patched together in large folio formats to produce a cohesive picture. In the frontispiece of The Oriental Portfolio, the grandeur of the architecture and the spectacle of the pageantry that imprint the authority of the Mughal Empire upon the scene are rendered impotent in the distant and diminutive view that recalls its fading prestige, dislocating the space from its material past and introducing it into the lexicon of images that would define the 2.1 T.H. Pitt, title vignette from The Oriental Indian nation in the Western imagination. To Portfolio, 1838 see the frontispiece, then, as a benign documentation of the Indian landscape misses the thrust of its gaze that astutely identifies the scene as the seat of power and deftly leads the viewer into the heartland in its successive pages, substituting territorial occupation with an aesthetic contemplation and consumption that renders the space always available to the gaze. The visual objectification of the landscape allowed for easy substitutions and the landscape portrayed in the frontispiece continued to have an afterlife in the years to come as colonial power inscribed itself upon the Mughal-dominated architecture.17 In 1877 it was in a clearing by this symbolic site of Mughal authority that Queen Victoria was proclaimed as Empress of India in a grand durbar ceremony that astutely exploited the visual to stamp its authority upon the Indian landscape. The durbar included a procession through the city of Delhi against the dominant Mughal architecture, and artists and photographers were invited as part of the festivities, resulting in the production of an official book with photographs by Samuel Bourne and Charles Shepherd.18 So successful was the durbar in stamping British authority that it inspired two further durbars – in 1903 marking the coronation of Edward VII as Emperor, and then again in 1911 to mark George V’s ascension to the throne. While much analysis of the durbars has focused on the adoption of Oriental symbols of kingship by the colonial masters, the memorialisation of the events remains an early instance of a landscape produced specifically for visual consumption. Julie Codell enumerates how viceroys Page 4 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination commissioned ‘artists, journalists, photographers and filmmakers who disseminated durbar events around the world through paintings, illustrations, periodicals, travel narratives, life writings, photographs, cartes-de-visite, postcards, official books, private albums and films’.19 The festive pomp and pageantry recreated the landscape as visual spectacle while reproductive technologies allowed (p.72) the gaze to be endlessly reproduced, facilitating its appropriation as scenic artefact. Lavishly illustrated travel books like The Oriental Portfolio reflected the curiosity and excitement generated by the British exploration of foreign lands as prints and engravings of these expeditions began to be freely circulated by the late eighteenth century. The production of illustrated travel books and prints of scenery took off when aquatint (developed in France in the 1760s) became popular in England, and received a further boost with the coming of lithography in 1796. A large number of printing establishments, publishing firms, books and print sellers emerged around the new market for foreign prints, offering artists and viewers a site to cultivate their interests. Rudolph Ackermann’s Repository for the Arts at the Strand was one such institution. Situated barely three miles from East India House, it held literary evenings as guests examined the fine colour-plate books that it published within its elegant library, illuminated by gas-light. Apart from printing and publishing books and prints, Ackermann’s premises contained a school of drawing, a watercolour gallery, a circulating library where subscribers could borrow pictures to take home, as well as a showroom where books, periodicals, manuals of instruction and artists’ materials could be purchased.20 By the 1830s, tinted lithographs of views like The Oriental Portfolio, magnificently produced in large folio formats, had become particularly popular and participated in the wider visual culture associated with imperial spectacles.21 Unlike the uncoloured lithograph with its sharper contrasts, these were printed on a yellow ground that threw up the whites and the greys with softer hues, allowing for a suffused atmospheric lighting that improved upon earlier prints. Using motifs of ancient cities from faraway lands, the folios served as collectors’ items and the ivory and white tones reinforced the dying grandeur of distant empires. The artist best known for this genre was David Roberts (1796–1864), whose Picturesque Sketches in Spain and The Holy Land were widely renowned and heavily subscribed to. Roberts had in fact contributed a drawing of a zenana scene based upon a sketch by Thomas Bacon for The Oriental Portfolio. In his own folios, Roberts employed similar strategies of penetrating hidden worlds in his title vignettes; the frontispiece for the third volume of The Holy Land pictured a narrow passage through deeply cut rocks, allowing the land to emerge into visibility. The Oriental Portfolio was conceived by Horace Hayman Wilson (1786–1860), chair of the department of Sanskrit at Oxford, using drawings by several travelling artists including Thomas Bacon and Captain R.M. Grindlay. Wilson was best known for his two volumes on the Select Specimens of the Theatre of the Hindus (1827) and had served in Bengal from 1808 to 1832 as an official of the East India Company and secretary of the Asiatic Society founded by William Jones. Wilson compiled the text accompanying the (p.73) prints, and it was this, he claimed, that distinguished The Oriental Portfolio from previous travel catalogues like those of Balthazar Solvyns or Charles D’Oyly that contained only imagery. Even when some like the Daniells’ Oriental Annual had included text, they were, according to Wilson, ‘miscellaneous and unconnected … too scattered and detached a form to supply a connected and copious series of graphic illustrations of India’. Instead, the Portfolio hoped to capitalise upon the popularity of Oriental literature and to include ‘typographic accompaniments … from the most competent authorities’. Text and image, art and literature were thus wedded together in visualising for the
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination British public a land that had served as a ‘theatre of so many brilliant military achievements and such extensive commercial enterprize’.22 However, what rendered the Portfolio cohesive was not merely the explanatory text but, as I will indicate below, an attentive arrangement of the plates that took away the haphazard, disconnected nature of the travelling portfolio by keenly following the tourist’s gaze into the Indian heartland. If the frontispiece of The Oriental Portfolio explicitly attributed the visual emergence of the Indian landscape to art and literature, the raised curtain pointed to the contemporary vogue for Oriental drama on the stage, so theatre was equally implicated in staging the Oriental world for the Western viewer. In the year following the Mutiny of 1857, for example, the site was revisited in plays like The Storming and the Capture of Delhi, which dramatised the event on stage not only in London but also in faraway Canada until as late as 1895, transporting romanticised images of the Indian landscape in vivid costume and colour. Exquisitely painted backdrops and spectacular pageantry that included exotic animals like lions and tigers, but most notably the elephant, adapted representational strategies from other contemporary visual forms like the panorama and the diorama and even ethnological performances and exhibitions.23 John Mackenzie has in fact asserted that theatre adopted the visual effects of other types of spectacle (including prints) as a means of translating ‘military and naval news to the stage’ such that imperial ideology and nationalist sentiment were produced in the staging of victories in the colonies.24 The gesture of unveiling thematised in the frontispiece of The Oriental Portfolio (see Figure 2.1) formed an essential mode of apprehending the hidden Oriental world indicated in travel books and drawings, or even in expressions like the ‘purdah princess.’ To unveil the hidden lands was to reduce its obscurity by bringing it into the field of vision with the promise of rendering it completely visible and thus knowable. The latter half of the nineteenth century, wrote Jean Louis Comolli, lived in a ‘frenzy of the visible’. It was an effect made possible by the social multiplication of images, but ‘also something of a geographical extension of the field of the visible and the representable: by journies [sic], explorations, colonizations, the whole world (p. 74) becomes visible at the same time that it becomes appropriatable’.25 In travel books like The Oriental Portfolio, unveiling the Orient essentially performed an epistemological function in proposing a visual knowledge of the unknown lands. Like maps, travel books and portfolios produced new forms of visual knowledge about the little-known lands with which Britain had begun to establish trading or military relationships. If maps had posed an abstract relationship with the land, travel books like The Oriental Portfolio included more intimate views that sought to take the viewer into the heartland. The gesture of unveiling invoked a long history of unveiling the veiled goddess – identified as Artemis of Ephesus but actually a syncretic figure from late antiquity that incorporated the Egyptian goddess Isis. Pierre Hadot has drawn out an extensive history of the idea of unveiling nature that he extends back to pre-Socratic fragments, proposing that it was resurrected in the Enlightenment in the promises of science to expose the secrets of nature.26 The German Romantic tradition readily adopted the motif in its writings with figures like Schiller (Das verschleierte Bild zu Sais, 1795) and Novalis (Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, 1798–99), identifying the veiled goddess with Isis of Sais, while English artists like Benjamin West (The Graces Unveiling Nature, 1779) and William Hogarth (Boys Peeping at Nature, 1730) interpreted the goddess as nature in an understanding that would continue over the course of the next two centuries. Particularly significant for our purposes is an engraving of Apollo unveiling Isis/Artemis by Bertel Thorvaldsen in Alexander von Humboldt and Aime Bonpland’s German translation of
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Ideen zu einer Geographic der Pflanzen from 1807. The image served as a dedication to Goethe by the authors and included a copy of Goethe’s book The Metamorphosis of Plants at the goddesses’ feet. Humboldt’s study on botany readily subscribes to the model of science unveiling nature’s secrets; however, in relating the act of unveiling to his own travels to the New World (between 1799 and 1804), Humboldt ties this expansion of knowledge to the voyages of discovery. Keeping the symbolism regarding the conquest of nature in mind, the image of the Greco-Roman male god unmasking the veiled Isis figures as a prototype that imagines a mysterious, feminised Orient made available to and interpreted by a rational Western gaze. It is a feminised Orient that is unveiled for the Western viewer in these images, each veil claiming to unravel its secrets. In his formulation of Orientalism, Edward Said had proposed that ‘The cultural, temporal and geographic distance [between the Occident and the Orient] was expressed in metaphors of depth, secrecy, and sexual promise: phrases like “the veil of an Eastern Bride” or the “inscrutable Orient” passed into the common language.’27 The female body emerges as crucial in the enterprise of envisioning the Orient as Other and strategic visual technologies are devised to illuminate her secret interiorities. Visual technologies refer here not (p.75) only to mechanical devices for enhancing vision, but also negotiations between knowledge and power in the act of making visible, producing what Jonathan Beller has in another context called the ‘calculus of the visible’.28 The Oriental Portfolio provides a good example of the trajectory of the imperial gaze, charting the course of the eye as it unravels the mysteries of the Orient. The successive pages of the Portfolio direct the eye through fortified gateways (Figure 2.2) that serve as passages into the 2.2 T.C. Dibdin, ‘Ancient Gateway at Deig’, heartland, to nautches (performances of 1838 courtesans dancing) in the anderoon (Figure 2.3), which was a private interior chamber for the womenfolk akin to a harem. As a space that was shielded from the outside gaze, it was the illumination of the harem that rendered the Orient completely visible to the Western viewer.29 A scene of the dilapidated zenana building at Fatehpur Sikri follows, and although there is no imaginative reconstruction here of the pleasures inside as had been rendered by artists like William Daniell (The Favourite of the Harem, 1829 or Zohara, a Nautch Girl at the Court of Asoph-ud-dowlah, 1834), the accompanying text mentions its historical role in that it contained apartments of the emperor’s multiple wives. The lithograph of the anderoon was based upon drawings by Captain Robert Melville Grindlay, who had accompanied an embassy to Kabul in 1808 led by Montstuart Elphinstone, and most of the figures represented were portraits.30 The region had been the subject of some intrigue between the French and the British and the palace belonged to Meer Morad Ali, one (p.76)
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination of three brothers who exercised great influence upon the court of Kabul. Although the supporting text identifies the danseuse as ‘Misree Khana’ (literally ‘storehouse of sweets’), dwelling upon her grace and beauty, the portfolio affected a disinterested air, ‘These are the amusements of the anderoon, and to these, although intolerably tedious to an European, the natives devote long hours of the night with an earnestness of enjoyment that sets ennui or lassitude at defiance …’31 The zenana and nautch girls were popular subjects for travelling British 2.3 Captain Grindlay, ‘A Nautch in the artists and would go on to produce a vast Palace of the Ameer of Sind’, 1838 archive of imagined pleasures within the zenana’s lush interiors in the minds of both viewers and artists. Here, the choice to depict the private pleasures of the ruling elite in Kabul determinedly overlooked the political battles waged in the region. Although the image purports to document the British embassy of 1808, at the time of the preparation of the portfolio, British forces were active in Kabul deposing the Russian-backed ruler Dost Muhammad and installing Shah Shuja, who was friendly to the British in his turn. Shah Shuja was an unpopular ruler who was executed in 1842 and the British were forced to withdraw as Dost Muhammad regained the throne, the events being ironically celebrated as a British victory in plays like The Affghanistan War! or, the Revolt of Cabul! and British Triumphs in India. Such generic views of the Orient as enigma incited a vast production of (p.77) literary, theatrical and visual material aimed at rationalising its mysteries. Even as these aimed at the production of a neutral scientific discourse, making these spaces intelligible to the Western viewer, they were structured as projections of a desire to represent the unrepresentable, to visualise the invisible. As such, hidden interiors lying typically out of bounds for the foreigner, like harems or the anderoon, become the objects of a voyeuristic gaze representing a determination to ferret out secret enigmas by exposing them to the light of the visible world. Evelyn Fox Keller has viewed this as a systemic project of control implicated in a gendered division of a male subject of knowledge investigating secret interiorities typically figured as feminine: The ferreting out of nature’s secrets, understood as the illumination of a female interior, or the tearing of nature’s veil, may be seen as expressing one of the most unembarrassedly stereotypical impulses of the scientific project. In this interpretation, the task of scientific enlightenment – the illumination of the reality behind appearances – is an inversion of surface and interior, an interchange between visible and invisible, that effectively routs the last vestiges of archaic subterranean female power.32 To unveil the ‘purdah princess’ was therefore to visually appropriate the East in its complete visibility, rendering all obstructive hermeneutic veils transparent in the act. As Barbara Harlow points out, ‘more than analogy links the imperialist project of colonizing other lands and peoples with the phantasm of appropriation of the veiled exotic female’.33 In conjoining the female body with the Indian landscape The Oriental Portfolio establishes the two as twin objects of a desiring gaze that seduces the viewer with promises of possession. Charting a pathway into the Indian
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination heartland, it educates the eye in how to see, offering itself as a pedagogical tool for the interested viewer.
Act 2: war and the colonial vision machine The representations of art and literature together with the sword in The Oriental Portfolio were not quite at odds with one another as we might presume. As trade and military conquest dominated eighteenth-century engagement with India, larger numbers of Englishmen began to travel to India. Richard Gough, the director of the Society of Antiquaries between 1771 and 1791 and author of a book on the Topographical Antiquities of Great Britain (1780), lamented, ‘Other nations of Europe have produced men in some line of literature, who, either as missionaries or private gentlemen, have enquired into the manners of the Orientals. How small has been the number of Englishmen who have practiced the arts of peace among them!’34 Gough hoped that with the efforts of Warren Hastings and William Jones at Calcutta, English research into the colonies might finally outstrip that of European competitors. (p.78) Writing in 1810, the uncle-and-nephew team of Thomas and William Daniell famously wrote of their artistic renderings of the Indian landscape as a ‘guiltless spoliation’ and sought to undo both the impression of the British marauding armies as well as the whiff of commerce that had clung to British forays in the East. In the introduction to a set of aquatints of their picturesque travels to India and China, they announced an era of easier access to Oriental lands that were now visible to viewers in England. The scopic desire was motivated, in their view, by the noble spirit of ‘discovery’ that may have been originally kindled by a ‘thirst for gold’ but was now exalted to higher and nobler aims than mere commercial speculation. Since this new era of civilization, a liberal spirit of curiosity has prompted undertakings to which avarice lent no incentive and fortune lent no reward: associations have been formed, not for piracy, but for humanity: science has had her adventurers, and philanthropy her achievements: the shores of Asia have been invaded by a race of students with no rapacity but for lettered relics: by naturalists whose cruelty extends not to one human inhabitant: by philosophers, ambitious only for the extirpation of error, and the diffusion of truth. It remains for the artist to claim his part in these guiltless spoliations, and to transport to Europe the picturesque beauties of these favoured regions.35 Before Richard Gough or the Daniells felt compelled to explain the British engagement in the East through a cultural lens that underplayed its commercial and military stakes, a little-known pen and ink drawing by East India Company captain Isaac Pyke presented a much starker picture of their interests. A frontispiece that prefaced Pyke’s narrative of his journey aboard The Stringer from Bombay to England between 1712 and 1713 illustrates his impression of the encounter with the East (Figure 2.4). The frontispiece depicts two soldiers in uniform bearing arms and flanking an early crest of the East India Company that includes heraldic sea lions and ships and bears the legend, ‘Deus Indicat’, which translates as ‘God directs [the way]’. In front of this standard, three distinctly Oriental men in flowing robes and Eastern headgear kneel in submission, bearing bales of goods as well as jars and wares for trade. A palm tree situates them squarely in the tropics, while the figures contain clues identifying them as Indian, Persian and Chinese, major trading partners of the East India Company ascertained by the items of their trade. In 1778 Spiridione Roma fulfilled a commission for the East India Company headquarters in London that recast this motif of Eastern traders and their wares into a classical trope that included an allegorical figure of Britannia and disposed of the unseemly guns and uniformed Page 9 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Company men. The East Offering its Riches to Britannia featured a pale-skinned goddess seated high on a rock that was interpreted as signifying ‘the firmness and stability of the Empire’,36 receiving jewels from a dark, bare-breasted Indian (p.79) (p.80) figure and porcelain and tea from a Chinese maiden, while an East Indiaman ship sailed prominently in the background.37 The allegorical personification of the continents drew from an older tradition illustrated in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia (1603), but Britannia herself found a renewed popularity with the publication of James Thomson’s patriotic anthem Rule, Britannia! (1740). A camel and an elephant stand beside the palm trees in Roma’s version, while Mercury presides over the ritualised presentation of goods to Britannia, who, despite handling a string of pearls, is perched on the rocks and holding a spear. A more immediate precedent for Roma’s ceiling painting was a basrelief by John Michael Rysback, whose Britannia Receiving the Riches of the East (1728–30) had included a similar figure of Britannia accepting riches, with a river god looking on as a ship was emptied of its cargo. Explaining the motif, Barbara Groseclose has recalled that, ‘Conventions of allegorical art in the eighteenth century easily lent themselves to the idealization of a relationship between Orient and Occident, in which a compliant, ingratiating East
2.4 Isaac Pyke, frontispiece, The Stringers Journall, 1713
hands over jewels and other costly goods to a receptive, passive Britannia.’38 However, Pyke’s early formulation of this trading relationship salutes not Britannia but the authority of the East India Company with its coat of arms, its navigational prowess and its disciplined soldiers guarding the safe passage of goods. As Pyke writes in his journal, the first things he noticed in Bombay were the Company’s warehouses and magazines: ‘I can’t comend [sic] them enough for their usefulness, safety, strength and beauty.’ Above the standard in Pyke’s illustration, a strange, heavy drape held aloft by a rope hovers midair and a man seated on a mythical bird with a dragon’s tail and holding an axe and a knife is poised in the skies. While this could appear to be a guardian figure like the god of commerce, Hermes, who was also the messenger and accompanied merchants and travellers, it possibly recalls the threat of the Angrian pirates that Pyke reports being plagued by in his account. Pyke refers to Caun Angery, ‘a noted and potent pyrate’ who, unless suppressed, could be ‘the total ruin of the Bombay settlement’. According to Pyke, Caun was a coolie labourer who had worked at building the Bombay Fort but had taken to plundering passing ships and ‘now rules as Prince’. The Angrian pirates were the followers of Kanhoji Angria, a figure who was somewhat allied with the Marathas but nevertheless generated confusion because of a lack of details regarding Page 10 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination his loyalties and objectives.39 In Pyke’s drawing the figure astride the bird does not wear the robes of the Oriental figures below and occupies an ambiguous space, factors which might serve to confirm his obscure status. In mythologising the pirates thus, Pyke participates in the colonial characterisation of Angrians as marauding adventurers, a fact disputed in more recent scholarship that views Kanhoji Angria as a naval commander heroicised in local histories and committed to contesting the naval supremacy of the East India Company in the Indian ocean.40 (p.81) The grand theatrical motif of the lifted curtain reveals a scene of an encounter between East India Company officers and Eastern traders, recalling the representation of distant outposts of the empire in contemporary theatre. The popularity of colonial themes in eighteenthcentury drama not only featured the pomp and pageantry of Eastern spectacle but also served as a stage for the performance of difference that could be articulated to undergird a notion of a British self-identity.41 And indeed the subject of Pyke’s drawing is a representation of Otherness against which one might measure the self. This dramatic scene of a meeting is often represented in travel imagery in benign terms that mitigate the violence of such encounters; but instead, in Pyke’s image, looming over such ceremonious transactions are not only the violent iconography of the knife and the guns but, apropos the curtain, a cloak-and-dagger theatrics of clandestine intrigues and secret deals that the East India Company was involved in.42 If visuality emerges as a military strategy in the eighteenth century, as has been argued, it involves not only representations of war but the emergence of a field of the visual that is harnessed by the authoritative state to impose order and control.43 Pyke’s vision, made possible by the naval authority and military expertise of the East India Company, indicates through the curtain held aloft the possibilities and threats of this visuality enabled by trade. Pyke was one of a vast number of draughtsmen, hydrographers, topographers, nautical scientists and civil engineers enlisted by the East India Company to assist in its colonial operations who produced visual records of the Indian landscape. A major corpus of colonial visual material produced under the aegis of the East India Company owes its origins to the requirements for mapping and surveying the Indian landscape, the plotting of coastlines for trade, the settlement and capture of forts. Such views helped later expeditions to identify the sites. As Alexander Dalrymple, hydrographer to the East India Company, pointed out, ‘Views are useful, not only in giving the most competent description of the Country, but in pointing out the proper places for landing, watering, wooding, fishing & c’.44 Recent studies have drawn attention to the ways by which mapping and surveying the colonial landscape was integral to the assertion of imperial vision.45 However, other pictorial genres including topographical drawings, picturesque views and panoramic landscapes were equally implicated in an imperial project of knowledge and control. As Nicholas Dirks points out in his examination of the drawings of Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor General of India, the conventions of the picturesque and topographical surveys served on the one hand to make the terra incognita knowable, while on the other they contributed to the project for military and economic power.46 Some have even viewed the early colonial interest in Indian architecture as born from an engagement with the military mapping of the Indian landscape.47 (p.82) The concern with topographical drawing and mapping was not limited to British interest in India and in fact linked directly to military strategy. The Board of Ordnance housed in the Tower of London, tasked with supplying munitions to the army and the navy, had taken up the charge of mapping of the Scottish Highlands and also undertook civilian mapping projects of counties, towns and estate holdings. It instituted a Drawing Room staffed with draftsmen, surveyors and artists like the brothers Paul and Thomas Sandby to draw up ‘manuscript maps’
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination required by the military for siegecraft, encampments, route selection and coastal charting.48 With the institution of military academies like the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1741, drawing was included as an integral part of the curriculum along with technical subjects like fortification and artillery, and professional artists were employed to teach the cadets the rudiments of drawing. After an unsatisfactory sharing of facilities with the British army, the East India Company founded its own training academy at Addiscombe in 1809 where artists like William Fredrick Wells and John Christian Schetky served as professors of drawing. Pyke’s drawing forms the frontispiece of a shipping log-book with detailed nautical charts and also includes an account of the caves at Elephanta, with drawings of the pillars and statuary as well as references to previous accounts of Elephanta. As such, it reveals the ambiguous character of such accounts, which were initiated at the instance of tactical and military requirements but allowed for amateur interests in drawing or history, religion and architecture to surface. In accounts of Company painting in India, drawing is often posed as a recreational activity, an ‘amusement’ that helped to overcome the endless ennui faced by soldiers, with the picturesque Indian scenery providing a source of inspiration. This association of drawing with the arts of leisure and refinement and the accomplishments of the genteel class distanced the more technical and professional training received by cadets at the military academies, and provided opportunities for advancement in the ranks that were not lost on the cadets themselves. Thomas Postans, then a lieutenant stationed at Bombay, writes in Hints to Cadets, ‘I would instance music and drawing as worthy of every cultivation … For the pencil, India offers a wider scope than any other country in the world, in the grandeur of its scenery, interesting beauties and peculiarities of its architecture, picturesque costumes and striking characteristics of its various races.’ However, he is quick to admit that ‘Drawing, independent of its employment as an amusement, may be made subservient to the most valuable purposes in India and add greatly to the reputation and advancement of its possessor.’49 Lieutenant Tredway Clarke of the Madras Army likewise proposed drawing as a stepping-stone for a career in the army in a letter discussing his son’s prospects: ‘in case the Boy shows a natural genius and inclination for drawing, I am desirous it should be encouraged by his beginning under a proper Master – as the (p.83) qualification may hereafter be of great use to him in the army’.50 The author Emma Roberts, who advocated sketching from nature as an inexhaustible source of amusement to cadets, hastened to contextualise drawing among other useful pursuits including the study of architecture, civil and military engineering, principles of road making and a competent knowledge of the art of surveying and making maps which would ‘frequently advance a young officer, who can make himself useful to Government when taking possession of new territory’.51 Recreational drawing was therefore embedded within a wide range of visual, technical and engineering skills that afforded advancement in social standing. Despite the attention accorded to drawing as an aesthetic amusement in the military academy and the army, it bears underlining that an inordinately large number of amateur works (sketches, drawings, engravings, watercolours and oil paintings) in the India Office Collection in London is by soldierartists from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.52 These have been reproduced in lavishly illustrated books with titles like Scenic Splendours and Passionate Quest, as well as grand exhibitions which have perpetuated the view of Company drawings as aesthetic objects divorced from the context of trade and military engagement even in contemporary accounts. Nicholas Dirks has cautioned that the notion of autonomy of art that underwrote Romantic ideology in its offerings of the picturesque and the sublime has concealed how these aesthetic practices were embedded in the project for political and military power.53
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination While recreational drawing remained tied to industrial and military activity in India, the army encouraged it as a useful pursuit ‘affecting the sobriety, respectability and happiness of soldiers’ and the ‘surest means of checking drunkenness in the Army’.54 In 1866 the Regiment of the Bombay Army organised the Soldiers’ Industrial Exhibition, which included displays by soldiers of not only drawings, paintings and engravings but also leather goods, metal-work, embroidery and wood carving, with a special encouragement to cadets to contribute articles of ‘Mechanics and Invention’, which could be purchased by museums and other institutions. A report on the exhibition proposed that it would serve as a recruitment strategy for cadets. By offering men profitable employment in their leisure hours, it claimed to preserve the ‘industrial element’ and to ‘ensure the enlistment of a higher class of men, who with lodging free, and but little affected by the usual vicissitudes of life will prefer the army, as the surest means of livelihood and provision for old age’.55 Meanwhile soldier-artists continued to produce amateur drawings. A humorous sketch-book by a soldier at the Poona Military School provides a wonderful insight into the daily activities of soldiers undergoing training in India, even as it illustrates the amateur drawing skills of the cadets.56 Soldiers (p.84) are depicted on horseback, training with the cavalry, in classrooms along with their instructor, on missions taking cover in the countryside, digging ditches and even taking examinations during their term at the school in 1853. While the sketches are rough and simple, the artist’s skill in showing foreshortened horses, galloping or screeching to a halt, indicates his facility with drawing and relating his experience in visual form. The wide range of visual and material objects produced under the banner of the army that extended from sketches and oil paintings to leather goods and cutlery in fact cast the military as ‘a fertile source of supply for the wants of the public’.57 Pyke’s frontispiece is significant as an amateur drawing that eschews the Romantic aesthetic conventions that would dominate late eighteenth-century renditions of the Indian landscape, foregrounding the vital interests that drew Company traders to Indian shores. As the Daniells’ claims of a ‘guiltless spoliation’ gained traction within an aestheticised art-historical tradition that celebrated images produced by travelling British artists as the explorations of a Romantic spirit, it bears recalling that images and dramatisations of British victories in wars like the battle at Seringapatnam (many of which were drawn by Company soldiers) or of the Mutiny were avidly consumed by the British public in popular visual culture in prints, panoramic displays and theatrical productions.58 The events at Mysore in fact aroused such public interest that three books on views of Mysore were produced in 1794 alone, announcing the birth of a genre of views of the theatre of war, a genre that has enjoyed continuous popularity since.59 Viewing the colonial landscape through the lens of war and juxtaposing wider visual cultural artefacts with aestheticised art-historical imagery produces a much more complex arena that points to the erasure of violence in the art-historical record.60
Act 3: the conquering empire of light and reason A third scene of unveiling presents itself from the marble commemorative statue of the Orientalist scholar William Jones (1799) by the sculptor John Bacon, at St Paul’s cathedral in London (Figure 2.5). If The Oriental Portfolio had promised to uncover the darkness within which the Indian landscape had remained hidden to Western viewers and make visible its hidden interiorities, Bacon’s sculpture heralded a triumphant moment that sought to introduce light into a benighted land. Jones stands in confident contrapposto, wearing a toga that emphasises his classical learning and holding in his hand a scroll, while leaning against a volume of The Institutes of Manu, an orthodox text on Hindu law that he had translated from the Sanskrit. On
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination the pillar below, a set of books mark him out for his learning, callipers attest to his scientific spirit, a pair of scales recall his role as a judge of the Supreme Court at Calcutta, a Ptolemaic globe and a lyre underline his aesthetic commitments and universal (p.85) knowledge. Gazing out into the distance he towers over a plaque at the base that describes his heroic conquest of Oriental knowledge. The base of the statue contains a plaque with two allegorical male figures drawing back a drape from a roundel that is located between them (Figure 2.6). The figure on the left holds aloft a lighted torch, in a gesture of triumph; the second figure leans over the roundel with a lamp. The metaphor of leading (p.86)
2.5 John Bacon, Memorial to William Jones, 1799
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination from darkness unto light is doubly articulated though devices of illumination and the drawing back of the curtain. Drawing back the drape here specifically introduces light into a world of darkness. The Enlightenment trope of the light of reason dispelling the ignorance of darkness is here appended to the liberatory rhetoric of the colonial civilising mission as the guardian figures holding back the curtain perform a heroic act of rescue, ushering the pagan idolatory into the light. It is not accidental that the Indian figures in this image stand out sharply as ‘the much maligned monsters’ characterised by Partha Mitter, set against the heroic Greco-Roman body of the coloniser.61 The profusion of animal figures, along with the zodiac ring and the ‘unnatural’ image of the (p.87) 2.6 John Bacon, base of the Memorial to trimurti, stand in for the arbitrary character William Jones, 1799 of Indian belief, sought to be ‘enlightened’ by the towering figure of William Jones standing authoritatively above. Despite the centrality of this sculpture in the largest church in London, it has confounded art historians, with even contemporary sources deeming it fraught with cryptic symbolism.62 Like The Oriental Portfolio and its imagination of the nation as a two-dimensional image held aloft by allegorical figures in high relief, here too the Indian world is framed as picture in a roundel, long a symbol of possessive ownership (Figure 2.7). Bounded by the frame are a gamut of objects claiming to represent the nation – a saree-clad woman that one author has vaguely identified as Ganga, the ‘much maligned monstrous gods’ that have been identified with Hinduism and zodiac imagery – a subject of much discussion in Asiatick Research (the journal of the Asiatic Society founded by Jones) as representative of Hindu chronology.63 The imagery is culled from the Puranas, a body of literature claiming to represent the Indian historiographical tradition that would later come under attack by figures like James Mill for its mythological character and irrational content. Bacon’s sculpture, however, belongs to an earlier moment where an enthusiasm for Indology sought to recuperate the Pauranik tales as independent corroboration of the biblical narrative. An inscription above the roundel labels it ‘COURMA AVATAR’, identifying the scene as that of the tortoise avatar of Vishnu. Here Vishnu in his guise as the tortoise intervened in the battle between the warring devatas (gods) and asuras (demons) as they churned the ocean in search of the nectar of immortality. During the course of the churning, using the serpent Vasuki as the rope and Mount Mandara as the staff, the Earth began to sink. Vishnu, in his tortoise avatar, performed a heroic act of rescue as he held up the mountain upon his carapace. The churning oceans threw up fourteen treasures, including the sun and the moon, Indra’s elephant, the horse that draws the chariot of the sun god, and the bull, all of which are represented around the central four-armed figure of Vishnu atop the churning staff. In his essay on ‘The Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, William Jones had interpreted the cosmic floods of the tortoise avatar of Vishnu Page 15 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination as an allegorical rendering of the deluge described in the Old Testament, and hence the Pauranik narrative served as an affirmation of the biblical story.64 Thomas Maurice (1754–1824), Oriental scholar and keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, corroborated this reading of the tortoise avatar. He found in the rainbow, one of the treasures thrown up by the churning ocean, a similarity with Noah’s story where the rainbow appears at the end of the great flood.65 Bacon’s source for the roundel appears to be an engraving from Thomas Maurice’s The History of Hindostan (1795), which included a representation of Vishnu in the guise of a tortoise, with the inscription noting his act of rescue (p.88) from the deluge (Figure 2.8).66 Maurice himself had claimed to copy the illustration from a volume in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries that listed the nine avatars of Vishnu. Bacon’s copy is almost identical to Maurice’s with the horned asuras, the placement of the elephant and the horse, and even the churning staff itself. In The History of Hindostan Maurice had set himself the task of writing an antediluvian history containing (in the extended title of (p.89)
2.7 John Bacon, detail of the base of the Memorial to William Jones, 1799
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (p.90) the book) ‘Indian and other Oriental accounts of the General Deluge’ while also discussing Indian cosmogony, astronomy and the solar and lunar zodiacs of Asia, amongst others. His account of the ‘Courma Avatar’ is followed by an analysis of its astronomical allusions relying largely on William Jones’s proposition that the tortoise avatar related to Hindu astronomy. In each case the goal was to seek a convergence between Hindu and Mosaic mythologies that recent scholarship has interpreted as a means of assimilating the strangeness of Hinduism in the late eighteenth century, so much so that pagan idolatory found a way into the central dome of the most significant church in London.67 One of the most predominant myths about the convergence between Hindu and Mosaic ideologies related to the trimurti. In Bacon’s roundel the trimurti that stands to the left of the saree-clad figure undoubtedly recalls the colossal three-faced figure of Siva from Elephanta, given the amount of attention 2.8 Thomas Maurice, ‘Courma Avatar’, 1795 the sculpture had received in antiquarian circles. While more recent scholarship has identified the figure as Mahesamurti, available accounts in the late eighteenth century like the German cartographer and explorer Carsten Niebuhr’s explained it as a composite figure of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva.68 Thomas Maurice invoked both William Jones and Niebuhr to identify the figure as trimurti and relate it to the Christian trinity, finding further affinities between the Brahmanical religion and rites and those of the Druids in his own country. It is unclear which visual sources Bacon drew upon, given that Bacon’s version features decidedly conical headgear (karand mukut) rather than the flattened version (kirit mukut) of Niebuhr. The influential iconographic resource, Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon, was published in only 1810, therefore James Forbes’ drawings (1775) of the altarpiece at Elephanta with its pointed headgear probably served as a more likely source. Maurice emerged as a keen interpreter of Jones’s writings and Bacon’s reliance upon him is understandable not only because of the esoteric nature of Jones’s work but also because Bacon shared his deep-seated religious beliefs, as well as a common patron in the East India Company. Maurice was a clergyman by profession whose first writings on India were written against the backdrop of the French Revolution and ‘neither his conviction, the result of education and reflection, nor his profession, would permit him to publish anything respecting India without an effort at least to refute the argument and subvert the hypothesis of the atheists of the day, who had taken their stand to endeavour to root out Christianity and demoralise the world’.69 He was moreover an ardent admirer of William Jones, whom he had met during his early days at Oxford and upon whose death he had penned an elegiac poem. In his preface to the History of Hindostan he claimed ‘perfect co-incidence with the opinion of Sir William Jones’ relying upon Page 17 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination his authoritative scholarship adapting them into popular histories of India. His writings were in fact widely embraced, as evidenced by the fact that Samuel Taylor Coleridge (p.91) copied a passage from Maurice’s accounts of the icy caves of Kashmir (probably Amarnath) from History of Hindostan for his definitive Romantic poem, Kubla Khan (1816).70 Bacon himself was a devout Christian and founding member of the Eclectic Society (later the Church Missionary Society) who likely sympathised with Maurice’s views about Orientalist mythologies confirming the truth of the biblical. His biographies all underline his piety: ‘Religion with him was not the Sunday-coat of a formalist … but a change of heart and a hope full of immortality, grounded alone on the work of a Redeemer.’71 Bacon’s interpretation of Jones’s contributions to Indian literature and culture appears to be closely aligned with official East India Company policy. During the 1790s Bacon developed a close relationship with the East India Company, having contributed a statue of the war hero Cornwallis, as well an allegorical sculptural frieze for the pediment outside East India House. At this time, he also acquired three large commissions for St Paul’s cathedral, the last one being that of William Jones. When his design for the monument of William Jones was approved in 1796 the Secretary of the East India Company noted in his letter to Bacon their agreement over the ‘Ideas and Sentiment to be expressed.’72 As such, his allegorical style, with a predilection for classical tropes, found favour with his East India patrons despite his lack of training in Rome. In his biographies, Bacon emerges as a resolute nationalist and devout Christian whose lack of continental training is dismissed to recall pride in a home-grown education.73 The zodiac ring that crowns the roundel was testimony to the great interest in astronomy undertaken not only by Oriental scholars looking to understand Hindu cosmogony but also by Company officials for whom astronomy was an efficient means to establish the latitude and longitude of sites for conquest by the army, and both these sets of studies were published in Asiatick Research.74 Hindu cosmogony straddled a world between astronomy, mathematics and divination, engaging with both Pauranik notions of the cosmos where the earth was considered a flat disk in an egg-shaped universe and Siddhantic models of the earth as a fixed sphere around which the sun, moon and other planets revolved.75 William Jones had taken an active interest in Hindu astronomy and published three papers in Asiatick Research between 1790 and 1792 and was accompanied by others, including John Bentley and Samuel Davis. Thomas Maurice for his part made astronomy the centrepiece of his scholarship, explaining his interest as ‘make[ing] that exalted science subservient to nobler purposes; to collect in one centre the blended rays shed by the heavenly orbs, and direct their powerful focal splendour to the illustration of those grand primeval truths which form the basis of the national Theology; a Theology so inseparably connected with the NATIONAL GOVERNMENT’.76 Maurice’s invocation of heavenly light to reveal the primeval truth is a (p.92) particularly apt metaphor that ties together both Bacon’s symbolism of the revelatory powers of light and Jones’s own interpretation of its centrality in the Sanskrit text he has translated, as he notes in the Preface: The many panegyricks on the Gayatri, the Mother, as it is called, of the Veda, prove the author to have adored (not the visible material Sun, but) that divine and incomparably greater light, to use the words of the most venerable text in the Indian scripture, which illumines all, delights all, from which all proceed, to which all must return, and which alone can irradiate (not our visual organs merely, but our souls and) our intellects.77
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Jones attributes to Manu a dismissal of the heavenly light of the sun for the greater light of knowledge, a metaphor that finds easy acknowledgement within Enlightenment thought. However, this does not cast the Indian lands as ‘enlightened’. The laws of Manu remain in fact, a system of despotism and priestcraft, both indeed limited by law but artfully conspiring to give mutual support, though with mutual checks; it is filled with strange conceits in metaphysics and natural philosophy, with idle superstitions, and with a scheme of theology most obscurely figurative … it abounds with minute and childish formalities, with ceremonies generally absurd and often ridiculous …78 It therefore bears upon Jones to introduce light into this benighted world. It is the conquest of the irrationality of Hindu law by an ‘enlightened’ Jones, bringing it within the fold of the colonial administrative machinery, that marks the passage from darkness unto light. Jones’s act of translating the Manu-Smriti was undertaken with the noble mission of administering justice in accordance with native laws, but it also displaced Sanskrit scholarship in legitimising an authoritative version. Codifying the polymorphous system of legal codes into an urtext that could ultimately prove useful as an instrument of governance allowed Jones to override internal disputes among native specialists. The alliance with the law is therefore not accidental, its aim being to establish a moral and legal code within which claims for justice are addressed.79 Gayatri Spivak has in fact referred to the colonial codification of Hindu law (by Jones and other figures including Charles Wilkins and Henry Colebrooke) as the very example of epistemic violence representing, as it did, an effective means of control.80 Even as an enthusiastic Indological scholarship translated and made available an entire body of Sanskrit texts to a Western audience, there was an implicit understanding that they were rescuing the literature of an ancient past that lay in the danger of a decaying present. Implicit in this exercise was the notion that the British were bequeathing to the Indians their own history, one that had remained inaccessible to them through the corrupted (p.93) present and that the ‘enlightened’ British were recuperating. Bacon’s monumental sculpture of the towering Jones clad in classical garb encapsulates this relationship of knowledge and power as the trophy-like roundel featuring Pauranik gods is ushered into the light of civilisation by torch-bearing GrecoRoman guardian figures. A contemporary monument to William Jones by John Flaxman at the University College chapel at Oxford features a somewhat more subtle expression of relationships between Jones and native knowledge. Jones is seated on an elevated bench, composing his digest on a desk facing three seated Brahmins on a lower platform. A banana tree stands against the background, and an inscription underneath underscores his accomplishment: ‘He formed a digest of Hindu and Mohammedan laws.’ The seated Brahmins were presumably the scholars with whose help Jones compiled his digest, yet the iconography reverses the relationship in presenting Jones as the tutor schooling his pupils. More obvious examples of the paternalistic schooling of childlike Indian subjects by British guardian figures is included in the monuments of missionaries like the statue at St Paul’s cathedral of Bishop Middleton (London), who blesses two kneeling Indian subjects, or Francis Chanterey’s monument to Reverend Reginald Heber in St George’s cathedral in Madras, which features the same iconography. The language of leading from darkness unto light takes on another set of meanings in the missionary vocabulary but its similarity to Bacon’s rendition underlines the continuities between the two.81 Despite the honour accorded to Jones for his pioneering work, his digest of laws ultimately had little impact upon the Indian legal code, falling into disuse after 1864. It has been noted that Jones’s translation had a greater influence on Oriental scholarship than within the colonial
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination administration itself.82 Its triumph lay in the decipherment of Oriental mystique, an aspect uncannily grasped in Bacon’s sculpture by pitting the arcane symbolism of the Pauranik deities against the towering presence of Jones and the heroic Greco-Roman bodies of the guardian figures. Even as recent accounts have expressed puzzlement over its ‘cryptic’ symbolism, Bacon’s design was not only cognizant of popular Oriental scholarship but also seemingly in step with what Edmund Burke had referred to as the ‘new conquering empire of light and reason’ in his remarks upon the revolution in France.83 In its evocation of key metaphors of Enlightenment ideology Burke’s reflections had lamented the passing of the older order that left ‘all the decent drapery of life … rudely torn off’.84 This was also reflected in a series of frontispieces in seminal books by Enlightenment philosophers that invoked the metaphor of the light of reason, including Andrew Motte’s 1729 translation of Newton’s Principia, Voltaire’s Elements of the Philosophy of Newton (1738) and, most famously, Charles Nicolas Cochin’s drawing for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1772) (Figure 0.1).85 In appending the allegory of light and reason to the (p.94) political circumstance of empire, Bacon did no more than make visible the visual regime, which drew empire and colony into a network of relations between vision, knowledge and power.
Act 4: seeing too much In 1772 the painter Joseph Wright presented a remarkable allegorical work on the dangers of boundless untrammelled vision to the Society of Artists in London. Titled Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors (Plate 7), the painting told the tale of an Oriental nobleman who came across a tablet in the chamber of the tomb of his ancestors which promised him unimagined wealth: ‘In this tomb is a treasure greater than Croesus possessed.’ Lured by the thought, Miravan opened the tomb, only to discover a skeleton, along with a curse condemning his avarice: ‘Here dwells repose. Sacrilegious wretch, searchest thou for gold amongst the dead! Go son of avarice – thou canst not enjoy repose.’86 Wright exhibited the painting with a concise explanation of the story in the catalogue, and a longer version has been found in his diaries.87 The source was thought to be a parallel anecdote in Herodotus’ writings, centred on Darius, king of Persia; however, it bore none of the moral implications of Wright’s narrative. A later source, a volume of letters by a minor philosophical writer John Gilbert Cooper, entitled Letters Concerning Taste and published in 1755, has been deemed the direct source, having a word-for-word resemblance to the Miravan story as quoted by Wright.88 Cooper’s collection of essays in epistolary form popularised the ideas of the earl of Shaftesbury and included the Miravan narrative under a section of moral anecdotes entitled ‘Oriental tales’. It was obviously a well-liked book, reaching its third edition in 1757, and bears testimony to the popularity of moral and aesthetic allegories centred on the Orient.89 Miravan’s name was Page 20 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination borrowed from the stage by Cooper – it had 7 Joseph Wright of Derby, Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors, 1772 been used by Elkanah Settle in his play The Heir of Morocco (1682) and by Nicholas Rowe in Tamerlane (1702), where ‘Mirvan’ was a Parthian general and fitted the idea of a generic figure of the Orient. A parallel narrative about an Oriental nobleman whose inordinate love for wealth was the cause of his undoing was History of Nourjahad, a story written by Frances Sheridan (sometimes mistakenly attributed to Byron) in 1767 that was later performed at Drury Lane theatre in 1813. A similar allegory on the dangers of desiring unimaginable wealth, its 1814 edition was published with a frontispiece that envisioned a narrow passageway amid cut rock and thick vegetation. The tales forge a visual path into the Orient, uncovering the darkness that shrouds it. Wright’s painting features a turbaned figure hastily shielding his eyes from the sight of the skeletal remains entombed within the sarcophagus, the scene lit with a feeble candle, while other figures towards the left of the (p.95) painting stand in moonlight. As such, the night-time scene plays with natural and manmade light in a pattern that occurs across the spectrum of Wright’s works. While the painting has been read either as a morality tale about the dangers of greed or as a work that gestures to the aesthetics of mourning in the eighteenth century, Wright’s rendition is also quite clearly a cautionary tale about the limits of vision involving the Orient.90 Miravan’s hankering for wealth is cast as a desire to see that which should remain hidden, and the curse for his adventurous gaze is accordingly a loss of sight. That this tale of vision and loss is thematised around an Oriental figure makes it a particularly telling admonitory message that signals the thrills and hazards of the gaze in the context of empire. As Philip Mercier’s Sense of Sight had noted, maps and exploratory journeys were instrumental in extending the field of vision, bringing sights of new lands to European viewers, yet Wright displaces this drive to see onto an imagined Oriental figure. Keeping in mind the prospect of fortunes acquired in the colonies and the influx of wealthy ‘nabobs’ returning and upending the social hierarchy, Wright’s morality tale most likely resonated in complex ways with viewers, as Wright himself predicted in a letter to his sister.91 A more melancholic work that ties the intimations of mortality signalled in Wright’s painting to the dangers of seeing too much is the pair of paintings of Tahiti by William Hodges. The first, A View Taken in the Bay of Otaheiti Peha (Plate 8) was exhibited alongside a pendant work, A View of Matavai Bay in the Island of Otaheite, at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1776. Drawn from an oil sketch on Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific, it was painted aboard the Resolution during its visit to Matavai bay in 1773. Tahiti is represented as a visual arcadia with clear reflecting pools of water, swaying palms and a background of misty mountains, a view popularised in contemporary accounts of the islands. In a reworking of the painting, called Tahiti Revisited (Plate 9), Hodges introduces more figures, adds a dramatic piece of drapery (a tapa cloth that has been likened to a shroud) to the base of the tii statue and emphasises a funeral bier that stands in the middle distance at the lower right. The allusion to the bier is in the tradition of Nicholas Poussin’s famous image of Arcadia, Et in Arcadia Ego, which translates as ‘even in Arcadia there is death’.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination It has been speculated that Wright knew Hodges, and they certainly knew people in common, including the scientist and Royal Society member John Whitehurst (1713–88) and the radical Whig poet William Hayley (1745–1820). Wright was greatly influenced by Whitehurst’s writings on geology and had painted his portrait working on a diagram of rock strata while Vesuvius erupts in the distance. Meanwhile Hodges’ second wife was Whitehurst’s niece.92 Like Wright, Hodges had spent time in Derby, had worked with theatrical scenery and had an interest in the scientific and atmospheric qualities (p.96) of light in landscape. Hodges’ final paintings, a pair of works entitled The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War (1794–95) were indebted in part to Wright’s The Dead Soldier (1789), a painting that had moved Hayley to tears and one that he had likely communicated about in a letter to Hodges.93 While Hodges’ treatment is much starker, what binds his pair and Wright’s painting closer is the elegiac quality, where mourning and melancholia are bound together with edifying moral concerns in an allegory about sight.
8 William Hodges, A View Taken in the Bay of Otaheiti Peha, 1773
9 William Hodges, Tahiti Revisited, 1776
Hodges’ treatment of Tahiti came in the wake of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville’s accounts of Tahiti following his voyage in 1768, which had created the fantasy of a mythical paradise, christening it a ‘New Cythera’ after the place where the goddess Aphrodite was washed ashore. This presentation of a fecund landscape was later literally supplemented by Diderot’s version of the island as a utopia of libertarian sexuality. Meanwhile the father and son team of Reinhold Forster and George Forster who travelled aboard Captain Cook’s second mission recorded their impressions of the places Hodges had visited in Tahiti, including Bay of Otaheite Peha, taking note of the ‘view of several of these nymphs swimming nimbly all around the sloop, such as nature had formed them, [which] was perhaps more than sufficient entirely to subvert the little reason which a mariner might have left to govern his passions’.94 In Hodges’ painting two women cavort in the water, one floating as the other waits by the side and a ritual tii statue (an anthropomorphic carving of deified ancestors) looks on. Following in the tradition of his mentor Richard Wilson’s historical landscapes, Hodges uses ancient mythological themes set against a contemporary landscape, recalling here the classical iconography of the bathing Diana resonant in contemporary painting.95 Taking the place of the hunter Acteon, it is the viewer who is presented as the illicit voyeur, spying upon the bathing Diana and partaking in a visual pleasure that is construed as illegitimate. On the other hand, the positioning of the phallic tii statue gazing over the bathing nymphs reaffirms the place of the imaginary Tahitian man, whose right it is to look. The splayed buttocks of the Tahitian
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination woman, carrying the trademark tattoos that were the subject of a fetishist interest in European accounts, are served up to the gaze of the viewer. David Bindman has acknowledged the voyeuristic quality of the painting, where male presence is displaced onto the visiting sailors as well as the spectators at the Academy where the painting was exhibited. However, he is reluctant to admit the popular reading of the painting regarding Tahiti as an idyllic paradise representing the infancy of man, arguing that such an arcadia would surely exhibit amorous love between both the sexes, and also because it simplifies the views of Hodges’ travelling companions, the Forsters, who he believes were in close conversation with Hodges during the journey. In the racial theory of the Forsters, Tahiti occupied a middle ground, its inhabitants not savage like the Mallicolans but in fact industrious and representing a (p.97) native ingenuity in their canoes and sailboats, which were, however, nowhere as sophisticated as the British ships. Prone to warring with neighbouring islands, they did not fit the descriptions of Bougainville’s peaceful Arcadia or the primitive savage.96 However, by contextualising both versions of Hodges’ views of Tahiti, I suggest below that what was at stake in Hodges’ paintings of Otaheite Peha was not so much a claim about the paradise-like purity of the islands but a popular understanding of its decline, a sullying of the visual Arcadia through European contact, which was endorsed by the Forsters.97 In the second version of the painting, titled Tahiti Revisited, Hodges’ addition of a third seated figure appears to present the scene as a social narrative of women casually conversing amongst themselves rather than overtly serving the gaze of the viewer. The additions as well as the tonal gradations of the painting have been seen as accommodating the taste of the Royal Academicians, who frequently censured his lack of finish.98 However, in light of the iconography of unveiling that I have been cataloguing and its close association with the trope of discovery, the addition of the garment at the base of the tii statue (a tapa cloth made from the bark of a tree) perhaps denotes something else. If Tahiti Revisited is indeed the second version painted by Hodges, the cloth and the lighter palette most likely indicate the Tahitian lands unveiled to the European gaze, an unveiling that has robbed it of its rich colours. Described as a funerary shroud, the cloth’s placement is nevertheless puzzling in that it stands out against the tii statue, rather than the bier on the right. In fact, the shroud functions as a convenient double that alludes to the garment that the bathing figures have discarded, keeping alive the theme of an unveiling, while also serving a ritual function underlined by its proximity to the ancestral figurine. Moreover, Hodges inscribes the tapa cloth with zigzag yellow painted strokes that attest to his own presence, so that it functions as an index of the artist in a manner of subjective mark-making that would find much popularity in the coming century.99 It is notable that Hodges inscribes his authorial vision upon the veil, for in fact it is this that distinguishes his work from the previous three instances of unveiling outlined in this chapter. The Graces unveiling The Oriental Portfolio subscribed to a pattern that had been indicated both in Pyke’s drawing and in Thomas Bacon’s vision for William Jones’s sculpture in attributing visual agency to a divine source. Hodges’ act of unveiling, on the other hand, is conflated with the artist’s own vision, a witnessing that brings upon death, carrying a Faustian note of tragedy into the act of seeing. The veil inscribes the European discovery of Tahiti as a shared sight onto the painting, so that the pair function like a pendant set that chronicle the passage of time, much like the later The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War or the twin Matavai Bay paintings. The notion of primitive simplicity sullied by European contact was consonant with George Forster’s views regarding the ‘corruption of manners’ (p.98) that followed the exposure of Tahiti to European norms, its embracement of materialism and its consequent decadence.100
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination Hodges was also privy to the scandal over the spread of venereal disease into Tahiti, a fact described in both Cook’s and Forster’s accounts. The affliction of native bodies by disease and death casts its long shadow upon the frolicking women, while the funeral bier indicates it ominous future. Indicating his debt to the ‘moral landscapes’ of his mentor Richard Wilson, Hodges had maintained, ‘My pictures will constantly be lessons, sometimes of what results from the impolicy of nations, or sometimes from the vices and follies of particular classes of men.’101 In casting this morality in terms of the illicit gaze, Hodges conflates the bodies of the Tahitian women with the landscape in a familiar pattern so that the display of women’s bodies is also indicative of Tahiti’s exposure to the European world. Tahiti Revisited is a morality tale about the visual temptations of Tahiti, the anxieties and desires that underwrote the European expansion of visual frontiers, and ultimately a parable on the limits of vision. Like Wright of Derby’s painting of Miravan, Hodges’ image of Tahiti is presented as an allegory on the consequences of ‘seeing too much’. While Hodges intimation of death in the paintings of Otaheiti Peha referenced the contemporary discussions of disease and the tropics, it also drew upon the classical discourse of Et in Arcadia ego, in a reconciliation of the particularities of the present with the genre of the epic landscape that was the mainstay of his practice. His mentor Richard Wilson’s landscapes had similarly embraced classical mythological themes in picturesque paintings of the English countryside, including observational details and luminous atmospheric effects. Wilson’s version of an Arcadian theme was entitled Ego fui in Arcadia (1755) and drew upon Nicholas Poussin’s famous painting of the Arcadian shepherds, bringing continental traditions to British landscape art. Panofsky has noted a difference between the English understanding of the theme of Arcadia and the continental tradition, where the English continued with the original Latin that proclaimed the presence of death in the midst of happiness and translated as ‘Even in Arcadia, I [death] am there’. However, with Poussin’s second version of the painting a different meaning was attached to the phrase that rejected the medieval moralising impulse of the former. Instead, Poussin’s painting was interpreted as ‘I, too lived in Arcady’ and offered a meditation on the transience of earthly pleasures, so that rather than a confrontation with mortality offered in the earlier memento mori tradition, it was a contemplative acknowledgement of a beautiful past, a memory of bygone happiness. Panofsky suggests that Wilson brought across the continental tradition to English landscape painting, and his painting indeed endorses the meditative quality of Poussin’s.102 Hodges was in fact simultaneously experimenting with the more obvious skull and bones representations of the memento mori (p.99) tradition in his rendering of A View of the Monuments of Easter Island (1776), where a similar set of ritual statues tower over a bleak landscape with a human skull in the foreground. Tahiti Revisited, however, inclines towards the continental interpretation, following in the tradition of Wilson in exhibiting a mournful elegiac quality that laments Tahiti’s assimilation into the ‘civilised’ world. Hodges’ more reflective treatment of Tahiti would in fact confirm the Forsters’ perception of the islands as more ‘civilised’, particularly their women, whom they saw as bearing a cultivated feminine sensibility.103 It is this strange blend between the exotic visual pleasure of foreign landscapes and a quiet, mournful quality that is present in Hodges’ Indian landscapes as well. Unlike the South Pacific landscapes that signalled the innocence of a ‘natural’ pre-civilised world, the Indian landscape bore many reminders of its glorious past in the monumental architecture that dotted its terrain, and consequently one could not make the same Romantic claims of an untouched paradise. Instead the imposing architectural edifices told tales of a grand civilisation of the past now in
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination ruins. In views like that of Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra, Hodges employs Wilson’s technique of marginalising the primary structures by drawing the viewer’s attention to an ancient gateway on the left that streams sunlight through its arch, while the grand tomb of Akbar sits to the right. The dying grandeur of the Mughal empire, set against the fading light cast through the arch, presents the landscape as a historical one, a genre that Hodges particularly aspired to. Death and decay then permeate the Indian views through the presence of architectural ruins that are typically foregrounded in the images, a narrative of decline that was often used to justify the imperial mission. (See Ruins of Prince Shuja’s Palace at Rajmahal, 1781; View of the Ruins of a Palace at Gazipoor on the River Ganges, c. 1785; A View of the Ruins of Part of the Palace and Mosque at Futtypore Sicri, 1785–88.) Yet, the exotic Indian landscape does not lose its ability to delight the English eye: The clear blue cloudless sky, the polished white buildings, the bright sandy beach and the dark green sea, present a combination totally new to the eye of an Englishman just arrived from London, who, accustomed to the light of rolling masses of clouds floating in a damp atmosphere, cannot but contemplate the difference with delight: and the eye being thus gratified, the mind soon assumes a gay and tranquil habit, analogous to the pleasing objects with which it is surrounded.104 Hodges’ pictorial narrative in India proceeds to paint night scenes: moonlit scenes of women praying or of lamps floating down the river, reiterating his interest in atmospheric effects of light, now not only set within a new terrain but also invoking local customs.105 Creeping into the narrative of his Indian travels is a view of the interior of a zenana, upon which he offers brief (p. 100) comments as well. Hodges describes wandering amid the ruins of the zenana at Rajmahal, by the palace of Shah Shuja (Shah Jahan’s son and governor of Bengal) where, he claimed, three hundred women had died in a fire that engulfed the building, their fear of being exposed to the stranger’s gaze greater than their desire for selfpreservation. Interestingly enough the accompanying plate in his narrative is a copy of a Rajput painting of a zenana scene that he claimed to have received from someone he had met with in India and was later engraved by William Skelton (Figure 2.9).
2.9 William Skelton, ‘A View of the Inside of a Zananah’, 1776
Hodges’ inclusion of the plate portraying the interiors of the zenana in his travel narrative undoubtedly played upon readers’ expectations of such scenes. As indicated in The Oriental Portfolio, the zenana exercised a powerful hold over the tourist’s imagination as a symbol of a mysterious interior that was closed off to the outside gaze, so much so that Inderpal Grewal posits the idea of the harem as the metaphoric opposite of the panopticon in its symbolic opacity.106 Cloaked in secrecy and inviting the voyeur’s gaze, the subject had remained a staple of travel narratives from Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589) to Delacroix’s Women of Algiers (1834). As attempts to uncover its mysteries, visualisations of the zenana reinforced Page 25 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination fantasies of the colony as a scopophilic paradise, a space where the myth of complete visibility would find its deepest source of pleasure. Hodges’ resistance to visualising the scene through the European gaze, either as an imaginative recreation that was a staple of Orientalist depictions (p.101) of the harem or from hearsay of fellow travellers, is therefore noteworthy. Despite his firm claims to authenticity by emphasising in his preface to the narrative that his drawings were ‘drawn on the spot’, the scene is an obvious example of one that is borrowed. It presents a lively scene of entertainment performances for the ladies of the court in their garden pavilion and courtyard that Hodges does not claim to have witnessed, but he nevertheless hastened to attest to the veracity of the scene. Set amid a discussion of ruins, the story of the zenana is a melancholic story of sacrifice rather than of the private pleasures of a despotic ruler. In fact, the story is closer to the account of sati that Hodges had claimed to witness and that is also documented in his travel narrative. Unlike later nineteenth-century accounts of sati that saw it as a barbaric custom, Hodges views it as a serene event that spoke of the sacrifice and fidelity of the high-born woman. The mournful elegiac quality that Hodges exhibited in his twin Tahiti paintings of Otaheiti Peha carries across to his Indian excursions as well, as death haunts the landscape. Finally, the injunction against ‘seeing too much’ that was demonstrated in relation to the bodies of the Tahitian women guards his visual documentation of the zenana scene in India.
Epilogue While the iconography of unveiling was widely used through the long nineteenth century, the four scenes offer an account of the multiple contexts within which the veil was recalled as a technology of sight, associated with illuminating obscure worlds. Spanning a range from the excitement generated by the sights of new lands to a mournful lamentation of a loss of past grandeur, these scenes express the ambitions of the desire to see, as well as a confrontation with its limits. Yet, Hodges’ use of the veil in his Tahiti paintings marks a break from the past where divine agency was called upon to part the curtain and grant a view. Instead, Hodges’ investment in a scientific community and the emphasis on observational skills grant his discarded veil a distinctly human quality, so that the sight it enables is one born out of a historical event, the voyages of discovery and the visual horizons it breached. And yet, Hodges marks it as a personal vision, stamping it with his own act of witnessing. Even as the iconography of unveiling is dismissed as outmoded, the technologies of vision which it authorises continue to have resonance. The visual trope of discovery that underlines these acts of unveiling is continued in the exposing mechanism of the gaze, an aspect discussed in the following two chapters. The use of the veil as a visual device that extended the range of vision into hitherto unknown worlds was not unlike the developments in optical technologies like the microscope or the telescope that visualised invisible (p.102) worlds. These technologies which claimed to illuminate new worlds extended the field of the visible in feats of scopic mastery, to produce new relationships between the seer and the seen. The veil found new meaning in this milieu where the visible commanded a new legitimacy and tropes of visual mastery deployed light and visibility as crucial technologies of imperial power. The veil pointed to a technology of vision that promised the ability to look behind appearances for truths, corresponding to a metaphysics of depth formulated around the interiorised subject (an aspect I consider in Chapters 5 and 6). Both The Oriental Portfolio and the statue of William Jones employ the veil as a technology of sight that leads the gaze towards interior spaces. Such a ‘depth model’ of looking behind appearances for truth has played an important role in a longstanding hermeneutic tradition. More recent critical interventions have disputed the investment Page 26 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination in such an interpretive model, to draw attention to ‘surface readings’ that veer away from representational content to highlight instead the infrastructures that produce such representations.107 The veil in Isaac Pyke’s frontispiece and William Hodges’ paintings of Tahiti does not claim to reveal hidden truths, but is used more like a citation to refer to a mode of seeing enabled by the drawn curtain. As such, the visual dramaturgy in these images stage representation itself, calling attention to the ways in which a visual regime based on an optics of light and visibility engaged with the colonial world. Notes: (1) On the evidence presented by optical technologies see Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991). (2) Mercier’s map does not respond directly to the discovery of new worlds; however, its depiction of the strategically important Balearic islands off the Iberian peninsula alludes to the French support for Spain against the British in the race for empire within Europe. (3) See Mathew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India 1765–1843 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 24–25. (4) On the microscope, see Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). On the telescope, see Albert Van Helden, The Invention of the Telescope (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society Press, 1977), for what is considered the canonical account. (5) See Mary Terrall, ‘Heroic Narratives of Quest and Discovery’, in Sandra Harding (ed.), The Postcolonial Science and Technology Reader (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 84–102. (6) Eileen Reeves, ‘Reading Maps’, Word and Image, Vol. 9, No. 1 (January–March, 1993), pp. 51–65. (7) See Peter de Bolla, ‘The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer’, in Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (eds), Vision and Textuality (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 282–95 and Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760– 1860 (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). (8) Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003). (9) See Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011) and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 200. (10) See David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Boston: MIT Press, 1999). (11) For a discussion of these frontispieces see James Schmidt, ‘“This New Conquering Empire of Light and Reason”: Edmund Burke, James Gillray, and the Dangers of Enlightenment’, Diametros, Vol. 40 (2014), pp. 126–148.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (12) Michel Foucault, ‘The Eye of Power’, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 154. (13) See Caren Kaplan, Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018). (14) T. Mitchell, ‘The World as Exhibition’, Comparative Studies in History and Society, Vol. 31, No. 2 (1989), p. 231. (15) Thomas Daniell and William Daniell, A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1810), p. i. (16) See John Urry for an understanding of techniques of visual consumption and appropriation of spaces. He provides a useful definition of visual consumption of spaces: ‘constructing the physical environment as a “landscape” (or townscape) not primarily for production but embellished for aesthetic appropriation’. John Urry, Consuming Space (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). See also Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). (17) See Julie Codell (ed.), Power and Resistance: The Delhi Coronation Durbars (Mapin Publishing in association with The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, 2012). (18) Julie Codell, ‘On the Delhi Coronation Durbars, 1877, 1903, 1911’, BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History, ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Accessed 16 April, 2014] (19) Codell, ‘On the Delhi Coronation Durbars’. (20) Pheroza Godrej and Pauline Rohatgi, Scenic Splendours: India Through the Printed Image (London: The British Library, 1989), p. 23. (21) The trend for fine prints of Oriental landscapes continued until the 1860s, when photomechanical methods of printing replaced earlier technologies as photography gained widespread popularity. (22) A second version of The Oriental Portfolio from 1841, with smaller folios, that compiles both the first and second volumes together contains a preface by H.H. Wilson that restates the objectives of the publishing programme, restricting its scope to India rather than the wider Orient. H.H. Wilson, The Oriental Portfolio: Picturesque Illustrations of the Scenery and Architecture of India (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, 1841). (23) Marty Gould, Nineteenth-Century Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (New York: Routledge, 2011). (24) John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880– 1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 46. (25) Jean Louis Comolli, ‘Machines of the Visible’, in Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (eds), The Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 121–150. (26) Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Page 28 of 34 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (27) Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), p. 222. (28) Jonathan Beller, The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention Economy and the Production of the Spectacle (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), p. 9. (29) See Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). (30) ‘The Oriental Portfolio’, The Spectator, 28 July 1838, p. 20. (31) Wilson, The Oriental Portfolio, n.p. (32) Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Making Gender Visible in the Pursuit of Nature’s Secrets’, in Teresa de Lauretis (ed.), Feminist Studies/Critical Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 69. (33) Barbara Harlow, Introduction to Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. ix–xxii. (34) Richard Gough, A Comparative View of the Antient Monuments of India (London: John Nichols, 1785), p. iv. (35) Daniell and Daniell, A Picturesque Voyage to India by the Way of China, p. ii. (36) Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 48 (1778), pp. 628–629. (37) Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War, and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile Books, 2010), p. 276. (38) Barbara Groseclose, British Sculpture and the Company Raj (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), p. 50. (39) Patricia Risso, ‘Cross-Cultural Perceptions of Piracy: Maritime Violence in the Western Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf Region during a Long Eighteenth Century’, Journal of World History, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2001), p. 303. (40) Derek Elliott, ‘The Pirate and the Colonial Project: Hero of the Malabar Coast, Kanhoji Angria’, DarkMatter Journal 5: Special Issue: Pirates and Piracy (December 2009). (41) See Mita Choudhury, Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theater, 1660–1800 (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000); Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman (eds), The Tempest and its Travels (London: Reaktion, 2000); Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage 1660–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). (42) Two important accounts that detail this landscape of intrigue and obfuscations that embroiled the East India Company in the eighteenth century include Nicholas Dirks, The Scandal of Empire: India and the Creation of Imperial Britain (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006) and Partha Chatterjee, The Black Hole of Empire: History of a Global Practice of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). (43) Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘On Visuality’, Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 5, No. 1 (April 2006), pp. 53–79.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (44) Alexander Dalrymple, ‘Essay on Nautical Surveying’ [1771] quoted in Luciana de Lima Martins, ‘Mapping Tropical Waters: British Views and Visions of Rio de Janeiro’, in Denis Cosgrove (ed.), Mappings (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 155. (45) See Edney, Mapping an Empire. (46) Dirks, ‘Guiltless Spoliations: Picturesque Beauty, Colonial Knowledge, and Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of India’, in Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf (eds), Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past (New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., 1994), pp. 211–232. (47) See Zirwat Chowdhury, ‘“Imperceptible Transitions”: The Anglo-Indianization of British Architecture, 1769–1822’, unpublished dissertation. (48) Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). (49) Thomas Postans, Hints to Cadets, with a Few Observations on the Military Service of the Honourable East India Company (London: Wm. H. Allen and Co., 1842), pp. 13–14. (50) Letter of 1809 from Lieutenant Colonel Tredway Clarke (1764–1858), Madras Army, Photo Eur 219, f.46. Cited in Patricia Kattenhorn, ‘Sketching from Nature: Soldier Artists in India’, Marg, Vol. XLVI, No. 4, pp. 17–30, at p. 20. (51) Emma Roberts, The East India Voyager: Or, The Outward Bound (London: J. Madden & Co., Leadenhall Street, 1845), p. 119. (52) Kattenhorn, ‘Sketching from Nature’. See also Mildred Archer, British Drawings in the India Office Library (London: HMSO, 1969). (53) Dirks, ‘Guiltless Spoliations’. (54) ‘Report on Soldiers’ Industrial Exhibition Held at Poona, 5th September 1866’ (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, Byculla, 1867), pp. 7–8. BL 8022.de.2. (7.). (55) ‘Report on Soldiers’ Industrial Exhibition Held at Poona’. (56) Poona Military School, 1853. British Library, Asia, Pacific & Africa, ORW.1987.c.26. (57) ‘Report on Soldiers’ Industrial Exhibition Held at Poona’, pp. 7–8. (58) On Company images of the battle of Seringapatnam see Janaki Nair, Mysore Modern: Rethinking the Region Under Princely Rule (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pp. 27–59 and 101–126. On dramatic representations of the mutiny see Marty Gould, NineteenthCentury Theatre and the Imperial Encounter (New York: Routledge, 2011). (59) Robert Home (1794) Select Views in Mysore, the Country of Tipoo Sultan; from Drawings Taken on the Spot (London: Boyer, [Republished and Printed by Butters], 1808); Robert H. Colebrooke, Twelve Views of Places in the Kingdom of Mysore, The Country of Tipoo Sultan; from Drawings Taken on the Spot. To which are annexed, concise descriptions of the places drawn, with a brief detail of the operations of the army under Marquis Cornwallis during the war (London, 1794) and Alexander Allen, Views in the Mysore Country (London, 1794).
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (60) Two accounts that have attempted to rectify this have been, Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010) and Hoock, Empires of the Imagination. (61) Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977). Given the Greco-Roman characterisation of the sculpture, the significance of the roundels as serving within an imperialistic metaphor of annexation and display as trophy deserve to be noted. (62) Groseclose, British Sculpture and the Company Raj, p. 103. (63) Groseclose proposes that the draped figure is ‘mother Ganges’, given its affinity with a similar figure at the base of John Bacon Jr’s monument to James Achilles Kirkpatrick. British Sculpture and the Company Raj, pp. 102–103. (64) William Jones, ‘On the Gods of Greece, Italy and India’, The works of Sir William Jones: with the life of the author by Lord Teignmouth, Volume 3 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly; and John Walker, Paternoster Row, 1807), p. 338. (65) Thomas Maurice, Sanscreet Fragments, or interesting extracts from the sacred books of the Brahmins, on subjects important to the British Isles. In two parts (London: Thomas Maurice, 1797), p. 20. (66) Maurice notes that the engravings of Vishnu’s avatars (he includes the Varaha avatar and the Matsya avatar) were ‘fac similes’ from painted versions in temples and hence utterly oblivious to the rules of perspective. If they found admirers it was only because of their eccentric originality, he claimed. Thomas Maurice, History of Hindostan, Vol. 1 (London: W. Bulmer and Co., 1795), p. 40. (67) Thomas Trautmann, Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2004) pp. 74–80. (68) See Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters, pp. 109–112. (69) ‘Obituary – Rev. Thomas Maurice’, Gentleman’s Magazine, Vol. 94, Part 1, December–June 1824, p. 469. His obituary also claims his descent from the princes of Powis in Wales. Powis Castle was the site of a major collection of Indian art and antiquities, spirited away by Robert Clive after the battle of Plassey in 1757 when he returned to Britain with a personal fortune of £234,000, making him the richest self-made man in Europe. After Clive’s son married Lord Powis’s daughter in 1784 the estates were merged in 1801. (70) Deirdre Coleman, ‘The “dark tide of time”: Coleridge and William Hodges’ India’, in David Vallins, Kaz Oishi and Seamus Perry (eds), Coleridge, Romanticism and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 39–54. (71) Allan Cunningham, The Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters and Sculptors, Volume 3 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), p. 194. (72) Cited in Ann Cox-Johnson, John Bacon, R.A. 1740–1799 (London: St Marylebone Society Publication, 1961), p. 38.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (73) See Cox-Johnson, John Bacon and Richard Cecil, Memoirs of John Bacon Esq. R.A. (London: F & C Rivington, 1801). (74) Srabani Sen, ‘The Asiatic Society and the Sciences in India, 1784–1947’, History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization: Vol. 15, Part 4 (Science and Modern India: An Institutional History), ed. Uma Das Gupta (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2011), pp. 27–68. (75) For how the two were reconciled see Christophe C. Minkowski, ‘The Pundit as Public Intellectual: The Controversy over virodh or Inconsistency in the Astronomical Sciences’, in Alex Michaels (ed.), The Pundit: Traditional Scholarship in India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2001), pp. 79– 98. (76) Maurice, History of Hindostan, p. xxii. (77) William Jones (trans.), Institutes of Hindu law, or, The ordinances of Menu, according to the gloss of Cullúca: comprising the Indian system of duties, religious and civil: verbally translated from the original Sanscrit (Calcutta: Printed by order of the government; London reprinted, for J. Sewell …; and J. Debrett; 1796), p. xvi. (78) Jones (trans.), Institutes of Hindu law, p. xv. (79) For a closer analysis of the metaphor of light in Jones’s translation project see Jenny Sharpe, ‘The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire; Or, How William Jones Discovered India’, boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 26–46. (80) Gayatri Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 281. (81) Despite his invocations to the light of knowledge, Jones posits Christianity as the only true revelation, an attitude that resonates with Maurice and Bacon. For an explicit account of Jones’s religious beliefs and their impact on intellectual history see Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 44–79. (82) J. Duncan Derret, Religion, Law and the State in India, p. 250, cited in Sharpe, ‘The Violence of Light in the Land of Desire’. (83) Accounts that have discussed Bacon’s sculpture and expressed a baffled curiosity include Groseclose, British Sculpture and the Company Raj, p. 103; Nicholas Penny, Romantic Church Monuments (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 146. Jason Edwards has pointed to the problems in deciphering the obscure imagery in ‘Introduction: From the East India Company to the West Indies and Beyond: The World of British Sculpture, c. 1757–1947’, Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2010), pp. 147–172. (84) Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987), pp. 66–67. (85) See Schmidt, ‘“This New Conquering Empire of Light and Reason”’.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (86) The catalogue entry for the Society of Artists exhibition in London as cited in William L. Pressly, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby’s “Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors”: Variations on an Arabian Tale’, The British Art Journal, Vol. 2 No. 1 (Autumn 2000). (87) Wright’s account book is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London; the Miravan entry was published by Benedict Nicholson: ‘Wright of Derby, Houasse et un conte oriental’, Revue de l’ art, Vol. XXX (1975), pp. 35–38. (88) F.P. Lock, ‘Wright of Derby’s “Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors”’, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 141, No. 1158 (September 1999), pp. 544–545. (89) See Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908). (90) Most analyses have viewed it as a tale of greed, including Nicholson, Joseph Wright of Derby, Volume I and Pressly, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby’s “Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors”’, pp. 14–19. Ronald Paulson has appended it to the aesthetics of mourning in the eighteenth century. See ‘The Aesthetics of Mourning’, in Ralph Cohen (ed.), Studies in Eighteenth-century British Art and Aesthetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 148–181. (91) On ‘nabobs’ see Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Wright’s letter to his sister is cited in Pressly, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby’s “Miravan Breaking Open the Tomb of his Ancestors”’. (92) Edward Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters (London, 1808), pp. 242–243. (93) Simon Macdonald, ‘To “shew virtue its own image”: William Hodges’s The Effects of Peace and The Consequences of War, 1794–1795’, British Art Journal, Vol. IX, No. 1 (2008), pp. 57–66. (94) George Forster, A Voyage Around the World (1777), cited in David Bindman, ‘Philanthropy Seems Natural to Mankind: Hodges and Captain Cook’s Second Voyage to the South Seas’, in Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (eds), William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 23–24. (95) See Michael Rosenthal, ‘Gainsborough’s Diana and Actaeon’, in John Barrell (ed.), Painting and the Politics of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 167–194. (96) See Bindman, ‘Philanthropy Seems Natural to Mankind’, pp. 21–26 and David Bindman, From Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 123–150. It is pertinent here to point to Georg Forster’s subsequent translation of Kalidasa’s Shakuntala in 1791, prompted by his belief that the Tahitians were related to Indians in their ‘closeness to nature’. See Madhuvanti Karyekar, ‘Fostering Aesthetic Toleration through Literary Translation: Georg Forster’s Sakuntala’, in Joanna Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander and Douglas T. McGetchin (eds), Transcultural Encounters Between Germany and India (New York: Routledge, 2014), pp. 13–14. (97) Bindman himself has acknowledged a ‘Rousseauian pessimism about the decadence of Europe and its impact upon the naïve Tahitians’ in the accounts of the Forsters. See Bindman, From Ape to Apollo, pp. 129–130.
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Four acts of seeing: the veil as technology of illumination (98) Isabel Combs Stuebe, The Life and Works of William Hodges (New York: Garland Publications, 1979), pp. 139–142. (99) Michael Charlesworth, Landscape and Vision in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 135–136. (100) Bindman, From Ape to Apollo, p. 130. (101) Hodges cited in Edwards, Anecdotes of Painters, p. 248. (102) Erwin Panofsky, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego: Nicholas Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition’, Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1955), pp. 295–320. (103) See Harriet Guest, Empire, Barbarism, and Civilisation: James Cook, William Hodges, and the Return to the Pacific (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). (104) William Hodges, Travels in India During the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783 (Calcutta: Bibhash Gupta, 1987), p. 2. (105) Two of his best works on the Indian landscapes are moonlit scenes: View in the Jungleterry, Bengal, Moonlight and A Moonlit Landscape with Tombs (1787) featuring the romantic effects of moonlight to enhance the exotic scenery. In a later work painted for Mrs Hastings, he introduces dramatic lighting and a double rainbow that recalls his painting of New Zealand’s southern island, Dusky Bay from 1775. The rainbow finds mention in both Cook and Forster’s accounts of the voyage as formed by the spray and indicates Hodges’ interest in observational naturalism. However, as a traditional symbol of divine deliverance it recalls the Deluge, tying Hodges’ work with the contemporary thought of Thomas Maurice, William Jones as well as John Whitehurst, all of whom had invoked a scientific approach to the study of the ancient past to confirm the truth of the narrative of the Deluge. An excellent account of Hodges’ approach to light is given in Bernard Smith, European Vision and the South Pacific 1768–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 36–75. (106) Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). (107) Fredric Jameson discusses the depth model in Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 61–62. See also Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best on the limitations of the depth model in Jameson’s account: ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, Vol. 108 (Fall 2009), pp. 1–21.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00011
Abstract and Keywords Countering the predominantly literary analysis of Parsi theatre, this chapter reassesses theatre as the site of many experiments with visual technologies as the proscenium stage introduced a fixed grammar of the curtain into the fluid spaces of premodern performance. Framed like a painting, the stage introduced illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes to present stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into its world. Exploring links between Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s paintings, the chapter discusses melodrama as an alternative aesthetic mode that bound viewers and performers. Finally, it proposes limits to the gaze of darshan as a visual trope in analyses of theatre and mythological imagery, arguing that innovative optics of theatre and painting were influenced by and in conversation with technologies of the spectacle within imperial networks. Keywords: Parsi theatre, Visual technologies Curtain, Painting, Illusionist painting, Ravi Varma, Melodrama, Darshan
[B]ehind the curtain there is nothing to see, but it was all the more important each time to describe the curtain, or the base, since there was nothing either behind or beneath it. (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault) ‘Behind the Veil! Behind the Veil!’ screamed the editorial of the Pune-based The Mahratta in June 1908, lamenting the ‘mystery stricken mind’ of the British as they sought to penetrate the veil of the East. Drawing upon Tennyson’s famous lines from In Memoriam, the editorial lashed out against the British characterisation of the ‘mental seclusion’ of the Indian mind that resulted in an inability to ‘know what the Indian people really thought in their inner mind’. Such a portrayal, it proclaimed, could only have an uncomplimentary implication, i.e. that the educated leaders of the Indian people were capable of double dealing. If there was any purdah, it suggested, it was the one that covered the workings of government dealings: ‘Dark is the mystery of the secret work that is always being done there in the interest of the Government, and against the interest of the people. Oh, for the magic power that could give the people at Page 1 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism least occasional glimpses into the diabolical cooking of public affairs which the people are never destined to see, but the bitter fruits they have to eat.’1 The immediate provocation for these words was a speech made by Lord Minto, the Governor General, upon his promulgation of the Explosives Act and the Newspapers Act, both of which were designed to curb seditious activity on the part of an Indian unrest that was seizing much of Western India. Minto, for his part, had invoked the military hero the Duke of Wellington: ‘It was the Duke of Wellington who said that he had spent the best part of his life in trying to know what was going on on the other side of the hill in front of him, and for us the purdah of the east unfortunately hides much from view. It would be better for us and many races of this country if we know how to lift it. At present we have failed to do so.’2 Minto’s discussions on the purdah of the East referred to the popular writings of Meredith Townsend, the influential editor of The Spectator whose book Asia and Europe (1901) (p.114) sought to dwell upon the inherent differences between European and Asian thought. Townsend devotes a whole chapter to ‘The Mental Seclusion of India’ in his book, lamenting the inability of the Englishman to ‘understand the hearts of the men he governs’ because: ‘in his most facile moments the Indian never unlocks his mind, never puts it to yours, never reveals his real thought, never stands with his real and whole character confessed, like the Western European’.3 Nor was this seclusion detected among other nations: ‘The Chinese are not so hidden from us, as are the Indians of Asia; while the Indians of Spanish America, though hidden from us, are not hidden from the Spaniards, who live among them.’4 Townsend concludes his assessment by surmising that mental reserve is the first essential characteristic of the Indian. Inasmuch as the seclusion of women in purdah had characterised aspects of Indian society, it was further strengthened in writings like these where a predisposition towards seclusion reflected the utter inaccessibility of the Indian mind. Lord Minto’s remarks, directed as they are to illuminating the darkness within which opposition to the colonial government was brewing, called for a greater visibility as a means of surveillance over Indian civil society. Cast in the language of visibility and concealment, the exchange between The Mahratta and the colonial administration laid claim to a discourse on transparency that was implied in the political sphere and that bore the legacy of Enlightenment ideas stemming from philosophers like Montesquieu. In his celebrated account of Oriental despotism, Montesquieu had frowned upon the singular opacity of the monarch’s decision that is uninformed by public opinion, proposing instead a transparent society of representative government.5 As such, transparency in the public sphere offered a means of countering the threat of darkened spaces with the light of knowledge. Homi Bhabha’s consideration of Montesquieu’s ideas on India proposed that although the colonial government invoked the language of transparency in relying upon writing (documentation and record) to make legible its authority to the wider public, it was nevertheless undone by the ambivalence of its address, which spoke in a double voice as both authoritative empire and liberal nation. Its impact was underscored in the inquisitorial ‘demand for a narrative’ made upon the colonial subject in an attempt to ‘understand’ him. For Bhabha, ‘the natives’ resistance represents a frustration of that nineteenth-century strategy of surveillance, the confession, which seeks to dominate the “calculable” individual’ and he characterises the colonial subject’s response as a ‘sly civility’, speaking in two tongues at the instantiation of the colonial master.6 What is interesting is that The Mahratta’s response was also couched within a similar advocacy of a transparency within the public sphere and its claims to political representation. The Mahratta saw its own role as implicated in the reflection of public opinion, one that was sought to be conveyed to the (p.115) government as an indication of all that lay beyond the purdah. At
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism the same time, it was alert to the acts of surveillance by which the colonial government sought information on its publics, listing ‘the host of paid and unpaid informers and members of the secret service, of the intelligence and espionage departments’.7 The colonial government was accused of a purdah of its own, the accidental revelation of which could reveal the true intentions of its attitudes to the public. The Mahratta was the brainchild of Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an influential Hindu nationalist leader from Western India who, along with Vishnu Shastri Chiplunkar and Gopal Ganesh Agarkar, two prominent Hindu leaders, launched the weekly in 1881. The trio were heavily invested in social and political reform, adopting a singularly confrontationist attitude towards the colonial government, and Tilak was even charged with sedition in a case of the killing of a British officer, reportedly encouraging the assassination through his outspoken writings. Tilak himself had never shied away from expressing his opinions in his journals. The inaugural issue of Kesari (the Marathi weekly launched along with The Mahratta) clearly explicated the role that Tilak saw for political journalism: Just as street lights and the rounds of police constables bring to light anything wrong or unjust happening on the roads in the dark, the editorial pen brings to light the injustices and the wrongs of the administration … It is our intention to write impartially about the way in which officials of Government perform their duty. Thus, the Kesari undertakes to keep a vigilant eye on the administration and give it praise or blame when due, without favour or fear.8 While Tilak’s mouthpiece announced this expository role for journalism, a number of other newspapers across the country also adopted the role of casting light into a darkened world – The Searchlight (Patna), Som Prakash (Calcutta), Nur Afshan (Ludhiana) or Utkal Dipika (Cuttack). If journalism took up the task of illuminating hidden secrets in the public sphere, the stage emerged as another public platform where the purdah featured in debates on visibility and concealment, on fiction and realism, bringing the aesthetic and the political into closer conversation. This dialectic of transparency and secrecy drawn from Enlightenment ideals continues to have political import in the public sphere today, but its memorable imperial history of worlds hidden behind ‘bamboo curtains’ and ‘iron curtains’ has received little critical attention.9 This chapter examines the legacy of visual epistemologies of unveiling from the last chapter, taking the case of Parsi theatre and its staging technologies which introduced the curtain to produce a new grammar of relationships between the viewer and the image.
(p.116) The theatrical apparatus: staging technologies Theatre formed a crucial node in the network of images that circulated amid the newly emerging visual arena in urban bases in late nineteenth-century India. With the publication of newspapers and magazines, advertising images, labels and photographs, posters and playbills, the urban visual sphere provided an arena where experimentations with new visual technologies introduced urban spectators to a vibrant commercial visual culture that evolved its own language for negotiating the sacred, the political and the modern. Sandra Freitag places the pictorial image as central to the act of imagining a community, a place where ‘spectatorship meets creation in a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies and figurality’.10 Innovations in printing and reproduction technologies formed the thrust of these experiments but painting and theatre were equally implicated in the changes and I will focus here on Parsi proscenium theatre as providing a paradigm for the interaction between the viewer and the image. The introduction of the curtain and the contained space of action in proscenium theatre presented a material space for the drama of vision and the action of veiling Page 3 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism and unveiling within which claims to truth were presented in the colonial visual regime. As Indian performers and viewers adapted the language of proscenium theatre, it emerged as a powerful space for the staging of visual effects through technologies of light and visibility, producing mass spectator subjects. I will read the appeal of Parsi theatre as an incipient laboratory for the experimentation with visual technologies and cultures that emerged in response to photography and early cinema and its production of the urban visual subject who sought out its visual pleasures. In studies on nineteenth-century theatre the stage has largely been read as a performative development of a literary culture, given the predominance of textual translations for the stage, authors from literary backgrounds and the association of journalists who represented the educated middle classes of the city.11 However, it was strongly invested in the visual and even Bharatendu Harishchandra’s idea of theatre, which saw it as an elite cultured activity opposed to the vulgar swaggers of Parsi theatre, defined it as drishyakavya, poetry for the eyes.12 Illusionist painting, directional lighting and lavish costumes presented stories with verisimilitude, enticing viewers into the world of illusion created on stage. Parsi theatre stood at a cross-roads where Urdu literary cultures embodied in Agha Hashra Kashmiri’s Rustom aur Sohrab or Agha Hassan Amanat’s Indar Sabha, Hindu Pauranik kathas like Raja Harishchandra, Shakespearean tragedies like Othello or cross-cultural love stories like Yahudi ki Ladki (The Jewish Daughter) converged in a theatrical model of visual story-telling that would carry over to the emerging cinema. The visual grammar introduced (p.117) by the curtain and corresponding staging and lighting technologies was the crucible within which such experiments took place, producing new spectator subjects. The earliest proscenium theatres were introduced by the British in the mid-eighteenth century; however, the explosion of indigenous theatres based upon the proscenium stage occurred in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The Play House in Calcutta was established as the first public theatre in 1753 by East India Company officials, missionaries and merchants and was followed by a second playhouse in 1774 for which David Garrick (1717–79), the noted theatre personality, sent ‘the best dramatic works … together with complete setts of scenery, under the care of an ingenious young Mechanist from Drury Lane, whom he recommended to superintend that department’.13 The young man was Barnard Messink, who was the son of Garrick’s own scene-painter and machinist at Drury Lane, James Messink, thereby bringing to India not just English theatre practices but also painting and set design in vogue in contemporary London.14 Garrick was known to have experimented with ways of rendering stage design more authentic through lighting, costumes and striking painted backdrops and wings that served to create an effect of depth and distance on the stage. His associates included the painter and set designer Phillipe de Loutherbourg (1740–1812), who created spectacular special effects through lighting technologies for the stage and also pioneered the eidophusikon (1781), a miniature theatrical machine that, alongside technologies like the panorama (1787) and diorama (1822), is considered pre-cinematic in its experimentation with technological illusionism.15 In 1768 Garrick facilitated the supply of several copies of plays along with seven scenes painted upon canvas of dimensions between 29 feet and 16 feet, including two street scenes, a bed-chamber scene, a parlour, a hall, a park with trees and a garden scene to the Calcutta theatre.16 That this theatrical scenography was well regarded is attested in a letter of 1781 by Eliza Fay, who speaks of the scenery and decorations as quite equal to what could be expected, with tickets costing as much as a single gold mohur, a significant expense.17
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism The world of English theatre was bound closer to painting in India with the visits of the artists Tilly Kettle (1734–86), William Hodges (1744–97) and Johan Zoffany (1733–1810), all of whom had close ties to the English stage. Hodges had served as a scenery painter in Derby and his drawings and prints from his voyages in the South Pacific served as the basis for De Loutherbourg’s final work for the stage, Omai: Or, a Trip around the World (1785). Billed as an exotic pantomime, its visualisation of the Pacific Islands and its inhabitants illustrated how theatrical scenery and pictorial representation were closely bound in a joint enterprise to showcase distant lands and satisfy a geographical curiosity. The Daniells included the playhouse in their Views of Calcutta (1786) in an aquatint that featured the theatre alongside (p.118) Holwell’s Monument to the survivors of the ‘Black Hole’ and the eastern wall of Fort William (Figure 3.1). Tilly Kettle specialised in theatrical portraits including subjects from Oriental dramas, such his portrayal of the actress Mrs Yates as Mandane in The Orphan of China. Exhibited in 1765, it was based on Arthur Murphy’s tragedy of the same name that had been first performed at Garrick’s Drury Lane theatre in 1759, and his later travels to India have been seen as fuelled by the fantasies born from Orientalist theatre.18 Johan Zoffany was also closely associated with David Garrick, who 3.1 Thomas Daniell, ‘Old Fort’, 1786 was his first patron, and he completed several portraits of Garrick, conversation pieces with his wife, as well as paintings of him in performance. His association with the theatre in London, and Garrick in particular, followed the example of William Hogarth and attested to the involvement of painting in theatre, which occupied a privileged place in metropolitan English cultural life.19 While public playhouses sought out the services of professional scenographers and set designers from the bustling London theatre scene, there is also evidence of smaller portable theatres with changeable scenery, proscenium and wings in collections in India. Claude Martin, the Frenchman in service with the English East India Company at Lucknow imported a specially designed mechanical theatre, approximately 7 feet wide and 8 feet high, with (p.119) eight different painted scenes, wings, marionettes and lighting that could be dimmed. The theatre formed part of Martin’s collection of mechanical toys that included a barrel organ, a musical snuffbox, musical clock with automaton animals and birds, amongst others, and participated in the wider European interest in mechanical devices for personal amusement and instruction.20 In his letters to the suppliers of the theatre, Martin includes very specific descriptions of his requirements for the painted sets and designs, attesting to both the vogue for spectacular dramatic effects in stage design and the mechanical possibilities for producing such visual effects. The standard painted sets included scenes of a palace with columned architecture, a garden with urns and statues, a landscape with rustic dwellings, a prison scene, a grotto that could be used to represent hell, a desert scene, a forest and flights on both sides that allowed for deities to ascend and descend, along with devices to conjure thunder and lightning. Martin asked for many newer visual effects that could convey ‘more magic’ through the lighting effects,
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism including erupting volcanoes, fiery dragons, fire-like lightning, haloes of fire, artificial water chutes and cascades, along with hailstorms to add to the thunder and lightning. Raising his budget to include more marionettes, which could be dressed in Indian clothing, and betterquality paintings that would also show seas both stormy and calm, Martin describes in detail how the lighting would create varied atmospheric effects. Placed along the sides and the back, with reflectors to move along the paintings and the transparent wings, they could represent jets of fire, the rising or setting sun or volcanoes and fiery grottoes.21 The crucial technology that would allow for these visual effects was transparent painting or painted transparencies, an innovation popularised by de Loutherbourg’s eidophusikon, which involved painting upon thin, gauze-like fabric that was backlit to allow light to pass through, creating a brilliant luminous effect.22 Transparent paintings evolved to sophisticated forms on glass to produce that other theatrical entertainment, the dissolving view, that commonly formed a part of stage shows in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Stand-alone transparent paintings were used in celebratory contexts and formed the centrepiece in spectacles such as the commemoration of the victory over Tipu Sultan at Seringapatnam. In 1793 the façade of the theatre in Calcutta was heavily illuminated with lamps set against a large transparent painting by Arthus Devis (1762–1822) of the storming of Bangalore by British troops in March 1791. Over the eastern door was another transparent painting of Seringapatnam, and the windows were draped with paintings of the forts captured – Nanadroog, Ramgery, Shivagery etc.23 Transparent painting continued to be used regularly for imperial celebrations – those for the battle of Waterloo included a painting of the duke of Wellington, based on a sketch by George Chinnery, exhibited over the gateway of the Government (p.120) House with splendid illuminations.24 Sita Ram, the painter who chronicled the marquis of Hasting’s travels across North India included a watercolour of the grounds of Claude Martin’s palace (renamed Farhat Baksh after it was bought by Nawab Saadat Ali Khan) illuminated with lamps and fireworks, but also featuring transparent paintings of female figures along the pavilions and railings (Plate 10). Martin wanted his theatrical scenery to show the spectacle of ‘volcanoes and other subterranean fires, through the effects of light and transparent scenery, with lightning, thunder etc. and the descent of the infernal deities or others like fiery dragons etc’.25 The inclusion of thunder, hail and lightning incorporated sound effects that were also popularised by de Loutherbourg, who used copper sheets suspended by wire to produce thunder and two discs of strained silk pressed together to create the hollow whistling sound of loud 10 Sita Ram, View of the Illuminations at the gusts of wind.26 Although one might dismiss Palace of Furruk Bukhsh, 1814 Martin’s particular tastes as those limited to the connoisseur, they are nevertheless indicative of the close relationships between practices in painting and theatrical technologies that extended between London and colonial outposts like Lucknow and were reflected in public practices of celebration. Zoffany remained an important link between these worlds and Martin repeatedly asked his theatre suppliers to
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism take Zoffany’s advice into account, drawing relationships between the theatrical innovations of de Loutherbourg and imperial tastes in the colony. If Calcutta pioneered the experiment with proscenium theatre in India, it was in Bombay that it flourished, spearheaded by a commercial theatre culture that held sway over the second half of the nineteenth century in the city.27 Parsi theatre in Bombay and elsewhere, known for its eclectic romances and mythological dramas, used elaborate curtains, drawing from European stage practices. Sir Jamsetji Jijabhai, the prominent Parsi merchant, provided financial support for early playhouses for Indian audiences including the Bombay Theatre, modelled on London’s Drury Lane, and Grant Theatre, which was instrumental in attracting a wider middle-class public with dramas staged on the Hindu epics in Marathi. Jijabhai was also instrumental in the formation in 1856 of an art school in Bombay named after him; despite its professed goal of training craftsmen, his recommendation of painting as the primary subject indicated that he saw both art and theatre as elevating public taste.28 While graduates from the art school frequently participated in public art projects and the printing industry, reports from the school indicate that it also provided painters to the city’s evolving theatres.29 Well-known painters for theatre included Dinshah Irani, Dadi Ratanji Dalal and Baburao Painter, who, along with his brother Anandrao Mistri, painted backdrops for several theatre companies including the Lalit Kala Darsa Mandali between 1910 and 1916.30 There is also evidence of German and Italian artists working as painters, (p.121) and well-regarded painters like Husain Khan of the New Alfred Company were paid as much as Rs 1,500 per month.31 Scenic effects in Bombay theatres were often of uneven quality and reviews in the local press in the mid-nineteenth century often complained of the scanty fittings and scenery that was ‘occasionally independent of perspective’.32 This spurred decisive efforts to improve it, borrowing from the stagecraft of foreign visiting companies in the 1870s. The visiting Italian Opera Company had introduced gas lighting into the Grant Road theatre in 1866 and also repainted its sets and scenery and this laid the basis for the introduction of more lavish lighting effects.33 In the 1870s directional and coloured lighting began to be used with great subtlety and effect. In 1873 the performance of the play Indarsabha by the Elphinstone Dramatic Society in Bombay used limelight to represent the colours of each of the four fairies in the play, who were named after gemstones: Pukhraj (topaz), Nilam (sapphire), Lal (ruby) and Sabz (emerald), so that as each appeared on stage the scene was bathed with the colours of her garments.34 Around the same time, the Alfred Theatrical Company pioneered mechanical tricks on stage, including the eruption of a volcano, the emergence of a giant from the earth and the descent of fairies upon the stage, all shown to spectacular effect.35 A measure of the mechanical contrivances available on the Bombay stage is provided in a review of the Elphinstone Dramatic Society that displayed the ‘springing up of gardens in the middle of deserts, and the reappearance of deserts by the touch of the magician’s wand; a piece of rock turning into a bed of roses; an ancient castle guarded by a dragon which shivers into fragments by the touch of Solomon’s sword; a sparkling fountain out of which emerges one of the chief characters of the play …’36 At the same time, boxed sets of stock theatrical scenes became available in Bombay, a simplified version of Claude Martin’s mechanical portable theatre. In Calcutta too, from the 1860s onwards it was reported that ‘Almost the sole occupation of the idle rich … was to start amateur theatres’ with all the scenic apparatus of the Victorian stage.37 Parsi theatres were extravagantly fitted with huge, painted curtains and gaslights that lit up the scene from the foot of the stage. Gas lighting was not without its attendant dangers – the Great National Theatre in Calcutta caught fire in 1873 during its premier production, Kamya Kanan
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (The Delectable Garden) due to a fault in its gas lighting. The auditorium itself was brightly lit and not darkened for performances until well into the twentieth century, a fact lamented in accounts that said it detracted from creating genuine illusions.38 The Novelty theatre constructed in 1887 was massive, seating up to 1,400 people, and continued the practice of using painters for its curtains; it featured a screen painted by the German artist Maurice Freyberger, who had become well known for creating the atmosphere of the ‘sensation scenes’ in Boucicault’s plays. The nearby Gaiety theatre had enormous 22-feet high (p.122) curtains and the Governor of Bombay, Richard Temple had personally supervised the painted act drop, which featured a scenic view of the city including prominent buildings in the neo-Gothic style, designed to instil civic pride.39 Some dramatists used as many as fourteen different curtains for a single play and the drop scene curtain was used to display their ideological allegiances; the Westernised Elphinstone Company thus featured a scene of the Paris exhibition while the Baronet Company displayed the J.J. Hospital as a symbol of Jameshji Jijabhai’s charitable munificence. According to theatre historian D.G. Godse, the glamorous and dazzling stage décor of Parsi theatre was motivated by a craze for novelty and promoted by the producers in a spirit of showmanship. He recounts stories about the extravagance of the Gandharva theatre company’s legendary fittings, ‘Eighty rupees for a pair of footwear, twenty thousand for the precious carpeting, thousand five hundred for the silver crown … two large mirrors placed in the two wings to observe how one’s character looks while performing; wigs obtained from Paris; perfume fountain for sprinkling in the auditorium’. So spectacular were the stage setting and curtains that they frequently received applause from audiences.40 A measure of the success of Parsi theatre companies was indicated in the international tours they undertook. The Victoria Parsi Theatre Company, for instance, took a troupe of ninety performers to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London in 1885–86 and continued on to tour Europe and the United States. Between 1888 and 1889 it toured South East Asia, including stops in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Burma, Thailand, Singapore and Java, performing Alibaba and Forty Thieves and Laily and Majnu to packed houses. Considered amongst the most reputed theatrical troupes in Asia at the time, the company travelled with a large quantity of stage equipment, requiring ten train carriages to transport its equipment in Java. Applauded in the press for its ‘English language songs, ballet dancers, magical scenic effects and the cinematograph’, its actors were frequently garlanded by audiences at the end of shows.41
The reality effect: theatre and the curtain Anuradha Kapur has noted that the proscenium theatre creates a shift in stage vocabulary quite unlike the open-staged theatrical models prevalent in traditional Indian performative practice in pre-colonial India, introducing new relationships between the performers and the audience.42 The introduction of the curtain is the primary device that is instrumental here, demarcating a performative space from the audience. Although proscenium theatre created a new spatial dynamics framing the scene like a picture for its audience, it was primarily associated with Anglicised drama practices. In vernacular drama the curtain was first introduced as a crucial innovation in Vishnudas Bhave’s (p.123) staging of Sita’s Swayamvar in 1843, a moment associated with the birth of modern Marathi drama. According to Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s description, the curtain was held by two men and would locate the acting areas, defining for the audience the various spaces within the mise-en-scène, indicating a more fluid sense of spatial demarcations.43 The separation of the performers from the audience symbolised by the curtain has been seen as the birth of modernism in accounts like Michael Fried’s Absorption and Theatricality.44 Fried’s
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism thesis posits the construction of an autonomous fictive space that nevertheless laid claims to facticity and marks the birth of realism in its creation of a ‘supreme fiction’ that viewers could identify with. The external beholder is invited to step into the painting (or stage) and live the ‘supreme fiction’ of the world represented. The developments in Indian theatre with the introduction of proscenium stages and curtains point to a somewhat different model that nevertheless made claims to the real. On the one hand, the scene drops, stage machinery and lighting effects conspired to create an illusionism that drew the viewer into its ambit of ‘effects of the real’, but on the other hand, the proscenium curtain was also seen as a veil that had the power to expose deception, not unlike the claims for journalism made by The Mahratta. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century a series of plays invoked the theatrical space as ‘a mirror of reality’ claiming to reveal hidden truths. The first of these plays, Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror, 1861), was an instant success, highlighting the exploitation of the indigo workers at the hands of the colonial masters. The play claimed to penetrate the veil of appearances paraded in official accounts, and in his preface to the play, addressed to the colonial planters, the author, Dinabandhu Mitra, sought to expose the lies perpetrated by ‘the editors of two daily newspapers’ (the Englishman and the Bengal Harkaru) who were ‘filling their columns with your [planters’] praises’. ‘You say, that some amongst you give donations to schools, and also medicine in time of need but the Planters’ donations to schools are more odious than the application of the shoe for the destruction of a milch cow, and their grants of medicine are like unto mixing the inspissated milk in the cup of poison.’ Instead the play claimed to hold a mirror to the planter’s face so that he ‘could erase the freckle of the stain of selfishness from his forehead’.45 The play became widely known for its subversive potential and has often been considered the first nationalist drama.46 In a court case where the English translator of the play, James Long, was sued for libel (by the newspaper editors), Alexander Forbes, the editor of the Harkaru and a former planter, argued that since ‘[t]hese dramas [were] looked upon as fictions with a great deal of truth in them’ the play ‘would be believed by natives not acquainted with the Indigo planters as a true representation of their conduct’.47 The translator Long, on his part, argued that as drama it was fiction and invoked (p.124) a long tradition of literature extending from Molière and Dickens to Sanskrit drama, to convince the court of the harmlessness of the play.48 Yet, some fourteen years after the play was written, it could still arouse passions and the stage artist Benodini Dasi recounted a performance in Lucknow from 1875 when European spectators unsheathed their swords as the peasant on stage attacked the actor playing the British planter.49 While its reception prompted the colonial government to pass the Dramatic Performances Act in 1876, aimed at prohibiting ‘dramatic performances which are scandalous, defamatory, seditious, obscene or otherwise prejudicial to the public interest’, what is significant for our purposes is also how the motif of a ‘mirror of reality’ was readily adopted.50 A string of plays modelled on the success of Nil Darpan followed, including Gaekwar Darpan (The Mirror of Baroda, 1875) and Chakar Darpan (The Tea Planter’s Mirror, 1875). In each instance the prevailing official accounts were disputed and the story hidden from the public eye was sought to be revealed. The curtain was the perfect metaphor for these exposés and the stage emerged as a primary site for dramatising the misdeeds of the colonial state. As many theatres were converted into cinema studios in the early twentieth century, the theatrical curtain persisted as a symbolic prop that transferred the truth value of the theatrical exposés to cinema. The screen itself was called a purdah and the idea of the veil as revealing the
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism truth held sway well into the early twentieth century. The noted filmmaker D.G. Phalke attested to the place of the purdah in an early article in Navyug in 1918 which was presented in the traditional theatrical format of the sutradhar addressing the audience about an ‘analysis of his art’.51 It takes the form of a conversation between the manager of the play and his wife who is called upon to come upon the stage from behind the purdah. She emerges speaking: Lord, was it you only who was saying ‘work behind the curtains etc.?’ This curtain has created duality everywhere. There is a curtain for women. There are double dealings in thoughts and conduct in case of men, in politics, patriotism, at home and outside too. In short, this curtain has helped to show one appearance from the inside and the other from the outside and also to conceal mysterious things, and to cover up secrets, and to prevent them from being disclosed. Human nature is also becoming more and more skilled in concealing vile. I am fed up with all this. The more curtains you have the greater the absence of straight dealings and innocence. Phalke responds by agreeing with her that curtains had created duality and that they should be abolished to support the ‘re-establishment of truth’. However, he qualifies his statement, proposing that he is not against all curtains, certainly not the stage curtain. ‘What you call the screen or curtain in cinema is the substratum which holds my visual illusion.’ Likening the screen (p.125) to a water surface that reflects like a mirror, he reiterates the purdah as holding the ‘vision of my moving picture’.52 The transition to the moving picture therefore maintained the idea of the curtain as a mirror of reality. The centrality of the curtain to the experience of proscenium theatre and its concomitant values of exposing the truth launched a search for the curtain in indigenous sources. Critical writings on theatre grappled with the question of the curtain in ancient Sanskrit theatre. The curtain was generally perceived to be of foreign origin, being called yavanika in the Natya Shastra, and Orientalist scholars who had written on Indian theatre had interpreted this to refer to the Greek origins of Indian theatre. This was in keeping with the tenor of Orientalist investigations in Indian art and architecture that saw its ancient arts as derived from Greek sources. This view was challenged in nationalist writing on Indian theatre, which sought to read a wide corpus of Sanskrit literature with a view to discovering evidence for the curtain within indigenous sources. An ingenious reading of Sanskrit texts found words for the curtain in yamanika and javanika. Meanwhile, Ananda Coomaraswamy proposed the presence of a curtain in Sanskrit theatre but located it not as the drop curtain of proscenium theatre but as one located between the stage and the nepathya-grha (tiring room) that the actor pushes aside as he enters the stage.53 In this reading the curtain was acknowledged as having been used in Sanskrit theatre, but it was not the proscenium curtain of the contemporary stage. The theatre thus provided a paradigm for the unveiling mechanism of the gaze that sought to uncover the truth. By exposing into visibility, a claim to truth was offered, not unlike the claims forwarded by the Orientalists and their casting-off the veil of superstitions of the Indian past. The consistent recalling of these plays as a ‘mirror of nature’ presented the stage curtain as a veil of illusion that was lifted to offer the viewer a transparent rendition of social realities. In its evocation of perspectival spaces that drew the observer into its world of painted effects, the sets designated intricate pathways between the outside and the inside – the public spaces of forests, gardens, city boulevards alternated fluidly with inner spaces of pillared palace halls and soliloquies, situating the viewing subject within a new grammar of relationships that Anuradha Kapur describes as a ‘bourgeois realism’.54 However, unlike Fried’s account of an enclosed
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism fictional world that viewers purely identify with, Parsi and Marathi theatre offered many instances of what Fried calls ‘theatricality’ – an extra-diagetical frontal address to the audience.55 This was supplemented by technologies of spectacle that overwhelmed the viewer; as I have shown, Parsi theatre experimented widely with stage machinery employed in representing the miraculous powers of the deities portrayed.56 These technologies of the spectacle intended to overwhelm the viewer with realistically painted sets, extravagant costumes, magic tricks and lighting (p.126) displays, producing an effect similar to what Tom Gunning has called the ‘aesthetics of astonishment’.57 Even as theatre claimed to represent a ‘mirror of reality’, these mechanisms afforded an experience of the stage as one not simply involved in a transparent rendition of reality but a complex performative arena invoking multiple representational strategies.
Ravi Varma and the theatrical tableau Ravi Varma, the artist most closely associated with the world of theatre in the last quarter of the nineteenth century rarely used the curtain itself, but as even a cursory glance at his oeuvre reveals, theatrical borrowings are clearly apparent. While this has been commonly related to his preference for watching plays and his growing up in a household where Kathakali dramas were commonly performed, it does not explain the terms of transaction between theatre and painting. It is not accidental that in his denunciation of Ravi Varma, Coomaraswamy’s criticism included the theatrical: ‘Theatrical conceptions, want of imagination and lack of Indian feeling in the treatment of sacred and epic Indian subjects, are Ravi Varma’s fatal faults.’ It is well known that Coomaraswamy’s preference for Bengal-school paintings saw Ravi Varma’s works as imitative of Western realism, and he goes on to charge Ravi Varma with holding a ‘smoky mirror to the art of other men’ rather than opening another window for men ‘to look out upon the foam of perilous seas and fairy lands forlorn’.58 Coomaraswamy’s critique reveals an interesting conflation of the theatrical with realism that is extended to an affective register in underlining the inability of such a representational mode to reflect an ‘Indian feeling’. While Ravi Varma’s paintings run the gamut from explicitly staged historical narrative to iconic imagery, the Pauranik paintings make explicit reference to the world of theatre. Ravi Varma directly appealed to strategies invoked by Parsi theatre to stage his Pauranik paintings, both in his adoption of the technological apparatus of oil painting and its simulation of the real and by embracing prevalent aesthetic modes like melodrama in Parsi theatre to appeal to viewers. As theatrical scenery with its extravagant screen drops, wings and stage props embraced pictorial illusionism to depict mythological narratives, oil painting attempted a similar translation. Ravi Varma drew from the Puranas, Hindu mythological tales that were an integral aspect of social memory in nineteenth-century India. In his staged paintings of these narratives that worked somewhat like European history paintings that he was familiar with, he provided a visual template for evoking a classical Indian past. Oil painting, with its perspectival illusionism, made appeals to scientific certainty in its endorsement of the British advocacy of naturalism as the ‘correct’ mode of depicting objects.59 As such, the extravagant, fictive Pauranik narratives that (p.127) otherwise drew contempt from the British for the ‘monstrous shapes of the Puranic deities’ sought authentication in Ravi Varma’s paintings by recourse to methodologies that had the sanction of a modern, scientific practice.60 Yet they never entirely abandoned nonrationalist visual modes, as there is a manner in which these stylistic devices function as emphasising the mythic content of the images. Just as the elaborate and complex use of stage effects and props often served to underline the enactment of miracles in mythological dramas, Ravi Varma’s use of trompe l’oeil techniques functioned as magical optical experiments that used the technologies of oil painting to emphasise the supernatural exploits depicted. Ravi Varma’s Page 11 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism realism may be seen as a ‘theatrical device’ allowing him to bridge the divide between mythical subjects rendered in the language of a scientific realism so that history and tradition blend seamlessly into a national heritage. The crux of Ravi Varma’s relationship with theatre was its reliance upon the tableau or the jhanki of Parsi theatre. The jhanki (literally glance) was commonly associated with devotional practices like the Ramleela of Banaras, where it formed part of religious processions which froze still at appropriate moments to allow the public to worship the actor deities. As such it allowed for a slippage between narrative enclosure and a devotional element that directly engaged with the public. Its use on the proscenium stage occurred as the freezing of the scene at a dramatic juncture, and the allegiance to devotional performative practices was balanced by its framing as a picture under the proscenium arch in a gesture that spelled spectacular excess.61 In the stilling of the narrative movement and the appeal to an iconic moment, it brings up the possibility of the gaze of darsan – the visual exchange between the viewer and the icon that forms an essential aspect of Hindu ritual practice.62 This notion of the iconic has also been recognised in the direct frontal address to the viewer that Parsi theatre borrowed from popular theatrical forms (Nautanki, Bhavai, Yakshagana etc.) that negated the staged realism of the scene to acknowledge the presence of the viewer. The tableau stood at the heart of theatre’s engagement with the pictorial and Ravi Varma’s Pauranik paintings rely heavily upon the theatrical tableau inasmuch as the scene is staged within the lavish sets that Parsi theatre was known for and represents a dramatic moment. Several paintings, including Shri Krishna as Envoy and Draupadi at the Court of Viraat, portray elaborate architectural settings featuring ornamental pillars and richly costumed subjects in their midst. Following the example of academic Victorian painters like Lawrence Alma Tadema and Fredric Leighton, the antique architectural backdrop, coupled with the large size of the canvas and the propensity of oil painting to mimic the real, summons the past with an immediacy that bears directly upon the present.63 The melodramatic use of the female body set against the scenic architecture typically seizes a charged moment that (p.128)
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (p.129)
3.2 Ravi Varma, Raja Harischandra, Chandramati and their son Rohitasva, 1896
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (p.130) heightens the dramatic impact (The Triumph of Inderjit) with an emotional appeal that resonates to the viewer. In the paintings on Harishchandra – the tale of the ruler who lost his kingdom and his family in his quest for truth – which was very popular on the stage, however, Ravi Varma forgoes the architectural backdrop to experiment with the smoke and lighting effects of the stage. The two paintings of Harishchandra by Ravi Varma both show the pathos of his wife as she takes her dead son to be cremated and Harishchandra, as the guard of the crematorium, demands a fee before he recognises her. In the paintings the smoky background of the burning ghats and the directional lighting of the stage cast strong shadows as Taramati bemoans her fate and Harishchandra pathetically watches his family (Figures 3.2 and 3.3). In each instance the moment portrayed is akin to the ‘pregnant moment’ of European history painting, directed towards a morally constituted subject with the objective of 3.3 Ravi Varma, Harishchandra and Taramati, 1898 imbibing the lessons of history. In isolating a singular dramatic moment that defines the relationship to the past as well as projecting into the future, the pregnant moment inserts the viewer into a visual history, here through the melodramatic appeal of the suffering body. In a travel account of a tour to north India in 1895 C. Raja Raja Varma (Ravi Varma’s brother) recounts their trip to Banaras and their awe at walking through the same bazaar where Harishchadra had sold his wife and son. He also discusses a performance of Harishchandra at the Novelty theatre in Bombay by the Parsee Victoria Company that was drawing ‘monster houses’: The play was in Hindustani, and was so successful that it was having a run of several nights. The acting, singing and scenery were far above those of ordinary native playhouses. The story as everyone knows, beautifully illustrates the moral that truth triumphs in the end. We followed with thrilling interest the woes and trials of that truth loving king Harischandra, who to keep inviolate his word, sold his kingdom, wife, son, and himself, and became slave to a pariah. The plot thickens and even great misfortunes overtake the unfortunate king, culminating at last in his being forced to cut off the head of his dear wife with his own hand, when the god Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, with all the minor attendant powers appear on the scene, and in the midst of tears of the audience the drop scene falls.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Melodrama and its discontents Raja Raja Varma’s description of the Harishchandra play brings up another genealogy of Victorian theatre to which one might append the Parsi theatre tableau and see how it negotiated iconic devotional modes.64 Peter Brooks’ reading of the place of the tableau in French theatre underscores its singular (p.131) relationship to the painted image in indicating alliances with melodrama, in that it offers a clear and unambiguous visual summary of the emotional tenor of the scene. For Brooks, the tableau marks a decisive break with French classical theatre in that it replaces a tradition dependent upon the word and language with one that privileges visual representation of meaning.65 While the circumstances in Indian theatre were vastly different in that the popular theatrical traditions undergoing transformation under the arch of the proscenium stage relied upon the language of gesture and engaged with the body that Brooks announces as new to the French stage, there was always the question of how language mediated the diverse communities in the audiences of Parsi theatre.66 At the Grant Road theatre in Bombay all performances were in English until 1853, after which it was slowly replaced by Gujarati, Hindustani and Marathi. Yet, avid theatre-goers like Ravi Varma and his brother C. Raja Raja Varma, both native Malayalam speakers, were frequent patrons of the Parsi theatre, often accompanied by their American friend, the actor Edmund Russell. Russell performed Shakespeare on the New York stage but was an avid enthusiast of Indian theatre and gave readings at high society soirees from Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia (1903) and also performed with the dance pioneer Ruth St Denis on a production of Shakuntala (1905).67 The appeal of mythological theatre to such diverse subjects indicates that language may not have figured as a great barrier, and the visual spectacle and aural register (the frequent use of song and music) were equal to surmounting the linguistic challenges. C. Raja Raja Varma reports an evening at the Star theatre in Calcutta in 1895 accompanied by Prince Martanda Varma of Travancore to see a Bengali play about the destruction of Madan by Mahadeo. ‘The tone and cadence of the Bengali prose as delivered on the stage sounds far from musical to us who were unacquainted with the language’, he writes. This does not take away from his appreciation of the play, which he describes as full of pathos and fancy and the actress who played Rati (the wife of Madan) as credible and possessing a charming voice. The theatre itself was tastefully furnished and decorated and ‘the melodramatic portion [of the play] was followed by a few comic representations of character and concluded with a series of gorgeous transformation scenes’.68 Melodrama and visual effect colluded to provide a sensory experience of theatre relying upon a familiarity with the mythic narrative rather than an understanding of the language itself.69 Parsi theatre therefore not only stood at the cross-roads of a literary culture adapting to the stage, but was an incipient laboratory for experimentation with visual technologies through stage tricks and entertainment acts, producing affective communities through its melodramatic narratives. Travelling Parsi theatre companies were part of a wider domain of visual and entertainment performances that were patronised by princely states like (p.132) Mysore and Baroda, states that were the largest patrons for Ravi Varma’s Pauranik paintings – and indeed Ravi Varma’s commissions are catalogued alongside these travelling showmen. These included a wide variety of acts ranging from magic lanterns to conjurers and legerdemains, exhibitions of the powers of mental calculation and piano performances by visiting European artists.70 In Baroda these entertainments included exhibitions of the magic lantern and a ‘dissolving view apparatus’. Albert Scheelez ‘Representations’ consisted of dissolving views of various towns and palaces in Europe and Mr Renton’s exhibition of the magic lantern included sights and scenes of Europe and Java interspersed with innumerable comic scenes, known to have been performed all over Page 15 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism India. These performances were catalogued alongside a professor of legerdemain – Mr Thorn, ‘the great Prestidigitauteur’ – Signor Bosco and a certain Mr. Narayan Martand’s exhibition of the powers of mental calculation. Maharani Jamnabhai herself requested a performance at Nazarbagh palace by a celebrated conjurer from Jamnagar whose tricks and skills were worth seeing.71 On the stage, magic lantern acts were incorporated into the theatrical acts themselves – they boldly advertised ‘Transformation Scenes’ and ‘Dissolving Views’, and scenes of the Franco-Prussian war and the Zulu and Abyssinian wars were shown with the aid of a bioscope.72 At Mysore, apart from a large number of musicians and artists, the palace hosted the Parsi drama company of Pestonji Framji Baliwala in 1870 and a Marathi drama troupe of Sangli in 1878, and audiences were said to be very impressed by their new stage techniques – if somewhat discomfited by the language. The ruler Chamarajendra Wodeyar even started a palace troupe in his name, Sri Chamarajendra Karnataka Nataka Sabha, which performed plays like Shakuntala and Othello in Kannada.73 Melodrama as evoked on the Parsi stage or in Ravi Varma’s Pauranik paintings is an obvious deviation from Peter Brooks’ formulation of a genre that frames the moral universe in a postsacred era. The sacred character of the imagery is central to its popularity and consumption, underlined by the constant shift between the iconic and the illusionist registers. In fact Kajri Jain has argued that the stage or the pictorial medium (prints or oleographs) served to reterritorialise the sacred so that the stage sets with their pastoral or palatial imagery perform the function of animating the icon of temple or processional worship, now with a different notion of a theatrical or viewing public.74 That this involves stage tricks underlining the miraculous character of the scenes suggests that the world of theatre, and by equivalence the trompe l’oeil of Ravi Varma’s paintings, was equally invested in animating the sacred. Oil painting was seen not only as a sign of the ‘fine arts’ with its concomitant legitimisation of scientific naturalism paraded in colonial accounts, but as a modern technology that allowed for the vivid reimagination of the mythic past. C. Raja Raja Varma writes about his experience of the railways in a (p.133) similar vein, lauding their ability to bring together Hindus of every region to the holy city of Banaras, ‘The plain Malayali from the verdant valleys of Malabar … the money loving Gujarati and the not-less money loving and ubiquitous Marwari, the brave Rajput, the handsome Cashmeri … and last though not least, the much abused Bengali Babu, all brought together through the agency of steam, and actuated by one motive of religion mingled freely like the children of one mother.’75 The technologies of modernity were not situated within a secular disenchanted space but had the potential to animate the sacred. Kathryn Hansen has pointed to the absence of melodrama as a descriptive category for Parsi mythologicals, arguing that its European etymology with the emphasis on the innovation of ‘melos’ was not applicable in the Indian case, given the predominance of music in almost every category of theatrical performance. Instead, she notes the usage of the term ‘samsari khel’ or ‘worldly play’, a descriptor that distinguished it from Pauaranik plays of the past with subjects drawn from the world of everyday experience featuring settings like the coffee house or taverns; characters like the police, detectives and magistrates or illicit activities like gambling or horse racing, all of which related to contemporary life. Hansen draws continuities between this portrayal of the everyday and the development of the genre of the social drama that would later migrate to cinema, proposing a local translation of melodrama now divorced from the transnational circuits of Victorian theatre.76
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Despite Hansen’s caveats on the limitations of melodrama in the Indian context, I will argue below that it still appears as an appropriate aesthetic mode for the Pauranik paintings and their adaptation of the theatrics of the stage. In the many reappraisals of the melodramatic form that have appeared since the publication of Brooks’ influential thesis, particularly from feminist film studies, melodrama has been viewed as a mode of making meaning associated with the narration of the everyday, rather than the exceptional as defined in Brooks’ ‘mode of excess’, bearing a particular relationship to realism.77 In the traditional reading, melodrama served as the antithesis of realism in that its excessive sentimentality and theatricality runs counter to the realist paradigm of order and pragmatism. Instead more recent interventions have viewed melodrama not simply as a genre but as a perpetually modernising aesthetic mode that extends beyond cinematic narratives to produce spectacles of emotional suffering framed upon innocent bodies.78 A trans-medial phenomenon that engages mass audiences in modernity, melodrama ‘redistributes the visibility of suffering in the social sphere’ and bears a particular relationship to national trauma.79 In the case of the melodramatic casting of the Pauranik narratives on stage and in painting, the spectacle of pathos and suffering amid sensational visual effects had enormous emotional resonance, as Raja Raja Varma’s description of the teary audience attests.
(p.134) Disguise and subterfuge If visual tricks had comprised the repertoire of performances of the magic lantern, theatre and oil painting, then disguise, impersonation and trickery were plentiful on the Parsi stage.80 There was on the one hand the impersonation of female characters by male actors, a practice that was enforced in theatres like the New Alfred in Bombay. On the other hand, the plot devices of popular plays like Agha Hashr Kashmiri’s Yahudi ki Ladki, or Pauranik tales like Keechakvadh, Shakespearean drama like The Merchant of Venice or Persian masnavis like Amanat Ali’s Indar Sabha all involved the use of disguise and mistaken identity as a staple feature of the narrative. Disguise presents itself as a fundamentally visual problem, requiring the complicity of the audience as they follow the fortunes of the dissembling actor in his exploits. In other instances, the audience is surprised by the unveiling of the true identity of a character. A dialectic of recognition and dissemblance forms the substance of the plays, which rely upon the audience to make the visual deductions that grant the narrative its coherence.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Ravi Varma’s engagement with theatrical vocabulary is underlined in the frequent recourse to themes of disguise and recognition in his works. In Mohini and Rukmangada, Arjun and Subadhra (Plate 11) as well as several paintings on the agyaat vaas from the Mahabharata, the drama of recognition or the ‘passing’ of disguised characters (that the viewers can see) is integrated into the mise-en-scène. Arjun and Subadhra presents Arjun dressed as a sannyasi (mendicant) wooing Subhadra. According to the story, Arjun was in exile in Dwarka when he fell in love with Krishna’s younger sister against the wishes of her brother Balaram, who wanted her to marry Duryodhana instead. Arjun disguised himself as a sannyasi to avoid recognition by her family and win Subhadra’s love. An oleograph of the painting by Ravi Varma carried verse from Byron’s Don Juan: 11 Ravi Varma, Arjun and Subhadra, 1890 Each was the other’s Mirror, and but real Joy sparkling in their dark eyes like gems And know such brightness was but the reflection Of their exchanging glances of affection81 If this sentimental exchange of glances between the lovers is able to pierce through the disguise and appeal directly to the viewer, then the paintings on the theme of the agyaat vaas from the Mahabharata, which called for the Pandavas to remain in disguise during their last year in exile, ruminated on the exigencies of an assumed identity. A popular retelling of the episode was performed as Keechakvadh, a story found in multiple stage versions as early as 1885 and in several paintings and oleographs by Ravi Varma, and then spilled over into the cinema, with Nataraj Mudaliar’s Keechak Vadham (p.135) (1917) and Baburao Painter’s Sairandhri (1920) amongst the earliest films.82 Banished into exile for thirteen years, the Pandavas along with their wife Draupadi spend the last year in agyaat vaas at the court of King Viraat, where each finds employment as a lowly servant in the royal court and household. However, Draupadi finds herself subjected to the unwanted advances of the queen’s brother, Keechak and is thrown into the quandary of either having to reveal her true identity or to bear the ignominy of accepting his overtures. Humiliated in the court of King Viraat, Draupadi appeals to her husbands to take action against Keechak, but Yudhishtira, the eldest and always patient, urges her to refrain from any action that would lead to the discovery of her true identity. Finally, Draupadi turns to Bhima, who lures Keechak and kills him in a secret rendezvous. Ravi Varma painted at least five paintings on the agyaat vaas, the earliest dated 1891, with numerous prints and postcards until at least 1910. Three of the paintings examine the quandaries faced by Draupadi in attending to Keechak. In the first, Queen Sudeshna conspires to arrange for Draupadi to visit Keechak’s harem, on the insistence by her brother. A troubled
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Draupadi receives the directive, and is forced to carry out the queen’s, commands since she cannot reveal her true identity. The next two paintings dwell upon her helplessness, emphasising the immorality in Draupadi’s summons to prostitute herself before Keechak; she carries a tray of wine and victuals that serves to underline the dubious nature of her calling (Plate 12). Draupadi is cast into grief; dilemma in attending to the needs of the evil Keechak is intended to evoke anger at her humiliation, calling for a response that will deliver her from her fate. The encounter at Keechak’s harem shows an expectant Keechak inviting Draupadi as she crouches behind a curtain, her tray of victuals flung down in the foreground. Significantly, her act of self-protection is to hide behind the curtain. The final painting of Draupadi’s degradation at the hands of Keechak shows her lying prone at the court of King Virat to where she has run, begging for protection from the king and her husbands present at the court (Plate 13). A disinterested Virat ignores her pleas, even as an emotional Bhima urges him to attend to Draupadi.
12 Ravi Varma, Draupadi in Disguise, n.d.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism The extended elaboration of the Keechak story in Ravi Varma’s painting presents many aspects of the melodramatic imagination in tableaux form. The pathos of the scenes presents the trials and tribulations of Draupadi, using her body and her gender to narrate a story of virtue despite suffering. Drawing a Manichean distinction between the chaste Draupadi and her struggle to maintain her purity against the evil Keechak, the paintings tugged at the emotional heartstrings of the 13 Ravi Varma, Draupadi at the Court of viewer. Ravi Varma was adept at using the Viraat, 1897 female body to convey emotion: whether in genre paintings like Woman Reading a Letter or Reverie, or in mythological paintings like Shakuntala and Damayanti and the Swan, the trope of the innocent female body was exploited (p.136) to epitomise virtue. In fact, his biographer Veniyoor gushed at the sensation created by Varma’s painting of Sita Bhoopravesham (Figure 3.4) when it was exhibited in Baroda because of its ‘emotive overtones that language can hardly convey’. Elaborating on the scene he writes, It is a part of the sad chapter of Hindu lore wherein a woman, paragon of every virtue, is unjustly accused of infidelity to her lord because she was kidnapped by a powerful foe and eventually recovered after a bloody war …The scene is the 3.4 Ravi Varma, Sita Bhoomipravesh, 1880 Court to which she has been brought back; Rama is there, their sons are there, the sages and courtiers look on, and then suddenly a chasm opens at her feet, the Earth-Goddess appears and holds Sita to her bosom in the act of taking her away. The look on Sita’s face is an enigma: it may be anger or love, grief or pride, perhaps a shade of every emotion she had known in her life.83 In theatres, a small trap door would have been part of the proscenium stage floor to allow for the disappearance of Sita into the earth, and also for the gods to emerge. As on stage, the staple ingredients of melodrama, including the pathos, the suffering feminised body and sensational drama, are brought together to narrate a story of virtue that makes moral claims by drawing upon well-loved Pauranik stories. (p.137) Pauranik tales continued to inform the moral universe of the vast urban public attending theatre, transcending language barriers and serving as ideal vehicles for melodramatic narratives interpreted by mass-culture entertainment forms. The impetus to draw upon the Puranas had existed since the early days of Parsi theatre and Ravi Varma’s use of
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Pauranik themes was first displayed in a painting of Shakuntala that had been much admired and went on to form the frontispiece of the second edition of Monier Williams’s Shakuntala. The popularity of the mythological was partly a result of Orientalist translations that had found respectability amid the educated elite. As one person commented after a performance of MonierWilliams’s English translation of Shakuntala in Trivandrum in 1892, Our object in acting Hindu plays is to bring home to the Hindus the good lessons that our ancient authors are able to teach us. If there is one lesson in these days more than another which familiarity with the fountains of Western literature constantly forces upon the mind, it is that our age is turning its back on time-honoured creeds and dogmas.84 Indeed, many advocates of theatre pressed its case as engaged in moral upliftment. Girish Chandra Ghosh, the famous theatre personality of Calcutta, held great regard for mythologicals, ‘all high class books of each nation have been based upon mythology. Homer, Virgil, Milton and Michael [Madhusudan Dutt] produced their best pieces on mythology … No poet’s conception can surpass that of Vyasa or Valmiki …’85 Ravi Varma’s Pauranik paintings and prints were equally upheld as improving public tastes, replacing the so-called Poona pictures with their ‘cheap portrayals in atrocious taste of scenes from heaven and hell and such other stuff as was dished out in the name of religion’.86 Unlike European melodrama born of a post-sacred world and viewed as the diminutive step-sister of a high-born realism, the Pauranik tales presented in theatre and painting proposed a sophisticated narration of the past with morality tales tailored for the present.87 The valorisation of the mythological was paralleled by a Hindu revivalism in the last decade of the nineteenth century, both in Bengal and in Western India, with the popular mobilisation of festivals like the Ganesh chaturthi by Bal Gangadhar Tilak in 1893.88 In Bengal Girish Chandra Ghosh acted in a number of subversive plays which veiled political content with Hindu themes: Siraj-ud-Dowlah, Mirkasim, Chhatrapati Sivaji and Karmafal amongst others. After the passing of the Dramatic Performances Act in 1876, which aimed to curb sedition, playwrights actively sought out mythological plays so as to evade laws on censorship, using the religious character to camouflage the anti-colonial political content of their plays.89 A number of plays were banned under the Act and several playwrights resorted to allegory to disguise anti-colonial content, sometimes using historical themes drawn from the life (p.138) of Hindu leaders like Sivaji or Rajput rulers, and mythological themes drawn from the Mahabharata. In Bombay several playwrights were associated with the radical nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak and his arrest and trial in 1898 spurred a number of plays with covert political content, including Bandhavimochan (Liberation From the Yoke), where he was represented as Satyavrata (Devoted to Truth), performed at the Grant Road Ripon Theatre in Bombay in 1898.90 In Calcutta too, Chhatrapati Sivaji was staged at the Minerva and Kohinoor theatres in 1907 during the Sivaji festival – a festival which had been launched by Tilak and supported by Aurobindo Ghosh and Bipin Chandra Pal. The most significant amongst these plays was Keechakvadh (1907), written by Krishna Prabhakar Khadilkar in Marathi and played to packed audiences across Western India, including in Bombay. It was finally banned for seditious content in 1910. Krishna Prabhakar Khadilkar was amongst Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s closest followers and took over the editorship of the Kesari after the conviction of Tilak in 1908 for a series of inflammatory articles. The Keechak theme was popular enough to inspire at least four cinematic versions between 1916 and 1933, one of the films being censored for its graphic violence in the scene of the killing of Keechak. Khadilkar’s
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism play took the form of an explicit allegorical battle between nationalist forces and the colonial government. Keechak was identified with Lord Curzon, the Governor General, and Draupadi was cast as the Indian nation under attack. Her husbands too were drawn into the contemporary political context. The patient Yudhisthira was seen as representing the moderate faction of the Indian National Congress and Bhima was allied with the extremist faction of the party. The many dialogues in the play debated the values of the moderate position versus the extremist one and, taking the cause of Bhima’s actions, the play advocated for the necessity of a violent overthrow of the colonial administration. In 1907 the two factions of the Congress party were brought into open confrontation in Surat over differences that had been brewing for a decade. The extremist faction led by Tilak called for a violent political agitation to protest against the British and this led to a split in the Indian National Congress. Keechakvadh was specially staged for Tilak, Lala Lajpat Rai and Aurobindo Ghosh after their return from the Surat session and was a popular success as it was performed across Maharashtra between 1907 and 1909, often during the Ganesh festival. As reports of political allusion in the narrative made their way made their way to police intelligence, the Deputy Commissioner of Police in Bombay, F.A.H.M. Vincent, went to see the play to verify the reports for himself, and cleared it of any subversive potential. However, Khadilkar was found to be associated with revolutionary activity and this time the colonial government turned to the Maratha historian Charles Kincaid in London to convince the British government to ban the play. A series of articles published (p.139) in The Times (London) and republished in the Times of India and Bombay Gazette turned the tide of opinion against the play and it was finally banned in 1910, hastening the passage of the Indian Press Act, which likewise aimed to control seditious activity. The Times reported that the alleged allegorical substitutions were in fact real and carried political charge: These things are an allegory. Although his name is nowhere uttered on the stage or mentioned in the printed play, everyone in the theatre knows that Kichaka is really intended to be Lord Curzon, that Draupadi is India, and Yudhistira is the Moderate and Bhima the Extremist Party. Every now and again unmistakable clues are provided. The question indeed admits of no doubt, for since the play first appeared in 1907 the whole Deccan has been blazoning forth the identity of the characters. Once they have been recognized the inner meaning of the play becomes clear. A weak Government at home, represented by King Virata, has given the Viceroy a free hand. He has made use of it to insult and humiliate India … It may be said that all this is mere fooling. But no Englishman who has seen the play acted would agree. All his life he will remember the tense, scowling faces of the men as they watch Kichaka’s outrageous acts, the glistening eyes of the Brahmin ladies as they listen to Draupadi’s entreaties, their scorn of Yudhistira’s tameness, their admiration of Bhima’s passionate protests, and the deep hum of satisfaction which approves the slaughter of the tyrant.91 As theatre actively participated in the game of hide and seek with the colonial government, the curtain revealed itself as a valuable tool of deception. Aravind Ganachari lists a novel method employed by G.B. Phansalkar of the Swanjan Hiteshi Natak Mandali, who used drop scenes printed with swadeshi messages in 1907: ‘Have patriotism for your country, Don’t take articles from foreign countries, and Don’t drink.’ These writings were interspersed with three pictures, the first of which showed a European bowing to the superior commercial skills of the Marwari trader. The second showed the Peshwa flanked by his attendants receiving a crouching European before him and the third showed a European in a carriage pulled by a Brahmin,
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism intending to show the current reversal of fates. The curtains were confiscated by the District Magistrate of Satara, S.R. Arthur, and the government was informed that ‘the prefatory verses … told every spectator what he was expected to understand by the allusion of the curtain’.92 Phansalkar for his part denied all claims regarding the originality of the images, claiming to have copied them from British writings on Western India by James Douglas. The magistrate only later realised that he had significantly altered the images to convey the veiled meaning.93 This strategic use of the curtain that exploited its capacity to reveal and conceal indicated a sophisticated understanding of the mechanics of theatre as well as of the claims to truth that it proffered. The stage here becomes (p.140) the setting within which a subterranean narrative of Indian nationalism is exposed to the spectator, concealed within the allegorical Pauranik narrative. However, this was just as easily veiled in debates on censorship by denying the immediate political resemblances, claiming to be an innocuous rendering of a mythological past. This tactical use of the theatrical vocabulary with its strategic veiling and unveiling motion suggests that both viewer and playwright were party to the performance. Rather than viewing Parsi theatre and its ‘miracle plays’ (as one American spectator called it) as a naïve mode of story-telling that played to the spectator’s superstitions, it is more useful to see its parallels with the visual spectacles of mass cultures of urban modernity.94
Contesting visual genealogies In his study of early cinema Tom Gunning identifies an exhibitionist impulse in capitalist mass culture in its offering of new sources of visual stimuli for urban audiences – producing what he calls an ‘aesthetics of astonishment’, building on Brooks’ analysis of melodrama. Locating such an aesthetics within the enthusiasm for technological spectacles, as well as the thrills and sensations of Coney Island-style fair attractions, he dismisses the notion of the spectator as a gullible rube passively digesting the spectacles. Instead, he views them as sophisticated urban pleasure seekers actively seeking out novel visual entertainment that corresponds to their experience of modern life: ‘The magic theatre [of Melies] laboured to make visual that which it was impossible to believe. Its visual power consisted of a trompe l’oeil play of give and take, an obsessive desire to test the limits of intellectual disavowal – I know, but yet I see.’95 Gunning effectively links trompe l’oeil with theatre, and in either case the reliance on illusionism did not propose a naïve belief in the reality of the image spectacle. Given the theatrics of the curtain, one could attribute a similar worldly perspective to the urban Bombay spectator (like the Varma brothers), whose familiarity with the products of advanced printing technologies in the form of ‘god pictures’ and calendars, product labels and advertising, print and pictorial journalism, oil painting and photography not only granted the spectator a visual acumen but also presented the promise of making meaning of the world through images.96 In his study of Bombay Gyan Prakash has pointed to how the city was presented as a visual cipher that one had to learn to decode correctly in new forms of urban writing like journalism and crime stories.97 Proscenium theatre formed an important space for such visual education. Run by Parsi and Gujarati entrepreneurs, and staging Persianised fantasy tales and Shakespearean drama that drew staunch Hindu subjects from Kerala, the Parsi theatre provided a visual template for overcoming linguistic barriers. Its experiments with visual technologies (p.141) relied upon specialised stage machinery, painted curtains and sets, elaborate costumes and furnishings and innovative lighting effects as a basis for urban entertainment spectacles, promising sensational thrills to spectators in the transnational visual economy.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Ravi Varma’s oil paintings were drawn into the ambit of theatrical visual effects and innovations in staging practices; the large scale of his canvases, their simulation of velvets and silks, the recreation of palatial interiors all echoed technologies of the spectacle. Moreover, oil paints and artists’ materials were allied to these technologies as an integral part of imperial and industrial networks. Commercial outlets like Thacker Spink & Co. in Calcutta and Bombay stocked artists’ materials directly from suppliers like Winsor and Newton in London. Raja Raja Varma noted his trips to their outlets in his diaries. In addition to pigments they stocked drawing instruments, scientific instruments, telescopes, varnishes, paintbrushes, as well as books and journals, supplying not only private individuals but also establishments like the J.J. School of Art and the Calcutta School of Art. Beyond the portability of paints noted in art-historical studies, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards pigments were manufactured through chemical industrial processes, notably using coal tar dyes, replacing costly organic materials like lapis lazuli or madder root. While the latter were sourced from Asia, the new chemical pigments were imported into India. Considering artists’ materials as part of industrial trade networks aligns oil painting more closely with the plethora of illusionist visual technologies of the day and undermines the narrative of the singular artist and his subjective vision. As such, the intersections between painting and theatre point to painting as performative – in the painted screens of proscenium theatre, in the ‘transparent’ dioramas used in East India Company celebrations or in the strategic veiling of surreptitious nationalist narratives, painting worked upon viewers to produce certain effects. In underlining the sensational effects of trompe l’oeil painting and its debt to melodrama and theatrical technologies of spectacle, this argument attempts to displace the centrality of darsan as the primary affective motor guiding the reception of Indian imagery, an iconic holdout against a stultifying colonial perspectival vision. Examination of colonial visual culture has posed darsan as an embodied vision enshrined in devotional practices and the viewer as ‘a worshipper, drinking the eyes of the deity that gazes directly back at him’, and thus resisting and rejecting ‘the anaesthetic’ art of the colonial visual regime.98 Darsan has authorised a narrative on frontality as an alternative visual model accommodating the corporeal excess of the devotional image, which has been adopted by historians writing across a broad swathe of visual culture from lithographic prints to calendar art and cinema.99 Such a focus on devotional imagery has undermined the corporeal engagement with technologies of (p.142) illusionism and unintentionally supported the institutionalisation of a lineage drawn from Ravi Varma via D.G. Phalke to calendar art and contemporary mythological media to place the primacy of iconic imagery drawn from Hindu narratives at the heart of the story of visual modernity.100 Recent film scholarship has disputed the centrality of D.G. Phalke’s Raja Harishchandra (1913) as the ‘first’ film, noting the production of several dance shorts as early as 1898, as well as documentation of the political protests at the partition of Bengal in 1905 and the commemorative films of the Delhi Durbar in 1903.101 Rosie Thomas situates the origins of cinema in the genre of the Arabian Nights fantasy film based on the Persian quissa-dastan literary tradition, replete with spectacular special effects and magical tricks. Displacing the Brahmanic Hindu origins of cinema with the stunt film, she poses the intriguing question as to what an alternative genealogy of Indian cinema might look like if Ali Baba were seen as the first film instead of Raja Harishchandra.102 One might ask the same question of art history and its reliance upon Ravi Varma’s Pauranik imagery as an originary moment of self-assertion for a nationalist art.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Situating Ravi Varma’s works within the heterogeneous visual arena of proscenium theatre displaces the thrust of the Brahmanic story of origins and its reliance upon darsan with a more mundane aesthetics of melodrama and an enthrallment by the deceptions and illusions of visual technologies. The incredible power of oil painting to summon the real was here part of a wider network of illusionist technologies forged around light and visibility that formed an important aspect of the mass spectacles of urban modernity. While these visual innovations indeed produced new relationships with mythological narratives, iconic frontality was but one story of technologies of illusionism and the production of an embodied vision. Industrial capitalism spawned a range of corporeal practices wedded to visual technologies that were best showcased in Parsi theatrical extravaganzas that extended beyond mythologicals to include other genres of fantasy and history, besides being supplemented by magic lantern acts, dissolving scenes and magic shows. Like theatre, painting too saw the assertion of a number of other genres, including portraiture, landscape, genre painting and figure drawing, and Ravi Varma’s practice was in fact dominated by portraiture, a more prosaic genre than the fanciful mythological paintings he was known for and one that raises questions about selfhood and representation that may not be entirely reducible to the gaze of darsan. The focus on Ravi Varma’s Pauranik paintings in canonical history as a visual template for imagining a national past has in fact served to obfuscate the heterogeneous landscape of visual technologies in colonial modernity with a Brahmanic story of origins. However, as I show in Chapters 5 and 6, portrait practice and its experiments in the assertion of an (p.143) autonomous identity may be far more valuable indicators of the sovereignty sought through the Pauranik narrative of origins. In all of this the theatrical apparatus served as a significant node in the formation of a mass urban spectatorship forged around an instrumentalisation of light and visibility and a public engagement with visual technologies introduced through industrial and imperial circuits. Formulated around a dialectic of transparency and secrecy, such a viewership had an impact upon paintings and prints as they similarly experimented with public exposure and mass audiences, an aspect that I discuss in the following chapter. The curtain was central to experiments with the visual as the fundamental innovation of proscenium theatre, controlling what could and could not be seen in the new visual regime. Accompanied by dazzling stage tricks, painted sets, elaborate costumes, lighting technologies and melodramatic narratives, theatre showcased the possibilities of visual technologies and an affective and cognitive engagement with the visual that prevailed over language and narrative to engage the urban spectator. Notes: (1) ‘Behind the Veil! Behind the Veil!’ in The Mahratta, Pune: Sunday, 21 June 1908, p. 293. (2) ‘Behind the Veil! Behind the Veil!’ (3) Meredith Townsend, Asia and Europe (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), p. 151. (4) Townsend, Asia and Europe, p. 148. (5) Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, Persian Letters [1721] (Harmondsworth, England and Baltimore: Penguin, 1973). (6) Homi Bhabha, ‘Sly Civility’, October, Vol. 34 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 71–80. Page 25 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (7) ‘Behind the Veil! Behind the Veil!’. (8) Cited in Vishwas Gangadhar Bhat, Lokmanya Tilak: His Life, Mind, Politics and Philosophy (Poona: Prakash, 1956), p. 28. (9) See for instance the special issue of Theory, Culture and Society edited by Clare Birchall. ‘Between Transparency and Secrecy’, Theory, Culture and Society, Vol. 28, No. 7–8, December 2011. (10) Sandra Freitag, ‘Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus between Creation, Consumption, and Participation in the Public Sphere’, in Rachel Dwyer and Chris Pinney (eds), Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 39. (11) See Vasudha Dalmia, Poetics, Plays and Performances: The Politics of Modern Indian Theatre (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). (12) Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Birth of Hindu Drama in Banaras’, in Sandria B. Freitag (ed.), Culture and Power in Banaras Community, Performance, and Environment, 1800–1980 (Berkeley: University of California, 1989). (13) This was noted in London Chronicle, 10–13 December 1774. Reprinted in David M. Little and George M. Kahrl (eds), Letters of David Garrick, Vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1963), p. 1009. (14) Rakesh H. Solomon, ‘Culture, Imperialism, and Nationalist Resistance: Performance in Colonial India’, Theatre Journal, Vol. 46, No. 3, Colonial/Postcolonial Theatre (October 1994), pp. 323–347. (15) On De Loutherbourg and stage technologies see Martin Meisel, Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983). On the eidophusikon see David Kornhaber, ‘Regarding the Eidophusikon: Spectacle, Scenography, and Culture in Eighteenth Century England’, Theatre Arts Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 45–58. (16) David Garrick, His private correspondence with the most celebrated persons of his times, Vol. 1 (London; Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1831), pp. 295–296. (17) Eliza Fay, The Original Letters from India, 26 March 1781 (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink & Co., 1908), p. 153. (18) Hermione de Almeida, George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 68. (19) On Zoffany’s strong ties to theatre see Robin Simon, ‘Strong Impression of Their Art: Zoffany and the Theatre’, in Martin Postle (ed.), Johan Zoffany R.A.: Society Observed (Yale Centre for British Art: Yale University Press, 2011), pp. 50–73. (20) See the collection of devices exhibited at the Getty Museum in 2002 and catalogued in Barbara Maria Stafford and Frances Terpak, Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on Screen (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001).
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (21) See Rosie Llewellyn Jones (ed.), A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century India: The Letters of Claude Martin 1766–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 206–237. (22) On transparent painting see Anita Callaway, Visual Ephemera: Theatrical Art in Nineteenth Century Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2000), pp. 4–55; and Edward Orme, An Essay on Transparent Prints, And on Transparencies in General (London: Printed for and sold by the Author, 1807). (23) W.S. Seton Karr, Selections from Calcutta Gazettes of the Years 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1794, 1795, 1796 and 1797 Vol. 2 (Calcutta: O.T. Cutter, Military Orphan Press, 1865), pp. 361–363. (24) Hugh David Sandeman, Selections from Calcutta Gazettes of the Years 1806–1815 inclusive Vol. 4 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent Government Printing, 1868), p. 407. (25) Jones (ed.), A Man of the Enlightenment, p. 230. (26) See Dutton Cook, ‘The Story of a Scene Painter’, Nature and Art, Vol. 1, September 1865, p. 103. (27) D.E. Wacha mentions a theatre built by public subscription in the Fort area near Bombay Green as far back as 1770 but it was only in 1842 when Jagannath Sunkersett built the Grant Road Theatre that theatre became a popular urban entertainment. D.E. Wacha, Shells from the Sands of Bombay (Bombay: K.T. Anklesaria, 1920), pp. 345–350. (28) For Jijabhai’s investment in the art school and the production of ‘gentleman painters’ see Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 30–45. Consider also how theatre was conceived as an urban, elite, modern recreational activity, informed by a scientific temperament and disseminated following European standards of taste. Coupled with the British disregard for Indian performative practices there was an assumption that proscenium theatre had bestowed upon the Indians ‘a taste for a better class of entertainment than that to which they had for some time been accustomed’, Delissa Joseph, ‘The Vernacular Drama in India’, The Theatre, 1 July 1882, p. 11. (29) Story of the J.J. School of Art (Bombay: Government Central Press, n.d.), p. 80. (30) Fida Hussain mentions Dinshah Irani as very famous and interested in magic. ‘Fida Hussain: Fifty Years in the Parsi Theatre’, in Kathryn Hansen (ed.), Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (London: Anthem Press, 2011), p. 267 and Sri Ram V. Bakshi, The Indian Theatre: A Preliminary Checklist (Lawrence, KA: University of Kansas, 1968), p. 97. (31) Somnath Gupt, The Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development, trans. Kathryn Hansen (Calcutta: Seagull, 2005), p. 177. (32) Kumud Mehta, ‘Bombay’s Theatre World – 1860–1880’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bombay, Vol. 43–44 (1968–69), p. 276. (33) A report from 1884 includes several theatres from Calcutta, including the Corinthian Theatre, Theatre Royal and the Opera House, as lit by gas, equipped with good stages and fine scenery so as to be recommended for drama companies looking to tour the world. See Harry
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Miner (ed.), Harry Miner’s American Dramatic Directory for the Season of 1884–1885 (New York: Wolf and Palmer Dramatic Publishing Company, 1884), p. 7. (34) Kathryn Hansen, ‘The Indar Sabha Phenomenon: Public Theatre and Consumption in Greater India’, in Christopher Pinney and Rachel Dwyer (eds), Pleasure and the Nation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 87. (35) Gupt, The Parsi Theatre, p. 128. (36) Mehta, ‘Bombay’s Theatre World’, p. 276. (37) Cited in R.K. Yajnik, The Indian Theatre: Its Origins and its Later Developments Under European Influence (New York: Haskell House, 1970), pp. 87–88 and 264. (38) Yajnik, The Indian Theatre, p. 115. (39) Kathryn Hansen, ‘Parsi Theatre and the City: Locations, Patrons, Audiences’, in The Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2002), pp. 40–49. Anuradha Kapur suggests that the screens were in fact act drops, not screen drops as proposed by Hansen, in that they were dropped at the end of each act and did not function either as the proscenium curtain or as the screen drops, which sought to recreate the scene with distinctive painted locales. (40) D.G. Godse‘Gandharva-Kaaleen Nepathya’ (Marathi), Maharashtra Times, Bal Gandharva Janma Satabdi Viseshang, Bombay, 1988, p. 89. Cited in R. Nandakumar, ‘Raja Ravi Varma in the Realm of the Public’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Vol. 27–28 (1995), pp. 41–56, fn. 6. (41) Cited in Dafna Ruppin, The Komedi Bioscoop: The Emergence of Movie-going in Colonial Indonesia 1896–1914 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 73–77. (42) Anuradha Kapur, ‘The Representation of Gods and Heroes: Parsi Mythological Drama of the Early Twentieth Century’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, 22–24 (1993), pp. 85–107. (43) Ashish Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Vol. 14–15 (1982), pp. 47–78. (44) Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). (45) Dinabandhu Mitra, Neel Darpan: The Indigo Planting Mirror, translated from the Bengali by a Native (Calcutta: C.H. Manuel, 1861), pp. 1–2. (46) The extent of its anti-colonial thrust has been questioned by Ranajit Guha and Nandi Bhatia. Both contend that the singular political importance which the play achieved was largely on account of the internal politics within the British administration (in collusion with Mitra, according to Guha) and that although it claimed to speak on behalf of the ryot, it was committed to British law. Ranajit Guha, ‘Neel-darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 2, No.1 (1974), pp. 1–46 and Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). (47) Cited in Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, p. 33.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (48) Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, pp. 33–34. (49) Binodini Dasi, My Story and my Life, ed. and trans. Rimli Bhattacharya (Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), p. 146. (50) Dramatic Performances Act, 1876. Printed in Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, p. 121. (51) D.G. Phalke, ‘Indian Cinema Article No. 3’, in Studies in Film History: A Compilation of Research Papers devoted to D.G. Phalke, 1870–1944 (Poona: Film Institute of India, 1970), pp. 74–75. Originally published in Navyug, February 1918. (52) Phalke, ‘Indian Cinema Article No. 3’, pp. 75–76. (53) S.K. De makes the inspired reading of yavanika in ‘The Curtain in Ancient Indian Theatre’, Bharatiya Vidya, Vol. 9 (1948), pp. 125–131. See Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Hindu Theatre’, The Indian Historical Quarterly, Vol. 9 (1933), p. 594. The idea had probably floated around for some time amongst nationalist theatre scholars as Chandra Bhan Gupta recounts in his summary of the evidence and claims for the curtain in The Indian Theatre [1954] (Munshilal Manoharlal: Delhi, 1991), pp. 43–49. (54) Anuradha Kapur, ‘Impersonation, Narration, Desire, and the Parsi Theatre’, in India’s Literary History (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 87–118. (55) Kapur, ‘Impersonation, Narration, Desire’. (56) Kapur, ‘The Representation of Gods and Heroes’. (57) Tom Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous Spectator’, Art & Text, Vol. 34 (Spring 1989), pp. 31–45. (58) Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘The Present State of Indian Art’, The Modern Review, Vol. 2, No. 2 (August 1907), p. 107. (59) British artists and historians frequently berated Indian artists for their inability to conform to the rules of perspective. Consequently, teaching at the art schools like the J.J. School of Art emphasised ‘correct’ drawing and such painting commanded an authority within colonial art institutions. See Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, pp. 29–119. (60) Sir George Birdwood, an influential authority on the Industrial Arts in India and an influential member of the Royal Society of Arts is quoted on his denunciation of the representation of Puranik deities in V. Nagam Aiya, Travancore State Manual (Trivandrum: Gazeteers Department, Government of Kerala, 1999), p. 262. (61) Both Anuradha Kapur and Richard Schechner take this view in their reading of the jhanki. Kapur, ‘Impersonation, Narration, Desire’, p. 97; Richard Schechner, The Ramlila of Ramnagar (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 168. (62) See Diana Eck, Darsan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (63) For relationships between academic painting, Victorian melodrama and its wide reach see Caroline Dunant, ‘Olympian Dreamscapes: The Photographic Canvas; The Wide Screen Paintings of Leighton, Poynter, and Alma-Tadema’, in Jacky Bratton et al. (eds), Melodrama, Picture, Screen (London: British Film Institute, 1994), pp. 82–93. (64) Kathryn Hansen in fact calls for such a partial reading of the jhanki, looking at how both darsan and nazar might have been at play in the freezing of the tableau. Kathryn Hansen, ‘Ritual Enactments in a Hindi “Mythological”: Betab’s Mahabharat in Parsi Theatre’, Economic and Political Weekly, 2 December 2006, pp. 4985–4991. (65) Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James and Melodrama as the Mode of Excess (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 55–73. Brooks describes how theatre spills into the nineteenth-century novel of Balzac and Henry James, with the melodramatic mode becoming a sign of a non-verbal excess. (66) See Kathryn Hansen, ‘Language Community and the Theatrical Public: Linguistic Pluralism and Change in the Nineteenth Century Parsi Theatre’, in Stuart H. Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds), India’s Literary History: Essays on the Nineteenth Century (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), pp. 60–86. (67) Sally Banes, Dancing Women: Female Bodies Onstage (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 84. (68) C. Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India of His Highness Prince Martanda Varma of Travancore (Bombay: Education Societies Steam Press, 1896), p. 86. (69) Manishita Dass makes a similar argument in Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Modernity and the Public Sphere in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). (70) The Parsi theatre actress Mary Fenton was known to have travelled across India with her father, who was a military pensioner, exhibiting magic lantern shows with him. Gupt, The Parsi Theatre, p. 125. (71) Baroda State Archives, Section No. 14, File No.1. (72) Yajnik, The Indian Theatre, p. 97. (73) Selections from the Records of the Mysore Palace, Vol. 1 (Mysore: Divisional Archives Office, 1993), p. 3. (74) Kajri Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of Indian Calendar Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 93–114. (75) C. Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India of His Highness Prince Martanda Varma of Travancore (Bombay: Education Societies Steam Press, 1896), pp. 99–100. (76) Kathryn Hansen, ‘Mapping Melodrama: Global Theatrical Circuits, Parsi Theater, and the Rise of the Social’, BioScope, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2016), pp. 1–30. (77) See Linda Williams, ‘Melodrama Revised’, in Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), pp. 65–77; Christine Gledhill, ‘Rethinking Genre’, in Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (London: Arnold Publishers, 2000), pp. 221–243 and Thomas Postlewait, ‘From Page 30 of 32 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism Melodrama to Realism: The Suspect History of American Drama’, in Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou (eds), Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 39–60. Christine Gledhill (ed.), Home is Where the Heart Is. Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: British Film Institute, 1987) and Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). (78) See Scott Loren and Jorg Metelmann, Melodrama after the Tears: New Perspectives on the Politics of Victimhood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2015). (79) Agustín Zarzosa, Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2013), p. 5. In art-historical methodology, Aby Warburg’s pathosformel similarly isolates an iconography of pathos that had particular relevance to narratives of nationalism. See Colleen Becker, ‘Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as methodological paradigm’, Journal of Art Historiography, No. 9 (December 2013), pp. 1–25. (80) In Mehmud Farooqui’s account of the dastaan tradition, which fed into the Parsi theatre, he includes Aiyyari – chicanery, trickery or disguise – as an essential aspect of the work. Cited in Ravi Vasudevan, The Melodramatic Public: Film, Form and Spectatorship in India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010), p. 37. (81) E.M.J. Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma (Trivandrum: Government of Kerala, 1971), p. 40. (82) Anuradha Kapur lists the Surabhi Theatre Company from Surabhi in Andhra Pradesh as having performed Keechakvadha for its inaugural event. ‘Optics for the Stage: Curtains for the Surabhi Company’, in Jyotindra Jain (ed.), India’s Popular Culture: Iconic Spaces and Fluid Images (Bombay: Marg Publications, 2007), p. 59. (83) Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 21. (84) From the letter reproduced in the preface to the eighth edition (1898), Sakoontala or The Lost Ring, trans. Sir Monier Wiliiams (reprint, New Delhi: Tulsi Publishing House, 1979), pp. viii–ix. (85) Cited in Prabhat Kumar Bhattacharya, Shadow Over Stage (Calcutta: Barnali, 1989), p. 114. (86) Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 22. (87) Sudhir Kakar has even clubbed mythologicals (along with historicals) as the brahmins of the film industry, with stunt films as the shudras in the varna system of Bombay cinema. ‘The Ties that Bind: Family Relationships in the Mythology of Hindi Cinema’, India International Centre Quarterly, Vol. 8, No. 1, Indian Popular Cinema: Myth, Meaning and Metaphor (March 1981), p. 11. (88) See Raminder Kaur, Performative Politics and the Cultures of Hinduism (London: Anthem Press, 2005). (89) Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance, pp. 43–44.
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‘Purdah hai purdah!’: proscenium theatre and technologies of illusionism (90) An excellent account of the banned plays and the nationalist context from archival sources in Bombay is provided in Aravind Ganachari, Nationalism and Social Reform in a Colonial Situation (Delhi: Kalpaz, 2005), pp. 27–56. (91) Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan & Co. 1910), pp. 338–339. (92) A.C. Logan, Commissioner of Central Division, quoted in Ganachari, Nationalism and Social Reform, p. 45. (93) Ganachari, Nationalism and Social Reform, pp. 44–45. (94) Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1906), p. 229. (95) Gunning, ‘An Aesthetic of Astonishment’, pp. 31–45. (96) See Jyotindra Jain, Bombay/Mumbai: Visual Histories of a City (New Delhi: CIVIC, 2013). (97) Gyan Prakash, Mumbai Fables (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 52–60. (98) See Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 23. (99) Some of the earliest connections between Ravi Varma and Phalke based upon an iconic frontality were noted by Ashis Rajadhyaksha, ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Vol. 14–15 (1987), pp. 47–78 and Geeta Kapur, ‘Mythic Material in Indian Cinema’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Vol. 14–15 (1987), pp. 79–108. Their observations have found an appreciative audience across the visual cultural spectrum, particularly histories of cinema. See, for instance, Babli Sinha, Cinema, Transnationalism, and Colonial India: Entertaining the Raj (New York: Routledge, 2013); Rachel Dwyer, Filming the Gods: Religion and Indian Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); or Preminda Jacob, Celluloid Deities: The Visual Culture of Cinema and Politics in South India (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2009). (100) C. Raja Raja Varma’s travelogue and diaries are full of observations about the dark ages of Muslim rule in India and the sufferings of Hindu populations under them. (101) See Ranita Chatterjee, ‘Journeys in and Beyond the City: Cinema in Calcutta 1897–1939’, unpublished dissertation, University of Westminster, 2011. (102) Rosie Thomas, Bombay Before Bollywood: Film City Fantasies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014).
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00012
Abstract and Keywords A discourse on veiling and unveiling was implicated in changing notions of the body in nineteenth century India, prominent amongst which was the place of the female nude. Introduced by European artists and taught at the British-run academic art schools in India, the nude was also displayed in the houses and palaces of the elite as a symbol of good taste. This chapter argues that this idea of the nude – as the body shorn of all clothing – was premised upon Enlightenment ideas of the ‘naked truth’ that assumed the naked body as ‘natural’ and prior to representation. In the Indian context, however, as many authors have noted, it was the adorned body that was regarded as auspicious. This chapter evaluates how the female body becomes the site of an inordinate erotic investment in nineteenth-century Indian pictorial practice, premised upon exactly such a mechanism of veiling and unveiling, providing us with some historical perspective in recent debates on nudity in Indian painting. Keywords: Erotics, Veiling, Unveiling, Body, Female nude, Clothing, Naked truth, Adorned body
Supposing that Truth is a woman – what then? (Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil) The film Rang Rasiya (Colours of Passion, 2008) based on the life of Ravi Varma situates the Pauranik tale of Urvashi and Pururavas at the heart of the narrative to tell the story not only of star-crossed lovers but of the proscriptions of the naked body. The Pauranik version told the story of the heavenly nymph Urvashi who could marry the mortal Pururavas only under the condition that she could never see his naked body.1 However, the jealous gods plotted to break the union by casting a sudden streak of lightning at an opportune moment when Pururavas was unclothed, and Urvashi was forced to abandon him. An oleograph by Ravi Varma depicts Urvashi sailing upwards into the sky (Plate 14) as Pururavas laments his loss and this was adapted into a poster for the film featuring Ravi Varma mourning the loss of his muse Sugandha, modelled on the courtesan Anjani bai, who was rumoured to have posed for a number of his paintings.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed In Rang Rasiya director Ketan Mehta cleverly alters the story so that the possibility of Urvashi seeing Pururavas naked is not only foreclosed but displaced into an interdiction on all nudity, so that in Mehta’s retelling neither could see the other naked. Pururavas is frustrated by the adhura sach (incomplete truth) of his conjugal arrangement that prevented him from the intimacy of a nagna-satya (naked truth). One night he purposely tugs upon Urvashi’s saree as the gods cast lightning upon the scene and for a brief moment each is able to see the other in their nagna-satya, unveiled of their trappings of clothes. However, the defiant gaze extracts a tragic price – a separation that was ordained by the gods. The original story that hinges upon the uncomfortable threat of Urvashi’s gaze upon the naked Pururavas is defanged in the cinematic version into one that effectively reverses the dynamics of seeing, so that Urvashi is reinstated as its object rather than being the bearer of the gaze.2
14 Ravi Varma, Story of Purūravas and Urvashi: Urvashi flying off to heaven while Purūravas tries to stop her, 1896
In the film Ravi Varma relates the tale of Urvashi to Sugandha as an (p.152) example of the many beautiful stories of a glorious past that remain untold because of the societal proscription against nudity that prevent his access to suitable models who would be willing to ‘face the truth of nudity’. It is a thinly veiled use of the literary source to encourage Sugandha to disrobe and assist him in this higher calling of presenting noble stories to a wider audience. The naïve Sugandha is of course seduced by his story, casting off her garment to strike an imaginative pose that Ravi Varma sketches and that is used as a poster for the film. Granting a licence to Ravi Varma (and his viewers) to gaze upon the eroticised female body, the narrative serves as a prelude to a love scene between Ravi Varma and Sugandha as they clothe each other’s bodies in paint, surrounded by his paintings. Paint binds the relationship between the artist and his muse, driven by a masculine desire that seeks visual pleasure in female bodies, both representational and real.3 While Ravi Varma was by no means unique in isolating the female body as the subject of representation, the reliance upon the Urvashi myth revealed an anxiety about public representations of the nude female body and the artistic licence to depict them. The most celebrated case in public memory was undoubtedly that of M.F. Husain (1915–2011), whose paintings of nude Hindu goddesses had drawn accusations from the Hindu right of wanting ‘to strip our mother naked’.4 Rang Rasiya allegorically references Husain’s trial by framing the story of Ravi Varma in an entirely fictional court case charging the painter with obscenity for his drawing of Urvashi. The painter uses the courtroom to make a public case for his art as an
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed authentic interpretation of Hindu belief, convincing both the judge and the viewers of the film of the artistic legitimacy in depicting the female body.5 The Husain case as well as its dramatisation in Rang Rasiya have nevertheless generated questions specific to the discipline of art history in isolating problems in the representation of the female body, particularly the vexed question of the female nude vis-à-vis the male painter/ viewer. Mehta’s valorisation of a nagna-satya clearly invoked the European tradition of the nuda veritas and its long history of the celebratory nude inherited from Greco-Roman conceptions of art and popularised throughout the nineteenth century.6 Yet, despite Mehta’s invocation of the Pauranik myth, studies have noted how the naked female body shorn of all ornamentation was rarely well regarded and routinely considered inauspicious in courtly culture in South Asia. This chapter examines the colonial encounter through the collision of two orders of representation upon the site of the female body, the one invested in an Enlightenment ideal of an unveiled naked truth or the nuda veritas, and the other drawn from courtly culture where nakedness was seen as inauspicious and that instead proclaimed ornamentation as a veiling of the body that was not only aesthetic but the centrepiece of what Daud Ali calls a ‘body (p.153) culture’.7 Drawing examples from Ravi Varma and contemporary academic art, it describes how even as the aestheticised nude entered the representative lexicon of Indian artists, the naked body continued to be referenced in uncomplimentary ways, featured as a symbol of loss or degradation in the tradition of courtly culture. The naked body was, moreover, recalled as shameful in popular narratives of colonial rape which underlined the violence of the colonial gaze that sought to unveil the ‘purdah princess’ in an epistemic project of control.
Reproductive technologies and the threat of exposure The introduction of the female nude into the curriculum of art schools in the late nineteenth century coincided with the simultaneous explosion in printing technologies which explored the erotic possibilities of the circulation of the female body in the public sphere. While erotic imagery in Rajput or Mughal painting had also portrayed the nayika and her seductive charms, often unclothed, the paintings themselves had remained within the limited viewership of elite patrons and contained within miniature formats.8 However, printing technologies in colonial modernity circulated the female body on a vastly different scale and to a broader, undifferentiated audience. Linked to anxieties about the place of women in public life, the representative power of women’s bodies in the public sphere took on a new charge to emerge as a potent site of both erotic investment and threatening sexuality in nineteenth-century Indian pictorial practice.9 In what follows I take from Lynn Hunt’s edited volume on the place of sexuality within the social body in modernity to articulate what she has called ‘an erotics of the body politic’.10 Hunt examines the explosion of reproduction technologies and the circulation of prints singling out the female body in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France against the backdrop of the increasing participation of women in the public sphere. Extending the Hobbesian notion of the social body formed around the sovereign to the fragmented polity of revolutionary France, Hunt contends that women’s bodies emerged as potent signifiers of the health of the body politic in the sovereign’s relative absence. Enlightenment figures like Edmund Burke and Rousseau had warned against the corrupting influence of women in public life and consequently representations of women’s bodies in the public sphere were marked by the implied transgression of boundaries between the public and the private.11 Consequently, the health of
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed the polity was played out in narratives of dangerous sexuality or bodily virtue, in an erotics of the body politic. In India too, the imperial body had served as the site through which subjects acknowledged their participation in the body politic, but by the (p.154) late nineteenth century freely circulating icons of the female body were invested with a moral and erotic charge to emerge as alternative signifiers of the emerging nation.12 The most popular icon was of course Bharat Mata, and an erotics of the body politic was largely mediated through popular narratives of her chastity and violations. Here too, a transgression between public and private spaces constituted the terrain of such an erotics, inasmuch as the exposure of women’s bodies to the public gaze formed the backdrop. Practices of women’s seclusion, most conspicuously through the zenana or andarmahal (inner quarters) but also through the concomitant veil or purdah, rendered these transgressions more acute as female bodies entered the public sphere.13 Reproduction technologies explored the erotic potential of the female body in periodicals and journals, in the packaging and labelling industry, in photographic or oil portraiture, summoning the body both as fantasy and with palpable realism. The anxieties of women’s presence in public life carried across to these spaces, expressed in the reluctance of women to have their portraits displayed publicly, for example. Maharani Jumna Bai of Baroda, who had sat on several occasions for portraits for artists like Ravi Varma and Val Prinsep, saw it as improper to have her portrait publicly displayed at the Poona Fine Arts Exhibition.14 The public viewing of female bodies carried a threat of exposure, where an anonymous public gaze was seen to violate the sanctity of the body. This exposure of women’s bodies was accompanied, on the other hand, by renewed prescriptions for veiling the body. Ravi Varma’s paintings and oleographs of female figures participated actively in the production and public circulation of female icons, providing wonderful examples of veiling practices in devising innovative draping rituals for the body.15 In paintings like The Galaxy of Musicians (c. 1889) the distinctive focus on clothing was not only about asserting ethnographic identity but also in devising prototypes for the proper comportment of female bodies. Appropriate attire, then, was both a moral question and an aesthetic one, and the creative veiling of the body attempted to contain the ramifications of the exposure of bodies in the public sphere. At the same time Ravi Varma indicated a simultaneous interest in the uncovered female body in paintings like At the Bath (1902) (Plate 15), which explored the limits to which the unveiled body could be depicted.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed This simultaneous veiling and unveiling of female bodies in the public sphere constituted the terrain of an erotics of the body politic. The furore over the female nude in Rang Rasiya or the Husain affair have posed the unclothed female body as the ultimate erotic object, arguing either for veiling the body or for the legitimacy of such representation. On the other hand, Mario Perniola observes that neither clothing nor nudity is erotic when it (p. 155) prevails as an absolute value; it is the transit between nudity and clothing that lies at the heart of eroticism.16 In late nineteenth-century visual culture experimentations with nudity jostled alongside elaborate agendas for clothing the female body, veiling and unveiling it in suggestive ways. Crucial aspects of the popular ambivalence about the female body, including an anxiety over the unveiled female form, were evident in colonial visual culture and its circulation of female bodies, where the naked body was referenced in complex ways. At the same time, a new15 Ravi Varma, At the Bath, c. 1902 found interest in draping and exhibiting the female body participated in the contemporary efforts to fashion an identity for the ‘New Woman’ who was emerging at the seams of public life.
Shameful nakedness and the violated body The threat of exposure of the female body in the public sphere was indicated in the predominance of two metaphors of a violation that gained currency in colonial India. The first of these, sati, has inspired much scholarly attention, but the second, rape, has been less examined.17 Rape had existed widely as a concept metaphor for imperialism in nationalist references to the ‘rape of the motherland’, highlighting the colonial occupation in strictly sexual terms, but the narrative on rape has been dominated by accounts of white women being raped by Indian men (in texts like E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India). Salman Rushdie has contested this: ‘if a rape must be used as a metaphor of the Indo-British connection, then surely, in the interests of accuracy, it should be the rape of the Indian woman by one or more Englishmen of whatever class – not even Forster dared to write about such a crime’.18 Although descriptions of Indians raping British women abound (in paintings and stories of the violation of English womanhood during the Mutiny of 1857, for example), representations of Englishmen raping Indian women remain undocumented.19 Despite the supposed invisibility of such narratives, the violated national body crops up in the most prominent voices in nationalist painting, theatre and literature. Edmund Burke had drawn attention to how the East India Company ‘brutally violated’ Indian women in his opening speech at the trial of Warren Hastings20 and this metaphor of imperialism as a rape of the nation would Page 5 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed go on to be adopted by Jawaharlal Nehru: ‘They seized her body and possessed her but it was a possession of violence. They did not know her or try to know her. They did not look into her eyes for theirs were averted and hers cast down through shame and humiliation.’21 The feminised national body was represented in the popular plays Nil Darpan, Chakar Darpan and SurendraBinodini, where the central female characters were all raped by their colonial masters, the action serving to arouse sentiment against the aggressors. Dinabandhu Mitra’s Nil Darpan included melodramatic scenes where (p.156) the malevolent planter Mr Rogue’s attempts to rape Kshetromoni, a peasant girl, centre on stripping her naked: ROGUE: Dear, dear, come to me. KSHETROMONI: Sahib, you are my father, please let me go … [holds Rogue’s hands and pleads] Please let me go, you are my father. ROGUE: I want to be the father of your child. Come to bed or I will kick your belly. KSHETROMONI: Oh! My child will die. I am carrying. Have mercy, please let me go. I am pregnant. ROGUE: [tearing off her clothes] I will see you naked. Only then will you be rid of shame. KSHETROMONI: Sahib, I am your mother, don’t make me naked. You are my son, don’t take off my clothes …22 The iconic instance of the violation of the female body in the popular imagination was the Pauranik story of Draupadi Vastraharan (Figure 4.1), which hinged upon the shame of the body stripped naked. Pamela Lothspeich has noted its popularity amid a rising tide of rape narratives in Hindi literary and theatrical productions in late colonial modernity, penned not only by obscure writers but by noted figures like Maithili Sharan Gupt as well.23 The tale from the Mahabharata related the humiliations of Draupadi as she was lost in a game of dice by her five husbands to their cousins, the Kauravas. Dragged by her hair into the Kaurava court, she was sought to be stripped by Dushasana, the Kaurava prince, in full view of the court. Draupadi appealed to Krishna, however, and in a miraculous gesture he sent an unending stream of cloth that saved her from the shame of being presented naked in court. Lothspeich reads the popularity of rape literature as an expression of the defilement of the nation, its purity polluted by foreign occupation. Ravi Varma had painted an early version of the scene that was also copied by his son, highlighting Draupadi’s humiliation before Krishna’s intervention, and he continued this theme of an attack on the body politic, enlisting other popular Pauranik tales. It emerges as a significant trope in multiple paintings of Sita captured, of Draupadi disrobed and, most commonly, in the episode from the agyaat vaas where Draupadi was humiliated by Keechak’s unwanted advances (see Chapter 3), where Ravi Varma presents an amoral sexual attack upon the feminised body of the nation. In melodramatic portrayals that highlighted the pathos of the female body these paintings conveyed the degradation of the polity; however, it is unclear Page 6 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed whether Ravi Varma attributes the degradation to the British presence. C. Raja Raja Varma’s diaries attribute the destruction of past glories to marauding Muslim armies and he is generally beholden to the British for their civilising influence. This of course does not tell us about Ravi Varma’s views but it is fair to assume that they were similar. Ravi (p.157) (p.158) Varma had close ties to nationalist leaders, including Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Govind Ranade, but their focus on social and political reform and faith in Western institutions in achieving reform granted their brand of nationalism a different character than the anti-colonial nationalism that targeted British imperial sins and emerged in the first decade of the twentieth century.24 The contrast between past splendour and present degradation was a powerful trope that featured both in Ravi Varma’s painting and in colonial Bengal, using the violated naked body to convey the shameful present.25 The miserable fate of Bharat Mata had featured widely in the poems and songs that accompanied the nationalist Hindu Mela organised by the Tagore family in Bengal since 1867. In the 1873 Mela, Kiran Chandra Bandopadhyaya staged a play entitled Bharat Mata where the enslaved figure of the nation was presented as an emaciated woman whose degradation at the hands of colonial Britain was interestingly configured through her naked state and the absence of adornment. Lamenting her wretched plight, Bharat Mata wails, ‘Look just once at the misery of your unfortunate mother, my sons. The plundering robbers have taken away all my ornaments. I have no oil for my hair and how much longer will I have to wear these dull and tattered rags?’26 Another contemporary allegorical account from the same year, based upon a tantric text by Akshay Chandra Sarkar, portrayed Bharat Mata as a widow, a potent symbol of deprived womanhood. Once again her 4.1 Ravi Varma, Draupadi Vastraharan, c. pathetic state was indicated through bodily 1888–89 degradation, her lack of clothes and her unkempt appearance, ‘Bharat Mata is now Dhumabati – the widow. In her state of widowhood, she lacks food to nourish her body and Page 7 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed clothes to cover herself. Her hair is rough from the lack of oil and unkempt. She has lost her teeth and suffering has made her gaze intense and piercing.’27 Coomaraswamy presented foreign occupation as rape, casting Bharat Mata as a wealthy maiden whose hand had been sought by many: ‘and of these, one whom she loved the least had possessed her body for many years; and now there came another and stranger wooer with promises of freedom and peace, and protection for her children; and she believed in him, and laid her hand in his’. This foreign lord saw that her children learnt his language and his thoughts and were told stories of how he had saved their mother from wretchedness. When Mata Bharat bore him a girl, however, she made sure to secretly teach her the ancient wisdom of her ancestors and ‘her heart was turned away from her father and his people and his teaching’. As the child grew older she rejected her father’s tyranny and went to live in a place apart where she counselled the children as they rose in opposition to the foreign lord. She was wedded to none, yet ‘she was called mother by all’.28 Although the naked shame of the female body exploited the full range of melodramatic possibilities, the many reproductions of a pivotal scene from the narrative of Nala and Damayanti convey the indignity associated with (p.159) nakedness through the male body.29 While the male nude body carried connotations of austerity and purity in courtly culture, when it was associated with the figure of the ascetic and his renunciation of the world, the naked body shorn of its habiliments served as a powerful symbol of loss.30 The tale tells the woes of two lovers who were exiled because of Kali’s wrath and the scene inevitably portrayed is Nala’s desertion of Damayanti in the forest. Dispossessed of his wealth and kingdom, Nala is left literally 4.2 Calcutta Art Studio, ‘Nala and naked as a bird flies off with his last Damayanti’, c. 1895 possession, his clothing. As Damayanti sleeps, Nala tears her garment in half to cover himself and creeps away in the dead of the night, in the hope that at least she will return to her father’s court. The story was widely represented in popular prints, and also translated by Orientalist scholars like Henry Hart Milman and Monier Williams. Christopher Pinney has suggested that the story is a consideration of the destruction of Hindu polity by modernity, and certainly the themes of exile and dispossession formed powerful allegorical narratives for a nation in colonial servitude.31 What is significant for our purposes is how that loss was conveyed through the absence of clothing. The loss of Nala’s garments, a scene described with much pathos, served as a potent symbol of dispossession, in keeping with the aesthetics of adornment in courtly culture. The Calcutta Art Studio (Figure 4.2) presented Nala in the academic conventions of European painting as a tragic Greek hero brooding over his fate, and here the Greco-Roman body coincided with biblical ideas of shame regarding the naked body, (p.160) adding another layer of complexity to resonate across a wide section of the educated elite.32 Art-historical literature affirmed this sense of the violated body of the nation, using images of the exposure of the female body. Shyamacharan Srimani’s volume The Rise of the Fine Arts and
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed the Artistic Skills of the Aryans (1874), considered to be the first work of art history in Bengali and a product of an indignant cultural nationalism, sought to defend Hindu iconography against Western criticism by viewing explorations of ancient India by foreign scholars as defiling the land: ‘These acts were as profane as removing the garment from the motherland’s sacred bosom, a sacrilege to which patriots should not be indifferent … Hence, brothers, arise, rescue our mother from her miserable condition.’33 Not surprisingly then, expressions of reclaiming the national body were wrought in similar metaphors. The nationalist-sympathising director of Bombay’s J.J. School of Art, W.E. Gladstone Solomon, envisaged his students’ projects as implicated in a similar gesture of unveiling the ‘Secret of their own Country’: the Western buildings in which the different departments of the School are housed almost seem, to knowledgeable eyes to have been draped by the hands of their Indian students with invisible ‘saris’ … In the depths of their dark eyes are the fires of enlightenment, but it is a Secret of their own Country that they are engaged in unravelling in the School of Art.34
The naked and the nude The nude was inevitably implicated in the transactions of the female body in the public sphere. Occupying a privileged place in art-historical studies, the nineteenth-century nude emerged as the sine qua non of salon art, claiming to represent the idealised female body in its purity. Arthistorical studies on the nude like Kenneth Clark’s have famously distinguished between the naked and the nude, offering the first as a ‘raw’ product of nature that the artist fashions into an ideal aesthetic form.35 Clark’s work has been critiqued for relying upon a gendered idea of the male artist working over the raw female form, transforming nature into art, but its assumption of the naked body as culturally unmediated has persisted in revisionist art-historical accounts as well.36 John Berger too viewed the naked body as raw and pure, characterised by the absence of artifice: ‘To be naked is to be oneself … To be naked is to be without disguise.’37 For Berger, unlike Clark, it is the naked body that is valorised as original and pure, while the nude draws the body into the lie of aesthetic convention and pictorial objectification. However, both assume the unmediated character of the naked body as ‘natural’ and prior to representation and the nude as a form of ideological clothing. (p.161) Anthropological accounts have questioned this easy acceptance of the naked body as existing outside representation and in analyses of bodily ornamentation have proposed the skin itself as ‘the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted’, much like clothing.38 If one disavows the primacy of the unalienated naked body as standing outside representation and draws it into the scheme of depictions of the body, it is possible to see nakedness as just another mode of representing the body. Rather than standing outside the social order, nakedness may be seen as intricately woven into the social fabric, its place defined in and through cultural practice. The naked body then presents as complex a semiotic register as the clothed body. For Ruth Barcan a privileging of nakedness as pre-social has functioned as a mode of valorising an unmediated original, and the clothing of the body in its social and cultural guises is seen as corrupted versions of this ideal self. This nostalgia for lost purity in the movement from a primal, unalienated human nature to a secondary derivative form makes equations of the body with language. Phrases like the ‘veil of rhetoric’ repeat a homology between clothing and language where the dream of unmediated communication is likened to the naked body, as prior to representation, and consequently the veiling of the body is perceived as a representation of the
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed second order.39 As Hans Blumenberg puts it, an interminable quest for a ‘natural’ nature in modernity structures a dialectic between social dissimulation and a naked truth.40 Barcan views in this homology an idea of a fall from an original state of perfection, noting how it converges with the biblical narrative of the Fall and the shameful covering of the bodies of Adam and Eve.41 The layers of clothing that covered the despoiled nakedness of fallen man therefore stand as metaphors for duplicity, deception and indeed the lie that social convention was posited in these accounts. The mid-century nostalgia for the Greek ideal of heroic nudity in Victorian England centred on the popularity of the Elgin marbles, and a renewed interest in Winckelman celebrated the Greek nude as such an original state of perfection.42 For figures like William Acton, a keen proponent of the Greek ideals of physical health and athleticism, who also penned the definitive book on the moral and physical decaying Victorian body (Prostitution, Considered in its Moral, Social and Sanitary Aspects, 1857), the Greek nude offered ‘natural’ purity as an ideal that the contemporary diseased body could aspire towards.43
Ornamentation and the nude As European art-historical accounts wrestled between the naked and the nude, it was widely accepted that in Indian art practice it was the ornamented body that stood as an aesthetic and ethical ideal, being regarded as not only beautiful but also auspicious.44 Physical beauty and moral perfection in both (p.162) male and female bodies were invested in the adorned body, where adornment referred not only to drapery and jewellery but also to perfumes, cosmetics and hair styling. Ornamentation (alamkara) was a question not only of beauty but of propriety and not surprisingly found its sustenance within the courtly culture, where a culture of selfrefinement defined one’s place in the polity. Daud Ali puts ornamentation at the centre of an entire ‘body culture’: ‘The perfection of the self through the ornamentation of one’s soul and body enabled one to take one’s place as an “ornament” in a morally ordered polity, fit to “decorate” one’s family or one’s lord.’45 Given the centrality of adornment in social and individual life, alamkara extended to architecture and language as an aesthetic and ethical ideal. The Sanskrit literary tradition, too, presented a homology between clothing and language, with alamkara referring to both a figure of speech and bodily ornamentation. Countering the modernist rejection of alamkara as excess, Coomaraswamy’s analysis of the etymology of both the Sanskrit and Latin (ornare) words for ornament revealed that they originally implied the completion or fulfilment of the object, so that rather than the perception of a luxurious excess they were a necessary component.46 The naked body in this formulation was an aberration of the social order, although it could have moral authority if associated with the male body of the ascetic or be deemed inauspicious when associated with widows, who were perforce required to renounce their right to adornment. Within courtly culture, the naked body implied grief, abstinence or calamity. By the turn of the twentieth century this belief in ornamentation was beginning to show cracks. In 1903 Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a progressive Bengali writer from Calcutta, published an essay in the women’s magazine Mahila titled ‘Alankar’ or the Badges of Slavery. A severe indictment of jewellery, particularly the practice of gifts of jewellery to women, Hossain took a feminist position, deeming such gifts as leashes that bound women as slaves: And our beloved jewellery – these are [nothing but] … badges of slavery. Prisoners wear iron shackles … [and] we [lovingly] wear chains made of gold and silver … As if life’s happiness and enrichment depend solely on them … No matter how destructive alcohol is,
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed the alcoholic does not want to give it up. Likewise we feel proud when we bear these marks of slavery on our bodies.47 If courtly culture had sung praises to the adorned female body, Hossain saw it as the very depths of depravity. Her essay drew a picture of a newly wed daughter-in-law of a rich Muslim family from Bihar perched upon her bed covered in gold jewellery, noting the amount of money spent on the gold – as much as Rs10,240! Not content with this brief description, she goes on to enumerate in detail all of the ornaments she wore and the weight of each (On the head, tiara, half seer [440 grams] … anklets, exactly 3 seers [2640 grams] of (p.163) heavy gold …) to show that she had eight seers of gold laden upon her. Moving on to her clothes of heavy gold and silver thread, her coiffed hair plastered with jewellery and her forehead pasted with sequins, Hossain draws moral judgements from the excessive ornament on display: ‘Her body is an insensate mass, her mind is even more obtuse.’48 Incapable of any movement or action, she would be better served if on display in a museum, Hossain objected. Hossain’s critique of ornamental excess coincided with the introduction of foreign prints and reproductions in the rapidly growing printing and publishing industry, which circulated the nude female figure as an aestheticised object of desire.49 In the second half of the nineteenth century cheap German prints by academic artists had flooded the Indian picture market portraying nude female bodies in thinly veiled allegorical themes and these reproductions were prominently displayed in the houses and palaces of the elite as a symbol of good taste. By the mid-nineteenth century, Germany had launched itself as a leader in printing technologies, so that studios and commercial production houses often sent their images to Germany for reproduction.50 In 1894, when Ravi Varma decided to set up his printing press, he imported the machinery from Germany and also employed two German technicians to run the press. The German monopoly over massproduced prints also extended to artists’ aids and books of stock classical poses. Le Nu Esthetique and Der Kunstlerische Akt were widely advertised as artists’ substitutes for models posing nude. Meanwhile, art schools grappled with the question of the nude. Abanindranath Tagore, who had received training from European artists including Olinto Ghilardi and Charles Palmer, was introduced to the nude model through the latter, who persuaded a soldier from the barracks close by to model for his student. As the soldier began undressing, Tagore grew alarmed and asked him to stop, thereafter abandoning the experiment with life study.51 Later, at the Government College of Art and Craft, Tagore expressly forbade his students from figure drawing, particularly the nude: ‘Why are you wasting your parents’ hard earned money on a model? If you are really so keen on such indulgence, why not visit the red-light district? It may be cheaper in the long run. But I ask you, do you have the right to spread such corruption in our society?’52 This antipathy to the naked body, with its undertones of sanctimonious morality, was complemented by a preference for the adorned body. In advice to Nandalal Bose on his painting Uma’s Meditation, he suggested that Uma be shown as bedecked with jewellery to emphasise her youth and beauty.53 Students in the colonial art schools were introduced to European conventions of the nude as they received instruction in figure drawing and modelling. Plaster casts of antiques like the Aphrodite of Knidos and the Belvedere Torso imported from England formed the basis of the training, as did reproductions (p.164) of European favourites printed in magazines and journals or displayed in the annual exhibitions of painting in the major cities. However, this did not imply that the students wholeheartedly imbibed the aesthetics of the nude as representing
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed the epitome of artistic perfection. The head of the Madras Art School, Robert Chisholm, described his students’ response to a copy of a nude Venus with a shower of gold from Jupiter falling upon her. Even though it was the most popular picture amongst the students, when asked as to why they considered it good, Chisholm was faced with the answer that it presented a naked English lady. Needless to say, Chisholm promptly had it removed – it would take a little longer for the students to buy in to the aestheticised rhetoric of the nude.54 In Bombay, however, the artist M.V. Dhurandhar from the J.J. School of Art affirmed the impact of classical figural sculpture: Standing in front of huge plaster-of-Paris statues of the Venus de Medici, Apollo Belvedere, Apollo Saurochthonos and The Discobolos I felt as if in a dream … I went round and round the statues and yet I was not sated … Even out on the street, I felt like one possessed and kept seeing them appear before me.55 Dhurandhar went on to experiment with the nude female figure in copies of antique casts as well as in oleographs of Pauranik themes printed by the Ravi Varma Press. Raja Raja Varma described his visit to the J.J. School of Art and the encounter with the plaster casts in equally exalted terms: The entrance hall of this temple of art was a pantheon of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses. Imitations in plaster of paris from the antique were arranged all round the walls. Here stood ‘Venus de Medici’ ‘the statue that enchants the world’, there ‘Apollo Belvedere’, – a wonderful combination of ‘serene majesty, sublime intellect and physical beauty’ at one corner reclined Theseus of giant power, with his nose, hands and feet broken off; in another stood the remnant of Antonius the embodiment of perfect manly beauty.56 In extolling the virtues of Apollo Bevedere and Antonius in those terms, Raja Raja Varma repeats Victorian attitudes to classical mythology and its celebration of the nude. The Ravi Varma Press (often including Dhurandhar as artist) featured several semi-nude figures of goddesses in oleographs of Pauranik themes, the unclothed female body emerging as a figure for visual consumption in thinly veiled Pauranik narratives. The confrontation with the law was then inevitable and a landmark judgment on what constituted obscenity was delivered by Judge Mahadev Govind Ranade, an important Hindu social reformer, and Justice Jardine at the Bombay High Court in 1895. Attended by the Varma brothers, who were known to Ranade, the case involved four German prints featuring two semi-nude female figures and two nude figures, which had been fined by the magistrate of Pune for being indecent. The Court referred to prior judgment on the notion of obscenity defining it as intention (p.165) to ‘deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences’. Much debate involved the question of partial nudity versus complete nudity; however, the judgment struck down the charges of obscenity, arguing that the effect of the nude pictures was ‘not necessarily to deprave or debauch’, leaving open the idea of artistic or conventional use not intended to pollute public morality.57 While the pictures were readily available to the court and not described in the judgment, C. Raja Raja Varma’s report of the trial inserts remarks upon the specific clothing as well as the idea of ‘classical subjects’ and the artist’s intention:
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed The judges, were, it appears, of opinion that naked pictures of classical subjects were not obscene, in that, the artists had higher ideals than those of merely exciting the sensual appetites of the spectators. The pictures in question might have been classified among them, had it not been for the introduction into them of modern silk umbrellas and apparel which divested them of their idealism.58 Two significant points are made in Raja Raja Varma’s interpretation of the judgment and its acceptance of westernised conventions of the nude as invested with higher ideals. First, locating the naked body in the ancient past recalls notions of the ‘natural purity’ of the ancients, mitigating the sexual content; and second, apparel is conceived as the mark of the fall. Raja Raja Varma’s interpretation keeps intact the idea of past purity, but instead of Bharat Mata’s descent from rich ornamentation to a naked and beggarly present it is a fall from the purity of the unclothed body to the dissimulations of clothing, endorsing the idea of ‘naked truth’. Clothing and attire emerge as significant in constructing a relationship with the past. Walter Benjamin notes that fashion becomes increasingly crucial as a measure of time in modernity, as a sign of the commodity form. With its transient quality, fashion marked a break from traditional ritual that revolved around the recurrent seasonal life cycles of organic nature.59 By contrast, the celebration of novelty by fashion looked forward only, dismissing the past as outmoded. The reliance upon clothing as a mark of the passage of time was revealed in the many discussions of appropriate clothing in Victorian history painting and would go on to play a significant role in Indian nationalist politics where apparel declared not only one’s identity but also one’s commitment to the modern.60
Draping the female body Ravi Varma’s Pauranik paintings specifically use dress to draw a connection with the past, so that the ancient, classical subjects that he proposed to depict (p.166) are located in time through their dress. In 1888 Ravi Varma undertook an all-India tour with the specific aim of studying ‘the ancient costumes worn by Hindu princes and princesses from old paintings or statues’.61 He had just received an important commission to paint fourteen large Pauranik paintings for the Durbar Hall of the Laxmi Vilas Palace, a new abode being constructed for the Gaekwad of Baroda, a generous patron of the arts. Instructed to paint scenes from the Ramayana and Mahabharata, he set out to look for a garment that would serve as a national costume, but met with little success because ‘Every shade of race and nationality in India has a dress and ornament of its own so that it was difficult to find a common costume which would satisfy every class equally.’62 The absence of an ancient national costume was explained as a product of Muslim destruction: ‘During the long period of Mohammedan supremacy, any vestige of whatever was old and purely Hindu, had been effaced from the face of the country.’63 A fall from the purity of the past was put forward that was sought to be resurrected in the contemporary moment. Even before Gandhi’s adoption of khadi for the nation, nationalist politics was deeply invested in the question of dress, and debates regarding appropriate dress for Indians dominated public discussions in the nineteenth century.64 The articulation of an identity through dress was encoded in many aspects of courtly culture, as clothing served to instantiate authority, to delineate hierarchy and as insignia for caste and social status.65 In the colonial modernity, the possibility of refashioning the body anew through dress arose through a fluidity in caste and social boundaries presented by the emergence of a civil society and a public sphere. The body
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed was no longer necessarily defined by hierarchy and readily readable dress; individual bodies carried the possibility of representing the social and political anew, through attire. By the mid-nineteenth century large numbers of urban Indian men, particularly in Calcutta and Bombay, had adopted articles of European clothing, turning to trousers and frock coats and caps of distinctive types. This incorporation of foreignness in sartorial styles was widely lampooned in popular prints such as those from Kalighat. The Bengali babu was painted as a fop and a womaniser and his adoption of European dress was interpreted as a symbol of decadent values and loose morality, as the sign of one who paid great attention to his outward appearance but let his home and family decay. Ananda Coomaraswamy pointed to the problem in an early essay entitled ‘Borrowed Plumes’ (1905), deriding the adoption of European clothes by the native population. It was a ‘vulgar imitation’ of the West, he declared upon his return to Ceylon from England, and he discarded his suits. Clothing thus emerged as the focus of a highly charged debate upon the adoption of a westernised life-style and a visible index of one’s commitment to the nationalist cause. (p.167) Ravi Varma’s Galaxy of Musicians (c. 1889) has typically been read as announcing the possibility of a collective national identity, the fragmented regional polity prior to its assimilation in the national whole; but it is equally representative of the multiple individual bodies of the nation. As agency diffused from the singular body of the sovereign to the multiple bodies of the nation, older codes of visible authority were replaced with new modes of instantiating power. Sartorial practices were an important part of this and the ambiguities in the process of reading the new signs of visible authority were reflected in the many debates around appropriate dress. Women’s bodies presented particularly fecund sites for these contests of power and draping the body was implicated in an agenda of balancing visible signs of identity with the threats that female sexuality posed. Even the earliest British paintings and surveys of India had employed native clothing as a mark of the customs and manners of the people, highlighting different regions and their particular dress. Francois Balthazar Solvyns’ survey, for example, was entitled A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Etchings Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos (1799) and would culminate in the ambitious agenda of the Peoples of India photographic survey, an eight-volume opus on racial types that was created in the aftermath of the Sepoy insurrection of 1857 with the aim of classifying native populations to aid the disciplinary mechanisms of the state. As Bernard Cohn has demonstrated, dress was a visible sign of difference and British authority was relayed through a retention of British standards of dress and the converse encouragement to Indians to dress in an ‘oriental manner’.66 These attempts to reinforce separateness through clothing emerged because ‘as a frontier between the self and the not self’ dress was situated on the margins of identity and, as such, threatened to destabilise the borders between the coloniser and colonised.67 Even the earliest of Ravi Varma’s works display an interest in using attire as a mark of identity. Amma Thampuram of Mavelikara, a portrait of a Nayar matriarch along with an adolescent girl is an early statement of the significance and place of attire in portraiture. Indicating their aristocratic lineage, they are depicted in their heavily crafted jewellery and gold-embroidered garments. The garments identify their caste-designated identity, as the Nayar nobility of the Travancore region typically left their breasts uncovered, sometimes using a thin white garment, as does the figure of the matriarch. In the later portraits of Malayali women, Ravi Varma abandons the designation of caste-based identity as was implied in traditional garments and, as
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed R. Nandakumar notes, adopts a more cosmopolitan dress that outgrows the regional boundaries of Kerala.68 The interest in draping the female body continued in later works as regional differentiations were acknowledged. In 1892–93 Ravi Varma submitted a (p.168) series of ten genre studies for the Columbian World Exposition in Chicago entitled ‘The Life of the Native People’, delineating women from different parts of India, their class and dress, the aim being to ‘show the American public … the charm and sophistication of the apparel of India’s women’.69 The paintings were exhibited in the ethnographic category and Varma received an award applauding their ‘ethnographic value … giving careful attention to the detail of costume and articles used in the social and ceremonial life …These paintings give a good idea of the progress of instruction in Art.’70 Ravi Varma used ethnic portraits of women, painting a Parsi bride, a Malayali mother, a Begum from a courtly zenana and even a nautch girl from Bombay as representative of Indian womanhood. Despite these efforts expended towards draping the female body in ‘authentic’ garb, Ravi Varma’s inability to create a ‘national costume’ was a cause for lament,71 as his obituary by the cultural commentator Ramananda Chatterjee noted: The costumes of men and woman must have puzzled him. But his unconscious patriotism kept him true to India; he did not in the least cast a longing look towards Europe, ancient mediaeval or modern, for the habiliments of his characters. On the contrary he made a laborious effort to discover an all India costume … But one is tempted to ask why, discovery failing, he did not make an attempt to invent some artistic and graceful Indian costume. Indian nationalists are sometimes found to discuss the question of an all India dress. His would have been an artist’s solution of the problem. But somehow or other he did not make the attempt; a fact that all true nationalists cannot but regret. Hence we find in his pictures costumes belonging to Southern India for the most part. But it is Indian all the same.72 If, on the one hand, Ravi Varma’s efforts were directed towards draping the female body, there was a simultaneous interest in the unveiled body. In Begum at Bath, Ravi Varma draws upon the fascination for viewing women from the zenana, as a stately woman is undressed by her maids for her bath in a marble pool. In a context where women’s trips to public bath houses were frowned upon by the new norms of respectability, his choice of a Muslim woman at the bath house is telling. At the Bath (1902) (Plate 15) was painted together with his brother, who noted the difficulty in getting models for the painting, having to rely upon prostitutes who readily came for immoral purposes but were quite averse to posing in the nude.73 The painting was never displayed publicly but was hailed by the chosen few who saw it as a masterpiece and a compliment to the beauty of Malabar womanhood, although one early biographer cautioned that the female characters do not possess ‘the innocent purity of unsipped blossom [!]’74 C. Raja Raja Varma’s diary mentions another method the brothers employed for their (p.169) nude studies: sailing in boats close to the bathing ghats where ‘The women who walk along the street so closely veiled, strip themselves almost naked and indulge in bathing or washing without any sign of modesty.’75 C. Raja Raja Varma had probably relied upon these furtive methods for the depiction of the transparent drapery of the young girl in Water Carrier (c. 1890s), which pioneered the ‘wet sari’ look that would go on to feed the fantasies of countless viewers. A more direct debt to the nude as practised in European academic art was Ravi Varma’s painting of Judith, a copy of Benjamin-Constant’s painting of the same. Benjamin-Constant’s painting, which portrayed a bare-breasted Judith holding a sword behind her back, was in the collection at
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed the Laxmi Vilas Palace in Baroda, which included works by other European painters as well.76 Ravi Varma’s copy of the painting, now in the Sri Chitra Art Gallery in Trivandrum, is a nearfaithful copy that reproduces the dark shadows and the glistening skin of the model’s body even as her gaze is turned away from the viewer. Benjamin-Constant was better known as a painter of Oriental scenes, but his painting of Judith was commended as an ‘example of pure virtuosity in the painting of the nude’ and provided Ravi Varma with a model in the absence of actual sitters.77
Attired in virtue Ananda Coomaraswamy’s invocation of the chaste maternal body of Mata Bharat was not quite true to the story of the original bearer of that appellation. As the mother of Bharat, in whose lineage the nation of Indian peoples was said to have been conceived (Bharatvarsha), Shakuntala was literally Bharat Mata. First related in the Adi parvan or the ‘book of beginnings’ from the Mahabharata that contained origin myths and genealogical accounts, the narrative acquired prominence as a foundation myth for the nation.78 Ravi Varma’s illustration of Shakuntala Patralekhan was used as the frontispiece for the second edition of Monier Williams’ translation (Plate 16). It depicted the heroine as a lovelorn nayika gazing into the distance as she reclines upon the grass in the woods, flanked by her companions and writing a letter to Dushyanta upon a lotus leaf. The painting was well received and thereafter Ravi Varma produced several other works on the story of Shakuntala, but rather than the chaste iconic figure of Bharat Mata he was inclined to portray her as an alluring nayika pining for her lover.79 In a later critique it was exactly this portrayal of female desire that was deemed unbecoming: In a country in which that posture is held to be ill-bred {I ought to state here, that I do not know of any country in which a young lady may stretch herself on the floor in public} every home contains a picture of a fat young woman (p.170) lying full length on the floor and writing a letter on a lotus leaf! As if a sight that would outrage decorum in actuality, could be beautiful in imagination! In a country in which romantic emotion is never allowed to show itself in public, pictures of the wooing of Arjuna and Subhadra abound.80
16 Ravi Varma, Shakuntala Patralekhan, 1911
In casting Shakuntala as the nayika pining for her lover, Ravi Varma recalls the arts of seduction associated with the figure. Seductions that were unseemly not only according to Victorian attitudes of feminine modesty but also, by posing the nayika as an upper middle-class heroine for a national public, signalled to a mass public sphere the practices associated with courtesanship that were the preserve of an elite aristocratic culture. Ignoring Ravi Varma’s seductive Shakuntala, Bharat Mata’s popularity as a pious maternal figure recalled a discourse on domesticity and chastity that was embraced by artists at the art schools in Calcutta and Bombay. In Calcutta, as Tapati Guha Thakurta has shown, anxiety over unregulated female sexuality manifested itself in the reproduction of pious, chaste female figures dedicated to the cause of nation building.81 In Bombay, artists at the J.J. School of Art Page 16 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed took to portraying everyday female figures – fisherwomen, malis, Marathi women within the home or Hindu women visiting the temple – in watercolours and oils. Given the art school’s training in academic techniques, the figures were full-bodied and lifelike, materialising the female body in palpable form on the one hand, whilst containing female sexuality within the bounds of home and hearth.82 When the subjects did stray outside the bounds of domesticity, temple settings were common, keeping alive the association of women’s bodies with purity and sacrality. While evocative portraits of female figures within the home formed a significant presence (Pestonjee Bomanjee, Lady Feeding a Parrot (1883), M.F. Pithawalla A Parsi Girl (1902)), a few paintings depicted the woman outside the home, in public spaces. A visit to the temple allowed the woman to step outside the home yet remain unsullied by the gaze of strangers. In Bombay both professor and pupil engaged in the production of symbols of pious Indian womanhood. Instructor John Griffiths’ (1838–1918) The Temple Steps, submitted to the Royal Academy exhibition in 1893, portrayed a devout Hindu woman gliding down the steps of a temple holding onto a naked child, a theme emulated by his pupil M.V. Dhurandhar in two similar watercolours, the temple looming much larger in his version, the child notably clothed and the figure of the woman exaggerated by her undulating hips. Dhurandhar endows the woman with a sensual presence (Figure 4.3), dormant in Griffiths’ version, that would extend to several printed images of women across the body of his work. G.K. Mhatre’s plaster cast sculpture from 1895 on the same theme isolated (p.171)
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (p.172) the figure of the woman carrying offerings, drawing applause from all quarters including Ravi Varma, Rabindranath Tagore and Sir George Birdwood. Birdwood, who would go on to famously deny the very existence of fine arts in India at the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1910, gushed over Mhatre’s sculpture, calling it a ‘provisional masterpiece’ and likening it to an early Canova.83 In a subtle hint recalling his upper-caste status, Birdwood commended Mhatre for relying upon his ‘pristine Aryan instincts’ to convey the ‘sweet, spiritual beauty’ of Hindu womanhood. He saw in it the reflection of ‘the sanctity of woman, and the domestic life centred in her, which has always proved the sure foundation of the social life of the Hindus, and remains to this day the distinctive node of Hinduism’.84 Ravi Varma had viewed Griffiths’ The Temple Steps during a tour of the J.J. School of Art with Griffiths himself in 1895. Despite Griffiths’ pride in his chef d’oeuvre, Raja Raja Varma records his disappointment with the painting in his account, noting that ‘it was poor in colour, poor in execution and poor in design … We have seen a similar subject handled in a more masterly way by Mr. Van Ruith …’85 Horace Van Ruith (1839– 1923) was an academic painter who had worked in London and Capri and visited India at the invitation of the Gaekwad of Baroda. His painting entitled Worshippers at 4.3 M.V. Durandhar, Steps to Devotion, c. 1907 the Trimbakeshwar Temple in the Town of Trimbak, in the Nasik District of Maharashtra Dedicated to Lord Shiva depicted a more casual scene with multiple figures by the ghats near the temple as devotees took a dip in the early morning light. However, Ravi Varma’s own treatment of the theme was considerably less complex than Van Ruith’s, focusing on a single woman and a beggar and bearing resemblances to contemporary Victorian valorisations on the theme of charity. In Giving Alms at the Temple (1899), a richly ornamented upper-caste Hindu woman holding her tray of offerings casts a few pennies into the hands of a seated beggar. As in other works like Sita in Ashoka’s Grove (1894), the woman’s upper-caste identity is underlined by her fair skin against the darker skin and bare torso of the beggar, and both mark his degraded status. Cloaked in a veneer of piety, or set within Pauranik tales that had cultural sanction, women’s bodies were granted licence to belong to spaces outside the home.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed These practices of eroticising the body while simultaneously couching it within sacral contexts held wide currency within academic art practices as late as the mid-twentieth century. Ranada Gupta’s (1870–1927) Jubilee Art Academy in Calcutta emerged as an important centre that nurtured painters trained in the academic tradition with a particular interest in the nude. It would go on to train artists like S.G. Thakur Singh (1899–1976), whose collection of paintings (Paintings of Indian Womanhood) featured seductive portraits of women in wet sarees, rationalised as the ritual bath in the temple or the watering of the tulsi plant after the bath and exploiting the religious (p.173) context to depict women’s naked bodies.86 Represented in major royal collections around the country, his paintings included such gems of Indian womanhood titled Innocent Candle, The Lover of Art, At the Temple Door and After Bath, which were nevertheless commended by J.P. Gangooly, then principal of the Government School of Art for their ‘cleanliness of treatment’.87 Hemendranath Mazumdar (1894–1948) largely dispensed with the religious veneer to emerge as the best-recognised artist of this genre of the wet-saree painting, boldly featuring respectable middle-class women unveiled within the home for the voyeur’s gaze.88 In each case a transgression of limits between the interior domestic spaces that comprised the woman’s world and an exposure to the public world of the gaze provided the frisson in the viewing of female bodies. In her analysis of art-historical writing of the period, Tapati Guha Thakurta has pointed to how the canon of Indian art that was conceptualised around the turn of the twentieth century expressed deep discomfort about the blatant sexuality in the corpus of early Indian images. It sought to come to terms with it, she proposed, by positing twin categories of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘sensual’ as the essence of Indian art, where the sensual was perceived as a subset of the sacred. The sexualised female form was recognised through ‘garbs of interpretive rhetoric, particularly by a veil of spiritual and symbolic meaning’ that submerged its sexual overtones within a veneer of aesthetic value.89 I would add that not only art-historical literature, but also academic art wrested with this problem by veiling the erotic potential of female bodies in situating them within sacral contexts. Bodily participation in the public sphere was regulated not only by sartorial codes, but also through bodies ‘attired in virtue’, as Himani Banerji has called such moral veilings of the body.90 Moreover, as Perniola’s notion of eroticism specifies, such veiling presented new ways to eroticise the female body – in the frisson provided by the purity of the sacral spaces and the public exposure of her form within the new spaces of representation.
Cloth, commerce and Christianity In closing it is worth pointing to overlapping interests between the commerce of cotton in the colonial economy and the missionary desire to clothe the native.91 In a speech made to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in 1884 the celebrated explorer Henry Morton Stanley dwelt upon the economic possibilities of clothing the native if each inhabitant of the Congo Basin were persuaded to buy one Sunday dress – 320,000,000 yards of cotton. Two Sunday dresses and four everyday dresses would amount to 3,840,000,000 yards annually, which at two pennies per yard would be £16,000,000. He continued: (p.174) The more I pondered upon these things I discovered that I could not limit these stores of cotton cloth to day dresses. I would have to provide for nightdresses also, and these would consume 160,000,000 yards. Then the grave cloths came into mind …
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed And, driving home the economic imperative of clothing the native, he concluded: ‘I have proved to you that if every inhabitant of the Congo Basin had only six dresses of cheap cottons each every year, your trade would be worth £25,000,000 per annum.’92 Clothes were at once commodities and accoutrements of a civilised self, and the sartorial adventures in colonial India were driven both by the products of industrial capitalism and through the lens of the civilising mission. Colonial perceptions of the naked native body had long connoted savagery and primitiveness.93 The picture of the ‘naked savage’ was commonly recalled in colonial writings, made famous in Rudyard Kipling’s well-known description of Gunga Din as clad in ‘nothin’ much before, An’ rather less than ’arf o’ that be’ind’.94 This comfort with nakedness never failed to shock the Western eye and was explained as a sign of evolutionary inferiority: though the costumes in Europe vary, still there is no absolute nakedness, such as strikes every person on arriving in India … To the European the sight [of a near naked boatman] is hardly human, to see a black animal kneeling on three bits of wood, connected only with the fibres of a coconut, paddling away alone several miles from land … What then must be the feelings of a person, landing fresh from London, without having witnessed any intermediate state of society between the height of European civilization in the finest city in the universe, and that to which he is so suddenly brought!95 The desire to ‘civilise’ the native’s dress was particularly apparent in missionary activities where the naked were often quite literally clothed.96 The Christian injunction ‘Clothed and in their right minds’ served as a moral order to cover the shameful nakedness of the native, where nakedness figured as lack and was inflected with shame from the biblical story of Adam and Eve. Missionary attitudes to clothing the naked body were particularly relevant in colonial Kerala, where they played an important role in social transformation, and the body of the woman was central to these experiments.97 The introduction of the nude in colonial India therefore could not be disassociated from perceptions of the naked body which, while indebted to formulations of the body from courtly culture, were often caste specific, with regional variations. Moreover, the art-historical question of the aestheticised nude rubs up against colonial constructions of nakedness filtered through imperial missionary networks and commercial interests, countered on the other hand (p.175) by nationalist assertions of a shameful nakedness as a fall from the plenitude of the past. In all of these, the naked female body presents a particularly complex semiotic register, caught between changing attitudes to nakedness and shame and thrust upon wider publics through reproductive technologies. In the larger narrative of the imperial gaze and its propensity for unveiling as a mode of knowing that I have been outlining in this book, the female nude stood for the fulfilment of a gaze that dispensed with the dissimulating veils that obstructed vision in its apprehension of the obscure object of desire. The colonised female body was doubly inscribed within this visual regime, as both feminine mystique and Oriental inscrutability were sought to be unravelled in feats of scopic mastery. However, rather than viewing this visual drive solely as an epistemic project of control over the colonised body, this chapter has explored its implications in erotics – proposing an erotics of art, rather than a hermeneutics, in Susan Sontag’s famous formulation.98 Instead of opposing ideals of either the naked body shorn of all clothing or the adorned body as the measure of aesthetic refinement of courtly culture, which both reinstate the feminised erotic Page 20 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed object, this chapter has explored the transit between clothing and nudity that Mario Perniola deemed the essence of erotics, to examine acts of veiling and unveiling as implicated in such erotics. The next chapter shifts terrain to examine male bodies, where patterns of revealing and concealing pose very different questions of selfhood and autonomy and, rather than the public exposure of female bodies, we encounter notions of privacy and intimacy. Notes: (1) The many versions of the myth are recounted in the introduction to the translation of Kalidasa’s Vikramorvasiyam by V.N. Rao and David Shulman in How Urvashi Was Won (New York: New York University Press, 2009). (2) A second film on Ravi Varma’s life, Makaramanju (Mists of Capricorn), also centres on the myth of Urvashi and Pururavas, although it sticks to the Pauranik narrative in having Urvashi view Pururavas naked. Both films were based upon a romanticised Marathi biography of Ravi Varma by Ranjit Desai that presented the artist as a crusader for social and imaginative freedoms and rebelling against the societal interdictions of the naked body. (3) I discuss the relationship between artistic identity and female bodies in the film more closely in ‘Mythologies of the Artist in Modern India: Cinema, Melodrama and Ravi Varma’, in Sandra Kisters and Rachel Esner (eds), The Mediatization of the Artist (Amsterdam: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 215–232. (4) Quoted in Shohini Ghosh, ‘Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms’, in The Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media (Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2004), pp. 447–454. (5) On the trope of the court case in Hollywood cinema as a device for dramatising the arguments to a wider public see George F. Custen, Bio/Pics: How Hollywood Constructed Public History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992). (6) See Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (New York: Atheneum, 1985), pp. 294–328. (7) Daud Ali, Courtly Culture in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 180. (8) See, for instance, Imma Ramos, ‘Private Pleasures of the Mughal Empire’, Art History, Vol. 37, No. 3 (2014), pp. 408–427. (9) Charu Gupta’s Sexuality, Obscenity and Community: Women, Muslims, and the Hindu Public in North India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001) offers a particularly good account of the anxieties of women in public life. See also Shobhana Nijhawan, Women and Girls in the Hindi Public Sphere: Periodical Literature in Colonial North India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). On Kerala see J. Devika (trans. and 0ed.), Her-Self: Gender and Early Writings of Malayalee Women (Kolkata: Stree, 2005). For visual archives, see Malavika Karlekar, Visualizing Indian Women, 1875–1947 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006). (10) See Lynn Hunt (ed.), Eroticism and the Body Politic (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), which presents views from Enlightenment France.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (11) Hunt in fact locates the emergence of pornography in this transgression between the public and the private viewing of erotic art following Walter Kendrick’s study of the emergence of ‘secret museums’ for private consumption of materials considered ‘obscene’ by the wider public. The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). (12) For a discussion of imperial body politics see Monica Juneja, ‘Translating the Body into Image: The Body Politic and Visual Practice at the Mughal Court in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Axel Michaels and Christoph Wulf (eds), Images of the Body in India: South Asian and European Perspectives on Rituals and Performativity (Delhi: Routledge, 2011). (13) There is fair amount of literature on the zenana and life behind the veil in India. Significant accounts include, Margaret U. Urquhart, Women of Bengal: A Study of the Hindu Purdahnashins of Calcutta (London: Student Christian Movement, 1925); Dagmar Engels, Beyond Purdah? Women in Bengal 1890–1939 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996) and Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). On Kerala Brahmanic practices of seclusion see Devaki Nilayamgode, Antharjanam: Memoirs of a Namboodri Woman, trans. Indira Menon and Radhika P. Menon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011). Meredith Borthwick’s study of the changing role of women in colonial Bengal interestingly complicates the simplistic narrative from invisibility in the inner quarters to public visibility by describing how women clad in fine transparent muslin saris and wearing jewellery took to public life attired in the Brahmo style, wearing a visible petticoat, blouse and sometimes even shoes or umbrellas. See Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal. (14) Correspondence between H.G. Hart, private secretary to Sir Richard Temple, and Madhav Rao Dewan at the Baroda Court from July 1878 discusses the possibility of exhibiting a life-size likeness of Maharani Jumna Bai on loan for the Poona Fine Arts Exhibition. Madhav Rao declined, based on the Maharani’s decided unwillingness to allow it to be exhibited, arguing that it would be ‘counter to both natural and conventional feelings of delicacy … because … other ladies than Indians also object to the exhibition of their likenesses’. Baroda State Archives, Section 65, File 6. Letter from T. Madhav Rao, 18 July 1888, A 832. (15) See Tapati Guha Thakurta, ‘Women as Calendar Art Icons: Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in Colonial India’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 26, No. 43 (26 October 1991). See also Patricia Uberoi, ‘Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 25, No. 17 (28 April 1990), pp. WS 41–48. (16) Mario Perniola, ‘Between Clothing and Nudity’, in Michel Feher et al. (eds), Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Vol. 2 (New York: Zone, 1989), pp. 236–265. (17) On sati, see Lata Mani, ‘Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India’, in Kumkum Sangari and Suresh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), pp. 88–126; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), pp. 271–313 and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1993) for a brief overview. (18) Salman Rushdie, ‘Outside the Whale’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981– 1991 (London: Granta Books, 1991), p. 89. Page 22 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (19) See Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: Figure of the Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 67, 65–6; Nancy Paxton, ‘Mobilizing Chivalry: Rape in British Indian Novels about the Indian Uprising of 1857’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 36 (Fall 1992), pp. 5–30. (20) Cited in Sara Suleri, Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 60. Suleri argues that rape as a dominant trope for imperialism was not ‘critically liberating’ because it disavowed the homoerotics of the Anglo Indian narrative (p. 17). However, in Eve Sedgewick Kosofsky’s formulation of ‘homosocial desire’ these bonds are not interrupted by female rape, in fact it serves as a rallying point around which dominant male power circulates. See Eve Sedgewick Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). (21) Jawaharlal Nehru, Towards Freedom: The Autobiography of Jawaharlal Nehru (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 272. (22) Quoted in Kironmoy Raha, Bengali Theatre (New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1978), p. 19 (23) Pamela Lothspeich, ‘Unspeakable Outrages and Unbearable Defilements: Rape Narratives in the Literature of Colonial India’, Postcolonial Text, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2007), pp. 1–19. (24) Reappraisals of Nil Darpan have contested the anticolonial thrust of its plot, noting that it reserved its criticism for specific individuals and was committed to British law. See Ranajit Guha, ‘Neel-darpan: The Image of a Peasant Revolt in a Liberal Mirror’, Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (1974), pp. 1–46 and Nandi Bhatia, Acts of Authority/Acts of Resistance (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). (25) Ravi Varma experimented with other Pauranik stories to convey the degradation of the Indian polity. Aja’s Lament, a painting that was published in the inaugural issue of the Modern Review, a journal of arts and ideas edited by Ramanand Chatterjee from Calcutta, told the story of the great love between Dashratha’s parents, Aja and Indumati. Indumati was struck by a garland from Narada and Aja lamented her death in powerful verse that is amongst the most celebrated passages in Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsha. According to Indira Vishwanathan Peterson, the lament became one of the ‘set pieces’ that kavya poets took over from the epic, employing ‘formulaic language and the conventional imagery of the contrast between past splendor and present degradation’ as speakers mourn the death of beloved people. See Indira Vishwanathan Peterson, Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 59. (26) Cited in Indira Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of Culture in Colonial Bengal (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 99. (27) Chowdhury, The Frail Hero and Virile History, p. 96. (28) Ananda Coomaraswamy, ‘Mata Bharata’, Modern Review Vol. 1, No.4 (April 1907), p. 369. (29) Ravi Varma portrayed several scenes from Nala Damayanti, including Nala’s desertion of Damayanti. (30) See Ali, Courtly Culture in Early Medieval India, pp. 165–166. (31) Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods (London: Reaktion, 2004), p. 34.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (32) The Banga Bashi affirmed: ‘In the eyes of the public, the Art Studio pictures are very beautiful. The forest scene of Nala Damayanti is imposing deep, dark, silent and lonely forest.’ Cited in Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine: The Many Origins of the Cinema in India (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), p. 74. (33) Shyamacharan Srimani, The Rise of the Fine Arts and the Artistic Skills of the Aryans (Calcutta: Roy Press, 1874), p. 45. (34) W.E. Gladstone Solomon, The Bombay Revival of Indian Art (Bombay: n.d.), pp. 79–80. (35) Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956). (36) Lynda Nead has remarked upon the resilience of this narrative that she finds in T.J. Clark’s discussion of Manet’s Olympia as well. See Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 15–16. (37) John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 1972), p. 54. (38) See Terence S. Turner, ‘The Social Skin’, in Jeremy Cherfas and Roger Lewin (eds), Not Work Alone: A Cross-cultural View of Activities Superfluous to Survival (London: Temple Smith, 1980), pp. 112–140. (39) See Ruth Barcan, Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2004), pp. 47– 52. (40) Hans Blumenberg, ‘Metaphorics for a Naked Truth’, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 43. (41) See Barcan, Nudity, pp. 47–52; Hans Blumenberg quotes from Franz Werfel’s ‘Theologumena’ to express the same idea with an aggressive aphorism: The naked truth, the ‘nuda veritas’, is the whorish bride of the barbarian. Culture begins at the exact moment when something is to be hidden, in other words, with an awareness of original sin (Adam’s fig leaf is the first document of culture). Blumenberg, ‘Metaphorics for a Naked Truth’, p. 41. (42) As Alison Smith notes, the influence of Richard Westmacott’s The Schools of Sculpture Ancient and Modern (1864) and Walter Pater’s essay on Winckelman published in The Westminster Review in 1867 marked a growing interest in Greek mythology and sculpture. This was underscored by the popularity of the Elgin Marbles, which had been granted their own room at the British Museum, and painters like Burne-Jones, Leighton, Watts, Moore and Whistler all turned to studying the Greek body from the Elgin Marbles in their search for ideal form. See Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 117–120. (43) On William Acton, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid Nineteenth Century England (New Brunswick and London: Transaction, 2009). Also, see Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London, New York: Verso, 2005), pp. 111–117. (44) See Vidya Dehejia, The Body Adorned (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). (45) Ali, Courtly Culture in Early Medieval India, p. 180.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (46) Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Ornament’, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December, 1939), pp. 375–382. (47) Cited in Mahua Sarkar, Visible Histories, Disappearing Women (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 223. (48) The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (1880–1932), edited by Mohammad A. Quayum (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 27–28. (49) By the late eighteenth century representations of female sexuality in Pahari paintings often combined with sophisticated strategies for unveiling the nayika (heroine) to the viewer/lover, anticipating the nude female body in some manner. See Molly Emma Aitken, ‘Spectatorship and Femininity in Kangra Style Painting’, in Vidya Dehejia (ed.), Representing the Body (New Delhi: Kali for Women in association with the Book Review Literary Trust, 1997), pp. 83–101. However, the viewership for these images was considerably limited, restricted to connoisseurs commissioning the images, and certainly not available to a mass public. (50) A good overview of the German commercial printing industry and its relationship to empire is found in David Ciarlo, Advertising Empire: Race and Visual Culture in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). (51) J.P. Ganguly, ‘Early Reminiscences’, Viswa Bharati Quarterly Abanindra Number, 1942, pp. 16–21. Cited in Partha Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India 1850–1922: Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 303. (52) P. Mandal, Bharat Shilpi Nandalal, p. 68. Cited in Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, p. 303. (53) Abanindranath Tagore, cited in Mitter, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, p. 302. (54) Remark made in the discussions following a lecture by E.B. Havell at the Royal Society for the Arts in January 1910. It was reprinted in the Journal of the Royal Society of the Arts, Vol. 58, No. 2985, 4 February 1910, p. 289. (55) Mitter recounts this in Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, p. 58. (56) C. Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India of His Highness Prince Martanda Varma, of Travancore (Bombay: Printed at the Education Society’s Steam Press, 1896), p. 35. (57) ‘Queen Empress vs Parashram Yeshwant’, 10 January 1894, Bombay Series, Vol. 20, pp. 193–195. (58) Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India, p. 27. (59) Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). (60) Smith, The Victorian Nude, pp. 165–213. (61) E.M.J. Veniyoor quotes from Ravi Varma’s Malayali biography in Raja Ravi Varma (Trivandrum: Government of Kerala, 1981), p. 27. Page 25 of 28 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (62) Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 27. (63) Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 27. (64) See Himani Bannerji, Inventing Subjects: Studies in Hegemony, Patriarchy and Colonialism (London: Anthem Press, 2002) and Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996). On Gandhi and clothing see Lisa N. Trivedi, Clothing Gandhi’s Nation: Homespun and Modern India (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2007). (65) Bernard Cohn, ‘Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism: India in the Nineteenth Century’, in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 106– 162. (66) Cohn, ‘Cloth, Clothes and Colonialism’, pp. 117–121. (67) Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), p. 3. (68) R. Nandakumar, ‘The Missing Male: The Female Figures of Ravi Varma and the Concepts of Family, Marriage and Fatherhood’, South Asian Studies, Vol. 1 (January 1996), p. 69. (69) A note accompanying his paintings to the exhibition had this to say, as cited in E.M.J. Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 32. (70) The citation is framed at Sri Chithra Art Gallery in Trivandrum. (71) Himani Bannerji notes that Debendranath Tagore faced the same problem of an appropriate dress for women as they emerged from the women’s quarters to consort with men in the outer chambers of the house and their transparent sarees were deemed unseemly. Bannerji, Inventing Subjects, pp. 102–103. (72) Ramananda Chatterjee, ‘Ravi Varma’, The Modern Review (January 1907). Reproduced in Raja Ravi Varma: New Perspectives (New Delhi: National Museum, 1993), pp. 144–146. (73) C. Raja Raja Varma’s diary entry for 15 February 1902. Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger (eds), Raja Raja Varma: Portrait of an Artist: The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 120. (74) S.A. Pillai, Ravi Varma and his Art, p. 28, cited in Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 272. (75) C. Raja Raja Varma’s diary entry for 21 June, 1901. Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 103. (76) Benjamin-Constant’s bare-breasted version of Judith is less popular than the clothed version in the collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (59.185). However, as the show of BenjaminConstant’s work at the Musee de Beaux Arts in Montreal revealed (Benjamin-Constant: A French Painter in the New World, 2015) the bare-breasted Judith was also widely reproduced. (77) E.S. Cameron, ‘The Art of Benjamin-Constant’, Brush and Pencil, Vol. 10 (July 1902), p. 243.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (78) On the popularity of the narrative see Romilla Thapar, Shakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). (79) Ravi Varma had exhibited the painting at the Fine Arts Exhibition in Madras in 1876, where it won a prize and the Governor, Lord Buckingham had purchased the work, attesting to its popular reception. (80) Sister Nivedita, ‘The Function of Art in Shaping Nationality – part 2’, The Modern Review, Vol. 1, No. 2 (January 1907), p. 129. (81) Tapati Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). (82) A particularly good example is the set of watercolours by M.F. Pithawalla, Reminiscences of Bombay, 1905, that was presented to the Princess of Wales by the women of Bombay. It is currently archived in the Royal Commonwealth Society Library, Cambridge University; RCMS 89/70. (83) Birdwood was, however, chastised by both Greenwood, the principal of the Art School, and Robert Chisholm of the Madras School of Art for claiming that Mhatre was a self-taught artist (relying on his Aryan instincts), whereas he had received training at the J.J. School of Art. (84) George Birdwood, ‘To the Temple’, Journal of Indian Art and Industry, Vol. 8 (1898), p. 1. (85) Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India, pp. 35–36. (86) The copy in the collection at the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library was presented to Jawaharlal Nehru by the artist in 1954, as indicated by a hand-written dedication inside the book. Interestingly, the oil paintings, which were essentially pasted onto the pages (as lithographs), had the images torn off whenever the themes indicated a more seductive treatment of the body (After Bath, Morning Dream). (87) S.G. Thakur Singh, Paintings of Indian Womanhood (Amritsar: Thakur Singh School of Arts, n.d), n.p. (88) Partha Mitter cites a contemporary critic of Mazumdar who notes that his paintings were considered bold and daring because they featured respectable women at a time when women were behind the purdah. The Triumph of Modernism (London: Reaktion, 2007), p. 138. (89) Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Clothing the Goddess: The Modern Contest over Representations of Devi’, in Vidya Dehejia (ed.), Devi: The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art (Washington, DC: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1999), pp. 157–179. (90) See Bannerji, Inventing Subjects, pp. 99–134. (91) Jean Comaroff’s study of the connections between civility, cloth and commerce amid the colonial interactions of the Tswana peoples of Southern Africa is illuminating in underlining the commercial implications of missionary attitudes. See ‘The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject’, in David Howes (ed.), Cross Cultural Consumptions: Global Markets; Local Realities (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 19–38.
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Erotics of the body politic: the naked and the clothed (92) H.M. Stanley, Address to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce (London: W.M. Clowes & Sons, 1884), pp. 12–13 and 30. Cited in Barcan, Nudity, p. 159. (93) For an account of colonial attitudes to the naked body vis-à-vis constructions of the ‘primitive savage’ see Philippa Levine, ‘States of Undress: Nakedness and the Colonial Imagination’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Winter 2008), pp. 189–219. (94) Rudyard Kipling ‘Gunga Din’, in Gunga Din and Other Favorite Poems (New York: Dover, 1990), p. 5. (95) J. Briggs, Letters Addressed to a Young Person in India; Calculated to Afford Instruction for his Conduct in General, and More Especially in his Intercourse with the Natives (London: John Murray, 1828), pp. 25–28. (96) This is discussed by Bernard Cohn, as also by Malcolm Barnard, who recounts the instance of Darwin’s offering of clothing to the natives of Tierra del Fuego in Fashion as Communication (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 51. (97) J. Devika offers a good account of the dress reform related to women in colonial Kerala in ‘The Aesthetic Woman: Re-Forming Female Bodies and Minds in Early Twentieth-Century Keralam’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2 (May 2005), pp. 461–487. (98) Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Octagon, 1982), p. 14.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00014
Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the discourse on light and shadow in two paintings of scholars by Ravi Varma that use chiaroscuro to depict men reading within the interiors of a westernised home. Ravi Varma uses the symbolic qualities of light and shadow to produce private interior spaces, in this case an imagined inner world, where the Nayar matrilineal tharavad (household) is transformed into an intimate space for the cultivation of the (male) self. In step with the contemporary Malayalam novel, the paintings identify the domestic interior as a stage upon which a private life is imagined, where personal space and reflection are brought together to convey an interiority that one typically associates with the bourgeois modern subject. The chapter evaluates how the interior figured in domestic architecture and family life, its implications for gender and social relations and, finally, how a new idea of home emerged in tandem with a territorial imagination fuelled by the new possibilities of travel in late nineteenthcentury Kerala. It argues that chiaroscuro emerges as an effective visual device to produce the fictions of the self-reflective autonomous self, with the light and darks suggesting hidden interiorities and buried subjectivities. Keywords: Masculine, Scholar, Ravi Varma, Chiaroscuro, Reading, Tharavad, Domestic interior, Private life, Travel
The sensible sun, which rises in the East, allows itself to be interiorized, in the evening of its journey, in the eye and the heart of Western man. He summarizes, assumes and achieves the essence of man ‘illuminated by the true light’. (Jacques Derrida, ‘White Mythology’, 1982) To say that desire is part of the infrastructure comes down to saying that subjectivity produces reality. Subjectivity is not an ideological superstructure. (Felix Guattari, ‘Crise de production de subjectivite’, Seminar of 3 April 1984) Page 1 of 29 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings Between 1900 and 1905 Ravi Varma made two paintings of men reading (Plates 17 and 18). The works are unusual, and so different from the mythological paintings and princely portraits that earned Ravi Varma his reputation with patrons and clients as to appear to be the work of another painter. While Ravi Varma was best known for his paintings of love-lorn women gazing winsomely at the viewer, men were rarely presented as idealised figures beyond commissioned portraits. Ravi Varma’s sketch-books feature several examples of men in everyday scenes, so it is evident that he experimented with the idea, but very few seem to have made the transition into a final painting. The two small paintings are not strictly portraits, in the sense that there is no information on their being commissioned, nor do they represent particular individuals; rather, they represent characters within environments. More properly, they are genre paintings that portray the subjects within scenes of contemporary life. At least two other paintings of men exist from the same period: The Retired Soldier (1902) and The Miser (1901), both of which are more anthropological in nature. In the scholar paintings, however, Ravi Varma attempts to go beyond the dominant paradigms of anthropological portraiture or studio portraits of the period in exploring the subjective potential of the Indian man in his private universe, a characterisation that is explored with much empathy and that throws light on the idealised male self in turn-ofthe-century Kerala. The period 1900–5 was an eventful one for Ravi Varma that saw him assume responsibility for his large joint family at Kilimanoor, lose his (p.186) brother and close companion C. Raja Raja Varma and receive the honour of a Kaiser-i-Hind medal from the imperial government. It was also a period of hectic professional activity as he travelled across India to fulfil commissions from princely states and participate in exhibitions across the country. It is one of the bestdocumented periods of Ravi Varma’s career and also saw the publication of an early biography, Ravi Varma, the Indian Artist (1903); we also have access to his day-to-day affairs through a diary kept by his brother.1 In the midst of such momentous personal and professional change, how should we consider these paintings of men seated in leisurely repose within the interiors of homes warmly illuminated by lamplight? The subjects appear at home in the westernised environment and engaged in the self-absorbed act of reading, offering an opportunity to glimpse inside the private space of an upper class home that would have otherwise remained unavailable to foreign eyes. In his discussion of domestic quarters, George Birdwood attested to the fact that such spaces generally remained out of bounds to the visitor: ‘Europeans, as a rule, and all strangers are seen in the public rooms; and only intimate friends in the private apartments.’2 Novels from the colonial period like Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire (The Home and the World, 1919) have described the gendered differentiation of spaces within the Indian home, where the interior chambers were reserved for domestic and family affairs while the outer spaces were available for visiting guests and public affairs. Partha Chatterjee proposed that Indian nationalism emerged from a similar division where colonial mastery in the public realms of statecraft, science or the economy saw an emerging nationalism lay claim to the ‘inner’ spaces of the home and the family, which were invested with maintaining the sanctity of national culture.3 In recent years Chatterjee’s thesis regarding the separation of spaces between a westernised outside and an inner domain bearing the essential marks of cultural identity has been complicated as scholars have described a vibrant vernacular literary culture that negotiated colonial dominance in the public sphere.4 At the same time studies demonstrating colonial influence on homes or public debates on domestic matters have suggested that interior spaces were equally transformed by the colonial encounter.5 In Kerala, J. Devika has argued that Partha Chatterjee’s thesis did not quite apply because the domestic domain was not preserved as a sacred ‘inner space’ outside the bounds of Page 2 of 29 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings the modern state but was the site of major reform and transformation.6 In key legislation like the Malabar Marriage Act (1896) reforms were sought by progressive Nayar men, so the familiar binary of nationalist interests preserving ‘tradition’ and the colonial state’s reformist agenda simply did not hold. Instead, various caste permutations between the Brahmins, the Nayars and the lower castes were far more influential factors in shaping public opinion.7 The simultaneous transformation of the agrarian economy through the creation of a new middle class that chose professions in (p.187) bureaucracy and the law saw domestic life transformed as large joint families were disbanded. With the transformation of family life and property holdings through a series of legislative acts, the home too was imagined anew. Bourgeois identity increasingly defined itself in terms of the home, its collection of objets d’art, its craze for European furniture, plush curtains and rugs. While interior spaces had routinely been represented in Rajput or Mughal painting, these spaces were situated within gardens or fortresses and continuities were drawn between the interior and exterior spaces.8 Ravi Varma’s visualisation of a cloistered interior space excludes any reference to the outside world except through the objects that find their way into the painting – westernised furniture, innovations like lamps that used kerosene to give a brilliant light and the reading material that functions as a window onto the world.9 As in his formal portraits, Ravi Varma’s staging of objects is deliberate, evoking a tastefully decorated upper-class home within which he situates his cosmopolitan reading subjects. It is not accidental that the subjects portrayed are male. Two recent interventions have underlined how colonial modernity saw a realignment of gender relations within the unique feudal structure of the Kerala Nayar tharavad (household) where large extended families lived together and property passed in accordance with matrilineal inheritance laws. G. Arunima’s work has focused on the political and legal reform that saw the dissolution of the matrilineal tharavad in colonial India. She argues that the interventions occurred at the behest of a younger generation of Nayar men whose desire for independent lives led them to break away from the tharavad and to insist on being allowed to inherit a share in the property. Legislative reforms saw marriage norms transformed as men acquired the right to own private property. The social and legal bases for women’s freedoms within the older kinship structures were effectively eroded.10 Meanwhile, J. Devika has examined how gender emerged as the fundamental indicator of difference in late nineteenth-century Kerala as progressive reform in the public sphere envisioned a ‘free’ autonomous subject, reworking caste-based identities of hierarchy and servitude so that spaces of the public and the private were coded anew.11 In placing the man within the deepest interior of the home, Ravi Varma seemingly goes against the grain of popular reform. However, as I will argue, this does not compromise his masculine authority but, in fact, extends it by envisioning new spaces for men within the changing social and domestic landscape. In doing away with the central presence of women (and children) within the home, Ravi Varma imagines a private space inhabited by the solitary figure of the scholar, the only representation of an idealised male subject in all his work. As the large, communal, matrilineal multi-family tharavads based around agriculture in Kerala crumbled by the late nineteenth (p.188) century, younger men increasingly travelled away from home to find careers in distant cities. The home acquired a new prominence in their imagination and nostalgic stories of travel and return in Malayalam literature redefined its place in the social psyche.12
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings The idealisation of the domestic interior as a space for repose and reflection belongs to a wider personalisation of interior spaces that accompanied modernity. As Walter Benjamin writes: The nineteenth century, like no other century, was addicted to dwelling. It conceived the residence as a receptacle for the person and it encased him with all his appurtenances so deeply in the dwelling’s interior that one might be reminded of the inside of a compass case, where the instrument with all its accessories lies embedded in deep, usually violet folds of velvet.13 Bourgeois notions of privacy, domesticity and comfort converged in the modern interior, offering a place for self-reflection. The literature on European modernity has focused largely on the public reorganisation of spaces of Haussman’s Paris, the freedoms of the flâneur and the public anonymity of the streets as central to the modern experience. However, Haussmanisation was also accompanied by an inward turn, into private spaces that were reflected in nineteenthcentury European painting and architecture.14 As Penny Sparke points out, the interior was not just an abstract idea. It was consumed pictorially as a visual artefact, experienced spatially through architecture and materially through the furniture and objects d’art that filled its spaces.15 The interior was particularly suited to the solitary ideals of the scholar. ‘To live in these interiors’, wrote Benjamin ‘was to have woven a dense fabric about oneself, to have secluded oneself within a spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry. From this cavern, one does not like to stir.’16 If the public sphere formed an arena for the exhibition and contestation of identities, the domestic interior was no less crucial to the constitution of the modern self.
Darkness and interiority The portraits of men reading are remarkable not only because they are the only two genre paintings featuring men in an oeuvre that comprises scores of female portraits, but also because they are among the few instances where Ravi Varma experiments specifically with chiaroscuro. While some mythological paintings had also explored the use of light and shadow, these paintings of men reading were studies in indoor lighting and participated in the experimentation with lighting technologies that was making inroads in public culture in early twentieth-century India. East India Company artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had explored the direction of light by (p.189) appending shadows to figures or modelling objects; however, Ravi Varma’s paintings go further in employing gradations of light as a tool to organise pictorial space and invoke a symbolic language of light and dark to relate an experience of modern life. The first work, called The Student (Plate 17), presents a bespectacled man sitting at a table in front of a lantern and immersed in reading a book. The lamp casts its glow upon the upper half of his body, on his face and his book, reflecting off the white garment he wears. In the distant doorway an indistinct figure of a servant waits in the shadows under a smaller lamp. Light here not only demarcates pictorial space between foreground and background but also indicates access to the world of education and reading. Unlike Ravi Varma’s female subjects, who are portrayed in lush landscapes or marbled courtyards, the world represented here is that of the solitary space of the scholar and his realm of books, with the man actively engaged in singleminded intellectual pursuit and not cast in mindless reverie like the painter’s female models.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings The second painting, Man Reading a Newspaper (Plate 18), presents a young man reading a newspaper within the interior of an upper-class home. The painting on the wall, the furnishings and the furniture all underline the westernised home of the subject. A seated figure in the foreground appears to be holding a translucent fan in his left hand while a large ceiling punkah hovers above. Like the first painting, it is a remarkable experiment in the possibilities of using light and shadow within interior spaces, the large shadow of the reader’s head on the wall creating a dramatic diagonal between the three heads.
17 Ravi Varma, The Student, c. 1901
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings Chiaroscuro appears anachronistic in narratives of modern art, which is characterised by a stepping out from the shackles of the studio and the darkened ground of the painting to experiment anew with natural light. In dispensing with the layered canvas and its associations with inherited patterns and enabling the viewer to apprehend the qualities of natural light for themselves, modern art has kept alive a Romantic privileging of immediacy in pleinair painting. Yet this discourse on plein-air painting has rarely extended to the works of travelling artists and their encounter with tropical light – a feature reflected abundantly in Orientalist painting of the nineteenth century.17 Against these claims of immediacy in plein-air painting, recent scholarship on the ascendance of Paris as the ‘city of light’ has explored experiments with indoor lighting by nineteenth-century Parisian painters, showing them to be equally fascinated with the tonal range and luminous effects afforded by the rapidly changing technologies of artificial
18 Ravi Varma, Man Reading a Newspaper, c. 1904
lighting.18 A displacement of the privilege accorded to natural light in narratives of modernism allows us to approach chiaroscuro anew, to evaluate its abilities to shape pictorial space through modern technologies of illumination. Chiaroscuro was essentially a method for describing pictorial space, and (p.190) beyond questions of natural or artificial light it speaks to the instrumentalisation of light for the production of spaces upon the picture plane. In India chiaroscuro was a newly learned device for painters in the late nineteenth century and its treatment of pictorial space appeared ‘modern’ to Indian artists in that it presented illusionist space. Artists like Ravi Varma imbibed techniques of chiaroscuro from academic prints that were made accessible in artists’ journals and magazines and even experimented with copies from the collections of the palaces at Mysore and Baroda, which had invested in European art. C. Raja Raja Varma attested to spending hours admiring the sculpture and paintings housed in Baroda’s Laxmi Vilas palace in 1895, which included a copy in oils of J.J. Benjamin-Constant’s Judith.19 Ravi Varma’s copy of the painting mimics the darkened ground typical of ‘old master’ renditions of the theme, dramatically juxtaposed against the pale skin of Judith’s breasts. While this explanation of Ravi Varma’s use of chiaroscuro risks the familiar dangers of a belated non-Western imitation of European academic practices, my contention here is that in the choice of a contemporary subject, the solitary practice of reading and the focus on the kerosene lantern, the use of chiaroscuro also speaks of experiments with new lighting technologies that exploited the possibilities of indoor lighting. Royal palaces like those at Baroda and Mysore were amongst the first to use artificial lighting for both domestic and ceremonial purposes, and in 1903 the ballroom of Laxmi Vilas palace was fitted with as many as twelve crystal chandeliers lit Page 6 of 29 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings by electricity, a surfeit noted in accounts that speak of one as the norm for a ballroom of its size.20 The palace at Trivandrum too was lit by ‘a row of glass chandeliers hung from the ceiling and there were standing lamps on the tables besides’.21 The lighting technologies offered to customers within imperial economic circuits catered both to elite tastes in palaces with ornamental lighting and to more modest homes where the bright light of the kerosene lamp replaced the traditional coconut-oil lamps (Figure 5.1). The transformation of spaces by new lighting technologies was not limited to the indoors. Street lighting had transitioned from oil to gas in the middle of the nineteenth century. In July 1857 the first gas lights were introduced in Calcutta, where the lighting of fifty-five lamps on the streets extending from Bow Bazaar to Harrington Street was a moment of great celebration. The managing director of the Oriental Gas Company, which had been awarded the contract, reported the ‘wonderment and excitement’: ‘For the first week, the crowds which paraded the streets were immense, and their conjectures as to the cause of the light were amusing. Even now, crowds assemble every evening at each end, and run along the line with the lamplighter, setting up a shout of astonishment as he applies his lantern to the burner.’22 Parts of Bombay, including the city centre, were electrified in 1882, a mere three years after Edison’s public demonstration of the electric bulb at Menlo Park in 1879. (p.191)
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (p.192) Trivandrum adopted electricity much later, in 1929, but its streets were lit by gas in 1898 and by 1906, when Ravi Varma died, more than seven hundred lamps lit up all the major streets of the town. In 1889 proposals to light up the Mysore palace with electric lighting included incandescent lamps, arc lamps and the largest projector lamp in India of 5,000 candle-power, which promised to illuminate an area of between sixty and eighty miles, casting shadows which could be seen as far as Madras and Ootacamund.23 The infrastructural network of lighting technologies extended both outwards into public projects of street illumination and into homes, with implications for civic and communal life, introducing new relationships between the home and the world and facilitating the production of spaces such as those indicated in the two paintings by Ravi Varma. Film scholarship has examined the production of a visual aesthetics of light and shadow that updates the art-historical notion of chiaroscuro with the spaces and technologies of industrial modernity.24 Exploring urban spaces in the mid-twentieth century through narratives that were classified as melodramas or thrillers, noir was a late appellation granted to the genre 25
5.1 Advertising images of lighting technologies, Indian Industries and Power, 1912–13
in the 1970s. Yet, as was argued in the Introduction of this book, the chiaroscuric production of urban space was a staple feature of urban writing and imagery in the nineteenth century as Paris and London were lit up by gas and Lahore and Bombay served as fodder for the reveries of the nocturnal flâneur in the writings of Rudyard Kipling or illustrations by Dhurandhar (see Introduction). As with urban noir, in both paintings the play between light and dark produces spaces. That is to say, following Henri Lefebvre, the light does not reflect an already existing space but produces it socially – as a product of perceived, conceived and lived spaces.26 Ravi Varma uses chiaroscuro not merely as an innovative tool to add to the pictorial realism of the scene but as a dramatic device that endows an everyday scene with a greater theatricality. The lights and darks dramatise the relaxed posture and slumped body while retaining a pronounced intimacy that is absent in Ravi Varma’s formal portraits. The darkness is particularly suited to the portrayal of depth and interiority and, despite the apparent disregard for the viewer, one might say that both paintings are theatricalised presentations of the self. Unlike the fully visible frontal Page 8 of 29 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings anthropological portrait, the light and dark produce new patterns of visibility, folding the self into hidden interiorities and public visibilities, so that even as the face features as the visible index of the self cast into the light, the simultaneous disavowal of the viewer and the absorption in the book propose a latent depth that is inaccessible to the eye. Deleuze describes subjectivisation as a process of such an endless folding of the self, where the inside of thought is produced by a doubling of the exterior world through mechanisms of power.27 This illusion of depth does not figure upon the subject alone but extends to the pictorial space around (p.193) him as light modulates the space to produce depth between foreground and background. The notion of the self in nineteenth-century Kerala has been the subject of much literary and historical analysis, and in its evocation of depth and interiority Ravi Varma’s paintings participated in the fashioning of a modern identity in Kerala that was simultaneously expressed in the Malayalam novel.28 Sudipta Kaviraj has argued that the idea of ‘private life’ is a historical construction of Western modernity, and although some notions of privacy existed in pre-modern Indian life (personal religious reflection, for example) the idea of a subjective interiority linked with the individual was particularly new in the Indian context in the late nineteenth century. Given voice in the realist novel or autobiographies, it mediated earlier forms of self-expression to forge new relationships between the individual and his world that approximated to what Kaviraj calls ‘the invention of private life’.29 Ravi Varma’s portraits exploit chiaroscuro to invent such subjective inner worlds figured upon the self-absorbed reading subjects and situated in a personal intimate space produced by lights and shadows. After all, private life was invented not only through personalised acts of reading and writing given voice within the literary sphere but also within the home, burrowed deep within its interior. If the darkness is an encouragement to consider depth and reflection as marks of the modern individual, illumination is clearly associated with the act of reading. The singular importance accorded to education, particularly English education, was in keeping with a recognition that it opened up possibilities for social mobility, both for lower-caste individuals exploited by the caste hierarchy and for the middle-class, who sought careers in law and the administrative services. In the lower-caste Malayalam novel Saraswativijayam (The Triumph of Knowledge) of 1892, Potheri Kunhambu tells the tale of an untouchable Pulaya who rose to become a judge presiding over a trial involving a Nambudri Brahmin who had many years earlier attempted to kill the Pulaya for the indignity of singing in his presence. ‘Education is the greatest wealth of all,’ declared Kunhambu in the epigraph, drawing upon the lessons preached by the Christian missionary reform movement in Kerala, which championed the cause of lower-caste education.30 The middle-class novel Indulekha (1889) likewise framed its entire plot within the importance of an English education for the younger members of the family – an initiative that was rebuffed by the older family guardians, with the conflict providing the basis for the tension in the novel between tradition and modernity.31 Both novels have been crucial for thinking about modernity and identity in Kerala, and Ravi Varma was probably acquainted with them.32 Drawing upon a symbolic vocabulary of light and reading, Ravi Varma immediately situates his subjects within the dialogues and debates of turn-of-the-century Kerala. In an undated painting of Ravi Varma by his brother C. Raja Raja Varma, (p.194) titled Ravi Varma in Mourning (Plate 19), he is shown in a similar pose to the readers, a bearded figure bent over a book as the glow of a hidden lamp illuminates his face and upper body. Rupika Chawla has disputed the claims that the figure is indeed Ravi Varma mourning the death of his uncle in 1883, noting the discrepancy between Ravi Varma’s age at that time (35) and the older, greying subject of the portrait.33 However, Ravi Varma spent a year in mourning in 1896 when his
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings maternal uncle Raja Raja Varma died, and possibly also mourned the death of his cousin Kochu Koil Thampuran who died in 1903, after which he became head of the family.34 Raja Raja Varma could well be referencing any one of these events, or even recalling the mourning scene at a later date, but the 1903 date would place the painting in conjunction with Ravi Varma’s own experiments with light and shadow. If we do accept that it is indeed Ravi Varma depicted here, then the two scholar portraits assume an autobiographical dimension that not only suggests that the paintings were based upon personal experiences of the intimate pleasures of reading but also attests to a desire for privacy afforded within the domain of the bustling tharavad, taking refuge in the prescribed rituals for mourning.35 These paintings of men reading are not the only examples of reading subjects from the colonial period. An undated painting by the contemporary Parsi artist Pestonjee Bomanjee (1851–1938) depicted a young man seated upon a chair, facing the viewer and reading a newspaper (Plate 20). Bomanjee’s instruction at the J.J. School of Art in Bombay had trained him in the academic realism that was popular amongst the students and faculty at the art school and his painting bears the marks of that orientation. Like Ravi Varma’s paintings, it 19 C. Raja Raja Varma, Ravi Varma in has very few props and is similarly lit, with Mourning, c. 1901 the glow upon the man’s face even though the source of the light is not made evident in the painting. The canvas upon the easel on the extreme right of the painting bears a landscape, pointing to the profession of the subject as an educated, cultured artist. The Goan painter Antonio Xavier Trindade (1870–1935), who was also trained at the J.J. School of Art, similarly excelled in intimate portrayals of the interiors of the home. One painting depicting children gathered around a table and studying by the light of a lamp makes use of a dramatic light and shadow that suggests a common vocabulary for representing reading. It is quite possible that Ravi Varma borrowed from the Bombay artists – he had certainly seen their work at exhibitions and even in their studios; however, I have been unable to ascertain any evidence of a direct correspondence between them. What is pertinent here is the common focus on reading as a sign of a cultured mind and its promises of social mobility. Ravi Varma’s focus on the pleasures of the book and the private act of reading is a reminder of the explosion in print cultures that accompanied modernity in nineteenthcentury India. The boom in commercial publishing resulted in a wide variety of texts that not only drew from elite literary and (p. 195)
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings poetic sources but also included massproduced entertainment literature and the scribal culture associated with the ‘document raj’ of governmental
20 Pestonjee Bomanjee, At Rest, c. 1900
bureaucracy.36 These texts intervened in a pre-print world of oral performance and manuscript culture, producing new literary habits, but did not entirely replace it. A photograph of Ravi Varma seated in his studio in Kilimanoor portrays the traditional mode of learning – the recitation of Pauranik texts by an itinerant (Figure 5.2).37 In his dhoti and with an uncovered chest he sits on the floor in the company of two men, one of whom reads aloud (from a book) to him. Another sketch entitled ‘Reading the Palm 5.2 Unknown photographer, ‘Listening to a Purana Recitation’, c. 1890s Leaves’ in his diaries includes a dhoti-clad man seated on the ground and holding a palm-leaf manuscript in his left hand (Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum). That Ravi Varma was intimately acquainted with and enjoyed a performative tradition of textual recitation and yet chose to focus on books in his paintings points to his own predilection for a world where books were associated with an elite. This is underlined in portraits where they frequently serve as props – his portrait of Kerala Verma includes a leather-bound volume of ‘Byron’s Poetical Works’ (Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum), or his portrait of Maharani Lakshmibai includes books with titles like ‘Near Home or Europe Described’ and ‘The Young Lady’s Book’ (Sri Chitra Art Gallery, Trivandrum).38 Despite the sparse interiors of the paintings where reading serves as the primary activity, the dramatic lights and darks situate the portraits of the (p.196) reading men within homes that provide places for privacy and reflection. What did interior spaces look like in nineteenthcentury Kerala? And if, as Sudipta Kaviraj argues, private life was ‘invented’, what spaces did it inhabit? My analysis examines how private space figured in domestic architecture and family life, its implications for gender and social relations and, finally, how a new idea of home emerged in tandem with a territorial imagination fuelled by the new possibilities of travel in late nineteenth-century Kerala.
Interior spaces The most striking visual images of interior spaces in nineteenth-century India are undoubtedly Deen Dayal’s photographs of the opulent palaces that he was invited to document (Figure 5.3). Crammed with crystal chandeliers, marble statuary, imported furniture and carpets, they portray the manner in which Indian royalty was adopting European tastes in decorating interior spaces. Ravi Varma was a frequent guest at the palaces of the rulers of Mysore and Baroda and of the Nizam of Hyderabad, all of whom spent extravagantly in furnishing their many homes and public buildings. In fact, Ravi Varma’s commissions of royal portraits and mythological paintings (at Mysore and
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (p.197) Baroda) formed part of the budget for decorating these palaces. However, it was not just royalty that adopted these trends but elite collectors like Raja Rajendra Mallick, whose Marble Palace in Calcutta was stocked with academic art, carpets and marble statuary, or the merchant R.K. Jalan, whose collection included Chinese ceramic ware and French tapestry and furniture in his Quila House in Patna.39 Lord Curzon, the British viceroy, denounced the craze fuelled by ‘globe trotters and curio hunters’ that had a 5.3 Lala Deen Dayal, ‘A drawing room in the negative impact on Indian art and Bashir Bagh Palace in Hyderabad’, handicrafts. ‘So long as they prefer to fill photograph, c. 1880s their palaces with flaming Brussels carpets, with Tottenham Court Road furniture, with cheap Italian mosaics, with French oleographs, with Austrian lustres, and with German tissues and cheap brocades, I fear there is not much hope,’ he declared.40 The enthusiasm for Western academic art and interior furnishings was also expressed in the contemporary Malayalam novel. In her study of the early novel G. Arunima discusses the transformation of the home as an exhibition space for such ‘baubles of modernity’ and points out that many early Malayalam novels (Indulekha, Meenakshi, Lakshmikeshavam) were set within bourgeois Victorianised homes.41 In fact, a distinction is marked between the valuable objects of an earlier world – golden shawls, boxes of gold and silver, golden watches – and the more ‘English objects’ that the heroine Indulekha prefers.42 In a description of the stately mansion in Calcutta the author goes into raptures, describing the beautiful crystal chandeliers, the velvet beds, gilt statues and fountains that graced the mansion, and transport him into a ‘land of fantasy’.43 While Ravi Varma’s mythological paintings were frequently set within these sumptuous spaces with marble columns and silk curtains that seek to bridge the gap between the ancient India that he recalled and contemporary tastes, the two paintings of men reading are set within more austere settings, with minimal props that are nevertheless distinct and personalised. The painting of the scholar indicates him seated upon a chair and reading at a desk; in the second work the room contains several pieces of furniture – at least two upholstered chairs, a writing desk and an upholstered settee upon which the reader sits. The westernised furniture is striking, if only by its very presence. If elite homes were crammed with objets d’art, British accounts of the period note with astonishment the utter lack of furniture in middle- and lower-class Indian homes.44 In this, Nayar homes were no different from their North Indian counterparts. A census report of Travancore from 1871 describes the furniture in Nayar homes as ‘scanty’, comprising a cot and a few mats as well as bronze lamps and pitchers.45 Of the spacious tharavad in Marthanda Varma, Pillai writes: ‘Although the family was amongst the richest of the land, most of the rooms in the house were not furnished in a style suitable for healthy occupation.’46 Ravi Varma’s subjects occupy a middle ground (p.198) between an obsessive craze for English goods and an ‘artful’ fashioning of the interior that was nevertheless furnished entirely with westernised objects.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings The intimacy and familiarity of the subject within the space is a marked departure from the many staged mythological scenes or studio portraits that abound in Ravi Varma’s oeuvre. The stiff postures and awkward figure–ground relationships that were the result of painting the backdrops separately from the figures in the majority of his works have inspired cheeky interpretations by contemporary artists precisely for their clumsy integration of the figure into the background space.47 In these paintings, however, the subjects appear comfortably ensconced, blending smoothly with the interior and its modern baubles. There is little evidence to suggest such a personalisation of interior spaces. Such a demarcation of private spaces for individuals within the home would have been relatively uncommon in nineteenth-century vernacular architecture, where an easy communion between the outside and the inside prevailed. Moreover, interior spaces were polyvalent, with spaces and objects shared amongst joint family members and little differentiation between the functions of the individual rooms. ‘[S]ince no part belonged to anyone, it never had a personal quality, it contained no pictures or décor selected and put in place according to any one person’s taste, in short, the household and all it contained was relatively “impersonal”, including its architecture.’48 In Ravi Varma’s native Travancore the typical Nayar home was situated within the large compound of a tharavad, the term serving to describe both the matrilineal kinship structure and the particular architecture that housed these families. Wealthy Nayar homes were constructed around a number of open courtyards (nalukettu) that let in the light and employed beautifully carved wooden panelling to screen out the sun. Large tharavads comprised several smaller separate buildings and suites secluded for the use of individual households comprising a married woman and her children (tavazhis), and this allowed for a fluid movement between the more public spaces of the larger family and the somewhat more private spaces.49 All men, except for the head of the household (karanavan), who lived with his family, were relegated to common bachelor rooms or dormitories which provided little space other than for sleeping. Unlike the women’s spaces, which formed the heart of the household, the men’s chambers were minimally connected, being accessible only via the common public spaces, often limited to the front courtyards and living spaces directly behind them, while the interior bedrooms, storage rooms and religious spaces were reserved for the women.50 At Kilimanoor (Ravi Varma’s ancestral home) there were separate apartments for the women, and even common spaces such as the performance arena where Kathakali dances were held had separate chambers for women. Despite the gendered segregation of spaces, it is important to note that even (p.199) these chambers were not personalised and allowed access to different publics, including household servants (of the authorised caste), family members and children. At both Kilimanoor and Mavelikkara (his wife’s tharavad) Ravi Varma had his own studio space that may have provided him a solitary haven from the daily bustle of the tharavad. Regardless of his personal situation, which also included temporary homes (and studios) in Bombay and Madras, amongst other Indian cities, the two paintings posit a tension between the communal character of the household, the lack of access for men to the interior spaces that was undoubtedly the prevailing norm and the deeply personal act of reading within the comfort of the home. Contemporary Malayalam novels affirmed the tharavad as a hub of activity, bustling with servants, extended family members and guests. In the historical novel Marthanda Varma (1891) the author, C.V. Raman Pillai, situates much of the action within the spaces of a sprawling Nayar tharavad that is described as spacious and well ventilated, with courtyards including separate chambers for women, guest rooms, an armoury for weapons, a temple for the household gods
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings and secret cellars and tunnels.51 However, the contemporary Malayalam novels indicate a predilection for private spaces, and in Indulekha we are made aware of the heroine’s apartment, its tasteful décor and her suitors’ ritualised access to it. This new idealisation of personalised spaces within the home is repeated in the two paintings. A reading of the paintings as evocative of domestic life in Malabar is therefore not borne out by the architectural evidence and there is no suggestion that Ravi Varma is indeed referring to his own home in these paintings, since they depict spaces that are not in any way identifiable with the typical tharavad. C. Raja Raja Varma writes of the features that characterise a Malayali home:52 ‘the paintings, the huge elephant’s tusks, the ivory knick knacks, nay the very beams and door posts of massive teak’, and it is clear that Ravi Varma makes no effort to include any of these in the paintings.53 If dress and jewellery signified caste and ethnic identity in female portraits, the deliberate representation of an ambiguous space to represent the men spoke to the experience of Nayar men like Ravi Varma who had travelled the breadth of the country and had access to the more westernised, urbane spaces afforded in the cities, transcending regional identity for a more cosmopolitan one.54 The simple attire indicates an easy adoption of Western articles of clothing like the shirt, along with the achkan and mundu, and points to the changing sartorial tastes of Indian men as they adapted items like shirts to suit their own stylistic preferences.55 The choice is a marked departure from the clothing catalogued in ethnographic studies like that of Francois Balthazar Solvyns (A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings: Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos, 1799) or J. Forbes Watson’s Peoples of India (1868–75), which had catalogued ‘native (p.200) clothing’ as a marker of ethnic identity. Ravi Varma himself experimented with the idea, most notably in his Galaxy of Musicians (1889), where women from the different regional provinces of India were clad in regional dress in a conglomerate that pointed to a nascent idea of the nation (see Chapter 4). The decision to represent the men in a mix of westernised clothing is therefore a deliberate one that eschews such ethnic markers of identity for cosmopolitan ones. The elite – wealthy Parsis in Bombay and minor royalty – had started mixing Indian and European garments by the late nineteenth century and Ravi Varma’s naturalisation of such mixed dress probably relied upon their experiments.56 The moustaches that the subjects sport were quite unfashionable in the day amongst Malayalis and the simple cap that covers the head was likewise not an aspect of the dress of Malayali men.57 Noting the peculiarity of Malayali men in not wearing caps, Raja Raja Varma points to their common presence in Bombay in his travel writings, where to be seen without one would be amiss and cause the person to be taken for a mourner or a convict.58 The basic caps worn by the figures are perhaps more like the ‘made up head-dresses’ that J. Forbes Watson (1827–92) described in his exhaustive catalogue as ‘articles of attire … more in accordance with our European notions of clothing’.59 Unlike the traditional turbans that marked ethnic identity (and Watson catalogues several different examples with a view to assisting the trade in textiles), these were simple skull-caps, sometimes embellished with embroidery or golden thread. The male subject therefore personifies an ideal that is representative of the newly emerging class of educated professionals, rather than being identified by the ethnic markers used for casting female identity. In using the male body to signify the hybridised ideal, Ravi Varma participates in a refashioning of the visible indexes of the modern self that so engaged his contemporaries. In these portraits of the cosmopolitan man who transcends regional affiliation, Ravi Varma appeals to the elite Indian subject that historians have identified as singularly important in the crafting of national identity. A product of European education and tastes, he stood at the intersection of the colonial government and local community, a member of a newly
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings visible middle class that was responsible for creating the dominant forms of nationalist culture, modernising the vernacular discourse within the terms of European institutional structures. As such, the paintings could well serve as posters for Benedict Anderson’s influential thesis on national identity as an ‘imagined community’ fostered through the products of print capitalism, articulating a tension between a public visibility and a private interiority, with the subject nestled deep within the interior of the home while engaging with the public world of letters.60
(p.201) Phallic solitude The very representation of the man within the deepest interior of the home must be viewed in the light of prevailing domestic relations within Kerala in the early twentieth century, when a well-established matrilineal system came under attack from younger Nayar men choosing independent lives. The Nayar tharavad was traditionally a space centred on the women of the house (although the head of the household was the maternal uncle, the karanavan). One explanation for the very emergence of the matrilineal structure was the relative absence of Nayar men, who were recruited as militia in armies far away from their tharavads.61 The women of the tharavad had informal hypergamous marriages with members of the Nambudri Brahmin community who did not reside with them, and the children born of these alliances remained part of their mother’s tharavad, as property passed along the mother’s lineage. While some Nayar men remained within the tharavad and attended to the land holdings and properties held in joint custody, the most highly regarded marital alliances of Nayar women were with the Nambudri Brahmin men.62 By the late nineteenth century the place of the Nayar man within this structure had become increasingly ambiguous. His role in the military had diminished under the colonial system and, increasingly, younger members of the tharavad found jobs in the legal system or the colonial administration, reducing their dependence on the tharavad. In the 1880s a growing disaffection with the family structure of the tharavad had manifested itself, led by younger Nayar men who resented the Nambudri interference in the tharavad. Voiced in newspapers and magazines and also in contemporary Malayalam literature, it pointed to an embarrassment with the ‘promiscuous polyandry’ of the Nayar women, a view that British anthropological accounts had popularised.63 The call for a transformation in the matrilineal structure sought legal reform to garner property rights for men through the Malabar Marriage Act, which was eventually passed in1896. It proposed a nuclear family model that allowed for monogamous conjugal relations with Nayar men and also responded to the needs of modern Nayar men making independent careers for themselves outside the feudal structure of the tharavad. Ravi Varma’s There Comes Papa (1893, Plate 21) intervenes in this debate, with its presentation of a young mother with her child standing within the confines of a westernised home, a dog sitting to her right.64 It is clearly a bourgeois offshoot of contemporary Victorian images of the mother waiting for the father to complete the picture of the small, happy nuclear family. The central figure of the painting is Ravi Varma’s daughter, someone whose own life was spent within the traditional tharavad, yet she is represented here as an icon of the new family ideal.65
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings R. Nandakumar’s reading of There Comes Papa has recalled the absence (p.202) of male figures in Ravi Varma’s paintings, reasoning that it pertains precisely to the absence of a social space for their representation within domestic and family life. Since fathers were never part of the household but merely visited their wives and children, there was never any emotional investment of the father with his family. Socially accepted codes of behaviour between men and their wives and children were distant and formal, based upon rules of decorum dictated by social status and rank. A photograph described as ‘Ravi Varma at home with his wife and eldest daughter’ in N. Balakrishnan Nair’s biography consists of two separate photographs, one of the mother and daughter, the other of Ravi Varma in exactly the same chair in the same spot. Drawing from this representation of family life, Nandakumar proposes that the numerous Ravi Varma paintings of women yearning for their lovers represented a new emotionality invested in marital relationships, missing from previous generations and made possible by the calls for a nuclear family.
21 Ravi Varma, There Comes Papa, c. 1893
Nandakumar notes with amazement the utter absence of male figures in Ravi Varma’s works where even the karanavan (the maternal uncle who served as the head of the tharavad) is never represented despite his frequent portrayal in contemporary Malayalam literature as a despotic figure. This absence is all the more significant because amongst Ravi Varma’s earliest paintings was that of the grand matriarch (Amma Thampuran), and several portraits of the female members of the tharavad exist. Nandakumar concludes that in Ravi Varma’s experience there were no prototypes of men that could serve as an ideal self-image, as he could not identify with either the traditional Malayali man or the common, dhoti-clad image of his fellow countrymen that he rejected from his view of sophisticated urbanity. ‘There was no male image forthcoming that could privilege itself by being identified with that which was ideologically masculine as constituting the artistic self-image.’66 It is unclear why Nandakumar does not consider the pair of images of men reading as serving exactly that ‘artistic self-image’, but it is quite possible to see the overwhelming impact of Ravi Varma’s female figures as occluding the very existence of the few male genre paintings. In fact, showing the men ensconced within the very interior of the home is an attempt to situate the male figure within the domestic space, displacing the primacy of the female figure in the Malayali imagination, while also dismissing the common Victorian association of the woman with home and hearth that is portrayed in There Comes Papa. And yet, the interior spaces represented in both paintings are not so much domestic spaces with the appurtenances of family Page 16 of 29 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings life and children but quiet, secret places inhabited by what Gaston Bachelard has referred to in his analysis of intimate spaces as ‘psychic weight’.67 Bachelard describes the home as an imagined space, as much a product of memories and daydreams as it is of the walls, corridors and cellars that define it. The home ‘is the human being’s first world’ whose (p.203) maternal, protective spaces are kept alive in the imagination, even when they might cease to exist in the real world. Ravi Varma here reimagines the home not as a domestic space with the woman at its centre but as an interior space for the performance of a private life. The absence of women from this space would tend to underline Nandakumar’s thesis regarding the separation of the spaces of men and women in Ravi Varma’s family history. However, it also brings to mind the notion of ‘phallic solitude’ that Henri Lefebvre attributes to modern spaces in the early twentieth century.68 Lefebvre’s description of abstract modernist space associates an aggressive masculinity with the phallic verticality, the authoritarian town planning and the repressive spaces of modern bureaucratic machinery, but one might extend such a phallic solitude to the cloistered space within which the male subject is depicted here. In his discussion of the homosocial spaces of the adda in nineteenth-century Calcutta, Dipesh Chakraborty wrests Lefebvre’s notion of phallic solitude to draw attention to the exclusively male literary culture that fashioned modern lives in the city.69 The exclusion of women from the adda was an aspect of the gendered separation of spaces in traditional Bengali households, where it was necessarily seen as opposed to feminised domestic spaces, coding intellectual spaces as masculine even when they were part of the home.70 Chakraborty’s discussion of adda has emphasised its oral culture as well as its convivial communitarian character; but what of the private solitary spaces of reading and writing that were equally aspects of the literary cosmopolitanism that Chakraborty celebrates? The insertion of the male subject within the interior of the home was not simply a transgression of the gendered separation of spaces but a displacement of the matrilineal structure by a newly instituted patriarchal order. Between 1887 and 1896 the matrilineal household was the site of a protracted battle between the older members of the tharavad with their hierarchical caste values and its younger members who sought individual freedoms, away from the strictures that bound the large, joint family.71 The redefinition of family life that they sought was solemnised by the passage of the Malabar Marriage Act in 1896, which granted Nayar men both property and conjugal rights and is regarded as a signal event in the narrative of Nayar personal identity. In view of this bitter conflict within the home, Ravi Varma’s romanticised presentation of the home in these two paintings takes on an added significance. In Man Reading a Newspaper, rather than depicting the disaffection between the generations that characterised life in the tharavad, Ravi Varma instead presents a harmonious portrait with the older man seated to the left and watching over the younger man reading. In his left hand he presumably wields the hand-held punkah that occupies the centre of the painting, performing a task that would typically have been assigned to the lowliest of servants. (p.204) Ravi Varma does not portray the older man in the guise of the much-reviled figure of the karanavan or maternal uncle, who was known to trivialise the benefits of an English education and forbade the younger members (ananthavaran) from wasting money on it. In Indulekha, the karanavan is portrayed as a crotchety old figure with a vile temper whose dictates are resented by the members of the tharavad and who stands as a member of the old guard refusing to be swayed by the promises of modernity.72 In the painting, on the other hand, the older man’s elegant, long jacket and mundu mark him as a more modern figure and, unlike the karanavan’s disregard for the younger men’s English education, the paternal figure here takes
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings an active interest in the younger man’s education, doting upon his kin by performing the most menial of tasks. He literally takes the back seat here, allowing the younger figure to be cast in the light. The implied indulgent relationship is a criticism of the domineering ways of the karanavan, who was seen as controlling the lives of the younger men of the tharavad, not supporting their educational pursuits or their desires to travel away from the tharavad. In its portrayal of an idealised resolution of a protracted problem within the home, the painting endorses the narrative of individual freedom centred on the progressive male members of the household within which the transformation of the tharavad was cast. The large shadow that falls upon the back wall of the painting is undoubtedly that of the young man reading; however, given that the source of light is obscured, the shadow casts an ambiguity that is disconcerting in that it repeats the shape of the older man’s head. It is tempting to read the shadow as the disembodied presence of the dreaded figure of the karanavan, the ‘head’ of the disintegrated tharavad who exists as the ghost of a past that casts its shadow upon the present. What is more likely, however, in this representation of the elder figure watching over the younger man is Ravi Varma’s own complex position as he assumed the place of the karanavan in his tharavad in Kilimanoor. In 1903, following the death of his cousin Kochu Koil Thampuran, Ravi Varma took over the responsibilities of the large tharavad, which consisted of more than a hundred members. In his biography, Veniyoor noted Ravi Varma’s unhappiness with the assumption of such responsibilities that took away from his painting and travelling, but reported that he eventually submitted to the call of duty.73 The figure seated in the foreground could well be a self-portrait, for the moustache and facial features resemble those of Ravi Varma’s official portrait when he received the Kaiser-i-Hind medal, although what is presented here is a younger version of himself. The easy comfort between the two men speaks of Ravi Varma’s need to distance himself from the stereotype of the repressive karanavan, while the dark silhouette hovering on the wall is an uncanny reminder of his uneasiness in his new role. On the other hand, the large, ambiguous shadow unites the (p.205) common aspirations of the two men who privilege the values of education and the written word in a meeting of minds underlined by their common headgear. Together, the three heads create a dramatic diagonal that draws them into a silent patrilineal alliance that does away with the fraught relationship between the karanavan and the ananthavaran as a thing of the past and presents an idealised vision for the future. What is striking in this presentation of the past, present and future, each notably figured as a man’s head, is the absence of women, given their prominent role as powerful matriarchs within the older system. One could, in turn, point to the case of the ‘missing female’, to rephrase Nandakumar’s intriguing question, and once again I propose that the rejoinder of a gendered separation of spaces does not quite answer for her absence. In the novel Indulekha the heroine is presented as an educated woman fond of reading and capable of holding her own amid her suitors, but she refrains from presenting political views, restricting her wit and learning to literary subjects and musical accomplishments. This view regarding appropriate topics for men and women was echoed in the public sphere, which saw the birth of the genre of the woman’s magazine in Kerala. The Keraleeya Sugunabodhini declared at the very outset, in 1892, ‘We will publish nothing related to politics. Principles, physiology, entertaining tales, writings that energise the moral conscience, stories, Womanly Duty, the science of cookery, music, biographies of ideal women, the history of nations, bookreviews and other such enlightening topics will be published …’74 In a painting by Ravi Varma that is undoubtedly modelled on the character of the heroine Indulekha (Figure 5.4), a reclining
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings Nayar woman is poised upon a velvet couch with a book open in front of her. Like her male counterpart she has a dark-skinned maid attend to her; however, unlike the male portraits of the self-absorbed reader, she submits to the gaze of the viewer, typifying what Hollis Clayson has referred to as ‘absorption light’ in her analysis of prints of women reading in nineteenth-century France.75 In fact, in Man Reading a Newspaper the only prominent decorative motif in the room is a framed painting of a woman, of the kind that Ravi Varma himself excelled in portraying – the sensual mythological heroine. The figure is deliberately indistinct, but the posture relates it to his most celebrated painting of Shakuntala reclining on the grass in the woods and writing a letter to Dushyanta, her lover, on a lotus leaf. Shakuntala Patralekhan (see Plate 16) had won accolades at the Madras Fine Art Exhibition in 1876 and had been acquired by the duke of Buckingham and was also used as the frontispiece for Sir Monier Monier-Williams’ translation of the Sanskrit classic by Kalidasa. Endorsed thus by the cultural elite, this citation of his own work presents the woman as a trophy, to be framed, collected and displayed on the walls of the modern home in a gesture that speaks to his entire body of work. (p.206)
The home and the world The reimagination of the home as an idyllic retreat for the self was at once a response to the dissatisfaction within the tharavad but, in its choice of the reading subject, presented a path by which to escape the confines of the household. The dissolution of the tharavad that saw its younger members seek a career outside was largely dependent upon the social mobility afforded by an English education. The reading subjects of the paintings are emblematic of the new identities fostered by an English education, 5.4 Ravi Varma, Reclining Nair Lady, 1902 men whose tastes are cosmopolitan and who have ventured outside the home and travelled as part of their education, only to return to the sanctuary. The paintings showing the subjects comfortably cocooned are all the more remarkable because they were painted during a period (1900–5) when the Varma brothers were travelling across India for professional reasons, fulfilling commissions, attending to their printing press near Bombay or overseeing their properties within Kerala. The peripatetic brothers were rarely in one city for longer than a few days, sometimes even a few hours, as they criss-crossed the breadth of the nation by train, carriage or boat. Ravi Varma’s sketch-book includes random vignettes from his travels, including scenes of a train, a woman directing a porter with her luggage and street scenes. Raja Raja Varma diligently kept a diary which documented his travels, and even composed a narrative of his journey to (p.207) North India when he and his brother accompanied the prince of Travancore, Marthanda Varma, in 1895. Prior to this, in 1888–89 they had also undertaken a long tour of North India with the express purpose of studying ancient costumes to prepare for a large commission of mythological paintings for the Gaekwad of Baroda. Ravi Varma’s investment in the interior makes sense only in light of his peripatetic life-style and his travels across the nation. The presentation of the secluded interior as a space for repose was a common trope in nineteenth-century Victorian imagery and it has often been interpreted as an
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings anchor for the rootless and alienated subject of modernity.76 Charles Rice argues, however, that the emergence of the interior as a cultural form in the nineteenth century was not simply an answer to the problem of the homelessness of modernity but in fact one of its mechanisms, enacting modern norms of domesticity.77 The modern interior, then, was a paradoxical space that conveyed the desires for stability in a world conditioned by the impossibility of retreat and immersion. Ravi Varma was undoubtedly acquainted with the trope of the bourgeois interior from his subscription to various European artistic periodicals, but it was also a response to the modern experience of anonymous public space.78 Throughout his travels across India, Raja Raja Varma records their stay in transitional public spaces – dharamshalas, guest-houses, dak bungalows, chattrams, they even rented a temporary house in Bombay. The homes in the two paintings are instead invested with a comfort and familiarity that bears the marks of individual presence almost as a denial of the impersonal spaces that were a part of Ravi Varma’s life and travels, imagined anew for the staging of an interior life. C. Raja Raja Varma’s diaries underline the importance of travel, both as a means for professional success and as a kind of cultural education. Carefully noting Ravi Varma’s first trip away from home (a pilgrimage tour of the Mukambika temple on the western coast of Kerala in 1870) as well as subsequent professional travels that they undertook jointly, Raja Raja Varma organised the various journeys under categories of the many native states they visited, places of pilgrimage and worship, hill stations and principal cities.79 Ravi Varma had lamented his inability to travel abroad for fear of losing his caste, but the long list of sites within India indicates the spatial imagination of the upper-caste Malayali gentleman, which now extended beyond its southern province and into more unfamiliar spaces. Contemporary Malayalam literature employed the trope of the journey as an encounter with hetero-topoi where the selfcertainties of the subject were put into question, and the return to the familiarity of the home formed a moment of truth and reconciliation that affirmed selfhood.80 If literary experiments employed the journey as a trope for the constitution of the subject, the Varma brothers’ approach to travel involved the fashioning of a particular kind of subject, the cultured (p.208) man. Raja Raja Varma approvingly excerpts Baron Ampthill’s address to a student convocation in 1903 exhorting Indian men to travel: There are two things, which I should like to recommend in particular to the young men of Southern India as means of increasing and spreading culture. The first is Art, and the second is travel, for as regards both of these things it seems to me that you have still much to learn …Suffice it to say that some form of Arts should be the hobby of every cultured man … New scenes engender new ideas, and I strongly advise you to seize any little opportunity you may have to wander to some place where you can rest your minds by contemplating the beauties of nature or the works of man according as your inclinations prompt you.81 In Raja Raja Varma’s writings, travel is imagined as a cultural education not dissimilar to the aristocratic grand tour in Europe, and in each case it remained the preserve of an elite class not merely because of the costs of travel but also in the particular spatial imagination that it engendered. Curiously enough, Raja Raja Varma’s diary record of places he visited is followed by a list of ‘titled native gentlemen’ whom the brothers knew intimately. That this spatial imagination is closely bound to class identity is indicated in Ravi Varma’s painting The Student, which depicts the subaltern standing in the background shadows under the doorway, on ambiguous territory, at once a part of the household but not fully a member. Dilip Menon’s analysis has asserted that ‘homelessness was an existential fact’ for the lower castes. Unlike the
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings upper-caste novel with its certainties of home and family, the lower-caste novel was characterised by a homelessness that not only spoke of their landless state but also their dependence upon their masters. Moreover, the subaltern’s territorial imagination did not subscribe to given national borders but inhabited pre-modern geographies of oceanic travel, renewed by more modern journeys as indentured labour.82 In The Student a servant in the shadows waits upon the reading gentleman, the dim overhead lamp merely marking out his contours, unlike the warm glow of the lamp that suffuses the scholar’s face. If the world of books and education afforded the gentleman his freedoms, the subaltern’s world was severely circumscribed by his caste restrictions. Kerala’s caste hierarchies were amongst the most stringent in the country, with certain lower castes like Pulayas and Chermas owned as slaves – even their shadow falling upon a higher caste Brahmin was deemed polluting. Household servants in the Nayar tharavad did not belong to these untouchable castes (who, despite the abolition of slavery in 1843, were persecuted) but were often lower-caste shudras. Raja Raja Varma notes four servants who travelled with them on their trips – two Brahmins (to cook and maintain the dietary prescriptions based on their caste), one Varar and one shudra.83 C. Raja Raja Varma’s account of his trip with Prince Marthanda Varma (p.209) (which was published for private circulation) portrays a geography that is both imagined as sacred and unchanging and transformed by technology. In the tour of North India, holy cities like Banaras and Mathura occupy as central a place on their itinerary, as do Darjeeling and Agra. Along the journey Raja Raja Varma notes the sacred mythologies that have haunted places, telling stories like the one about the Tinnevelly Brahmin who constructed an irrigation channel to expiate his sins. Soon thereafter, he extols the virtues of the spinning mill whose use of water power indicates a ‘triumph of art over nature’. The writing mediates a curious middle ground between an archaic notion of the journey as pilgrimage and the modern tourist’s wanderings for siteseeing and pleasure. He prefaces his travelogue with the observation that pilgrimages in the past were fraught with untold dangers of encounters with dacoits and wild beasts, so that those who travelled were never sure of making it back home. In the era of the railway and the telegraph, however, not only had time and distance been annihilated, but even the numbers of pilgrims to the Ganges had increased because of a general feeling of security.84 The sacred geography is in fact animated by technological intervention. After five months on tour in North India, Raja Raja Varma’s sense of relief in reaching home is palpable. Sitting in a Malayali house amid a grove of coconut palms in Ponani, he finds occasion to muse upon his travels where he had seen ‘splendid cities, impregnable fortresses, marble palaces, and golden temples, and yet, nowhere had we seen, except on the Himalayas, such a magnificent natural scenery as in this most favoured of lands’. In a prescient story that anticipates Kerala’s popular contemporary tourist slogan as ‘God’s own country’, he reports a conversation with A. Seshia Sastri (a Tamil Brahmin who had served as the Dewan of Travancore), who had observed that ‘God, after he had created the Universe, formed a land for his own residence – a land which was the miniature of the whole world, a beautiful land of happiness and plenty. That land, was Malabar …’85 The comforts of the home as a space of repose in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings acquire meaning only against the possibilities of travel across the nation – mobilities facilitated by the railways, the brothers’ the professional careers and the dissolution of the tharavad. Both the diary and the travel narrative are exemplary genres for the musings of the private, interiorised self and its encounters with the world and yet, what is remarkable about Raja Raja Varma’s writings is the very absence of any self-expression that might indicate his psychological
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings or emotional life. There is the description of the places visited, a record of the events of the day and the occasional flight of Romantic poetry at the sight of a particularly beautiful natural scene, but little indication at all about his inner motivations or desires. In later years, when he was often struck by migraine-like headaches that rendered him incapacitated during his travels, we are treated to a matter-of-fact description of his symptoms and an oblique reference to Ravi Varma (p.210) instead: ‘My brother feels rather lonely without me in his evening drives.’86 Udaya Kumar has noticed a similar disavowal of the private in Malayalam autobiographies of the period and proposed that, as a public exhibition of the self, the autobiography is but one mode of intervening in a diverse field of public utterances and, rather than seeking for an authentic expressiveness, it is more instructive to view the genre as a performance of selfhood.87
The antarmahal: interiority and subjectivity The crisis of the self that followed the dissolution of the tharavad-centred life has been viewed as inextricably linked to the rise of the Malayalam novel in literary and historical scholarship, but it has been much harder to view the tensions and dissatisfactions with the past in the visual archive, where Ravi Varma presents a harmonious continuity with the past and even contemporary subjects tend to be romanticised. G. Arunima suggests that Ravi Varma’s painting was at odds with the novel in that it failed to produce any images of city life and its promises of anonymity that had so enamoured the novel, despite Ravi Varma’s having spent much time in Bombay.88 Perhaps we need to look away from prototypical urban imagery for an understanding of modernity. As I have argued, imaginations of the home and interiority were no less committed to relating the modern experience. Recent analyses of French painting have similarly rejected the narrative of the ‘Baudelairean boulevardiers’ that has dominated scholarship on modernity, to analyse how masculinity and artistic creativity were mutually implicated within the domestic interior.89 By inscribing the man within the deepest recesses of the tharavad, Ravi Varma reenvisions the modern interior as a space for the cultivation of the male self in a gesture that resonates with the European example, but that also, interestingly, dovetails with the imagination of the creative individual in Bengal in the coming decades. A pen and ink sketch of the Tagore home at Jorasanko (‘The Studio of Abanindranath Tagore Depicted Around 1909–10 at Jorasanko Calcutta’, c. 1920) by Nandalal Bose had chronicled it as a space of creative activity, featuring both private acts of reading as well as shared learning, consonant with the homosocial spaces of the adda.90 Abanindranath Tagore also located the artist within the interior chambers of a house in The Hunchback of Fishbone (1930), proposing an antarmahal, an inner space that harboured creative thought. ‘In a three storied house the production of art was being continued. On the ground floor the artisans (karigars) prepared colours, made the drawings. On the first floor sat the artists and the critics – the rasikas. They judged and enjoyed art. On the second floor sat the artist in his private domain, where he nurtured his art and played with it like a mother. In all three spheres could exist the genius.’91 Ratnabali Chatterjee has viewed Tagore’s work as a (p.211) turning point in staking a place for the autonomous artist, now no longer tied to the networks and social relationships of patrons within feudal society.92 Following this, art historians have appended Tagore’s ideas in The Hunchback of Fishbone to a narrative of artistic autonomy, emblematic of an inward turn associated with artistic individualism.93 However, as I indicate above, there are many reasons to consider Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (or those of his compatriots including Trindade and Bomanjee) as experimenting with questions of interiority and selfhood. As such, this chapter has proposed bourgeois precedents for what has been posed as a singular achievement of Bengali nationalism in imagining the solitary spaces of the creative individual. The recurrence of this trope of artistic individualism across India (Bombay, Kilimanoor, Calcutta) suggests that such an Page 22 of 29 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings imagination of creative selfhood might have been a broader phenomenon, raising the question of how it might equally be indebted to the imperial visual economy where practices of reading converged in illuminated interiors crowded with the ‘baubles of modernity’ to fashion such portraits of subjective interiority. Ravi Varma’s paintings of men reading explore this space of repose using new technologies of light to imagine the drama of the self, between public visibilities and hidden interiorities. The notion of the self evoked here is one that corresponds to the European subject of modernity, with its metaphysics of depth and a sovereignty determined by consciousness – aspects underlined in the quiet acts of reading. However, as I have argued, the idea of a private life evoked here is an idealised artistic self-image belied by the architectural and literary evidence, an invention of private life in Sudipta Kaviraj’s terms. Moreover, despite the evocation of subjectivity and interiority as key aspects of this sovereign self, both paintings feature attendant figures, a doubling that undoes claims to autonomy, an aspect that I will examine in the next chapter focusing on the painting of the reading scholar. Notes: (1) C. Raja Raja Varma’s diaries have been published as Raja Ravi Varma: Portrait of an Artist: The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma, edited by Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). (2) Sir George Christopher Molesworth Birdwood, Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878: Handbook to the British Indian Section (London: Offices of the Royal Commission, 1878), p. 76. (3) Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 3–13. (4) On vernacular print culture see, G. Arunima, ‘Imagining Communities – Differently: Print, Language and the (Public Sphere) in Colonial Kerala’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2006), pp. 63–76 and Francesca Orsini for an example of the Hindi public sphere. Francesca Orsini, The Hindi Public Sphere (1920–1940): Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Mary Beth Heston has proposed a mixed public sphere in Kerala based on an architectural aesthetic that reflected the tastes of both the native elite as well as Europeans. Mary Beth Heston, ‘Mixed Messages in a New “Public” Travancore: Building the Capital 1860–1880’, Art History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (2008), pp. 211–247. (5) See Robin D. Jones, Interiors of Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 129–133 and Dipesh Chakraborty, ‘The Difference-deferral of (a) Colonial Modernity: Public Debates on Domesticity in British Bengal’, History Workshop, Vol. 36 (1993), pp. 1–34. (6) J. Devika, ‘Negotiating Women’s Social Space: Public Debates on Gender in Early Modern Kerala, India’, Inter Asia Cultural Studies, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2003), pp. 43–61. (7) See Dilip Menon, ‘No, Not the Nation: Lower Caste Malayalam Novels of the Nineteenth Century’, in Meenakshi Mukherjee (ed.), Early Novels in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), pp. 41–72.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (8) For an analysis of how Kangra painting employs narrative and visual strategies in engaging the sakhi (female companion) to connect the inner world of the nayika with the outside world of her lover, see Molly Emma Aitken, ‘Spectatorship and Femininity in Kangra Style Painting’, in Vidya Dehejia (ed.), Representing the Body: Gender Issues in Indian Art (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1997), pp. 83–101. (9) Gas lamps were also in use, imported from Germany at the time, as indicated by Raja Raja Varma in his diary. (10) G. Arunima, There Comes Papa: Colonialism and the Transformation of Matriliny in Kerala, Malabar c. 1850–1940 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2003). (11) Devika, ‘Negotiating Women’s Social Space’, pp. 47–48. A more detailed enunciation of her argument is found in J. Devika, Engendering Individuals: The Language of Re-forming in Early Twentieth Century Keralam (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007). (12) Dilip Menon addresses the role of travel in Saraswativijayam in the Afterword to his translation of the book. Potheri Kunhambu, Saraswativijayam, trans. Dilip Menon (New Delhi: The Book Review Literary Trust, 2002), pp. 106–113. Udaya Kumar references the trope of the journey in Indulekha in ‘Seeing and Reading: The Early Malayalam Novel and Some Questions of Visibility’, in Meenakshi Mukherjee (ed.), Early Novels in India (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), pp. 161–192. (13) Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 220. (14) See for instance, Susan Sidlauskus, Body, Place, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Painting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth Centry Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Charles Rice, Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (London and New York: Routledge, 2007); The Darker Side of Light: The Arts of Privacy, 1850–1900, ed. Peter Parshall (Farnham and Washington, DC: Ashgate and National Gallery of Art, 2009). (15) Penny Sparke, The Modern Interior (London: Reaktion, 2008), p. 13. (16) Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 216. (17) One notable exception has been Marc Goetlieb’s essay, ‘Figures of Sublimity in Orientalist Painting’, in Elizabeth Cropper (ed.), Dialogues in Art History from Mesopotamian to Modern: Readings for a New Century (New Haven and London: National Gallery of Art, 2009), pp. 317– 342. (18) Hollis Clayson, Illuminated Paris: Essays on Art and Lighting in the Belle Epoque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019). (19) C. Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India of His Highness Prince Martanda Varma, of Travancore (Trivandrum: Education Societies Steam Press, 1896), pp. 40– 41. An earlier version of this chapter, published in Art History, Vol. 37, No. 3, pp. 510–535, used page numbers from a draft copy of Raja Raja Varma’s narrative in the possession of the Kilimanoor family. This chapter uses page numbers from the published version.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (20) Edmund Russell, ‘The Court of the Rajahs’, Everybody’s Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 2 (February 1903), pp. 99–113. (21) Sir William Denison, Varieties of Vice Regal Life, Vol. 2 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1870), p. 210. (22) ‘Gas Lighting in Calcutta’, Journal of the Society of Arts, Vol. 5 (11 September 1857), pp. 590–591. (23) The Electrician, 26 April 1889, p. 699. (24) See Patrick Keating, ‘Film Noir and the Culture of Electric Light’, Film History, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2015), pp. 58–84. (25) See for instance, Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). (26) Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). (27) Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Sean Hand (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press, 2006), pp. 94–123. (28) See, for instance, the construction of the modern self in Udaya Kumar, ‘Self, Body and Inner Sense: Some Reflections on Sree Narayan Guru and Kumaran Asan’, Studies in History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1997), pp. 247–270 and Dilip Menon, ‘No, Not the Nation: Lower Caste Malayalam Novels of the Nineteenth Century’, in Meenakshi Mukherjee (ed.), Early Novels in India (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2002), pp. 41–72. (29) Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Invention of Private Life’, in David Arnold and Stuart Blackburn (eds), Telling Lives in India: Biography, Autobiography and Life History (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), pp. 83–115. (30) Christian missionaries frequently drew upon metaphors of light to describe their role in India. See, for example, Thomas Whitehouse, Lingerings of Light in a Dark Land: Researches into the Syrian Church of Malabar (London: William Brown and Co., 1873). (31) See G. Arunima, ‘Writing Culture: Of Modernity and the Malayalam Novel’, Studies in History, Vol. 13, No. 1 (January–June 1997), pp. 271–290. (32) This is a conjecture based on the popularity of the novels and his interest in reading subjects as there is very little mention of Malayalam literature in Raja Raja Varma’s diaries, although he routinely chronicles his library visits and his English reading materials. (33) Rupika Chawla, Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India (Ahmedabad: Mapin, 2010), p. 40. (34) After the reference to the death of Kochu Koil Thampuran in Raja Raja Varma’s diary there is, in fact, no entry for the fourteen days between 30 March and 12 April 1903. One might surmise that the lapse concurred with an abbreviated mourning ritual of fourteen days instead of the customary year. Neumayer and Schelberger, Raja Ravi Varma, p. 158.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (35) This is complicated by the fact that the scholar in the first portrait has been identified as C. Raja Raja Varma by Neumayer and Schelberger. Although I have not been able to find corroborating evidence for the claim, the portrayal of each other as scholars rather than as painters is an interesting choice. (36) See Francesca Orsini, Print and Pleasure: Popular Literature and Entertaining Fictions in Colonial North India (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2009) and Bhavani Raman, Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012). (37) I am grateful to Nandakumar Raman for encouraging me to consider this. (38) Near Home or the Countries of Europe Described (London: Hatchard & Co., 1866) by Favell Lee Mortimer was an educational manual for children, which forcefully endorsed the values of geographical knowledge. The Young Lady’s Book: A Manual of Elegant Recreations, Exercises and Pursuits (London: Vizetally, Branston & Co., 1829) included a lengthy section on painting as a suitable activity for cultivated women, with detailed instructions on how to manage light and shadow. It proposes that students practise with a lamp rather than a candle because of the steadiness of its source of light (p. 355). (39) For an interesting account of the ambiguous place of western furniture in Bengali homes and novels see Supriya Chaudhury, ‘Phantasmagorias of the Interior: Furniture, Modernity and Early Bengali Fiction’, Journal of Victorian Culture, Vol. 15, No. 2 (2010), pp. 173–193. (40) This was part of a speech delivered by Lord Curzon at the inauguration of an Indian art exhibition that accompanied the Delhi Durbar in 1902. Lord Curzon in India: Being a Selection from His Speeches as Viceroy and Governor General of India (London: Macmillan & Co., 1906), p. 207. (41) The remark was included in a paper presented at a workshop on Cultures and Empires, Stanford University, February 1999. G. Arunima, ‘Fantasies, Phantoms and Funny Jokes: The “City” and Colonial Modernity.’ (42) Kumar, ‘Seeing and Reading’, p. 165. (43) O.C. Menon, Indulekha, trans. Anitha Devasia (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 167–168. (44) Jones, Interiors of Empire, pp. 129–133. (45) Report on the Census of Travancore (Trivandrum: Government Press, 1876), p. 124. (46) C.V. Raman Pillai, Marthanda Varma, trans. B.K. Menon (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1998), p. 42. (47) See contemporary artists N. Pushpamala and Clare Arni’s series Native Women of South India – Manners and Customs (2000–4). They single out two works by Raja Ravi Varma and one by his brother, Raja Raja Varma: Lady in Moonlight, Lakshmi and Returning from the Tank. (48) V.S. Pramar, A Social History of Indian Architecture (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 48.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (49) Samuel Mateer, The Land of Charity: A Descriptive Account of Travancore and its People (London: J. Snow & Co., 1871), p. 54. (50) For the impact of matriliny on architecture, see Balakrishnan Menon Parameswaran, ‘Matriliny and Domestic Morphology: A Study of the Nair Tarawads of Malabar’, MA thesis, McGill University, 1998 (51) Raman Pillai, Marthanda Varma, p. 42. (52) The notion of a ‘Malayali’ identity commonly appears in the writings of the period, including Raja Raja Varma and Potheri Kunhambu. In Kunhambu’s novel it does not displace caste categories, but nevertheless envisions a broad-based cultural identity premised upon territorial and linguistic grounds. (53) Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India, p. 16. Ravi Varma had in fact started construction on a new building that blended westernised elements beside his studio at Killimanoor, but died while the construction was still in its early stages. (54) Both Geeta Kapur and R. Nandakumar make this point in their respective essays. Geeta Kapur, ‘Ravi Varma: Representational Dilemmas of a Nineteenth Century Indian Painter’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 17–18 (1989), pp. 59–80 and R. Nandakumar, ‘Raja Ravi Varma in the Realm of the Public’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 27–28 (1995), pp. 41–56. (55) A US trade report from 1915 notes how Indians were most particular about stylistic details like the depth and shape of the cuff or the length of the sleeve and preferred to have native tailors stitch their clothes for them rather than buy them. Henry D. Baker, British India with Notes on Ceylon, Afghanistan and Tibet, Special Consular Reports, Vol. 72 (Washington, DC: Department of Commerce, 1915), p. 261. (56) Emma Tarlo, Clothing Matters: Dress and Identity in India (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996), p. 50. (57) Potheri Kunhambu notes the Malayali dislike for the moustache in Saraswativijayam, p. 31. (58) Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India, p. 111. (59) J. Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India (London: Printed for the India Office, by George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1866), p. 54. (60) Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983). (61) Kathleen Gough, quoted in Arunima, There Comes Papa, p. 5. (62) An indication of this is seen in Indulekha, where a Nambudri suitor is proposed for Indulekha despite his obvious uncouth character or a consideration of Indulekha’s own desires. (63) See Arunima, There Comes Papa, p. 22.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (64) Both G. Arunima and R. Nandakumar have read Ravi Varma’s There Comes Papa as emblematic of the new ideals for nuclear families that accompanied the dissolution of the tharawad. Nandakumar, ‘The Missing Male’ and Arunima, There Comes Papa. (65) Douglas Haynes has noted the predominance of the nuclear family ideal in advertising imagery for insurance between 1918 and 1940, to the extent that no examples exist of the extended joint family, which was undoubtedly the prevailing norm. ‘Masculinity, Advertising and the Reproduction of the Middle-class Family in Western India, 1918–1940’, in Henrike Donner (ed.), Being Middle Class in India (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 23–46. (66) Nandakumar, ‘The Missing Male’, p. 77. (67) Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), p. 12. (68) Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 309. (69) Dipesh Chakraborty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 180–213. (70) Swati Chattopadhyay argues for a more violent displacement of women from Calcutta’s public spaces, proposing that the nostalgic recalling of adda in contemporary studies is in fact evidence of a continued system of male privilege. Swati Chattopadhyay, Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism and the Colonial Uncanny (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 185. (71) Arunima, There Comes Papa, p. 128. (72) The novel in fact begins with the protagonist Madhavan fuming at the karanavan for refusing to provide for the English education of a younger cousin, Shinnan. (73) E.M.J. Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma (Trivandrum: Government of Kerala), 1981, p. 52. (74) Quoted in Devika, Engendering Individuals, p. 50. (75) Hollis Clayson, ‘Looking within the Cell of Privacy’, in Parshall (ed.), The Darker Side of Light, p. 56. (76) Christopher Reed, Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996). (77) Rice, Emergence of the Interior. (78) Some journals that comprised his collection included The Artist (London), Royal Academy Pictures (London), Moderne Kunst (Berlin) and The Portfolio (London), amongst others. (79) Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 78. (80) Kumar, ‘Seeing and Reading’, pp. 173–174. Also see Dilip Menon, ‘A Place Elsewhere: The Nineteenth Century Subaltern Novel in Malayalam’, The Blindness of Insight: Essays on Caste in Modern India (New Delhi: Navayana, 2011), pp. 73–109.
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Private lives and interior spaces: masculine subjects in Ravi Varma’s scholar paintings (81) Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 146. The entire speech is reprinted in Baron Ampthill, ‘An address delivered to the graduates admitted at the convocation of the senate of the University of Madras’, Madras, 1903. British Library, Mss/Eur/233/59. (82) Menon, ‘A Place Elsewhere’, pp. 73–109. (83) He refers to two of them by name – Venku, the Brahmin who was associated with the royal family of Travancore, and Ayyapan, the shudra who was a trusted man and had been in their service for many years, Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, pp. 98 and 130. Despite their anxieties to maintain caste rituals even while travelling, there is reason to believe that the Varma brothers were somewhat sympathetic to the efforts of lower-caste Christian converts who had embraced an English education. Both the brothers contributed to the Indian Ladies Magazine, a women’s magazine edited by Kamala Sathianandan, who belonged to a wellknown Tamil literary family that had converted to Christianity as a way to escape caste restrictions. (84) Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India, pp. 2–3. (85) Raja Raja Varma, A Narrative of the Tour in Upper India, p. 137. (86) Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 186. (87) Udaya Kumar, ‘Autobiography as a Way of Writing History’, in Raizuddin Aquil and Partha Chatterjee (eds), History in the Vernacular (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008), pp. 418–448. (88) G. Arunima, ‘Face Value: Ravi Varma’s Portraiture and the Project of Colonial Modernity’, Indian Economic Social History Review, Vol. 40, No. 1 (2003), pp. 75–76. (89) See Temma Balducci, Heather Belnap Jensen and Pamela Warner (eds), Interior Portraiture and Masculine Identity in France, 1789–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). (90) I have explored this in much detail in ‘Masculine Regeneration and the Attenuated Body in the Early Works of Nandalal Bose’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2 (2010), pp. 167–188 (91) Abanindranath Tagore, Gharoa. Cited in Ratnabali Chatterjee, From the Karkhana to the Studio (New Delhi: Books & Books, 1990), p. 104. (92) Chatterjee, From the Karkhana to the Studi, pp. 102–104. (93) See Tapati Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 267– 268 and Chattopadhyaya, Representing Calcutta, pp. 171–177.
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00015
Abstract and Keywords Taking a small portrait by Ravi Varma of a scholar reading in the glow of a lamp as a servant waits upon him in the background shadows, this chapter evaluates the emergence of the elitist figure of the artist against the backdrop of the subaltern craftsman. The differential inscription of light marks their place within the new order of visibility – the named artist whose face glows in the lamp and the anonymous craftsman marked by his labour. Keeping in mind recent arthistorical scholarship that has tended to view the figure of the artist as the paradigmatic modern subject, this chapter tracks the developments in portraiture and the assertion of individualism, arguing that the representation of the elite artist allowed for a way to transition from the dominant anthropological model of portraiture popular in nineteenth-century India to the fiction of the assured subjectivity of later portraits. Keywords: Ravi Varma, Shadows, Artist, Subaltern, Craftsman, Labour, Portraiture, Elite, Subjectivity
The new slogan of Western societies is that we should all ‘become subjects’. (Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial Labour’, 1997) The representative figure of such [colonial] perversion … is the image of postEnlightenment man tethered to, not confronted by, his dark reflection, the shadow of colonized man that splits his presence, distorts his outline … disturbs and divides the very time of his being. (Homi Bhabha, ‘Remembering Fanon’, 1986) This chapter returns to Ravi Varma’s painting of the reading scholar to inquire further into portraiture and subjectivity around the turn of the twentieth century. The Student (see Figure 5.1) readily subscribes to models of absorption and selfhood available in the canonical European corpus of eighteenth-century painting, where the reading subject implied a disregard of the viewer, indicating a solipsistic investment in the self that celebrated his autonomy. This Page 1 of 26 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows autonomy was extended to painting itself, in Michael Fried’s thesis, so that modernism was viewed along this absorptive model as expressly negating the viewer in the creation of a ‘supreme fiction’.1 Predominant amongst the visual fictions that sustained this model of the autonomous self was the genre of portraiture, which asserted the values of a sovereign self by focusing on the aesthetics of the face, which emerged as an exemplary form of the subjectivism of modernity.2 Portraiture has long been associated with the emergence of individual identity, relying upon the face as the primary site of an imagined self; however, more recently art historians studying slavery have framed the prominence and entrenchment of portraiture in Western art history against the simultaneous expanding trade in human bodies in the transatlantic world.3 In their account, the face emerges as a privileged signifier for producing ‘being’ against the backdrop of the trade in bodies that defined slavery. If the transatlantic slave trade commodified the body, the colonial economy of labour brought into play a different set of relationships between the face – as the signifier of the self – and subaltern bodies that I will examine in this chapter through portraits of artists and craftsmen. If the light and dark (p.219) evoke an interiority underlined by the self-absorbed reading subject, how do we read the relationships between the reader cast into the light and that of the subaltern in the shadows? The exclusive focus on the face as the visual index of the self and the concomitant idea of interiority through the darkness present the work as an intimate portrait. On the other hand, the identity of the person standing in the shadows is indicated by his posture, his position on the margins and his clothing, all of which testify to his servitude. There is no attempt to delineate his facial features and it is, in fact, the utter absence of an individual identity that is produced in this representation in the shadows. What might this juxtaposition of characters within the painting and its use of visibility and shadows tell us about representational practices like portraiture in nineteenth-century India and portraiture’s construction of the visual fiction of an autonomous self? Ravi Varma’s painting of the scholar bears a strong resemblance to a sequence from D.G. Phalke’s short film titled How Films are Made (1917) (Figure 6.1). Ravi Varma and Phalke have been yoked together in several studies of Indian modernity as sharing a similar aesthetic sensibility.4 Not only were they both attracted by the idea of rendering the Pauranik narrative in a so-called ‘modern’ medium, but each was equally drawn to the visual tricks afforded by the new media. One memorable scene in the film shows
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows (p.220) Phalke busily working at a desk, examining papers while periodically pressing a buzzer to summon an assistant to his desk with files and papers. Like the scholar, the director is portrayed deep in thought, perusing books and documents brought to him by the assistant who is appropriately wearing a turban, his skin visibly darker than Phalke’s. Phalke is portrayed as an artist engaged in important business, seated at a desk and framed by signifiers of his cultivated aesthetic tastes, including a shelf laden with books, a 6.1 Still from D.G. Phalke’s, How Films Are sculptural artefact, a painting on the wall Made, 1917 and an animal skin draped casually over the empty chair in the foreground. Like Varma’s reader, Phalke portrays his work as engaging his intellectual faculties even as his magic fingers control the servant’s labourintensive work – the subaltern made visible and invisible at the director’s command. Phalke, in contrast, usurps the pictorial space on the strength of his superior intellect. The displacement of bodily labour onto the waiting servant marks the identity of the auteur, whose personal tastes and vision determine the visual aesthetics, deeming subaltern labour a lowly skill to be rendered visible at will in the art-making process. Shuddhabrata Sengupta makes a similar assessment in his discussion of lighting in early Indian cinema before the advent of colour film, when a chiaroscuric display of light and shadow dominated the visual idiom.5 He makes the important point that the dramatic lighting of these films (Madhumati, Kagaz ke Phool) calls attentions to the craftsmanship of the filmmaking process in its evolution of a visual language where film technicians and cameramen are granted a greater presence. Later films using sophisticated, high-powered lighting technologies tend to conceal the machinations involved in the production process and this reflects directly upon the status of the subaltern technician rendered invisible in the process of creating the spectacle. Sengupta presents a variation of the argument about the distinctions between the so-called ‘licked surface’ of academic painting and the realism of avant-garde artists like Courbet and the Impressionists. Marxist critiques presented the smooth finish of academic art as concealing the craftsmanship of the process and being aligned with bourgeois preferences for the glossy finish of commercial imagery. Avant-garde art instead drew attention to the painted surface as a testament to the artist’s labour and an acknowledgement of the artificiality of the image.6 The narrative of European modernism has largely been concerned with the significance of this autoreferential gesture that incidentally sought to make everything visible, even the artist’s intervention. Yet this acknowledgement of the artist’s labour was marked by a transition from communitarian, guild-based practices of artisanal virtuosity to one that viewed such mark making as conveying an individual authority. Ravi Varma and Phalke’s marginalisation of the labouring body complements this process of authorial assertion to produce the visual fiction of the autonomous artist, motivated by personal vision and intellect.
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows (p.221) Both Ravi Varma and Phalke distance themselves from the labouring body in these representations that seek a place for westernised media like oil painting and film as ‘art’, announcing a cleavage between art and craft that persists in the modern Indian imagination. If the face emerged as a privileged signifier producing ‘being’ against the body of the slave, the colonial economy of labour and its ambiguous relationship to what Saloni Mathur has called the ‘cult of the craftsman’ served as a foil for imagining the artist.7 Through the latter half of the nineteenth century the image of the labouring Indian craftsman achieved iconic status in colonial accounts, reproduced in journals and exhibited at various trade exhibitions. Seated on the ground with the rudimentary tools of his trade, his body served to underline a painstaking practice of craftsmanship that had seemingly remained unchanged from time immemorial. Even as this body was romanticised in colonial accounts like that of J.L. Kipling, it held little appeal for artists like Ravi Varma. Instead, the ‘gentleman artist’ fashioned himself as an elite, educated figure aspiring to a life of the mind that was conspicuously missing in portraits of the craftsman. Taking lessons from discussions on slave portraiture, this chapter will examine the role of portraiture in the visual construction of an elite subjectivity, situating the artist portrait against those of craftsmen. Ravi Varma’s portrait of the scholar was emblematic of a wider trend within nationalist art, seeking to imagine an exalted place for the artist against the dominant image of the labouring craftsman paraded in colonial accounts. Mimicking practices of self-representation from colonial accounts of the artist, the gentleman painter located personhood in the face, distancing himself from the dominant iconography of the labouring craftsman working with the tools of his trade.
Shadowlines Ravi Varma’s painting of the scholar is not a traditional portrait inasmuch as the subject is not readily identifiable, although one source has proposed that the figure is his brother C. Raja Raja Varma.8 As a genre painting, then, it presents the cosmopolitan male subject of late nineteenthcentury India, an elite but relatable figure who dominated nationalist discourse. The shadowy presence of the subaltern in the background registers the conditions of the production of such elite subjectivities in colonial India, the immaterial labour of the reading subject supported and sustained by the bodily labours of the anonymous servant waiting in the shadows. Most significantly, however, it contests the autonomy of the subject – here the very inclusion of the figure in the shadows undermines the singularity of the reading subject, so that the visual fiction of the autonomous self indicated in portraiture is disrupted by its ghostly doubling in the shadows. Given Ravi Varma’s investment in portraiture, which not only formed (p.222) the major source of his professional income but also allowed him to consort with an elite society that saw portraits as a mark of social distinction, it is hard to dismiss the shadowy figure as an oversight. One might argue that the presence of a subordinate figure alongside the central subject had precedents in both Company painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as court painting, in both of which it was common to emphasise the relative importance of the ruler or the East India Company official with attendants. Ravi Varma had explicitly used similar strategies, employing a darkened subordinate figure in his painting as a foil for the central characters, for example in the painting of the reading woman modelled on the Malayalam literary heroine Indulekha, where a dark-skinned attendant stands beside the reclining lady reading a book (see Figure 5.4). Similarly, in Sita in Ashoka Grove (1894), the darker, bareskinned adivasi women frame the fair, upper-caste Sita, or in Matsyagandha (1905), where the heroine is a light-skinned maiden set against the darker skins of the poor fisher folk around her
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows and it is clear that lighter skin is associated with virtue and persons of lower class and caste are represented as darker skinned. In The Student, without the visible signs that bestow elite status like the sumptuous silks and velvets of drapery or the exquisite backdrops of marble statuary in royal portraits, it is the waiting subaltern signalled by his labouring body that asserts his status. This ploy for the presentation of elite subjects is translated into one that involves the use of light and shadow to present foreground and background, borrowing from photographic techniques in vogue. Studio photography had experimented widely with lighting effects and in the last decade of the nineteenth century the pictorialist trend in photography frequently employed theatrical scenes and misty effects. Shapoor N. Bhedwar’s The Feast of Roses was typical of this trend, winning honours at the Royal Photographic Society in 1890, amongst others.9 Ravi Varma had a copy in his collection and it had served as a prototype for his painting of Damayanti and the Swan (1899). In a lecture on portraiture read out to the World’s Congress of Photographers in Chicago in 1893 (an auxiliary to the World’s Columbian Exposition where Ravi Varma also exhibited his work), Bhedwar dwelt upon the importance of light and its contribution to the beauty and effect of a composition. ‘The knowledge of the way in which light and shade, with their respective intermediate gradations, are arranged, and to which the name chiaro-oscuro is given, is of supreme importance for an art student to acquire.’ He cited the well-known pictorialist photographer Henry Peach Robinson’s suggestion to divide the pictorial plane into masses of light and shade and to ‘arrange and light the principal object that the eye may see at first, and be gradually and insensibly led over the whole picture: to keep parts in obscurity and to relieve others according to their pictorial value’.10 While Bhedwar’s pictorialism presented the values of light and shade as a (p.223) pleasing harmony, such contrasts served in fact to highlight racial difference in photography and film, which evolved novel lighting techniques to shore up values of radiance and purity around white skin, juxtaposing it against darkened backgrounds, clothing or darker subjects.11 Moreover, the technology and metaphorics of light in photographic discourse was imbued with racial connotations that took on a particular valence in colonial contexts, as black bodies served as a foil to emphasise whiteness and all the racial superiority it commanded.12 John Blees, photographer and author of a contemporary volume on photography in colonial India from 1877, proposed chiaroscuro in portraiture as a product of aesthetic preferences that reflected a class difference: As the fashion at present stands, that part of human creation which earns its bread by manual labour as a rule like those photographs in which they are represented with not too heavy facial shadows, and condemn the ‘darker’ without appeal. The higher classes of society do just the contrary: to them the ‘Rembrandt’, the shadow style of lighting, is the ne plus ultra of photographic practice.13 Having relied upon photographic sources for his own portraits, Ravi Varma likely responded to these pictorial conventions of light and shadow, particularly as they related to elite tastes. This chiaroscuric production of the self through a differential inscription of light upon the body indicated how racial and class divisions were incorporated into the image, in a manner not unlike Winslow Homer’s engraving that mapped the urban population within symbolic zones of ‘sunshine and shadows’ (see Introduction). This was a re-inscription of practices in colonial Kerala, where shadows were not simply the obverse of light but were imbued with significance within the caste order. The very shadow of an untouchable had the power to pollute a Brahmin, and very often in public places an upper-caste Page 5 of 26 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Nair walked in front of the Brahmin to ward away people of the lower castes to avoid pollution.14 Therefore, rather than the insubstantial illusion that it is considered in post-Enlightenment discourse, the shadow was an extension of the body that had a phenomenological presence. Coexisting with other forms of ritual pollution that denied untouchables entry into public spaces like temples or wells, it formed part of a complex phenomenological network where bodily presence was carried across space through the voice or shadows, typically denied in a framework where vision and visibility are predominant.15 In the lower-caste novel Saraswativijayam (1892), for instance, the very voice of a singing Pulaya was enough to pollute the Brahmin walking in his vicinity. Although shadows rely upon light and are therefore necessarily a visual phenomenon, in the discourse of untouchability they are in many senses allied with the sense of touch as well. (p.224) While there is no reason to believe that the figure in Ravi Varma’s painting is indeed Dalit (and the lowest among them, like Pulayas and Cheras, would certainly not be found within upper-caste homes), the question of Dalit identity has generated a new cultural politics in Kerala that could be useful for thinking through the painting. Susie Tharu has referred to the Dalit as the ‘impossible subject’, not only because of a lack of agency but as one whose nether world is constantly haunted by the spectre of death.16 More recent discussions of Dalit subjectivity in Kerala have examined this impossible space of habitation and its relationship to language, where speech is marked by experiences of shame and humiliation and the very act of enunciation carries political charge. Udaya Kumar transposes the silences of language to the visual realm of darkness, reading the Dalit writer C. Ayyapan’s work as a ‘spectography of the night’, where the darkness breeds a ghostly narrative that remains illegible to rationalist thought.17 Literary scholarship on the Dalit experience has explored this impossible subjectivity and its habitation of the night in a range of writing that has invoked the ghostly, bhutham and pretham in Malayalam. In stories of figures who are possessed by demons or narrators who are spirits and speak from the realm of the dead, they are testimonies to the powerful violence that marked the experience of everyday Dalit life, where tales of brutal punishments, executions of untouchable lovers of caste Hindus and Christians, the rituals of exorcism have imprinted themselves onto the fabric of everyday life. Such haunting, I would submit, is also what is at stake here. The romantic posturing of elite subjectivity by the male figure, in whose name the narrative of the nation is written, is similarly haunted by a ghostly narrative of the repressed self. Beyond this example of the subaltern in the shadows, Ravi Varma’s sketchbooks contain a few examples of common people, including barbers on the street or street children, and these too function like ‘impossible subjects’ who fail to make the transition as subjects of painting, as individuals on their own terms. As I will argue below, Ravi Varma’s portrait practice was implicated in the presentation of the elite subject of colonial modernity, and consequently registers an uneasy relationship with his subaltern counterparts. In her study of whiteness, Susan Gubar has observed that ‘if the concept of whiteness depends … on the appropriation of black beings, then perhaps one of the predicaments of white culture has resided in its blindness about its dependency on represented (and thus effaced) black bodies’.18 This chapter will by example explicate the myth of the autonomy of the authorial subject cast into the light through portraiture and its location of personhood in the face.
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows (p.225) Portraits of the artist Despite religious and gendered proscriptions on the public display of portraits, portraiture was a thriving industry in late nineteenth-century India and participated actively in the production, circulation and memorialisation of the self in its painted, sculpted and photographic iterations.19 Commissioned for both public and private consumption, portraits were indicative of the tastes of an aristocratic and bureaucratic class whose institutions and palaces they graced, and attested to the power and social significance engineered by such practices of display.20 As Natasha Eaton has shown in her study of the gifting of portraits within the eighteenth-century colonial economy, portraits were an intrinsic part of the social and cultural capital of elite patrons.21 By the late nineteenth century, however, there were several inflections on portrait practice and, apart from the promise of social distinction guaranteed by sculptural, oil or photographic portraiture, it was also invoked as a measure of scientific knowledge (in anthropological portraiture) to indicate family lineage (family portraits) or to represent everyday prototypes (genre painting, which also employed portraiture). Technical developments had encouraged the mushrooming of photographic studios offering cheap portraits, resulting in what Christopher Pinney has called an ‘industrialization of portraiture’, in effect a mass staging of the self through the photographic image.22 Portraits of artists emerged within this social landscape to attest to the artist’s participation within this elite sphere of the visual production of the self. An illustration of an Indian portrait painter published in the London-based The Illustrated Times in 1861 presented an image of the ‘gentleman artist’, a figure that it observed was becoming more visible in public life (Figure 6.2). Portrayed in profile, he sits upon a stool facing a large easel, a palette in one hand and a brush in the other. The text helpfully identifies him as a foremost man in his profession – a Royal Academician at least – as is indicated by the fact that he uses an easel and does not sit upon the ground as do the inferior members of the profession in the East, as well as artisans of all descriptions who pursue the most active employment while squatting serenely on their heels. The chair and the easel both stand as markers of a new class hierarchy that distinguishes the gentleman artist from his artisan counterparts. His seated subject is also shown to be an esteemed lady, not only in her saree that demurely covers her head, but also in the raised cushion upon which she sits. The author assumes that she is the wife of an official of rank, and the artist has been introduced by her husband into the interior of the zenana to record her fleeting beauty. Many artists of this class were to be ‘had for the asking’ in cities like Delhi, Lucknow and indeed most other cities in Upper India, the (p.226)
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows article claimed. When one needed their services, all one had to do was to send the servant to fetch one and he would happily entertain himself in the outer verandah with the servants ‘for hours’ until he was asked in. How unlike what is to be expected of Sir Edwin Landseer or Mr Millais, mused the author, to be called upon at such short notice by a servant.23 By the early nineteenth century the Murshidabad trained painter Sita Ram was well known enough to have his portrait drawn by a Calcutta artist. Sita Ram’s watercolour albums for Governor General Rawdon-Hastings experimented with ideas of the picturesque landscape, and he included a portrait of himself seated on the ground sketching in a landscape of the Patna riverside in a rare citation of the
6.2 ‘An Indian Portrait Painter’, Illustrated Times, 1861
self.24 This self-referential gesture was affirmed in another clever watercolour by a contemporary Lucknow painter (p.227) in the collection of the British Library that shows the artist seated upon a chair with a paint box, brushes and a palette in the European manner (Plate 22).25 The artist’s face features extremely fine brushwork and the blended colours and tonal gradations reminiscent of Mughal portraiture, while his head turns a degree beyond the idealised profile to reveal the face. Rather than the dramatic mise-en-scène featuring curtains that is found in portraits in oil, a simple raised chik (window blind) unveils his figure set within an opening that ingeniously doubles as both painting and window. The right edge of the painting features the border of a picture frame that continues along the bottom of the image. However, the left edge features a recessed wall that continues along the bottom, allowing for a three-dimensional rendering of the space as a window frame. Seated alone, without an attendant or a sitter, he paints a picture of a female figure.26
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows This portrait of the westernised Indian artist was to undergo considerable change around the turn of the twentieth century as Bombay Art School-trained painters like M.F. Pithawalla (1872–1937), M.V. Dhurandhar (1867–1944), Pestonjee Bomanjee (1851– 1938) and Xavier Trindade (1870–1935) evolved new iconographies for representing the artist, drawn largely from European practice that underlined class identity and education. Pestonjee Bomanjee’s portrait of the artist (At Rest, c. 1900) portrays him as an educated figure reading a broadsheet while the canvas sits by his side. A photographic portrait of Dhurandhar published in The Modern Review from 1907 similarly portrays an intense figure seated upon a chair wearing gold-rimmed glasses and clad in a buttoned coat, holding a palette and brush in his hand, the very picture of a gentleman artist (Figure 6.3). The issue included Dhurandhar’s The 22 Anonymous, An Artist Seated at a Table Sacred Steps as its frontispiece, and an Painting a Picture, 1815–20 explanation of the painting that accompanied the artist’s portrait helpfully explained his role: ‘And we feel that the artist is in truth priest and poet and prophet, revealing to us the innermost significance of scenes that a blind world passes daily by, unheeded and unknown.’27 Pithawala likewise included a self-portrait in the catalogue of his portraits exhibited at the Dore Gallery in London in 1911. It portrayed the artist in coat and tie, holding a palette of colours and a brush in his hands, standing against a framed painting in the background. Pithawalla was the son of a farmer from Surat who had studied at the J.J. School of Art between 1888 and 1895 and his representation in collar and tie would certainly have been for the benefit of his English hosts, but it also signalled the commonly acceptable mode in which to depict the artist. Pithawalla’s catalogue included an introduction by Sir George Birdwood, whose public censure of the practice of the fine arts in India at the Royal Society of Arts had infamously compared a Buddha sculpture to boiled suet pudding. Here he commended students of the J.J. School of Art as capable of producing not only ‘art craftsmen, but artists in (p.228)
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows the very highest meaning of the word’.28 Crediting this development to the protections of the British Raj, he claimed that, contrary to the swadeshi trend of boycotting English goods, in practice, Indians had turned their backs on their own arts and manufactures.29 The people of Bombay treated the native (p.229) artist like a dog, he observed, recalling an earlier moment: ‘I know a Delhi artist [miniature artist] in Bombay, his “pen” is perfection, who could never, until I gave him introductions, get access to native gentlemen through the crowd of pampered menials about their doors. To a puttiwalla [peon] an artist is a dog!’30 It was the apparatus of an institutional education, the technologies of replication associated with oil painting and the class identity affirmed in the artist portraits of the J.J. School of Art students that granted the painter a position in society. 6.3 M.V. Dhurandhar, ‘Artist Portrait’, If the Bombay Art School students Modern Review, 1907 embraced the persona of the gentleman artist, Ravi Varma underlined his royal lineage. His family at Mavelikara had some connections to the Travancore court and these were strengthened by the adoption of his granddaughters by the royal family in 1902, an event encouraged by Ravi Varma, who met the British Resident, G.T. Mackenzie, as well as the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, to bring it about.31 An early letter of introduction from T. Madhav Rao of the Baroda court to James Fergusson, the Governor of Bombay from 1881, described him as a relative of the Maharaja of Travancore and an independent gentleman who had taken up painting as an amusement and had made considerable progress. Christening him a ‘gentleman artist’ who had won the favour of colonial officials like the duke of Buckingham and the Governor of Bombay James Fergusson, Madhav Rao lauded him as entirely self-taught and ‘gifted with genius’.32 It was this narrative of aristocratic pedigree, self-taught genius and an appreciation by a cosmopolitan clientele that spanned the breadth of the country, including both British officials and the Indian elite, that allowed Ravi Varma to emerge as the prototypical figure of the ‘Artist’. By 1896–97 Ravi Varma was referred to as Ravi Varma, Artist, Koil Thampuran in his official correspondence with the Travancore palace.33 Unlike hereditary painters who depended upon royal patronage or the art school-trained artist who looked towards institutional networks and the new printing and publishing industry, Ravi Varma represented the first generation of artists who were able to carve out a professional career based on independent commissions from several royal houses. Photographs from Ravi Varma’s collection at Kilimanoor include several showing him in the act of painting, including two self-portraits, and which testify to his identification as an artist and provide clues regarding his place and position in the social hierarchy.
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows A photograph of Ravi Varma posing in front of a canvas portraying the Nizam of Hyderabad (c. 1902) underlined this connection to royalty that served as a source of his reputation (Figure 6.4). Seated holding his palette and brush, Varma is dressed formally in an achkan (long coat), ceremonial turban and shoes, similar to his dress in the official portrait after receiving the Kaiser-i-Hind. The studio, likewise, is not presented as a work space. Instead it is furnished with carpets and curtains and potted plants that render a parlour-like atmosphere to the room. The work of an unknown photographer, (p.230) (p.231) the picture is elaborately staged and represents how Ravi Varma would have liked to present himself, possibly to the court of the Nizam, where he was seeking an introduction. Seated upon a chair, Ravi Varma asserts his presence as a radically different artist than craftsmen, who were portrayed seated cross-legged on the ground with the tools of their trade. The chair granted Ravi Varma an elevated status that was not merely metaphorical; Kalighat satirical portraits of the elite urban dandy – the baboo – invariably portrayed him seated upon a Victorian chair.34 A less formal photograph that has Ravi Varma wearing a mundu also includes the chair as an essential aspect of his studio working space. Here his chest is bare and, rather than the ceremonial robes, the sacred thread deeming him upper caste marks his caste identity. Ravi Varma had much experience with the established iconography for the depiction of 6.4 Ravi Varma painting a portrait of the royalty, given that this was the mainstay of Nizam, c. 1902 his professional practice, and the portrait presented him with the aristocratic air of his own subjects, if not quite the grandeur and regalia of royal portraits. However, the careful cultivation of a royal persona was not altogether convincing for the Nizam. C. Raja Raja Varma records in his diaries the frustrations of the brothers at not being granted an audience by the Nizam, despite waiting for more than two months. The brothers had visited Hyderabad in 1902 in the hope of receiving a commission for his portrait but had to resort to working from a photograph by the Calcutta studio of Johnston and Hoffman. Ravi Varma left five paintings, including a portrait of the Nizam with Raja Bhagwan Das, the Nizam’s jeweller, to be shown to the Nizam at his convenience. There is no evidence they were ever shown to the Nizam, and Bhagwan Das himself finally bought the portrait, bargaining it down to half its original price.35 This was quite a contrast to the treatment meted out to the painter Valentine Prinsep, who had been granted an audience (and a commission for the Nizam’s portrait) quite easily in 1888–89 and was familiar enough with the
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Nizam to nickname him ‘Azure’, mocking the huzoor that typically greeted His Highness’s presence. The association with royalty that has persisted in legends of Ravi Varma as the ‘Painter Prince’ was in fact a constructed persona. According to his biographer E.M.J. Veniyoor, when Ravi Varma was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind medal in 1904 it cited his name as Raja Ravi Varma, creating a minor scandal within the protocols at the Travancore court in challenging the authority of the ruler. But Ravi Varma diplomatically offered that Raja was his family name (his brother and uncle had the first name) and conveniently declined to use it in Travancore.36 This association with royalty has also been instrumental in the canonisation of the artist in the contemporary imagination, in providing prototypes associated with kingship that were annexed to the idea of the artist. Stories from his earliest biographies proclaim his genius with heroic feats that celebrate both his artistic potential and his destined (p.232) fame. There are the obligatory stories of genius from his youth – the divine intimations of his birth, his painting on the walls as a child, his having tamed a wild elephant, his having mastered the techniques of oil painting on his own and his romantic liaisons with the beautiful women he painted.37 This has colluded in the production of the figure of the ‘great artist’, one who held his own as he consorted with both Indian royalty and the British elite. Not surprisingly, these images of the artist distance themselves from the toiling body of the craftsman, and paint a picture of leisure and comfort that is his province. The best-known photograph of Ravi Varma at work in his studio in Girgaum (Figure 6.5), Bombay shows him with his brother, who was his collaborator and a painter in his own right. Unlike the staged photograph of Ravi Varma with a painting of the Nizam, this studio is a more functional space crowded with canvases, both on the easel and on the walls and floor. Both brothers stand in front of their respective works and the paintings displayed represent the very core of Ravi Varma’s practice – representations of love-lorn women wistfully gazing into the distance. His brother faces a model seated on a chair in front of him. The figures of the two artists, one gazing at the painting and the other facing the model, form the triangulated nature of their (p.233) working partnership, revealing in steps the process of creating the final image. The figure in the right-hand corner of the painting is the model transcribed into paint by Raja Raja Varma upon his canvas. To his right, Ravi Varma the master painter puts the finishing touches on another painting, while a completed product lies behind it. It is a process that graduates from the literal transcription of the individual to an imaginative portrayal of the woman in reverie. There is also in the casual stance of the brothers an effortless ease and a nonchalance that treats the overt display of labour as unseemly and I believe this is not accidental but crucial to the very persona projected by the artists.
6.5 Ravi Varma and Raja Varma at their Girgaum studio, 1894
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows The brothers were by no means dilettantes who painted for amusement, unlike the many British amateurs who honed their skills in the exotic Indian landscape. In fact, their professional schedule was a gruelling one. Raja Raja Varma’s diaries are a testament to the brothers’ peripatetic life that was spent travelling the country in search of commissions and managing their investment in the printing press they had set up near Bombay. The diaries, maintained pretty regularly between 1895 and 1904, are largely records of their professional dealings – sittings with models, sketching outdoor scenes, financial considerations, framing and transporting of artworks, with occasional remarks about theatrical performances they attended or their poor health in the last few years. The photographs and sketches of Ravi Varma tend to present quite a different picture, that of the leisurely painter for whom the imagination is as much a part of the working process as his technical skills. In a casual remark in the diary, Raja Raja Varma refers to his difficulty in dealing with women for their portraits because ‘they think that the greater the labour they give the artist the better the picture becomes’.38 The suggestion is that their paintings were not merely works of technical sophistication but also in some sense inspired by a creative vision. The transformation of the prosaic subject of the portrait into the woman lost in reverie in front of which Ravi Varma stands therefore represents both aspects of his professional practice. Ironically, the photograph of the brothers working in their studio complicates the narrative of singular personhood and subjective interiority attached to the figure of the ‘Artist’ in contemporary mythologies, to reveal the brothers as collaborators who frequently worked on paintings together, sometimes even signing both names on the same canvas.39 This unusual collaborative partnership of the brothers is rarely acknowledged for what it is in the many biographies of Ravi Varma. C. Raja Raja Varma was a more ‘modern’ painter, devoted to painting landscapes and portraits of common subjects that often won prizes at the various art exhibitions in which the brothers participated. In addition to keeping a diary of his activities, which remains the most reliable source of information on the artists’ lives, he published a short travel narrative of his tours across North (p.234) India as part of the entourage of Prince Martanda Varma of Travancore in 1896. Although Raja Raja Varma was a constant companion of his brother on their tours and, as noted, they frequently worked together on paintings , he is recalled in every biography as an assistant to his more famous brother, standing in the shadows of his older brother’s pronounced ‘genius’. My intention here is not to resurrect his career but to point to the collaborative practice as an example of the manner in which professional lives were embedded in familial structures, a fact that complicates the simplistic narrative of autonomous artistic personhood portrayed in portraits and monographs. Ravi Varma walks a fine line between endorsing modern practices of signature and authorship in his individual works, while remaining perfectly comfortable in a collaborative partnership with his painter brother, attesting to what some scholars have pointed out: that in the Indian context the author is not quite dead or needs to be resurrected but, like the Hindu iconographic tradition, may in fact have multiple heads and multiple hands.40
Craftsman portraits: the labouring body The Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851 had presented one of the earliest opportunities for the large-scale display and exhibition of Indian crafts in England. The spectacular display at the exhibition’s Indian Court – replete with a stuffed elephant and a gold and silver howdah, marked a moment when the wider British public was presented with a veritable ‘cornucopia of treasures’ from the subcontinent: ‘divers articles of state and luxury – superb couches, royal bedsteads with richly embroidered curtains; marble
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows slabs and carved furniture, in wood and ivory; … illustrative of the wonderfully exact and patient industry of Hindoo workmanship’.41 In the midst of this display of exquisite objects were rudimentary clay figurines of the craftsmen themselves – cotton spinners, blacksmiths and potters at work with the tools of their trades. Not only were these workers recalled within the exhibition, they were also portrayed in contemporary broadsheets and journals. The Illustrated Exhibitor reproduced sketches of the figurines (Figure 6.6), which had occupied a ledge surrounding the Indian pavilion, including a potter, and a weaver sitting bare-chested and upright at a rudimentary loom, a simple picture of an artisan whose trade had seemingly remained unchanged from time immemorial. The figures of the artisans drew much attention from visiting spectators. After gushing about the riches of the East on display, the French political economist Jerome Adolphe Blanqui was led to remark: ‘Poor people! unclad, fed with a little rice, habitually dwelling beneath the canopy of heaven or of trees, paid none know how! We see them in their attitudes of work, their implements in their hands, their miniature looms before them – they really live before us.’42 (p.235) In fact, the figure of the Indian craftsman working with the simple tools of his trade dominated discussions of Indian art and craft through the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. Identifying a cult forming around the craftsman, Saloni Mathur goes so far as to say that ‘the actual physical body of the craftsman – ruined, disfigured and enslaved by colonialism – became a powerful metaphor … for the state of the national body itself’.43 Pictured in journals and magazines, popularised in exhibitions and museum collections, his labouring body represented the state of Indian art and
6.6 ‘Indian Loom’, Illustrated Exhibitor, 1851
industry.44 This was no portrait with its attention to the visage that attested to individual identity; instead it represented a nameless figure, typically set against a nondescript background, whose bodily labour confirmed his occupational identity. Unlike the heroic male body popularised in Ford Maddox Brown’s monumental image of the English working class (Work, 1865), the Indian craftsman was presented seated on the ground with his crude implements in front of him. Popular opinion deemed him ‘physically weak, and incapable of hard, manual labour’.45 On the other hand, he was championed by British critics of industrialism, and the image of the labouring craftsman countered stereotypes of the idle native, serving as a symbol of the pre-modern harmony with nature. He prompted a romanticisation of preindustrial community and village life, recalling craft guilds and handcrafted (p.236) techniques that had been passed down the centuries through hereditary craftsmen.46 And yet, ironically, his skills helped to popularise luxury Indian commodities to English consumer markets. Around his figure was also woven the dream of a revival of the handicrafts industry as it competed in the international market-place for consumer goods.47 The craftsman’s rudimentary tools as well as his effeminate body recalled the simplicity of his working methods, a far cry from the world of complex machinery currently being introduced in rapidly industrialising Britain. In a discussion of the workers of the various nations represented Page 14 of 26 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows at the Crystal Palace, Blanqui lauded the superior products of the Indian craftsmen but ridiculed their work habits. Recounting the story of a bricklayer who had been provided with a wheelbarrow to speed the process, only to be found cradling the barrow like a baby in his arms, Blanqui underlines their primitive approach to tools and inability to grapple with modern technology. The steam engine, he declared, ‘was destined to do more for India than all her other teachers have yet effected’, yet even the most intelligent workmen saw it as a bhoot (ghost), unable to fathom the logic of its workings.48 Observations of this sort permeate writings about the Indian worker where he serves as a foil to the efficiency of the European worker. A few yards from the Indian room at the Crystal Palace, adjoining it to the west, was the industrial utopia spelt out in the display of machinery. Its promises of the minimisation of labour laid claim to the industrial success and prosperity of the British nation – the contrasting lack of ‘progress’ made in the Indian industrial arts could not have been more starkly drawn.49 The English display of machinery covered half of the area of the entire exhibition and the Frenchman M.J. Lemoinne recounts his wonder at the grandeur of the spectacle where ‘where England shines in all her splendour’. Working pumps, presses, drills and engines filled the galleries, whirring in motion and performing the spectacle of technology like ‘so many demons under the influence of some occult power’. Lemoinne ventures to imagine a time when machines would replace handicrafts and men would have no occupation but to sit with folded arms and watch the ‘monsters of nature chained to the triumphant car of the human will’. Such minimal labour that even a woman or a child could operate them with their delicate hands would leave man ‘with nought to do but to think, and inebriate himself with thinking till death’.50 These visions of the elimination of labour were borne out in the visual and textual presentation of the exhibition that included images of uniformed workers overseeing machinery while casually conducting a conversation. The worker is recalled as one who merely supervises these ‘self-acting machines’ that do not exact his physical skills but call for his vigilance and oversight.51 However, this picture of the contented worker was not quite representative of reality, and contemporary broadsheets like Friend of the People chronicled (p.237) strikes by painters and glaziers even during the construction of the Crystal Palace itself.52 Peter Hoffenberg has noted that viewers of the exhibition saw only overseas workers and machines at work in the displays, not English workers, who were rendered invisible in the presentation.53 As the worker was rendered invisible in the displays of the spectacular powers of technology and the concomitant paeans to progress, so was manual labour consigned to the distant past and the colonial periphery. In fact, the two sections of the Crystal Palace exhibition that boasted meticulously handcrafted materials and objects were the Indian galleries and the Medieval Court. Against this backdrop, the Indian weaver at work with rudimentary implements remained far removed from the fascinating world of complex machinery and its possibilities in eliminating human toil. At the same time, his workmanship was in no way comparable to that of the artist. The very exhibition was divided into four sections, which represented the various stages of production – raw materials, machinery, manufactures and the fine arts, representing in ascending order the industry of man. While the first three sections contained several Indian entries, the fine arts section contained drawings by a few unnamed artists and some British painters depicting native costumes. The catalogue declared, ‘The fine arts have hardly attained that excellence in India as to require much notice … Painting has never attained to any excellence.’54 Later, at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886, a far greater selection of fine arts was exhibited, including Mughal manuscript paintings, photographs by Lala Deen Dayal and the firm Bourne and
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Shepherd, Kalighat paintings and works by artists like Jagannath Anant from Bombay and Ram Lall from Indore.55 The Art Journal pronounced them of ‘very unequal merit’, adding that the elaborately bedecked portraits of the rulers might be of interest only to the student of goldsmiths’ work or costume.56 In 1893, when Ravi Varma was commended for his ten oil paintings sent to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago that depicted ethnographic subjects from various social classes and communities, he was awarded certificates not in the Fine Arts but in the section titled Liberal Arts and Ethnology. The iconography of the craftsman introduced at the Crystal Palace exhibition was to continue with minor variations over the second half of the nineteenth century. The Illustrated Exhibitor had included rough sketches based on the clay figures from Kishnagur portraying both men and women engaged in the production of goods and manufactures, including farming, pottery and grinding corn. Not only were the tools simple, but the upright, seated postures and rigid bodies pointed to rudimentary techniques of modelling the human figure. Later portraits from the South Kensington Museum (1874) continued with the seated posture, but the two-dimensional, stick-like figure of the worker was fleshed out into a rounded form using modelling (p.238) and by attempts to provide some context to the portrait by surrounding the body with the tools of the worker’s trade. John Lockwood Kipling’s portraits of the craftsmen did most to elevate the body of the artisan into a homage of his labours. The portrait of a woodcarver (Figure 6.7) depicts him in the (p.239) customary posture, seated upon the ground with his head lowered as he works on his carving. Portrayed from a lower angle that forces the viewer to look up to the looming body that fills the picture frame, Kipling’s portrait attempts to restore some dignity to the worker’s enterprise. There are folds in the drapery of his clothing and his face bears an expression worn with age, so that the two-dimensional treatment of the abstract worker from the Crystal Palace is endowed with depth and character here. Kipling’s belief in the moral and uplifting quality of labour was noticeably Ruskinian and conveyed his critique of industrial modernity.57 He chronicled a wide range of craftsmen – zardosi workers, potters, weavers, even including convicts from the Amritsar jail at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886 as a symbol of the redemptory powers of labour; but they remained unnamed, identified only by their professions. In 1902 6.7 Lockwood Kipling, Woodcarver, 1870 Percy Brown’s drawings of silversmiths and enamellers for the Official Catalogue of the Indian Art Exhibition at Delhi attested to the longevity of this popular iconography of the labouring body of the seated artisan.
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Despite these attempts to resurrect the artisan, he remained largely unnamed, and identified by his labouring body rather than by his face. The clay models that had captivated viewers at the Crystal Palace exhibition gave way to live performances, and from the 1880s onwards most major international exhibitions included live craftsmen. The 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London included some forty-five artisans at work weaving carpets and making boxes, who were featured in the popular press and attracted large daily crowds. This display of the artisan’s body was not restricted to overseas exhibitions, as was evidenced by an exhibition at the J.J. School of Art in 1890 which included workers throwing and decorating pots, stitching embroidery and making silver teapots. Even exhibitions dedicated to showcasing modern industry such as the Indian National Congress’s Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition (1904) included craftsmen from the J.J. School of Art demonstrating carpentry, weaving, pottery and other skills.58 In 1886 clay figurines of the artisans at work were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in Bombay, and they remain on display at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in the city. Unnamed, and marked by his labouring body, the craftsman remained identified by his profession in a manner quite distinct from the individualised artist portrait with its marks of subjecthood. Ubiquitous in display, his disfigured body stood as a sign of an art practice that had remained unchanged for centuries and was offered as an explanation for the lack of progress of Indian industrial arts. In 1900 the production of crafts provided employment to 95 per cent of industrial labourers in India, and consequently debates on crafts were central to both the economic and cultural life of the nation. Faced with the prospect of industrial modernisation, a lively debate ensued regarding its (p.240) place in the Indian economy and veered between a romantic resurrection of the craftsman’s specialised knowledge and exhortations to industrial progress based on a modernisation of the crafts.59 The portrait of the craftsman, represented in journals and exhibitions bending over the tools of his trade, steadfastly at work, was crucial to this debate. Critics of the working methods of the craftsman pointed to his lack of enterprise, his apathy, his ready adaptation of the worst copies of English design and his secretive and inefficient techniques.60 As a result of this ‘psychological degeneracy’, the entire trade in Indian crafts was seen to be suffering and in need of being revived.61
Mythologies of the artist Given the predominance of the figure of the craftsman, nationalist writing around the turn of the twentieth century struggled to advance the idea of an Indian tradition of the ‘fine arts’ against the colonial denunciation of its art practices.62 Deeptha Achar has enumerated the strategies that nationalist art historiography employed to designate ancient artefacts as ‘art’: ‘identification and validation of Sanskrit texts on aesthetics, hunt for “signatures” of artists in … ancient art as well as for ancient Indian equivalences for key terms in western aesthetics, reconceptualisation of representational practices in order to validate the aesthetics of temple sculpture and not least, a re-ordering of a relationship between art and craft’. In fact she suggests that not only did the nationalist art-historical project redefine the role of the craftsman in the exalted terms of the artist but it also situated him along the axis of caste as a Brahmin, allowing for a hegemonic transference of interests.63 Standing at the supposed origins of modern Indian art, the myths surrounding Ravi Varma have celebrated him not just as a named artist but as an exemplary individual bearing all the signs of creative genius, one in whose image the very notion of a modern artist is written. This conflation between the modern artist and individualised identity is not particular to Ravi Varma, and arthistorical scholarship has tended to view the artist as the paradigmatic figure of the modern subject. Grant Kester’s scholarship on the emergence of individualism in European thought has
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows made arguments about the simultaneous rise of modern artistic identity in seventeenth-century intellectual history.64 Amelia Jones traces the cult of the artist to a more recent past, locating it in the nineteenth century following the impact of Jacob Burckhardt’s influential theses on Renaissance individualism and Kantian and Hegelian notions of art and freedom.65 Donald Preziosi’s analysis of the film Lust for Life explores modern mythologies of artistic identity, indicating how a ‘Vasarian auteurist ideology’ was invoked in the ‘fixing [of] the artist-hero on the sunlit stained-glass of homogeneous Selfhood’.66 In the case of Ravi Varma, his privileged semi-aristocratic life, his proximity (p.241) to both the British elite and Indian royalty and the aura of a westernised notion of the artist were all instrumental in the fashioning of his persona as a visionary artist, which marked a departure from the social status of the professional painter in nineteenth-century India, tied closely to the fortunes of his patrons. In an acknowledgement of the changing status of the artist in the contemporary Indian imagination, an essay on Ravi Varma’s career in The Modern Review in 1907 described him as the greatest artist of modern India, a nation-builder who showed the moral courage of a gifted ‘highborn’ in taking up the ‘degrading profession of painting’.67 It was a characterisation that had persisted during his lifetime. A biography published in 1903 agreed that painting was a lowly activity but credited the Maharaja of Travancore with spotting Ravi Varma’s talent. ‘Though painting was considered in those days a degrading profession for a gentleman, the enlightened Maharaja, under whom Travancore first came to be known as a “model state”, thought quite otherwise. His Highness found great promise in the boy and extended his patronage to him …’68 This common assumption regarding the profession of painting as unbecoming of the aristocratic class was repeated in obituaries of the artist after his death.69 S.N. Joshi, writing in the collection of Ravi Varma’s oleographs that he put together in 1911 agreed that Ravi Varma’s choice of a career was an anomaly in royal families: ‘In those days the profession of a portrait painter or even of a gifted artist was looked down upon as being not quite worthy of a scion of a princely house.’70 Embodied in the figure of Ravi Varma was therefore the subtle transference of hegemonic class and caste interests, as well as the social capital associated with aristocracy, to the emerging institution of the fine arts as native craftsmen communities were superseded by the elite English-speaking subject. In invocations such as that in the Modern Review, Ravi Varma heroically takes up the poor craftsman’s burden, as it were, elevating artistic practice from its craft-like origins to the status of a fine art. Ravi Varma’s career as an independent painter with commissions that spanned the breadth of the county granted him a profile quite unlike those of traditional artisans dependent upon the declining patronage of the princely courts or British officers of the East India Company. Transcending his regional affiliations with South Indian painting, Ravi Varma was thus able to embrace a pan-Indian identity, and European naturalism that spoke to the English-educated urban subject announced itself as the perfect language for these conversations. Inasmuch as the craftsman’s disfigured body stood as an emblem of the dying craft industry, Ravi Varma’s image of the exalted artist conveyed the promise of a new status for the arts – elevating public taste, drawing upon the lofty ideals of classical themes and association with the elite. This celebration of the artist’s imaginative potential and distance from the labouring body was implicated in parallel developments in British (p.242) art practices associated with the Aesthetic Movement. By the 1870s the mid-century celebration of the labouring body in Ford Maddox Brown’s canonical image of the working class had petered out, culminating in 1877–78 in the famous libel trial in the case of James McNeil Whistler against the art historian John
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Ruskin.71 Ruskin, who had consistently upheld the values of craftsmanship, was incensed by Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, an almost abstract painting of a night-time fireworks scene. Calling Whistler an imposter for the absence of any signs of labour, he accused him of ‘flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face’.72 At the ensuing trial Whistler asserted that the painting was the product not merely of two days’ work, as alleged by Ruskin, but of the knowledge gained in the work of a lifetime. The judge’s decision in favour of Whistler and award of damages of a farthing endorsed the myth of the imaginative artist whose subjective vision was more important than any outward display of labour. Viewed against the backdrop of the victories of aestheticism, the romantic imagination of the artist and his vision are perhaps more understandable. Raja Raja Varma’s diaries mention Whistler in passing as an influence upon the London-returned Parsi painter N.N. Writer, who followed him in applying the paint thinly to the surface.73 This changing nature of the finish of oil painting has been central to accounts of labour and European modernism. Following Baudelaire’s association of the ‘licked surface’ of academic painting (fini), with the slickness of industrial commerce, the original characterisations of labour and virtuosity – ‘the qualities of probity assiduity and professional conscience – and also discretion’, were transformed and increasingly viewed as concealing the labours of the artist in their presentation of a fictive world.74 As such, avant-garde experiments with visible brushstrokes (in Impressionism, for example) were an acknowledgement of the fiction of the painting and testimony to the artist’s intervention.75 The brief mention of Whistler’s finish provides no evidence to believe that either of the Varma brothers made any inferences about labour, but the construction of an artistic subjectivity using the technology of portraiture was nevertheless implicated in the question of artistic labour and its relationship to the toiling body of the craftsman. As Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz point out in their study of slave portraiture, the enslaved body served as the condition of possibility for asserting the visual fiction of a subjective mastery. Ravi Varma’s painting of the scholar poses the labouring body of the waiting servant in a similar role.76 In this displacement of bodily labour onto the subaltern craftsman one might view a pattern indicative of the wider place of artistic labour within the colonial economy. As the reports from the Crystal Palace indicate, a division of labour emerged within the colonial economy where the Indian craftsman found his place. It was one where the ‘lower’ arts, i.e. industrial arts, were (p. 243) conceded to the colonies, specialising as they did in labour-intensive work produced by starving natives. The ‘higher’ arts with their symbols of progress and their aestheticised narratives centring on the minimisation of labour were preserved by the coloniser. Thinking through the question of labour and aestheticism within the wider colonial economy produces parallels with the world of commodities that are hard to ignore – the mainstays of cheap labour and outsourcing in the contemporary Indian economy may in fact have venerable roots. Here I concur with radical scholarship like Arindam Dutta’s, which explicitly views the construction of a colonial field of aesthetics as an ideological programme initiated by economic imperatives and circulated across the British imperial world through bureaucratic institutions. It describes the formation of the artisan as a cyborg, a human diminished into a recorded value within the new industrialised economy.77 The split between manual and mental labour is of course an old one with roots in the very birth of art history, but its redefinition in the latter half of the nineteenth century against the backdrop of colonialism and industrialisation coincided with new conceptions of artistic
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows subjectivity, not only in India but across the colonial economy. Scholarship in design history has placed the colonial labour economy at the heart of questions about the transformations introduced by industrialisation in the nineteenth century, and this chapter has argued that a more expansive framework for the displaced subaltern body is required within changing notions of artistic subjectivity, pictorial genres and formal innovations.78 Artistic subjectivity has traditionally been viewed through a lens of the autonomy of painting and artist, yet this narrative of singularity and authorship was also a form of intellectual property extending to colonial markets and commercial networks. European modernism has focused largely on formalist affirmations and denials of labour rather than contextualising these practices with concurrent discourses on the minimalisation of labour in evidence at displays like the Crystal Palace exhibition, or the cheap labour offered by colonial outposts. In fact, resituating the question of labour within art practices more broadly speaking will allow us to ask, in the spirit of Susan Gubar’s remarks on the dependence of autonomous discourses of white identity upon black bodies, as to how the invisible labour of the colonial craftsman was instrumental to the production of an elitist modernism and its aestheticised critical histories. Doing so would necessarily mean situating aesthetic practices within a transnational imperial economy of labour, contesting the national art-historical paradigms currently in place. Ravi Varma’s portrait of the scholar points in this direction, registering darkened bodies in the service of elite subjects in the light. Notes: (1) Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). (2) Georg Simmel, ‘The Aesthetic Significance of the Face’, in Georg Simmel, 1858–1918: A Collection of Essays and a Bibliography, edited by Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1959), pp. 276–281. (3) Angela Rosenthal and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz (eds), Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). (4) Ashish Rajadhyaksha was the first to draw the parallels in ‘The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, No. 14–15 (1982), pp. 47– 78. Geeta Kapur, Kajri Jain and Christopher Pinney have all followed the twin trajectories with considerable interest in their writings. (5) Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Cameramen in the Shadows of Hindi Cinema’, in Ajay Sinha and Raminder Kaur (eds), Bollyworld: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005), pp. 118–140. (6) Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984). (7) Saloni Mathur, India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). (8) Erwin Neumayer and Christine Schelberger have identified the figure as C. Raja Raja Varma, Ravi Varma’s brother, but I have not been able to corroborate the finding. Erwin Neumayer and
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Christine Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma: Portrait of an Artist: The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 264. (9) ‘Shapoor N. Bhedwar’, The Photogram, Vol. 2, 1895, pp. 252–253. (10) Shapoor N. Bhedwar, ‘Portraiture’, Anthony’s Photographic Bulletin, Vol. 24 (New York E. & H.T. Anthony & Co. Publishers., 1893), pp. 749–750. (11) See Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). (12) See Tanya Sheehan, ‘Comical Conflations: Racial Identity and the Science of Photography’, Photography and Culture, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2011), pp. 133–155 and Melissa Miles, ‘Out of the Shadows: On Light, Darkness and Race in Australian Photography’, History of Photography, Vol. 36, No. 3 (2012), pp. 337–352. (13) John Blees, Photography in Hindostan; or Reminiscences of a Travelling Photographer (Byculla: Education Society’s Press, 1877), pp. 115–116. (14) See Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 37. (15) On the phenomenology of untouchability see Gopal Guru and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). (16) Susie Tharu, ‘The Impossible Subject: Caste and the Gendered Body’, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 31, No. 22 (1 June 1996), pp. 1311–1315. See also Anupama Rao, ‘Representing Dalit Selfhood’, Special issue Dalit Perspectives: A Symposium on the Changing Contours of Dalit Politics Seminar, No. 558, February 2006. (17) Udaya Kumar, ‘The Strange Homeliness of the Night: Spectral Speech and the Dalit Present in C. Ayyappan’s Stories’, Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences, Vol. 17, No. 1–2 (2010), pp. 175–190. (18) Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 40. (19) For a catalogue of British portraits painted in India see Pauline Rohatgi, Portraits in the India Office Library and Records (London: The British Library, 1983). Mildred Archer also lists a number of Indian portrait painters in her account of Company Painting in India. See Mildred Archer, Company Drawings in the India Office Library (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1972). (20) While portraits in elite homes and palaces have been much studied, those commissioned by the colonial administration have received less attention. There are indications of several portraits commissioned for governmental bodies which hung in municipal halls, Vakil’s associations, banqueting halls of the government houses and judicial buildings. (21) Natasha Eaton, ‘The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics, and Empire in South India, 1750–1795’, Cultural Critique, No. 70 (Fall 2008), pp. 63–93. (22) Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008), p. 137. Page 21 of 26 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows (23) The Illustrated Times, 28 September 1861, p. 204. (24) See J.P. Losty, Sita Ram’s Painted Views of India: Lord Hastings’s Journey from Calcutta to the Punjab, 1814–15 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2015). (25) The catalogue number at the British Library is Add.Or.347. The watercolour forms one of a series of four paintings depicting occupations and customs, which include a painter and a scribe. Interestingly enough, the artist is described as a Limner, while the watercolour designating Painter refers to a craftsman seated on a striped rug painting charpoy legs. (26) This self-referential image of the artist is not alone. There is at least one similar Company image of the artist seated on a chair drawing a portrait (‘An Indian Artist copying a European Portrait’, Painting on mica, c. 1875) catalogued in Mildred Archer and William Archer, Indian Painting for the British (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), Fig. 41. Sumathi Ramaswamy has also referred to this as an example of a meta-picture, invoking W.J.T. Mitchell’s notion of a ‘picture about a picture’. Sumathi Ramaswamy (ed.), Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003), p. xvii. (27) The Modern Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (July 1907), p. 100 (28) Exhibition Catalogue: Oil Paintings (Portraits and Sketches) by M.F. Pithawala, The Dore Galleries (London: New Bond Street, 1911), n.p. (29) This was in fact a frequent complaint even by supporters of Indian art like William Rothenstein. See William Rothenstein, Men and Memories: Recollections 1872–1938 of William Rothenstein, abridged with Introduction and Notes by Mary Lago (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978), p. 165. (30) George Birdwood, Report on the Government Central Museum and on the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of Western India for 1863. Being the History of the Establishment of the Victoria and Albert Museum and of the Victoria Gardens, Bombay (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, Byculla, 1864), pp. 8–9, Selections from the records of the Bombay Government, No. LXXXIII, P/V 845–854. According to the Hobson-Jobson dictionary a puttiwalla or puttywalla was ‘one with a belt’. It was the Bombay equivalent of the chaprasi (Calcutta) or the peon (Madras), who was an orderly attached to the office bearing a badge and a belt. (31) E.M.J. Veniyoor, Raja Ravi Varma (Trivandrum: Government of Kerala, 1981), p. 46. (32) Madhav Rao’s letter was in response to Governor James Fergusson’s appreciation of a painting by Ravi Varma exhibited at the Poona Fine Arts Exhibition in 1881 titled Nair Girl Tuning a Fiddle and addressed to Lt. Col. Stracey, Military Secretary to the Governor of Bombay. Letter from T. Madhav Rao to Lieutenant Colonel H. Stracey, Baroda, 21 September 1881. A 902, Baroda State Archives, Section 65, File 6. (33) The correspondence with the Palace that relates to his initiative for setting up a gallery of paintings in Trivandrum uses the appellation Artist consistently with his name. ‘Art Gallery, Painting of Pictures for Same 1896–99’, Serial No. 7059, Kerala State Archives. (34) Val Prinsep in fact notes how the protocols of the Nizam’s court were arranged around the rights to use the chair. He recounts an incident when the then British Resident, C.B. Saunders, was determined to undo previous practice that required all persons to remove their shoes and Page 22 of 26 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows squat on the ground in the Nizam’s presence. Indicating his intention to Salar Jung, Saunders put his troops on hold to attack Hyderabad if anything untoward happened to him, while Jung in turn lined up the streets with his own men. Saunders survived the visit, sat on his chair and did not take off his shoes, but Salar Jung later complained that some of the Nizam’s prestige was lost thereafter. Valentine Prinsep, Imperial India: An Artist’s Journals (London: Chapman and Hall, 1879), p. 308. (35) Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, pp. 118–126. (36) E.M.J. Veniyoor offers this anecdote that has been generally accepted as an origin for the additional Raja in his name. Raja Ravi Varma, pp. 53–54. However, the official publication listing the honour notes his name as Ravi Varma Koil Tamburan, Travancore. The India List and the India Office List for 1905. Compiled from Official Records by Direction of the Secretary of State for India in Council (London: Harrison and Sons, 1905), p. 172. (37) A number of popular biographies have circulated romanticised accounts of his genius. These include S.A. Pillai, Ravi Varma and his Art (Quilon: S.A. Pillai, 1928); K.P. Padmanabhan Tampy, Ravi Varma (Trivandrum: Kripon & Co., 1934) and Ranjit Desai, Raja Ravi Varma (New Delhi: Harper Perennial, 2013). (38) Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 111. (39) See Rupika Chawla, Raja Ravi Varma: Painter of Colonial India (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2010), p. 338. (40) Sanjay Subramaniam, David Shulman and V.N. Rao, Textures of Time: Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2011). (41) [John Tallis], Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace and the Exhibition of the World’s Industry in 1851, Illustrated by Beautiful Steel Engravings, from Original Drawings and Daguerreotypes by Beard, Mayall, etc, 3 vols (London: John Tallis, 1852), Vol. 1, p. 33. (42) Jerome Adolphe Blanqui (M.Blanqui) quoted in [John Tallis], Tallis’s History and 2escription of the Crystal Palace, Vol. 2, p. 240. (43) Saloni Mathur, India By Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). (44) For an analysis of the role of journals in popularising the figure of the craftsman see Deepali Dewan, ‘Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past: The Journal of Indian Art and Industry and the Production of Knowledge in the late Nineteenth Century’, in Julie Codell (ed.), Imperial Cohistories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press. (Madison and Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), pp. 29–44. (45) Samuel Phillips, Crystal Palace: A Guide to the Palace and Park (Sydenham: R.K. Burt, Crystal Palace Printing Office, 1859), Vol. 1, p. 112. (46) On the romanticisation of the labouring artist see Deepali Dewan, ‘The Body at Work: Colonial Art Education and the Figure of the “Native” Craftsman’, in James H. Mills and Satadru Sen (eds), Confronting the Body (London: Anthem Press, 2004), pp. 118–134.
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows (47) See Abigail McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) (48) Jerome Adolphe Blanqui (M.Blanqui) quoted in [John Tallis], Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, Vol. 2, pp. 72–73. (49) See Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). (50) M.J. Lemoinne (Letter 3) in [John Tallis], Tallis’s History and Description of the Crystal Palace, Vol. 2, pp. 159–160. (51) Rafael Cardoso Denis suggests that advances in mechanisation meant not necessarily an invisible labour force but one whose value lay in their powers of vision – as overseers of the mechanical equipment. See ‘An Industrial Vision: The Promotion of Technical Drawing in midVictorian Britain’, in Louise Purbick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 74. (52) See Peter Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display (Berkeley: University of California Press,), p. 80. (53) Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, pp. 179–184. (54) Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition, Vol. 2 (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), p. 937. (55) E.M.J. Veniyoor has claimed that Ravi Varma was represented in the Indian and Colonial Exhibition; however, the catalogue does not name him. The closest equivalence is an oil painting, Portrait of a Jew, from Travancore with Rama Vurma Coil Thumburan noted as the exhibitor. (56) The Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886: Supplement to the Art Journal (London: J. Virtue and Company, 186), p. 31. (57) This typical portrait of the craftsman was often inserted in Kipling’s other drawings. Illustrating Flora Annie Steele’s Tales of the Punjab, Kipling introduces a blacksmith in his drawing for the story ‘The Sparrow and the Crow’ and sets the figure amid a decorative arrangement of entwined tendrils and leaves, alongside an emaciated cow, a deer and a sparrow, all protagonists in the story. Flora Annie Steele, Tales of the Punjab (London and New York: Macmillan, 1894). (58) McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, pp. 55–60. (59) These were the terms in fact of the debate that took place at the Royal Society of Arts in January 1910 when George Birdwood made his incendiary statement regarding the utter absence of a fine arts practice in India. While Birdwood’s statement hijacked the agenda and inspired a rebuttal from several people, including William Rothenstein and Ananda Coomaraswamy, the primary opposition lay between E.B. Havell’s advocacy of a resurrection of the craftsman’s knowledge versus Cecil Burns’ (the principal of the J.J. School of Arts) urgent appeal to modernise Indian crafts to compete in the industrial marketplace. See Sir George Birdwood, ‘Response to E.B. Havell’s lecture on “Art Administration in India” at the Royal
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows Society of Arts in London, January 13th, 1910’. Reprinted in the Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. LVIII, No. 2985, p. 286. (60) B.H. Baden Powell, ‘On Some Difficulties of Art Manufactures’, Journal of Indian Art, Vol. 1, No. 1–16 (October 1886), pp. 37–39. (61) E.B. Havell, The Basis for Artistic and Industrial Revival in India (Madras: Theosophist Office, 1912), p. 146. (62) On the colonial denunciation of the fine arts tradition in India, see Partha Chatterjee, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Tapati Guha Thakurta The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Sir George Birdwood, the first curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Bombay and author of The Industrial Arts of India (1880) had declared ‘Of this fine art, the unfettered and impassioned realization of the ideals kindled within us, by the things without us, I have up to the present and through an experience of seventy-eight years, found no examples in India.’ At a well-publicised event at the Royal Society of Arts in 1910 he famously compared an Indonesian Buddha sculpture to ‘boiled suet pudding’. Birdwood, ‘Response to E.B. Havell’s lecture on “Art Administration in India”’, p. 286. (63) Deeptha Achar, ‘Crafting Education: Caste, Work and the Wardha Resolution of 1937’, in Shivaji Pannikar, Parul Dave Mukherji and Deeptha Achar (eds), Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian Art (New Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2003), pp. 385–393. (64) Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). (65) Amelia Jones, Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (New York: Routledge, 2012). (66) Donald Preziosi, ‘That Obscure Object of Desire’, in Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 26. (67) Ramanand Chatterjee, The Modern Review, 1907, reprinted in Raja Ravi Varma (New Delhi: National Museum, 1993), pp. 144–146. (68) Ravi Varma The Indian Artist (Allahabad: Indian Press, 1903), pp. 2–3. (69) The Madras Times (5 October 1908), p. 8 concurred: ‘Mr. Ravi Varma, whose death we recorded yesterday, was of high descent, being a near relation of the ruling family of Travancore, which makes it all the more to his credit that he devoted his life to hard work at his art.’ (70) S.N. Joshi, Half Tone Reprints of the Renowned Pictures of the Late Raja Ravi Varma (Pune: Chitrashala Press, 1911), pp. 1–2. (71) An excellent account of labour history in Victorian culture, including its colonial dimension, is offered in Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labor in Victorian Britain (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005).
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Impossible subjects: the subaltern in the shadows (72) A good account of the trial and its implications is offered in Linda Merrill, A Pot of Paint: Aesthetics on Trial in Whistler v Ruskin (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press in collaboration with the Freer Gallery of Art, 1992). (73) Neumayer and Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, p. 81. (74) Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art (New York: Viking, 1984), p. 221. (75) Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, pp. 205–232. (76) Rosenthal, and Lugo-Ortiz (eds), Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. (77) Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Design in the Age of Global Reproducibility (New York and London: Routledge, 2007). (78) See for instance Mathur, India by Design and Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
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Postscript
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
Postscript Niharika Dinkar
DOI:10.7765/9781526139641.00016
Abstract and Keywords I began this book by pointing to imperial practices of light that in turn inflected the more recognisable representations from twentieth-century India, such as the literary movement Chhayavaad or cinematic noir. While the succeeding chapters went on to develop an archaeology for such visual practices in the long nineteenth century, in closing I would like to indicate how such an approach might help in addressing more intractable visual archives that have remained bound to dominant tropes of mimicry and the latter’s devaluation of the copy.... I began this book by pointing to imperial practices of light that in turn inflected the more recognisable representations from twentieth-century India, such as the literary movement Chhayavaad or cinematic noir. While the succeeding chapters went on to develop an archaeology for such visual practices in the long nineteenth century, in closing I would like to indicate how such an approach might help in addressing more intractable visual archives that have remained bound to dominant tropes of mimicry and the latter’s devaluation of the copy. Take the well-known case of the reception of Gaganendranath Tagore’s Light and Shadow (1920), viewed as a bad copy in colonial accounts, by even such a staunch supporter of modern Indian art as William Archer. Tagore had simply selected a scene that looked ‘cubist’ and rendered an illustration of geometric architecture for Archer so that, despite its ‘modernistic manner’, it had ‘an air of trivial irrelevance’, lacking the power of Braque or Picasso. Tagore’s forms were stylised copies, bearing no relation to Indian art: ‘However modern and cosmopolitan a particular society may be’, declared Archer, ‘it had still its own national character – a character which made modern France different from modern Italy, modern India different from modern France.’1 Partha Mitter has used the example of Tagore’s to elaborate upon what he calls the ‘Picasso manqué’ syndrome, whereby the colonial subject’s emulation of the master’s vocabulary is implicated in the imperial power structure, terms that were of course equally applicable to Ravi Varma.2
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Postscript Archer’s inability to find an appropriate cultural context for Tagore’s formal departures is understandable, given that nationalism has remained the primary pivot around which questions of form were addressed. Moreover, cubism was posed as a logical development of a narrative of the dissolution of perspectival space, a narrative that had no corollary in India. However, thinking outside the perspectival narrative grants us insights into the painting that take away from its derivative status in canonical accounts. As this study has posited, Tagore’s experiments in light and shadow were by no means unprecedented, and they register the impact of lighting technologies and (p.251) their transformation of the nocturnal landscape through the dramatic chaos of paintings like The City in the Night (c. 1925) or the rendition of night-time entertainment spaces like Madane Theatre. Ratan Parimoo’s alternative genealogy for Gaganendranath Tagore’s interest in cubism relates his experience to lighting and stage design in theatre, drawing from Gordon Craig’s set designs which tended to replace illusionist interiors with lofty symbolic form illuminated with a mass of light and shade. A secondary influence, from the world of Russian theatre through Nicholas Roerich’s designs for the sets of Sergei Diaghilev’s ballets and Anna Pavlova’s friendship with the Tagores, provided a new sense of theatrical design, which saw the inclusion of large painted sets that often clashed against the movements of the performers.3 Tagore’s experiments with light in Madane Theatre or Temple Cubistic therefore spring from a nuanced understanding of pictorial space in close dialogue with the advances in lighting technologies and the new architectures which it made possible. Tagore was amongst the first to get himself an electricity connection, dispelling anxieties about its use – so much so that a pleased Electric Supply Company exempted him from the connection fees, since his enthusiasm served as an advertisement for the corporation. In his reminiscences, illustrated by Gaganendranath, Rabindranath Tagore expresses a pictorial sensibility in his recollection of lamp-lit evenings at their Jorasanko home: After nine in the evening, my lessons with Aghore Babu over, I am retiring within for the night. A murky flickering lantern is hanging in the long venetian-screened corridor leading from the outer to the inner apartments. At its end this passage turns into a flight of four or five steps, to which the light does not reach, and down which I pass into the galleries running round the first inner quadrangle. A shaft of moonlight slants from the eastern sky into the western angle of these verandahs, leaving the rest in darkness. In this patch of light the maids have gathered and are sitting on the floor close together, with legs outstretched, rolling cotton waste into lamp-wicks, and chatting in undertones of their village homes. Many such pictures are printed in my memory.4 Gaganendranath Tagore’s cubism also displays his commitment to addressing the role of technology and its experiments with light. A portrait of J.C. Bose, plant biologist and a significant figure in the development of radio and sonic technology (Jagdish Chandra Bose demonstrating his new apparatus, c. 1921), shows him demonstrating one of the many devices he invented, the microwave apparatus that detected and measured microwave frequencies. At a public demonstration in 1895 Bose had used millimetre-range wave-length microwaves to ring a bell at a distance and ignite gunpowder, inscribing his ideas in an essay, ‘Adrishya Alok’ (Invisible light). Light, then, was a subject of much experimentation in Gaganendranath Tagore’s works, beyond his (p.252) cubist turn, extending across the spectrum of his early works as well. While a more detailed analysis must await its turn, I offer this brief example of Tagore to indicate the avenues that open up in considering his use of pictorial space against the predominant role of
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Postscript technologies of light, its scientific applications and its role in theatre and civic life, all of which show up in his work. As such, this points to the possibilities opened up by drawing the question of light into art-historical analyses of modernism and contemporary debates on vision and space. Hans Blumenberg refers to light as an absolute metaphor that lends itself to infinite transcultural translations, and any study on the subject must perforce concern itself with only a sliver of its potential histories.5 This study is no exception, and in viewing the transformative role of light in the nineteenth-century visual economy it has addressed a small fraction of the sea-changes which it involved. My hope, however, is that it has evolved a preliminary methodology for thinking through the material and visual cultures of light in colonial modernity, the role of light in questions of vision and visibility and its significance within an imperial optics. The question of how industrial and imperial formulations of light engender ways of seeing remains relevant today. Empire has shown itself to be remarkably resilient, especially when allied with industry. Technologies of illumination continue to be deployed against the citizens of the postcolonial state to produce routine knowledge of its subjects, inscribing bodies into an ever more complex architectonics between consumer, industry and the state. Viewing the antecedents of an imperial vision machine through the matrix of lighting technologies and practices, even as the industry of representation woven around light migrates to newer media, presents itself as an important exercise in understanding relationships of vision and power forged through light. Notes: (1) William Archer, India and Modern Art (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. 1959), p. 43. (2) Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007), p. 7. (3) Ratan Parimoo, The Paintings of the Three Tagores, Abanindranath, Gaganendranath, Rabindranath (Baroda: Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, 1973). (4) Rabindranath Tagore, My Reminiscences (New York: Macmillan, 1917), pp. 103–104. (5) Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
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Bibliography
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
(p.253) Bibliography Niharika Dinkar
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Bibliography Ramaswamy, Sumathi, ed., Beyond Appearances? Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003. (p.261) Reed, Christopher. Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London: Thames and Hudson, 1996. Rice, Charles. Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity. London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London and New York: Verso, 2005. Rosen, Charles and Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth Century Art. New York: Viking, 1984. Rosenthal, Angela and Agnes Lugo-Ortiz, eds, Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Ruppin, Dafna. The Komedi Bioscoop: The Emergence of Movie-going in Colonial Indonesia 1896–1914. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016. Rushdie, Salman. ‘Outside the Whale’, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta Books, 1991, 87–101. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. Schechner, Richard. The Ramlila of Ramnagar. London; Routledge, 1993. Schivelbusch, Wolfgang. Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Angela Davis. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Schomer, Karine. Mahadevi Varma and the Chhayavad Age of Modern Hindi Poetry. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990. Sharpe, Jenny. Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Shulman David and Rao, V.N. How Urvashi Was Won. New York: New York University Press, 2009.
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Bibliography Articles in edited collections and journals Aitken, Molly Emma. ‘Spectatorship and Femininity in Kangra Style Painting’. In Representing the Body, edited by Vidya Dehejia, 82–101. New Delhi: Kali for Women in association with the Book Review Literary Trust, 1997. Arunima, G. ‘Face Value: Ravi Varma’s Portraiture and the Project of Colonial Modernity’, Indian Economic Social History Review, Vol. 40, No. 1, 2003: 75–76. Arunima, G. ‘Imagining Communities – Differently: Print, Language and the (Public Sphere) in Colonial Kerala’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 43, No. 1, 2006: 63–76. Arunima, G. ‘Writing Culture: Of Modernity and the Malayalam Novel’, Studies in History, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1997: 271–290. Asher, Catherine. ‘A Ray from the Sun: Mughal Ideology and the Visual Construction of the Divine’. In The Presence of Light: Divine Radiance and Religious Experience, edited by Mathhew Kapstein, 161–194. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Batchen, Geoffrey, ‘Electricity Made Visible’. In New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, edited by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan, 27–44. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Batchen, Geoffrey. ‘The Naming of Photography’. History of Photography, Vol. 17, No. 1, 1993: 22–32. Bates, David. ‘Idols and Insight: An Enlightenment Topography of Knowledge’, Representations, Vol. 73, No. 1, 2001: 1–23. Becker, Colleen. ‘Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as Methodological Paradigm’, Journal of Art Historiography, No. 9, December 2013, 1–25. Benjamin, Walter. ‘Paris: Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, Perspecta, Vol. 12, 1969: 163–172. Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’, Representations, Vol. 108, Fall 2009: 1–21. Bhabha, Homi. ‘Sly Civility’, October, Vol. 34, 1985, 71–80. Bille, Mikkel and T. Sorensen. ‘An Anthropology of Luminosity: The Agency of Light’, Journal of Material Culture, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2007: 263–284. (p.264) Blassnigg, Martha. ‘Clairvoyance, Cinema and Consciousness’. In Screen Consciousness: Cinema, Mind and World, edited by Robert Pepperell and Michael Punt, 105– 122. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Bressani, Martin. ‘Light into Darkness: Gaslight in Nineteenth Century Paris’. In Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban Illumination, edited by Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty and Dietrich Neumann, 28–36. New York: Routledge, 2015. Castle, Terry. ‘Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie’, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15, No. 1, 1988: 26–61.
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Bibliography Devika, J. ‘The Aesthetic Woman: Re-Forming Female Bodies and Minds in Early TwentiethCentury Keralam’, Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2005: 461–487. Dinkar, Niharika. ‘Masculine Regeneration and the Attenuated Body in the Early Works of Nandalal Bose’, Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2010: 167–188. Dinkar, Niharika. ‘Mythologies of the Artist in Modern India: Cinema, Melodrama and Ravi Varma’. In The Mediatization of the Artist, edited by Sandra Kisters and Rachel Esner, 215–232. Amsterdam: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Dirks, Nicholas B. ‘Guiltless Spoliations: Picturesque Beauty, Colonial Knowledge, and Colin Mackenzie’s Survey of India’. In Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past, edited by Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf, 211–232, New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co. Pvt. Ltd., 1994. Dunant, Caroline. ‘Olympian Dreamscapes: The Photographic Canvas; The Wide Screen Paintings of Leighton, Poynter, and Alma-Tadema’. In Melodrama, Picture, Screen, edited by Jacky Bratton et al., 82–93. London: British Film Institute, 1994. Eaton, Natasha. ‘The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics, and Empire in South India, 1750–1795’, Cultural Critique, No. 70, Fall 2008: 63–93. Edwards, Jason. ‘Introduction: From the East India Company to the West Indies and Beyond: The World of British Sculpture, c. 1757–1947’, Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 11, No. 2, 2010: 147– 172. Elliott, Derek. ‘The Pirate and the Colonial Project: Hero of the Malabar Coast, Kanhoji Angria’, DarkMatter Journal 5, 2009, n.p., www.darkmatter101.org/site/2009/12/20/the-pirate-and-thecolonial-project-kanhoji-angria/ [Accessed 10 February, 2012] Flood, Finbarr Barry. ‘Correct Delineations and Promiscuous Outlines: Envisioning India at the Trial of Warren Hastings’, Art History, Vol. 29, No. 1, 2006: 47–78. Foucault, Michel. ‘The Eye of Power’. In Power/Knowledge, 146–165. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Foucault, Michel. ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow. New York: Penguin, 1984, 32–50. Freitag, Sandra. ‘Visions of the Nation: Theorizing the Nexus between Creation, Consumption, and Participation in the Public Sphere’. In Pleasure and the Nation: The History, Politics, and Consumption of Public Culture in India, edited by Rachel Dwyer and Christopher Pinney, 35–75. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001. Galinier, J., A.M. Becquelin et al. ‘Anthropology of the Night: Cross-Disciplinary Investigations’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 51, No. 6, 2010: 819–847. Ghosh, Shohini. ‘Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms’. In The Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media. Delhi: Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 2004: 447–454. Gledhill, Christine. ‘Rethinking Genre’. In Reinventing Film Studies, edited by Linda Williams and Christine Gledhill, 221–243. London: Arnold Publishers, 2000. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Page 16 of 35 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
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Index
Empires of Light: Vision, Visibility and Power in Colonial India Niharika Dinkar
Print publication date: 2019 Print ISBN-13: 9781526139634 Published to University Press Scholarship Online: May 2020 DOI: 10.7765/9781526139641
(p.282) Index academic art 5, 8, 27, 97, 127, 153, 159, 163, 169–170, 172–173, 190, 194, 197, 220, 225, 242 see also J.J.School of Art; Madras Art School; Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta; Jubilee Art Academy agyaat vaas 134–135, 156 Aladdin 12–13, 60 alamkara 162 Ali, Daud 153, 162 Alibaba and the Forty Thieves 9, 60, 122 Arcadia 95–99 Archer, William 250 Arunima, G. 187, 197, 210 Babylon Electrified 10–11 Bacon, John 84–88, 90–94, 97 Bacon, Thomas 72 Barcan, Ruth 161 Baudelaire, Charles 55, 210 Benjamin, Walter 11, 165, 188 Berger, John 160 Bhabha, Homi 18, 114, 218 Bharat Mata 158, 169–170 Bhedwar, Shapoor N. 222 Birdwood, Sir George 172, 186, 227, 248n.59, 248n.62 Blanqui, Jerome Adolphe 234, 236 Blees, John 223 Blumenberg, Hans 161, 179n.41, 252 Bomanjee, Pestonjee, 170, 194, 211, 227 Bose, Nandalal 163, 210 Brahmin 51–52, 58–59, 93, 139, 186, 193, 201, 208, 209, 223, 240 Brahmanic 9, 90, 142 Brown, Ford Maddox 235, 242 Burke, Edmund 1–4, 10, 50, 93, 153, 155 camera obscura 41, 45, 50, 53–55, 61 Casid, Jill 45, 53 Page 1 of 5 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Index Chakraborty, Dipesh 203 Chatterjee, Partha 186 Chatterjee, Ratnabali 210 Chhayavaad 6, 8, 250 chiaroscuro 4–5, 11–12, 27–28, 188–190, 192–193, 220, 223 Chisholm, Robert 164 Chugtai, Abdur Rehman 7 Clark, Kenneth 160 Colonial and Indian Exhibition 122, 237, 239 Comolli, Jean Louis 2, 73 Constant-Benjamin, J.J. 169, 190 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 125–126, 158, 162, 166, 169 Crary, Jonathan 2, 45 Crystal Palace exhibition 234–239, 242–243 Dalit 224 Dalrymple, Alexander 46, 81 Daniell, Thomas and William 41, 69, 71, 73, 75, 78, 84, 117 darsan 9, 59, 127, 141–142, 147n.64 Das Indische Grabmal 24, 58–60 Deen Dayal, Lala 196, 237 Deleuze, Gilles 17, 20, 113, 192, de Loutherbourg, Phillipe 117, 119–120 Devika, J. 186–187 Dhurandhar, M.V. 13, 164, 170, 192, 227 Dirks, Nicholas 2, 81, 83 Draupadi 127, 135, 138–139, 156 Drury Lane 94, 117–118, 120 East India Company (British) 46–49, 53, 72, 78, 80–82, 91, 117–118, 141, 155, 188, 222, 241 Eaton, Natasha 225 Elephanta 24, 41–66, 82, 90 Elphinstone Theatre Company 25, 27, 122 Elphinstone Dramatic Society 121 Enlightenment 1–4, 6, 8, 18, 20, 21, 24, 29, 55, 57, 68, 74, 77, 86, 92–93, 114–115, 152–153, 160, 218–223 (p.283) Fergusson, James 43 flâneur 13, 55, 188, 192 Flood, Finbarr Barry 45 Forster, E.M. 24, 56, 155 Foster, George and Reinhold 96–99 Foucault, Michel 6, 8, 20–21, 29, 68 Fried, Michael 123, 125, 218 Garrick, David 117–118 Ghosh, Girish Chandra 137 Gillray, James 50, 54 Glissant, Edouard 18 Government College of Art and Craft, Calcutta 163, 170 Grand Master, or Adventures of Qui Hi? in Hindostan, The 24, 47–56 Grant Road Theatre 120, 121, 131 Gubar, Susan 224, 243 Page 2 of 5 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Index Guha-Thakurta, Tapati 170, 173 Gunning, Tom 9, 55, 126, 140 Hadot, Pierre 24, 74 Hansen, Kathryn 27, 133 Hastings, Warren 2, 45, 50, 53, 55, 77 Haussmanisation 11, 188 Hodges, William 41, 95–102, 117 Hogarth, William 24, 48, 74, 118 Homer, Winslow 12, 223 Husain, M.F. 8, 152, 154 Indulekha 193, 197, 199, 204–205, 222 J.J. School of Art 120, 141, 160, 164, 170, 172, 194, 227, 229, 239 Jones, William 25, 41, 72, 77, 84–93, 97, 102 Jubilee Art Academy 172 kaleidoscope 24, 45, 51–56 Kapur, Anuradha 122, 125 karanavan 198, 201–202, 204–205 Kaviraj, Sudipta 193, 196, 211 Keechakvadh 134, 138 Keechak 135, 138, 156 Kettle, Tilly 117–118 Kilimanoor 185, 195, 198–199, 204, 211 Kipling, J.L. 221, 238–239 Kipling, Rudyard 12, 174 Kumar, Udaya 210, 224 Kunhambu, Potheri 193 Lang, Fritz 24, 58–61 Lefebvre, Henri 10, 192, 203 lighting projects 9–16, 190–192 Bombay 12–13, 16, 32n.28, 121, 190, 192 Calcutta 13, 16, 25–27, 119, 121, 190, 251 Trivandrum 190, 192 Lippit, Akira 21 Madras Art School 164 magic lantern 1, 17–18, 24, 45, 48–50, 53–56, 61, 132, 134, 142 Mahabharata 134, 138, 156, 166, 169 Mahratta, The 113–115, 123 Malabar 16, 133, 168, 199, 201, 209 Malabar Marriage Act 186, 203 Malayalam 131, 188, 193, 197, 199, 201, 202, 207, 210, 222, 224 Malayali 133, 167, 168, 199, 200, 202, 207, 209 Martin, Claude 118–120 Mathur, Saloni 221, 235 Maurice, Thomas 87–91 Mazumdar, Hemendranath 173 Mehta, Ketan 151–152 melodrama 25, 126–127, 130–133, 135–137, 140–143 Menon, Dilip 208 Messink, Barnard 117 Page 3 of 5 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Index Minto, Lord 113–114 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 68 Mitter, Partha 29, 45, 86, 250 Mughal 7, 69, 71, 99 Mughal painting 153, 187, 227, 237 Nala Damayanti 27, 158–159 Nambudri 193, 201 Nandakumar, R. 167, 201–203, 205 Nayar 167, 186–187, 197–199, 201, 203, 205 nayika 153, 169–170, 212n.8 Nead, Lynda 11, 27 New Alfred theatre 121, 134 Nil Darpan 123–124, 155, 177n.24 nude 27, 152–154, 159–165, 168–169, 172, 174–175 O’Doyly, Charles 48 opacity 7, 18, 20–21, 100, 114 Orient/Oriental 2, 5, 7, 8, 12–13, 18, 21, 24, 43, 45, 55, 57–58, 60, 68, 78, 80, 84, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 114, 118, 125, 137, 159, 167, 169, 175, 189 Oriental Gas Company 16, 190 Oriental Portfolio, The 25, 69–77, 87, 100, 102 Panofsky, Erwin 98 panopticon 20–21, 100 Paris 5, 11, 122, 188–189, 192 Parsi theatre 25, 113–143 (p.284) Pauranik 9, 25, 27, 87, 91, 93, 116, 126–127, 132–134, 136–137, 140, 142–143, 151–152, 156, 164–166, 172, 195, 219 Perniola, Mario 154, 173, 175 Phalke, D.G 9, 60, 124, 142, 219–221 phantasmagoria 12, 24, 41, 44–45, 48–49, 53, 55–56, 60–61 Pinney, Christopher 22, 159, 225 Pithawalla, M.F. 170, 227 plein air 5, 189 portraits 47–48, 75, 118, 154, 167–168, 170, 172, 185, 187–188, 192–200, 202–205, 211, 218–224 artist portraits 225–234 craftsmen portraits 234–240 Prakash, Gyan 37n.103, 140 Prinsep, Val 154, 231, 246n.34 proscenium 8, 25, 113, 116–127, 131, 136, 140–143, 145n.28, 145n.29 Pulaya 193, 208, 223–224 purdah 25, 73, 77, 114–115, 124–125, 153–154 Pyke, Isaac 46, 78, 80–84, 97, 102 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 123, 244n.4 Raja Harishchandra 60, 116, 130, 142 Rajput 6, 100, 133, 138, 153, 187 Ram, Sita 120, 226 Ramayana 166 Rang Rasiya 151–152, 154 Rawdon-Hastings, Francis 47, 52–54 Riis, Jacob 12 Page 4 of 5 Subscriber: OUP-Reference Gratis Access; date: 09 October 2020
Index Romanticism 5, 41, 43–44, 56–57, 83–84, 91, 99, 189, 209, 235, 240, 242 German Romanticism 24, 57–58, 74 Rowlandson, Thomas 24, 47–56 Ruskin, John 44, 239, 242, Sanskrit 57, 58, 72, 84, 92, 124–125, 162, 205, 240 Schivelbusch, Wolfgang 1, 5, 10 Seringapatnam 84, 119 Shakuntala 131–132, 135, 137, 169–170, 205 Singh, S.G. Thakur 172 soldier artists 81–84 Starobinski, Jean 36n.83 St Paul’s Cathedral 84, 91, 93 Suhrawardi 7 Suleri, Sara 22, 45, 177n.20 Tagore, Abanindranath 163, 210 Tagore, Gaganendranath 6, 25, 250–251 Tagore, Rabindranath 6, 172, 186, 251 Tahiti 95–102 Tanizaki, Jun’ichiro 21 tharavad 187, 194, 197–199, 201–210 Thomas, Rosie 9, 60, 142 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 115, 137–138 Townsend, Meredith 113–114 transparency 18, 20, 114–115, 143 transparent painting 119–120 Trindade, Antonio Xavier 194, 211, 227 Trivandrum 137, 169, 190, 192, 195 trompe l’oeil 9, 127, 132, 140–141 Urvashi 151–152 Van Ruith, Horace 172 Varma, C. Raja Raja 130–133, 141, 156, 164–165, 168–169, 172, 186, 190, 193–194, 199–200, 206–209, 221, 231–234 Varma, Mahadevi 6 Varma, Ravi 6, 8–9, 25, 27–29, 126–137, 140–142, 151–154, 156–158, 163–170, 172, 185–211, 218–224, 229–234, 237, 240–243, 250 Wilson, Horace Hayman 72–73 Wilson, Richard 96, 98–99 World’s Columbian Exposition 222, 237 Wright, Joseph 9–10, 94–96, 98 zenana 72, 75–76, 99–101, 154, 168, 225 Zoffany, Johan 117–118, 120
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