Land of dreams: A glimpse into India under the Raj

India of a bygone era comes alive in the DAG exhibition of paintings by foreign artists from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Golden Temple, Amritsar (c. 1919) by Charles William Bartlett, Kokka woodblock print on paper. | Photo Credit: DAG

The English geographer, historian, and cartographer James Rennell, known for his strikingly accurate maps of India, wrote in the preface to his 1788 book, Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan; or The Mogul Empire “…almost every particular relating to Hindoostan is [sic] become an object of popular curiosity.” Rennell, of course, was using the obsession with India as a peg to introduce the country, its history and geography, to his readers, but this popular fascination (not just in Britain but in the entire West) with India was to have far-reaching consequences. It was to influence everything from fashion to food in Europe; it was to change the way even common people lived in England.

By the late 1700s, events like the Battle of Plassey (1757) and the Siege of Seringapatam (1799) had cemented the hold of the East India Company over the riches of India. The strengthening of this commercial enterprise, with concomitant prosperity for Britain, increased Western interest in the country. People across Britain, especially, wanted to see the sites of great victories, the grandeur of India’s ancient temples and forts, and the exotic landscapes rendered familiar by the Union Jack fluttering over them.

Those foremost in catering to this desire were the many artists who journeyed East. Among the earliest—and most prolific, as well as the best known—were the uncle and nephew pair Thomas and William Daniell, who spent seven years touring India and painting all they saw, from Calcutta to Delhi, Mysore to Garhwal. William Hodges (a contemporary of the Daniells), George Chinnery, James Baillie Fraser, Tilly Kettle, and Thomas Hickey were some others who, in the century between Plassey and 1857, brought India alive on canvas and paper. It is invariably this group of artists and this time period that are highlighted when pre-Independence artistic depictions of India are mentioned: their landscapes; their classic portraits of company officials, Indian princes, and commoners; their illustrations of life on the street.

But, as an exhibition at New Delhi’s DAG art gallery attempts to show, the Daniells, Hodges, and their contemporaries were only the forerunners to an equally talented set of foreigners who made India the focus of their art. The exhibition, Destination India: Foreign Artists in India, 1857-1947 (until August 24), showcases the work of 38 foreign artists who came to India in the 90 years after the rebellion of 1857, often described as the first war of Independence. On display are 85 artworks, including a couple of published books; DAG’s collection includes a further 20 artworks that are not on show currently.

Fascination with the “exotic East”

The historian Giles Tillotson, conducting a walkthrough of the exhibition on its opening day (July 13), remarked that this, in fact, was the first time that the works of these artists had been brought together. The general tendency has been to overlook this period of India-focussed art by foreigners—a result of several (often inaccurate) assumptions.

For one, it was assumed that the invention of photography in 1839 dealt a blow to the art of painting as a means of recording a space and an event. Also, there was a long-held idea that the “East ends at Damascus”—patently incorrect, given that (as Tillotson pointed out) the East might actually be said to begin from Damascus. Those who went beyond Damascus—and there were lots of them—often washed up in India. There was plenty to see here, plenty to record, despite the convenience of cameras.

Courtyard of a Palace, India (Humayun’s Tomb) by Marius Bauer, watercolour on paper pasted on board. | Photo Credit: DAG

In its heyday, the East India Company was one of the biggest patrons of India-bound artists. Not only did officers of the company commission artworks for private collections, the company itself employed artists to work on maps and other functional “art”. More to the point, the company commissioned art to emphasise its power and wealth: massive artworks commemorating its great battles, for instance, to decorate East India House, its London headquarters.

In the aftermath of the Uprising of 1857, Company Raj gave way to British Raj, but the change in rule only served to open India up further to those eager to search it out. The railways had arrived, too (in the 1850s), making it that much easier to travel, to witness sights that less intrepid travellers of earlier times might have been deprived of.

The 19th century also saw a growing trend of Orientalist art in Europe. From across Europe, especially France, Russia, Germany, and Britain, artists visited western Asia and North Africa to paint vividly coloured, highly detailed scenes of what they saw as the “exotic East”. That a fair number of artists would look beyond Arabia and the Maghrib to India—as exotic but also more convenient thanks to British rule, railways, and so on—is not hard to believe.

Those who came to India in this period and painted its terrain, structures, and people were a varied lot. For one, they came from different countries. Olinto Ghilardi was Italian; Boris Georgiev Bulgarian; Mortimer Menpes Australian; and Hiroshi Yoshida Japanese. There were Germans, a Dane (the gifted Hugo Vilfred Pedersen), Dutch (Marius Bauer), Americans (Roderick Dempster MacKenzie, Edwin Lord Weeks), and of course, plenty of Englishmen.

Some, like Pedersen, or the immensely talented Weeks, were trained artists. Four of the artists in this collection, including Cecil Leonard Burns, headed art schools (Burns headed the Bombay School of Art from 1899 to 1918). Others came to art through other channels. The engineer George Strahan, for instance, was a self-taught artist: his exquisite views of Kashmir make this hard to believe.

Wular Lake (Jammu and Kashmir) (1894) by George Strahan, watercolour on paper. | Photo Credit: DAG

Some came with the express purpose of creating art to be sold: William Carpenter and William Simpson, for instance, were sponsored by publishers and magazines. The war artist William Simpson was commissioned by the lithographers Day & Son to produce drawings commemorating the Uprising of 1857, but he ended up finding much more to interest him. The American artist Roderick Dempster MacKenzie specialised in hunting scenes and was commissioned by various maharajas to depict their shikar (hunting) expeditions; he found other, equally striking subjects to paint: one of his paintings, part of the exhibition, is a fine depiction of an Afghan soldier in the Karakoram.

Udaipuru no shiro / Udeypoor (1931) by Hiroshi Yoshida, Kokka woodblock print on paper. | Photo Credit: DAG

As varied as these men (and one woman, Mary Anne Blyth, of whom little is known), were their styles and subjects. For those used to the fairly European, realist style of classical art that was adopted by many of these artists, the spare lines and muted colours of Japanese woodcuts can seem unusual. At the turn of the century, a Japanese woodcut publisher named Shozaburo Watanabe had pioneered the Shin Hanga (new prints) movement in woodcuts, and two artists exceptionally skilled in this form are represented in the exhibition. One is the Japanese Hiroshi Yoshida; the other is the Englishman Charles William Bartlett. Their stylised, clean, and carefully controlled colours and lines are a treat, whether in Bartlett’s The Golden Temple, Amritsar or Yoshida’s The Palace of Udaipur.

Right at the beginning of the exhibition are some paintings by the Dutch painter, etcher, and lithographer Marius Bauer. Disillusioned by the westernisation of Bombay, Bauer was more enamoured of the relatively more “Eastern” Banaras (now Varanasi), Mathura, Gwalior, and Rajputana. His fascination with the exotic, however, did not come in the way of him putting his own—somewhat westernised?—spin to his depictions. Fantasy crept into his India paintings, combining with his travel memories to create a style he dubbed “postdreaming”: for example, there is an armour-clad knight, looking straight out of the Crusades, in an impressionist depiction of Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi.

Highlights

• The exhibition, “Destination India: Foreign Artists in India, 1857-1947” (until August 24), at New Delhi’s DAG, showcases the work of 38 foreign artists who came to India in the 90 years after the rebellion of 1857.
• These artists were a varied group, with varied styles and subjects. While they were faithful to reality in depicting India on canvas, an element of fantasy often crept in.
• India comes alive in this collection of portraits, landscapes, and scenes from familiar monuments, bustling streets and tranquil gardens.

Realism with fantasy

A world apart from Bauer’s surreal work are the sharply realistic, vivid paintings of Edwin Lord Weeks. But here, too, is an unexpected twist, a veering away from the conventional. One of the most striking paintings in the exhibition is Weeks’ Dancing Girl: the combined impact of the detailing, movement, light, characters is stunning. But for anybody familiar with Delhi’s historic spaces, the setting is easily recognisable. This is the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya, where a dance like this—colourful, titillating, perhaps even bawdy—would never be performed. In its own way, Weeks’ work is as much a mix of fact and fantasy as Bauer’s.

Jumma Musjid, Delhi (1864) by William Simpson, watercolour on handmade paper. | Photo Credit: DAG

While earlier artists tended to use watercolour only for preparatory sketches or “cartoons”, these later artists saw nothing wrong in rendering a final artwork in watercolours. They experimented in other ways, too. In the earlier, pre-photography era, artists like the Daniells and Hodges had been expected to faithfully chronicle what they saw. The focus was on veracity, though (as is obvious from the works of the Daniells) they did tend to stretch the truth a little by throwing in human figures to emphasise the proportions of a building or a landscape feature. By Weeks’ and Bauer’s time, the need to record the truth in its entirety was no longer a constraint, with the easy availability of photography. Thus the emergence of a certain sense of creativity.

Recording India

And yet, in some ways, the artists of this later period were as faithful, if not more, to reality as their precursors. As an example, there is the depiction of the ghats of Banaras, described by the politician and author William Sproston Caine in Picturesque India: A Handbook for European Travellers (1890) as being peopled by a “kaleidoscopic crowd”.

Benares am Goldenen Tor (Benares at the Golden Gate) by Erich Kips. Oil on cardboard. | Photo Credit: DAG

Banaras, like the Taj Mahal, had been extremely popular with visiting European artists for decades, but pre-1857 artists tended to portray chiefly the architecture of the ghats and the magnificence of the Ganga, keeping only the rudiments of the crowds. Hodges’ The Ghauts at Benares has no more than a dozen figures; the Daniells’ views of ghats like Shivala and Dasashwamedha are likewise marked only by a handful of strategically-placed figures, all serving to underline the river and the ghats.

While Banaras and the Taj Mahal remained popular subjects of art in the 1857-1947 period, too, the pristine, sanitised version of the ghats was done away with. In the DAG exhibition, you get to see several stunning artworks on Banaras that throb with life: German Erich Kips’ Benares am Goldenen Tor (Benares at the Golden Gate), for instance.

India comes alive in this collection of paintings. There are portraits, there are landscapes, there are familiar monuments (Jama Masjid by William Simpson stands out), and scenes of bustling streets and tranquil gardens in Jodhpur and Kashmir respectively.

This is India as it was, as much as India as it was seen by foreign eyes.

Madhulika Liddle is a novelist and short story writer.