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Mitchell Winter/Department of History of Art and Visual Culture/ UC Santa Cruz
Conference: “Precarious Exchange: Materiality, Network, and Value in South Asia in the World”
Title: Morass of Beauty, Soil, and Sea: Aporias of the Colonial ‘Picturesque’ in Nineteenth
Century India
As a teenager, I was enamored with the writings of the alleged ‘Romantic’ poets
operating in England and Germany during the established ‘Revolutionary Era’, a period of about
a hundred years spanning from the 1750’s to the end of the 1850’s. My understanding of
European writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, and Goethe was set against a public high
school curriculum of European history that stressed the shifting political atmospheres of postGlorious Revolution England, post-Jacobin France, and post-Revolutionary America, celebrating
those societies’ libertine shedding of the yoke of oligarchy. Ironically, the Era of Enlightenment
and Revolution ‘at home’ in Europe was also the beginning of the age of colonialism ‘abroad’
and its paired economic policy of mercantilism. From the beginning of the 17th century with the
chartering of both the British and Dutch East India Companies, the Western understanding of
‘India’ as a site for resources, luxury goods, and imagined cultural fascination became a
dominant feature of (I argue) all writing and representation concerning the south Asian peninsula
under colonialism.
The ‘collective effervescence’ that has come to define the Bohemian Romanticism of the
nineteenth century through the type of emancipatory historicism I experienced in high school
neglects to consider the wider problems of cultural exchange that circulated in the European
colonies. It does so by erasing the histories of colonialism and intercultural translation that were
embedded in the literary and artistic projects of the so-called ‘Romantics.’ I am only now
beginning to understand that some of my favorite poets and artists from the European canon
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were profoundly influenced by the ‘idea’ of India—as a site for luxury resources, as an imagined
future utopia, as a sublimated European past, and as a laboratory for conceptions of human
emancipation. These seemingly conflicted formulations of ‘India’ constitute the formal
philosophical condition of the ‘aporia,’ an impossible object that can never be fully demarcated
as ‘readable.’ In a book that recalls all his previous work on the topic, Jacques Derrida provides
the etymology of ‘aporia’ as “the refused, denied, or prohibited passage, indeed the nonpassage,
which can in fact be something else.” Literally, a-without, poros-passage, opening. The aporia
exacerbates difference through the constant unreadability of its interlocutors, supporting
Derrida’s point that “[t]he affirmation that announced itself through a negative form was
therefore the necessity of experience itself, the experience of the aporia…as endurance or as
passion, as interminable resistance or remainder.” I increasingly find myself in this position of
non-passage, being a white scholar of India, reporting or re-presenting the views that dominated
so much of European Romanticism. In the face of an extended engagement with Orientalist
thinking, which set precedent for mid-nineteenth century ethnographic studies like Sir Alfred
Lyall’s on Indian sociological systems, I take up the view that Europeans steeped in the
Romantic tradition were not neutral ‘artists,’ but were implicated, from the start, in the very
structure of imperialism.
The remainder of this talk will revolve around the three associated concepts of landscape,
ocean, and the ‘picturesque’ as they were deployed by British merchants, colonists, and artists in
India from around 1757 to the 1857 Indian Revolt and from 1860 to around 1925. To this end,
the main visual materials from this period that I will focus on are British Company paintings
produced between c. 1700-1850 CE and cloth trade labels produced by British-run Indian cotton
mills between c. 1860-1930 CE. My analysis of visual culture in colonial India follows Kuan-
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Hsing Chen’s model of a “geocolonial historical materialism” outlined in his book Asia as
Method: Toward Deimperialization and focuses on the conceptual grouping of landscape, ocean,
and the ‘picturesque’ as a triangulation of Europe’s obsession with India’s material resources as
sources of luxury, power, and knowledge. To further clarify the concepts of ocean, landscape,
and the ‘picturesque,’ I turned to the secondary material of Françoise Vergès, W.J.T. Mitchell,
Ann Bermingham, Henri Lefebvre, Mary Louis Pratt, Talal Asad, and Nicholas Dirks, and the
primary source material of the eighteenth century theorists of the ‘picturesque’ William Gilpin
and Uvedale Price. In addition, I have gone back to Edward Said’s paradigmatic text Orientalism
due to Chen’s engagement with the cultural studies tradition instituted by Said and Stuart Hall in
his crafting of ‘deimperialization.’ Said’s point that ‘Orientalism’ is a ‘structure of feeling’ that
works on the psychological and cultural foundations of the European ‘will to power’ resonates
deeply for the case of India when he claims that: “sensuality, promise, terror, sublimity, idyllic
pleasure, intense energy: the Orient as a figure in the pre-Romantic, pre-technical Orientalist
imagination of late 18th-century Europe was really a chameleon-like quality called (adjectivally)
“Oriental.” Strikingly, the pre-Romantic ‘Oriental’ shares the same ever-shifting, thus
impossible, position that Derrida’s aporia requires as a condition of its existence.
With the mercantilist exploitation of capital came significant advances in navigation,
shipping, and colonial bureaucracy, owing in part to the strict legers that Company-employed
merchants were required to keep. Advances in maritime science stimulated prolonged trade
contact between Europe and Asia, contrasted to earlier land or partial sea-based travelling trade.
In light of this, Françoise Vergès adapts Fernand Braudel’s study of the Mediterranean sea as a
complex network of interrelated trade posts to an understanding of the Indian Ocean as a similar
site of struggle and confluence. She entertains the possibility that the “Indian Ocean as a cultural
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site, construed so that its historical world of African-Asian exchanges may expand our
imagination and open up possibilities for change—rather than being locked in the
territorialization imposed by imperialism and postcolonial nationalism...Every spatialization
involves new closures.” Vergès, a native of the French colonial island of La Réunion off the east
coast of Madagascar, notes the violence, trauma, and displacement of people that occurred in the
Indian Ocean world as a result of European imperialism, but contends that “there were also
practices and idioms of cultural translation that maintained and developed a world of trade and
exchange.” Sites of cultural confluence, Mary Louis Pratt’s ‘contact zones’, thus form an integral
part of Vergès’ analysis of Indian Ocean politics. She asserts the primacy of ‘contact zones’ that
were not necessarily hegemonic or subversive, like the trade agreements for cloth established
between East Africans and West Indians in the 15th century. Conversely, though European
mercantilist monopolies set up a type of ‘contact zone’ in the Indian Ocean, Vergès sees them as
inherently driven by the accretion of capital and profit, which must always include a critique of
ideology.
The work of the late Murphey Rhoads and Meera Kosambi on colonial Indian port cities
in Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta foregrounds the instrumentality of the ocean as a necessary
feature of early imperial domination. Always located on the border between land and sea,
colonial port cities remained far away from the imagined ‘dangerous’ interior of the Indian
landscape. If colonists or British tourists ventured into the Deccan or into the plains of southern
India, they did so in heavily outfitted carriages or palanquins, usually managed by an Indian
driver. Mildred and W.G. Archer note in their monograph Indian Painting for the British that
British travel artists and tourists would commonly stop to “take in” the surrounding landscape
and would frequently supplement this form of looking with sketchings, paintings, or descriptive
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letters to loved ones back home. The point being that the visual or written descriptions we find
from the wives of colonial administrators or amateur artists travelling in the interior of the
subcontinent often erase the human labor required to get them there and only comment on the
‘natural beauty’ of the physical landscape. This sort of ‘travel writing’ (to use Mary Louis Pratt’s
terminology again) was also expressed in East Indian Company-produced paintings and
illustrations of native Indian ‘types,’ a composite form of documentation that essentialized entire
class and caste groups living in India into recognizable forms. Accounting for the responsibility
that these colonial authorities had to the people they studied and depicted would require us to
envision these ‘artists’ as early ethnographers due to the fact that anthropological inquiry has
undoubtedly been symbolically castrated by late twentieth and twenty-first century critiques of
ethnography. In the specific case of Colonel Colin Mackenzie, first Governor of the Madras
Presidency in south India, some have suggested that his surveys, maps, and unfinished sketches
of decaying Hindu temples were not explicitly implicated in the colonial ethnographic project.
Nicholas Dirks makes the distinction between Mackenzie’s ‘visual ethnography’ in the form of
his sketches on Indian ‘costuming’ and other depictions of ‘native’ types and the later
ethnography of the post-Plassey period: “Both in the absence of any kind of systematic and
autonomous sense of a ‘caste system,’ and in the concentration of pictorial attention given to
characters who reflected the political landscape of the 18th century Deccan—the residues of
India’s late medieval feudal culture and society—we see major differences between Mackenzie’s
vision of India’s ethnography and the ethnography that became canonized in the late 19th
century.” Starkly opposed to earlier landscape drawing done by Mackenzie, these ethnographic
sketches “appear to have been drawn by Indian draftsmen, attempting to draw in a British style.”
Rather than seeing Mackenzie’s influence as “too early” to be considered ethnographic, we
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should understand that his work was perhaps the pre-historical base for later developments of
ethnographical work in India. There are differences to be sure; Mackenzie sometimes did not
complete the drawing he was working on, was not very good at documenting or writing about his
work, and did not leave behind much in the way of official explanation of his subjects—he was
first and foremost a cartographer. Mackenzie’s addition to the archive of colonial knowledge
may have been a subconscious gesture to categorize the people of India through racial
distinctions, even if ‘ethnography’ as a formal method in anthropology was not fully established.
In the European colonial mind, hierarchizing the Others one came in contact with was in line
with Christian theological doctrines pertaining to eschatology, where all individual bodies are
eternally fixed in cosmological time according to their actions and the hereditary actions of their
ancestors. Thus, it is under this eschatological imperative that conceptions of the ‘picturesque’ in
India were formulated, as a sublime rendering of a Christian cosmographical account of time.
Epic literature and the renaissance of Greek and Latin texts in late seventeenth century
Europe was given fruitful expression during the neoclassical period (starting c. 1760), feeding
directly into the narratives of the next period of Romantic lyricism and naturalism embodied in
such figures as Wordsworth in England, Goethe in Frankfurt, and Alexander von Humboldt in
Prussia. The unveiling of the natural world began as the scientific principles and maxims of the
Enlightenment era crystallized, forming an aperture, fully dilated, that allowed a ‘full’ picture of
the cosmos, and in our case the Indian landscape, to pixilate into focus. For Englishmen,
centuries of deforestation spurred by exponential industrial activity had desecrated the sacred
body of what W.J.T. Mitchell calls “Europe’s great bog.” Ann Bermingham along with Sveltana
Alpers have written extensively on the influences of the realist depictions of Dutch Golden Age
oil painting on the British ‘picturesque’ tradition, but it was an English artist, schoolteacher, and
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writer named William Gilpin who was the first to comment at length on the ‘formal’ qualities of
picturesque art. Both his 1768 treatise An essay upon prints: containing remarks upon the
principles of picturesque beauty and his 1772 work Observations, Relative Chiefly to
Picturesque Beauty, make no mention of the Dutch tradition. Gilpin’s first 1768 essay contains a
glossary of explanatory terms used in the course of his argument that evoke, and perhaps
anticipate, Romantic artistic sentiments. For example, “a whole: the idea of one object, which a
picture should give in its comprehensive view,” “picturesque: a term expressive of that peculiar
kind of beauty, which is agreeable in a picture,” and so on. Despite the vague and somewhat
unhelpful definitions that Gilpin provides, the entirety of the essay is an encyclopedic effort to
catalog the kinds of picturesque representations of the countryside that were proliferating in the
studies and salons of British artists in the 1760’s. It should be noted that Gilpin’s artistic ‘vision’
was not an anomaly in the cultural milieu of the nascent British Empire. His Essay upon prints,
published 168 years after the induction of the British East India Company and a mere eleven
years after the military exploits of the Battle of Plassey, fits into a constellation of British artistic
practices that were formed in the mid-eighteenth century. In other words, though Gilpin’s work
posed as authoritative, it was not exceptional. Pratapaditya Pal and Vidya Dehejia inspect some
of the ways in which liberal British educational systems in the eighteenth century helped to
reproduce ideals of drawing, painting and portraiture in their book From Merchants to
Emperors: British Artists and India. Whether upper and middle class British students were
destined to be a financial clerk in London or a colonial official in Madras, they all studied the
same rigorous curriculum, wedded to a realist depiction of the world, which included mastering
three-point perspective and linear alignment. Pal and Dehejia assert that “[w]hatever else may be
said of British imperial rule in India, no other colonial power in history left such a vast amount
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of visual material recording the life and perceptions of the ruling class with such fidelity or in
such graphic detail.” After 1757 with Robert Clive’s ‘victory’ at the Battle of Plassey “British
Indian history…the British interest in things Indian, whether material or cultural, diminished in
proportion to the imperialist expansion.” For British artists drawing Indian landscapes during the
early colonial period, the geography of India became a virginal paradise, resplendent with natural
resources and quaint people. After the Battle of Plassey and certainly after the 1857 Revolt, the
landscape began to take on a darker hue—mountains rose menacingly in the background and
ruins became a dominant visual feature. One can see the transition from a celebratory vision of
India as the imagined homeland of Western Europeans who had lost much of their natural
landscape through industrialization to a fixated sight on India as a generator of disease, death,
and threats to Christianity.
As a final aside, I extend my analysis from Company produced ‘art’ to images
manufactured in British-run cotton mills that began operating around the 1850’s. Representations
of the Indian landscape crop up frequently in this genre of prints, produced originally as practical
measures of cloth but then later adapted for branding and advertising purposes. However, as
Richard Davis notes in his essay “Krishna Enter the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” the
landscape that is shown is not an Indian landscape, but a European one. He describes the
“Manbhajan” print of the Calcutta art studio, established in 1878, in which Radha and Krishna
“occupy a dark wooded glade that looks as if they had transferred Vrindavan to the Black forest
of Germany.” This aspect of the ‘picturesque’ was transplanted directly into the designs of cotton
trade label manufacturers and resulted in a similarly idyllic picture of India, one that hid the
machinations of human labor needed to keep the cotton industry running. In one particular label,
a dye factory is shown amid a landscape populated by indistinguishable bodies—bodies of
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Indian workers laboring to produce the dye used to color their own clothes and the clothes of
aristocrats in Europe. Labels like these, along with ones that depicted mythological figures such
as Krishna, Rama, or Devi, gained enormous popularity among the Indian populace for their
vibrant color palettes, familiar cultural themes, and their small, portable size. I contend that this
later development of landscape aesthetics in colonial India via British-run corporations was the
practical application of the previous era of landscape speculation and representation produced by
the British East India Company. By documenting the generalities of life in pre-revolt India,
British commercial interests were able to market ‘their’ products (finished cloth) to a population
of Indian consumers who could either continue spinning their own cloth of lesser quality or buy
higher-quality cloth at a slightly inflated rate. Thus, not only were the material resources (cotton)
of India being mined, sorted and sent back to Europe for processing and then being sold back to
Indians for a profit, but ideologically European depictions of the Indian landscape were also
being manufactured based on assumptions drawn from the Romantic inheritance and being
presented to Indians as commercially free ‘gifts.’ In this way, the tensions expressed between
land, material, representation, and reality offer us a presentist view of British colonialism as it
operated in the prevailing visual archive of India.
In this short paper, I have outlined some of the ideological presuppositions that
underpinned the production of British Company art and trade labels during the colonial period in
nineteenth century India. I hope to have shown, despite the canon of art history indicating
otherwise, that works hailing from the so-called British ‘picturesque’ tradition were anything but
‘Romantic,’ ‘universal,’ ‘humanist,’ ‘emancipatory,’ or ‘morally neutral.’ Indeed, though my
adolescent self sighs at the false prospect of a universal landscape available to all the world’s
peoples, it is my view that the historical particularity of landscape and its associated connotations
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of ‘home,’ ‘nature,’ ‘safety,’ etc., cannot be transcended in any medium. European observers of
landscape unconsciously assumed an etic response to Indian social life; that is, they assumed the
position of the analyst, the detached artist, or the scholar without considering the fact that they
were operating within the alien cultural milieu of India. This incontrovertible fact indexes Homi
Bhabha’s famous aporia: the simultaneous desire and disavowal of colonized people’s cultures,
customs, and art. Lastly, my engagement with this form of research has radically implicated
myself in the project of European Romanticism, based on the fact that my original exposure to
the ‘picturesque’ was through artists and poets who unilaterally disregarded India as a place with
its own traditions and its own conceptions of landscape, beauty, and value.