Art of Exchange: Circulation of Visual Culture in colonial India
October 28, 2006
Abstract Submissions
1. TransNational HaHas: The Limits of the Abstract
Arindam Dutta, MIT
The paper looks at one scene in a possible history of looking: the scene of
agriculture in the transition from the first British empire (the Americas) to the second
British empire (Asia) in the late eighteenth century. Agrarian and “physiocratic”
valorization, not mechanized industry, was the primary fuel for the establishment of
global capitalism. In the conventional Eurocentric narrative, the onset of modernity is
described by the subsidence of agriculture. In a global narrative, however, this lapsarian
description must be substituted by its inverse, that of exponential expansion. To the
extent that this new onset of economic valorization was secured by different
arrangements of rights of property, the new economic re-orchestration of access to land
also had to be “worked through” through new rituals, new choreographies of social
relationship on the land.
The eighteenth century garden was one aesthetic – “visual” – face of this de- and
re-territorialization of economic relationships in the countryside. This paper picks up
episodes in the history of the English garden – with their attendant themes of formality
and informality, Palladianisms and Gothicisms - and their influence and differences from
manorial estates in English colonies abroad: the plantation architectures of South
Carolina and Virginia, and the zamindari estates of Bengal. There is, of course, no
archetype of “the” English or any other form of garden, one that can be simplistically
defined as if to simplify ideology itself. The garden is rather explored as a transactional
feature, the scene of an ideological contest, not only of new property relationships, but as
a threshold of new forms of visibility and invisibility in the translation from nature to
economy. The haha, the submerged ditch that separated the sociality of the owners from
that of the farm labourers, is an emblem of this new dynamic of visibility and invisibility.
Researching a series of sources, sites and situations, the paper attempts to notate other
displacements, translations of the haha as a globalizing archetype of economic power.
2. Trafficking Inalienability Art, sovereignty and the gift in South Asia, 1760-1820
Natasha Eaton, UCL
This paper aims to recuperate gifting practices from the meta-ethic of commodity by
exploring the entanglement of Mughal and colonial regimes of inalienability. My
intervention explores the agency of art as gift at the courts of Arcot, Hyderabad and
Lucknow and the strategic techniques of resistance devised by princes against the
imposition of colonial aesthetics.
Both Indian and British societies developed sophisticated gifting practices which would
be difficult to reconcile in the colonial encounter. Mughal political culture emphasised
the importance of wonders, rarities, jewels and robes of honour; British abuse of this
regime of value and Parliamentary intervention against this taxonomy of presents forced
The Art of Exchange: Circulation of visual culture in colonial India
Sponsored by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University
the ‘resolution’ of a hybrid gift –the painted portrait. British governors sent European
artists to those Indian courts coming under either direct/indirect Company rule -- but they
did not offer their likenesses in return. The Company tried to annul or at least to mystify
the British metropolitan portrait exchange-as-reciprocation, by forcing Indian rulers to
pay for their own likenesses, to be sent to the Company as a species of tribute. But
nawabs played the East India Company at its own game by using deferral of payment as a
mode of resistance. And their display of colonial pictures –hung upside down, allowed to
atrophy (in stark contrast with the careful preservation of Mughal manuscripts), or
interspersed with their own likenesses, indicates nawabi refusal to be drawn into
colonialism’s desired practices of inalienability.
3. The Emerging Cosmopolitan Artscape in Early 19th Century Calcutta
Susan S. Bean, Peabody Essex Museum
During the first half of the 19th century, before the impacts of art schools, world’s fairs,
and arts and crafts movement ideology, sculptors and painters from traditional art-making
lineages responded to the increasingly cosmopolitan artscape of Calcutta. They reshaped
art practices through encounters with artists and works from local, regional and distant
sources, new materials and techniques, new styles, and a more differentiated arena of
patronage. Using works preserved in a museum collection and related documents, this
paper retrieves some episodes in clay modelers’ production of portraiture and social
commentary, and the incorporation of Western naturalism. The practice of clay modelers
is related to parallel processes among painters who took up and reworked European oil
paint and watercolor, and Western approaches to portraiture and landscape. The aim is to
consider the extent to which artists from traditional backgrounds and their patrons led the
way toward the 19th-century transformation of visual culture in the decades before
colonial institutions and the new elite art movement, emerging later in the century, began
to dominate the scene.
4. “Magical Realism” and the “Ruse of Recognition” in Colonial Thanjavur:
Maratha Court Portraiture in the 19th century
Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Mount Holyoke College
This paper critically examines the discursive shifts in visual and representational
practices at the Maratha court in colonial Thanjavur through a study of portraiture.
Painting and portraiture gained prominence at the Maratha court in the early 19th century,
as the result of a confluence of factors, including the presence of European artists and the
rise of the hybrid, popular “Company” style in Thanjavur, and the European education of
the polymathic Serfoji II, who ruled under British supervision from 1798- 1832, and
pioneered South Indian modernity in many spheres. I argue that, although royal portraits
played an important role in the court’s negotiations with its colonial overlords and with
modernity, they reveal at the same time the court’s resistance to European
representational discourses. If Serfoji continued to commission “Company” style
portraits even as he himself embraced realist art in other contexts, portraits from the court
of his son Shivaji II (1832-1855) adopt the iconographic and “magical realist” styles of
popular art even in the era of photography. Noteworthy, too, are the shifts in the
The Art of Exchange: Circulation of visual culture in colonial India
Sponsored by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University
contexts, placement and display of royal portraits from Serfoji’s reign to Shivaji’s. The
paper aims at illuminating the conversations embodied in these portraits --between what
Homi Bhabha (“Signs taken for Wonders”, 1994) has called “ruse of recognition” and
what Christopher Pinney (“Indian Magical Realism”, 1999) has called “magical realism”,
and between the court and the wider colonial public sphere in formation.
5. Costume Dramas: Artistic Hierarchies at the Court of the Marathas
Douglas Fordham, University of Virginia
When Thomas Daniell exhibited an ambitious six by nine foot painting at the
Royal Academy in 1805, he must have known that the London public would need some
interpretative guidance. Entitled A representation of the delivery of the Ratified Treaty of
1790 by Sir Charles Warre Malet to his Highness Narrain Peshwa, the fifteen-year-old
event would have been obscure to all but the most avid Orientalists and East India
Company investors. A pamphlet published alongside a reproductive print of the work
helpfully suggested that “This picture derives interest from the accurate delineation of
costume, in the faithful representation of an important political event in the annals of the
British Empire in the East.” It is the troubled deployment of ‘costume’ as an aesthetic and
a political concept that forms the central problematic of this talk.
In a Western aesthetic context, ‘costume’ was conceived within a hierarchy of
genres that dictated how cultural difference should be represented. As ‘costume’ moved
up the hierarchy of genres, it was subjected to a historical logic that progressively limited
what local details could signify. In a colonial Indian context, ‘costume’ played an
important role in the attempt by East India company officials to hierarchically organize
Indian society. As Nicholas Dirks has argued in relation to the vast Mackenzie archive,
“Costume was the key sign and objective focus of ethnographic difference.... Both in the
absence of any kind of systematic and autonomous sense of a ‘caste system’ and in the
concentration of attention on characters who reflected the political landscape of the
eighteenth century Deccan”. (Castes of Mind, 31) These two conceptions of ‘costume’ –
the metropolitan aesthetic and the colonial political - came together in Thomas Daniell’s
grand durbar painting where they reveal the limits of ‘fine art’ in the promotion and
representation of meaningful cultural exchange.
With the aid of a sizable archive of drawings, watercolours, and paintings
depicting Maratha durbars in Poona in the 1790’s, it is possible to specify the nature of
those limits in a specific historical context. Beginning with Daniell’s grand durbar scene
it is possible to dig down through the hierarchy of genres to a full-length portrait of the
Peshwa by James Wales, and down yet again to a series of preparatory sketches by
Robert Mabon. From this core sample emerges a model of British artistic practice that
goes beyond tautological assertions of imperial ideology to emphasize the ways in which
genre conventions constrained how visual artists represented their Indian experience.
Just as importantly, it recovers potentially subversive elements within an imperial archive
that were eventually contained and ordered by the narativizing logic of metropolitan
history painting. The fluidity of ‘costume’ as an aesthetic and a political concept
provides a clearer sense of ‘political representation’ in the late eighteenth century and the
negotiations undertaken by the British and the Marathas to have it conform to their own
interests.
The Art of Exchange: Circulation of visual culture in colonial India
Sponsored by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University
6. The Indian village in Victorian space
Saloni Mathur, Department of Art History, UCLA
When Liberty’s department store opened in late nineteenth century London, it was
a fabulous showcase for exotic objects from the East that captivated the imagination of
European consumers. It’s founder, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, was a successful
entrepreneur whose London warehouses full of Indian silks, rugs, shawls, and furniture
helped build his reputation in the Victorian fashion world. He shared an interest in Indian
design with men like William Morris and John Ruskin, leaders of the Arts and Crafts
Movement, but largely ignored the critique of capitalism that provided the philosophical
basis of the movement. My paper will focus on the place of India in the emergence of
this modern institution, and will emphasize, in particular, the interplay between
discourses – aesthetic, commercial, anthropological, and museological – in the space of
mass consumption of the Victorian department store. By examining a discrete set of
historical events, I trace the convergence of multiple discourses surrounding the
production, export, and display of India’s “living” craft traditions in a public spectacle
concerning Liberty’s department store in London during the 1880’s.
7. Circulation of Objects across the Empire: From India to Canada
Deepali Dewan, Royal Ontario Museum
Scholarship on the exchange of ideas and objects in the colonial period has tended to
focus on movement between colony and metropole. This paper examines the circulation
of objects in the broader British Empire. Specifically, it investigates the case study of a
carved wooden door that travels from India to the other British colony at the time,
Canada. Four moments in its journey are examined: its “excavation” in Gujarat, its
display at the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London, its subsequent acquisition
into the Imperial Museum collection, and its final transference in 1927 into the collection
of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. This paper explores the intersection of
institutional frameworks, the formulation of ideas about art, and the dynamics of multiple
colonialisms to understand the movement of this object. The paper asks what does this
case study mean for our understanding of the ways in which objects and ideas circulated
around the Empire? How can we consider the broader British Empire as a whole while
still taking into consideration the nuances of specific colonial contexts? How can we
(re)conceptualize the nature of such movement? This paper suggests some possibilities.
8. Weaving Heirlooms: Reviving historic carpet designs in colonial western India
Abigail McGowan, University of Vermont
One of the most promising traditional industries slated for revival in late 19th and early
20th century western India was the art of carpet weaving. Characterized by low
technology, high labor intensivity, high product value and strong demand (albeit largely
overseas) carpets appealed for obvious economic reasons. They also, however, captured
development interest for their aesthetics: representing India’s famed artistic skills in color
and ornamentation, carpets could be both economic and cultural, providing employment
The Art of Exchange: Circulation of visual culture in colonial India
Sponsored by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University
and preserving cultural heritage at the same time. The problem was that tufted carpet
weaving was hardly practiced in western India in the late nineteenth century.
In that vacuum a new industry sprang up in which design professionals, industrial
activists, factory managers, dye agents, carpet weavers and private merchants all played
their role in defining the nature of what was supposed to be a revival of carpet
production. Working from 17th and 18th century examples in the collection of the
Maharaja of Jaipur and still in use in sufi tombs in Bijapur, Western carpet enthusiasts
worked to define and disseminate historic carpet designs through books, journals,
exhibitions and museums. Those designs were in turn put into production in jails, art
schools, mission workshops and private factories, where convicts, orphans and Christian
converts were introduced to artisanal work. Thanks in part to the fact that workers and
managers alike were new to craft production, however, the end result was never exactly
what the design experts had hoped for. Departing from printed patterns to incorporate
foreign design elements, substituting brighter aniline dyes for muted natural dyes, or
embracing new color combinations altogether, carpet workshops forged their own
definition of Indian styles, suitable to their own understanding of market demand and
aesthetic standards.
In examining the development of carpet weaving in western India, I draw attention
to the troubled birth of design as a field and to the centrality of economics to aesthetic
questions in late colonial India. For all the institutional power of officially validated
design experts their world was a limited one, circumscribed by their repeated inability to
influence actual production. Although some carpet workshops did hire professionally
trained designers, art officials considered the work of such designers aesthetically
suspect, contaminated as it was by the sullying influence of the marketplace.
And yet it was the marketplace that made design and designers possible. Taking the idea
of the ‘art of exchange’ in a slightly different light, then, I point to the ways in which
visual trends in carpets operated in and through economic processes.
9. Indigo, Photography and Colonial Authority: Context and Subtext in Fergusson’s
Archaeology in India
Finbarr Barry Flood, New York University
In 1884 the English architectural historian James Fergusson published a monograph
entitled Archaeology in India With Especial Reference to the Works of Babu
Rajendralala Mitra. Publication of the work took place against the controversy generated
by the Ilbert Bill, which would have given senior Indian magistrates jurisdiction over
British subjects. Manifestly about methods, models, and the indigenous reception of
‘European’ science, Fergusson’s extraordinary personal and professional attack on the
celebrated Bengali scholar Rajendralal Mitra directly engages the proposed legislation. In
his assault, Fergusson contrasts an indigenous capacity for feats of memory with the
deeper truths of European scientific knowledge, which the native subject was incapable
of assimilating fully. Following a methodology championed in his architectural
ethnographies, Fergusson typologizes Mitra, figuring him as an example of the hybrid
native subject to whom the proposed bill would defer juridical authority.
The Art of Exchange: Circulation of visual culture in colonial India
Sponsored by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University
Despite the specific circumstances in which it was produced, there are reasons to think
that the seeds of Fergusson’s venomous assault on Mitra’s authority were sown much
earlier. Circumstantial evidence and a close reading of Fergusson’s text adumbrate a subtext that lies in two seemingly disparate biographical factors: both men’s involvement
with the Bengali indigo trade, and their pioneering use of photography. In Mitra’s case,
these activities were directly related for in 1857 - on the eve of the Mutiny - he was
expelled from his position as Treasurer of the Photographic Society of Bengal in
consequence of his vocal support for striking indigo workers. Mitra’s expulsion was
controversial, with at least one European member of the Society publishing a polemical
pamphlet to rally its members in his support.
Against this background, Archaeology in India appears as a distillation of anxieties about
the changing relationship between colonial and native scholars in the middle decades of
the nineteenth century. The context and sub-text of the work illuminate the broader sociocultural matrices that shaped the narrative (re)construction of India’s past, and the ways
in which tensions surrounding the politics of colonial capital inflected these narratives.
-6The Art of Exchange: Circulation of visual culture in colonial India
Sponsored by the Southern Asian Institute, Columbia University