J.P. Losty (Thames & Hudson 2015)
I’m one of those (possibly rare) weirdos who reads coffee table books intensively from beginning to end. I loved reading this one and would recommend it to all those who like Company or Murshidabad style art or are interested in colonial Indian history. I didn’t read it all at one go but kept coming back in between other reads, with several months long intervals in between.
This travelogue is a fascinating record of what Lord Hastings, Governor General of India (1812-1821) noted down in his private journal of what he saw, thought and did during an official cruise (with frequent landings) along the Ganges. It was an epic river journey from Calcutta to Punjab and then back to Barrackpore in seventeen months from 24 June 1814 to 9 October 1815. His purpose was to monitor the ongoing war with Nepal and the aftermath of the Sikh war. So, he sailed in a massive flotilla of some 220 barges and smaller boats (some were lost in river storms) from Bengal to Patna, Benaras, Allahabad, Kanpur, and from there, journeyed partially over land to Lucknow, Delhi and Punjab.
Lord Hastings’ journal comes significantly to life with over 200 water colours by the Bengal artist Sita Ram who travelled with the Governor General and painted most of what his journal records. Art historian J.P. Losty combines Lord Hastings’ journal (first published by his daughter Sophia, Marchioness of Bute in 1858) with another account in Bishop Heber’s diary and with Sitaram’s paintings, transforming the whole into a fascinating illustrated colonial perspective of nineteenth century India.
Lord Hastings, with a career spanning America, Europe and India was one of the most powerful personages of his time, in addition to virtually being the ruler of India. His views, intended as a future aide memoire for his young children who accompanied him on the journey, provide an enthralling insight into his mind and the interactions between Indian potentates and their colonial masters. The governor general’s delineation of the character and worth of these native dignitaries is often pompously condescending when reassured by their show of open friendship or even contemptuous of their display of fawning servility. At other times, he expresses his suspicions of those who didn’t publicly fit into this behavioural spectrum. He refuses to go to Delhi although earnestly invited by the then Mughal emperor, to teach the latter a lesson in humility and to emphasise his own superior status. He exhibits a scrupulous and rigid refusal to accept any expensive gifts of jewellery, robes, etc. from Indian kings, nawabs, rajahs and princes without seeming to be aware of the irony of simultaneously harbouring designs to take over their lands as tributary vassal states!
The focus however, bringing the journal alive, is the art of Sitaram with its subtle individualistic modifications to the Company or Murshidabad school of art. Sitaram’s drawings and watercolours were originally compiled in twelve albums but of these, only ten albums (along with a few auctioned paintings that could be traced) are available in this publication, two albums having been dispersed earlier through auction. The paintings in this edition include a self-portrait of the artist, architectural drawings, landscapes, indigenous flora and fauna, and of course, several portraits and scenes depicting important events or landmark sites. In Losty’s words, Sita Ram was “a major artist of the period, who far transcends the limitations of most other Company school artists by combining the manner of the English picturesque with his own Indian perceptions.”
Sita Ram shows his Company training in his rapid wash watercolour technique, impressionistic brushwork, mixing colours to arrive at certain effects, his study of light and shadow to impart volume to objects and figures, and in his composition of landscapes from specific aerial viewpoints, often with multiple vanishing points, quite distinct from the rigid western unifocal perspective. Like other artists of his time, Sita Ram, working no doubt at great speed during this trip, often borrowed from existing older paintings of a scenic site, but added his own unique composition and impressionistic light-shadow brushwork to the whole. In this way, he changed not only the old Mughal Murshidabad style of Indian painting, but also modified the later western Company school of Murshidabad art (of William Hodges and Thomas Daniell) to which his oeuvre belongs. For copyright reasons, instead of reproducing any pics of his work, I add these links to sites with uploads of some of Sitaram’s best paintings:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Sita_Ram
https://monidipa.net/2018/09/08/paintings-by-the-colonial-era-company-artist-sitaram/
Lord Hastings only refers once in his journal to Sita Ram, and that not even by name, as a “Bengal draftsman” and a few times when highlighting architectural details, showing how little he recognised and valued the talented and dedicated artist as an individual. In fact, the journal, although private, reads much like an official report. It makes no mention of any names but those of important social and political figures in official meetings. Even when boats are lost in storms and in some cases, boatmen and Bengal army soldiers drowned, Hastings reduces it to mere statistics, noting the damage to his retinue rather than expressing regret for the lives lost. A great general of his time, deploying armies in various wars across the globe, the men serving under him were no doubt, ‘cannon fodder’ or ranked according to utility, not worthy of individual recognition. History evens the score by reducing Hastings’ journal to an explanatory commentary on Sitaram’s paintings, as well as a not-very-admirable insight into the colonial ruling mindset.
It is interesting, in the light of current political events, that Hastings makes a passing reference to the tendency of the Muslim invaders to demolish Hindu temples and rebuild them as mosques on the same sites, with the Hindus not seeming to care or react in any adverse way to such acts. He refers to his visit to see “the mesjid or mosque built by Aurangzebe on the spot where Krishna was born [in Mathura]. …The intolerant Moslem levelled the temple and built on its site a heavy mosque of red stone, which, though apparently much neglected, through the indifference of Krishna and his devotees, remains unharmed.” While no doubt alive to the divisive possibilities in this exploitable situation, he is also surprised by “the singular indifference which seems to exist among the inhabitants of this country, whether Hindus or Mohammedans, with regard to the condition of any edifices belonging to their respective sects.” This, according to Lord Hastings, was reportedly because the cost of rebuilding or maintenance was seen as an unnecessary expenditure. No doubt, this attitude was inevitable in a country where the native ruler’s purse strings and livelihood was constrained by the British Resident at court or other representatives of colonial power. Hastings’ colonial spirit would be soothed to see that now after centuries, the Hindus at long last have aroused to vengeance, turning the tables to a point where the smallest deliberate Muslim provocation can trigger the maximum intolerant Hindu reprisal!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not taking sides here. If I may express an opinion at all, I think it would have been a masterly riposte to have built on the reclaimed site of any destroyed temple, in the name of its patron deity, a multi-speciality hospital or a world class university, equally benefitting all Indians, in the true inclusive spirit of Hinduism manifest in our history. After all, employment, healthcare and education – does India have any greater needs at the present time?
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