Not Just Company Ltd.

A piece I did for India Today in February:

Indian art created for the East India Company is a revelation in both content and style.

By the late 18th century, Indian artists found it increasingly difficult to earn a living from the declining centres of the Mughal court or its successors. Meanwhile, they began receiving commissions from patrons affiliated to the East India Company. The art these painters created for expatriates has never received its due.

As the sun set on the British empire, these were no longer displayed proudly in the UK, nor studied much in a newly independent India. In 2014, when art historian B.N. Goswamy picked out 101 images for his Spirit of Indian Painting, only one was a Company commission.

The very name ‘Company School’ betrays its emphasis on the colonial patrons “while excluding any reference (even geographical) to the artists who created beautiful works of art”, notes art historian Henry Noltie, whose essay on 18th and early 19th century Indian botanical drawings is part of a superb new volume called Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, published alongside the first exhibition of Company-commissioned Indian art, on at the Wallace Collection in London till April 19, 2020. The show and the book have both been put together by author and historian William Dalrymple, whose interest in early colonialism has sustained a literary career, from White Mughals (2002) to his most recent, The Anarchy (2019). 

Sumptuously produced yet scholarly, Forgotten Masters features a hundred masterworks by artists like Bhawani Das, Sita Ram, Shaikh Zain ud-Din of Patna, Shaikh Amir of Karraya, Yellapah of Vellore, and Ghulam Ali Khan of Delhi. As the names show, ‘Company School’ artists were from different communities and may have trained in the Mughal, Maratha, Pahari, Punjabi, Tamil or Telugu traditions. Their subjects, too, were varied—botany, architecture, but also daily life, festivals, modes of transport and, crucially, ordinary people.

The Impey Children in Their Nursery,
by Shaikh Zain ud-din, C 1780 (Courtesy: Private Collection)

Since previous Indian courtly art was dominated by rulers, durbars and deities, Mildred Archer argues that this documentation of the Indian natural and social world “democratised Indian painting”. Many ordinary Indians appear, from dancing girls to servants of the new colonial household, palanquin bearers, the huge staff assembled for ‘The Impey Children in their Nursery’, or Shaikh Amir’s portraits of Indian grooms with the sahib’s dogs, horses and children. Nature had interested some Indian rulers, like Jahangir, but none appointed artists to document a personal zoo, as Justice Elijah and Lady Impey did in Calcutta. These gorgeous botanically accurate renditions of yams, palms or other plants by Manu Lall, Vishnupersaud and others; Shaikh Zain ud-Din’s birds or Haludar’s studies of macaques, gibbons or sloth bears for the surgeon Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, were new for India. 

Unlike the thick jewelled tones and decorative settings prized by Mughal and other Indian traditions, these images of soldiers, pujaris or city panoramas were often watercolours on white laid paper from England, with the surrounding area left empty. 

Cheetah, by Shaikh Zain ud-Din, for the Impey Album.

In Forgotten Masters, we see the European patron’s eyes turning the Indian miniaturist’s brush to the service of architectural and anthropological precision, for a brief glorious period before photography made these skills superfluous. These works should be celebrated as Indian, but also serve as a reminder that modernity in India began as colonial modernity.

Published in India Today, 28 Feb 2020.