Orientalism Transposed

Impact of the Colonies on British Culture

Julie F. Codell, Dianne Sacko Macleod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429761645
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

First published in 1998, this volume reflects that, ever since the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism twenty years ago, scholars have tested his thesis against the wider application of his terms to cultural practices and the rhetoric of power. The cultural impact of the British on their colonies has been extensively investigated but only recently have scholars begun to ask in what ways British culture was transformed by its contact with the colonies.

The essays in this volume demonstrate how influential the Empire was on British culture from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. They show how, from cross-cultural cross-dressing to Buddhism, British artists and writers appropriated unfamiliar and challenging aspects of the culture of the Empire for their own purposes. An examination is also made of the extent to which colonized people engaged in the orientalising discourse, amending and subverting it, even re-applying its stereotypes to the British themselves. Finally, two essays explore instances of the exchange of ideas between colonies.

Several of the essays are based on papers given at the 1996 Conference of the College Arts Association.

II

The aesthetics of the colonial gaze

5

The memsahib’s brush: Anglo-Indian women and the art of the picturesque, 1830–1880

Romita Ray

‘The memsahib’s brush’ focuses on Anglo-Indian women as artists and travellers in the colonial Indian landscape.¹ For most British women stationed in the subcontinent in the nineteenth century, sketching and painting were confined to genteel pastimes undertaken in privacy. Yet a simple hobby to keep the eye and hand occupied proved to be an agreeable solution for adjusting to a foreign landscape. Observing people, places and events comprised the first step towards settling down in an unfamiliar environment. And recording them helped articulate the individual’s location within a new set of cultural structures and social systems. Not surprisingly, a stream of travel manuals published at the time encouraged would-be memsahibs to keep themselves busy with paper and paint. In effect, boredom, sloth or homesickness were meant to be conquered in their new colonial setting. Bearing this goal in mind, Emma Roberts, a well-seasoned traveller and author of several publications on India, cautioned her readers to cultivate ‘active and industrious habits’, among which drawing ‘is perhaps the … independent and … useful accomplishment… There can never be wanting subjects for the pencil in a country, and amid a people so truly picturesque.’²

By the early nineteenth century, recording scenes in South Asia went hand-in-hand with journeying through the country. Artists who jotted details of their natural surroundings for mementos to be sent home or for private albums of gathered memories, were a varied group, belonging to the military, the Civil Service, or Archaeological and Survey departments. Memsahibs too used the opportunity to paint picturesque scenery, setting aside domestic boundaries to step outside and draw.³ Art-making in the colonial setting coincided with the development of theories of the picturesque in England and with the promotion of picturesque tours to scenic spots tucked away in Scotland and Wales. Just as amateur artists armed with Claude glasses and sketch-books visited celebrated picturesque sites throughout the country, so too did their counterparts in India find visually appealing locations to fill their sketch-pads. Over time, a landscape aesthetic originally attached to Scottish, Welsh and English environs eventually came to signify the foreign qualities of the colonial setting. Emily Eden, who travelled in India for six years, commented on this matter, comparing India with ‘a constant theatrical presentation’ where ‘everything is so picturesque and utterly un-English’.⁴

An important outcome of the artistic interest in the Indian picturesque was that it offered colonial Britons a chance to come to grips with their foreign surroundings on their own terms. Because the picturesque was deeply involved in analysing man’s relationship with nature, artists and aesthetes first focused on the physical geography of their new setting.⁵ Yet they encountered a terrain whose boundaries often shifted according to the East India Company’s political decisions and the Crown’s control over the area from 1858 onwards. Picturesque views, however, represented the colonial landscape as an aesthetically pleasing still-life instead of a politically unstable mass of land. The infamous Mutiny of 1857 might have escalated anxieties about social relations between Indians and Britons, but it had little effect on how natural settings were shown through the picturesque lens.

For memsahibs, painting scenic spots gave them a chance to escape from crowds of native strangers as well as from the curiosity of other Anglo-Indians to the solitude of the outdoors.⁶ Drawing a river, meadow or flower, however, frequently evoked nostalgic memories of places they had left behind in Scotland, England or Wales. The occasional recollection of the homeland within the colonial space inevitably depended on comparisons between the two settings. Was there a spot of England that could be glimpsed in India? Or was the subcontinent an entirely different environment? By instinctively evaluating their new surroundings in this manner, colonial Britons were encouraged to contemplate upon their sense of belonging to India. And as much as they grew accustomed to the climate, flora and fauna of an unfamiliar landscape, they also extended their picturesque scrutiny to indigenous peoples and other Anglo-Indians. Observing the human body led in turn to a heightened awareness of the social and cultural institutions which surrounded their subjects and indeed themselves.

It is the memsahib’s sense of place and identity, revealed in her picturesque renderings of the subcontinent, that forms the main subject of my paper. How did the memsahib’s brush enable her to locate herself in an unfamiliar country? Did the picturesque highlight and/or dissolve social distinctions between Indian and Anglo-Indian communities? What strands of colonial histories did they inscribe for British audiences at home? In what contexts did viewers come across their visual records?

In this paper, I examine these questions through paintings and prints produced by five British women who visited India at different times between 1830 and 1880. Their themes grew out of situations, people and places they came across, depending on what opportunities their social class afforded them in the subcontinent. Emily Eden, for instance, visited India as the Empire’s First Lady when she accompanied her brother Lord Auckland during his tenure as Governor-General (1836–42). Her connections allowed her to approach Indian monarchs and aristocrats, some of whom willingly posed for her artistic pursuits. Lady Charlotte Canning, Viceroy Charles Canning’s wife, hailed from similar social circles and lived through the Sepoy Mutiny of 1837, dying in Barrackpore in 1861. In contrast to the other artists discussed here, she kept her drawings for her personal perusal, sharing them only with close relations and friends. Unlike Lady Canning, Fanny Parks, a middle-class Englishwoman who had spent more than twenty years in the subcontinent, published her personal memoirs as an illustrated travelogue.⁷ Few memsahibs matched her richly detailed accounts of their Indian experiences, but one woman rivalled her eye for intricacy. This was Sophia Charlotte Belnos, the only professional artist among the cluster of female painters discussed here, who had set up an art studio in Calcutta by the middle of the nineteenth century.⁸ Forty years after Mrs Belnos published her first book, Marianne North, a wealthy unmarried Victorian who counted Edward Lear (also a fellow explorer of India) among her friends, carved a niche for herself among London art lovers with her painted views of India.⁹ North visited Jamaica, North America, Brazil, Japan, and Java before she finally arrived in the colonial subcontinent in 1877. India inspired her to produce over 200 paintings of trees and flowers, as well as of buildings, to be later displayed among other drawings in the gallery named after her in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.¹⁰

The circulation of these colonial narratives, whether drawings or written texts, within India and Britain as well as between the two countries, points towards the very routes through which the search for British national identity was channelled to the Empire’s larger playground. It is difficult, however, to chart every instance of colonialism transposed. Images of India comprised a barrage of associations rather than a neatly packaged set of signs and symbols. At times the culture of Empire that poured back into Britain created definite impressions, as in exhibitions held in art galleries and the Crystal Palace.¹¹ At other times the effects were more nebulous, especially if they involved personal preferences for things Indian or simply a curiosity about events in the colonies. George Franklin Atkinson, who served in the Bengal Engineers between 1840 and 1839, humorously reviewed the situation in a poem in Curry and Rice (i860), his book about a fictitious Anglo-Indian station:

What varied opinions we constantly hear
of our rich Oriental possessions;
What a jumble of notions, distorted and queer,
Form an Englishman’s ‘Indian Impressions!’¹²

The mass of land known as ‘India’ was perceived in a variety of ways by different audiences at home and abroad. Some clung to their ideas about the country as an exotic space packed with caparisoned elephants and bejewelled maharajas, whereas more sophisticated spectators could trace the connections between Indian and European Antiquity. The possibilities were endless. The outcome, however, was the same - an ‘imagined community’ labelled as the British Empire, an amalgam of English, Scottish, Irish, and Welsh placed alongside Bengali, Punjabi, Bihari, Tamil, Kashmiri, Andhra, Assamese, Carnatic, and Gujerati peoples.¹³

The Memsahib Travels

Every memsahib, no matter how long or briefly she lived in India, was first and foremost a traveller in the colonial subcontinent.¹⁴ So were the records she produced, for they too journeyed from India to Britain where they reached eager readers and art lovers. Thus the movement of ideas and impressions via letters, diaries and journals formed the initial basis of colonialism transposed. An illustration by Fanny Parks from her two-volume journal, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of The Picturesque, During Four-and-Twenty Years in the East; with Revelations of Life in The Zenana (London, 1850), brings the phenomenon of travel in colonial spaces to the forefront (Figure 5.1). We observe a group of camels gathered around a pool with books hanging from their necks as a spider crawls forward, a volume caught between its legs. A closer examination reveals that the books can indeed be recognized as Parks’s memoirs as well as Captain Mundy’s popular illustrated volume of Indian manners and scenery, Major Luard’s well-known drawings of India, and Emily Eden’s portfolio of portraits of Indian people and princes.¹⁵ Parks’s work highlights the density of motion packed into traversing the Indian subcontinent, the influx and outflow of movement (both actual and ideological), of journeys begun, concluded and continued. And these aspects are embedded in the figure of the camel, a motif which itself reflects the many acts of travelling. Just as the sturdy animal finds its way through desert sands, the illustrated book survives a journey of its own through a network of readers in India and Britain.¹⁶ The camel garlanded with books can also be seen as a parallel to the artist’s figure, the latter chalking out an individual route amidst the paths taken by other British visitors. It is therefore appropriate that the picture of book-bearing camels serves as a frontispiece to Parks’s written narrative because it sets the tone for her own ‘wanderings’ through word and image.

In its most widely understood form, the act of travelling signifies a movement from one physical point to another, while the traveller becomes a repository for memories of time and place gathered at each spot along the journey’s route. If enthusiastic enough, he or she documents those individual moments, eventually creating a long trail of records that are variously labelled travel narratives, journals, memoirs or sketches. When these are transmitted to other observers, another trail of looking and recording commences, resulting in a fresh corpus of records, viewers, and, possibly, newly inspired travellers as well. Parks’s composition scratches at the surface of several types of movement built into a journey: of motion through geographical regions, of an imaginary movement through imagined spaces, and of a movement of ideas and observations associated with real or fantasy landscapes. Simon Schama notes that landscapes ‘are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock’:

But it should also be acknowledged that once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling categories, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery.¹⁷

Following this logic, Parks’s actual journey through a tangible physical terrain has been reinvented as an imaginary construct in which a group of camels hover in some invented oasis to quench their thirst at the water’s edge. The books swinging from their necks, however, allow us for a moment to step out of this fantas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• I. Identity, agency and masquerade
• II. The aesthetics of the colonial gaze
• III. Intercoloniality
• Bibliography
• Index