Mitchell Winter/Department of History of Art and Visual Culture/ UC Santa Cruz

Winter 1

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 post-Glorious 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 embeddedin 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 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-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 FrançoiseVergès, W.J.T. Mitchell, Ann Bermingham, Henri Lefebvre, Mary Louis Pratt, TalalAsad, 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 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 MeeraKosambi 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 Britishthat 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 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 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 SveltanaAlpers 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 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 beautyand 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 thecountryside 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 VidyaDehejia 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 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 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.