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Somewhere within this pretentiously-titled and almost unreadable book
is the potentially interesting idea that the Company School of artists -
Europeans painting in India before the Mutiny - were able to promote,
through their pictures, the virtues of British rule over the perceived
misrule and chaos of native administration. If this is indeed what the
author is positing, then it certainly bears investigation. Paintings by
Indian artists are considered here too, both those that foiiowed, or
imitated, European works and the earlier miniatures which were
criticized by Europeans for their lack of perspective. Since the author
doesn't care to define 'mimesis,' dictionaries tell us that it is a
specialized term meaning, in the artistic sense, 'accurate, illusionistic, a
representation of the visual appearance of things, an imitation.'
The author's guru is Homi Bhabha, a post-structuralist disciple of
Edward Said, and professor at Harvard University, who among other
things was awarded second prize in a 'bad writing competition' in
1998. His influence is clear. The author declares in her long and
abstruse Introduction that: 'Against the epistemic entanglement of
bourgeois liberal modernity, which has been characterised by ideas
about the authority of visual evidence... there is another regime of value
and efficacy that implicates and determines what we now understand as
being the protean development of a vernacularizing capitalism: the
economies of the shrine, the bazaar and the nawabi court.' There is
much else like this, which makes it difficult to isolate valid
observations like William Hodges' fondness for drawing ruined
buildings, about which he said'... this fine country [India] exhibits in
its present state a melancholy proof of the consequences of a bad government, of wild ambition and the horror attending civil
dissentions...'. The counter-argument of course is that ruins chime
well with the fashion of the time for the picturesque, as Giles Tillotson
pointed out in his book on Hodges, The Artificial Empire.
What is more serious, though, are the numerous inaccuracies
throughout the book. Considering the extremely large number of
acknowledgements to scholars in the field and the various grants which
supported the author's studies, it is surprising these were not picked up
on. Five of this reviewer's books are listed in the extensive
bibliography, but on one page alone (page 184) I am misquoted three
times and the wrong page reference is given. The picture by Hodges of
Fatehpur Sikri (page 149) is not of course an aquatint, but a gouache.
The Collector of Bihar's name was Augustus Cleveland, not Clevland.
The Deb brothers of Calcutta did not commission full-length portraits
of themselves, but three-quarter length images . And why are they
described as 'creole oil portraits'? One could go on .. ..... The pictures
are nice.
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