Author: William Dalrymple
Publication: The Guardian.Uk
Date: August 25, 2007
URL: http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2155526,00.html
In an era when most British officials were
interested only in exploiting India, a few remarkable men celebrated Hindu
art and culture. William Dalrymple explores the rich legacy of their collections
and commissions
In 1805, a young scholar-official of the East
India Company was invalided home to Suffolk at the age of only 35. Edward
Moor had first gone out to India at the age of 11, soon learnt to speak several
Indian languages, and became passionately interested in the cosmology and
beliefs of the Hindus.
Now, back in England with time on his hands
and in an unfamiliar country he hardly remembered, Moor filled his time by
gathering together and organising the artistic, anthropological and textual
materials he had been collecting for many years on the deities and images
of Hinduism. Five years later, in 1810, he finally published his masterwork,
The Hindu Pantheon
Written in the same style as other encyclopedias
of the gods of the classical and near-eastern world that were then being published
across Europe, such as John Bell's New Pantheon (1790), Moor's book was the
most detailed and accurate attempt yet by any European scholar to collate
and compare the textual and artistic material on Hinduism. As well as classifying
the complex and elusive universe of the gods and godlings of India, The Hindu
Pantheon was the first serious analysis in English of the everyday rites and
practices of ordinary Hindus.
Before Moor, British scholars in India had
managed to write some quite amazing nonsense about the Hindus and their religious
practices. Sir William Jones, the pioneering Sanskrit translator, correctly
believed that the ancient language of the Brahmins was "more perfect
than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either".
Nonetheless, he also passionately believed that the Hindus were a lost tribe
of Egypt. Others in Calcutta were equally sure that the Jains were confused
descendants of the followers of Pythagoras, and that the three-faced Maheshamurti
image of Shiva was somehow a strange Indian representation of the Christian
Trinity.
So Moor's work was not flawless. Yet, by and
large, The Hindu Pantheon remains a remarkably encyclopedic and accurate guide
to Indian mythology. It brought together almost everything that was then known
by European intellectuals about the religion of the Hindus, and contained
reliable descriptions, images and genealogies of some 2,000 of the major deities.
Moor corrected, for example, the widespread belief that depictions of the
half-man, half-woman Ardhanarishvara Shiva actually showed one-breasted classical
"Amazons", as earlier travellers had whimsically thought.
Although Moor's work remained in print for
over a century, he is remembered today less for his scholarship than for the
remarkable Indian paintings, miniatures and artworks he commissioned and collected
as part of his research. These consisted of over 640 items of Hindu painting
and sculpture, with a special emphasis on the varying iconographies of the
different deities.
Now, as part of the celebrations for the 60th
anniversary of Indian independence, the British Museum is mounting a remarkable
exhibition called Faith, Narrative and Desire: Masterpieces of Indian Painting
in the British Museum. This shows part of the Moor bequest, as well as many
other works from the museum's superb and rarely exhibited collection, concentrating
particularly on the Hindu art commissioned from Indian painters by British
patrons. The show is thus a timely tribute both to the breathtaking skill
of the miniature painters who created the images and to the curiosity and
passion of the early British patrons who commissioned them.
The finest of the images on display is probably
a remarkable Jaipur-school gouache bought by Moor in Pune, depicting Shiva
and his consort, Parvati. The two divine lovers sit on a tiger skin draped
over a terrace, just after sunset on a monsoon night. They lean back on lavishly
embroidered bolsters as they enjoy the evening breeze, the edge of the clouds
turning golden in the fading Himalayan light. Parvati affectionately touches
Shiva on his chest; the latter's foot nuzzles his consort's knee.
Yet amid the tender domestic intimacy lies
the strangeness and paradox inherent in a god who is both devoted husband
and turbulent cosmic dancer, at once the ascetic and the erotic. The skulls
of Shiva's fallen enemies hang from his shoulders; a snake curls around his
neck; the river Ganga spouts from his matted locks. The exquisite picture
was a particular favourite of Moor, who wrote: "I think it the most beautiful,
highest finished thing I ever saw . . . painted with consummate skill."
Nearby is another remarkable commission of
the same period, showing Shiva in his form as the wild, fanged yogi Bhairava,
riding upon a giant green parrot amid a shower of yellow amaltas. Facing it
is the wonderful Month of Bhadon, part of a series of brightly coloured Barahmasa
images that Moor commissioned, illustrating verses of Keshav Das on the different
seasons and the emotions that are connected with them. The turbulence of the
thunder of the monsoon mirrors the emotional upheaval of the lovers Radha
and Krishna, who sit enraptured at the centre of the picture. On a rooftop
chattri-pavilion above, Krishna's favourite bird, the peacock, displays his
magnificent fan of tail feathers; below, three sporting elephants splash in
the rain-swollen river.
In images such as these, the seasons are used
as metaphors for the emotions, and the scenery is the landscape of the imagination.
Such images were painted not to be shown in a picture gallery or hung on a
wall in the European fashion, but to be collected in folders and enjoyed with
a group of friends on a terrace in the evening - much the same setting as
Shiva is depicted sitting in. Nevertheless, the British Museum has made a
remarkably good job of displaying these small but perfect pictures, with lighting
carefully arranged to bring out the burnished gilt of the borders and the
inlaid iridescent beetle wings and carapaces that are arranged to form the
deities' necklaces and bracelets. Other paintings illustrating the seasons,
from Bundi in southern Rajasthan and also shown in public for the very first
time, hang nearby.
At a time when British aristocrats were looting
every classical antiquity they could lay their hands on across the Mediterranean,
and shipping home much of their plunder to the British Museum, few East India
Company officials showed any interest in the art of the Hindus. However, Moor
was not the first British enthusiast to collect Hindu statuary. That honour
goes to Charles "Hindoo" Stuart, a strange Irishman who, in the
1780s, travelled to India while still in his teens and seems to have been
attracted to Hinduism almost immediately.
Within a year of his arrival in Calcutta,
he had adopted the practice - which he continued to his death - of walking
every morning from his house to bathe in and worship the Ganges, according
to Hindu custom. "Incredible as it may sound," wrote one horrified
officer, "there is at this moment a British general in the Company's
service, who observes all the customs of the Hindoos, makes offerings at their
temples, carries about their idols with him, and is accompanied by fakirs
who dress his food. He is not treated as a madman, but would not perhaps be
misplaced if he had his idols, fakirs, bedas, and shasters, in some corner
of Bedlam, removed from its more rational and unfortunate inmates."
Stuart appears to have worshipped as well
as admired the statues he collected. Certainly he is known to have commissioned
and built an entire Hindu temple at Saugor, and he wrote an anonymous pamphlet
called The Vindications of the Hindoos in which he tried to discourage European
missionaries from attempting conversion, arguing that "on the enlarged
principles of moral reasoning, Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand
of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people
for all the useful purposes of a civilised society".
Stuart's military contemporaries never quite
knew what to make of their general. One of his junior colonels, William Linnaeus
Gardner, himself a British convert to Shia Islam, wrote how "he regularly
performs his pooja and avoids the sight of beef". Later, Gardner noted
that Stuart was planning to take a week off to bathe at the Kumbh Mela, where
he was later seen sitting "surrounded by a dozen naked faqueers who,
joining their hands over his head, gave him Benediction . . . Every Hindoo
he salutes with Jey Sittaramjee [Victory to Lord Ram and Queen Sita]".
Eccentric as he may have been, Stuart was
a central figure in the history of the western appreciation of Indian art.
His collection, which towards the end of his life he put on display to visitors
in his house in Calcutta, now forms the core of the British Museum collection
of Hindu statuary, known today as the Bridge Collection after a subsequent
purchaser. It is without question the finest group of Hindu sculptures brought
to Europe in this period. Appropriately enough, several of the finest masterpieces
of Pala art from Stuart's collection line the stairs that lead up to the exhibition.
About two decades before Stuart began collecting
his first Hindu images, another Company official, Sir Elijah Impey, commissioned
Mughal-trained miniaturists to paint his menagerie. It was the first recorded
commission of Indian artists by a British patron, and remains one of the most
successful.
The three artists whom Impey summoned to his
classical Calcutta palace were all from Patna, 200 miles up the Ganges. They
had clearly been trained in the old Mughal techniques of miniature painting.
But when they worked for the Impeys - using English watercolours on English
paper, and taking English botanical still lives as their models - an extraordinary
fusion of the two cultures' artistic impulses took place, a fusion that resulted
in an entirely new type of painting, known today as the Company School.
The brilliance and simplicity of the colours,
the meticulous attention to detail, the gem-like highlights, the way the pictures
seem to glow, all show the Company artists' Mughal training; the tentative
washes of a memsahib's watercolour are a world away. Yet no artist working
in a normal Mughal atelier would have placed their subjects detached from
a landscape against a white background, or with flowers cut into a perfect,
scientific cross-section, as is usual in Company botanical images. Two traditions
met head on, and from that blinding impact an inspirational new fusion took
place.
In time, the Company style came to be used
by British officials all over India to record many facets of Indian life,
including the flora and fauna that came to fascinate the British. Its extreme
precision meant that it quickly became recognised as the perfect medium for
illustrations to the different schemes of classification that appealed to
the Enlightenment minds within the Company. Soon officials were commissioning
Indian and Mughal-trained artists to paint huge numbers of botanical specimens
and exotic Indian animals; the different castes, trades and occupations of
India; and the country's architectural monuments and deities.
The exhibition includes an especially fine
Company image from Patna of a roadside seller of clay images. An elegantly
attired client is being offered a standing image by a sitting lady in a green
sari and yellow blouse; behind, her half-naked husband, a potter, turns a
bowl on a wheel. The client, however, is looking up at an image of Kali trampling
on the recumbent Shiva.
But it is Company images of the gods, of exactly
the sort commissioned by Moor, that dominate Faith, Narrative and Desire.
There are spectacular examples of a set of images of the gods of the Tamil
country, recently acquired by the museum - Ganesha sitting straddled on a
bandicoot; Shiva incarnate in a garlanded linga; Kama, the god of love, attempting,
at Parvati's suggestion, to shoot a long-meditating Shiva with his arrow.
Best of all, there is a wonderful image of a wooden temple chariot being drawn
in a festival at the great temple of Sri Ranganatha at Srirangam. At the open
window of the chariot, two bare-chested Brahmins attend on an image: one carries
a tray of lamps and a bell, while the other throws petals over the holy image.
This perhaps surprising early colonial interest
in and respect for Hinduism was something that struck the Iranian traveller
Mir Abdul Latif Shustari on his Indian tour in the early 19th century: "Most
remarkable is the way that the British take part in most of the festivals
and ceremonies of both Muslims and Hindus, mixing with the people," he
wrote. "They pay great respect to accomplished scholars of whatever sect."
Such intelligent interest in the beliefs of
India did not last. By 1813, a change in the charter of the East India Company
let loose a wave of evangelical missionaries on India. The act was pushed
through parliament by William Wilberforce, who told MPs that "the natives
of India, and more particularly the Brahmins, were sunk into the most abject
ignorance and vice". Within a few years, the missionaries were beginning
to change British perceptions of the Hindus. No longer were they inheritors
of a body of sublime and ancient wisdom, but instead seen merely as "poor
benighted heathen".
The Rev R Ainslie was typical of the new breed
of missionaries filling the cantonments, or military stations, of India during
the 1830s. In British Idolatry in India, Ainslie wrote of his visit to Orissa:
"I have visited the Valley of Death! I have seen the Den of Darkness!"
The sermon goes on to describe the "sinful and disgusting scenes"
Ainslie had witnessed, namely Company officials assisting the Hindus in their
ceremonies: "The cloths and mantles are furnished for the idol by British
servants. The horrors are unutterable . . . Do not European gentlemen encourage
these ceremonies, and make presents to the idol, and often fall down and worship?"
According to another outspoken evangelical, the Rev Alexander Thompson: "Those
who between 1790 and 1820 held the highest offices in India, were on the whole
an irreligious body of men who approved of Hinduism much more than Christianity:
some who hated Missions from their dread of sedition; others because their
hearts 'seduced by fair idolatresses, had fallen to idols foul'."
Such missionaries began ferociously to attack
any British official who, like Moor or Stuart, studied or took a sympathetic
interest in the religions of India. The British mind was closing, and the
short period of Hinduphilia was soon over. The brief flourishing of Company
School painting, the chief artistic product of that period, did not survive
the great uprising of 1857.
This one room of lovely images bears testament
to the strenuous attempts of a group of men working in India between 1780
and 1830 to understand the religious images and symbols of a world their compatriots
were about to seize, and then partially destroy. Today, as Britain struggles
to forge a more equitable relationship with India on the anniversary of independence,
this exhibition is an effective metaphor for a brief but important moment
of British scholarly and artistic engagement with, and appreciation of, the
arts and culture of south Asia.