Exhibitions 3
The Empire fizzles out
Juliet Reynolds
his is far worse than the Monet,' a man remarked resignedly to his wife at the °Pening of the Raj exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery last week. Evidently himself a relic of the Raj, he was not of course referring to the exhibits but to the enormous physical effort involved in viewing them. The sahib and his memsahib had all my sympathies. At that point I was °nly halfway round the show and, at half their age, an attack of torticollis had already begun to set in. By the time I emerged I felt as if I had just crossed the Rajasthan desert astride a camel. This is not to say that the biggest exhibition ever mounted by the National portrait Gallery is not worth the effort of a viewing. On the contrary, the able team of organisers has assembled a fascinating b°dY of work from across three continents, Providing Raj students and aficionados, as well as Indophiles in general, with a rare °PPortunity to reflect and reminisce over three-and-a-half centuries of Anglo-Indian history. One journeys from a portrait of James I, in whose reign the relationship be- gan, to Portuguese maps whose secrets passed into English hands, and a variety of East India Company memorabilia. One continues through the exploits of Clive and Hastings and the first Imperial history Painters such as Tilly Kettle and Zoffany, through portraits of recalcitrant rajas and scenes of their submission, to the building of the Indian army and the ethnographic Paintings of the Indian artists of the Com- Pali), school, and finally to the Queen Em- press herself and to the growth of the nationalist movement that would bring the relationship to an end a century later. It is the bigness of the whole thing that is the main drawback — not its bigness of conception, for the Raj was a grandiose affair and could only be dealt with on a grand scale, but its bigness in the sense of overcrowding. There are simply too many images, too tightly packed, to hold the vast subject in focus. To put it another way: one can't see the Raj for the sahibs.
It is the later sections of the exhibition that suffer most from this drawback. In- deed, the most illuminating sections are those on the heritage of the Mughals and the early days of the East India Company when trading activities were a relatively uncomplicated affair involving the ex- change of finished goods for silver bullion. It is not merely because one is much fresher at the beginning that one can focus on the prelude to the complex love-hate rela- tionship that was to build up between the Indians and the British. Nor is it only because these earlier sections are more objective, less self-conscious, than the later ones where history is perhaps too uncom- fortably close for balanced scrutiny. It is also because the images themselves are more judiciously selected and displayed and hence communicate with greater clar- ity. Take as examples the Mughal minia- ture copied by an English engraver and the Holy Family in a landscape copied by an Indian artist from a Persian copy of a European drawing! Nothing could better illustrate the mutual fascination of the two distant cultures and their unprejudiced readiness to exchange ideas. Again, the wonderful miniature with figures on the outskirts of a military camp clearly demon- strates the Hindu-Muslim unity that ex- isted in Mughal times. By contrast, there is little in the later sections to clarify the Detail from 'Bengal Village Scene' by George Chinnery, c.1820 policy of divide-and-rule that the British implemented with great efficacy.
The exhibition also helps to perpetuate the myth that the British did not alter the Mughal method of land taxation. We are shown a very fine Gainsborough of Lord Cornwallis, the ultimate vanquisher of Tipu Sultan. Yet there is nothing to clarify the appalling consequences of Cornwallis's Permanent Settlement of Bengal in 1793. Under this Act, for the first time in Indian history, a peasant could be evicted from his land for failure to pay his taxes, and a vast new class of landless labourers was thereby created. But any proper study of the Raj must address itself to the unpleasant truth that the revenue from the highly prosper- ous Bengal provided much of the finance for the Industrial Revolution in England, while so many Bengalis became impover- ished under the new kind of aloof landlord also created by the Permanent Settlement. There is, however, greater clarity in the sections on the growing supremacy of the Company, by 1818 the de facto master of India, and the growing resentment of the ruled which culminated in the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857-9. Here it is made plain that these latter events were caused by a complex variety of reasons, not least among them the anger of the disinherited aristocracy and of a peasantry crippled by ' taxes.
Happily, the exhibition also takes a look at the lighter and brighter side of the Raj. An Indian page in European clothes un- dressing a lady shows the association in the Indian mind between the European and the bawdy, while 'Count Roupee in Hyde Park' satirises Company employees who had come home rich, highlighting the fear of the landed aristocracy that this new money was pushing them to the sidelines of power. There are also portraits of figures such as Edmund Burke, the first British politician of standing to be deeply con- cerned about the fate of India and its people, and a number of outstanding In- dologists, among them Sir William Jones, a brilliant Sanskrit scholar. Nearby there is a landscape with a memorial to James Prin- cep, an indigo planter who deciphered the Brahmi script and helped throw much light on ancient Indian history. In artistic terms, it is the landscapes that satisfy the most. Though the British artists who travelled around India could never become really intimate with their subjects, always showing the distant, detached view, they evidently felt great involvement in their task of picturing India for their partrons in England. 'A Ruined Tomb' by Thomas Daniell, 'The Allahabad Fort' by Robert Smith, 'The Ganges Canal' by William Simpson, 'Bengal Village Scene' by George Chinnery and 'The Maha- baleshwar Ghats' by William Carpenter are all greatly evocative, though they do not quite capture the magical quality of light so special to India.
What a pity that the final section of the exhibition could not have drawn from the wealth of Indian art — much of it land- scape — that emerged through the fires of the nationalist movement. Instead of being shown even a small selection of works by the artists of Bengal and Bombay — works that parallel with exactitude the deep ideological divisions of nationalist politics — one is treated, for example, to no less than four very boring drawings by Kipling's father, an array of uninspired photographs of peasants by Cecil Beaton and of serried rows of Bombay buildings, and last but not least an appalling chipped plaster head of the last Viceroy. Disaster is the only word to describe what should have been a grand finale to the Raj exhibition. This reinforces the point made earlier that an exhibition which uses art as a means of understanding history should concentrate on the quality rather than the quantity of images.
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