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Abstract
This article proposes a new reading of early-19th-century modernity by examining India's so-called “ethnographic” paintings, and arguing that rather than participate in a trajectory of speed and acceleration these works produce colonial polyrhythmic temporality. First, the article establishes that many of these images depict action, not ethnicity or occupational group. It then situates these images in economies of circulation, viewing, politics and commercial enterprise. By focusing on the action in the subject matter—do-ing rather than do-er, processes rather than occupations—a layered, polyrhythmic range of temporalities emerges, upturning dualistic, acceleration-driven, and rupture-based understandings of visual culture from this period.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to audiences at the 2011 College Art Association meeting, and to Molly Aitken for including me in the panel on South Asian painting there. This article evolved from an extremely productive dialog with a range of readers who helped to shape the final product at all stages. I thank in particular Jane Bennett, Jennifer Culbert, Katrin Paul, Deborah Hutton, Melia Belli, Sam Chambers, Sanchita Balachandran, Rebecca Hall, Elizabeth Rodini, Hilary Snow and Paul Hockings. I received support in this project from the Royal Ontario Museum (and Deepali Dewan), as well as the staff at the British Library and the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Funding from the British Academy enabled much of the archival research.
Notes
Paul Virilio is the most oft-cited theorist on acceleration and the role of technology for the contemporary world as well as for modernity [(1977) 1986]. Marc Augé's development of an understanding of supermodernity acknowledges the role of colonialism as a key element of acceleration [Citation1999]. Charlie Gere's Derridean reading of time helpfully refocuses the discussion on iteration and performance and away from acceleration [Citation2006]. Other scholars have moved past acceleration to examine other modes of temporality, including most prominently untimeliness [W. Brown Citation2005; Chambers Citation2003, Citation2011; Cheah and Guerlac eds. Citation2009; Connolly Citation2002]. Here I build on these challenges to acceleration that address the ontological questions related to temporality, by reminding us of the centrality of colonial relations of power as well as injecting an awareness of media not traditionally associated with the modern, like painting.
Both Carnatic and Hindustani music employ polyrhythms, and both have developed elaborate counting systems to help remember and maintain these complex rhythms. Balinese gamelan music employs interlocking rhythms called kotekan. West African music has long informed a wide range of global traditions, including Cuban, South American and African-American rhythms. Dave Brubeck, drawing on African and Middle Eastern traditions, as well as his own experimentation, was among the leaders in incorporating polyrhythms (along with polytempo and polytonal elements) into American jazz in the mid-20th century. Steve Reich is the best known of the so-called minimalist composers to work with polyrhythms.
I build on the work of both Chakrabarty [Citation2000] and Timothy Mitchell [Citation2000] in rethinking the center–periphery relation and marking the centrality of colonial spaces and technologies of power in the production of modernity. Edward Said called for contrapuntal readings of histories, texts and events in order to demonstrate the intimacy of connection across moments formerly seen as separate (e.g., Indian darbārs and British coronations; [Citation1994]). Instead, an understanding of polyrhythms anchors my reading of the visual culture of the Gangetic plain in the early 19th century, producing a shared temporality that maintains distinction and difference but slips out of dualism toward action and participation.
The interest in colonial-era visual culture spread in conjunction with the rise of nostalgia for colonialism in the 1980s in both the United Kingdom and North America. In addition to the extensive documentation of the collections at the British Library and the Victoria and Albert Museum, pursued by Mildred Archer and her various co-authors (see References), see also Pal and Dehejia [Citation1986]; Bayly [Citation1990].
Hook-swinging, a devotional ritual formerly practiced in many places in the subcontinent, often featured in images from this period and is described in colonial texts within the same framework as fire-walking, reclining on beds of nails, or self-flagellation [Oddie Citation1986, Citation1995; Schröder Citation2012]. Eating raw sheep was not common, either in practice or in imagery, but circulated in images by both Indian and British artists executed around the turn of the 19th century. Losty [Citation1988] traces the sources for the imagery of the sheep-eater.
This journal, which was produced entirely by the Madras Literary Society, amateurs who were otherwise doctors, lawyers, military officers, churchmen or administrative officials (all male), came out in Madras during 1833–51, 1856–61, 1864–66, and 1878–94. Calcutta, Bombay and Colombo had similar scholarly journals.
Mildred Archer (1911–2005) was the pre-eminent scholar of colonial-era painting, both Indian and British. She catalogued and published the paintings in the India Office Library, now part of the British Library. Her efforts mean that both the British Library's collection and the Victoria and Albert's collection of colonial painting have been extensively catalogued: her work defines the field.
Cabinets of curiosities and the use of the term curiosity as a descriptor for certain kinds of objects, particularly those grouped together by collectors as curiosities, date to the late 16th century in Europe. See Hooper-Greenhill [Citation1992] for more on the historical genealogy of this term and practices of display related to it. Archer's meta-indexes recall the juxtapositions in Borges' Chinese encyclopedia as famously examined by Foucault [Citation1970].
These paintings of paired “castes” echo earlier efforts to catalog the peoples of Central and South America for the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the 18th century, called casta paintings, although the differences between the two groups are quite significant. Casta paintings came from the 16th- and 17th-century racialization of intermixed groups in Latin America. Castas were initially racially intermixed people, and in the 16th century different designations arose to distinguish among the various mixtures: mestizo (Spanish-Indian), mulatto (Spanish-Black), zambo or zambaigo (Black-Indian). Taxonomies were developed to include up to 20 different types. These all relate to Spanish or white blood and an assessment of the percentage of ethnic mixture based on a privileging of European blood. While Anglo-, French- and Portuguese-Indians of mixed ethnicity existed in South Asia, the percentage remained small, and the necessity to articulate the amount of whiteness in various populations was not the impetus behind the South Asian “caste” paintings. For more on casta painting, see Carrera [Citation2003]; Katzew [Citation2004]; Katzew et al. [Citation1996].
Zanānā is a term used in South Asia to refer to the most private area of a home, which also coincides with where women would spend most of their time. The term (in various transliterations) is used across sectarian affiliation.
These images follow a well-worn pattern of individual portraiture by tapping into European and South Asian precedents in pose and iconography, and include imagery of eroticized bodies also consonant with the association of the erotic with the “Orient.” As a result these paintings present an image of “India,” but rather than typologize caste or ethnicity for the viewer they focus on a particular aesthetic of static, controlled images, easy to ingest, exotic and titillating. These paintings, placed in the album and taken together, make the bodies static and flatten them into objects for viewing, and they certainly take part in a 19th-century Orientalizing mode; but this does not participate in a larger epistemological project to know and categorize India. These paintings are comparable to later photos and postcards in their production of an erotic Orientalizing viewing relation. See Alloula [Citation1986]; Mathur [Citation2007]; Carotenuto [Citation2010].
Like the emphasis on action that spinning represented for Gandhi in his appropriation of it for the anticolonial movement in the early 20th century, the emphasis on craft-as-action in the early 19th century underwrites appropriations by activists in the later 19th century. Rather than static images representing ethnographic types, these are instead images of doing that could be reworked into the image of the Indian craftsman hard at work later on in that century; Dewan [Citation2004]; McGowan [Citation2009]; R. M. Brown [Citation2010].
Several firqās comprise a tālukā, and their administrators—tālukdārs—controlled the land and tax revenues for large regions, reporting during this period to the East India Company.
Saloni Mathur's work on postcards adds an additional commercial and object-oriented understanding of the circulation of images in the late 19th and early 20th centuries [Citation2007].
New research on the movements of artists and paintings among courts in western India has helped to clarify the mechanics of the transfer of images, both from one generation to the next as well as among artists and courts; Aitken [Citation2010].
New research on Indian photography indicates that her photographers established themselves as artists as a central part of their commercial enterprises, and that the debates in France and elsewhere as to whether photography was art did not have much salience in the subcontinent. This suggests another continuity between the studios of early-19th-century painters and those of later-19th-century photographers; see Hutton [CitationForthcoming].
See Fabian's analysis of this temporal difference within the context of anthropological methodologies [Citation1983].
Certainly some painting from this period taps into modes of representation that resonate with the erotic, as in the Lucknow “Costumes” album. But these works specifically pose figures as portraits or as bodies and draped forms to be enjoyed visually. The “do-ing” paintings operate differently. For more on erotic bodies and the circulation of postcard images, see Mathur [Citation2007].