Abstract

In 1792 the British took two young Indian princes as hostages to guarantee that their father, Tipu Sultan, would meet the terms of his surrender. This article analyses the art works that emerged in response to that event, arguing that this seemingly triumphal imagery was an ambivalent phenomenon in which can be found significant undercurrents of anxiety over the morality of the capture of children. I suggest that the hostage imagery's recourse to paternalistic motifs in fact demonstrates the crises of legitimacy that paternalism encountered as it attempted to establish itself as a moral incarnation of an increasingly aggressive imperial power.

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