Colesworthy Grant's Portraits of Colonial Society in India: Lithography, Liberalism, and the Global Making of Middle‐Class Culture, c. 1833–57

Abstract

This essay explores how lithographic printing connected colonial society in India to global developments in the making of middle‐class culture. It focuses on two print portrait series that the artist Colesworthy Grant (1813–80) released in illustrated periodicals: Lithographic Sketches of the Public Characters of Calcutta; and A Series of Miscellaneous Rough Sketches of Oriental Heads. The former defined white society in Bengal according to a masculine, agentic image of the public individual, whereas the latter engaged ambiguously with ideas about the colonial literary sphere and the nature of civic participation in order to distinguish so‐called Anglicized individuals from a taxonomic ordering of South Asian society. The article contextualizes these portraits in relation to the liberal social reforms that reshaped the East India Company's rule in the period 1833–57, arguing that lithographic periodical illustration worked to reconfigure the character and racial boundaries of the Company's increasingly middle‐class regime.