Pornography and Indian miniature painting: the case of Avadh, India

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article investigates miniature paintings produced in Avadh, India, during the reign of the nawabs of Avadh (r. 1722–1856) that have been consequently labelled as pornography. My case studies include Avadhi miniature paintings that have been installed and categorized as pornography and/or as obscenity starting in the nineteenth century and into the present day. British colonial administrators first applied the label of obscenity to these paintings when they began to taxonomize and donate their collections to museums in the 1800s. In the British Library, for example, painting albums such as Richard Johnson’s Album J.42 were sequestered alongside other material that might provoke sexual arousal. Curators later marked this album for destruction in 1830. When the word pornography started gaining wider currency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these paintings moved from the parameters of obscenity into pornography. Rather than focusing entirely on the censorship practices undertaken in museums and archival libraries with regard to these paintings, this article builds on recent scholarship that interrogates the use of the languages of colonialism and race in the formation of the category of pornography.