To Fill “a Gap in Indian History”

Abstract

This essay examines the category of “Company” painting, shorthand for painting associated with the East India Company, which dominates the art historiography of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century South Asia. Using the archive of Mildred Archer (1911–2005), the British Library curator who formalized this approach in Western scholarship in tandem with scholarly commentaries by art enthusiasts P. C. Manuk (1873–1946) and Rai Krishnadas (1892–1980), we highlight the complexities of Company painting as both modality and practice. Providing insight into the little-recognized role of Ishwari Prasad (1870–1949), whom Archer and Manuk lauded as the last living artist of the Mughal tradition, we examine his vanguard formulation of a Kampani qalam (“Company style”), where he reframed Mughal art in the era of Company mercantilism and thriving exchange between European and Indian artists at Patna. Further, Prasad emerges as a key interlocutor between the critic and educator E. B. Havell (1861–1934) and the artist Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951), integrating Mughal and Company lineages within the growing pan-Asian sensibility at the Calcutta School of Art. Foregrounding Prasad's obscured history illuminates how ideas of Mughal, Company, and Modern art belonged to a common intellectual ferment; yet these approaches took separate paths in post-independence India. In tracing the genealogy of Archer's Company painting, we recover multiple voices and strands of artistry informing its gestation in addition to its colonial legacy, complicating Archer's focus on it as an artistic inheritance of the British Empire.