Looking back in 1837 on his career in India, first as Governor of Madras and then as Governor-General, Lord William Bentinck argued that if India was to become what he called 'a detached dependency' of Great Britain, British rule had to be made popular. This could only be done, even though that rule must of necessity be authoritarian, by becoming paternal.1 This is one of the earliest usages of the word in this context, and while it grates on modern sensibilities, it provides an essential clue of the meaning of British imperialism in India, both for the ruler and the ruled. Paternalism is never a one-way street, and in his remarkable study of the relationship of art to nationalism, Partha Mitter explores its fascinating complexity in a way that illuminates not just art but much of modern Indian life. If patronage by a ruling class is decisive in determining the forms of art that are created, as many would argue, then the taste and policies of the British in India during the great formative period of modern India, from 1850 to 1920, is surely of central concern in the history of art. Mitter's subtitle, 'Occidental orientations', can be read, although he in fact does not stress the point, as a subtle comment on the contemporary fascination in much current writing on India with 'orientalism', the alleged construct of an interpretation by Westerners of the civilizations of Asia and the Middle East in order to dominate them. In the case of India, many recent scholarly works have asserted, for example, that caste, the familiar denomination of Indian social structure, and Hinduism, the term used for the religious beliefs and practices of the majority of the people of the subcontinent, were interpretations of Indian civilization devised by the British in order to maintain political control. The consequence, doubtlessly unintended, of such scholarship, is to credit the handful of British officials who ruled India with extraordinary success in somehow persuading the vast, heterogeneous Indian population to accept such constructs of the conquerors as caste and Hinduism as 'virtual reality'. To be sure, the conquerors are excoriated for the self-fulfilling image of India they imposed on India itself as well as on the rest of the world, but the Indian of the past, with all its grandeurs and miseries, is submerged before the onslaught of the selfrighteous, insolent British who demanded that Indians adopt Western ways, symbolized by speaking English. Mitter distances himself from these simplistic versions of history, but his analysis of the reception by Indian artists of the academic naturalism of nineteenth-century European painting, especially as it was taught in government-sponsored art schools, is obviously germane to it. One of his essential theses is that by concentrating on western influence on Indian life, whether in art, literature, economic life, or politics, scholars have deprived the colonized of their own voice. What his study sets out to do, and which he achieves with brilliant success, is to look at the intellectual and social contexts of the private lives of Indian artists as they were interwoven with British imperialism in all its myriad forms. The 'occidental orientations' of his title has to do with the self-image of these artists as they confronted the political fact of British power and, in their own profession, the dominance in the nineteenth century, particularly in Britain, of academic naturalism.
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Apr 30, 2022
Open Access