eaton, natasha, excess in the city- the consumption of imported prints in colonial calcutta,...

EXCESS IN THE CITY?The Consumption of Imported Prints in Colonial Calcutta,c.1780c.1795

NATASHA EATON

Manchester University, UK

AbstractThis article examines the role of imported prints in early colonial Calcutta.It explores the critical entanglements of this art of mechanical reproductionwithin the cosmopolitics of imperialism. Questioning the 18th-centuryconsumer revolution and contemporary actor network theory, it askswhether either help us to comprehend fully these picturehuman relations.In time of economic boom and recession within this early East IndiaCompany state, art was valued not so much as an inalienable possession butfor its seemingly contradictory status as both quasi-fetish and as an aestheticof the ephemeral. Patriotic yet disposable, such pictures participated withina visual labyrinth driven by lotteries and gambling, theft and debt. UsingIndo-Muslim and British attitudes towards the colonial art market, thisarticle exposes the centrality of chance and luxury for a creole heterotopiathat ultimately hinged on a tense ambivalence.

Key Words chance consumption fetish pictures/things print-capitalism

Chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others andaffirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity . . . I knowof districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books andkiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how todecipher a single letter.(Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel, Labyrinths)

As regards the sounding out of idols, this time they are . . . here touchedwith the hammer as with a tuning fork there are no more ancient idols

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Journal of Material CultureCopyright 2003 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)Vol. 8(1): 4574 [1359-1835(200303)8:1; 4574;031762]

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in existence . . . That does not prevent their being the most believed in andthey are not (usually) . . . called idols.(Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How to Philosophize with aHammer)

Were chance volumes of prints constantly in danger of becoming some-thing other? Dampened by the tropics, passing in and out of the lives ofdying Britons, such images performed a crucial role as believed-in-idolsin Calcuttas public life. Engaging with current concerns with culturalthingness, networks and the proliferation of hybrids, this article under-scores the importance of prints in the symbolic-economic space of Britishcolonial diaspora. It examines the nature of colonial consumption in thecontext of recent ethnography and postcolonial studies. These willprovide the framework to plunge into the consuming patterns ofCalcuttas British diaspora in order to analyse its attitudes towards printsas luxury goods of conspicuous consumption and markers of racialsegregation. The final section argues for the centrality of prints throughthe lens of the emporium effect. It also exposes the tensions in fashion-ing a discursive forum informed by both politics and by art, at a timewhen Calcutta was catapulted from spectacular boom into darkestrecession.

Celebrated in contemporary newspapers and traceable in thosemercantile records that constitute the imperial archive, paradoxicallythis most ubiquitous of art forms has hardly left its mark on extantcolonial collections. As East India Company archive fever burned withimperialist nostalgia to preserve what was perishing under colonialrule (the rare or curious) English prints played no part (Derrida, 1995;Rosaldo, 1989). Instead they were classified by the pragmatics ofeveryday life, as familiar and disposable, possessing an ambivalentrelationship with difference. Being the art of mechanical reproduction,they had no entry into the archive as fetish, which performed as thestand-in for the past that brings the mystified experience of the thingitself (La Capra, 1985: 92). Yet distinct rituals surrounded prints in India;they possessed their own aura that was only heightened by their statusas reproductions cast into exotic new contexts. They may have allowedconsumers to stake a claim in global networks but they were deeplyinflected by the local. They constituted a parallel as much as aderivative modernity that was generated by innovation, imagination,pleasure, nostalgia, melancholy and the unlived (Appadurai, 1996;Larkin, 2002). Circulating in international networks, prints entailed amode of linkage between forms of micro-political agency and widercultural processes that valorized something more than patrioticcelebration or mourning over the rupture of exile and loss. Instead they

J o u r n a l o f M AT E R I A L C U LT U R E 8 ( 1 )

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highlighted more indeterminate emotions about the contingent nature ofnational and colonial existence (Gilroy, 1997: 3345).

Along with other imported commodities such as cheese and cham-pagne, prints were preferred to local art and luxuries. Who cared aboutan over-priced, cumbersome Zoffany portrait, a badly-scraped localengraving or the flawed, curious realism of Company painting, whenyou could have a cabinet of English prints! Like their human cohabitants,these pictures lived brief lives, succumbing to the heat and the dust,monsoons, ants and the damp. Glittering, nationalistic, novel andexpendable, prints signified as conspicuous waste rather than as in-alienable possessions.1 Yet they contained an animism capable ofmoulding the appearance, even the very being of the city. For instance,prints not only decorated Calcuttas public buildings but these verystructures were devised by Company engineers reliant on importededitions of Vitruvius Britannicus. In turn these buildings were recordedby amateur engravers such as Captain William Baillie who combined hismilitary topography with flourishes gleaned from Boydells views ofLondon, Edinburgh and Ireland, declaring, I lay my hands on all booksof views that come within my reach (Humphry, 178592).2

Provincial Mughal artists forced to migrate from the former capitalof Bengal, Murshidabad, were commissioned by colonial officials totrace, copy and reverse prints such as William Hodges Choix des Vuesde lInde.3 As patrons Britons and Indians could choose from (anddiscriminate against) an enormous range of art.4 For instance the estateof Henry Maschmann included a print of Gainsboroughs Watering Placesold to Mr Needham for 24 Rupees (hereafter Rs), two prints of QueenMary and King Charles sold to Govind Pyker for 31 Rs and four squareHindustani pictures sold to Pharsee Johame for 38 Rs.5 A distinct Indianpatronage structure flourished amongst north Calcuttas mercantilecommunity, which created its own taste agenda. Partners in colonialcommission houses, these merchants became shrewd observers ofBritish social mores for the accretion of their own cultural identities practices mediated by prints.

In these complex networks, prints display and their subject matterformulated technologies for fashionable, nostalgic colonial selves, as wellas influenced the consuming patterns of indigenous artists and elites.They instigated and became entangled within debates over luxury,climate and race. They had access to Indian spaces interdict to theBritish; they signified English authenticity whilst becoming utterlyhybridized by the tropics.

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ANIMISM IN THE LABYRINTH: RETHINKINGTHINGS IN COLONIAL CONSUMPTION

Objects are naturally shifty.(John Frow, 2001)

Why should these torn bits of paper (that died before colonial archivescould enshrine or reject them) be allowed to share their tales of the city?Monographs on objects have become increasingly numerous from livesof the biro to the tampon as part of a growing preoccupation withhistories of consumption. The consumption of culture dominatesdebates on 18th-century life, yet what does it actually mean to consume,what did these diasporic pictures want?

In western democracies consumption has become one of the prin-ciple means for participating in the polity. Yet, it is also dubbed destruc-tive of the worldly durability of things embedded in the culture ofpre-modern use. So what of 18th-century colonial consumption? To alarge extent the idea of a celebratory, Whiggish consumer revolutionstill lurks beneath debates concerning the discovery of the economyand the dissemination of luxury goods (Berg and Clifford, 1999; Berming-ham and Brewer, 1995; McKendrick et al., 1982). Such interpretationsdefine consumption as a symbolic trace of social status which elevatesprestige through distinction and emulation (Baudrillard, 1968; Bourdieu,1979; Veblen, 1899). Yet where is the agency, the alterity of things?Bourdieu asserts that human agency is unaltered by passive objects,whilst Baudrillard suggests that objects are charismatic, even person-forming. Although his definition takes men and things to signify arbi-trarily through linguistic simulacra (hence neglecting issues of being andillegibility), he does acknowledge some (albeit human-oriented) agencyfor objects.

It is largely through the work of Bruno Latour that things are at lastbeing given equal borrowing rights and entry into a network of recipro-cation with humans. Deconstructing the Cartesian res and the Kantianthing to be perceived by the transcendental subject, Latour shows thatthings and humans are co-produced. Using the concepts of quasi-objectand quasi-subject, he argues that modernity portrays society as eithertoo weak or too powerful vis--vis objects which are alternately toopowerful or too arbitrary (Latour, 1993: 53). Instead quasi-objects andquasi-subjects are discursive, generated in and articulated by networksrather than removed into a realm of sleek nature, autonomousdiscourse, false consciousness, and simulacra.

Real objects are always part of institutions, trembling in their mixed statusas mediators, mobilizing faraway lands and peoples, ready to become peopleor things, not knowing if they are composed of one or of many, of a black


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box counting for one or of a labyrinth concealing multitudes. (Latour,1996: 61)

Things are the age-old and the new Others of discourse that refuse toreturn the human(ist) gaze. This is not to re-enchant things whichwould merely be to turn human agency on its head, but rather it mani-fests an entanglement of men and things where the world is many, notdouble.

Whilst this has made us rethink the whole problematic of Europeanmodernity understood as disenchantment, it is yet to be used in colonialcontexts in sites of staging other modernities. Appadurai and Thomashave traced the social lives of entangled objects (specifically concerningcommodities and exotic private property) but in the end they also reducethe agency of things to culturally configured tropes (methodologicalfetishism), merely extending the humanist root-metaphor of culture asthe production of humans alone (Appadurai, 1986; Thomas, 1991). Post-colonial studies it seems, is not yet ready to throw out the modernist-colonialist paradigm and to shift its agenda from a theory of agency stillafflicted and inflected by colonial legacies. Whilst Latour was penningWe Have Never Been Modern, Homi Bhabha was rethinking hybriditythrough the lens of ambivalence as axiomatic to colonialism. This criticallinkage of ambivalence to hybridity reinscribes colonial encounters witha productive tension a sense of difference that is not about pure other-ness. Bhabha uses things to symbolize the slippage between Britishcultures incomplete translation to the colonies which becomes both asource of increased, despotic control and of anxiety of the incomplete,the uncanny, as these cracks in colonial discourse create a space forresistance. He mobilizes chapattis and bibles as signs and symbols inimperial encounters. Like the peoples they encounter, these thingspossess ambivalent status not quite objects, belonging to the colonizedwho are never accorded full subjecthood. Although these things are ulti-mately reduced to a linguistic, if highly problematic signification, theirrole within colonial struggles opens new horizons for their alterity andagency (Bhabha, 1994).

Sometimes chapattis and bibles assume a quasi-fetish status inBhabhas India and it is discussions of fetish that convey the animism,allure and repulsion of things in the colonies Deriving from thePortuguese for witchcraft, fetish became enmeshed with the personifi-cation of material objects and belief in objects supernatural powersarising from chance or arbitrary conjunctions. This alleged aleatoryprocedure for the external determination of a subjects will by the contin-gent association of a singular material object with an individual purpose,constituted the fundamental intellectual perversion of fetish worship(Pietz, 1988: 112). Fetish was transformed into the Modern Other not


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only to a Christian or commercial European imperialism, but also as aform of devil worship integral to all exotic, primitive, barbaric places.Yet fetish bears the same root as fact it is the religion of Europealways in denial, convincing itself it is rational, that the world is paintedin black and white, that things, ideas and people do not seep, feed, bleedinto one another. By making these humannonhuman, natureculture,subjectobject, factfetish (factish) connections, Latour suggests that weshould think sideways that such networks operate on the horizontalnot the vertical hierarchy that has divided races, that has severed menfrom things (Latour, 1998). This is not merely to free things from thePanopticon of racial and cultural confinements, but to recognize thatthings are messy, that these cyborgs, these hybrids pertain to thelabyrinthine, to the creole and that this has always been so.

Facts and fetishism were integral to colonial Calcutta. Informationgathering dominated early Orientalist activity, but so did the less-explored realm of fetish. Compartmentalizing Hindus as iconophiles andMuslims as iconophobic, Britons were poised in an in-between space oftheir own making. Unlike the Catholic Portuguese who employedEuropean and Indian painters to adorn their churches and governmentbuildings, Britons eyed all painters with suspicion. The East IndiaCompany refused direct patronage to British artists. Although the Courtof Directors granted permission to 60 professional painters to travel toits Presidencies (rebuffing several others including leading artist FrancisWheatley), it remained reluctant to fund print schemes, to accept workdedicated to the Company and ignored pictures sent as gifts by suchtalents as William Hodges (Archer, 1965). Former Mughal court artistsknown as Company School painters were commissioned by Britons toproduce cheap watercolours of trades and castes or else to partake in theinformation-gathering projects of the colonial state for whichprofessional British artists were considered unsuited. Denigrated for adearth of genius and yet praised for copying, these Indian artists asmimic men played a crucial if liminal role within the Company state(Archer and Archer, 1955; Guha-Thakurta, 1992). Given these obliqueand highly mediated relationships between the Company authorities andartists, why did English prints more than any other art form (andseemingly so marginal to these encounters) assume a quasi-fetishstature?

WHITE SEPULCHRAL CITY: IMPRINTING DEATHAND LUXURY IN CALCUTTA

The city of Calcutta is such a place that even birds may tear out theirfeathers . . . if any animal grazes here it will lose its life . . . the trees arebereft of fruits, streams are filled with rubbish, the city is charmless . . .


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The hearts of the people are always devoid of truth, righteousness andmorality. They keep their doors shut all day and night out of fear of theirown kind.(Karam Ali, The Muzzafarnama)

Calcutta: city of palaces, city of death, articulated by a rhetoric of white-ness yet dirty, labyrinthine an oriental city with a sickly, colonial heart.Established as a factory in 1690, this small fort-based enclave was razedto the ground in conflicts with the nawab of Bengal Siraj ud-daula in1756. With victory machinated at Plassey the following year and theright to stand forth as diwan of Bengal, Calcutta usurped Murshidabadas the new capital. Huge houses coated in seashell lime and ornamentedwith classical facades were raised amidst warrens of lanes and stinkingtanks. Villages were destroyed by its Leviathan expansion forcing ruralimage-makers to migrate to the bazaars. To the north, the Black Town,pivoting on the fiefdoms of a few wealthy indigenous (merchant-secretaries to the British, also distended to gigantic proportions, so thatby 1790 the city harboured a population of over 200,000.

Poorly constructed on a mosquito-infested swamp, the majority ofthe city remained impenetrable to British painters and surveyors andwas strongly criticized by the Indo-Muslim elites hardly the idealharbinger for the fine arts. Although as many as 27 British painters andprint makers used Calcutta as their base, the colonial community wasnever more than tepid in its artistic support. This became glaringlyobvious in the sudden recession from 1785, forcing painters either toexplore India in search of ethnographic subjects and landscapes (whichthey hoped to translate into successful metropolitan print schemes), orto relinquish their artistic practice a strategy officially outlawed by theCompany. Portraiture was dying; nabobs became debtors; Cornwallisstrict reforms along with war in Mysore effectively ended Hastingsglittering era of money and corruption. Despite attempts to enforceapartheid between the Black and White Towns, Calcutta became a denseheterotopia, its art market a tournament economy driven by the tensionsof a proto-cosmopolitanism. Given this intense competition, shoddy,pricey, colonial printmaking suffered most. William Baillie in corre-spondence with his former colleague the now London-based minia-turist Ozias Humphry, apologized for the poor quality of the etching ofhis Twelve Views of Calcutta: it will appear a very poor performance inyour land I fear. You must look upon it as a Bengali work (Humphry,178592). A familiar criticism, colonial print-making was repeatedlymarginalized by the nationalistic, patriotic agenda of Britains print capi-talism (Shaw, 1981).

In the London press Calcutta was stereotyped as a hyper-realm ofsickly, effete, vicious and decadent nabobs, all in search of oriental


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wealth. As early as the 1750s the city was represented as a den ofiniquity, indolence and decadence; Clive declared it be one of the mostwicked places in the universe . . . rapacious and luxurious beyondconception (Christies, 1998: 73). Calcutta resembled a brilliant ifslightly tawdry imitation of Europe its mimicry associated with themenacing, farcical tropical gothic of a middle-class aristocracy(Anderson, 1991: 137; Spear, 1963: 34). One reason for disdain was theslippage between definitions of needs and luxuries in the metropolis andthe colony. In Britain, the dangers of oriental goods (such as tea andopium) were hotly debated by moralists; they condemned these irre-sistible, addictive things for ruining individuals and for corrupting thebody politic. Here was a discourse of Orientalism articulated by thingstoo powerful for their own good, exaggerated in the colonies through thetrope of the decadent, carnivalesque English nabob. Assimilation of theOrient might slip into infatuation; a dose of the exotic might become aninfection rather than an inoculation . . . Medical environmentalismreinforced the idea of an Indianized European body as diseased. Thenabob as a hybrid of East and West was primarily the product of culturalmiscegenation (Collingham, 2001: 34). Calcuttas British diaspora wasnot only exposed to these oriental temptations but was simultaneouslychastised for its extravagant consumption of English things. Medicaltreatises prescribed against the use of tight corsets, rich, meaty dishes,Madeira and too much dancing to London tunes, all of which led tohumeral imbalance, fever, liver disease and to painful death. The concoc-tion of climatic determinism and over-consumption placed corporealstrain on the nervous system whose proper functioning was crucial tothe physiological processes of aesthetic perception.

Such medical prescription colours the few polite portraits of colonialresidents where luxury signified through self-representation andaesthetic display. In Zoffanys painting of the Auriol and DashwoodFamilies, the subjects stage themselves under a jackfruit tree, attendedby Indian servants, displaying their imported china, Chippendale chairsand decked in the latest European fashions (made from oriental silk).The picture demonstrates how a repertoire of complex objects can createartefact-centred selves and how self-centred artefacts can become thenew artistic subjects for an exotic British portraiture. Oriental actionarticulates the scene chess, tea and hookah smoking connote a height-ened sense of colonial cosmopolitanism that elicited a distinctly creoledialectic between needs and luxuries:

Living is very expensive on account of the great rent of houses, the numberof servants, the excessive price of all European commodities such as wineand clothes. The perspiration requires perpetual changes of clothes andlinen; not to mention the expenses of palanquins, carriages and horses.


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Many of these things which perhaps luxuries are in this climate, real neces-saries of life. (Kindersley, 1777: 292; my emphases)

In Britain, needs and desires were closely entangled; Adam Smithcautioned that luxuries could not keep off the winter storm, but leave(their possessor) always as much and sometimes more exposed . . . toanxiety . . . to disease and to death (Smiths Essay on Jurisprudence citedin Xenos, 1989: 12). Yet in the colonies luxuries became integral to thesurvival of these hybridized and diasporic selves.

Not all luxuries were defended as needs. Although in the boom,Calcuttas inhabitants lavished coins on jewelled gowns, expensivevictuals and riotous ritual, they considered painting an unstablecommodity, as exotic excess. Art was marginal to both colonial habitusand to public potlatch. Only for a wealthy few did pictures (usuallyBritish oil portraits and sometimes rare Mughal manuscripts) perform assymbolic capital. To demonstrate this distinction, they paid astronomi-cal prices to British artists who were prohibited from trespassing in otherprofessions.6 This market for British painters was severely constrained,not only by a lack of local enthusiasm but also by its exclusion fromglobal networks; as heavy customs duties in Britain deterred colonialpainters from sending their works from India, inferring that this shouldbe a one-way artistic dissemination.7 Instead several insured themselvesas print-dealers which was viewed by the Company as a legitimateform of private trade a practice that proved vital to their survival.8Whilst the colonial press exposed artists squabbles, oscillating portraitprices and print-scheme delays, in contrast advertisements for importedart (couched in polite idioms, defined by efficiency, regularity anduniversal taste) promoted a visual economy, as opposed to graphicanarchy.9

This press puffing reflected metropolitan celebration: the calcu-lation in all understandings is on the foreign sale being thrice above ourown (The World, 3 February 1787 cited in Clayton, 1997: 262). Althoughan expanding international trade, print commerce depended on anintimate kinship network of ambassadors and artists for high-qualityprints to make the passage to India, whilst middling stock circulatedthrough established routes for luxury goods, as celebrated in the metro-politan press:

The print sellers have at present an amazing run for exportation; theengravers and colourers are fully employed, so great is the demand forpresents as well as trade in our East India settlements. The Indians in ourinterest are enraptured with views of our public buildings in the concavemirror. (London Evening Post, 2224 January 1767, cited in Clayton, 1997:262)


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Yet in these early accounts it is Indian wonder that justifies printconsumption, as such images began to infiltrate diplomatic gifting thusaffecting indigenous elite notions of art, self, space and taste.10 Simul-taneously, colonial documents disclose colonial contempt for Indiantaste. They frequently mock a range of indigenous elites for their choiceand display of English prints integral to a xenophobic discourse thataccelerated from the mid-1780s and against which colonial printconsumption must be situated.11

In the 1760s, leading London print dealers Ryland and Bryer devisedan ambitious scheme to distribute paintings and prints in Calcutta andMadras but being too inflexible in their economic demands, thepictures returned to Britain unsold, bankrupting the firm.12 Their cargowas both too highly priced and they lacked a network of contacts tonegotiate with local needs (the prints not even making it off Indian quay-sides into colonial enclaves), yet already sophisticated commoditynetworks were evolving in which prints would become powerful attrac-tors in global networks.13 By the 1780s, leading print dealers Macklinand Boydell were inundating Calcuttas market with lavish schemes suchas Shakespeares Gallery and English Poets by mobilizing trusted agents including relatives, artists and captains to distribute high-qualityimages.14 When in the tropics, prints demanded to be used in other waysto the metropolis. The miniaturist/print dealer Ozias Humphry describedsuch practices to his then fiance Boydells niece:

What I formerly suggested of furnishing my apartments with prints pastedto the wall cannot possibly prevail . . . in any degree in Calcutta as peopleare forever unfixd here. It being customary to let houses from month tomonth only, no person finds himself sufficiently interested in a house todecorate it in so costly a market. Framed prints which are movable andtransferable are in great fashion in India. (Humphry, 178592)

White ants and the damp precluded prints from being pasted to walls orto dressing- or fire-screens as was the fashion in Europe. Instead, fewerimages were acquired already framed and glazed strategies whichpartially protected them from the tropical climate. Being relatively cheapand often won through lotteries, they transgressed the imperatives oftasteful decoration in Britain, as well as epitomizing the chronopoliticsof a hybrid public culture in a state of constant flux.15 The normallifetime of a Briton in Calcutta averaged just two monsoons; as part ofthis putrefying ethos, this short-term clique settled for what was ulti-mately short-term art, ciphered by an aesthetics of ephemerality crucialto the civilizing rhythms of accumulation and divestiture.16

Time became Messianic in the colonies. The climate assaulted notonly the corporeal constitution but also the familiarizing symbols of theEnglish constitution. So for artistic consumption to be validated, it had


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to signify as a transitory instance of individual wealth which should beallowed to decay; at best in this dialectic of men and things, there wasa race to the death. The tropics eroded markers of civilization such asarchitecture far faster than in Britain. Although landscape painters suchas William Hodges portrayed Calcutta as the epicentre of modernity (incontrast to his exaggeration of the atrophy of the Mughal cities such asMurshidabad and Agra), cheaply built in brick and chunam, this decayingcolonial city could never resemble the marble marvels of its chosenprecedents imperial Rome and Mughal India. Likewise its public artcollection consisted in a few motley scraps, patches and rags includinggrand canvases of the king and queen of France snatched from theFrench settlement of Pondicherry, Lord Clives and George IIIsimported portraits and the likenesses of the nawabs of Arcot and Awadh(privately owned and later removed by Governor-General WarrenHastings [Bhabha, 1994: 45]). Patching up these totemic traces becameimperative to imperialisms illusion of permanence.

Whilst public buildings provided at least semi-permanent, partially-inalienable art display, the rented homes of temporary residents signi-fied as space without places, time without duration, subject tostructural disintegration (Althusser, 1972: 78). Although a few residentsexclaimed what would you say of an apartment forty feet high and onehundred and twenty feet square, lighted by five or six crystal lustres?only a few Europeans could afford a large house; most lived in apart-ments or single-room dwellings that were defined by short rents andlocated on the margins of the White Town (Le Couteur, 1790: 199200).These were fluid spaces. The non-specificity of their rooms was a methodof responding to a changing market, in which there was no assurancethat the building would continue in its present use. This open-plancentral room design made Calcutta houses like a theatre in the round. . . [pivoting on] a concentric arrangement which allowed multiplepoints of entrance and dispersal where there was little privacy and evenless display of conspicuous consumption (Chattopadhyay, 1997: 150).

Although grand in size, let unfurnished and lacking the moral cachetof property, few of these apartments housed anything akin to an artcollection, but rather a bricolage of objets trouvs. This was taste basedon cultural difference more than on social distinction the majority ofCalcuttas colonial residents wanted to be with prints, in fact withanything European however deficient or absurd, instead of being labelledwith the taboo of Indian things.17

Paper and wainscot are improper both on account of the heat, the vermin,the difficulty of getting it done, the rooms are all white walls but plasteredin panels which has a very pretty effect and are generally ornamented withprints, looking glasses or whatever else may be procured from Europe.(Kindersley, 1778: 2789)


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Apartments in Calcutta were constantly limed down for medicalpurposes after the death of tenants or following the monsoon whichproduced a distinct aesthetic of whiteness defined by functionality,health and economy: the walls are painted white, paper or tapestry arenever used; they are sometimes hung with pictures or prints, but theseare destroyed in a short time (Solvyns, 1810: 123). In Britain white-washed walls were low in the hierarchy of polite decoration but inCalcutta they were puffed as marble-like, bestowing a freshness in themidst the miasmic humidity (Hodges, 1793:12).

Returning to the miniaturist Ozias Humphreys remark that no onefinds himself sufficiently interested to decorate a house in so costly amarket sufficiently interested evokes a host of meanings. Strugglingartists criticized local taste as being debased and basic, where likeness(given the often dramatic physiological changes in sitters and the needto maintain long-distance kinship networks), assumed primacy.18 Bothportraits and sitters decayed in the tropics, putting resemblancestrangely out of sync in these presentations of the self. Lack of interestalso referred to print acquisition. Calcutta survived on credit, thusconstraining art, property and taste, which transformed it into acommercial society in extremis. It fetishized appearances and promisesover substance and consumption over accumulation. Whilst these prints-as-credit-objects were being paid for they were simultaneously wearingout, which for an image-conscious, young and fashionable community,careless of an uncertain future, was the only solution. Always owingmoney to agency houses (from whence credit derived), objects werenever fully removed into the private, inalienable realm of the family(itself destabilized in the colonies), but remained obliged by the demandsof commerce.

In the severe recession from 1785, this network collapsed.19 Thesmall coterie of art patrons left for London.20 However the rake WilliamHickey did boast his art collection in terms of property, ostentation andenvy, capital distinguishing his superior taste. His conspicuous consump-tion acted as potlatch as glittering, desiccating pictures enabled wasteto become the ultimate object for acquisition:

In March 1790, my new mansion being furnished and very handsome Iremoved into it. I furnished it in such a style as gained universal approba-tion and acquired me the reputation of possessing great taste. The principleapartments were ornamented with immense looking-glasses, also a numberof beautiful pictures and prints, forming altogether a choice and valuablecollection. The expense was altogether enormous, but as I looked only topleasant times, having no idea I should ever be able to lay up a fortune, Iwas indifferent about the price of things, purchasing every article I felt anyinclination for. When completed my house was pronounced to be the mostelegantly fitted up of any in Calcutta and in fact there was none like it. Some


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of my facetious acquaintances christened it Hickeys Picture and Print Ware-house. (Hickey, 191325 volume 3: 159; my emphases)

As opposed to Humphrys remark that no one was sufficiently interestedin a costly market, Hickey is indifferent about the price of things,purchasing every article as conspicuous consumption overrideseconomy. Prints as quasi-objects both formulate and are articulated byHickeys judgement to the extent that their appropriation by the taxo-nomic momentum of the collection is incomplete. Instead they retaintheir alterity each picture vying for attention, as if still displayed in theanonymity of a warehouse. Thus pictures move in and out of colonialself-fashioning their ambivalence not allowing for their total appropri-ation by buyers such as Hickey. His neighbours allusion to an auctionhouse articulated the obvious insult to lob at his excess antithetical toconspicuous parsimony. This commercial analogy also conjures up oneof the few heterotopias where art could be viewed in late 18th-centuryCalcutta. By 1790 at least 75 per cent that is 10 auction houses weredealing in prints and paintings; they provided the colonial diaspora witha medium for constituting the world as a specific type of picture aprocess that can be termed the emporium effect.21

THE EMPORIUM EFFECT: LOTTERIES ANDAESTHETIC MONOPOLIES IN CALCUTTA

I come from a dizzy land where the lottery is the basis of reality . . . TheBabylonians threw themselves into the game . . . those who did not playwere scorned, but also the losers who paid the fine were scorned . . . Thebravado of a few is the source of the omnipotence of the Company . . .[which] made the lottery secret, free and general.(Jorge Luis Borges, The Lottery in Babylon, Labyrinths)

Borgesian Babylon provides a parallel modernity to 18th-centuryCalcutta. Both cities were portrayed as viciously luxurious, decadent andwicked. For both, Chance is fetishized to excess, as the cosmology foruncertain, extravagant, desperate living. The tale of these two citiestraces the chameleon transformations of lotteries from small enterprisesinto the ontology of public life.

Whilst the museum effect articulated the 19th-century Europeanarchipelago of arcades, prisons, schools, world fairs and museums,whose visual discipline operated through object lessons, how did theemporium effect articulate colonial life? (Alpers, 1991; Bennett, 1995).The early Company state, littered with prisons and asylums, lackedmuseums, exhibitions and arcades. Instead imperial emporia occupied acentral role in both politics and commerce. The men who ran these


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businesses were immensely powerful; they were frequently ambas-sadors, Orientalist scholars and had access to monopolies in covetedcommodities such as opium and indigo. Showcased in glittering lotteries,things fetishized the commercial meanwhile rather than imperialistnostalgia, becoming the metonyms for the Company state and its claus-trophobic voyeurism.

Unlike Britain the economy in colonial India had no autonomy.Based not only on social control, metropolitan governmentality con-tained within itself a space for dialogue, self-critique even for resistance(Foucault, 1991). In Calcutta, the East India Company regulated, evencreated the public by effecting the channels through which expressioncould be heard and entrenched itself as the sole arbiter of what discoursewas legitimate. Public amusements are perhaps fewer in Calcutta thanin any other city in the world of equal elegance in buildings, extent andin the taste of its European inhabitants as the dearth of leisure diversityexposed a severely impoverished civic forum (Calcutta Chronicle, 18January 1787). Thus the institutions of civil society in the forms whichthey had arisen in Europe always made their appearance in the coloniesprecisely to create a public domain for the legitimization of colonial rule(Chatterjee, 1993: 237). Although no government press regulations wereenforced until 1797, state coercion ensured that anti-Company opinionswere publicly censored in effect there was no free press, no print-capitalism and no graphic satire.22 Hence things that had assisted inthe creation and proliferation of opinion in England, such as highly-politicized pamphlets, newspapers and graphic satire, in Calcutta wereconspicuously absent.

The only local visual satire was the Scottish engraver James Moffatscrudely-etched Indian stereotypes and colonial types, which condemnedparasitical economic mores and quotidian habits subjects that wereboth trivial and grossly racial and which appealed to the familiar and todifference, the comic and the uncanny. In Hard Times (Figure 1) poorwhites bemoan the effects of recession on Calcuttas luxury consump-tion, as its division of labour collapses; the undertaker complains, I haveonly had 39 jobs yet the rains are almost over, indicative of a oncedecadent colonial community chastened by poverty. Whilst the construc-tion of difference increasingly distracted Britons from the limitationsin their own public sphere, (as poor whites and Indians became sub-altern others), imperial emporia invited inhabitants to assert limitedcitizen rights through consumption. This was a type of citizenship thatoperated through both distance and difference. Newspapers and satires(albeit months out of date) were imported from Britain and circulated inimperial emporia, which acted as both the technological channels anddialogic spaces for local debate.

Although driven by an imperial emporium effect, these businesses


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were always transcultural heterotopias. They were frequently funded byindigenous merchants who bought British pictures to adorn the publicapartments of their grand north-Calcutta estates which easily surpassedcolonial houses in their scale and decoration.23 Traffic in foreigncommodities in this colonial tournament economy gave these merchantspower, even if it meant excessive sacrifices to the gods in order to removethe contamination of English things. Many despised colonial commodi-ties (such as meat, alcohol and the realism of English prints) as pollut-ing, even as taboo, integral to their condemnation of the absurd Britishlove of luxuries (Abu Talib, 1814; Khan, 1998). According to Abu Talibsanalysis of English character, things pamper their appetites, which fromlong indulgence, have gained such absolute sway over them, that adiminution of these luxuries would be considered by many a seriousmisfortune . . . It is certain that luxurious living generates manydisorders and is productive of various bad consequences (Abu Talib,1814: 95). With regard to British art as luxury, to these writers theLondon scene is even worse than Calcutta. The Indo-Muslim travellerItesamuddin was astonished that paintings fetched as much as 2000 andAbu Talib noted that Mr Christie the auctioneer also paid me muchattention and gratified me highly be showing me the articles he had forsale. He once exhibited to me a number of pictures which he valued at60,000 and when I called there a few days afterwards, they were all


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FIGURE 1 James Moffat, Hard Times, etching and watercolour, Calcutta 1796.Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University



disposed of (Itesamuddin, 1827: 42; Abu Talib, 1814: 121). According toAbu Talib broken statues are worshipped by Britons to the point offetishization:

Statues of stone . . . are held in high estimation, approaching to idolatry.Once . . . a figure [in] which nothing but the trunk remained . . . sold for5000 pounds. It is really astonishing that people possessed of so much know-ledge and good sense who reproach the nobility of Hindustan with wearinggold and silver ornaments . . . should be tempted by Satan to throw awaytheir money. (Abu Talib, 1814: 1434)

In this view, Britons are mindless dupes taken in by fetishism and byfalse idols which become enmeshed within the urban phantasmagoriaof the emporium effect. These imperial emporia were axiomatic to bothcolonial rituals and the practices of everyday life:

Balls, card parties and what are called Europe shops which are literallymagazines of every European article whether luxury or convenience. Theseearly in the morning are the public site of the idle and gay who therepropagate the scandal of the day and purchase at an immoderate price thetoys of Mr Pinchback and the frippery of Tavistock Street. (Asiaticus, 1909:33)

Lacking museums and galleries, and generally disenchanted by artistsprivate studios, for colonial consumer-citizens Europe shops becameproto-Arcades. Dazzling and novel they furnished a glamorous way ofseeing the world through glass, prints and all the luxuries of metropolitanlife. There is no didactic drive for object lessons here sensual thingswant intercourse with humans:

Here you may for hours lounge up and down and feast your eyes with thecontemplation of the best prints and paintings, or turn to another part of theroom and examine whole folios of caricature. You may take a chair and dipinto the most recent publications. You may taste a cheese or read the historyof the country where it was made; you may contemplate painted beautieson canvas or fall in love with painted beauties who are gazing at them . . .you may buy 10,000 Rs worth of articles or walk away without anything andgive equal satisfaction. In short it is the most agreeable lounge in the world,but at the same time the most tempting one. (Roberdeau, 1805: 34)

Europe shops are defined by a mixture of corporeal and ephemeralpleasures rather than by Kantian aesthetic experience as the colonialbody literally collapses into these things feasting, tasting, dipping intoand falling in love. Here is the porous, amorphous colonial self whoseembodiment relies on imported luxuries. This is not the manifestationof a strict civilizing process that represses corporeal aspects of the self,but the carnivalesque desires of early colonial lifestyle. Things create the


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division of space in these showrooms and their ensuing rituals. Onelounges in these lounges which proffer the fragments of metropolitanliving, moving through a jungle, a symphony of pictures, chairs, booksand painted beauties ornamented with white lead and vermilion bothpictorial and as flesh in the world. These imported things linked thecolonial body indexically to Britain. Imported foods were the fruit of theland; even topographical aquatints were based on drawings using thecamera obscura whose black-boxing techniques created links betweenimage and reality. Here was a corporeal patriotism enmeshed with thedemands of colonial desire.

In these glittering emporia, possession was usurped by display,especially in the time of severe economic recession. By the late 1780sthese credit-weary Europe shops collapsed:

About ten years ago there were no more than three or four Europe shops inCalcutta at which time they continued to increase till within the last twelvemonths; in this period most of the debts now due to individuals werecontracted and in consequence . . . they began to decrease until the presentday when strange it is that there should not be a single European shop inall Calcutta; they are converted to commission warehouses . . . ready moneyonly is the universal condition. (Calcutta Chronicle, 30 October 1788)

During recession, when engravers complained that they did not believethat even Woollett [Londons most renowned engraver] himself . . .would make both ends meet, this import market grew ever moresophisticated. (Baillie to Humphry HU/4/114, Humphry, 17851792.)The market became saturated with images Pictures are in abundance ofone sort or another . . . as to prints, the commonest bazaar is full of them.Hodges Indian views are selling off at the out-cry by cartloads andalthough framed and glazed, are bought for less money than the glazealone could be purchased in the bazaar (Baillie to Humphry HU/4/130,Humphry, 17851792). To survive, Europe shops became attached tohouses of agency banking businesses that invested in real estate andup-country commerce, forming a powerful monopoly across northernand eastern India. In the purchase of imagery these agencies createdtheir own monopolies; only they could withstand credit and only theycould take risks in art sales. Things slowly atrophying, these showroomsgrew more and more distended in their attempts to woo viewers:

The competition among the 3 rival houses has excited emulation in tastydecoration, as well as in the active part of the business. The novelty of thenew house attracted a great body on its opening and the crowd has beenthere ever since, the purchasers not proportionally plenteous. Dring andRothman have been the statuary as usual. Both in numbers present andquantities sold the Europe goods of todays sale are of the best quality. Kingand Johnsons rooms present pillars and pictures of piety in the background


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the nearer the church the farther from music: a speaking trumpet would bea useful appendage to the crier there, for the lungs of Stentor could notconvey going a going through half the lofty roof. Some of those who loveto turn a penny bought some cheap bargains yesterday at these rooms andsojourning to the opposites, seeing what the effect of an unlocked jaw hasover the imagination are led to exclaim after crossing the street a plagueof both your houses. (The World, 9 June 1792)

These houses blew sense and taste out of all proportions, so that not eventhe herald from the Trojan wars could make himself heard and theallusion to the bitter factions of Shakespearian Verona reveals that rivalrytransgressed all boundaries.

Such reportage clashed with the self-imaging of these businesses asoverseers of the White Town. The house of Paxton, Cockerell & Cooccupied a prime site in the commercial quarter (close to the river, toTank Square, Writers Building and St Johns Church where most agencyheadquarters were located), paid tribute by the Daniells in the first printof their Twelve-View Series of Calcutta (Figure 2). The auction houseperforms as the centripetal point for a commercial narrative that reads


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FIGURE 2 Thomas Daniell, View of the East Side of the Old Fort, Clive Streetand Paxtons Auction House, Calcutta. 1786 aquatint and etching (ref. P87).By permission of the British Library, London



left to right from imported goods being off-loaded from the River Hugliat the old Fort (converted into the customs depot) and then conveyedto Paxtons. The Daniells have ironed out the tight conjunction of twostreets in order to give the city an illusory public piazza where Indiansin the civic humanist pose of Castor and Pollux are engaged in civilizedconversation.

Agency houses dispatched agents to London to establish links withpublishers and artists; Baillie begged Ozias Humphry to assist one ofDrings partners who was no judge of these articles I suppose and maybe taken in unless recommended to a tradesman of eminence and char-acter, inferring that the metropolis duped its colonies with shoddy,pricey goods (Humphry, 1792). Yet London connoisseurship became avital component in the selection of prints: a small but capital collectionof paintings selected by a gentleman of taste in London (CalcuttaChronicle, 26 July 1787). Novelty acted as a cogent factor, as caricatures,the latest print schemes and patented reproduction processes, poly-graphic paintings, even a panorama of London, inundated Calcutta.24

In contrast oil paintings rotting and aeconomic, were usually dis-seminated through dice games, tombolas, raffles and lotteries, many ofwhich had to be cancelled due to lack of public interest.25 The processof the auction in recession had become so unpredictable that it createdan ever-present potential for alienation, slippage or loss of economicconsensus within the public interaction of persons and things (Geismar,2001). Art sales (Calcuttas public showily dressed, objects dusted inwaiting), acted as complicated, spectacular, ocular tournaments arte-facts as the enactment of events where performances were the artefactsof people. In all this:

The object is the strand that holds the disparate components of the markettogether. This object, of paradoxical and ironic authenticity, its identityvacillating between that of frequently-produced commodity and uniquetraditional artefact, is both exhibited in the market and sits at the head of acult, its material form worshipped. (Geismar, 2001)

Bidding auctions had been popular in the early 1780s when the authen-tication of value reached an economic zenith, yet with recession,lotteries, dicing tournaments and raffles intriguingly played on thecollective and unique glamour of things to be attained not by monetaryfortunes but by good fortune supposedly more egalitarian by beingarbitrary. Through a species of aleatory contract the determinism ofthings tickets, ivory dice and slips of paper, forming their own collec-tives in the pots and jugs into which the human hand of fate was dipped,linked themselves to fellow things pictures with human players asmere mediators. The lack of a visible, a priori human control peopletermed chance.26 This practice deconstructed the distributive value of


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each image as picture and winner were cast into unpredictable encoun-ters. Pictures could retain and attain agency despite the arbitrary identityof their owners. Company officials stationed for a couple of seasons inCalcutta could reminisce that they once rented the most magnificentchandeliers and the finest prints a twilight of secular idols whichshaped their personhood.

CONCLUSION

DIASPORIC DISPOSSESSION AND SECULAR FETISHISM

Q: What is commerce?A: Gambling.Q: What is the most cardinal virtue?A: Riches.(James Hickey, Hickeys Gazette, March, 1781)

In Calcutta of the 1770s and 1780s, gambling fashioned techniques forscripting imperial selves and for presenting personhood, as well asorganizing the ontology for colonial existence. All three of these meta-physical and practical mnemonics involved the conspicuous mobiliz-ation of symbolic capital in the desire to take risks, displaying the abilityto lose even more than the need to win. Not confined to the whist, piquetand dicing soirees of Calcuttas mansions and taverns, borrowing,promising and indebtedness structured this society as an ostentatiousbut poorly constructed house of cards ready to collapse. Trade in Bengalseemed to Europeans to be a lottery in which the prizes were high butin which there were many blanks (Marshall, 1976: 49). Calcuttas jour-nalists prophesied the implosion, lotteries crowd on lotteries . . . but theproprietors do not seem to consider where the money to support themis to come (Calcutta Chronicle 1 January 1793).

With such an unstable art market, how could Calcuttas printeconomy participate within nascent notions of the British Empire? BothBritishness and Empire were still contingent, amorphous and reliantas much on colonial practices as on the metropolis for their articulations.Although agency-house advertisements frequently deployed Londonpractices to dignify imported things, this was a highly mediated sense ofsocial emulation and national belonging. After all, diasporic Britonscould imagine but not inhabit empty homogenous time, as the real spaceof modern life consisted in the density of heterotopias. The variety ofmetropolitan prints (of London, Scotland, India and the Pacific, portraitmezzotints and etched political satire) elicited a peculiar dialecticbetween fashion and an imagined nostalgia for places unvisited even forthings that never were. This imagined nostalgia thus inverts thetemporal logic of fantasy (which tutors the subject to imagine what could


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or might happen) and creates much deeper wants than simply envy,imitation or greed could by themselves invite (Appadurai, 1996: 77). Inthis colonial context, the nostalgia for the present demonstrated theslippage involved in the nationalistic meanwhile. Prints became colonialcompanions, whilst simultaneously exacerbating nostalgia an acutephysical homesickness which was a well-charted, often fatal medicalcondition. Eliciting a complex range of emotions, prints were disaporicin their very being. They were primarily designed for overseas marketswhich grossed over three times British sales; their scattering processesrelied on images being rhizomorphous able to graft, to grasp a constel-lation of contexts.

Calcutta had no free press, no sites for intense public debate; itsprintmaking was crude and expensive; it lacked graphic satire and localart academies the fundamental ingredients of metropolitan andaesthetic spheres. Capping it all, Calcutta lacked economic capital. Themajority of Calcuttas public did not rent or win more than a handful ofprints, instead pleasure of the spectacle gave equal satisfaction topossession. So things are not to be unpacked. Except for those prints sentas gifts, traded up country or bought by north Calcuttan parvenus, themajority of images in the colonial community circulated in the ether ofagency houses.27

Desires and needs slip sideways in the proliferation of colonialhybridities these things are familiar-exotic, not quite collectables, notquite souvenirs, perhaps closest to fetishes. Britons believed that fetishpossessed certain coordinates: fear of death, the active role played byChance as arbitrary objects become animated by super-human forceswhose origins are often obscured. All of these aspects were presentin print consumption. The fear of death was a constant apparition.Maybe Britons could protect themselves with an army of things ascharmed ornaments, but then maybe not. In lotteries Chance decidedwhose pledge would be rewarded with pictures its nebulous power castover the arbitrary. People wanted to be in the presence of prints. Simul-taneously they didnt mind too much if these images passed away theseobjets trouvs could be replaced similar sentiments forced to coursethrough others etched veins. Pictures then were suspended between themelodramatic polarities of iconophilia and iconoclasm. They pertainedto the everyday, to the petty magic of quotidian living. Lurking beneaththe drab region of objects, all things, not just the dangerous few possessuncertain glamour and animism (Latour, 1998: 266). As Latour asserts,modernitys fetishization of its own genealogy of iconoclasm (from theGolden Calf to Nietzsche) is always incomplete. The knife has no cuttingedge, the hammer is too heavy; the physicality of idols may be smashedbut they are always hit sideways their potency enhanced by these frail,failed acts of iconoclasm (Latour, 1998).


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In the light of trade meeting the ambivalent demands of an acceler-ating population, prints would seem to have done well for themselves;to have participated successfully in actor-network theory. Here also wasa colonial consumer revolution. But was this really the case? Calcuttamay have expanded rapidly, but this did not produce a burgeoning artmarket. In terms of the colonial artistic community, the efflorescence ofthe early 1780s was never recuperated, as the amount of painters plum-meted.28 Likewise for prints, the number of auction houses did notincrease dramatically in this final era before the atrophy of their strong-hold in the 1820s. Already by the mid-1780s Calcutta was saturated bypictures. The market for images was always a complex web articulatedboth by xenophobia and by violent unpredictability. Bengali parvenus,Eurasian women, Company School painters and nawabs all had accessto English prints which were treated as trading artefacts, as patternbooks, as curios, as signs taken for wonders, as inalienable possessions,as gifts or as furniture. Despite government policies of increased racialbias from the 1790s, prints as objects and technologies negotiated andinstigated channels and spaces that complicate their identification withBritish print capitalism.

Actor-network theory, whilst so illuminating in its redress of binaryoppositions between subject and object, has perhaps gone too fartowards reciprocation, efficiency and productivity involving men andthings. Yet conflict was everywhere. Being in the labyrinth of colonialexistence meant competition and conflict, as much as collaboration. TheBritish inclination for European over Indian goods and Shiite condem-nation of British luxuries-as-taboo fetishes, demonstrate the potency anduncertainty that were in things. They resist total translation; they possessa partial intransigence that defies absolute mutability in recontex-tualization. Objects rarely reveal their thingness to humans; they aredividuated, sophisticated and ambivalent. This is not to recuperatethings as subalterns with partial voices that must be represented, butinfers that they transform networks into labyrinths; they confuse, theyenchant, they keep humans at arms length and to hand, ultimatelyslipping sideways beyond their grasp.

At the level of community belonging and things as belongings, printssignified ambivalently as quasi-objects grappling with the cosmopoliticsof colonialism. These were prints capable of creating or withholdingtheir own context. For it is in-between the edict of Englishness that theassault of the dark, unruly spaces of the earth through an act of repeti-tion that this elusive, obdurate imagery emerges uncertainly (Bhabha,1994: 107).


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Acknowledgements

Research for this paper was funded by the British Academy, Yale University, TheLeverhulme Trust and by a Simon Fellowship. For assistance in locating materi-als back in the last century, I am grateful to Timothy Clayton and for commentsat its various life stages I am indebted to P.J. Marshall, C.A. Bayly, Brian Allen,Michael Rosenthal, Dongho Chun, Urmila De, Bhaskar Mukhopadhyay and thereaders and editors of the Journal of Material Culture.

Notes

1. The term inalienable possession is here used with reference to the workof anthropologist Annette Weiner. It is used to describe an artefact infusedwith the charisma of the giver which makes it difficult to give away and ismore valued when kept (Weiner, 1991).

2. Captain Baillies letters to miniaturist Ozias Humphry reveal his borrowingsfrom Boydell and Faringtons prints this also involved his evolution of acritical connoisseurship. St Johns-in-the-swamps in Calcutta built by JamesAgg drew closely on prints of St Martins-in-the-fields. Along with Govern-ment House, this was the only architecture built in Calcutta as a plannedpublic building. The rest were all private houses.

3. For the direct influence of Hodges Select Views of India (London,17851788)see a series of 16 watercolours by a Bengal artist Add Or 11311146 (Orientaland India Office Collections [OIOC], London).

4. See the Bengal Inventory Series L/AG/34/27/volumes 120. I am grateful toLizzie Collingham for alerting me to the importance of this public recordsseries.

5. Bengal Inventory Series: L/AG/34/27/18 (OIOC). The sale of Hastings effectsin 1785 reveal a mixture of British and Indian buyers vying for red prints,oval pictures and glass paintings including Moddrun Dutt and BoydeneathPundit. See also the estate of Thomas Harding L/AG/34/27/19: 1796 whenpictures including oval prints and The Death of Captain Cook were sold toGopi Mohun Baboo; also the sale of the goods of William Spink L/AG/34/27/11788 when five prints in gold frames were sold to Eduljee Darabjee. FromJames Lindsays estate L/AG/34/27/3 1790, Views of Europe were sold toSudersan Jain and Sadah Scin. Whilst these names have been anglicized,they disclose a range of Bengali, Eurasian, Parsi, Jain and Muslim buyers.

However there were many other estates which featured only British art,such as that of Justice Hyde L/AG/34/27/19; 12 January 1797 which includedportraits of his family, three volumes of Boydells collection of prints,Thomas Hickeys History of Painting and a print of Dr Johnson. Overall, theseinventories disclose a mixture of Indian and British things revealingcomplex, multi-layered notion of the self.

6. Willison, Zoffany, Seaton, Home and Kettle all made fortunes in India basedon higher prices charged to Britons and Indians at a variety of rates. TheSitters Book of Robert Home (Heinz Archive, National Portrait Gallery)reveals that he could charge 600 Rs (60) for a likeness matching the topprices of London painters (although lacking some of their talent!). As therent for a reasonable-sized house in Calcutta in the 1780s was 100 Rs permonth, oil portraits could be commissioned only by the wealthy few.

Ozias Humphry Papers, British Library: Add. Ms 22,951, ff.14 for theconditions for travelling to India. This was the rule for all British artists inIndia as seen in the Court of Directors letter for Tilly Kettle, who has


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obtained our license to proceed to Bengal on condition that he does not actin any other capacity or engage in any commerce whatever . . . in failurethere of, he is to be sent to Europe. P. Sinha (1949) Fort William-India HouseCorrespondence volume 5 London: entry for 11 November 1768, 151. By notallowing them to trade, the Company attempted to confine artists within adisinterested ideology.

7. Archer (1979: 440) note 46 observes that although some painters did sendtheir work to exhibitions at the Society of Artists and Royal Academy, theywere not encouraged to finish these pictures in India as heavy customsduties were levied on all finished pictures entering Britain until 1793.

8. For instance, Ozias Humphry, portrait painter and print dealer; GuildhallPolicy 111,936 policy number 45,5348.

9. For instance, the artist Swain Ward and engraver Richard Brittridgesquabbled over the production of Swain Wards proposed Six Views ofCalcutta (Calcutta Gazette 15 September 1785).

10. An early print commission to the court of Arcot can be found in the RobertPalk Papers BL: Add Ms 34,686 f.14. See also the Durbar Accounts of WarrenHastings, 17805 Hastings Papers BL: Add Ms 29,092 which included over100 prints such as views of London and mezzotints of George III gifted tothe prince in December 1784.

11. There are numerous 18th- and 19th- century colonial accounts of Indianinteriors hung with prints which infer the colonial belief that these imageshad been inappropriately appropriated. For instance Bute 1858 Vol. 1: 812notes that the nawabs palace at Murshidabad was decorated with a fewEnglish fox hunting prints of the secondary quality. Archer, 1955: 88;Archer, 1979: 288 note that prints were frequently hung upside down orfilled every inch of palace walls practices that subverted the imperative ofcolonial print decoration.

12. I am very grateful to Timothy Clayton for this case study. Ryland borrowed5000 in order to fund this scheme which included rare proofs by ThomasWatson and Valentine Green as well as old masters and the oils of GeorgeStubbs. See Anonymous, The Case of William Ryland Bankruptcy Cases,Public Record Office, Kew PRO/B1/77 30323 and PRO/C107/69. Rylandlater tried to send them to Russia again many were returned soiled. In1784 Ryland was hanged for forging two East India Company bills ofexchange his life and engraving skills inextricably linked to India. SeeMemoirs of William Wynne Ryland, 1784, the Whitehall Evening Post 1922April 1783 and Minutes of the Court of East India Directors B/99 1784(OIOC) 99.

13. Print sellers may have been encouraged by the success of figures such asJosiah Wedgwood who was expanding his trade to the east. His waresappeared regularly in wills and inventories as well as in the press. Forinstance black and painted teapots Calcutta Gazette 12 January 1786;Queensware Calcutta Gazette 8 August 1793. He even planned to travel toIndia; see Abu Talib, 1814: 96 Wedgwood paid me much attention and atone period was very curious to accompany me by the route of Persia toIndia in search of new markets and designs. He also experimented withsamples of Bengali earth Holzman, 1926: 91.

14. The case of John Boydell demonstrates this tight-knit network. His nephewwas stationed in eastern India so could provide trusted information. Thedurbar accounts of Warren Hastings from 1780 indicate that Boydells printswere already reaching India. Boydell also used Ozias Humphry who


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travelled over to India with Captain James Brabazon Urmston a well-respected figure in both colonial and metropolitan society. In spite ofrecession Urmston managed to strike a deal for Boydell with Pope and Fairliein 1785 (see Calcutta Gazette 11 August 1785). From 17881792 Boydell usedCalcutta merchants Colvin and Bazett to advertise subscription of his printsdirect to either India or Britain (appealing to a short term community). Thesemercantile contracts were renewed every season given the precarious statusof ships and colonial trade (see Anonymous, History of the Colvin Family Vol.1). Colvin and Bazett advertised the Shakespeare Gallery from 18 September1788 onwards and his History of the Thames was advertised in a similarmanner. By 1795 Boydell was using other leading auction houses those ofWilliam Dring and King and Johnson (see also Anonymous, Reminiscences ofthe Urmston Family).

Naval captains were allotted 30 per cent of their ships cargo space inorder to carry out their own private trade in luxuries to supplement theirsmall incomes, so many would be only too happy to carry out prints whichafter all were small and could hence even dodge Calcuttas customs duties.Many painters on their return to Britain continued to work as private agentsto patrons in India for instance Renaldi, Zoffany and Hodges all acted asagents for the up-country patron Colonel Martin who wrote to Humphry inCalcutta in 1786 I will receive your [Boydells] catalogue with pleasure. Ireceived a letter from my friend Hodges who purchased a parcel of printsat your Boydell and I am in expectation to see them (Humphry, 17851792:HU/3/184).

15. Prints were often marketed as prizes in lotteries being pre-selected byartists or men of taste. For instance the newly-arrived painter John Brownplanned a raffle of 10 prizes each containing a sufficient number of printsfor a room at 32 Rs per chance (Calcutta Gazette 2 October 1794).

16. For modernitys obsession with waste see Bataille, 1996. See also Appadurai,1996: 8384: The pleasure of ephemerality is at the heart of the disciplin-ing of the modern consumer. The valorization of ephemerality expressesitself at a variety of social and cultural levels: the short shelf life of productsand lifestyles, the speed of fashion changes, the velocity of expenditure, thepoly-rhythms of credit, acquisition . . . The much-vaunted feature of modernconsumption namely, the search for novelty, is only a symptom of a deeperdiscipline of consumption in which desire is organized around the aestheticsof ephemerality.

17. This is borne out by the Bengal Inventory Series L/AG/34/37 where printsoutnumber references to Hindustani pictures by about five times. Bothwere cheap, usually ready-made images, and both can be said in verydifferent ways to stretch the category of souvenir.

18. The people here are ignorant of everything but likeness and smoothfinishing . . . they see here daily the best and most finished pictures of Smart,Meyers and Cosway and all the best (London) miniature painters, whereasthey never see one oil picture and Mr Hickey a very weak painter is theirbest. Humphry to Mary Boydell, 1785 HU/3/49. There are but very fewjudges of a good picture; a likeness is what most people want, WilliamBaillie to Humphry HU/4/113. (Humphry, 17851792).

19. See for instance, Ozias Humphry (17851792) on his arrival in Calcutta in1785 wrote to Mary Boydell: There was never known in Calcutta so muchpoverty or so great scarcity of money as there is at this time, all the firstfamilies are withdrawn from it and I have been confidently assured that


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there are scarcely twenty person left in Indostan whose fortune amounts to20,000 pounds . . . your invaluable cabinet of prints has no chance now . . .of meeting an adequate purchaser in India HU/3/123.

20. The return of Mr Hastings who was a munificent patron . . . and the reso-lution that every person of property has taken to return immediately to avoidthe obligations of Pitts bill . . . added to the actual distress which prevailsin Bengal . . . leaves one not a very flattering prospect; Ozias Humphry toMary Boydell HU//3/36, August 1785. Also, Gavin Hamilton to OziasHumphry, painting is quite neglected here . . . there is really little encour-agement in any branch HU/4/18. He also noted you would hardly knowCalcutta again it is so much increased . . . in point of extent and number ofhouses and likewise in the bulk of inhabitants . . . manners are much thesame. The arts are quite at a stand no encouragement. Baillie acting asHumphrys agent warned the prints you left with me are now not worth afifteenth of their value; HU/4/130.

21. Singh, 1966: 115. Each year these agency houses tried to outdo each otherin quality and quantity of prints. For instance, Calcutta Gazette September9, 1784 prints: the greatest variety ever exposed for sale in this settlementamong which are many very scarce and valuable. Calcutta Gazette 9 March1786 Mr Ord will exhibit at his new warehouse a collection of upwards of1000 capital prints by the first masters of Europe and engraved by the mostcelebrated artists to be divided into 60 prizes to be sold as a raffle at 64Rs per ticket. From the finest oils of Stubbs (sold in a dice game) andReynolds (belonging to his nephew) one could purchase Boydells elaborateprint schemes down to auctions for second-hand prints and cheap imagesdistributed by agents of firms such as Carrington Bowles. For instance soldat the Cheap Shop next to Marvin and Forrests a great variety of Europeanarticles at a lower price than any other shop in town for ready money only. . . prints in burnished frames . . . Captain Stewarts investment for theAtlas, Calcutta Chronicle 19 July 1787. See also The World 4 January 1794for sale by commission at the European, Chinese and Indian Warehouse at46, Rada Bazaar Venus a capital painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds at 1000Rs as well as maps and pictures at 32 Rs. These few examples demonstratethe variety of art on sale throughout Calcutta stretching into the bazaars onits margins. Each year tens of thousands of images were imported bycaptains to Calcutta, Madras and Bombay (these two cities possessed similarmeans of marketing and distribution through their own newspapers andauction businesses many of which were linked both to Calcutta and toCanton).

22. The first newspaper Hickeys Gazette established in 1780 attacked Hastingscorrupt government but the editor James Hickey was soon arrested andhis paper disbanded. Later papers moaned that in this part of the world thechannels of intelligence are few the novelty of character trifling thefollies and vices of the people from a confined sphere of action not strikinglyconspicuous. The subjects of merriment and laughter but thinly scattered.The vicissitudes of fortune though often times extraordinary, seldom worthrelation, India Gazette 14 February 1785. See also the Calcutta Chronicle 2October 1791: The bounds of society are here very much circumscribed,authentic information on great subjects is necessarily held in profoundsecrecy and prudentially limited to a few; except by those few, publicopinions are not to be formed with ease and certainty.

23. These powerful urban zemindars counted for about 25 per cent of the buyers


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of prints. It is not clear how far these prints were used to decorate the outerapartments (bahir mahal) of their homes or were resold as trade. As formarkers of prestige they preferred rare icons won from older rural rajas orMughal manuscripts.

24. For instance, a very capital and elegant collection of prints with goldburnished frames upon an entire new principle, the patent of which wasgranted February last and are the only ones that have yet been brought tothis country, at Mouart and Farias rooms, Calcutta Gazette 26 September1793 and the Asiatic Mirror 9 October 1793. For the latest caricaturesincluding Hastings, Calcutta Gazette 28 June 1787. For polygraphic paintingsfrom 1789 onwards Calcutta Gazette 18 October 1789 at Edward Gardnersrooms to be sold by auction indicating wide appeal of these mass-reproduced oil painting simulations. See also Calcutta Gazette 31 November1791, Burrell, Dring & Co advertised for sale the effects of Francis Rundellwho had run the Old Theatre. These included some very beautiful poly-graphic copies of the following celebrated paintings: Landscape of Morningby Barrett, View of Glaciers, of the Icy Cavern by Webber, Conjugal Peace byKauffmann . . . Santa Teresa from Correggio. The panorama of London wasopened in Tank Square (where these agency houses were located) from 1January 1798, tickets available from Colvin and Bazett; Calcutta Gazette 28December 1797.

25. There are several instances of the sales of oil paintings through raffles,lotteries and dice games, traceable from the appearance of the first issues ofthe Calcutta Gazette in Spring 1784. Most do seem to have gone ahead suchas Urmstons investment of unsold oils by George Stubbs, divided into 6prizes, to be won in a raffle of 40 subscribers, ticket at 150 Rs. each. Theseincluded such well-known works as Reapers and Haymakers as well as Lionsand Tigers (Calcutta Gazette 1 September 1785, raffle at Pope and Fairlies).

An instance of a sale advertised then cancelled was that of Europe shopproprietor Joseph Queiros who proposed a raffle of old masters in 1784 first prize being 19 pictures worth 500 (Calcutta Gazette 9 December 1784).The subscription was not filled so he advertised them to be sold for readycash (Calcutta Gazette 12 May 1785).

26. Chance had become a feature of western metaphysics since Aristotle; by the1720s it had become linked to the aleatory contract which could be alegal agreement, the exchange of the present for an uncertain future,gambling, annuities and insurance policies or loans. Hazard was outweighedby the hopes of future expectation. It was largely because of the rise inrisks and insurance policies that merchants began to collect detailed demo-graphic data the first step towards governmentality.

27. This attachment of prints to agency houses is substantiated by comparisonbetween the place of art in the Bengal Wills Series (L/AG/34/29) and theBengal Inventory Series (L/AG/34/27 OIOC). The wills of European residentsrarely mention art (there is only the occasional reference to portraits to besent to family members). Yet art appears regularly in about 30 per cent ofthe inventories. These inventories consisted in the re-sale of departed ordeceased inhabitants things which were usually commandeered by theagency houses from whence they derived and then re-sold, the creditcancelled. By this stage, such goods were often frayed but this was a cheapway of picking up or renting things for instance Hodges aquatint Viewsof India (London, 17851788) forming lot 253 of the estate of John Roachwere sold to Mr Hawkins for 5 Rs (Bengal Wills Series, L/AG/34/27/9 1788).


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28. From 17721786 as many as 20 professional painters travelled to India (11working in oil); from 17871802 only 7 made the voyage (only one was anoil painter George Chinnery arriving in 1802), this was despite a rise inpopulation from 200,000 in 1780 to 35,000 by 1820.

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