As evidential windows on an actual world, visual representations seem to communicate reality. Naturalistic images in particular collapse the continuum of time and space, transporting the viewer into the shoes of the artist, so to speak, and presenting the world through his or her eyes. But a viewer's serial if disjointed encounters with drawings, paintings, and photographs tend to disguise the fact that visual representations--like their verbal counterparts--are conceived within larger, culturally embedded systems of knowledge and meaning.
The drawings and paintings produced by British artists in India serve to confirm and perpetuate a certain culturally accepted way of looking at the world, one which upholds a European cultural and moral superiority. British mercantilists, militarists, administrators, civil servants, ethnographers, geographers, planters, missionaries, travelers, and adventurers wrote about, sketched, painted, mapped, and photographed every possible aspect of India and Indian life, and all of these documentations supported British colonialism there. But visual representations of India helped the project of empire in particular ways.
Whether by amateurs or professionals, the work of artist-travelers brought to Britons back home visual evidence of something called India--a place they had previously only heard or read about. For the first time, there were palpable images to confirm or modify ideas about India that previously had come only from verbal texts. The artist's understanding of which scenes, peoples, monuments, or landscapes were to be illustrated, which were to be ignored, was in turn informed not only by such texts but by British society's larger, culturally accepted idea of India as different, exotic, and other. The Orientalist construction of India as a land lost in antiquity, filled with backward if colorful people, was amply validated by drawings and paintings of crumbling monuments, architectural curiosities, and exotic tribals and "nautch girls."
If by amateurs, such artworks--made perhaps at the end of a long day's journey or in a landscape that was being officially surveyed--were collected into journals, filed with official reports, gifted to friends, or--like contemporary postcards--sent to friends and family back home. As empire expanded across the subcontinent, amateur artists especially --whether in an official or unofficial capacity-- helped to make the "Indian world" visible and usable for British capitalism.
Works by professional artists found a wider audience. British paintings done in India were sold both in India and in Europe; in London, sketches were turned into engravings that could be sold in limited editions, used to illustrate weekly news sheets, and/or bound into elaborately produced travel books. It was these reproductions that early on defined how India and its people looked for the mass of the British population, and that ultimately fueled its collective imagination with the idea of empire. [Presentation includes 35mm slides.]
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