Читать книгу Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff, Maya Jasanoff - Страница 13

You could find yet another sign of Lucknow’s cultural preeminence by visiting the city’s bazaars. Thread your way into the narrow lanes of the chowk—among vendors toting giant trays of sweets, mangoes, and coconut wedges, past the flower stalls laced with garlands of jasmine and marigold—and you would find the Orient for sale. In the spice market, there were cones of magical colored powders and sacks of Persian cashews, East Indian cloves, obscure roots and aromatic barks; in the jewelers’ shops, pearls and Golconda diamonds, emeralds from the New World mines, lapis lazuli from the snowy reaches of Afghanistan. There were kite-makers and metalworkers, potters and tobacconists; cloth merchants selling bolts of fabric woven stiff with gold zari; and stalls where the celebrated Lucknow embroiderers sat bunched over yards of muslin, their intricate designs taking shape under a blur of moving hands. The perfumers could sell you another local favorite, pure attar of roses, or mix any scent you liked from the mysterious essences that lined their shelves.

It was in these bustling bazaars that you might also buy fine art and rare texts. Here, dealers did a lively trade in manuscripts, calligraphy, and paintings old and new. To sift through the paintings on sale would be like looking into fantasy worlds, where skies were celadon, skins were blue, and peacocks sat on parapets in the moonlight. The dealer would turn them over to read the price, marked in a coded script, called raqam, that only he and his colleagues could decipher. Forty rupees, one hundred rupees. Two pounds, five pounds. A mere trifle compared with the finest illuminated manuscripts, licked onto paper with brushes no thicker than a single hair, every page bordered by a network of flowers and birds. Those could cost a thousand pounds.⁴⁴ In the bazaars you could also buy individual specimens from Lucknow’s famous calligraphers, in flowing swirls and scoops of nastaliq script. But a single letter in the hand of the best of them, Hafiz Nur Ullah, would cost you one rupee (two shillings), so the text had better be short.⁴⁵

Lucknow was the art capital of India, a Rome of the East. The reason for its thriving trade was sad but simple. In Delhi and the Mughal heartlands, the old aristocracy was in terminal decline. Their lands ravaged and their incomes no longer secure, many were reduced to selling off their family heirlooms—libraries and art collections included. In Lucknow, though, there was a nouveau riche elite ready and able to buy. Dealers, calligraphers, and artists left Delhi to find a better market among Lucknow’s new consumers. Manuscripts and paintings were prized in Mughal India in much the way that libraries, antiquities, and Old Master paintings were valued in contemporary Europe. So it made good sense that Asaf ud-Daula and his courtiers—many of them, like him, relative newcomers to affluence and power—should wish to buy the trappings of the Mughal nobility. As collectors and patrons, they were doing in Awadh just what Robert Clive had done in Britain: buying cultural capital to bolster their social positions.

And many Europeans in Lucknow followed suit. Antoine Polier was probably the most vigorous manuscript collector; others included Nathaniel Middleton, East India Company resident from 1777 to 1779; John Wombwell, appointed paymaster to the Company troops in 1782; and Richard Johnson, who lived in Lucknow as head assistant to the resident from 1780 to 1782. Johnson collected about as avidly as Polier, and his collection, preserved almost intact today in the British Library, attests to the range—and sheer beauty—of items circulating in the Lucknow art market. He bought many of his books in the bazaar; some of them still have prices marked in raqam. (In fact, since owners often stamped manuscripts with their seals—the Indo-ersian equivalent of a bookplate—it is sometimes possible to reconstruct the movements of a single manuscript over a period of several hundred years.) Johnson was also an active patron. During his two years in Lucknow he commissioned more than two hundred fifty paintings, including five complete ragamala series, which illustrate Indian musical modes. Johnson’s commissions to poets and writers included works not just in Persian—India’s premier literary language—but also in Urdu, which was rapidly gaining literary stature, thanks not least to the support of Asaf and his court.⁴⁶

What drew Europeans into this rarefied world? Plain curiosity, to some extent. They had come of age in Enlightenment Europe, and many approached India with a broad interest in the human and natural sciences. They were Orientalists in the traditional sense of the word: amateur students of Indian history, languages, religion, music, medicine, or whatever else their intellectual predilections steered them toward. Of course, Orientalism has come to mean something quite different since Edward Said’s pathbreaking book of that title. By no means a mere pastime, Said argued, Orientalism was bound up in the pursuit of imperial power. Gathering knowledge about the Orient was a prerequisite, and sometimes a substitute, for gaining authority over it. Legal codes, maps, political intelligence, population statistics, history books, religious texts—all of these helped imperial rulers infiltrate the cultures they confronted, and devise ways of governing them. By collecting knowledge, the East India Company really was collecting an empire.

Warren Hastings was a prime specimen of the Orientalist in both the contemporary and the postcolonial senses of the term. Wellborn and well educated, steeped in the classics, tending toward deism, and convinced of the intrinsic merits of ancient cultures, Hastings was a dedicated and accomplished student of the Orient. He knew Urdu and Persian, took an interest in Sanskrit and in Hindu doctrine, and, not coincidentally, collected manuscripts.

Not for show alone was he invited to become the first president of the Asiatic Society; and though he graciously deferred the honor to Sir William Jones, he gladly accepted the title of patron instead. But as governor of Bengal, Hastings also harnessed scholarship to imperial rule. A good case in point was his patronage of Nathaniel Halhed, whose A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) came to serve as a foundation for Company-administered Hindu courts. The aim was to rule India by its own laws, but the effect was to impose a British interpretation of what those laws were, to split Bengal’s (and later India’s) population into rigid categories, to essentialize cultural difference, and to sow the seeds of religious communal division.⁴⁷

Antoine Polier and the other Lucknow collectors were Orientalists in both senses too, devoted students of Indian culture as well as agents embedded in the workings of imperial expansion. While Hastings, however, was born a gentleman and became a governor, Polier and his friends stood closer to the margins of social and political power. Orientalism, for them, included a powerful dose of frank self-interest. Sentimental aesthetes these men were not. They were hardheaded careerists on the make. (Not for nothing was Richard Johnson’s nickname “Rupee”—more, it must be said, for his talent at making rupees for others than for earning them for himself.) And as a trip to the bazaar would quickly show, collecting seriously was a very expensive business. This was certainly not just a hobby. But neither was it part of a job, or a wider program of imperial rule. Collecting was a personal, social investment. And for Polier, its rewards were of two striking, and dramatically distinct, kinds.

The Janus-faced profile of Lucknow Orientalism is beautifully captured by two portraits of Antoine Polier at home. The first, by Johan Zoffany, offers a fine glimpse of the erudite society that flourished among Lucknow’s European residents. Painted in 1786, shortly before Polier left Lucknow, the canvas shows Colonel Polier and His Friends—Claude Martin, John Wombwell, and Zoffany himself—relaxing one cool morning at Polierganj, Polier’s Lucknow house. Martin eagerly leans behind Wombwell to point out a detail in a watercolor of the Lucknow house he had designed for himself some years earlier. Zoffany is painting away at his easel. And Polier, looking over some of his beloved Indian manuscripts on the table beside him, has just been distracted by his gardeners, who are bringing in the morning produce for his inspection. Legs splayed, belly protruding from his uniform jacket, Polier surveys the fruit of his land with proprietorial care. Cabbages, onions, mangoes, papayas, tomatoes, bananas: his eye roams; his hand dangles loosely from its long lace cuff; and he points, delicately, at his choice. This, Zoffany seems to say, is a true lord of the manor. And a nabob from the neck up; with his drooping mustache, sagging jowls, and fur hat, Polier looks uncannily like his employers, the nawabs.

Altogether, the picture resembles the British conversation pieces for which Zoffany was known (if, that is, one can look past the turbaned Indian servants, the scampering monkey, and the huge branch of bananas on the floor). Like those paintings, which often posed families in front of their rolling, well-tended acres, this picture celebrates comfort, comradeship, property. Polier lived richly and well. Nudged out of Company service in Bengal, he had found lucrative employment in Awadh as a military engineer under Shuja and then Asaf ud-Daula. He even received, in 1782, a courtesy appointment as brevet colonel from the East India Company (though with the stipulation that he not serve in any corps). He had rank. He had land, the critical indicator of social status. And, of course, he had a collection.

The painting also pays tribute to gentlemanly erudition, a theme Zoffany had addressed some years earlier in a well-known picture of the leading antiquarian Charles Townley. Antoine Polier was definitely an Orientalist. Not long after this painting was finished, Elizabeth Plowden “saw a very curious collection of all 3 Gods which Col. Polier has procured paintings of,” and noted that “he has also inform’d himself of their history which he has an idea of putting in some persons hands for publication. It will be a very curious and interesting compilation and is to be embellished with prints from the ninety he has in his possession.”⁴⁸ Polier had been studying Hindu texts with the aid of his pandit (teacher) Ram Chand, and did eventually commission a book on Hinduism. (Ram Chand was Sikh, not Hindu, but he “had two Brahmins always attached to his suite, whom he consulted on difficult points.”)⁴⁹ Polier also contributed to Europe’s “Oriental Renaissance” by sending the first full copy of the Sanskrit Vedas (ancient sacred Hindu texts) back to Europe.⁵⁰

Polier’s intellectual interest in Indian religion was not altogether surprising given that one of his uncles, a leading Protestant theologian in Lausanne, was a correspondent of Voltaire’s and a contributor to the Encyclopédie; at least two of the same uncle’s daughters, Polier’s cousins, would follow their father into the world of letters. And there was an obvious respect in which collecting opened doors for Polier. Shut out from Company hierarchies because of his foreign (Swiss) birth, Polier could use collecting and connoisseurship as an alternate way up the ladders of India’s European society. He had the same pandit as the illustrious Orientalist Sir William Jones, whose discovery that Sanskrit shared a common parent with Greek and Latin (Indo-European) helped to raise the stature and status of Indic studies in the west. Polier’s taste for rare Asian manuscripts brought him close toWarren Hastings. He was on friendly terms with both men, and cannily sent them gifts of “fine Oriental writings”—”as a small token,” he told Hastings, “of my gratitude and regard.”⁵¹ It also could not hurt that he was a friend and patron of Zoffany. Polier must have been delighted to be voted a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal just two weeks after its founding.⁵²

But there was another way in which Polier’s collection was a social investment, a form of self-fashioning. This second face of Lucknow Orientalism comes to life in a strikingly different image of Polier relaxing at home, a 1780 miniature by the Lucknow painter Mihr Chand. It is evening now, and out on the verandah Polier rests against the plump cushions of a yellow settee. A pair of dancers performs for him, accompanied by four musicians. The warm, low light of glass lanterns turns the dancers’ bodies into elastic shadows beneath their violet and crimson skirts. The sky behind them is alive with fireworks and whorls of ocher smoke. Polier, though, is not distracted. He nurses his hookah and studies the dance. His crisp muslin robes are edged with heavy golden embroidery, his scarlet turban banded with a jeweled sarpesh and spiked with a bristling black feather ornament. His face is the plump, serene profile of a Mughal nobleman.⁵³

Mihr Chand’s miniature is an exact parallel to Zoffany’s painting: a celebration of Polier’s gentility. It is also, if anything, more accurate. Polier may have studied Hindu scriptures and Sanskrit, and traded manuscripts with his European friends. But he led his everyday life in Lucknow, in Persian, with his two Indian wives, a daughter, and two sons. His Persian name, given to him by Emperor Shah Alam, was Arsalan-i Jang (Lion of Battle). His jagir (revenueproducing land grant) was near Aligarh. He was a Mughal nobleman.

The details of Polier’s life in Awadh appear with marvelous intimacy in the pages of his surviving Persian letters, the I’jaz-i Arsalani, bound into letterbooks according to a Persian literary convention.⁵⁴ They lead the reader into a world where personal relationships across cultural lines not only were a part of professional life in India, or even (as they had been for Elizabeth Plowden) after-hours sociability, but also infused every aspect of private affairs. Many of the letters gathered here were fired off to a wide network of Indian agents (Hindu, Muslim, and Christian), all across Awadh and Bengal. On Polier’s instructions, these men would buy and sell for him everything from guns, elephants, and steel, to opium, oranges, gold lace, and dried fruits. While Polier was on campaign with the nawab in the winter of 1774, his agent Mir Muhammad Azim sent him such essentials as tobacco, wine, paper, and ink, while in the meantime getting his mirrors polished, supervising the embroidery of a tent and an elephant canopy (”the embroiderer is a bastard,” Polier wrote, “please be strict with him and have it sent soon”), searching out sugar candy “of high quality, oil free and crystal clear,” and traveling to Faizabad bearing hookahs, shawls, and birdcages for Polier’s household, and a bag of toys for his young son.⁵⁵

These agents also supplied him with various items for his collection. “I have learnt that a boat full of books and other papers and a wilayati chariot with musical instruments for me have gone astray towards Chunar,” he complained to two deputies from Calcutta. “As soon as you receive this letter, send a harkara [messenger] to bring this boat from there to Faizabad. Unload it and keep my things in place.”⁵⁶ Some months later, he wrote to thank another agent for sending a copy of the famous Persian poem the Gulistan and a fresh batch of pictures—as well as some chutney and mango pickle. “I relished the [chutney and pickle],” he said, “and enjoyed reading the book and going through the album. You write that there are other good pictures in Murshidabad. I would like to have a look at them on my arrival there.” In place of the rather formal officer of Zoffany’s painting, one can just imagine Polier lounging around in his long muslin jama, nibbling on pickles and Indian snacks, while thumbing through the pages of his latest Persian book.⁵⁷ One can imagine also, reading Polier’s letters to Mihr Chand, a little of what it may have been like to work for him. “I fail to understand why you are sitting idle,” Polier chastised Mihr in one letter. “Prepare some more similar portraits if you have finished the ones you were engaged with so far. This…is your work, and it is meaningless to sit idle.” On another occasion he ordered Mihr to “prepare a draft of the painting of the dance. I will see the draft when I come back and then you can finalize it as per my instructions.”⁵⁸ Could this be the very painting that still survives?

The I’jaz also recorded deeply personal matters. Polier had two Muslim wives, about whom little is known beyond their names, Bibi Jawahar and Bibi Khwurd. (Even here there is some disagreement: Claude Martin referred to them as Jugnu and Zinat.) But in his letters to them, and to his household steward, Lal Khan, it is possible to peer into a cross-cultural domestic ménage of a kind not often opened to view. There was nothing at all unusual about a European man living with one or more Indian mistresses, or bibis, during this period. (The best-known relationships involved men, and often women, of high rank; but these were merely the most visible.) It was also not considered particularly scandalous. Even Elizabeth Plowden—a white Englishwoman, whom one might expect to be “protected” from knowledge of such things—knew about Polier’s half-Indian family and visited his children at Claude Martin’s house. While she was in Lucknow, another of her friends and his bibi had a baby girl; Elizabeth went to see them, too, pronouncing the baby “the fairest and smallest Child I ever saw born of an Hindostauny Woman.”⁵⁹ (Tragically, the infant died two days later.) These relationships were a normal feature of European society in India right up until the late eighteenth century, especially in Lucknow and Hyderabad, outside the more segregated society of the presidency towns.⁶⁰

Later generations responded to interracial liaisons with such horror—and tried so vigorously to cover up their traces—that it is still often difficult to get a sense of these families as living, breathing, feeling groups. But Polier’s letters nicely animate his own domestic sphere. On learning that Bibi Khwurd, the younger of the two women, had been suffering a difficult pregnancy, Polier instantly wrote to Lal Khan to insist that she have constant attendance, fresh clothes, and a clean room. Bibi Jawahar got a sound scolding for not telling him about her co-wife’s discomfort. “Your welfare is linked to hers. I therefore write to you to remind you that it is your responsibility to take care of her. Make sincere efforts to please her. I will be delighted if she is comfortable and if I hear anything contrary to this I will keep her separately. Since I love you,” he concluded, “I am happy that you have now made up [with her]. Rest assured that I am fond of you, and forget the heart-burn.”⁶¹ Tension between the wives lingered for some months but evaporated when Bibi Khwurd had her baby: a girl.

Polier was a devoted father, constantly concerned about the health and well-being of his children. When they were ill, he called not on Lucknow’s European doctor, William Blane, but on local hakims who practiced traditional yunani medicine. While he was away on business trips, he sent his children a regular stream of small gifts, sweetmeats, and paternal instructions. “My dear son,” he wrote to his eldest boy, Anthony,

it is necessary that you go for horse riding and for strolls in the garden to enjoy the greenery and the beautiful flowers. You should visit Captain Martin two to three times a day without fail. Sit with him for some time and introduce yourself to whoever comes there so that you get used to interacting with people. It is not proper to stay indoors for long. This is a must.⁶²

It is plain from this letter that Polier wanted his son to become familiar with European society and learn to move in it; he may well have hoped to send Anthony into the East India Company army, a common career choice at the time for officers’ half-Indian sons. And yet, of course, it was not in English that Polier and his son corresponded, but in Persian, their family language.

Looked at full on, Antoine Polier’s two faces blend into an extraordinary hybrid: the image of a man who had managed to make it in both European and Mughal society at the same time. As a collector and patron of Indian art—a practice valued in both cultures—he scored a double coup. Some would argue that imperial collecting of any kind is fundamentally an acquisition of power. Maybe so. But with Polier, as with Robert Clive and many of Polier’s Lucknow peers, this was power of a very personal kind. A Swiss-born foreigner in Indian service, Polier was not an “imperialist” like Governor Warren Hastings. It was specifically because he was excluded from the East India Company hierarchy that he needed to find a different way in, other routes to fame and fortune. Orientalism wove Polier into an elite group of Europeans in India, and underscored his position among them as a man of property, learning, and talent. Yet if Polier was an Orientalist, he was an Oriental, too. For as a collector and patron, he was also acting out the role of the Mughal nobleman that he was. From the moment he left Company Bengal in 1773, Polier lodged his career, his affections, his money, and his interests in Mughal India. He worked for Indian rulers, started an Indo-Persian family, acquired a title and a jagir, and adopted the way of life of a member of the Mughal elite. Collecting was a sport of princes in Mughal India, too, and Polier cemented his status in Lucknow by indulging in it.

None of this meant that he renounced his European friends, gave up his political allegiances and desire for promotion, or abandoned the idea of returning to Europe. (How, why, and with what consequences he left Lucknow behind is for the next chapter to tell.) But as long as Polier lived in Lucknow, capital of cultural crossing, he could keep up both personæ. And he was by no means the only, or even the most conspicuous, collector to reinvent himself in Lucknow, to cross the lines. For while Polier and others were delving into the world of Mughal cultivation, Claude Martin and Asaf ud-Daula were managing between them to make Lucknow a center of European connoisseurship as well.