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ARTIST and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a provocative exhibition on imperial-era art recently closed at London’s Tate Britain. The exhibit brought together work by colonisers and the colonised and raised difficult questions about whether modern-day Britons are meant to consider this era with pride or shame.
The exhibition comprised 200 or so paintings and artefacts from the 16th century onward covering imperial forays across the globe. The most interesting works included indigenous depictions of colonisers, for example, Brits on bicycles carved into Nigerian wood panels.
Unsurprisingly, there was much visual propaganda. Sir Francis Drake leans on a globe in one image, Queen Victoria presents a kneeling African prince with a Bible in another. In John Millais’ ‘The North-West Passage’, a mariner contemplates a daunting Arctic trade route to Asia while his daughter — a vision in white lace and rose-tinted shawl — reads at his feet. The painting was apparently widely referenced in its time (1874) to suggest that familial duty drove imperial ambitions.
The urge to humanise seems to have dissipated.
South Asians likely most rankled at Edward Armitage’s ‘Retribution’, a response to the 1857 rebellion. In a cheap allegory, Britannia — muscular, vengeful — stands over the slaughtered bodies of a woman and child and prepares to drive her sword through a Bengal tiger, formidable in size, but starting to cower.
Arguably the most striking works were three portraits of Indian artisans (indeed, one adorned the poster for the exhibition). One features Ramlal, a nine-year-old carpet weaver from Gambur. He is ennobled by a neatly tied red turban; the velvety sheen of his skin and the slight tilt of his head portray the delicacy required for nimble weaving.
The portrait of Bukshiram, a 102-year-old potter from Agra, emphasises his furrowed brow and glistening eyes — with tears? of anger or condemnation? or are those cataracts robbing him of his trade? — while the neat folds of his shawl convey the dignity of hard-worked shoulders.
Mohammad Hussain, a 26-year-old coppersmith from Delhi, is painted in profile. He refuses to look upon artist or viewer, and his sharply outlined forehead and aquiline nose recall Mughal portraiture, defying colonial subjectivity.
The images are rendered with such empathy and dignity, one first assumes that they are subversive, an indigenous symbol of resistance. In fact, the portraits were commissioned by Queen Victoria and painted by the Austrian artist Rudolf Swoboda. The subjects were brought to England from Agra to ‘perform’ their crafts at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 after being trained in ‘traditional’ Indian practices at Agra’s central jail as part of a British rehabilitation programme.
On learning the true context of the portraits, what seems empowered is weakened. The portraits are revealed to be a smug display of colonial paternalism, the white man’s burden somewhat offset in this instance by the successful reform and rescue of these particular natives. Resistance transmutes into the satisfaction of an empire morally justified in its perpetuity.
There is no hint in these strong portraits of the ethical compromises: colonisation, child labour, exhibitionism — turning a culture into a curiosity.
And yet, one aspect of the portraits was deeply moving — their interest in the individual. The Guardian’s reviewer Jonathan Jones suggests Victoria commissioned the paintings so that she could gaze upon her distant subjects. In Swoboda’s rendering, thanks to a tilt of a head and a droop of a moustache, the artisans are beautifully human.
Closer to home (in space and time), this urge to humanise seems to have dissipated. Victims of terrorist attacks or drone strikes, ‘missing persons’, jawans lost on the Zarb-i-Azb battlefields or in urban reprisal attacks, fatalities during natural disasters, persecuted religious minorities, victims of honour killings, the thousands of ‘suspected militants’ detained in counterterrorism operations: they have all been rendered in our political rhetoric and media as archetypes; statistics gradually stripped of their tragedy as the numbers mount into the tens of thousands in a perverse echo of Stalin.
From the morass we have raised some heroes — Malala Yousafzai, Aitzaz Hasan. But in becoming heroes they have ceased to be humans. That is probably why this paper’s online memorial to the victims of the APS attack was so effective and shocking — it transformed victims into individuals and turned statistics into stories.
Over the coming decades, these anonymised individuals will demand to be seen and heard. Their lack of individuality will prove risky for Pakistan — it risks brewing rage and resentment; worse, it risks enabling a national amnesia about what we have collectively endured. As we move on from a bloody decade and start to tweak our security and foreign policies, we must also do the hard work of recognising the individuals those policies have claimed. That will be the only way to reckon with the horrors of our recent past.
The writer is a freelance journalist.
Published in Dawn, April 11th, 2016
