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The Aesthetic in Colonial India

Tania Roy
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 244
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300251

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244 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)
The Aesthetic in Colonial India
Tania Roy
Keywords aura, disinterest, exhibition-value,
icon, Raj, realism, taste
K
ants Critique of Judgment (1790) con-
tinues to be read widely as the most
compelling articulation of the modern
discourse of the aesthetic; this supplemental entry
addresses only those aspects of Kants text that have
been aligned with the question of good and bad taste
in art. While it has been construed as a misinterpre-
tation, this reading of Kant has remained influential
since the turn of the 18th century. So, historian
Martha Woodmansee (1994) has shown how the
authority of the third Critique was deployed in
public debates about art and culture in Germany,
France and Britain in the late 18th century, in
disputes over standards of artistic creativity and the
status of authorial property rights. As a supplement,
this entry traces the after-life of Kants text, as it
passed from its contested European origins into the
British colonial administration of India; it makes no
attempt to establish the authenticity of readings
attributed to Kant in this period.
Kants dichotomous distinction between a
taste of sense and a taste of reflection, in this
version, marks the distinction between high and
low culture; and between upper and lower orders
of society (Bourdieu, 1984: 414, 48191). Kants
text appears to devalue the former, which is associ-
ated with immediate, interested or deeply
private satisfactions associated with bodily desires.
On the other hand, the taste of reflection assumes
a disinterested perspective, an attitude of
distance from both the art-object as well as from
ones own demands. Kant himself argued that such
exercises of taste had a place in public life. These
judgments were valid, as much for oneself as for
others; as was the pleasure, a cerebral kind,
afforded by the object (Kant, 1987: 578).
Within the terms of the European debate, the
aesthetics distinction between sense and reflec-
tion was deployed in a cultural context where
religion was, purportedly, a private affair. Since the
exercise of taste involved publicly valid judgments,
a properly aesthetic engagement with an object
would presumably transcend religious, that is to say
private, passions. Echoing this assumption, theorist
of 20th-century European mass culture Walter
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Page 244
Benjamin drew a distinction widely deployed by
recent scholarship between the exhibition value
of a publicly accessible, mobile work of art and the
cult value of a ritual object, veiled from view and
fixed to its consecrated place. In this tradition, a
post-sacred appreciation of art-works is funda-
mental to the exercise of good judgment.
In the mid-19th century, the shade of this
Kantian imperative passed from Europe, through
England to India, into the programmatic attempts
of colonial educators to inculcate taste in their
native students. Taste was itself construed within
the parameters of disinterest, that is, as a denial of
the religious or cultic function of images. Conse-
quently, it was thought that a properly aesthetic
education would suppress the natives concern
with the works proximity to divine power; and
would reform a putatively primitive interest in
the objects usefulness as a fetish or icon.
This pedagogical preoccupation with taste
came to provide a broader, ideological justification
for the foundation of Government Art Schools.
Institutionalized dissemination of the visual and
cognitive precepts of good judgment would
advance the scientific progress of a culture so
argued the eminent art-educator and amateur
painter, Sir Richard Temple, in 1883:
[Art schools] will teach them one thing, which
through all the preceding ages they have never
learnt, namely drawing objects correctly,
whether figures, landscape or architecture.
Such drawing tends to rectify some of their
mental faults, to intensify their powers of obser-
vation, and to make them understand analyti-
cally those glories of nature which they love so
well. (from Temples Oriental Experience,
cited by Mitter, 1994: 32, emphasis added)
From 1798 onwards, individuals as well as organiz-
ations had founded numerous art schools that were
perceived as pioneering in their attempt to system-
atically import artistic techniques of the West.
However, it was during the 1850s that schools in the
urban centres of Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and
Lahore were placed under the direct control of the
Department of Public Instruction (Guha-Thakurta,
1992; Mitter, 1994). The centralization of academic
art in this period was justified in terms of larger
imperial policy, as the impetus for a sweeping
analytic transformation of Indian culture. The
14_aesthetic_062680 10/5/06 10:27 am
Government Art Schools would inculcate public
taste, or, what was the same, secularize the basis of
aesthetic judgment. Based on the disciplined obser-
vation of nature and the practice of its accurate
reproduction, the art school curriculum was
supposed to fragment the fictive world of the
Hindu, whose idolatrous artistic traditions, as
understood by Victorian art historians, had
remained incapable of distinguishing between the
natural and the supra-natural. By the 1880s, the
education of colonial subjects in urban art academies
was aligned with the imperial mission of cultural and
societal modernization (Mitter, 1994: 123).
The technical component of academic art
training focused on one particular visual conven-
tion of Western European salon art, derived from
the Italian Renaissance, that of single-point
perspective. For those who argued that a regime
of visual instruction was of fundamental import to
the British administration of India, an intractable
anti-naturalism was a source of recurring concern.
Training in the uses of perspective, according to
Temple, provided a conclusive solution to such
recalcitrance. Perspective was fundamental to
practices most approved in European Art but also
embodi[ed] principles applicable to art in all
climes, insofar as it imparted the ability to draw
objects from nature correctly, that is, with a
fidelity to empirical detail, anywhere. It was
argued that the use of perspective awakened an
appreciation of realism in the arts; that the
practice of drawing objects true-to-life instilled
respect for the actual proportions of the subject-
matter, training attention to changes in its appear-
ance that were relative to the position of the
beholder. In the commentaries of art school
educators, perspective is treated as the proverbial
silver bullet that would fracture, once and for all,
the contact between the eyes of the beholder and
those of the deity. Art school instruction articu-
lated a comprehensive rejection of symmetry and
frontality visual norms that had hitherto framed
traditional representations of deities (Mitter,
1994: 35; Pinney, 2003: 115).
In the late 19th century, colonial perspectival-
ism became the sine qua non of good taste. Ethno-
grapher Christopher Pinney has argued that the
denial of eye contact between the pictures subject
and beholder evolved into a classical aesthetic of
absorption, where the composition is dominated
by an internalized gaze. So, the aristocratic sitter
of Maratha Lady (1920s) by Abalal Rahiman of
the Bombay school averts her eyes from the
viewers, remaining absorbed in the minute task of
threading a needle; in the mass-produced colour
lithographs of the Calcutta Art Studio (1880s),
even the god Shiv, ubiquitous within popular
imagination, now turned his vision towards the
Oriental Cupid [within the image], not to the
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Page 245
Problematizing Global Knowledge The Aesthetic 245
devotee gazing at the image (2003: 115). From
the 1880s until the 1920s, this principled denial
of the beholders presence became the consum-
mate expression of disinterested art. The images
self-absorption, its elliptical acknowledgement of
a distanced viewer, the genres of portrait and
history painting adopted from European salon art
of which these characteristics were typical all
this was disseminated by the British Raj through
Government Art Schools (Mitter, 1994). The
perspective of the absent-beholder came to
represent the very antithesis of cultic art, whose
single purpose lay in enabling a direct address of
the deity. For a colonial urban elite, perspectival-
ism became the signature of Western distinction,
a token of their distance from the obsolete world
of Hindu icons (Jain, 2003; Pinney, 2003: 116).
Yet even during the decades of its ideological
ascendance, in the years between the 1880s and
the 1920s, this strand of aesthetic discourse
retained a fragile authority over the arts in the
subcontinent. For if the standards of taste had
been imparted through the institutional frame-
works of Government Schools, the British were
themselves divided over the purpose of art
teaching. In the imperial metropolis, art instruc-
tion was concerned either with fine arts as taught
at the Royal Academy, or with vocational training
in the industrial or applied arts as at the Depart-
ment of Science and Art at South Kensington
(Mitter, 1994: 32). The Government Schools did
turn out a class of gentleman painters and collec-
tors in colonial centres, urban English-literate
gentry who had (restricted) access to the fine arts
curriculum at the schools. However, there was still
an unbroken exchange between academic art and
the mass market via the prolific popular image
industry. Indeed, one of the earliest lithographic
presses, the Calcutta Art Studio, set up in 1878 in
Bengal, was established by five graduates of the
Calcutta school. Still, not all trained artists had
had an education in the fine arts, for many were
vocationally trained as skilled craftsmen for the
service of the British administration. This was due
in large part to the British ambivalence over the
definition of the arts; an uncertainty that was
exacerbated in the colonial context by a racialized
distinction between the decorative arts (at which
traditional Indian artisans were purported to
excel) and the fine arts (that were apparently
non-existent within Indian civilization).
In tandem with the institutionalization of
Victorian taste rather than in spite of its imper-
atives the decades between the 1880s and the
1900s witnessed an exponential increase in the
production and sale of popular, mechanically
reproducible prints. These were dominated by
chromolithography, and the Calcutta Art Studio
was one of the most successful in the market. The
14_aesthetic_062680 10/5/06 10:27 am
246 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)
Studio owed its popularity to a mass demand for
images composed according to the traditional
iconic norms of frontality, and a corporeal
acknowledgement of the viewer. However, the
proprietors owed their commercial dominance
within a pan-Indian market in no small measure to
their own mastery of Victorian perspectivalism.
The naturalistic rendering of human figures and of
landscape had taken on an appeal that cut across
class and geographical lines. Indeed, indigenous
entrepreneurs had to respond with aesthetic and
technical innovations to competition from global
capital: German printers, for example, were
attracted by enormous profits and had begun to
flood an eager market with reproductions of
European subjects (that included erotic art)
(Neumayer and Schelberger, 2003). While the
Calcutta Art Studio produced mainly religious
icons, their prints consistently deployed the
devices of European naturalism often displaying
a carnal three-dimensionality, Hindu gods acquired
a musculature that was borrowed directly from
Greek divinities, becoming object lessons in
artistic anatomy acquired at art school (Mitter,
2003: 17). In Kantian terms, these images were
decidedly the product of a taste of sense. Divini-
ties now acquired a sensuous immanence even as
they directly satisfied the beholders demand for
visual reciprocity. Even so, Hindu iconography was
disseminated through a thoroughly hybrid, illusion-
istic idiom that had incorporated the technical
conventions of Victorian taste.
Another aspect of this hybrid aesthetic was the
imbrication of religious images within the
economy of the market. Indeed, the iconic status
of 19th-century lithographs their aura of
religiosity was constituted by their profane,
spectacular exhibition value. Mass-produced
commodities, icons acquired an unprecedented
mobility through railways that transported them
across the subcontinent, to devotees who could
acquire them locally. Moreover, lithography
exploited the significance of religious themes (e.g.
from the Hindu epics of the Mahabharata and the
Ramayana, or the stories of the Puranas) and
rendered these realistically, through the genre of
history painting. Lithographers (including those
contracted by international firms) reproduced
these thoroughly recognizable, carnally specified
figures of myth, for branding and advertising
purposes. But their sensual charge was used also to
exhume a national history. Icons addressed nation-
alist politics through the Hindu-inflected vocabu-
lary of religion. As a mode of mass communication,
and by virtue of their sheer excess, printed images
of gods were difficult to monitor, to categorize as
politically inflammatory, and therefore to censor:
sacralizing politics, they became integral to nation-
alist agitation in the 1920s and after (Pinney, 1997,
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Page 246
2003, 2004). Significantly, the two commercially
successful centres of chromolithographic produc-
tion, Bengal and Maharashtra, were witness to
volatile mass mobilization in this period.
Painted Indian icons did incorporate the
lessons of Victorian taste; paradoxically, its author-
ity was rapidly overwhelmed by paintings prolific
after-life, in print.
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Tania Roy is a visiting fellow in the Department of
English Language and Literature at the National
University of Singapore, with interests in the
Frankfurt School and Indian modernism.