Displaying Empire

A clumsy dismount from a local dinghy. Perilous camel rides. “Obedient” local servants. These are just some of the caricatures presented in Indian Spices for English Tables’ 120 lithographic sketches that fill the twenty-seven pages which chronicle the British East India Company officer George F. Atkinson's travels through India.

Black-and-white satirical sketches and captions, arranged like a modern graphic novel, were made during Atkinson's tenure from 1840-59 in the Bengal Engineers regiment of the Company's military. The book’s sense of authenticity, conveyed through Atkinson’s insistence of his first-hand accounts, and its accessible illustrations are a testament to the British interest and demand for narratives about the lives of its expatriates in India.

An Indian woman is powerfully poised over her deceased husband’s burning pyre, with a fist raised. Early European accounts of India recorded the ritual sati as an honorable death for a widow, sparing her from societal disapproval and the loss of certain social liberties.

Published in Hamilton Moore’s 1785 New & Complete Collection of Voyages & Travels, this was one of many prints circulated within British society that played upon the fear and fascination of unfamiliar and diverse cultural practices and lifestyles. This arcane practice was exoticized as a spectacle for the British gaze and would continue to be portrayed by artists and travelers.

Sati (or suttee as it was anglicized by British colonizers), a remote ritual sacrifice of a widow on the funeral pyre of her husband, became a touchpoint for colonial reform. Here, a bare-breasted woman draped in a white garment prepares for sati amongst a crowd of Hindu worshippers at the ghats of river Vishwamitri against a backdrop of temples and shrines in the city of Baroda (present-day Vadodara). Although both British and Indian communities had pushed for sati’s abolition, colonial lawmakers often cited the ritual's brutal nature as justification for reform of religious and cultural practices in India. The British government officially outlawed sati in 1829.

The print appears on page 7 of Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book (1836), consisting of 36 engravings accompanied by descriptions. Such printed editions were designed for sale to consumers in Britain and Europe, as table-top books that could be perused for entertainment and leisure.

This lithograph features architectural monuments of the city of Lucknow, following its military takeover after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which was characterized in British narratives as a Sepoy Mutiny. Centered in the print is the gleaming Gompti River that reflects the trees and prominent buildings along its shore, welcoming the viewer into the city.

The print is a fictionalized composition that juxtaposes Lucknow's local architecture with the unsettling presence of British military officials and canons. Such depictions catered to the widespread interest in the "Mutiny" amongst British families and the public.

This print is the earliest known published documentation of the Sidi Bashir Mosque in Ahmedabad, western India. The view is centered on the twin prayer towers of the mosque, known for shaking in tandem when ascended, such as during a call for prayer.

The British military officer Robert Grindlay first recorded this mosque while deployed with the Bombay Army. He would later start the influential Grindlays Bank, with various branches across British India. Grindlay’s detailed delineation of the mosque’s architectural and ornamental elements informed future survey and preservation activities.

The Company’s extensive cartographic surveys of India were initially produced through labor intensive means, requiring numerous assistants and local aides for measuring and moving instruments across a diverse terrain. With technical advancements, maps offered greater precision in delineating natural features, land- and sea-based trade routes, and infrastructure.

This hand-colored map reproduces a plate for an Atlas featuring the “Geographical, Political, Commercial & Statistical” history of the world, edited by statistician Robert Montogomery Martin, who compiled administrative data on British colonies. Vignettes of the ethnic population of Baluchis, a Mughal royal procession, the city of Lahore, and the Qutb Minar at Delhi, situate its wide-ranging geographic and cultural parameters. Colored boundaries indicate three major “Presidencies,” administrative divisions, military cantonments, and civil stations. Rapkin used a dark hatching for proposed railways that, within a decade, would become reality, connecting major cities of the subcontinent.

This European travelogue print, depicting the necropolis of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, was made for British audiences to learn about faraway sites in India, offering them as popular tourist destinations. It depicts tombs of the sultans (rulers), who ruled the Deccan province of Golconda from 1518 to 1687.

The nine tombs follow the dynastic style, a fusion of Persian, Pathan, and Hindu forms. The double-height structures are topped with tall onion domes, decorated with arcades of pointed arches. The buildings’ facades are intricately ornamented with lime stucco, plaster, and pillars. In the foreground, local merchants with camels and military personnel are portrayed as visitors to this site watched over by British officers.

This hand-colored print depicts the Hindu god Shiva (Sadashiva) carved into the rock-cut temples popularly known as Elephanta Caves. Created from a distanced vantage, the view shows a torch-bearing figure who illuminates sculpted guardian figures flanking the central deity, with three visible adjoined heads: fierce, pensive, and gentle. To one side are three turbaned men dressed in white tunics and brightly colored shawls. Large columns frame the entrance, while a mound of earth recedes into the shadows.

The view evokes the intimacy of a sacred interior while maintaining the detachment of an observing foreigner’s gaze. Drawn on site by Westall in 1803, engraved by T. Edge and published by Grindlay in London, the image emphasizes the iterative process through which sites in India reached British audiences.

A tall column of a pillar-shrine, decorated with a canopy, rises up from a mound surrounded by trees. It is venerated by three figures: one standing, one bowing, and one seated.

This print is based on a view created by the British landscape painter Thomas Daniell during his travels to India between 1786 and 1793. It was featured in the artist’s Oriental Scenery series that showcased India’s cities and landscapes to British audiences.

Like Daniell’s other views, the image utilizes a picturesque compositional frame. Techniques such as delineating light and shade, dramatic clouds, and thick vegetation, create a romanticized impression of a site harmonious with nature but also consumed by it.

A snake charmer plays his bīn, a traditional Indian wind instrument, while a hooded snake rises from the ground. This exoticized Indian bazaar scene is based on a drawing purportedly made on-site by Baron de Montalembert, a French officer serving in the British Army.

The engraving was published in a volume entitled Oriental Memoirs, by James Forbes, a British East India Company official who was also Montalembert's father-in-law. The combination of techniques, especially the choice of soft-ground etching in the shadings lends the print a sense of immediacy. The print’s self-attribution as an authentic representation drawn from an eyewitness account reflects how travelogue illustrations orientalized India’s people and lifestyles, while also serving as informal catalogs of dress, customs, and occupations.

The Mughal emperor stands on a large scale, surrounded by royal attendants and curious onlookers. This historically inaccurate depiction is a distorted version of a charitable weighing ceremony marking the emperor’s birthday, where equivalent donations of food, clothing, and commodities were distributed to the poor. Derived from a circulating Mughal manuscript folio, the view shows the emperor standing instead of sitting, within a makeshift tent.

The print is part of John Hamilton Moore’s A New and Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (1785). By refashioning a Mughal weighing ceremony into a circus-like spectacle the print reflects a European taste for exotic scenes of the distant “Orient.”

An unidentified Indian artist's portrayal of a seated woman working on the fabric of a ghagra (folk-style pleated skirt) propped over her raised leg served as a visual identifier of her trade as a seamstress or embroiderer. Painted with vivid natural pigments and fine shading on a laminated silicate mica sheet, this miniature was typically sold within souvenir sets of Indian subjects.

Depicting occupational types rather than individuals, these taxonomic images compress an array of standarized faces and poses into pocket-sized catalogs. Though such pictures catered to European exoticizing sensibilities, their use of colors derived from natural Indian pigments also maintained a sense of ethnic connectedness to India’s laboring populations amid commercialization of their land, resources, and ways of life.