Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 - Maya Jasanoff

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      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.

      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.

      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.

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