Inscribing Asymmetry: Johann Zoffany's Banyan and ‘The Extension of Knowledge’
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666030.2011.614422
ISSN2153-2699
Autores ResumoAbstract This article focuses on the banyan tree in Johann Zoffany's conversation piece painted in Lucknow around 1786–87. One of the most striking motifs in the composition, it has rarely been analyzed, especially within the context of what Warren Hastings called, 'the extension of knowledge' in colonial India. Specifically, I examine how its conflation with the artist's self-portrait spatialized the primeval within the orbit of collecting for the 'gentleman Orientalist'. Such an interpolation, I suggest, links key members of Lucknow's colonial elite portrayed in the painting with the newly instituted Asiatic Society in nearby Calcutta. To this end, I look at how the banyan encodes asymmetrical patterns of knowledge within new European loci of history and geography in India. Not only does it situate the performance of colonial gentlemanliness in a sensibility for the protean, it also conveys Zoffany's own agency in producing and affixing colonial knowledge. Thus, I discuss how the banyan metonymically stands for an emergent network of colonial cosmopolitanism in two very different centres of collecting and knowledge-formation. Furthermore, I posit that Zoffany anchors colonial knowledge in asymmetrical nodes through which 'native' cultural spaces and paradigms were rearranged into an uneven grid of information. Keywords: ZoffanybanyanPolierMartinJonesAsiatic SocietyLucknowBengal Acknowledgements I am grateful to the anonymous reader, Rebecca Brown, and Chandreyi Basu for their insightful feedback, and to Chittaranjan Panda, Gholam Nabi, and Arundhati Ray for their assistance in Kolkata. Notes 1. Natasha Eaton, 'Nostalgia for the Exotic: Creating an Imperial Art in London, 1750–1793', Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.2 (2006), 227–50 (pp. 240–41); Brian Allen and Jayne Shrimpton, 'Colonel Polier with his Friends', in The Raj: India and the British 1600–1947, ed. by C. A. Bayly (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1990), pp. 117–18; Hermione de Almeida and George H. Gilpin, Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2005), pp. 139–40; Lucian Harris, 'The Exploration of Nawabi Culture by European Collectors in 18th-Century Lucknow', in Lucknow: Then and Now, ed. by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2003), pp. 104–33; Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1979), pp. 154–57. Polier and Martin were Zoffany's most enthusiastic European patrons in Lucknow. The Lucknow conversation piece is the only painting to have survived from Polier's collection of the artist's works. The majority of Martin's collection of nineteen oil paintings are also either lost or destroyed. 2. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977; repr. 2008), p. 161. 3. Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 3–15; Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), pp. 1–111; Kapil Raj, 'Colonial Encounters and the Forging of New Knowledge and National Identities: Great Britain and India, 1760–1850', Osiris, 15 (2000), pp. 119–34. 4. Mary Louise Pratt, 'Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen', Critical Inquiry, 12.1 (1985), 119–43 (p. 121). 5. Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for "Indian" Pasts?', Representations, 37 (1992), 1–26 (p. 2). 6. Sir William Jones, 'A Discourse on the Institution of a Society, for Inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural, the Antiquities', in The Works of Sir William Jones (London: John Stockdale and John Walker, 1807), III, 9. For more about the Asiatic Society and its founder Sir William Jones, see O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past 1784–1838 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 30–48; The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by P. J. Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 14–15. 7. I approach cosmopolitanism as an epistemology of adaptation based on the fundamental notion that a cosmopolitan individual navigates cultural pluralism without necessarily being hampered by its variations. I also look at it as a social practice through which complex networks of exchange and cultural geographies are reorganized in order to cope with the conflicting paradigms of interconnectedness and separation. In this sense, cosmopolitanism can be, as Kwame Anthony Appiah reminds us, not just the 'solution' for resolving difference, but also the very 'challenge' that constructs cultural difference. Nowhere was this more relevant than in colonial India, where cosmopolitanism evolved in different ways at the dense interstices between Indians and Europeans, only to spatialize a staggering range of knowledge and identity. The literature on this subject is too vast to summarize; however, some useful references pertinent to my article include Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), p. xv; Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, 'Cosmopolitanisms', in Cosmopolitanism, ed. by Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002) pp. 1–14; Maya Jasanoff, Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East 1750–1850 (New York: Random House, 2005), pp. 57–65. 8. John Fryer, A New Account of East-India and Persia in Eight Letters Being Nine Years Travels, Begun 1672 (London: Printed by R. R. for Rt. Chiswell, at the Rose and Crown in St. Paul's Church-Yard, 1698), p. 105. One of the earliest travelers to describe the banyan was the Hellenistic writer Onesicritus who went to India with Alexander of Macedon. Impressed by its sprawling form, he observed that 'one [such] tree makes a huge sunshade like a pavilion with many pillars' for nearly four hundred horsemen. See Paul MacKendrick, review of Onesicritus: A Study in Hellenistic Historiography by Truesdell S. Brown in American Journal of Archaeology, 55.1 (1951), 116–17; Truesdell S. Brown, Onesicritus: A Study in Hellenistic Historiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949), pp. 58, 81–87; Georgia L. Irby-Massie and Paul T. Keyser, Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era: A Sourcebook (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 270–71. 9. William Hodges, Travels in India, during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782, &1783 (London: Printed for the author, and sold by J. Edwards, Pall-Mall, 1793), p. 27. 10. These include Hodges's view of the banyan engraved by Benjamin Thomas Pouncy and published in plate 5 of his Travels in India together with an unusual 'glowing banyan tree' in his View of the City of Rajmahal (1781). See Geoff Quilley's catalogue entry 48 in William Hodges, 1744–1797: The Art of Exploration, ed. by Geoff Quilley and John Bonehill (London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 150. 11. Allen and Shrimpton, p. 118. 12. Homi K. Bhabha, 'Anxiety in the Midst of Difference', Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 21.1 (1998), 123–37 (p. 123). 13. Pratt, p. 124. 14. Penelope Treadwell, Johan Zoffany: Artist and Adventurer (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2009), pp. 371–83. Another image of banyan trees in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art previously thought to be painted by Zoffany and entitled Moonlit Scene of Indian Figures and Elephants among Banyan Trees, Upper India (probably Lucknow) has been reattributed to the French artist Auguste Borget. 15. Jill H. Casid, Sowing Empire: Landscape and Colonization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 8; Mildred Archer, Natural History Drawings in the India Office Library (London: Her Majesty's Stationary Office, 1962). 16. Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 102; Richard King, Orientalism and Religion, Postcolonial Theory, India and 'The Mystic East' (London: Routlege, 1999), p. 131. 17. Charles Wilkins, The Bhagvat-Geeta; or Dialogues of Krishna and Arjoon, in Eighteen Lectures with Notes ([n.p.]: Religio-Philosophical Publishing House, 1871), pp. 8–14. 18. Wilkins, pp. 8–14. 19. Pennington, p. 102. 20. Pennington, p. 102. 21. Sir William Jones, 'On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India', in The Works of Sir William Jones, p. 320. 22. Sharada Sugirtharajah, Imagining Hinduism: A Postcolonial Perspective (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 3. 23. Jean Baudrillard, 'The System of Collecting', in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 7–24 (p. 12). 24. Jones, 'Institution of a Society', p. 3. 25. Ibid., p. 2; Sydney C. Grier (ed.), The Letters of Warren Hastings to his Wife (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905), p. 249. 26. Letter from Warren Hastings, Edward Wheler, John Macpherson, John Stables reprinted in Asiatick Researches, or Transactions of the Society instituted in Bengal for Inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia (Calcutta: Vernon and Hood, 1798), I, p. vi. Italics are mine. 27. Treadwell, p. 350. 28. Sir William Jones, 'On the Literature of the Hindus, from the Sanscrit, Communicated by Goverdhan Caul: with a Short Commentary [from Sir William Jones, William Chambers, et al.]', Dissertations and Miscellaneous Pieces Relating to the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia, and Others (London: Printed for G. Nicol, J. Walter, J. Sewell, 1792), II, 107. 29. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 67; Treadwell, p. 362; Natasha Eaton, 'Hodges's Visual Genealogy for Colonial India, 1780–95', in Hodges, pp. 35–42 (p. 36); Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 'The Career of Colonel Polier and Late Eighteenth-Century Orientalism', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 3rd ser., 10.1 (2000), 43–60 (p. 57). 30. It is likely that Martin kept abreast of the Society's goings-on through Polier and through the Society's journal. For his article, see Lieutenant Colonel Claude Martin, 'On the Manufacture of Indigo at Ambore', Asiatick Researches: or Transactions of the Society, Instituted in Bengal, for Inquiries into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences, and Literature, of Asia ([n.p.]: [n. pub.], 1792), III, 475–76. See also Samuel Charles Hill, The Life of Claud Martin, Major-General in the Army of the Honourable East India Company (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink, and Company, 1901), pp. 96–99; A Man of the Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century India: the Letters of Claude Martin 1766–1800, ed. by Rosie Llewellyn-Jones (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2003), pp. 269–70; Rosie Llewellyn-Jones, 'Claude Martin – "A Very Ingenious Man"', Asian Affairs, 30.2 (1999), 164–72 (p. 166). 31. Letter from Sir William Jones to Dr. Ford in The Life, Writings and Correspondence of Sir William Jones, ed. by Lord Teignmouth (London: Sold by John Hatchard, 1806), p. 302. 32. Garland Cannon, 'Sir William Jones, Persian, Sanskrit and the Asiatic Society', Histoire Épistémologie Langage, 6.6–2 (1984), 833–94 (p. 90). 33. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, pp. 59–80; Llewellyn-Jones, 'Very Ingenious Man', pp. 168–70; Maya Jasanoff, 'Chameleon Capital: The Allure of Lucknow', The Yale Review, 93.3 (2005), 1–29 (p. 23). 34. Eaton, 'Nostalgia for the Exotic', p. 236. 35. Treadwell, p. 360. For more about Hastings and Polier, see Antoine Louis Henri Polier, Shah Alam II and His Court: A Narrative of the Transactions at the Court of Delhy from the Year 1771 to the Present Time, ed. by Pratul C. Gupta (Calcutta: S. C. Sarkar and Sons Ltd, 1947), pp. 6–12. 36. The image is yet again unique in this regard. No other painting by Zoffany, not even the Blair portrait with which it shares strong similarities, deploys the banyan to frame political aspirations and cultural reinventions in this manner. For an insightful discussion of Polier's transformation, see Subrahmanyam, pp. 55–60. Polier's immersion in nawabi culture was also exemplified by his Persian letters, the I'jaz-i-Arsalani incorporating the title, Arsalan-i-Jang ('lion of the battle'), bestowed upon him by the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II. See Muzaffar Alam and Seema Alavi, A European Experience of the Mughal Orient: The I'jaz-i Arsalani (Persian Letters, 1773–1779) of Antoine-Louis Henri Polier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 9. 37. Polier quoted in Subrahmanyam, p. 56. See also Cohn, pp. 26–29. 38. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 67; Subrahmanyam, p. 56. 39. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 67; Treadwell, p. 360. Polier's Swiss nationality prevented him from being promoted beyond the rank of major within the Company's hierarchy. 40. For more information about the significance of Indian interlocutors, see Raj, pp. 119–34 (pp. 123–27); Parama Roy, Alimentary Tracts: Appetites, Aversions, and the Postcolonial (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 180–81; Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyan, 'The Making of a Munshi', Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, 24.2 (2004), 61–72. 41. Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999), p. 159. 42. Alam and Alavi, pp. 7–8; Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, pp. 63–64. 43. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, p. 65. 44. I am grateful to Tamara Sears for making this excellent observation during my talk entitled 'O you Shaggy Headed Banyan Tree: Reflections on the Picturesque', given for the Spring lecture series organized by the South Asian Studies Council, Yale University, April 2010. 45. William L. Pressly, 'Genius Unveiled: The Self-Portraits of Johan Zoffany', The Art Bulletin, 69.1 (1987), 88–101 (p. 100). 46. Tuan, p. 34. 47. Jones, 'Institution of a Society', p. 5. The 'discourse' was delivered on 15 January 1784. 48. Raj, pp. 119–34 (pp. 121–22); Michael J. Franklin, 'Cultural Possession, Imperial Control, and Comparative Religion: The Calcutta Perspectives of Sir William Jones and Nathanial Brassey Halhed', The Yearbook of English Studies, 32 (2002), 1–18 (pp. 1–2). 49. Wilkins, p. 14. 50. Jones, 'Institution of a Society', p. 3. Italics are the author's. By 1823 the banyan's sprawling form was being used by the artist William Daniell for one of his designs for the Royal Asiatic Society's seals. John Hansman, 'The Emblems, Medals and Medallists of the Royal Asiatic Society', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain, 1 (1984), 99–119 (p. 99). 51. Pressly, pp. 88–101 (pp. 100–01). 52. Jasanoff, Edge of Empire, pp. 102–05. 53. Kate Redford, 'From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England', Journal of Design History, 20.4 (2007), 291–307 (pp. 300–01). 54. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 2. 55. In a letter to Iftikhar-ud-Daula, Polier notes that he had 'instructed the gardener to take the maximum care in taking... the best variety of bananas' to him. Alam and Alavi, p. 267. 56. Quilley, p. 146. 57. Angélica J. Afanador-Pujol, 'The Tree of Jesse and the "Relación de Michoácan": Mimicry in Colonial Mexico', The Art Bulletin, 92.4 (2010), 293–307 (p. 296). 58. De Almeida and George Gilpin claim that these figures are 'clearly Nayars of Malabar', a problematic conclusion since the artist never visited the Malabar Coast. See De Almeida and Gilpin, p. 140. For more about the Nayar community during the colonial period, see Susan Bayly, 'Hindu Kingship and the Origin of Community: Religion, State and Society in Kerala, 1750–1850', Modern Asian Studies, 18.2 (1984), 177–213. I am grateful to Payal Banerjee for sharing her thoughts about the ascetic figures. 59. Certainly, Zoffany's rendering of ascetics would have appealed to Polier, whose collections of Ragamala paintings and Mughal art featured similar subjects. At least one drawing, Deva Gandhara Ragini from a Ragamala album that belonged to him, portrays two near-naked ascetics paying their respects to a sannyasi. See Malini Roy, 'Origins of the Late Mughal Painting Tradition in Awadh', in India's Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow, ed. by Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gode (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2010), pp. 176–78. Insofar as Mughal art is concerned, images of Hindu ascetics were produced during Babur and Akbar's reigns and continued to prevail in seventeenth-century pictures of holy men painted by artists like the Mughal painter Govardhan. Walter Smith, 'Hindu Ascetics in Mughal Painting under Akbar', Oriental Art, 28.1 (1981), pp. 66–75; Gregory Minissale, 'Seeing Eye-to-Eye with Mughal Miniatures: Some Observations on the Outward Gazing Figure in Mughal Art', Marg, 58.3 (2007), pp. 46–47. 60. While Sir William Jones noted somewhat vaguely that 'Tantra' comprised of 'incantations', the French missionary Abbé Dubois penned a more damning account of a tantric ritual in his Hindu Manners, Customs, and Ceremonies (1807). See Hugh B. Urban, 'The Extreme Orient: The Construction of "Tantrism" as a Category in the Orientalist Imagination', Religion, 29 (1999), 123–46; Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 49–50; Jones, 'On the Literature of the Hindus', p. 111. 61. For Halhed and Grant's scathing commentaries about Hindu ascetics and priests, and Jones's more cautious handling of priesthood, see Franklin, pp. 11–15; Rosane Rocher, 'British Orientalism in the Eighteenth Century: The Dialectics of Knowledge and Government', in Orientalism and the Post-Colonial Predicament, ed. by Carol Appadurai Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 1993), pp. 215–49 (p. 225–27). It should be noted, however, that rishis (sannyasis or yogis) were not necessarily priests and vice-versa. 62. Franklin, p. 16. Both Kali and Durga belong to the topos of the sakta goddess, sakta meaning divine power. See Guy L. Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1995), pp. 121–23; Cynthia Ann Humes, 'Wrestling with Kali: South Asian and British Constructions of the Dark Goddess', in Encountering Kali in the Margins, at the Center, in the West, ed. by Rachel Fell McDermott and Jeffrey J. Kripal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 145–68 (pp. 149–51). 63. Rachel Fell McDermott, Singing to the Goddess: Poems to Kali and Uma from Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 4; Hugh B. Urban, '"India's Darkest Heart": Kali in the Colonial Imagination', in Encountering Kali, pp. 169–97 (p. 174). 64. Pratapaditya Pal, 'Kali, Calcutta, and Kalighat Pictures', Marg, XLI.4 (1990), 1–16 (p. 1). 65. Franklin, p. 16, note 42; Rachel Fell McDermott, Mother of my Heart, Daughter of my Dreams: Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 173; Saugata Bhaduri, 'Of Public Sphere and Sacred Space: Origins of Community Durga Puja in Bengal', in Folklore, Public Sphere and Civil Society, ed. by M. D. Muthukumaraswamy and Molly Kaushal (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts and National Folklore Support Centre, 2004), pp. 79–91 (p. 81). 66. Madhu Khanna, 'The Goddess-Women Equation in Sakta Tantras', in Faces of the Feminine in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern India, ed. by Mandakranta Bose (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 112–19. Penelope Treadwell interprets the image of the naked woman as a reference to Zoffany's bibi (Indian mistress or wife), conjecturing that 'it is hard to imagine any Indian woman or girl showing herself naked to the world'. Such a generalization overlooks the possibility that Zoffany had indeed focused on a naked sannyasini for his composition (nudity was not out of bounds for female Hindu ascetics). Moreover, he never depicted bibis in the nude. Treadwell, pp. 363–65; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: the Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 79–81; Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 112–15; Pratapaditya Pal and Vidya Dehejia, From Merchants to Emperors: British Artists and India, 1757–1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), pp. 46–47. 67. At another level, his rendering can be linked to the growing fascination with the fakir (wandering mendicant) once described by Hodges for his 'more than savage appearance', and stereotyped by the early nineteenth century as the quintessential Indian ascetic. See Hodges, p. 31. Furthermore, Zoffany would have been familiar with the 1770 sannyasi and fakir revolt against the Company's new policy to extract additional revenue from zamindars in Saran and Burdwan. The rebellion intensified by the time he painted the Polier group portrait. See Suranjan Chatterjee, 'New Reflections on the Sannyasi, Fakir and Peasants War', Economic and Political Weekly, 19.4 (1984), PE2–PE13 (p. PE8). 68. Treadwell, pp. 358–59. Treadwell identifies these figures as 'Nagas' or 'naked, itinerant ascetics'; however, at least two of the figures (including one smoking a hookah) are brahmin priests. 69. Rita Kothari, Translating India (Delhi: Foundation Books, 2006), p. 12. 70. Pressly, p. 97. 71. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 2.
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