Natasha Eaton

Excess in the city? The consumption of imported prints in colonial Calcutta, c.1780-c.1795

This article examines the role of imported prints in early colonial Calcutta. It explores the critical entanglements of this art of mechanical reproduction within the cosmopolitics of imperialism. Questioning the 18th-century ‘consumer revolution’ and contemporary ‘actor network theory’, it asks whether either help us to comprehend fully these picture-human relations. In time of economic boom and recession within this early East India Company state, art was valued not so much as an inalienable possession but for its seemingly contradictory status as both quasi-fetish and as an aesthetic of the ephemeral. Patriotic yet disposable, such pictures participated within a visual labyrinth driven by lotteries and gambling, theft and debt. Using Indo-Muslim and British attitudes towards the colonial art market, this article exposes the centrality of chance and luxury for a creole heterotopia that ultimately hinged on a tense ambivalence.

Nomadism of colour: Painting, technology and waste in the chromo-zones of colonial India c.1765–c.1860

This article explores the contested ‘nomadic’ agency of colour in relation to colonialism in northern and eastern India. The author argues that colour provides us with a vital, if underexplored, field for analysing technologies of enchantment and questions of scarcity and waste in relation to the fundamental centrality of art to imperialism. Her intervention considers the ways in which the fetish, alchemy, alien(ating) material practices on the part of artists and the ontology of Sufism became implicated in struggles for power at the level of the political, the aesthetic and the globalizing economic. Although the palette can be thought of as a micro-centre of calculation – displaying as it does a range of hard-won substances from across the globe that wait to be transformed and perhaps sublimated into the aesthetic of empire – it is nonetheless the heterogeneous space for intense debate and violent, ironic Indian elite and subaltern resistance.

In search of pearlescence: Pearls, empire and obsolescence in South Asia

This article explores pearls as an allegorical device for thinking about British colonial art and economy in the later 19th century in South Asia. It takes as its focus elite and subaltern attempts to utilise pearls as a form of ‘armature’ and mode of resistance through an analysis of south Indian fisheries, the use of pearls in coercive portraiture and their ‘blind spot’ appearance in a well-publicised legal case for treason. The article argues that pearlescence – the sheen and light associated with pearls – was central to modes of understanding and representing the British colonial economy more broadly defined. Associated with both scarcity and waste, the pearl and the pearl shell came to define the shape of a globalizing modernity whose primary aesthetic was that of kitsch.

Swadeshi Color: Artistic Production and Indian Nationalism, ca. 1905–ca. 1947

Color held a contested status in relation to the discursive and affective entanglement of art and Indian nationalism. Examination of the artworks, speeches, manifestos, and musings of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Abanindranath and Rabindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Jamini Roy shows how color could be “redeemed” from the disciplinary straitjacket of the British colonial art school. Construed by Indian nationalists as both cosmopolitan and fundamental, color (in terms of its materiality and political resonance) became critical to the formation of a Bengali aesthetic. This new aesthetic, which can be loosely aligned with swadeshi (self-economy), was nonetheless deeply riven with conflict and contradiction.

Partitions Special Issue: Introduction

Abstract This introduction examines the contested histories of Partitions in South Asia with an emphasis on memory and the line, the map and the museum. The map is read variously as a decolonial device through the works of contemporary artists such as Gulammohamed Sheikhs ongoing project ‘Mappa Mundi’ which uses psychogeography as a cosmopolitan palimpsest for exploring the rich layered histories of artistic production, mysticism and magic realism. The line we read in relation to Radcliffe’s rather hasty decision to carve up India in 1947. In Mountbattens words, the British really ‘fucked up’. The line had devastating consequences for the displacement of millions, leading to millions of deaths and lasting trauma. The legacies of such trauma are only just beginning to be recognised. In many ways artists such as Somnath Hore and Shilla Gupta have led the way. Officially, the Partition Museum opened in Amritsar in Autumn 2016. Still very much a site of construction it aims to provide a much needed parallel to Holocaust memorials and the Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg. The Introduction also proposes the importance of iconopraxis, the criticality of the subaltern and the power of fabulation as ways of negotiating the genealogies of Partition.

Chromophobic Activism: The Politics and Materiality of Art and Colour in India, circa 1917–circa 1966

This article examines the contested agency of colour in twentieth-century South Asian nationalism and its afterlife in the postcolony. Questioning the entanglements of chromophobia and chromophilia it focuses on colours volatile status as it veered between poetic and political acceptance by Abanindranath Tagore, Gandhis seeming abhorrence of any colour but white, Rabindranath Tagores claim to colour blindness and recourse to inky cosmopolitanism and Nandalal Boses experiments with muralism in relation to art writing. Tainted by its association with colonial Britain and subaltern exploitation could colour be redeemed? Experimenting with local materials, artists began to devise alternative, sometimes radical chromatics that literally invoked the power of the earth. Post-Independence Indias most self-proclaimed colourist – disaffected Marxist Jagdish Swaminathan – sought to provincialize Western ideas of abstraction in his mystical, chromophilic practice. Seen through the lens of subaltern labour and contemporary artistic practice, colour has a distracting, coercive materialism that must be accounted for.

Virtual witnessing? Balthazar Solvyns and the navigation of precision, c.1790–1840

Abstract This essay considers the weight and bearing of the idea of precision and the notion of the virtual in relation to commercial artists travelling to India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Taking as its focus the work of Balthazar Solvyns, my discussion considers the fictional and the factual as relayed by the aesthetic of precision. The aesthetic of precision is by its very nature precarious: to be precarious was to carry something of the virtual and a kind of fictionality which being so performative in its documentary aspect carried its own risk – especially when confronted with so-called Company School/Mughal artists who were highly critical of such colonial practice.