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Colonial Polyrhythm: Imaging Action inthe Early 19th CenturyRebecca M. Brown

To cite this article: Rebecca M. Brown (2013) Colonial Polyrhythm: Imaging Action in the Early 19thCentury, Visual Anthropology: Published in cooperation with the Commission on Visual Anthropology,26:4, 269-297, DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2013.804368

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Colonial Polyrhythm: Imaging Actionin the Early 19th Century

Rebecca M. Brown

This article proposes a new reading of early-19th-century modernity by examiningIndia’s so-called ‘‘ethnographic’’ paintings, and arguing that rather than participatein a trajectory of speed and acceleration these works produce colonial polyrhythmictemporality. First, the article establishes that many of these images depict action,not ethnicity or occupational group. It then situates these images in economies ofcirculation, viewing, politics and commercial enterprise. By focusing on the actionin the subject matter—do-ing rather than do-er, processes rather than occupations—alayered, polyrhythmic range of temporalities emerges, upturning dualistic, acceleration-driven, and rupture-based understandings of visual culture from this period.

COLONIAL POLYRHYTHMIC TEMPORALITY

The study of the 19th century, centered on the industrial revolution and globalpolitical and economic upheavals, often produces a narrative of acceleration, ofspeeding up, keyed to technological changes (sometimes termed revolutions) thatspurred society on to ever-increasing velocity.1 But the 19th century cannot beunified in such an easy manner, and the experience of speed, like any experience,does not constitute a shared, universal reality. Following theorists who havere-centered the understanding of modernity so as to incorporate and indeedhighlight colonial spaces and disciplines, I propose to decenter the narrativeof speed and acceleration and to redirect attention to what I will call colonialpolyrhythmic temporality.

One of the central problems of narrating colonial history lies in the tendencyto distinguish historical breaks: before and after a colonial presence, beforeand after control of monetary or political systems in the colonized country. Thisdovetails nicely with the art-historical tendency to periodize, in the context notonly of broad aesthetic movements but also of technological breaks or new

REBECCA M. BROWN is Teaching Professor in the History of Art at Johns Hopkins University.She has published Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest: Modern and Contemporary Indian Artfrom the Shelley and Donald Rubin Collection [2011], Gandhi’s Spinning Wheel and theMaking of India [Routledge 2010], Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 [Duke 2009], TheBlackwell Companion to Asian Art and Architecture [with Deborah Hutton, 2011], AsianArt [with Deborah Hutton, Blackwell 2006] and articles in Res, Interventions, CSSAAME,Archives of Asian Art, Journal of Urban History, Art Journal, Screen and Journal of AsianStudies. E-mail: rmbrown@jhu.edu

Visual Anthropology, 26: 269–297, 2013Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online

DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2013.804368

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developments in visual media. The 19th-century ‘‘breaks’’ thus involve the beforeand after of the industrial revolution, the invention and propagation of photo-graphic technology, and the spread of communication methods like thetelegraph and of transport modes like the railways. Acceleration arguments oftencite ‘‘mechanical reproduction’’ as an obvious marker of this new speed, butmechanical reproduction in the form of printing defined the circulation of bothtext and image long before the 19th century. And in the frameworks that linkmodernity to acceleration, the sometimes hidden and sometimes stated colonialfoil represents, by default, a lack of speed or even a stasis. Many scholars havepointed out this dualism—modern (read Europe) moving forward, leaving therest of the world (largely colonized) behind, catching up—and many have foughtit. Dipesh Chakrabarty frames this colonial temporal relation incisively as the‘‘not yet’’ of modernity [2000]. The challenge lies in removing the temporal pro-gression at the center of modernist history in order to move away fromacceleration and progression as central tropes of 19th-century history. Ratherthan finding and valorizing different modes of progress in the colony, my workon early 19th-century visual culture reassesses this approach to temporality.

I find that rather than theorizing time as an obsession with speed or anobsession with stasis, time might better be thought of as a rhythm; one with gapsand pauses; one that returns but not always to repeat; one that takes on patternsfrom a range of sources and brings them together into a moving, action-filled,layered polyrhythmic temporality. By polyrhythm I do not mean mere multi-plicity; I draw on the understanding of the term from musical traditions acrosssub-Saharan Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the jazz and modernist move-ments of North America.2 Polyrhythm involves multiple, repeating rhythmicpatterns overlaying one another to create complex but interconnected and inter-dependent rhythms, with no particular rhythm taking precedence over anotherand with each rhythm operating as a distinct sensory element. Polyrhythmicmusical compositions often produce a feeling of acceleration while sustaininga consistent tempo. I argue that colonial polyrhythms of repeated processes,shared moments of remembrance, pauses of differing duration, endless travelon sea and river—these rhythms form the modern much more fundamentally andconstitutively than narratives of acceleration propose.3

To unpack this claim I turn not to the celebrated technological media of the19th century (photography, lithography, chromolithography) but to the seem-ingly unrevolutionary world of painting [Figure 1]. South Asian art history hasbeen slow to study the subcontinent’s post-1750 painting traditions, and parti-cularly reluctant to legitimize work on paintings made within and for colonialsociety. These works carry the double burden of being both ‘‘late’’ and ‘‘hybrid’’and so, aside from a few scholars who assiduously gather these images togetherin exhibitions and catalogs, they have been left under-studied andunder-theorized.4 This rich vein of visual imagery cannot be easily subsumedinto simple narratives of othering, nor can it be absorbed into a narrative ofacceleration-and-stasis. The small-scale paintings I examine here, produced bynorthern Indian artists working in cities and towns of the Gangetic plain, circu-lated in a fledgling commercial marketplace driven by European colonial travelbut spilling over into elite Indian consumption as well.

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In the past, scholars have considered these works part of a ‘‘CompanySchool,’’ a label that sought to unify a diverse group of paintings from acrossthe subcontinent, based on presumed patronage by East India Companyemployees, officers, and other Europeans. In practice these paintings werecommissioned and purchased by a wide range of people, including Indianelites as well as individuals not at all associated with the Company.‘‘Company Painting’’ encompassed detailed botanical studies, images ofhook-swinging ceremonies, renderings of architectural facades, pairs ofpeople linked by marriage or occupation, and occasionally activities like eat-ing raw sheep.5 The organizing term brought together a group of paintingsspanning an area the size of Europe, with styles as varied as the austere,empty settings of Patna’s tradition in the north [Figure 2], the multi-scenecompositions of Thanjavur and Madras paintings in the south [Figure 3],and the detailed portraiture demanded by particular patrons like James andWilliam Fraser in Delhi [Figure 4]. Rather than mount a critique of such a dif-fuse and problematic rubric, I am here abandoning the organizing category of‘‘Company Painting.’’ In this analysis I focus geographically on the Gangeticplain, an area defined by the geographic and political importance of the riverand by historical connections among regional rulers; and I focus temporallyon the decades around 1830, when I see colonial polyrhythmic temporalityconsolidating.

To access the layered temporalities embodied in these paintings I first turn tothe seemingly simple task of identifying their subject matter. I argue against thetendency, in part produced by the lumping together of diverse regional andtemporal imageries, to discuss painted images of people from the early 19th cen-tury as ‘‘ethnographic’’ studies and demonstrate that many of these imagesdepict action, not ethnicity or occupational group. This move to action shiftsthe discourse away from stasis without embedding it within progressive lineartime. Second, I situate these images in economies of circulation, viewing,politics and commercial enterprise to ascertain how they shape the modernityof the early 19th century. By focusing on the action in the subject matter—do-ingrather than do-er, processes rather than occupations—one can see a layered,polyrhythmic range of temporalities, from the duration and rhythm of makinga piece of pottery to the time it takes to look at each painted image in a set, tothe memories evoked in the looking, to the time of circulation across India andto Europe, to the contrast produced in the push-and-pull between the rise ofmodern clock-time and the pace of handicraft production. This layered, poly-rhythmic temporality does not merely reflect the overarching tensions of this per-iod: it serves as the rhythmic grounding for those tensions.

FROM ETHNOGRAPHIC STASIS TO AN ACTIVE RHYTHM

Situating these paintings requires a bit of intellectual history, to assess the dis-course circulating about ethnic groups, typologization, and the study of ‘‘other’’peoples and cultures in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The term ethno-graphic, in the context of art-historical study of this period in India, is regularly

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used to identify images that depict people in the service of a larger project of cate-gorization based on ethnicity or caste. The latter category often erases the subtle-ties of generational familial relations, fluid and undefined ethnic and religiouslabels, and the job or occupation pursued by the people depicted. The use ofthe term ‘‘ethnographic’’ to describe the images I focus on here tends also to col-lapse the history of the 19th century and to ignore crucial shifts across that cen-tury, not least of which are the shift from Company rule to Crown rule in 1858and the widespread use of photography from approximately the same time. Thisterm also ignores the disciplinary shifts within the study of ‘‘other’’ peoples astraced by the history of ethnology and anthropology from the late 18th centurythrough to the early 20th. This section unpacks this century along these trajec-tories so as to demonstrate the importance of identifying more precisely the sub-jects depicted in these paintings. We must unsee the ethnographic before seeingwhat is right in front of us.

The 18th- and 19th-century efforts to understand the people of the worldoften appeared as tangential to archaeological or topographical inquiries:that is, as distinct as a curve and a line, while also intimately defining oneanother. As a specific kind of endeavor these studies also varied according tothe people who pursued them and their relative comprehensiveness. The18th- and early-19th-century understandings of cultures, rather than stemmingfrom university-based research, depended on travelers, missionaries andcolonial agents who lived outside Europe for extended periods and gatheredinformation about the people surrounding them. In the late 18th century theseactors observed and recorded what they saw in a documentary fashion, oftenasserting or bemoaning the incomplete quality of their final product andthereby acknowledging the partial nature of the knowledge produced fromsuch efforts [Clifford 1983; Stocking 1987]. In the early 19th century, colonialsurveys—of geography, natural resources, people, customs, archaeology—served as a loosely defined tool to understand the subcontinent. Regional ama-teur societies sprang up, such as the one that produced the Madras Journal ofLiterature and Science.6 Such information-gathering efforts shaped emergingquestions in the academic, scientific and administrative communities.

The late 19th century saw a growing systematization of these surveys, inconcert with the integration of photography as an authoritative recordingtechnology [Pinney 1997]. Surveys of Indian archaeology, for example, startedto explore new uses of the photograph, whether in Alexander Cunningham’sattempts to catalog and contextualize archaeological sites or in James Fergusson’suse of ancient sculpture to understand the ethnic groups in both ancient andcontemporary India [Guha-Thakurta 2004]. These efforts marked a shift fromthe acknowledgment of the partiality of knowledge in the late 18th century toa growing confidence in the possibility of a complete catalog of historical andcontemporary information on India’s people in the late 19th and early 20th. Theselater, comprehensive colonial surveys existed alongside photographic projectsdesigned to document the people of India and Europe, book-ended temporallyby the 1868–75 eight-volume People of India and August Sander’s 1929People of the Twentieth Century, the latter of which recorded 1920s Germans atwork [Lange, Conrat-Scholl and Sander 2002; Pinney 1997; Watson and Kaye

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1868–75]. By the 1930s anthropology (with other academic disciplines) anchoreditself on the presumption of an identifiable, bounded culture, a singularityquickly challenged during the postwar decades of decolonization coupled withrising critical engagement with the problems of studying the ‘‘other.’’

Pinney and others have shown that the rhetoric of comprehensiveness found inlater-19th-century photographic catalogs of people masks the rather haphazardmanner used to gather and organize these images [Falconer 2004; Pinney 1997].If the later-19th-century projects fall well short of their efforts to present a holisticview of India’s peoples and cultures, those of the late 18th century present theirlacunae more openly: comprehensiveness represented a desirable but unattain-able goal.

I take seriously the subtle epistemological changes of the 1830s and 1840sso that I can highlight some of the distinctions within the body of paintingsproduced during that time, and within the context of colonial relations of power.Rather than consider the 19th century as a unified moment, and rather than(therefore) project backwards anachronistic visions of ethnography onto thesepaintings, I propose instead to listen more closely to what they attempt to say.Unseeing the ethnographic enables the identification of action and smallmoments of do-ing, often focusing on specific, repeated tasks associated with lar-ger handicraft processes.

MILDRED ARCHER’S MULTIPLE INDEXES

Identifying subject matter often seems like the most straightforward of art-historical tasks. It forms a base level of description, after which one moves toan analysis of style, the unpacking of symbolic meaning, or the understandingof a historical context. But for Indian painting of the early 19th century the broadcategory of Company Painting has encouraged scholars to try to organizea diverse range of subjects by seeking patterns, patterns that quickly break downon inspection. The breadth of subject matters, even when narrowed to thosepaintings that focus on images of people, exceeds any attempt at categorization.Most of the time figures lack a particular physical setting, floating on a genericbackground of white paper; but enough images provide an urban or interior con-text to prevent broad generalizations. While paintings often focus on the laboringclasses, a large group of princely and aristocratic portraits again undermineattempts to characterize these works broadly. People also appear—in a crowdor as individuals—in paintings that focus on festivals, processions or ceremoniesassociated with religion and politics.

Mildred Archer’s work of the 1970s and 1980s in this area has shaped and alsolimited the field, as part of her project to catalog and valorize both the works sheand her husband, William, had collected, and those works she organized ascurator and archivist in the collections of the British Library and the Victoriaand Albert Museum.7 Perusal of the index to her centrally important andperiod-defining Company Drawings in the India Office Library [1972] gives a senseof the typologization that she used to make sense of the overwhelming number ofsubjects facing her as a curator and researcher. In addition to a final General

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Index, the book helpfully provides three other indexes: Artists, Monuments andBuildings, and Trades and Occupations. Trades and Occupations comprises 209entries and closes with a note: ‘‘For domestic servants see General Index: Ser-vants.’’ This adds a further 26 entries.

While these entries follow a pattern, often ending in the suffix -er—gardener,saddler, tinker and carpenter—they also often overwhelm with their specificity.Not only does the list include a Cloth-seller but also a Chintz-merchant. Amongthe selection of sword-related occupations one finds a Sword-furbisher, aScabbard-maker and a Scabbard-case embroiderer. The Betel-leaf seller andthe Betel-nut seller receive separate entries. And while domestic servants areseparated and placed in the larger ‘‘general’’ index, some entries includedin Trades and Occupations seem to qualify as neither trade nor occupation:Prisoner, for example; yet Trades and Occupations excludes titled positions suchas navab, subadar, prince, raja, as well as military personnel. Soldiers and othermilitary figures may be found in various places in the General index, mostprominently under Military Costumes, an entry further broken down into Britishand Company troops, Irregular forces, and Native forces, each of which hassubdivisions based on region and rank.

One might consider that this index, or rather set of indexes, representsa meta-index. On the first level, it serves as the index of a catalog, itself anorganized list of a group of objects. But those objects themselves come to thearchive in sets—sets that often provide insight into the ways these objects circu-lated when they were first produced and sold. Colonial-era consumers wouldpurchase several paintings at a time, often around certain subjects such as clothproduction or images of festivals. Therefore on another level these sets in turnserve as mini-indexes: attempts to bring together potentially disparate objectsto some unknown end. Where a book index operates as a tool, guiding readersto specific portions of the book, grouped sets of paintings do something slightlydifferent—or, given the variety of the sets of paintings, different sets do differentthings. They may direct the viewer to particular understandings of a group ofpeople; they may depict a portion of the activities going on in a particular region;they may gather together a portrait of a family or an occupational cohort orthe servants that surround a European officer. Alternatively they might presenta group of desired bodies; or they may demonstrate the prowess of the artistin the fineness of brush or the exotic materials used. They may bring togetherthings that qualify as ‘‘curiosities’’—a gathering of strangeness.8

Thus Archer’s index, despite its attempt at organizing and smoothing oversome of this variety so that certain types can be found quickly by a researcher,also reveals the rough texture and variations within the archive of images thatshe discusses. Grouping by occupation or costume often results from Archer’sattempts to mark groups of works in the catalog. While the emphasis on theperson, the do-er, in the index comes in part from the roughly contemporaneousinscriptions found on these paintings—inscriptions which often echo the -ersuffix by using the Hindi suffix -vala in its various romanizations (often -wallah)—at other times inscriptions describe the painting with a gerund, or add a gerundto the do-er description: spinning, grinding, weaving and carving.

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However, Archer’s attempts to mark groups of work may also be shaped bythe fact that sets simply arrived at the archive together or came from the sameregion or period. Such sets of paintings don’t necessarily enable easy labeling.A set of ten paintings on mica from South India, for example, purchased bythe British Library in 1962, include a ‘‘Nawab with sword,’’ a ‘‘Parsee withsword,’’ a ‘‘Cloth or sari-seller,’’ an ‘‘Orderly with letter,’’ a ‘‘Washerman ironingclothes,’’ a ‘‘Toddy-tapper about to climb a palm tree,’’ a ‘‘Village woman withrain hat (probably from Kerala),’’ a ‘‘Muhammadan woman,’’ and two Hinduwomen. Archer labeled them, ‘‘10 mica paintings depicting the costumes ofvarious castes in South India’’ [Archer 1972: cat. 23 i–x, 46–47]. The emphasison costume and caste in the overarching title directs the researcher andviewer to read the images in a certain way and to understand their groupingas purposive, leading toward a particular end. But Archer’s descriptive titles ofthe individual paintings do not suggest a focus on costume or caste; these labelsserve almost casually as place-holders and in some cases even obscure what thepaintings portray.

In attempting to assess the subject matter for these paintings, the approach tothem has been unduly determined by Archer’s project to catalog the works,a project that has fixed their identification both as Company paintings and aspaintings of costume, caste, or type of person.

ASSESSING SUBJECT MATTER: CASTES AND COSTUMES

Paintings that might indeed fit the label ethnographic—or, paintings of people thattake part in a project to categorize and typologize based on ethnicity, dress, occu-pation or caste—do exist in some form in this early-19th-century period. Thearchive includes pairs of people, often a man and woman, labeled sometimeswith the marker ‘‘caste’’ and produced in sets often bound into albums[Figure 5]. This type of painting is limited almost entirely to the Tamil regionin the south, and other kinds of painting—depicting handicraft processes, proces-sions, festivals, portraits—also circulated in that region.9 These paintings aretherefore a small subset of the painting that circulated in early-19th-centuryIndia. Even for this subset however the term ‘‘ethnographic’’ is an anachronisticone, for it would not have been used to describe them at the time. And while theycirculate in sets they do not take part in the ostensibly more systematic, photo-graphic typologization projects of the later 19th century.

In northern India too some instances of projects that sought, in a loose andnon-comprehensive manner, to categorize based on caste did exist. Perhaps thebest known of these were the more than 90 watercolor paintings commissionedby the brothers James and William Fraser between 1801 and 1835 [Figure 4].These paintings include extensive contemporaneous labels, often providing thename, occupation, caste, and even relationship of the sitter to the Frasers [Archerand Falk 1989]. Other projects, such as Balthazar Solvyns’ publication of over 250colored etchings ‘‘Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of theHindoos,’’ were based on Solvyns’ own paintings [Hardgrave 2004]. Both of

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these projects contain elements of an ethnographic, typologizing sensibility, butboth are also centrally driven by the vision of a single patron or sponsor. Thepaintings I examine here from the Gangetic plain circulated as goods in themarketplace, produced for purchase by Europeans and others who collectedthem during their movements around India. As such they remain distinct fromprojects like the Frasers’ commissioned paintings and Solvyns’ own images.While historically contemporary with the paintings I focus on here, I bracketoff these individually patronized works in order to assess the subject matterand impact of the paintings that circulated within the commercial marketplace.

In addition to these projects driven by single patrons, one finds images of indi-vidual people in fairly static poses that slip out of an ethnographic label but exhi-bit no action. Such paintings present portraits or generic female bodies ratherthan ethnic or occupational subjects. Archer’s index often labels these paintingsas ‘‘costumes,’’ focusing the attention on dress as a marker of difference. Onceexamined closely however one finds that ‘‘costume’’ encompasses a broad,diverse range of subjects, serving almost as a catch-all for any group of imagesof people, regardless of the subject matter of the images included. I turn to oneexample of this phenomenon to illustrate a facet of Gangetic painting that does

Figure 5 ‘‘Weaver and his Wife.’’ Artist unknown, Thanjavur (Tanjore), ca. 1800. (Image #

Victoria and Albert Museum, AL8940 N; color figure available online)

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represent a more static, inactive imagery of people but that, in the end, likeimages of action and do-ing remains outside an ethnographic project.

An album at the Harvard Art Museum now called ‘‘Costumes of India’’ under-scores the tensions between the practice of labeling and what the works them-selves depict. Its paintings date to the turn of the 19th century. An inscriptioninside the front cover of the album reads: ‘‘These drawings were brought fromCalcutta and environs and given to me by Colonel Mackay=December 1825London=Catherine Maria Charleville.’’ Lady Charleville’s initials, CMC, arewritten on the front of the album. It appears that the title ‘‘Costumes of India’’was first attached to the album by the French dealer who sold the album for350 fr. in 1930, as evidenced by a sales note included with the album. In 1800and later, in 1825, the album did not have a title. The album also has links toseveral locations. The paintings were done in Lucknow. Lady Charleville’s noteplaces Colonel Mackay in Calcutta and environs. Scotland is the likely location ofMackay’s family, while London is the site of the gift. The album also has linksto France, as France is associated both with Lady Charleville’s surname andthe location of the album when it sold in 1930. When the album arrived in LadyCharleville’s hands, however, it had no descriptive designation aside fromits relationship to Calcutta, and it thus represented a collection of related imageswithout any indication as to how to understand the volume’s contents as a whole.

Nevertheless, Catherine Maria Bury, Countess of Charleville (1762–1851), anaccomplished oil painter herself, would not have been entirely without guidance,as the album’s images all have contemporaneous English titles, and the subjectsinclude named individuals, such as ‘‘The Celebrated Notch Girl at Calcutta,Bibigean’’ and ‘‘The King of Oude’s Brother.’’ Of the 30 pages in the album 18 depictwomen, with several nautch (dancing) girls and several images of women bathing inthe Ganges in various states of dress or undress. Seventeen of the pages depictcourtly individuals, whether kings, relatives of kings, or ladies of the zanana.10 Noneof the labels focuses on costume, nor particularly on caste or even profession.

Thus the disconnect between the title given to the album in 1930 and theimages collected in the album springs from a number of factors. In providing thistitle the French dealer sought to appeal to a potential market. The designation heassigned was not anachronistic, as one does find costume albums from thedecades around the turn of the 19th century. The textual focus on clothing,whether it comes from an early-19th-century label or a designation after theimages have circulated, locates difference in dress as opposed to ethnicity oraction. In so doing it emphasized the exotic elements of the scene for the viewerwhile focusing on an element of everyday life—what one wears—as an easilyaccessed point of comparison across cultures.

When looking at the images themselves, however, any emphasis on the dressof the figures fades in comparison to the portraiture of named, titled individuals(King of Delhi or Rajah of Benares), or the attention paid to the body beneath thegarment. Many of the images of women in the album invite the viewer’s gazeinto the lives of those who inhabit the courtly zanana. However, instead ofproviding details of the zanana’s interior space these paintings depict the bodiesof zanana women resituated in outdoor locations, including bathing in the river[Figure 6]. As a result, across the album an underlying element of voyeuristic

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desire and eroticism undergirds the viewing experience. This album exemplifiesone aspect of the imaging of people in northern India during the early 19thcentury—an aspect that utterly escapes an ethnographic label.11

MAKING AND DOING: IN ACTION, NOT INACTION

The static, flattened, objectified quality seen in the Lucknow album contrasts withother early-19th-century paintings from Lucknow, Patna and elsewhere in theGangetic plain that depict action and people doing something. Often indexedunder ‘‘Trades and Occupations,’’ these paintings include butchers, potters,weavers and others at work in a wide range of regions and periods. A set ofPatna paintings from the Royal Ontario Museum includes a butcher and a barberwith five images of the cloth production process: spinning raw cotton into yarn,stretching and twisting the yarn in preparation for the warp, combing orbrushing the warp to eliminate flaws and make it consistent, weaving, and sell-ing the produced cloth [Figures 7–9]. These images, like many from across the

Figure 6 ‘‘A Hindoo Lady of the Zenana.’’ Artist unknown, Lucknow School, from an albumentitled ‘‘Costumes of India,’’ ca. 1800. (Harvard Art Museums=Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Giftof Mrs. C. Adrian Rubel, 1979.346.6. Photo: Imaging Department # President and Fellows ofHarvard College)

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Gangetic plain, depict these scenes without context; the vignettes float approxi-mately two-thirds of the way down the paper surrounded by empty space. Paint-ings from Lucknow often include a bit more context but, as seen in the albumdiscussed above, exterior settings are generic, providing little more than distanthills with one or two trees on them. Interior settings provide more detail in termsof rugs, bolsters and charpoys (cots, Hindi carpaı), but again represent a fairlygeneric space [Figure 10]. By forgoing any setting, these Patna paintings focusattention on the people doing things.

While paintings such as these are often listed or even inscribed as ‘‘-er’’paintings—butcher, barber, spinner—in some cases, as in an image of spinningfrom an album collected by Marquis Richard Wellesley, Earl of Mornington,and dating to his time as Governor-General of India (1798–1805), the activity takescenter stage in both text and image, as the inscription on the work reads:Spinning [Figure 11]. These labels refocus attention on the do-ing, the actionof making something. What is more, as their generic qualities extend from thebackground to the faces and dress of the people represented, these paintingsdo not operate to divulge ethnic identity or to present a group in the senseof a tribe or a defined caste community. Indeed I suggest the conflation of

Figure 7 Spinning. Artist unknown, Patna, ca. 1830. (Image with permission of the RoyalOntario Museum # ROM, 998.126.4; color figure available online)

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profession or occupation with caste has led to a serious misreading of theseworks. The dominant ‘‘ethnographic’’ reading leads us to overlook one of theprimary things these paintings depict: an image of doing, not simply an imageof do-er. Unlike the paired Tamil works, the paintings commissioned by orpainted by particular European patrons, or eroticized images of women, thesepaintings present small moments of action. And these moments involve repeti-tive, rhythmic durations with pauses and hitches, contributing to the multiplebeats of what I call colonial polyrhythm.

While some of these images slip into named jatis, professions related to parti-cular subcastes, many do not, and it is precisely these paintings that illuminatethe focus on action. Spinning, for example, is not linked to a single caste. Womenspin in the agricultural off-season whether they belong to a weaving family ornot, often getting the prepared cotton from a market and returning with spunyarn for a small profit. In addition spinning’s association with women unmooredits status as a profession. And the multiple modes of spinning—on a drop spindle(taklı) or upright charkha (spinning-wheel), with cotton, jute or wool—made thisparticular action difficult to pin on any regional occupational caste. And perhapsmost tellingly, in the second half of the 19th century spinning fades as a subjectmatter for photographers and disappears, in particular, from volumes whose goals

Figure 8 Weaving. Artist unknown, Patna, c. 1830. (Image with permission of the Royal OntarioMuseum # ROM, 998.126.3; color figure available online)

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leaned toward ethnographic categorization [R. M. Brown 2010]. Many of theseactive, gerundic images lessened in popularity as the focus shifted toa typologization of people based on caste or ethnicity.

Other subjects may overlap with concerns to document occupations and byextension caste, but the core of what they communicate remains action. Weavers,for example, usually are members of a particular caste and sectarian group,varying across the subcontinent. But the image of a weaver in the Royal OntarioMuseum set [Figure 8], like many images of weavers dating between the late 18thand the mid-19th centuries, shows him active at the loom, hand about to toss theshuttle through the open warp, eyes concentrated on the task at hand. A furtherindication of passing time and the duration of this action lies in the smoke risingfrom a hookah at his side. In a painting devoid of setting and seemingly uncon-cerned with atmosphere, the smoke serves to highlight the passage of time, andthe living, action-filled moment the viewer witnesses in this small painting. Thebarber in this same set has a similar level of concentration on his work, holdingthe razor intently at the side of his customer’s head [Figure 12]. Details ofmusculature and bodily position emphasize motion, from the awkwardly curvedbody of the man in the care of the barber to the barber’s own upraised little finger

Figure 9 Selling cloth. Artist unknown, Patna, ca. 1830. (Image with permission of the RoyalOntario Museum # ROM, 998.126.6; color figure available online)

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preparing in a moment to shave the man’s stubble. And the dramatic circularmotion of the treading of grain dominates ‘‘Threshing Paddy’’ [Figure 1]: thevibrant gestures used to depict the grain draw us into the painting, wherethe bobbing heads of the animals and the raised arm of the farmer reinforce theaction depicted. These images of professions do not just present types of peoplewith costume and accoutrement indicating their roles, as those images labeled‘‘caste’’ from Tamil Nadu do; they present miniature moments of do-ing andintimate engagements of concentration, of craft.

The depiction of a craft often does not emphasize the final product, thething produced. Many of the images of do-ing from this region show actions withno physical product—water-carrier [Figure 13], barber, cloth-seller—these subjectmatters, unlike spinning, weaving, or making pots, do not lead to the productionof any particular output. They use objects, distribute things, remove things, butdo not produce. The focus on craft in these paintings, and in all of these actionimages from the Gangetic plain, lies in craft as do-ing, rather than craft as mak-ing. The mixture of subjects that produce things and those that do not again rein-forces a reading of these works as gerundic. They depict crafting, doing, not craftand do-er.12

The temporal rhythms of action extend beyond the individual image aswell, for these paintings were collected and circulated in what Mildred andWilliam Archer, following their early-20th-century informants, describe asfirqa sets [Archer 1947: 25; Archer and Archer 1955: 29; R. M. Brown 2010:29–30; Purohit 1988, I: 409]. Firqa or firka in Urdu or Hindi means a com-munity or sect; the term also designates an administrative unit that overseesseveral villages in a region.13 A firqa, then, comprises a collection of smallerentities, a community made up of distinct pieces: an appropriate metaphorfor these groups of images. The pictures in sets were related, just as neighbor-ing villages might be related, but they also brought together distinct entitiesthat did not lose their particularity in the act of grouping. That these workscirculated in this way adds a further movement to them: the movement oflooking at these works in series, of physically lifting and shifting the piecesof paper, and of connecting the images with the eye.

The Royal Ontario Museum paintings constitute a firqa set that gathers togethervarious types of doing, including five images that operate collectively and sequen-tially to present the production of cloth. Even the butcher and the barber paintingsshow people in action. This sort of scene was extremely common in paintings andprints from the first half of the 19th century across northern India, whether animage of threshing [Figure 1], a carpenter labeled with name and caste from theFraser album [Figure 4; Archer and Falk 1989: pl. 92, 108], or the woman spinningfrom the Wellesley album [Figure 11]. Expansions and elaborations of thesesingle-figure scenes further underscore action and doing. A repeated iconographydepicting bankers receiving news from a dak- or postal-runner presents a scene offour men doing various activities related to banking and bookkeeping [Figure 14].Another painting in Harvard’s collection (with a similar example at the Victoriaand Albert Museum) depicts in a continuous narrative format the activity of afamous sheep-eater, with labels for each of the seven stages, moving from rightto left [Figure 15; Losty 1988].

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The action embodied in the single-person and group paintings—whethersingle people shown doing things in continuous narration or depicting a processlike cloth production across a set of images—direct one’s attention to the

Figure 14 Bankers receive news from a dak runner. Artist unknown, ca. 1850. (HarvardArt Museums=Arthur M. Sackler Museum, The Stuart Cary Welch Collection, Gift of EdithI. Welch in memory of Stuart Cary Welch, 2009.202.219; Photo: Imaging Department # Presidentand Fellows of Harvard College; color figure available online)

Figure 15 ‘‘Suza Geer Berah Geer, the Famous Sheep Eater.’’ Artist unknown, ca. 1785–90.(Harvard Art Museums=Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Stuart Cary Welch Collection, Gift of EdithI. Welch in memory of Stuart Cary Welch, 2009.202.226; Photo: Imaging Department # Presidentand Fellows of Harvard College; color figure available online)

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temporal dimension of these works, sometimes in terms of the imagined narra-tive they illustrate and at other times in terms of repeated, rhythmic actions oftenoccurring in a sequence. By taking seriously the time depicted, emphasizing itover a reading that sees the person as a typologized object, the analysis turnsfrom the body to what that body does, often in concert with simple machinesor tools. And as a result, these images cease to operate as static representativesof types, enabling them to take a more central role in colonial India’s relationsof power and the production of multiple polyrhythms of modern time.

CONSUMING ACTIONS

A central aspect of these artworks’ ‘‘modernity’’ lies in their patterns of circulationand movement as objects. Distinct from contemporary projects commissioned byindividuals, whether European or from the subcontinent, these paintings of actionfrom the Gangetic plain entered the marketplace through artists’ efforts to meet theneeds of travelers and visitors. This commercial frame exists within and helpsto produce a complex, overlapping set of desires, both erotic and nostalgic. Andcommerce directs attention back to the paintings’ mode of consumption—whatused to be understood as the Company element in Company Painting. Insteadof investigating the consum-er, however, I suggest a focus on the act and processof consum-ing. For only such an engagement gives the active and temporally fluidimagery involved its due.

Several major studies of popular prints and photography have redirectedscholarly attention away from a linear, two-way relation between patrons orconsumers and artists, and toward an economy of circulating images and objects.Kajri Jain’s work has located an economy of images within the context of popularcalendar prints [2007]. She follows the intertwined flows between producer andpurchaser, artist and production company, worshipper, customer and businessowner, to examine the intersections of seemingly unrelated worlds that theseimages bring together. Jain also works against the scholarly deployment ofimages as evidentiary objects, merely representing a historical time or politicalmoment. Instead she reads them as active objects in the on-going reshaping ofpolitics. Her subject, popular prints, are mechanically reproduced works thatcirculate beginning in the late 19th century alongside reproducible photographs.Jain’s work follows Elizabeth Edwards, whose analysis of the circulation of thephotograph takes seriously its physical form and its ability to literally slip in betweensheets of paper in a letter, which enables it to communicate across great distancesbut also to become unmoored from any textual explication of its content [2001].14

The paintings I examine here, while not created through technologies of mechan-ical reproduction, do share a pattern of circulation with both print andphotography. These paintings overlap temporally with the introduction of photo-graphy on the subcontinent and coexist with widespread use of a range of printtechnologies, from woodblock to lithograph and chromolithograph. One can seethis overlap even in the images themselves, whether in paintings based on photo-graphs and painted photographs [Dewan and Zotova 2012], or in paintings thatemploy an aesthetic of cross-hatching often found in etchings. As early as 1825

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the city of Patna, in Bihar, had one of the first two lithographic presses on thesubcontinent and supported an amateur lithographic society of artists, includingCompany officers, their female relatives and local painters [Losty 1989]. Theintertwined community of artists, trained in a wide range of aesthetic modes, gene-rated syntheses, collaborations and experimentations within this group of amateurand professional artists [De Almeida and Gilpin 2005: 257–264; Losty 1995].

One expects stylistic overlaps between print, photography and painting, usuallyin the direction of photography or printed media emulating painting. Butthe relationship goes both ways: paintings also emulate the mass-reproductionelement of print and photographic media. Of course paintings cannot be mechani-cally mass-reproduced but must be made one by one. However, in the first half ofthe 19th century compositions repeat with astounding consistency throughout theGangetic plain, across painting schools from Murshidabad and Calcutta in the eastto Delhi in the west. While one can identify different regional schools through thestyle of the painting, the iconography, pose and composition repeat with a greatdeal of precision; even firqa sets themselves repeat. Similar sets can be found indifferent places and times that reproduce the same iconography in only slightlydifferent combinations.15

In addition to sharing iconography, pose and composition, similaritiesbetween print, photography and painting extended to marketing and the waythat images were sold. Like later photographic studios, painters and theirfamilies produced sets for particular markets, offering a stock of images to sellto Europeans, Indians or others. Painters pursued particular commissions andproduced images ‘‘on spec.,’’ running their studios as family businesses[Archer and Archer 1955: 31]. In terms of both the repetition of iconographyand the way these images entered the marketplace, the border betweenprintmaking and painting in the early 19th century was therefore fairly porousin northern India.16

Once acquired, particularly by Europeans, how did these images circulate?As Saloni Mathur has argued with regard to postcards, the gender andposition of those who consumed them played a central role in their move-ments and meanings as postcards traveled from India back to the metropoleand into the archives of museums and libraries [2007]. The designation ‘‘Com-pany Painting’’ indicates that officers, soldiers and European employees pur-chased these works, but beginning in the 1820s Europeans in India includedmany hundreds of women. And even when purchased by men initially, asthe Lucknow ‘‘Costumes’’ volume demonstrates, albums of Company paint-ings and firqa sets did not simply circulate in the hands of men. The RoyalOntario Museum set was brought back from India in the 1830s by Julia Ferry-man, who kept an album of sketches of her own alongside paintings pur-chased from Indian artists. (Unfortunately the donation to the Royal OntarioMuseum did not include Ferryman’s sketchbook or diary.) These paintingsoften supplemented amateur sketches made by Europeans visiting India.Consumers of these paintings collected them in India as they traveled, so thatthe images served as mementos of experiences and sparks for conversation inthe drawing-rooms of the British elite. These paintings became part oflarger discursive frameworks, circulating alongside texts written in diaries,

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epistolary exchanges between colony and metropole, parlor discussions of lifein India, and other sketches and paintings done by the collectors themselves.Both women and men collected these paintings from various cities along theGangetic plain, discussed them, and received albums and sets of them as gifts.In this way, these works served to extend the experience of travel and living inthe subcontinent. The circulation of these paintings then adds several additionaldurations to the complex rhythm depicted in the works themselves.

DURATION, REPETITION, AND POLYRHYTHMIC COLONIAL TEMPORALITY

In consuming these paintings, collectors mark a desire for them as objects andimages, a desire often understood as nostalgia for a time long past in Europebut still extant in India.17 The collector gathers these images together as a wayof freezing, archiving and preserving a moment already past—a mode of salvageethnography. But like the ethnographic reading of the images, this readingpresumes a dualism and a distinction that, on closer examination, unravels.The desire these works evoke involves an embrace of multiple durations,repetitions and relations to time. Rather than making action static, the circulationand viewing of these paintings reinforces the motion depicted in their subjectmatter; this points away from an erotic or exotic objectification to an activeengagement and recalling of experience.18 And these paintings participate ina larger desire to seek out analog, less mechanical, modes of observing theworld. The decades around 1800 saw the rise of a range of artificial lenses andmanipulations of seeing, from the stereoscope to the kaleidoscope. Rather thaninstill a desire for more technological seeing, these technologies instead evokeda need to re-humanize seeing and observation of the world [Crary 1990]. Thusthe paintings of action from India, in their intimacy and their portability, createa space of viewer-centered, moveable contemplation, pursued in a range oftemporal modes, both quickly and in leisure.

In shifting the focus from the person (the do-er) in the paintings to the action(the do-ing), the desire figured in these paintings also shifts, from desire directedtoward an object to that directed to an action, an experience or a rememberedperformance—not a static thing but a span of time, a duration. And in turningaway from a distancing nostalgic relation to an object toward a re-experiencingof action and performance, these paintings point the way to a new kind oftheorization of colonial time. How do these works exhibit overlapping modesof time?

First, the paintings themselves depict an action of some relatively smallduration, one repeated over and over and also across the agricultural or yearlycalendar. The figures repeatedly turn the wheel, brush the warp, cut the meat,prepare the grinding-stone, carry the water. Sometimes in groups, they carryout multiple activities together, activities whose duration can be interrupted bya messenger or by a new customer arriving. The polyrhythm of these paintingsalso brings into starker relief the temporality of the colonial officer and hisassociates. Because of class difference this officer and friends probably neverexperienced such a rhythmic repetition of labor and time themselves, but they

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nevertheless mourn the loss of an idealized, imagined period of a simpler lifenow past. Thus the initial collectors of these images, whether elite Indiansor Europeans, may not have seen these activities in person themselves; andsubsequent viewers experience these images one step removed, and also mayhave had no first-hand encounter with the activities depicted. Daily rhythms inIndia might emulate some of these painted temporalities in repeated rituals,the movement of servants, and the regulated events of polite colonial society.Their temporality in London, Manchester or Glasgow involves the pace of thenew industrial revolution, the emergence of clocks to regulate the day, thecirculation of goods separate from labor and those who do things. To thesetemporalities we can add the time involved in sending letters from India toBritain, the delay in receiving news of events and new fashions from Calcuttaand London, the long, boring six-month passage on a ship across the world,and the difficult, extended travel on rivers through the subcontinent.

Second, the short durations depicted in these paintings are overlaid with theway they circulate as paper objects. Women such as Julia Ferryman purchasedthese paintings and then proceeded to do things with them: touching, examining,sharing these paintings, in her case not in an album but as objects in a set. Thesepaintings from the Gangetic plain do not appear bound in albums but insteadmove more freely as paper objects, a characteristic that adds to their mobile,active participation in the lives of those who made and circulated them. Theobject incorporates the temporal distance between her encounter with the painterthat sold these to her, her travels along the Ganges, her drawing-room backhome—the distance of memory, recollection and travel. These works, in present-ing ‘‘doing,’’ also stimulate a series of other actions: looking, consuming,purchasing, selling, collecting, traveling, remembering.

The repeated actions shown in these images, from spinning to carrying water,mark a sequence of durations that repeat in a manner akin to storytelling: eachiteration differs slightly from the one before, without losing the central kernelof the overlaid, interlocking rhythm. If one stops there, a reading of these imagesas representing a foil for the acceleration of the modern world might fit. But thecirculatory, collecting and viewing practices associated with these objects refusethat simple reading. The intimacy and miniaturization of these actions enabledthem to travel, to conjure memory, to freeze time but also to let it operate againin a new context—whether that context be the drawing-room, the museum or thearchive. Multiple repeated durations, small accelerations and decelerations,and the shifting viscosities of history and memory coalesce in these sets of paint-ings. This polyrhythm of colonial time belies the idea of acceleration as thecentral driving-force for the 19th century. Instead these paintings situate thelayered yet integrated temporalities of the colonial as the norm, both for the early19th century and continuing into the late 19th, even when ‘‘new’’ technologies ofphotography, chromolithography, the telegraph and the railway seductivelyelicit a reading of presumptive acceleration.

Paintings of a barber cutting hair or a spinner spinning yarn inject theirrhythms into the lives of Europeans traveling, living, and working in India.The paintings, like those who paint and sell them and those who buy and collectthem, operate as part of a growing capitalist, colonially driven economy. These

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paintings participate in a historical moment of upheaval, change and overwhelm-ing anxiety: the rise of the industrial revolution, the consolidation of colonialeconomic interests in the subcontinent, and the temporal disjunctures that attendboth. An impoverished reading would place these works in a larger genealogy ofdepictions of India as ‘‘behind’’ or ‘‘backward,’’ from the 17th- and 18th-centuryassociations of India with Biblical times, through to the later-19th-centuryconsolidation of India as pre-modern and pre-industrial. But these paintingsmark a particular historical moment of transition, confusion, anxiety and fluidity,one in which what I call polyrhythmic colonial temporality emerges, to includethe rhythm of the spinning-wheel and the nostalgic longing for a pre-industriallife. And then, as the paintings circulate in sets, they produce another pull oftemporal distance: the reminder, as one looks again at the album while sittingin London, of experiences not represented in the painting, the diary or thesketchbook. These rhythms together produce the temporal, physical and experi-ential asymmetries that underlie what it means to inhabit colonial and thereforemodern time.

Rather than consider these as merely hybrid images at the intersection ofcolonized and colonizer, or as images that objectify human actors in the serviceof ethnographic typologization, these paintings instead participate in theproduction of the layered temporalities and durations experienced by all thoseexperiencing the formation of modernity, the multiplicity of time, and the poly-rhythm of human action.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to audiences at the 2011 College Art Association meeting, and to Molly Aitken for including me in the

panel on South Asian painting there. This article evolved from an extremely productive dialog with a range of

readers who helped to shape the final product at all stages. I thank in particular Jane Bennett, Jennifer Culbert,

Katrin Paul, Deborah Hutton, Melia Belli, Sam Chambers, Sanchita Balachandran, Rebecca Hall, Elizabeth Rodini,

Hilary Snow and Paul Hockings. I received support in this project from the Royal Ontario Museum (and Deepali

Dewan), as well as the staff at the British Library and the National Art Library in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Funding from the British Academy enabled much of the archival research.

NOTES

1. Paul Virilio is the most oft-cited theorist on acceleration and the role of technologyfor the contemporary world as well as for modernity [(1977) 1986]. Marc Auge’s devel-opment of an understanding of supermodernity acknowledges the role of colonialismas a key element of acceleration [1999]. Charlie Gere’s Derridean reading of timehelpfully refocuses the discussion on iteration and performance and away from accel-eration [2006]. Other scholars have moved past acceleration to examine other modes oftemporality, including most prominently untimeliness [W. Brown 2005; Chambers2003, 2011; Cheah and Guerlac eds. 2009; Connolly 2002]. Here I build on thesechallenges to acceleration that address the ontological questions related to temporality,by reminding us of the centrality of colonial relations of power as well as injecting anawareness of media not traditionally associated with the modern, like painting.

2. Both Carnatic and Hindustani music employ polyrhythms, and both have developedelaborate counting systems to help remember and maintain these complex rhythms.

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Balinese gamelan music employs interlocking rhythms called kotekan. West Africanmusic has long informed a wide range of global traditions, including Cuban, SouthAmerican and African-American rhythms. Dave Brubeck, drawing on African andMiddle Eastern traditions, as well as his own experimentation, was among the leadersin incorporating polyrhythms (along with polytempo and polytonal elements) intoAmerican jazz in the mid-20th century. Steve Reich is the best known of the so-calledminimalist composers to work with polyrhythms.

3. I build on the work of both Chakrabarty [2000] and Timothy Mitchell [2000] in rethink-ing the center–periphery relation and marking the centrality of colonial spaces andtechnologies of power in the production of modernity. Edward Said called for contra-puntal readings of histories, texts and events in order to demonstrate the intimacy ofconnection across moments formerly seen as separate (e.g., Indian darbars and Britishcoronations; [1994]). Instead, an understanding of polyrhythms anchors my reading ofthe visual culture of the Gangetic plain in the early 19th century, producing a sharedtemporality that maintains distinction and difference but slips out of dualism towardaction and participation.

4. The interest in colonial-era visual culture spread in conjunction with the rise ofnostalgia for colonialism in the 1980s in both the United Kingdom and North America.In addition to the extensive documentation of the collections at the British Library andthe Victoria and Albert Museum, pursued by Mildred Archer and her variousco-authors (see References), see also Pal and Dehejia [1986]; Bayly [1990].

5. Hook-swinging, a devotional ritual formerly practiced in many places in the sub-continent, often featured in images from this period and is described in colonial textswithin the same framework as fire-walking, reclining on beds of nails, or self-flagellation [Oddie 1986, 1995; Schroder 2012]. Eating raw sheep was not common,either in practice or in imagery, but circulated in images by both Indian and Britishartists executed around the turn of the 19th century. Losty [1988] traces the sourcesfor the imagery of the sheep-eater.

6. This journal, which was produced entirely by the Madras Literary Society, amateurswho were otherwise doctors, lawyers, military officers, churchmen or administrativeofficials (all male), came out in Madras during 1833–51, 1856–61, 1864–66, and1878–94. Calcutta, Bombay and Colombo had similar scholarly journals.

7. Mildred Archer (1911–2005) was the pre-eminent scholar of colonial-era painting, bothIndian and British. She catalogued and published the paintings in the India OfficeLibrary, now part of the British Library. Her efforts mean that both the BritishLibrary’s collection and the Victoria and Albert’s collection of colonial painting havebeen extensively catalogued: her work defines the field.

8. Cabinets of curiosities and the use of the term curiosity as a descriptor for certain kindsof objects, particularly those grouped together by collectors as curiosities, date to thelate 16th century in Europe. See Hooper-Greenhill [1992] for more on the historicalgenealogy of this term and practices of display related to it. Archer’s meta-indexesrecall the juxtapositions in Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia as famously examined byFoucault [1970].

9. These paintings of paired ‘‘castes’’ echo earlier efforts to catalog the peoples of Centraland South America for the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires in the 18thcentury, called casta paintings, although the differences between the two groups arequite significant. Casta paintings came from the 16th- and 17th-century racializationof intermixed groups in Latin America. Castas were initially racially intermixedpeople, and in the 16th century different designations arose to distinguish amongthe various mixtures: mestizo (Spanish-Indian), mulatto (Spanish-Black), zambo orzambaigo (Black-Indian). Taxonomies were developed to include up to 20 different

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types. These all relate to Spanish or white blood and an assessment of the percentageof ethnic mixture based on a privileging of European blood. While Anglo-, French- andPortuguese-Indians of mixed ethnicity existed in South Asia, the percentage remainedsmall, and the necessity to articulate the amount of whiteness in various populationswas not the impetus behind the South Asian ‘‘caste’’ paintings. For more on castapainting, see Carrera [2003]; Katzew [2004]; Katzew et al. [1996].

10. Zanana is a term used in South Asia to refer to the most private area of a home,which also coincides with where women would spend most of their time. The term(in various transliterations) is used across sectarian affiliation.

11. These images follow a well-worn pattern of individual portraiture by tapping intoEuropean and South Asian precedents in pose and iconography, and include imageryof eroticized bodies also consonant with the association of the erotic with the ‘‘Orient.’’As a result these paintings present an image of ‘‘India,’’ but rather than typologizecaste or ethnicity for the viewer they focus on a particular aesthetic of static, controlledimages, easy to ingest, exotic and titillating. These paintings, placed in the album andtaken together, make the bodies static and flatten them into objects for viewing,and they certainly take part in a 19th-century Orientalizing mode; but this does notparticipate in a larger epistemological project to know and categorize India.These paintings are comparable to later photos and postcards in their production ofan erotic Orientalizing viewing relation. See Alloula [1986]; Mathur [2007]; Carotenuto[2010].

12. Like the emphasis on action that spinning represented for Gandhi in his appropriationof it for the anticolonial movement in the early 20th century, the emphasis on craft-as-action in the early 19th century underwrites appropriations by activists in the later 19thcentury. Rather than static images representing ethnographic types, these are insteadimages of doing that could be reworked into the image of the Indian craftsmanhard at work later on in that century; Dewan [2004]; McGowan [2009]; R. M. Brown[2010].

13. Several firqas comprise a taluka, and their administrators—talukdars—controlled theland and tax revenues for large regions, reporting during this period to the East IndiaCompany.

14. Saloni Mathur’s work on postcards adds an additional commercial and object-orientedunderstanding of the circulation of images in the late 19th and early 20th centuries[2007].

15. New research on the movements of artists and paintings among courts in westernIndia has helped to clarify the mechanics of the transfer of images, both from onegeneration to the next as well as among artists and courts; Aitken [2010].

16. New research on Indian photography indicates that her photographers establishedthemselves as artists as a central part of their commercial enterprises, and that thedebates in France and elsewhere as to whether photography was art did not havemuch salience in the subcontinent. This suggests another continuity between thestudios of early-19th-century painters and those of later-19th-century photographers;see Hutton [forthcoming].

17. See Fabian’s analysis of this temporal difference within the context of anthropologicalmethodologies [1983].

18. Certainly some painting from this period taps into modes of representation thatresonate with the erotic, as in the Lucknow ‘‘Costumes’’ album. But these worksspecifically pose figures as portraits or as bodies and draped forms to be enjoyedvisually. The ‘‘do-ing’’ paintings operate differently. For more on erotic bodies andthe circulation of postcard images, see Mathur [2007].

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