An essay analysing the works of a Painter who stationed in India during the British Raj.

Student Name - Mrinmoy Das 

Roll Number 95/ENG 200037 

19 Feb, 2022 

The human imagination has always been fascinated to the exotic and inaccessible things. The inhabitants of faraway places especially India's colourful places had always been a faseinating site in the heart of western imagination. Nevertheless, Zoffany genuinely took an interest in Indian and Anglo-Indian society. There is a sense of letting the hair down about some of Zoffany's Indian paintings. 

In the late 18th, at this point, demand grew in the metropole for inforrmation about life in India. The British public first glimpsed the domestic interiors established by East India Company men and women in India through portraits. Zoffany traveled to India and created a number of fascinating paintings that document Georgian life in that farthest cormer of the Empire. This was not the later India of Kipling, and interaction between the English and Indians was much less rigid. Zoffany's painting Colonel Blair with his Family and an Indian Ayah (1786) shows in the background that wood being piled for Satti, an old ritual of India where a widow had to burn alive with her dead husband, and the other a religious ritual of appeasement called Charak Puja in which a man is dangled by a wire between the shoulder blades. Here we aquant with Zoffany's interest in Indian india with the three paintings on the back wall which fascinated and horrified westerners.

Now we should check one of Zoffany's dynamic painting, Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match (1784-86) where Zoffany shows interesting facts about Indian subjects under the veil of a cock- fight. Those cocks belong to Asaf-ud-Daula, the Nawab Wazir (governor) of Awadh and Colonel John Mordaunt, an employee of Britain's East India Company. This Match depicts the meeting between two different cultures at its most rumbustious, complete with extremely vulgar allusion. It depicts numerous narrative details intended to engage the viewer's attention: the dancing girls, musicians, a water seller, and an elephant in the distance. The artist referred to this painting as 'an Historical picture' (quoted in Webster 2011, p.509). The arrangement of intimate physical relationships and exchanged glances in this painting may include intimations of unconventional desires and relationships. And the arrangement of the Nawab's clothing around his groin has been interpreted as indicating that he was sexually aroused, which could have been intended to demean him. Here the distinction is made between a colonial man and a colonized man over their sexuality. It is an act of legitimisation of the virtue of an English man.

Some scholars like Ann McClintock have turned to Freudian psychology to investigate the connection between empire, race and sex. In her analysis of imperialism, McClintock draws from Freud's analysis of abjection, in which she says "abject is everything that the subject seeks to expunge in order to become social. All imperial administrative sort to demarket the boundaries between white and native in order to butteress the separation between rulers and the ruled. We find this eurocentric ideology in many of Zoffan's paintings that he might have brought from the metropole. 

Even the colour contrast and racial presentation was made by Zoffany in William Blair with his wife's painting. Maria, the little girl, who is standing next to a black native Indian girl. Where Maria is shown not only in fashionable clothing that follows London styles, but her pose is a favorite in elegant English portraiture. In the sharp contrast, the native balck girl on the right whose posture is more straightforward, and her clothes likely much more comfortable, too. In response to the nabob controversy of the 18th century in India, East India Company officials residents in India sought to justify their seemingly luxurious lifestyle.The archival literature records the nabobs indulgence in both hunting and animal fights. Zoffany painted The Tiger Hunt (1795), where we see the nabobs, the part of travelling empire, desired to position itself on the back of the elephant during hunting, India was the part of the tropics, and the tropics are signified by certain measures : heat, moisture and luxuriant vegetation ( Arnold, David. 35). 

While in India Zoffany developed his skill in painting landscapes genre that had particular importance in the milieu. Colonial travelogues had just come into vogue at the time when Zoffany painted his pictures here in India. Pictures of landscapes we all know now were known to fulfill both factual symbolic purposes. During the industrial revolution in Europe people were frustrated with smoke, unhygienic places, slums and ghettos areas in the metropole and with the deficiency of beautiful natural landscape. But Zoffany like other pioneer landscape artists such as William Hodges, Thomas and William Daniel, William Simpson and James Baillie Fraser travelled across India exploring and sketching remote regions. Their paintings brought the effect of nostalgia for the lost beautiful Eden or golden age of England. In this context we may include the term used by Coco Fusco that is 'performative primitivism'. The idea of "performative primitivism" is important because it is related with the idea of 'Othering'. Performative primitivism is a mode of aesthetic idealisation that either emulates or aspires to recreate primitive experience.

Another instance of Zoffany's one of the most important Indian experiences is shown in the portrayal of Colonial Polier with His Friends. The setting is apparently Colonel Polier's house in Lucknow. Zoffany shows himself in the exact center of this picture. Yet he is an isolated figure: pinned between the table and the canvas on the easel. The painting on which he shows himself at work depicts three Hindu ascetics beneath a banyan tree.Zoffany's head is juxtaposed with the female nude, whose austere treatment is far different from that of a radiant Venus or one of the Three Graces. 

In some ways Zoffany bears witness to the events around him and in so doing reveals an awareness of matters we now known as orientalism. And the Oriental other is transformed into a fetishized object in the mind of the colonial. For European travellers travel was not a solitary confrontation with nature. Zoffany also depicts his exotic retinue in his painting of Sir Elijah and Lady Impey and their three children. The episode offered Zoffany the chance to depict the exotic retinue around the Impey family, comprising musicians arranged in line in the background, the household servants, one holding up a silver dish behind Sir Elijah, and the native nannies or ayahs seated on the ground in front of the musicians, one holding the third son on her lap.

Works Cited :-

1. Zoffany, Johann."Colonel Blair with his family and an Indian Ayah." 1810, The Tate Gallery, London. 

2. Zoffany, Johann. " Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match ." 1784-86, Lucknow and Calcutta Mezzotint Engraving, 1792. 

3. Zoffany, Johann. "The Tiger Hunt ." 1795. Calcutta. 

4.Arnold, David. "The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze." University of Washington Press. 2005.