Growing Together: The East India Company’s Fusion Art
INDIA HAD BEEN COLONISED earlier than southern Africa, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century its resources of timber and potential food and medicinal plants had barely been surveyed, let alone brought into the service of Europe’s empires. It had one other boon not common elsewhere in the tropics: an educated workforce with a written culture. One East India Company manager became quite breathless when he contemplated the potential of this untapped resource: ‘What a vast field lies open to the botanist in that boundless country. How many unemployed individuals are there whose leisure hours might be agreeably, usefully and profitably employed in this pursuit! … Great God, how wonderful, how manifold are Thy works!’ This vision of the subcontinent’s unemployed finding job satisfaction and possibly salvation in Flora’s arms wasn’t entirely typical of the East India Company’s mission. It had arrived in India in the early seventeenth century, and acquired a degree of power remarkable for what was notionally a purely commercial concern. It had a virtual monopoly on the exploitation of the country’s economic resources, and in many regions acted as a de facto government. Where it was in its own interest, it suppressed or appropriated key local industries.
But local botanical knowledge was another matter. The Company calculated that the Indian flora almost certainly contained plants of unrealised economic importance, and that local plant lore – and indigenous scientific knowledge – might be a short cut to discovering these. It began methodical survey work in the middle of the eighteenth century, and in 1787 set up a botanic garden in Calcutta. The first superintendent, Lt Col. Robert Kyd, was hard-headed but diplomatic about the Company’s role. He saw the garden’s function as ‘not for the purpose of collecting rare plants as things of curiosity or furnishing articles for the gratification of luxury, but for establishing a stock for disseminating such articles as may prove beneficial to the inhabitants as well as the natives of Great Britain, and which ultimately may tend to the extension of the national commerce and riches’.
Meanwhile, in the unexplored south-east coastal region known as Coromandel, a young Scots physician and botanist had already begun an impressive documentation of the region’s useful plants. William Roxburgh had joined the Company as a surgeon in 1776, but spent much of his time studying local plants. By 1789 he had abandoned medicine, and taken up the post of Company botanist for the region around Madras. With the job he also acquired a project started by his predecessor, Patrick Russell. Russell had dreamed of compiling an economic flora for Coromandel, and his outline had received the all-important approval of Joseph Banks. Roxburgh picked up the threads of the proposed book on Russell’s retirement, with a good proportion of the material already prepared. He had his own field notes and a portfolio of illustrations by an Indian artist, whom he’d kept ‘constantly employed in drawing plants, which he accurately described, and added such remarks on their uses as he had learned from experience or collected from the natives’.
Roxburgh eventually accumulated more than 2,500 paintings for the Company, of which Joseph Banks picked 300 for publication. They were published in twelve parts between 1795 and 1820 as Plants of the Coast of Coromandel, which remains one of the most extraordinary collections of flower paintings to have been published in Britain. Banks thought it was the finest Indian flora to have appeared in Europe. What makes the illustrations exceptional is their quality as cultural hybrids. The Company would have preferred accurate and unornamented field-guide illustrations, a crib for collectors and prospective cultivators. What they got was an exotic fusion of European precision and Mughal stylisation that revelled in the pure patterning of plants.
Sappan, painted by an unknown Indian artist for the East India Company and published in William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel, 1795.
There was a long tradition of flower painting in Mughal culture, chiefly of delicate miniatures built up by layer upon layer of brilliant body colour. The paintings were finished by the use of very fine brushes, which were drawn across the paint to add texture and surface detail. In this way it was possible to suggest the lustre of petals or the leatheriness of leaves. By modern standards traditional Mughal flower paintings are exquisitely detailed and highly successful at catching the jizz of a plant – not by impressionism so much as a kind of hyper-realism. But the East India Company regarded them, unmodified, as too obviously decorative. They lacked the literalism and austere clarity of line that had become customary in European plant illustration, and which were regarded as ‘proper’ for scientific representation. Nor did they employ techniques – the use of perspective, for example – which in the West were regarded as essential for highlighting a plant’s characteristic features, and providing guides to reliable identification.
So, as part of the process that led eventually to the chimerical style of Coromandel, Company officials had begun training Indian artists in European techniques. One of the models offered was James Sowerby’s work for the Flora Londinensis, with its fastidious attention to detail and to all the plants’ internal and external structures. They introduced the local painters to the subtleties of watercolour, and suggested how their own bright pigments might be muted for more restrained British eyes. The identity of the Indian artists isn’t known, except that they were mostly Hindus, and may have included artists such as Haludan, Vishnu Prasad and Gurudayal, who are known to have worked for the East India Company. They seemed happy to go along with this new approach: painting for the Company was at least regular work, even if they were paid a pittance. But though they succeeded in achieving the kind of accuracy demanded by the Company, the habits and traditions of their culture couldn’t easily be suppressed, and the house style that evolved – which came to be called ‘Company Art’ – is uniquely cross-cultural. On the surface the paintings are neat, comprehensible, even diagrammatic where necessary. But working inside these conventions, and without ever falsifying the plant’s detailed identity, the painters made compositions, relishing the contrast of colours and shapes, looking for suggestions of order, portraying an intriguing surface detail so sharply it looks as if it has been etched. They were, unconsciously, following a long and global tradition here, stretching from the late Palaeolithic, through the lush ornamentation of Gothic carving in Europe and Chinese landscape painting, where the inventiveness and caprice of plant growth are celebrated.
The water chestnuts, Trapa spp., are a family of floating aquatic plants whose tuberous roots, rich in starch and fat, are a staple in Asian cooking and familiar in oriental dishes in the West. The eighteenth-century Hindu painter of Trapa ignores the all-important root, but is carried away by the floatiness of the leaves. Shaped like spades and edged with dark hatching, they are fanned out from the stem like a hand of cards. The lagerstroemias, or crape myrtles, are now popular garden shrubs, but they’re seen afresh in the Coromandel painting, where the artist has emphasised the cut-and-crimped paper appearance of the flowers, and elegantly arranged them as a chaplet round the shoots, though he’s rather awkwardly twisted one of the leaves round so that the underside is shown. A reluctance to be as literal minded as their teachers hoped was common. Shading, intended to give a sense of depth, sometimes appears on the wrong side, and backgrounds can be so intense that they overpower the main subject. The illustration of sappan (Caesalpina sappan, source of a valuable red dye), which positions the small yellow flowers against the ferny leaves, has the look of a piece of jazzily printed fabric, but hardly shows off the flowers to best advantage. Large leaves especially were apt to be painted in flat, unmediated greens, with an appealing eggshell finish but not much leafy realism. ‘Most abominable leaves for which Master painter shall be duly cut,’ reads a severe Company jotting on the back of one of the original pictures. Yet Maria Graham, sister of the Professor of Botany at Edinburgh, watched some of Roxburgh’s artists at work in 1810, and thought their paintings ‘the most beautiful and correct delineations of flowers I ever saw’.
The crape myrtle Lagerstroemia speciosa, another example of ‘Company art’ from Plants of the Coast of Coromandel.
The lasting impression these paintings give, beyond the inventiveness of their patterning and layout, is their sense of light and heat. Sometimes the lack of perspective and shadow seems odd to eyes conditioned by northern climates and landscapes, but the pictures have the feel of plants painted in the sunshine. This was a revelation to painters used to European gloom. When William Hodges, landscape painter on Cook’s second Pacific trip, travelled in India, it was the light which impressed him above all: ‘The clear, blue, cloudless sky, the polished white buildings, the bright sandy beach, and the dark green sea, present a combination totally new to the eye of an Englishman, just arrived from London, who accustomed to the sight of rolling masses of clouds floating in damp atmosphere, cannot but contemplate the difference with delight.’ Perhaps this was as important a legacy of colonial botanical art as the new species it brought into the northern consciousness – the suggestion of a different kind of biological energy. A similar process was to happen in Europe half a century later, when the dazzle of the Mediterranean flora helped give birth to modern art.