In Sita Ram: Picturesque Views of India, the late Jeremiah P. Losty (1945–2021), emeritus curator of Visual Arts at the British Library, London, brought the Murshidabad artist Sita Ram into prominence.1 As a prolific researcher and curator, Losty created foundational scholarship on the arts of South Asia through his incisive research on the British Library's collections. Over the course of his long career Losty embarked on a program of acquisitions, adding to the substantive holdings of works commissioned by East India Company officials documenting their experience in India. His scholarship on the interaction between the East India Company and British and Indian artists relates to the overarching category of Company Painting, an art-historical framework that was solidified by his predecessor, Mildred Archer.2Sita Ram's contributions were first recognized in a 1974 Sotheby's auction of two albums entitled “Views by Seeta Ram,” and the folios were dispersed into various hands. The fuller context of the albums came to light in 1995 with the acquisition of remaining albums (numbered II–VIII and X) within a collection of drawings made for Francis Rawdon (1754–1826), the 2nd Earl of Moira who became the 1st Marquess of Hastings, the Governor-General of Bengal from 1813 to 1823. In that role, Hastings oversaw all affairs of the East India Company as it grew its administrative stronghold in India implementing an expansionist agenda through sustained military offensives. Hastings presided over a fractured political landscape, where the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II (r. 1806–1837) held only nominal authority and erstwhile Mughal provinces operated as self-governing semiautonomous entities; many had capitulated to the Company. By 1857 Mughal dynastic succession would come to an end, and the Company's authority would be subsumed by British crown rule in India. In the city of Murshidabad, the Mughal capital of Bengal, as in other newly controlled Company domains, artists looked for employment beyond the patronage of the local courts to Company officials and their families. Like other artists working in Mughal Murshidabad, Sita Ram would have experienced the transition from courtly patronage to Company employment unfolding in real time, who balanced private Company commissions and serviced a growing commercial demand for pictures. Many worked at Patna, a thriving commercial hub in the region that became a Company stronghold in the late eighteenth century.Losty identifies Sita Ram's exceptional skills in painting landscapes and natural-history subjects through the artist's works in ten albums made within a ten-year span during Hastings's tenure from 1813 to 1823, acquired by the British Library. We learn that eight of those albums were likely intended as illustrations to Hastings's private journal that recorded his seventeen-month journey between 1814 and 1815, from Calcutta to the Punjab, which he undertook with Lady Flora Hastings (Loudoun) and their children. The other two albums recorded a sporting tour in northern Bengal in 1817 and a convalescent tour in the Rajmahal Hills in the Bihar Province. Losty juxtaposes snippets of Hastings's journal with Sita Ram's drawings, illuminating the context of a particular site or subject that the artist illustrated. Hastings's endeavor involved traveling by boat along the Ganges to Cawnpore, and then by land to Oudh (Awadh) and Meerut toward Hardwar at the foot of the Himalayas, touching Delhi, then on to Agra and Fatehpur to the north, and ultimately sailing back on the waters of rivers that coalesced downstream toward Calcutta. The long journey was intended as a survey of the Company's newly acquired holdings and a quest to raise funds (promised in part by the Nawab of the affluent province of Awadh) in the region of a million pounds sterling for financing the Anglo-Nepal wars and other military campaigns. Hastings traveled in a large contingent of more than 200 boats that transported his aides and staff of East India Company officials, their families, support personnel, as well as 150 sepoys of a battalion of the Bengal Army—an extensive undertaking with an estimated 10,000 personnel. Sita Ram was a part of this vast itinerant camp and Lord and Lady Hastings's other tours, creating a pictorial document of their travels through stunning topographical views, detailed architectural drawings, sketches of flora and fauna, and genre scenes depicting people engaged in different occupations.In his journal, Hastings refers to Sita Ram as a “Bengal draftsman,” citing his work on architectural drawings and details. Losty surmises that the artist was an employee in the engineering or architectural establishment at Calcutta and trained as a botanical draftsman at the Sibpur Botanic Gardens under naturalists such as William Roxburgh (1751–1815) or at the menagerie of the governor-general's estate at Barrackpore before being brought into Hastings's orbit.3 Sita Ram's portrait (sourced from a private collection by Losty) shows him as a well-dressed elderly man, wearing white gathered trousers, a tunic, and an embroidered shawl. Seated at a table near a window looking out toward a sprawling settlement of Danish township in Serampore along the banks of the Hooghly River, he holds up a watercolor view of the same scene as a comparison. His instruments include a brush, a mixing plate, and a porcelain cup, and an oversized portfolio resting against the table. In another painting Sita Ram is identified crouching near a table on a flat rooftop of an opium godown at Patna, while delineating a riverside landscape. In this way we are introduced to the figure of the Indian painter at ease with plein-air sketching claiming authority over the genre of landscape painting. These vignettes, Losty suggests, show that Sita Ram had moved away from conventional painting practices that used mineral and earth pigments and a layered process of color application with a final finish achieved by burnishing the page. Instead, Sita Ram deployed a “rapid wash technique using watercolor or gouache where pigments are mixed with fillers such as Chinese white” that also suited British sensibilities. Further, Losty highlights Sita Ram's unique ability to filter the effect of sunlight in his paintings resulting in an “impressionistic approach to color” characterized by of a blurred brushwork and faceted color palette that created a ground awash with the effect of filtering sunlight through hues of green, blues, and yellow.Sita Ram: Picturesque Views of India places the artist within the circuit of experimentation that ensued as British and Indian artistic legacies of landscape painting came into contact in colonial Bengal. Losty suggests that Sita Ram's works bear a close interrelationship with the landscape paintings made by British artists such as William Hodges (1744–1797), who was in India from 1780 to 1783, and Thomas Daniell (1749–1840) and his nephew William Daniel (1769–1839), in India from 1786 until 1793. The travels of Hodges and the Daniells spawned numerous sketches and watercolors that the artists converted into aquatint prints and oil paintings upon their return to England, and many found their way into the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy in London.4 Thomas Daniell produced these aquatints in four sets, with an additional two, Antiquities of India, that were released in 1808; as a group they are referred to as Oriental Scenery (1795–1808). Antiquities of India and a set of aquatints based on the painter James Wales's drawings of Ellora Caves in Aurangabad were in circulation in India shortly after their production.5 Sita Ram's drawings were created within a few years after the release of the final installment of these aquatints. His works, while striking in their compositional parallels, reveal a careful calibration and modulation of long-standing artistic conventions. Losty draws attention to Sita Ram's “amazing grasp of the manner as well as the principals of the English Picturesque movement,” and suggests that the depiction of “ruined medieval buildings over intact classically inspired ones” or the artistic preference for manipulating the effect of irregularity to “impart ‘picturesqueness’ ” are elements of the picturesque style that are picked up in Sita Ram's works. In his extensive watercolor views, buildings often appeared incidental to topography.In Sita Ram's 1817 watercolor of the Firuz Minar, a late-fifteenth-century tower constructed by the ruler Saifuddin Firuz Shah at Gaur in the Malda district of Bengal, the artist frames the structure against a sprawling palas (Butea frondosa) tree, showcasing its distinctive bloom of bright salmon-pink flowers (Figure 1). Solitary trees are a powerful compositional device in Sita Ram's views, and often they are shown with an attention to detail seen in natural-history drawings.6 Here, the palas tree acts as an intermediary for the viewer's experience of the site; its exaggerated sinuous branches filter the scene, creating a dynamic frame for an otherwise passive view of the Minar. The composition oscillates between the composite landscape and the tree's botanical detailing, inviting close engagement. An earlier depiction of the Minar that was featured in Thomas Daniell's Antiquities of India was reprinted in a smaller monochromatic plate in a compilation produced by the artist in 1815. The plate shows the Minar positioned on a rising mound with its lower section amid a thicket of trees to create a dramatic contrast with its top half jutting into the sky, enhancing the Minar's sense of monumentality (Figure 2). In another version of the view sketched by Henry Creighton, engraved and printed by James Moffat and reproduced by Thomas Medland, the artist uses human scale to convey a similar impression of the height and grandiosity of the Minar (Figure 3). Sita Ram's version of the composition transforms the view significantly. It deploys a raised sightline, depressing the height of the tower to call greater attention to the surrounding landscape, adjacent to a lake that is partly visible in the distance. The palas tree in the foreground is visually balanced by a palm tree in the grounds; both trees cast jagged shadows. Figures, some recognizable as foot soldiers and attendants, provide a sense of scale. Elsewhere, Losty has commented on the “formal triangular design” of this view, referring to the placement of the tower in relation to the palas tree and the open landscape punctuated by a palm tree and itinerant figures. Using the effect of filtering sunlight, Sita Ram creates a brilliant chromatic groundscape bathed in hues of greens, blues, and yellows, rendered with uneven strokes that impart a sense of uneasy calm. According to Losty, Sita Ram's choice of Firuz Minar as his subject takes inspiration from Daniell, Creighton, and others, “yet its coloring is Indian.”7 Here we may extrapolate that the artist's attention to the experience of light and color, along with his ability to create a dynamic composition, highlights his experimental approach toward the British legacy of the picturesque that is used to achieve different effects.Losty's focus raises the larger question of the role of Indian artists who managed the dual concerns of (artistic) autonomy and (colonial) authority. As an aesthetic, the modality of the picturesque was both a pictorial tool and an overarching conceptual paradigm that informed painting and landscape design in Britain. As Romita Ray has noted, its instrumentalization in India refracted through the colonial and imperial ambitions of the British empire, often centered on the pragmatic, even violent ownership and control of land and the visualization of its peoples.8 Natasha Eaton in her assessment of William Hodges's works in India notes that the deployment of picturesque techniques of visualization that used the anatomy of ruins and decay were powerful modes of viewing history that British painters often cast within culturally deterministic modes of viewing Indian landscapes.9Sita Ram's drawings were made in the context of his patron Lord Hastings's administrative and military objectives for the East India Company. His extensive record of the Indian landscape when mapped onto his patron's colonial ambitions creates a stark picture of tightening Company control and militarism, the echoes of which reverberate beneath the surface of these landscape paintings. Many views show the arrival or departure of Company officials often seen riding on elephants with large retinues in tow. Some of these travels to the inner cities, villages, and settlements and older building sites would be followed by new laws of enclosure and taxation, as the Company sought to standardize its revenues from land-based agriculture and commerce.However, Sita Ram's landscapes resist a simplistic perception as a channel for translating a European vision of Indian life. The artist also utilized his training as a draftsman and natural-history painter to facilitate a new experience of the Indian landscape. His buildings are articulated using measured brushstrokes for achieving greater precision in the rendering of architectural details. Moreover, Sita Ram’s studies of animals and plants look back at older traditions of depicting natural life within Mughal album and manuscript paintings by seventeenth-century Mughal artists like Mansur (active 1590–1624) and Manohar (active 1580–1620).10 His stance, preferring to be seated than standing at a remove from the painting, allowed for a physical proximity that created moments of intimacy enacted in the purposeful brushstrokes that modulated depth and volume of color, achieving a blurred effect by muting the impact of the brush tip. The inclusion of local trees serves to personalize the landscape while, simultaneously, the rendering effect demands a constant refocusing of the eye. This clever technique disrupts the immersive, even lackadaisical experience of the picturesque. Instead, Sita Ram's compositions initiate a mode of active looking to create a more subjective view of the landscape.Losty's analysis plays a crucial part in raising Sita Ram as a major figure who experimented with an overarching Western pictorial legacy. This negotiation with Western conventions of landscape drawing, Losty suggests, is particularly notable during Sita Ram's unscheduled tour with Lady Hastings to Delhi and the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad, a Mughal capital since its founding in 1648 by Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), that was now the residence of the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II. Delhi was built successively over centuries in layers of fortifications of cities that had been built by former dynasties ruling the region. Losty notes that Hastings did not visit the Mughal palace and stayed on the city's outskirts laying camp at Shalimar Gardens, a Mughal garden site that was to become the establishment of the British Resident of Delhi, Charles Metcalfe (in office 1811–1819). Instead, it was Sita Ram who accompanied Lady Hastings on her tour of Delhi and the Red Fort. The artist's painted views of Mughal Delhi cover a wide range of subjects: he drew outlying fortifications of the fourteenth-century city Tughlaqabad; the twelfth–fourteenth-century mosque complex with its tower; the Qutb Minar in the southern suburbs of Mehrauli; the tomb and gardens of the Mughal emperor Humayun (d. 1556); as well as prominent structures within the Mughal enclave of Shahjahanabad among them the central avenue Chandni Chowk and the Jami Masjid, the large congregational mosque outside the palace precinct. Losty discusses that these sites in and around Delhi were often depicted missing key components, such as their outlying gardens or structures, or were displaced from their original locations. Sita Ram's view of Humayun's Mausoleum, for example, is placed within pastoral surroundings, foregoing its actual placement within an extensive charbagh, or quadripartite garden. Losty views these changes as the painter's “impressionistic” adjustments where he chose to deploy a “picturesque agenda” rather than a topographical one (18–19).These “Indian instincts” Losty surmises did not follow a prescribed path of painting of aligning with Western principles of perspective or composition. For instance, Losty points to Sita Ram's markedly different painting of the imperial palace precinct at the Red Fort, which is nonspecific in its depiction (Figure 4). In a view taken from the top of the Lahore Gate of the palace, looking over the Chatta or covered bazaar toward the Eastern stretch of the Jamuna riverfront, the “roof the Chattar Chowk and the vegetable gardens on either side of it are depicted accurately from the next courtyard on everything else is imaginary.” Losty notes that buildings in this quadrant could “charitably be interpreted as the Naqqar Khana, the Diwan-i Am, the Diwan-i Khass and the Moti Masjid” which are “depicted in the wrong position, with imaginary courtyard and towers.” Losty's views these stark omissions to the prominence of the qil'a-i mubarak, the auspicious fortress status as a “sacral place . . . as the seat of imperial authority . . . making it too sacred to be depicted accurately.” He attributes the absence of detail within the composition to the painter’s reverence for the Mughal emperor and his the of the palace precinct to who were often away from the Red Fort, view of the to painters with of and to The view is taken from the of a the Lahore Gate where two under a look out toward the palace a viewing that the palace structures in the inner Losty the of Indian painters to the and conceptual of landscape painting. The in the artistic of principles of perspective and of the of these conventions. Losty's prolific scholarship on Sita Ram the path to a more sustained analysis of the Indian painter's approach to landscape painting. Sita Ram's landscapes the perception of the picturesque as a aesthetic, as a mode of viewing the that was mapped on to the Indian landscape and by Indian artists who could only within its conventions. Instead, Sita Ram landscape painting as a genre that within it the modes of architectural and natural history painting, which were to the through which Indian life and landscape was and by the Company. the growing of the East India Indian artists such as Sita Ram and to the of a new to for his and and Natasha scholarship on the British in its imperial and colonial on practices of British in colonial India.
Yuthika Sharma (Wed,) studied this question.