British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Lineages of Empire

Convened by Dr Duncan Kelly, University of Sheffield

Thursday 24 August 2006 to Friday 25 August 2006

ABSTRACT

Trafficking Inalienability: Art, sovereignty and the gift in South Asia, 1760-1820
Natasha Eaton

This paper aims to recuperate gifting practices from the meta-ethic of commodity by exploring the entanglement of Mughal and colonial regimes of inalienability. My intervention explores the agency of art as gift at the courts of Arcot, Hyderabad and Lucknow and the strategic techniques of resistance devised by princes against the imposition of colonial aesthetics.

Both Indian and British societies developed sophisticated gifting practices which would be difficult to reconcile in the colonial encounter. Mughal political culture emphasised the importance of wonders, rarities, jewels and robes of honour; British abuse of this regime of value and Parliamentary intervention against this taxonomy of presents forced the ‘resolution’ of a hybrid gift –the painted portrait. British governors sent European artists to those Indian courts coming under either direct/indirect Company rule -- but they did not offer their likenesses in return. The Company tried to annul or at least to mystify the British metropolitan portrait exchange-as-reciprocation, by forcing Indian rulers to pay for their own likenesses, to be sent to the Company as a species of tribute. But nawabs played the East India Company at its own game by using deferral of payment as a mode of resistance. And their display of colonial pictures –hung upside down, allowed to atrophy (in stark contrast with the careful preservation of Mughal manuscripts), or interspersed with their own likenesses, indicates nawabi refusal to be drawn into colonialism’s desired practices of inalienability.

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