The Art of Colonial Despotism: Portraits, Politics, and Empire in South India, 1750–1795

There is something dizzying in the contagion of despotic power, the delirious multiplication of the prince's will.

—Pierre Saint-Amand, Laws of Hostility

Introduction

This essay considers the agency of art in colonial diplomacy and its entanglement with the discourse of oriental despotism. It tries to navigate the complex processes of translation that enabled an anonymous satirist (see Figure 1) to shorthand so many Anglo-Indian practices through a few etched strokes. Central to my thesis is the conflictual status of despotism as both viable political discourse and its "demonic other," as well as its relationship with art—in particular, the image gift. Initiated at the court of Arcot in the 1760s by the governor of Madras, George Pigot, this practice would be adapted by his adversary Warren Hastings in his own foreign policy in the Carnatic and the Deccan. Pigot arranged for George III to gift his portrait to the ruler of Arcot in the hope that the intervention of the English sovereign would ease the tense political situation. But in the following decade Hastings reworked this diplomatic dialogue of princes into a foreign policy legitimized as an "Enlightened despotism."Against the grain of the condemnation or denial of oriental despotism as a formof government by European thinkers Montesquieu, Dow, Orme, and Anquetil Duperron, Hastings devised his own ideas of despotism to justify East India Company rule in India.

I propose that these artistic–political machinations involved mimicry in two senses: first, Hastings's construction of the past Mughal emperors' rule as a virtuous model to be emulated but which would also be undermined by his Anglicist expansionist agenda. Second, mimicry provided Indian princes with a means of resisting the ideological imperatives of colonial art. Just as Hastings emulated Lord Pigot's use of portraits as gifts to Indian princes, so indigenous rulers appeared to copy the colonialists by incorporating British art into their collections. This, however, entailed a subversive mimicry that was deeply critical of the ethic of Western collections.

Figure 1.

Knave of diamonds. Anonymous, 1786. Etching. Collection of author.

Mimicry has played an instrumental role in the reassessment of cross-cultural encounters. The transactions that took place between metropoles and colonies resulted not so much in the desired replication of metropolitan authority but rather in the production of undesirable resemblances. And these resemblances were partial, thus suggesting similarity and difference—a point reiterated by Homi Bhabha in his seminal essay on colonial mimicry: "the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy. . . . Mimicry is like camouflage, not a harmonization or repression of difference but a formof resemblance that differs/defends presence by displaying it in part metonymically."¹ Far from being merely a colonial form of subordination (Macaulay's desire for a "class of brown Englishmen"² to execute the daily chores of empire), mimicry opens up a space for resistance whereby imitation subverts that which is being represented and allows power to vacillate. This opens up questions of agency, which gets moved from a fixed point into a process of circulation. Through their display tactics, Indian princes devised precise, subtle, and devastating strategies to undermine what they perceived as the curious and dangerous deployment of art in Hastings's foreign policy. These nawabi (princely) techniques of acquiescence and resistance undermined the Company's efforts to manipulate art as a colonial civilizing technique.

The Phantasm of Oriental Despotism: European Revulsion and Desire for the East

In eighteenth-century Europe, political and artistic debates became increasingly focused on the specter of oriental despotism.³ Unfortunately, there remains a persistent tendency to fetishize its perceived negativity. Against the grain, I propose that we need a situated critique that demonstrates why oriental despotism acquired such "phantasmic" potency and how it became fundamental to the rhetoric and the practices of colonial government.⁴ Predating the Company's ambition to affect the artistic taste of Indian princes through its use of art as diplomatic gifts, a range of European monarchs emulated, appropriated, and assimilated the collecting...