British Explorers and Orientalists in India

For a generation brought up on Edward Said’s writings on Orientalism, it may come as a surprise that it was British Orientalists who rediscovered India’s history and artistic heritage and made it accessible to all. The Palestinian-American Said knew little about India or else he might have recognised the cultural curiosity that inspired thousands of Britons to explore India’s past.

The ‘colonial gaze’, which Said’s followers dismiss as colonial appropriation, took the form of paintings and engravings by artists such as Thomas Daniel and William Hodges, long before Britain acquired any imperial ambitions in India.

Then there was Sir William Jones, the polymath who contributed more than any other individual to India’s national renaissance. Alongside his day job as a judge in Calcutta (now Kolkata), the East India Company’s capital, Jones studied and mastered Sanskrit, translated its classic texts and used the language to unlock the glories of India’s long-forgotten Hindu and Buddhist past.

Jones found Sanskrit ‘more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either. I am in love with the gopis, charmed with Krishna and an enthusiastic admirer of Rama. Arjun, Bhima and the warriors of the Mahabharata appear greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad’.

Unlike ancient Greece and Rome, India’s classical past had left behind no written histories, so it had to be reconstructed from lost pavilions and buried treasure. In 1784, with the active patronage of the first British Governor-General, Warren Hastings, Jones founded the Asiatic Society to take on this giant task. It became the beacon for a huge volunteer army of amateur antiquarians across the subcontinent, enthusiastic British civil and military officers, who scoured the mofussil (those regions beyond the East India Company’s control) for ruins and artefacts, wrote learned articles about them and sent their findings to be collated and studied in the Presidency cities: Calcutta (now Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) and Madras (Chennai).

When Jones returned to England a decade later, his health broken by overwork, the Asiatic was taken over by his protégé, James Prinsep, another polymath, who worked at the East India Company’s mint in Benares (Varanasi, in Uttar Pradhesh). Prinsep’s labours produced the biggest breakthrough in Indian historiography, the deciphering of the long-forgotten Brahmi script and, through it, the discovery of the Mauryan empire, which had united the subcontinent in the third century BC.

Prinsep and pin-men

The task began with the mystery of enormous, polished granite pillars, the heaviest weighing as much as 40 tons, which had been popping up all over northern India, inscribed with what looked like pin-men. The most notable is a pillar unearthed in Bihar in north-east India, with its triple-lion capital, now the emblem of the government of India.

Prinsep, aided by Britons based in places as diverse as Nepal, Punjab, Rajasthan and Bihar, spent many years painstakingly transcribing hundreds of coins and inscriptions and collating them with those on the pillars, before he finally broke the code with the Sanskrit word danam (which roughly translates as ‘gift’ or ‘offering’) and discovered the Brahmi script, from which Devanagari had evolved.

The pin-men were found to be the edicts of the Emperor Ashoka, now identified as the grandson of the same Chandragupta Maurya, whom Jones had discovered and dated. Prinsep announced his discoveries in a paper to the Asiatic, then suffered a physical and mental breakdown brought on by overwork. He had to be shipped home to England in 1838, where he died soon after.

The Ashokan edicts announced the emperor’s conversion to Buddhism; but little was yet known about the religion and the man who had founded it. There were rumours that he had been Egyptian, or perhaps even Ethiopian. The discovery of the Buddha’s Indian origins was also made by British explorers. In the late 1790s a British naturalist studying Buddhism in Burma heard reports that the Buddha was a Bihari, from north-east India. He explored Bihar a decade later and discovered the Bodh Gaya Buddhist ruins. He found Hindu Brahmins using the former Buddhist temple; but they told stories of being visited by strange-looking pilgrims from faraway lands, who turned out to be Burmese Buddhists.

In the decades that followed, the Buddha’s Indian roots were confirmed by the excavation of a series of stupas, Buddhist mound-like structures that housed relics. First came the discovery in 1819 of the stupas at Sanchi by Captain Fell. Bemused by their dome-like shapes, he wrote in a Calcutta journal that he felt unable to give ‘even a very faint idea of the magnificence of such stupendous structures and exquisitely finished sculpture’.

Excavations

Sanchi had long lain buried in forests, thus escaping destruction by either the Brahmanical Hindu revival that wiped out Indian Buddhism or by the Muslim invasions that shattered so many Indian temples. The stupas became the focus for further excavations by the man regarded as the father of Indian archaeology, Lieutenant Alexander Cunningham. He arrived in India in 1833, served with the Royal Engineers in various military campaigns, including the Sikh Wars, and collected antiques in remote places, such as Kashmir and Ladakh.

In 1834 Cunningham used his engineering skills to drill deep down into the main stupa at Sanchi, where he discovered evidence that Buddhism had been widespread for several centuries, from the Mauryan period down to the Gupta empire of the fourth century ad. He went on to excavate a large collection of Buddhist sculptures at Sarnath, the finest of which he shipped off to Calcutta. On a later visit, Cunningham was dismayed to find that many of the sculptures he had left behind were being used to dam a nearby river. It was typical of the constant battle British Orientalists fought to keep their finds from the Indian practice of using old stones for new buildings. Forty years later, when Cunningham discovered the 2,000-year-old Indus Valley ruins at Harappa, he found bricks from the site being used to lay the nearby Lahore-Multan railway line.

Having reached the rank of general, Cunningham retired from the army and spent the rest of his long life leading the newly established Archaeological Survey of India, which still administers the country’s artistic heritage. His last major discovery was the Bharhut stupa, full of Mauryan Buddhist treasures, which he sent off to Calcutta Museum, to be restored by the enthusiastic antiquarian Viceroy, Lord Curzon.

Cunningham was struck by the fact that the large crowds of locals who watched his excavation at Bharhut were disappointed that he unearthed no buried treasure. He grumbled in his diary that ‘few natives of India have any belief in disinterested excavations for the discovery of ancient buildings … their only idea of such excavations is that they are really intended as a search for hidden treasure, and ... I have no doubt that I was regarded as an arch deceiver who was studiously concealing the revelations made by the inscriptions as to the position of the buried treasures’. As at Sarnath, when he returned three years later, every remaining stone of the Bharhut stupa had been removed by locals to build their own dwellings.

Indian disregard for antiquity extended not just to the distant classical past, but also to far more recent Mughal and Rajput monuments. Even a building as recent as Aurangzeb’s Moti Masjid in the Red Fort at Delhi, built under Mughal rule, was found dilapidated with foliage growing through it in the early 1800s. It was restored by the British Resident, as was Humayun’s crumbling tomb and the imperial Jama Masjid. British visitors to the later Mughals at the Red Fort found both the Diwan-e-Am and Diwan-e-Khas turned into slums, their semi-precious, inlaid stones stolen from their marble friezes.

Romantic gardens

The Taj Mahal at Agra, described by Kipling as ‘the ivory gate through which all dreams pass’, was the Mughal monument most beloved of the British, who restored it from the 1780s onwards. Curzon oversaw the restoration of its gateway, gardens and surrounding buildings and declared: ‘If I have never done anything else in India, I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy.’ Curzon is now best remembered – and reviled – for his partition of Bengal. He had a passion for Mughal gardens and restored them at the Agra and Delhi forts and at Humayun’s and Akbar’s tombs. He brought a British romantic sensibility for wild gardens to the more formal Mughal layout, which can still be seen today.

Cunningham’s Buddhist excavations coincided with various British discoveries of important Hindu temple ruins, ranging from Mahabalipuram in the south to the Elephanta and Kanheri caves near Bombay and Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, with their then shocking eroticism. The most influential discovery was Ajanta, with its frescoes dating back to the first century BC.

It was a British cavalry officer who stumbled on Ajanta during a hunting expedition in the wilds of Berar. He braved fierce tigers and even fiercer Bhil tribespeople, then the main occupants, to explore the caves. In 1836 the Asiatic Society published his report on Ajanta’s classical wonders and it provoked much debate as to whether the frescoes were Hindu or Buddhist and why sites like this had been abandoned. Some even wondered if they were the work of Greek settlers left behind from Alexander’s invasion.

As the frescoes were deteriorating, it was decided to copy as well as conserve them. An artistic soldier, Major Robert Gill, arrived at Ajanta and spent the next 27 years copying the paintings. His collection was sent to be exhibited in London, but was destroyed in the Crystal Palace fire of 1866. Gill returned to Ajanta undeterred and started all over again, but died a year later, an unsung hero of art conservation. His work was continued for the next 13 years by John Griffiths of Bombay’s J.J. School of Art. The results were displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and, in an extraordinary run of bad luck, were also destroyed by fire. Luckily, this time they had been photographed and could be published in 1897. The frescoes were popular in London, with photo features in the Burlington Magazine and Illustrated London News and an Ajanta-style ballet at Covent Garden performed by the Russian dancer Anna Pavlova.

As important as any archaeological finds was the discovery of an entirely new approach to Indian art, giving it equal status with its Western counterparts. The pioneer of this was the art historian Ernest Havell, who came to India in 1890 as principal of the Madras School of Art and left 20 years later as head of the Calcutta School of Art. ‘No European’, he declared, ‘can understand or appreciate Indian art who does not divest himself of his Western preconceptions, endeavour to understand Indian thought, and place himself at the Indian point of view.’ He considered the Indian aesthetic as conceptual, rather than representational, its images stylised rather than naturalistic as in Greco-Roman art. It emphasised anonymous spirituality rather than the individuality of its subject or the identity of the artist.

Culture clashes

In 1910, at a stormy meeting of the Royal Society of Art in London, Havell clashed with his opponents, who maintained that India only excelled at decorative rather than fine art. He argued that multi-limbed and many-headed Hindu deities, so alien to the western eye, were allegorical representations of divine attributes and no more physiologically impossible than Christian angels. He emphasised the continuity from ancient Ajanta down to recent Mughal miniatures of a distinctively Indian aesthetic, crediting the Indian artist with the ability ‘to see with the mind, not merely with the eye, to bring out an essential quality, not just the common appearance of things; to give movement and character in a figure, not only the bone and muscle; to reveal some precious quality or effect in a landscape, not merely physiographical or botanical facts; and above all to identify himself with the inner consciousness of the nature he portrays’.

In recent times, the artistic discoveries of the Raj have raised questions of cultural ownership, with some Indians demanding the return of artefacts in British museums. The Indian equivalent of the Elgin Marbles are the so-called Elliot Marbles, also housed in the British Museum. The ‘marbles’ are actually limestone friezes from the Mauryan stupa at Amaravati in Andhra Pradhesh, intricately carved with scenes from the life of the Buddha. A Scottish surveyor turned antiquarian, Colin Mackenzie, first stumbled on it in 1798. Half a century later, another Scotsman, Sir Walter Elliot, returned to excavate the site, stopped it from being pillaged by locals and carted off some of the finest sculptures to the Madras Museum, some of which later found their way to the British Museum. Elliot’s career was typical of Orientalists. While serving for 40 years as a revenue official in Madras, he was also a linguist, naturalist, ethnologist and numismatist and wrote books on everything from cobras and exotic birds to rare coins.

Today, Elliot’s Marbles are displayed in a climate-controlled gallery specially created for them at the British Museum, as part of a Japanese-financed centre for the study of global Buddhism. In India, the stupa at Amaravati is neglected, while the Madras Museum’s collection of sculptures is one of its least visited rooms. That has not stopped the Archaeological Survey of India from requesting the return of the British Museum’s collection, a request declined in 2010. It is hard to imagine that they would really be better appreciated or conserved in the land of their birth. The cultural treasures the British took home with them are, after all, only a tiny fraction of what they salvaged, protected and left behind for the world to appreciate.

Zareer Masani is the author of Macaulay: Britain’s Liberal Imperialist (The Bodley Head, 2013).