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Journalism of Courage
The canvas of Company style artist Sita Ram, whose limited oeuvre spanning a few years in the early 1800s precedes his own scarcely-known life, creates an almost surreal set of compositions. At the Bikaner House in the Capital, a few works from his 10-album artistic documentation, from 1813 to 1823, offer a lyrical sense of place and time — be it Aurangzeb’s mosque on the Panchgana ghat of Varanasi, the majestic interiors of Lucknow’s Imambara during Muharram, or even a surreal Mughal garden built by Mir Jafar Khan, the first Nawab of Bengal, in Patna. In 1995, the British Library, London, had acquired unknown albums containing Ram’s paintings. These were compiled by Lord Hastings, the then Governor General of India, after his slow and arduous journey from Kolkata to Punjab, accompanied by Ram. It was also the first time his works had come to the fore after 1974, when two of his albums were sold in London, anonymously. For the first time since, Ram’s works have been compiled in a book titled Sita Ram: Picturesque Views of India (Roli Books, Rs 2,495) by JP Losty, former curator with the British Library, London. The accompanying exhibition in the Capital gives a peek into the book as well as the man.
“Sita Ram was completely unknown till 1974 and it was not until 1995 that the full range and quality of his work became apparent. All this material is outside India, since it was commissioned by Hastings and brought back with him. But he has emerged as one of the most important Indian artists of the 19th century,” says Losty.
Ram’s works are limited to 229 large watercolour drawings, out of which 160 made it to the book. In the book, as Hastings embarked from Barrakpore to Punjab, crossing Patna, Varanasi, Allahabad and Kanpur in boats, and on land through Lucknow and Delhi, his journal entries run in tandem with Ram’s impressions of the surroundings. “Hastings’ journals and the pictures match so often. In Agra, he was just a sightseer for the most part and his descriptions of the Mughal buildings and Sita Ram’s responses are wonderful,” says Losty. The author and curator omitted vast quantities of political discussions and focused on the journey, the means and the difficulties during travel, along with Hastings’ meetings.
Along with the landscapes, Ram, with his distinct impressionistic brushwork and a great eye for details, has also documented birds such as ostrich and cassowary, botanical depictions that he renders with scientific precision, and even butterflies and insects. However, it is his architectural finesse that made even Hastings refer to him more than once in his journals as the “Bengal draftsman”, as he placed facades of buildings within a pictorial space. His use of light and dark shades, to depict day and night, gives a realistic dimension to his work.
Ram’s adherence to the Company style, a term that originated in Murshidabad and is used loosely for Indian painters who adapted to British sensibilities, also provides a window to understanding the style often looked at as “degenerate” or “inferior”. “Indian painting didn’t die in the late 18th century, it just took a different channel, and great artists worked for different patrons, British and Indian,” says Losty.
With Ram’s works, Losty hopes for an alternate method to study history and its social and cultural components. “Formal history books are great for dates, facts and political events, but we need social and cultural history books to inform us of how people lived and went about their lives. Art can help with this — not so much the pompous formal portraits of rulers, but paintings of ordinary people going about their business. This is the great strength of so-called Company painting in the early 19th century, it concentrates on ordinary people and how they lived their lives,” he says.
Ram’s paintings, therefore, give a rare glimpse into a micro-history and provides a sense of places that perhaps don’t exist today. There are scenes from villages, of marketplaces and processions, imams reading the Quran, artisans weaving material and men atop horses, elephants and bullocks, as they go about their business. “Looked at in conjunction with the descriptions, such as those of Hastings in his journal, they present an unrivalled picture not just of British life in India but of how Indians of different classes reacted to it,” he says.
