Questionable Company: Representing Ethnicity at the Mughal Court

Abstract

This paper was prompted by the discovery of three dozen portrait drawings by an anonymous Indian artist in Old Delhi’s Chandni Chowk market. Some portraits, drawn in black pen and ink on paper and dating from around 1830, are framed by a caption, written in Devanagari script, apparently describing prominent figures in the Mughal court, following the British conquest of Delhi (1803). The first section focuses on the translated script of the captions around the portraits and provides some historical context to identify the subjects portrayed. It focuses on who they are. It also situates the portraits in relation to ‘Company School’ painting, i.e. work by eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century Indian artists adjusting their styles to paint subjects appealing to British (and European) taste. Attention shifts to portraits of British officials, possibly including Sir David Ochterlony, first Resident at the Mughal Court, 1803–06, and again, 1818–22, and Charles Metcalfe, 1811–18. The paper draws attention to the ways in which the artist distinguishes between Asian and European subjects, simultaneously coming to terms with the challenges of representing unfamiliar European ethnicities. The drawings themselves – historically interesting and occasionally amusing – are unique in relation to what is generally understood as ‘Indian painting’.