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20/06/2006
SYMBOLISM IN SIKH PORTRAITURE (Part 4)
SYMBOLISM IN SIKH PORTRAITURE,

THE SURINDER SINGH KAPANY SIKH ARTS LECTURE 2006

Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 20 June 2006
[CONTD./ 3]


SLIDE 30: Would he have found something to condone in the Pharaoh Akhenaten’s rebellious monotheism, coming as it did like Sikhism and Islam, after centuries of polytheism? Guru Nanak like his nine successors was fortunate that he became an icon before a pot-bellied naturalism could catch up with him.
SLIDE 31: The closest we come to a graven image of him is a rough, almost self-consciously incised token of him, stamped on coins issued with his name.
SLIDE 32: I had mentioned earlier that my talk would examine first Piety and then Portraiture.
SLIDE 33: The earliest published portraits we have of Sikh individuals were by Bathazar Solvyns, a diligent if not always inspired Flemish artist, who came to Calcutta in 1791. He published this drawing in 1799, with the comment that the Sikhs wore ‘black, or oftener very dark blue’, and added a doleful, joyless epitaph that they regarded this world ‘as a vale of tears and misery, from which it is always a happiness to be delivered.’
SLIDE 34: Solvyn’s second illustration was of a ‘Nanuk-Punhty’, whom he described more flatteringly as ‘much more peaceable’ than his earlier subject. For some absurd reason, which even Solvyns could not fathom, his model wore only one shoe and shaved off one side of his moustache.
I have included the images by Solvyn’s not because they were accurate, but because they delineated in nascent European minds a portrait-image of Sikhs that oscillated between the ridiculous and the sublime, between the mundane and the monarch.
SLIDE 35: Guru Govind Singh died in 1708, and within a hundred years, a breakaway community replaced its masters in the Punjab. A diminutive Sukerchakia chieftain called Ranjit Singh conquered what the Mughals neglected and established an empire.
He preferred not be portrayed at all, but when he was, it was invariably in profile. An attempt by the artist to show the maharaja in three-quarter profile failed and had to be whitened out.
SLIDE 36: That artist was no Van Dyck, and come to think of it, Ranjit Singh was no Charles I. He was too canny to believe in his own kingship or in the divine right of kings, which is why he remained king until the end and died in bed, not on the scaffold.
SLIDE 37: Ranjit Singh symbolised a post-Mughal autocracy, and while he remained personally modest and unassuming, rather like the present Queen, he saw courtly grandeur as the price, the unavoidable props of monarchy. This miniature of him by Imam Baksh Lahori is substantially both in composition and in tone not too different from one done three hundred years earlier…
SLIDE 38: …and included in the Akbarnama. This particular folio shows the young Akbar wrestling with his cousin Ibrahim.
SLIDE 39: Maharaja Ranjit Singh held strong religious beliefs tempered by secular convictions. If he was shown praying before a shrine to Chandiki Devi, as he is in this picture, it would not have diminished him as a Sikh. Chandiki Devi had been a favourite icon of Guru Govind Singh.
SLIDE 40: To his contemporaries, to western visitors, and to those who sat in a line in front of him and who would eventually succeed him – Kharak Singh, Sher Singh and then Duleep Singh – Ranjit Singh symbolised continuity and stability – for as long as he lasted.
SLIDE 41: The miracle is that he lasted as long as he did, considering how he punished his body. His death in June 1839 was a tragedy that his inept heirs were to transform into a disaster. His wives and loyal maidservants immolated themselves on his funeral pyre outside the Lahore Fort. Grieving courtiers in the foreground threatened to but in the end did not. They lived to fight another day – amongst themselves.
SLIDE 42: The era of Patronage in Sikh Portraiture can be said to have begun in earnest with Ranjit Singh’s flamboyant son Maharaja Sher Singh who ruled for a colourful two years between 1841 and 1843.
SLIDE 43: The Hungarian painter Auguste Schoefft was to Sher Singh what Cecil Beaton or Lord Snowdon or Lord Lichfield was to the modern monarchy. He portrayed his subjects with their warts hidden under strands of jewellery. Had Sher Singh worn one more diamond from his father’s carefully assembled toshakhana, he would have keeled over.
SLIDE 44: For his portrait by Schoefft, Sher Singh sat deliberately on his father’s golden throne. It was a powerful act of symbolism, for he knew as everyone else did how rarely his wiser father had used it.
SLIDE 45: Perhaps Sher Singh had been insinuated into the throne by Schoefft himself, for while in Delhi on his way to the Punjab, Schoefft had painted the fading Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah, overloaded with jewels, many of which were mediocre, if not actually paste.
Contd. / 5
 
20 June 2006
 
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