| SLIDE 46: Any artist who could pander to Sher Singh’s self-perception of himself as a Punjabi Sun-King was sure of a commission, as the artist of this ambitious panorama obviously was. |
| SLIDE 47: The grandest portrayal of Sher Singh was undoubtedly Schoefft’s expansive tour de force: Der Hof Von Lahor or the Court of Lahore. Schoefft did the preliminary drawings while he was still in Lahore in 1840 and then completed the painting by 1855 when it was first exhibited in Vienna. |
| By this time, Sher Singh riding his steed on the left was dead, the Koh-i-Noor carried by the young boy on the right had been surrendered to Queen Victoria, and the flamboyant Sikh kingdom of Lahore relegated to the shelves of history. |
| SLIDE 48: Power had shifted to a new centre of gravity – Jammu and Kashmir. Schoefft obligingly symbolised this shift by showing the Dogra raja Gulab Singh as the beneficiary of Ranjit Singh’s blessings, whereas the benefactions had in fact come to him from the British. |
| SLIDE 49: Standing in a self-absorbed group are his brothers Raja Dhian Singh, Raja Suchet Singh and his nephew Raja Hira Singh who returns Sher Singh’s salute. All died violently. |
| SLIDE 50: Had Raja Hira Singh lived in the 20th Century, with looks like his and even though he was not a Khan, he would have been ruling Bollywood. Even Emily Eden who died a spinster found it difficult to resist his over-confident panache. |
| SLIDE 51: He won over the Russian prince Alexis Soltykoff who used the young Raja and his father Raja Dhian Singh as symbols of Sikh warrior-hood. |
| Slide 52: You can see him again, dwarfed though this time by caparisoned elephants and overshadowed by ebullient acrobats. |
| SLIDE 53: Raja Hira Singh’s brief tenure as a wazir was essentially a prologue to the minority kingship of Maharaja Duleep Singh. |
| SLIDE 54: Schoefft must have seen Duleep Singh as a toddler when he visited Lahore in 1840. He painted him later with a sort of anachronistic grandeur, as if Schoefft had foreseen what a volatile history could not. |
| SLIDE 55: The two Sikh wars resulted in the annexation of the Punjab. William Simpson caught the symbolism of the altered order in this water-colour. Before 1846, the British had to call on the Sikhs; after 1849, the Sikh sardars were compelled to call on the occupying forces. |
| SLIDE 56: The young Duleep Singh – deposed, but still an object of curiosity. Lord Dalhousie had him painted by George Beechey in 1852 and hung him like a trophy on the wall of his castle, Coulston Hall. |
| SLIDE 57: Another trophy – a symbol of his success – was the wooden replica Dalhousie commissioned of the golden throne of Ranjit Singh. It was made for him by a firm in Calcutta which charged him Rs 585. |
| I wonder why Dalhousie felt the need to have such a facsimile. He could never have sit in it without feeling self-conscious or looking ridiculous. The throne tells me more about Dalhousie than pages of his memoirs do; its predictable emptiness exposes the hollowness of his victory. |
| SLIDE 58: After Duleep Singh went to England and added Queen Victoria to his list of personal conquests, he found himself being portrayed in the British image of an Indian maharaja. |
| SLIDE 59: You knew you had arrived at St James’s if Queen Victoria had you pose for Winterhalter. She commissioned this portrait of him in 1854. |
| Miles away from, Dalhousie wrote acidly to Sir George Couper: ‘I am rejoiced at Duleep’s success and favour at Court. Winterhalter may have arranged Duleeps’ drapery better than his valet, but has he preserved him a Sikh in outward form?’ |
| SLIDE 60: I suspect Winterhalter had been influenced in his composition by Van Dyck’s famous portrait of Charles I who stands in a similar posture of harmless, ineffectual defiance. |
| SLIDE 61: To Punjabis, Winterhalter’s portrait of Duleep Singh became a symbol of an absent maharaja, a remembrance of past glory and a potent symbol of prospective unity. For the Sikh painter Sobha Singh, it served as a template for repeated reproduction. |
| SLIDE 62: Duleep Singh remained ‘a Sikh in outward form’ but inwardly, he began to experience a transformation. Gradually, the injustice, the pastiche, the artificiality of his life ate into his psyche. Like many a NRI, he hankered for home. He tried to return to the Punjab where he hoped to replace the symbol with reality. |
| SLIDE 63: In this unsupported ambition, Duleep was egged on by his mother, the redoubtable Rani Jindan. Even though she was old and almost half-blind, she had still unquenched powers of persuasion that she used on her son with devastating effect. She reminded him of his lost heritage. He commissioned George Richmond to remind her of her lost looks. |
| SLIDE 64: The drawing done of her by Richmond in 1863 just before her death was developed in a full painting (this is now appropriately in the Kapany collection), and … |
| SLIDE 65: … also in a full-length study on wood, showing her reclining on a cushion she must have taken with her to London. |
| SLIDE 66: Meanwhile, north of the Punjab, Maharaja Gulab Singh was riding high. He provided timber to the British to construct churches, and patronage to artists – so long as they concentrated on his likeness. |
| SLIDE 67: Similarly, Sikh sardars became the center of artistic attention. They would be depicted dressed for war, with sword and shield at the ready, but shown administering peace to a never–ending stream of impatient supplicants. |
| SLIDE 68: Behind the scenes, domestic life was given a fresh impetus by Sikh patrons to whom the family unit, particularly children, mattered. |
| SLIDE 69: One of the most famous of such informal scenes – symbolic of the marriage between the Sikhs and their new subjects – is of a Sardar and his Pahari Rajput wife. The left side of the composition is the new order, the right a previous one. |
| SLIDE 70: A more overt expression of feminine under-employment, done in the mid 19th century. |
| SLIDE 71: The theme remained the same, even in this painting also by Auguste Schoefft. It was recently discovered by Jean-Marie Lafont and shows Fezli Azam Joo, the Indian wife of the French General Court, at their home in Lahore before she migrated to France where she died in 1869. She is an Indian in Indian dress … |
| SLIDE 72: … while in this photograph, we can see two British educated princesses – Catherine and Sophia, daughters of Maharaja Duleep Singh – reverting to Indian dress. |
| SLIDE 73: I have shown you examples of Symbolism in Sikh portraiture within the sub-themes of Piety, Portraiture and then Patronage. Let me conclude with a consideration of Punjabiyat as a symbol in Sikh painting. |
| SLIDE 74: Between 1849 and 1947, the Punjab was ruled by the East India Company (which by the way is still in corporate existence) and then by the British Government, represented here by a white man - Sir Herbert Edwardes – against a white background. Because of the British emphasis on education and cultural revivalism, one by-product was the emergence of the Punjab as a socio-cultural identity. |
| SLIDE 75: Paintings of the Sikhs and for the Sikhs were being made by the Sikhs. Guru Nanak by Sobha Singh, simplified into an immediately recognizable trinity. |
| SLIDE 76: Guru Nanak reduced like monotheism itself to the power of One. |
| SLIDE 77: Individual images of incidents from the lives of the Gurus – in this case Guru Angad – that earlier would have been part of an illustrated Janamsakhi. |
| SLIDE 78: Guru Amar Dass – the symbol of toil and sweat, … |
| SLIDE 79: And Guru Arjun, of Blood and Tears. |
| Contd. / 6 |
