University of Alberta

European Representations and Information Technologies in Early Nineteenth'Century India

by

Khyati Nagar ©

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

in

Humanities Computing

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1+1 Canada Dedication

To the spirit of India and my parents Abstract

The goal of this Masters thesis is to achieve a fuller account of the Bengal

Renaissance by looking at both the role that early nineteenth-century media technologies played in precipitating Indian ideas of westernization and nationalism as well as the ways in which these media technologies represented India in art.

In the early nineteenth century, the introduction and use of textual and visual media technologies sowed the seeds of the Bengal Renaissance. By examining the textual media technologies employed by the Serampore

Mission Press I show that Carey's press was an important factor in the emergence of the Bengal Renaissance. In studying the aquatints of Thomas and William Daniell and Balthazar Solvyns I show that visual media technologies worked with textual media technologies in bringing about social change and intellectual awakening in Bengali artists.

In the research presented here, Heidegger's seminal essay, 'The Question

Concerning Technology', provides a bridge between the past and the present, as well as between art and technology. Acknowledgements

There are many people I would like to thank, for they have supported my thesis writing in various ways. First of all I would like to thank my HuCo Professor and supervisor Dr. Harvey Quamen for introducing me to new ideas in technology, for numerous suggestions and comments that he took the time to make, for his guidance and the direction he helped me find. I would also like to thank my committee members Dr. Stephen Slemon and Dr. Sean Gouglas.

Thanks to my family for their unending support and enthusiasm toward all my creative and academic endeavors. Had it not been for my parents, Usha and Vinod Nagar, my sister Swati, and my son Aranya's happy aura, I would have never come back to school. They are my pillars of strength.

I would like to thank Dr. Maureen Engel, Dr. Grace Wiebe and Lois Burton at ARC for giving me the opportunity to work on my thesis while working there and creating many inspiring opportunities for me to keep my creativity alive. Thanks to Professor Patricia Demers for reminding me to focus on my research constantly. Thanks to Janey Kennedy at the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies for all her help and kindness. Thanks also to Dr. Geoffrey Rockwell for all his help.

Last but not the least, thanks to my friends— Laurie, Mustafa, Rhiannon, Doug, Debbie, Nicole and Stefan for opening their hearts and homes to me and my son — we would not have survived the long Edmonton winters without them. Table of Contents

CHAPTER l: TEXTUAL AND VISUAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY INDIA ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology 6 A Brief Overview of Politics and Policies from 1756 tol850 10

CHAPTER 2: TEXTUAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THE SEEDS OF THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Fort William College, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Orientalist Scholars and the Serampore Mission Press 23 Mahratta Dictionary 31 Hortus Bengalensis 38 Digdarshan and Samachar Darpan 45 The Serampore Mission Press as an Agent of Change 52

CHAPTER 3: VISUAL MEDIA TECHNOLOGIES AND THE SHAPING OF THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE IN ART ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. Brief Biographical Sketches of Thomas and William Daniell and Balthazar Solvyns 55 Comparing Techniques and Subjects 57 Defining the Picturesque 60 Images, Travels and Interpretation 61 Representation in Poiesis 92

CHAPTER 4: THE BENGAL RENAISSANCE AND INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY INDIA 95 End of the Bengal Renaissance and its Place in Modern India 100

Works Cited 102 Table of Figures:

1) Map of India from 1904 21 2) Title page from the Mahratta Dictionary 32 3) Page from Hortus Bengalensis 42 4) View of Old Court House Street 67 5) Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba 69 6) Calcutta from the River Hoogly 72 7) The Sacred Tree at Gyah 75 8) Gary 82 9) Bullock Cart in Dadar Mumbai 84 10) MahabharuterSobha 87 11) Maulys 90 12) Roadside Flower Stall 91 European Representations and Information Technologies in Early Nineteenth—Century India

Chapter 1- Textual and Visual Media Technologies in Early Nineteenth-Century India

My goal in this thesis is to achieve a fuller account of the Bengal Renaissance by looking at both the role that early nineteenth-century media technologies played in precipitating Indian ideas of westernization and nationalism as well as the ways in which these media technologies represented India in art.

In the early nineteenth century, the introduction and use of textual and visual media technologies sowed the seeds of the Bengal Renaissance. By examining the textual media technologies employed by the Serampore

Mission Press it will be shown that Carey's press was an important factor in the emergence of the Bengal Renaissance. In studying the aquatints of

Thomas and William Daniell and Balthazar Solvyns it can be shown that visual media technologies worked with textual media technologies in bringing about social change and intellectual awakening in Bengali artists.

Why is the study of these information technologies in India, especially those of two hundred years ago, important? The Bengal Renaissance in India has been compared by prominent scholars such as David Knopf to the

Renaissance in Europe. The Bengal Renaissance started with Raja Ram

1 Mohan Roy (1775-1833) and ended with Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941).

The ideals of the Bengal Renaissance shaped Indian society through a crucial period of almost one hundred and fifty years under British rule, and then with its close saw the departure of the British and the emergence of a self- governing Indian nation. Modern India owes much to the Bengal Renaissance activists and artists in the birth of modern India, and the way they took

European influences and made them Indian. The new "intellectual knowledge of European ideas, especially philosophy, history, science and literature affected the minds and lives of Indians radically" (Samanta l).

Though it is by no means certain when the term renaissance was first used in nineteenth-century Calcutta, Rammohan Roy referred to recent events in Bengal as being analogous to the European Renaissance and Reformation...The Bengali novelist Bankim Chandra Chatterji (1838-1894) frequently employed the word renaissance either in context of a revitalized Bengali language or literature or as the modern reinterpretation of the Hindu tradition. (Knopf 3)

Ram Mohan Roy is recognized as the father of the renaissance in Bengal. He recognized that social reform was the only way to unshackle the Indian mind from the ideas of caste systems, untouchability, and extreme religious rites and ceremonies. Among other things it was Carey's press that gave Roy the zeal and a platform to engage in a nationalist dialogue. "The scholar missionary, Reverend William Carey, first in association with the earliest

Bengali Press at his Serampore Mission, and later as a teacher of Bengali at

2 the Fort William College, had a critical role to play in the shaping of the

Bengali language, between 1800 and 1836" {Power in Print 49). Carey's

Evangelical agenda was also successful in questioning Hinduism in a way that Roy found it necessary to reinvent Hinduism. He was a proud Hindu who saw that without education and the fundamental knowledge of modern sciences Indians could not participate in the social transition from the medieval to the modern (Samanta 3).

Without William Carey's press and the technology of language in promoting

Carey's ideological agenda there would have been no medium for Ram Mohan

Roy to form his nationalist ideas. Not only was Carey's press instrumental in precipitating nationalist ideas, it was also a major force in the early nineteenth century to promote westernization. Most Bengal Renaissance minds promoted Western education and philosophy while keeping their

Hindu traditions safe. They supported the Western legacy of science and saw how science has been a major force in shaping the Western society since the sixteenth century. This progressive educational agenda of the British, missionaries, and Orientalists was quickly accepted by the Indian mind.

What Francis Bacon did as an important figure in the English Renaissance was mirrored in the early nineteenth century in India with the appearance of many educational institutions, newspapers and journals. It can be said that

Roy believed in Bacon's claim that "knowledge is power" (Dusek 42) and

3 vehemently supported many educational institutions that promoted the learning of Western science and technology.

Visual media technologies functioned in a different way from textual media technologies because they changed the way India was represented to its own people in the early nineteenth century. This instigated a nationalist feeling in the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century artists from Bengal and they produced a large body of work that was new and yet deeply influenced by various styles in Indian art. Some of the styles that inspired a new tradition in Indian art were borrowed from Mughal miniature paintings,

Kalighat paintings from Bengal, and the iconography of Hindu gods and goddesses seen in ancient Indian sculptures. This radical shift in representing India through art with an Indian identity as opposed to a

European identity would not have happened if these artists were not exposed to the European techniques in art that were very popular with the British

Governors and Officers in the early nineteenth century. The aquatints of the

Daniells and Solvyns are elemental in understanding how the European representations in art influenced the Bengal Renaissance artists.

Most research on the Bengal Renaissance has been from solely literary, historical, or artistic points of view. Most scholars do not place much importance on William Carey's press as an agent of social change in the early

4 nineteenth century. His press gets lost in the discussion of Warren Hastings'

Orientalist cultural policy, the British rule in general, and the Fort William

College. As we will see in Chapter Two, these epochs in the history of early nineteenth century India are important factors in the emergence of the

Bengal Renaissance, but the argument of this thesis is that it was Carey's press that started the movement. This argument, placed within the context of the Bengal renaissance and the emergent modern India, fills a gap in current scholarly theory.

Chapter Three shows that visual media technologies played an equally important role in the shaping of a nationalist agenda in art. This occurred because European artists chose to represent India through European styles that alienated Indians from the representations they saw of their own country. This alienation fostered a desire for Indian artists to create their own nationalist identity in Indian art.

To illuminate how these technologies worked as ideological tools in shaping of the Bengal Renaissance, I use parts of Martin Heidegger's seminal essay 'The

Question Concerning Technology' to show how technology hides or reveals its agenda. It is in this revealing or hiding of a cultural-technological agenda that the ideologies of nineteenth-century textual and visual media technologies come into light.

5 Heidegger and the Question Concerning Technology

In the research presented here, Heidegger's seminal essay, 'The Question

Concerning Technology', provides a bridge between the past and the present, as well as between art and technology. In this discussion technology is not only about manufacturing and machines but it encompasses a much wider meaning.

We typically perceive technology as only applied science or robotics. We see technology as an instrument and a means to an end. Heidegger gives us a more sophisticated analysis of what he sees as the essence of technology. He takes us back to Aristotle and the Greeks explaining that what we call cause, the Greeks called aition. Causes overlap and are linked, they are connected to one another. Heidegger gives us an example of a Silver Chalice. A Silver

Chalice would be just another Chalice if it were not made of Silver, which is its matter (hyle). It would not be a Chalice if it did not have the aspect (eidos) of a Chalice! for example, if it were a ring or a brooch. When the aspect of the

Chalice is combined with the matter {telos) they become responsible for defining the Silver Chalice as a sacrificial vessel. The silversmith is the intermediary who gives the Chalice its form which is the final cause (telos) for the Chalice to come into existence. In this example the four causes for being are very different from each other, and yet they belong together.

6 The causes of the birth of the Chalice are not enough though. Once the

Chalice comes into being, it makes its appearance^

Plato tells us what this bringing is in a sentence from Symposium (205b): he gar toi ek tou me onton eis to on ionti hotoioun aitia pasa esti poiesis. "Every occasion for whatever passes over and goes forward into presencing from that which is not presencing is poiesis, is bringing-forth [Her-vor-bringen]." (Heidegger 254).

How does this bringing-forth take place? Bringing-forth "unconceals" and this

"unconcealment" is "revealing". The Greeks have the word aletheia for revealing. The Romans translate this as Veritas', we say "truth" and usually understand it as correctness of representation (Heidegger 255).

Yet, with typical 21st century perception, we would see the silversmith's tools alone as being the technology. In giving this example Heidegger differentiates how we understand technology as an instrument that manufactures something, as opposed to the essence of technology. Later in this essay technology and art are discussed as two ways of revealing.

Heidegger explains the essence of technology as 'revealing' by explaining it as follows '•

We are questioning concerning technology, and we have now arrived at aletheia, at revealing. What has the essence of technology to do with revealing? The answer: everything. For every bringing-forth is grounded in revealing. Bringing-forth indeed, gathers, within itself the

7 four modes of occasioning—causality—and rules them throughout. Within its domain belong end and means as well as instrumentality. Instrumentality is considered to be the fundamental characteristic of technology. If we inquire step by step into what technology, represented as means, actually is, then we shall arrive at revealing. The possibility of all productive manufacturing lies in revealing. (255)

Heidegger's concern is more with 'revealing' than in 'manufacturing'. His concern is with the attainment of truth, and correctness of representation.

The true forms or objects that we see are concealed, and only through revealing, we can access the truth.This revealing occurs because of the

"technique", which is a collective result of the material, the form, the need for the form and the creator. For Heidegger, poetry is a revealing that brings forth the "truth" and technology is a revealing that challenges forth.

Heidegger describes the essence of modern technology as Gestellov

"enframing" and it is this enframing that "challenges forth". Enframing builds an ordering or a structure which must be understood. Enframing is an ordering or the creation of a sequence, only through which technology comes into being. In any technology, the sequence is very important; as soon as the sequence falls out of order, technology fails to reveal itself. One can understand this by looking at an example of any technology versus any art. I will take the simple example of a computer and a print hanging on an office wall. To use a computer, one has to plug it in an electrical socket, turn it on and know which program to use in order to make its use meaningful. If the knowledge of only one step is missing, the computer is useless. According to

8 Heidegger, "the essential unfolding of technology threatens revealing, threatens it with the possibility that all revealing will be consumed in ordering and that everything will present itself only in the unconcealment of standing-reserve" (Heidegger 263). Standing-reserve according to Heidegger is nothing "on the order of a machine", it is the way in which technology reveals itself. Standing-reserve is the saving power and according to

Heidegger it is the power by which the essence of technology comes into

"proper appearing" (261). In understanding enframing or the framework within which the early nineteenth-century textual and media technologies in

India unfold, my thesis builds a case for how these technologies worked under the influence of the British rule and in the period before Anglicization.

While Heidegger's essay helps us to look at ways in which technology hides and reveals ideological agendas, we need to look at the political scenario that enframed the existence of these technologies. Both textual and visual media technologies existed while Warren Hastings' cultural policy of Orientalism was a strong force in ordering bureaucracies in early nineteenth-century

India. For an understanding of this socio-political framework let us have a brief look at the politics and policies of the East India Company.

9 A Brief Overview of Politics and Policies from 1756 to 1850

The East India Company had strong trade relations with India from the beginning of the seventeenth century. From the middle of the eighteenth century the business of the East India Company changed as they started participating in political battles for the Moghul Empire. The cost of providing military support to Indian rulers could become very expensive, and Indian rulers were expected to pay handsomely for European military support.

These expected payments usually took the form of land revenues that were turned over to the East India Company? (Peers 25).

According to C. A. Bayly, in 1765, the East India Company was awarded the diwani of Bengal by the Moghul Emperor. During the effective rule of the

Moghul Empire, the diwan served as the chief revenue officer of a province.

This meant that they were recognized as the effective rulers of a province that probably contained something like 20 million inhabitants {India and the

British 19).

The regulating acts of the British Empire ensured how the East India

Company would function in India. The East India Company Act of 1773 recognized the Company's political functions but stated clearly that all acquisitions by the East India Company were on behalf of the Crown and not in its own right.

10 The East India Company believed that ruling the nation would be much easier if they had all possible information about India on hand, for which

Hastings' policy of Orientalism became very useful. Warren Hastings was the first Governor General of India from 1773 to 1785 and laid a very strong foundation for the British to get intimately involved not only in Indian politics but also in the culture and tradition of the land. It is under his

Governorship that the Asiatic Society of India was formed. "The original intention of Society members was not so much to publish their findings as to make available English translations of Oriental classics" (Knopf 34). Warren

Hastings promoted the study of Indian languages and enthusiastically patronized Indian as well as European musicians and artists (Peers 33).

The golden age of the British Orientalism in India though, is recorded as being between 1813 and 1823 under the Governorship of Marquess Hastings

(Knopf 178), because Calcutta became the earliest Asian city to develop the qualities necessary for the transformation of a traditional society to a modern one due to experiments in cultural fusion. Examples of publications from

Carey's press provide a glimpse into how these cultural fusions occurred in the early nineteenth century.

The agenda of the British was further established by incorporating their ideologies through social reform. A very concrete proof of the reform agenda

11 can be traced back to the efforts made by the British to transform social practices and customs (Peers 52). At this point in time, calls to allow

Christian missionaries into India were growing and with them came a heightened emphasis on Western education, for it was felt that "a combination of enlightened despotism, Christianity and Western science would liberate India from the shackles of what was increasingly viewed as its oppressive past" (Peers 57).

Another landmark piece of legislation was the Charter Act of 1813. Among other things, this Act asserted the dominion of the British Crown over the

Indian territories held by the East India Company and opened India to missionaries. Although India was opened to missionaries in 1813, William

Carey had been printing Bible tracts, preaching and teaching since his arrival in Bengal in 1793. The British Government until then was against supporting the missionaries, as the missionaries were against the despotic rule of Britain over its colonies.

Carey's multifaceted personality can be seen in the criticism of the Baptist missionaries by the Orientalist Scott Waring when he said "The head of this mission is a Mr. William Carey who enjoys a salary from the Company of eight hundred pounds a year, as a teacher of the Bengalee and Sanscrit

12 languages" (qtd in Knopf 138). Knopf explains why Waring was upset with

Carey because he was paid by the East India Company:

Waring was puzzled as to how a missionary -a Baptist one at that- who has no legal right to be in India was actually deriving money from the company. He found himself at a loss to understand precisely what Carey's title was^ in the Company's list, he was styled Mr. William Carey! in the Fort William College he was known as Professor Carey! while the Bible Society gave him the dignified title of 'Reverend'. (Knopf 138)

Carey's complex social identity helped him take numerous roles, as we shall explore further in Chapter Two. In that chapter language is explored as an invisible technology in the context of the publications of the Serampore

Mission Press, because it is Carey's press that became an agent of social change in the early nineteenth century, and it is not given that credit in historical studies of the period. Four publications by the press are discussed

—The Mahratta Dictionary, Hortus Bengalensis or a Catalogue of Plants

Growing in the Honourable East India Company's Garden at Calcutta, and the two Bengali newspapers, Digdarshan and Samachar Darpan. These publications are studied through Neil Postman's idea of language as an invisible technology and through Heidegger's essay.

According to Neil Postman, language has an ideological agenda and it does not always reveal this agenda. The complexity of exploring the idea of

13 language as a technology and that of 'challenging forth' or 'enframing' from

Heidegger's essay, are used to illuminate the ideology of the textual technology used by the Serampore Mission Press. Each publication offers a unique insight into how technology hides or reveals. In the Mahratta dictionary, we see that language hides its agenda. In Hortus Bengalensis, the agenda is clear and there is an effort to integrate indigenous knowledge, an invitation to 'revealing' but not quite 'revealing'. In Digdarshan and

Samachar Darpan, not only is the agenda clear, there is the induction of knowledge through a vernacular language where complete 'revealing' occurs.

Knowledge is not only created for the other but the other is also invited to join the argument and share in the opinions expressed. This transfer of knowledge and ideas became the main force for the emergence of the Bengal

Renaissance.

In Chapter Three it is my contention that although the Daniells were not under the constant direction of any Governor General, they embodied the qualities of representing India through European techniques. On the other hand, Solvyns' prints do not follow any canons of European art and represent

India to the world as it looked to him in reality. In art, the revealing is easier.

No matter in what order one perceives the visual, it reveals truthfully. The works of the Daniells employ a very different technique than Solvyns'. One could say that art is a kind of 'enframing' too but my argument is that it is

14 not. According to Heidegger, art 'brings forth' the revealing and technology

'challenges forth'. In art one is allowed to make a choice of interpretation and to choose to look at the layers of information without the fear of getting lost.

Toward the end of his essay, Heidegger's thoughts on art are that

The poetical brings the true into the splendor of what Plato in the Phaedrus calls to ekphanestaton, that which shines forth most purely. The poetical thoroughly pervades every art, every revealing of essential unfolding into the beautiful.

Could it be that the fine arts are called to poetic revealing? Could it be that revealing lays claim to the arts most primarily, so that they for their part may expressly foster the growth of the saving power, may awaken and found anew our vision of, and trust in, that which grants? (264)

In Chapter Three we see why revealing lays a claim primarily to the arts.

The fundamental difference between art and technology is that art seeks an aesthetic response, as compared to technology that seeks knowledge and understanding. Art is based on intuition and emotion whereas technology is based on reason.

In the next chapter we will study the publications of the Serampore Mission

Press in light of Heidegger's essay as well as the political circumstances described in the last few paragraphs. In Chapter 2, Heidegger's essay gives us a chance to look at technology from another point of view. This is an

15 important step toward understanding that the introduction of information technologies was already taking place in early nineteenth-century India.

Moreover, these information technologies had an ideological influence over the Bengali intelligentsia.

16 Chapter 2- Textual Technologies and the Seeds of the Bengal Renaissance

William Carey's Serampore Mission Press played an important role in precipitating ideas of Indian nationalism and modernism in early nineteenth- century India. In this chapter four publications of the press are used as examples that illuminate how textual media technologies became agents of social and intellectual change in Indian society. The four publications that form the core of this chapter are The Mahratta dictionary, Hortus

Bengalensis and the two Bengali newspapers Samachar Darpan and

Digdarshan.

Through these examples we will look at how the Mahratta dictionary, published in 1810, hid truth by disguising Carey's Evangelical agenda and his intention to downplay the importance and meaning of Indian languages.

This dictionary acted as an ideological tool and did not truly represent local knowledge. Hortus Bengalensis, published in 1814, started integrating

Indian words for European botanical terms, and in doing so created a path for educating Indians in European sciences. However, its intention was a one­ way transfer of knowledge.

17 The Bengali newspapers, published in 1818, finally became a strong platform for dialogue and debate between the British and the Indians. European knowledge was presented to the Bengali audience in their own language and gave them a chance to fully understand what was being presented to them.

The Bengali audience greatly benefited from this exposure because it gave them a chance to not only accept the intellectual ideas and knowledge presented to them by the British but to reject and retaliate against ideas that misrepresented indigenous cultural, traditional, scientific and religious knowledge. To return to Heidegger's essay, the newspapers reveal truly and completely. Once the truth was revealed to the readers of the newspapers, a whole new understanding of various situations and topics occurred, inviting

Indian minds to discover other forms of truth.

One of the biggest factors that contributed to the birth of the Bengal

Renaissance was the emergence of a large number of newspapers and periodicals in the early nineteenth century (Samanta 2). Although historians such as Aninidita Ghosh, Soumyajit Samanta, David Knopf and Shivanath

Shastri acknowledge the existence of William Carey, no one views him as a major player in the history of the Bengal renaissance. When Carey started printing numerous translations of the Bible in many different languages, there was a ripple effect that inspired the creation of many local vernacular presses in Calcutta. William Carey and his press are always present in the

18 discourse about Orientalist scholars of the time, and the numerous translations of the Bible in many Indian languages, and yet no one acknowledges the Serampore Mission Press as being the force that it was in precipitating ideas of westernization and nationalism in Indian minds.

The technology discussed in this chapter is language- specifically, the publications of the Serampore Mission Press started by the English Baptist missionary William Carey. My contention is that the British government,

Orientalist scholars, and Baptist Missionaries used the technology of language to gain control over how India was represented to its own people.

Language became the main tool in ordering bureaucracies, education, and biases in the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century.

Through the use of language, the British were able to introduce, and then ingrain, their ideas in the minds of Indians.

By studying how British bureaucracy used language as a means of social reform I want to understand and question the role of language. In this study the printing press plays an important role as an agent of language because the publications of the printing press reveal and give language its physical form through the written word. It is not the manufacturing or production of the publications that is of concern here, but the content of these publications.

The publications of the Serampore mission press started a movement in the

19 minds of Indian people that recognized the impact of European education and westernization, and ultimately gave the rise to Nationalist ideas.

In the early nineteenth century, vernacular languages such as Bengali,

Hindustani, Gujrati, Tamil, and Marathi from major British territories were in demand for three reasons—for training British civilians, for Bible translations, and for educating Indians in English. Anindita Ghosh describes the early vernacular printing presses as follows:

The earliest vernacular printing presses in Bengal were run and controlled by Europeans—missionaries and administrators. Missionaries needed printing for evangelical purposes. The needs of the administration based in Calcutta were also initially contributory. Bengali printed works were needed to codify Company regulation, train civil servants at Fort William College, and provide a wider audience for British Orientalist scholars. {Power in Print 109)

My focus is on Bengal within India, since Calcutta and the regions around

Calcutta, especially Fort William and Serampore, were the stronghold of the

East India Company and the Baptist missionaries respectively. In the following map (Fig.l) of India from 1804, the region on the East that is marked 'Bengal' marks the region in my study.

20 Fig.l. Map of India from 1904. Courtesy, Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D.D. (1761-1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA. http7/www.wmcarey.edu/carey/maps/1804indiamap.jpg

Coinciding with the birth of the Serampore Mission Press in 1800, Lord

Wellesley established the Fort William College, where William Carey was one of the first Professors to teach Sanskrit and Marathi and was appointed as the head for vernacular languages along with other famous Orientalist scholars like John Borthwick Gilchrist and H.T. Colebrooke (Crawford 123).

Carey took advantage of his association with the college to use the expertise of Indian linguistic scholars for his Bible translations in numerous Indian

21 languages. Orientalist scholars, and the British officers working in their directive, collected information in various areas about India. At times they used that information to mount their attack on indigenous knowledge. Later, as we will see in the case of the Bengali newspapers, the Serampore Mission

Press was instrumental in providing vernacular publications that were used by the wider public. The college was hailed as the "Oxford of the East" (Knopf

45) and yet in the beginning served only a limited and specifically European audience {Power in Print 74).

The work of missionaries and non-official agencies had a strong impact on the

East India Company. The charter act of 1813 included a directive from the parliament of England for "introduction of useful knowledge and religious and moral improvements," and allotted a sum of one lakh (equal to one hundred thousand) rupees for the "revival and improvement of literature and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among inhabitants of the

British Territories of India" (Crawford 123). This was a significant move and the result can be seen in the publications of the Serampore Mission Press from 1814 onward. As we will see, Hortus Bengalensis, Digdarshan and

Samachar Darpan are examples of the impact this act had on publications in the early nineteenth century.

22 In order to understand how Carey's publications at the Serampore Press influenced the beginnings of the Bengal Renaissance, we must first understand something of the historical period between 1794 and 1835.

Fort William College, Asiatic Society of Bengal, Orientalist Scholars and the Serampore Mission Press

The British favoured English, Persian and Sanskrit when they started establishing their rule in India in the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Scribal traditions flourished among the higher castes in

India until the mid-eighteenth century. Sanskrit and Persian were the most favored languages, as Persian was the language of the Moghul courts used by

Maulavis, and Sanskrit the classical language of India, language of the

Brahmins. The British view of Sanskrit through the Pundits molded the

European view of Indian linguistic traditions and culture. Even in the early nineteenth century, Sanskrit was still regarded by many elite Britons and

Indians as the lingua franca of the Hindu intelligentsia. It supplied 'refined tastes in competition' and 'strengthened the intellect of youth' {Empire and

Information 293). The upper castes as well as the British were very careful to eliminate and discard any crude vernacular spoken forms. A need to purify the Indian languages by restoring them to their original pristine Sanskritic forms became the prime concern of philologists and linguistics alike {Power in

Print 48). Brahmin scholars were employed in producing translations of the

23 Christian scriptures into Bengali and other vernacular languages {Power in

Print 50).

As the demand for British education needs increased, numerous other peripheral institutions like the Calcutta School Book Society and the School

Book Society were formed in 1817 and 1818 respectively. Carey himself took to the tasks of writing, translating and printing very seriously along with his missionary brethren. Carey originally started his printing press with a second-hand wooden press and William Ward was his chief printer. Paper was imported from England and types were brought from the newly established type-foundry set up by Charles Wilkins in Calcutta {Power in

Print 111).

Along with W. H. Pearce, who was the then superintendent of the Baptist

Mission Press, Alexander Duff, and Charles Trevelyan (a British administrator of the East India Company) set up a self-appointed committee to publish a list of recommended books for schools and libraries at the beginning of every month. Although this idea was met with opposition from the educated public of Calcutta, the trio's committee magisterially interlocked the strength of English literature with the superiority of

Christianity (Vishwanathan 87).

24 In discussing the printing press it is extremely important to be aware of the educational context of the time and place, because the rise of educational institutions meant a higher demand for books and publications. As these publications circulated more widely, they created a platform for the rise in popularity of the English language and which in turn became a platform for the manifestation of ideas as well as for the acceptance of the East India

Company's government and its ideologies. As Vishwanathan argues, the

British political agenda was to inculcate English as readers studied the

Christian Bible:

To be sure, the missionary description of Christianity's affiliation with literature was appropriated in is entirety by government officers. But while the missionaries made such claims in order to force the government to sponsor teaching of the Bible, the administrators used the same argument to prove that English literature made such direct instruction redundant. The successful communication of Christian truths through English literature was affirmed by the observations of clergymen and missionary visitors to the government schools, who frequently were heard to express astonishment at the accuracy and extent of a literature student's knowledge of Christianity. Judging by the enthusiastic accounts of those appearing before Parliament's Select Committee on Indian education, there was little exaggeration in the statement that "there is more knowledge of the Bible in the Hindoo College of Calcutta than there is in any public school in England". Charles Trevelyan went so far as to claim that there were as many converts from the Hindu College as from missionary schools; in addition, he insisted, they remained more lasting believers of Christianity precisely because their literary education had served to

25 develop their critical understanding more sharply than a purely religious education would have done. (Vishwanathan 88)

Another goal for British rule was to lay a foundation for the uptake of bureaucratic critical mass — textual information technologies to support government functions. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded in 1784 shortly before Warren Hastings' departure from India, directed its attention to the improvement of Indian learning for the purposes of governance {Empire and

Information 52). The Asiatic Society in Calcutta first published its transactions from 1799-1800 in five volumes. They framed their articles as an inquiry into the history and antiquities, the arts, sciences, and literature of

Asia. Most of these articles focused on analyzing India, the people and its ancient origins through religion and science.

The description of India by the Orientalists is idyllic, and represents the country as 'exotic'. Some articles question and condemn the religious leanings and indigenous scientific knowledge of the natives who were largely Hindus, while many articles have scientific leanings in which scientific instruments, plant life and astronomy are discussed. Orientalism was adopted as an official policy under Warren Hastings mainly because the British thought it would be advantageous to understand local cultures for an "efficient Indian administration" (Vishwanathan 28). The agendas of famous Orientalists

William Jones, Henry T. Colebrook, Nathaniel Halded, and Charles Wilkins

26 ranged from introducing the West to the treasures of the East as well as reintroducing the natives to their own culture.

Orientalism played a major role in Warren Hasting's cultural policy for late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century India because he aimed at creating a British administrative service component that would be competent in Indian languages and one that was responsive to Indian traditions. "In as much as the British servant was expected to work alongside his Asian counterpart in the administrative hierarchy, the Englishman would have to learn to think and act like an Asian. Otherwise, the British would be treated as aliens, rapport between ruler and ruled would break down, and the empire would ultimately collapse" (Knopf 17).

The following example is one of the articles from volume 5 of the

Transactions (see 5.81). John Gilchrist, the renowned Orientalist, wrote this article. It is interesting to note how he is not claiming to be an astronomer or chronologist yet says he understands enough to condemn the Indian system of time:

The inhabitants of Hindustan commonly reckon and divide time in the following manner! which exhibits a horography so imperfect, however, that its inaccuracy can only be equaled by the peoples' general ignorance of such a division that, with all its imperfections and absurdities, must nevertheless answer the various purposes of many millions in this country. I shall therefore explain and illustrate so

27 complex and difficult a subject, to the best of my ability and information from the natives, without presuming, in the discussion here, to encroach on the province of the chronologist or astronomer, who may yet investigate this matter with higher views, while my aim is, in the mean time, perhaps, not less usefully confined to ordinary cases and capacities entirely. (Asiatic Society of Bengal 5.81)

It is evident from this passage that this was a time when foreign notions of time were being introduced to Indians, while their indigenous knowledge of time and other ancient sciences were being questioned. This is an example of views written for European audiences.

The ways in which the Orientalist policies of the Asiatic Society undermined traditional Indian knowledge were important because Orientalism affected the way in which Carey's press functioned from 1800 to the time of his death in 1834. This is the period before the English Education Act of 1835 came into force. "The 1835 English Education Act of William Bentinck, which swiftly followed Macauly's minute of the same year officially required the natives of India to submit to the study of English literature, irrevocably altering the direction of Indian education" (Vishwanathan 45).

Between the Orientalism and the Anglicization periods Carey was initializing a movement that would carry Indian knowledge to the Europeans in vernacular languages and vice-versa. In creating a vernacular knowledge

28 base that was accessible to British scholars, civilians and missionaries, Carey created a platform to disseminate Biblical knowledge to the Indian public.

Carey was astute. He integrated all cultural nuances in his works to blend them well with the learning of the English language, which was becoming popular at the time. An example of this is A Dictionary of the Mahratta

Language. The following paragraphs situate this dictionary in its geographical, historical and epistemological context, which will be followed by an exploration of the dictionary itself. The point is to show how Carey used his dictionary to educate other Englishmen, and hid his missionary agenda to blend it more with the agenda of the Orientalists. In this way he kept himself in the good books of the British government, although he was very vocal in his political propaganda rejecting their rule.

Mahratta is what we know today as the Marathi language. It is spoken in the state of Maharashtra in India. Although printed mainly for a European audience, this dictionary was written for a particular audience, one who knew how to read the script. In using this dictionary as an ideological tool Carey was directing his European learners to only view and use the dictionary for

Evangelical purposes, while keeping the true meanings of some words hidden from them.

29 The dictionary's audience was comprised mainly of students at the Fort

William College. The dictionary served two purposes—one, to educate the

British and two, to provide easy access to other scholars for translating the

Bible. "It was primarily, however, part of the process by which Carey and his colleagues, Joshua Marshman, William Ward and a cadre of Indian pundits, translated the Bible into Indian languages" ("Mahratta Dictionary").

Neil Postman, an American professor and media critic has written, "We are unaware most of the time of how language works as it is an inseparable part of who we are" (Postman 124). His argument is that we do not think of language as a technology because we think it is inside us and not outside us, as a machine would be. It is much easier to accept a machine as a technological agent than language, because we do not see language as manufacturing anything, whereas a machine manufactures tangible objects.

He explains this concept as follows:

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view. Unlike television or the computer, language appears to be not an extension of our powers but simply a natural expression of who and what we are. This is the great secret of language^ Because it comes from inside us, we believe it to be a direct, unedited, unbiased apolitical expression of how the world really is. A machine on the other hand, is outside of us, clearly created by us, modifiable by us, even discardable by us. (Postman 125)

30 The point is that, precisely because we feel that language is "internal to us," to learn a language is to internalize the values and ideologies contained within the language. To learn English is to absorb English values. In the case of the Mahratta dictionary, Carey was not trying to teach Marathi to his

European audience so that they would imbibe cultural and traditional

Maharashtrian values. He was trying to convey his Evangelical agenda through the European audience, wrapped in a familiar language.

Mahratta Dictionary

According to the Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, eight copies of this dictionary burned in the fire at the Serampore Mission

Press that occurred on March 11, 1812, two years after this dictionary was published. Only two copies of this dictionary exist today, one at the Center for

Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, and the other at School of

Oriental and African Studies, London. Although there is no record of how many copies were originally printed, it seems to have circulated within the circle of the Evangelists and the teachers at Fort William College.

31 A

DICTIONARY

MAHRATTA LANGUAGE,

BY W. CAREY, D. D.

PttOr&SOB OF TliG SE/Nuilill/T^, MAHRATTA,'AND BESGAI.EE LAMCUAOE^ 1» fHB COLLEGE OF FottT WlLLlAM.

SERAMPOHE.

18W.

Fig.2. Title page from the Mahratta Dictionary, courtesy, Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D.D. (1761-1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA. httpV/www.wmcarey.edu/carey/mahratta/title.jpg

The script used in Carey's Marathi dictionary is the Modi script. The Modi script was used until 1950 to write Marathi, and then it was replaced by the

Devanagari script. In translating this dictionary, Carey was assisted by

Vidyanath, the chief Mahratta Pundit at Fort William College. Carey presented this dictionary to his audience as a medium through which

Europeans could familiarize themselves with customs and traditions of

32 Marathas. It would be recognized by his audience as a useful tool, because this is how Orientalist scholars and the British officers gathered information to attack local Indian knowledge. In the preface, Carey asserts the importance of learning Indian languages to facilitate trade and to promote a feeling of mutual confidence between the Europeans and the natives. He goes on to say:

It is also highly important as a medium through which alone Europeans can become acquainted with the manners and customs of the different Indian nations, and with a variety of circumstances known to the great body of the people and in which they are immediately interested. (Carey hi)

The last line in the paragraph captures my interest as Carey intends to document each and every nuance associated with the culture of the Hindus, and specifically the Marathas. Carey published this dictionary at an opportune time as "it coincided with the British triumph over the Marathas in a series of three wars that lasted from 1776 to 1782, from 1803 to 1806, and from 1817 to 1819" ("Mahratta Dictionary"). The second and the third

Maratha wars both took place in the first half of the nineteenth century and the Marathas lost both wars to the British East India Company. The

Maratha provinces and princely states were an important part of the British

Empire as they formed a large part of the territory ruled by the East India

Company.

33 What is most striking in Carey's dictionary is his struggle with cultural concepts and his passion for promoting his Evangelical agenda. As documented by the Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, his greatest challenge was "to promote understanding of Christian beliefs within an appropriate cultural context" ("Mahratta Dictionary"). For example, Mahratta for God is Eesh. Carey also gives us its other meaning in

Mahratta—"the staff or beam of a plough" (Carey 69), stemming from

Sanskrit where Eesh also means "powerful" or "supreme". There are other words in this dictionary that offer a meaning for cultural as well as

Evangelical purposes —Isht, which principally means "desired", also has other meanings in this dictionary —"approved" and "offered in sacrifice", which are not so commonly used in Marathi or Sanskrit. There are other meanings like "improper" (18), "saviour" (293), "wickedness" (319) and

"resurrection" (411), which have only one meaning in Marathi but also serve

Carey's Evangelical translation purposes.

An example of words that show his struggle to explain to European audiences some cultural concepts are Ozhalan, which he explains in English in many words as "to move the hands in circular manner at an offering of lamps, to give something in remembrance of a benefit" (Carey 104). It was hard for

Carey to introduce this concept to his European students and it became necessary to use a sentence to explain the ritual. Even then, Carey is not able

34 to capture the correct devotional meaning with which this ritual is conducted in India and refrains from explaining that this ritual is intricately connected to the worship of Hindu Gods. He does not say who these lamps are offered to.

Aarti, in Hindi or Ozhalan in Marathi, is supposed to be a modern version of similar fire-related rituals from Vedic times. Usually a lamp is circulated around a deity and is accompanied by a mantra or a song in praise of that deity. The priest then circulates this lamp among devotees. The devotees cup their hands over the flame and raise their hands to their foreheads. In doing so, the deity's blessings are passed on to the devotee. This is a complex ritual and can be appreciated only by a Hindu, for whom it has context and meaning. Carey has tried to introduce this term to his audience but he finds it difficult to introduce the cultural contexts associated with this term in his dictionary.

Another example is the word Antahpat, which Carey explains as "a piece of cloth held by proper assistants between two persons who are going to be married, until the moment deemed auspicious is announced by the astronomer" (Carey 22). He has been able to describe this term more easily as compared to Ozhalan but one can't help but wonder how difficult it is to

35 make sense of such an explanation without knowing the cultural meaning of the term.

Carey's intention was not to create an understanding of Maratha culture but to create an understanding of evangelical ideas. His bias toward Evangelical teaching and his eventual support to the British rulers made the discovery of these cultural aspects a great tool in educating the Indian population about the demerits of their rituals.

The examples above reflect Carey's endeavors to focus on his Evangelical agenda while presenting them to his audience. He just touches upon the many cultural complexities and provides only his view point in understanding them. It is precisely the moment which becomes critical to this chapter and illustrates the point both Heidegger and Postman make about concealing and about language as an invisible technology. In his introduction,

Carey presents his dictionary to his audience as a bridge to cover linguistic and cultural gaps but there is no mention whatsoever of his Evangelical ideas. In this way Carey used language as an invisible technology to promote his agenda.

36 Let us look at this example as an experiment to illustrate what Heidegger means by enframing and that technology "challenges forth" when it is not in proper sequence and not in order. In his essay "The Question Concerning

Technology", Heidegger's concern is more with 'revealing' than in

'manufacturing' with concern to technology. His concern is with the attainment of truth and correctness of representation. The true forms or objects that we see are concealed, and only when they presented to us in a certain way, when they are revealed, can we access the truth. In questioning technology etymologically, Heidegger goes back to the origins of 'technology' and explains that the word techne is "the name not only for the activities and skills of the craftsman but also for the arts of the mind and the fine arts"

(Heidegger 255). For the Greeks, techne was intricately linked to poiesis, the poetic, and thus linked to the "bringing forth", which is integral to the pursuit of aletheia or truth. In its modern avatar, technology is thought of more as

'manufacturing' than as 'revealing'. "It is as revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing-forth ... Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens" (Heidegger 255). In the last few paragraphs of this chapter I examine Heidegger's concern with technology alongside Postman's argument that language is an invisible technology. In doing so an understanding of Carey's techniques in hiding his Evangelical agenda are revealed.

37 This dictionary could exist and have meaning only for someone who wanted to learn Mahratta. Carey in turn knew that this dictionary would actually guide fellow Evangelists and help them in preaching and writing tracts in

Mahratta. His dictionary was also a useful resource for those European students who wanted to acquire a quick working knowledge of Mahratta.

Carey's dictionary only revealed what Carey wanted his audience to see. The meanings in his dictionary were designed to show only what he felt necessary for his students to see. They are given only what he believes is necessary in order to attain an understanding of Mahratta culture and words. In this example one understands language more as a technology because of the way it reveals. It challenges forth: Carey's dictionary had a meaning only within an Evangelical context. Detached from Evangelical purposes, the meanings or the revealing can be faulty. As illustrated by the few word examples earlier,

Carey is able to transliterate the terms but not so much their meanings, mainly because he was not interested in presenting the true meanings or religious contexts in the Mahratta dictionary.

Hortus Bengalensis

In its first decade, the Serampore mission press concentrated on translating various texts into different Indian languages for purposes of religious preaching and supporting the Fort William College. The second decade brought different publications ranging from Flora Indica or a Description of

38 Indian Plants, edited by William Carey, as well as the first Bengali newspaper, Digdarshan.

William Carey established the Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India in 1820. In 1814 Carey had already edited and published Hortus Bengalensis or a catalogue of the plants growing in the Honourable East India Company's

Botanic Garden at Calcutta. The author of this book was Dr. William

Roxburgh, but Carey's role was much more than editor of the book. He contributed to the twelve-page introduction, comments and botanical descriptions. In contributing introductions, comments, and descriptions,

Carey also used the seemingly innocent genre of the botanical catalogue to promote colonial ideologies that critiqued and diminished indigenous Indian knowledge.

The Botanical Garden at Calcutta was begun by Colonel R. Kydd in March,

1786 (Carey ii). The number of plant species in the Garden was about three thousand five hundred, making it an impressive collection. Carey published the catalogue for the Gardens in two parts. The first part was a catalogue of plants that were growing in the Garden and the second part was comprised of

"plants described by Dr. Roxburgh, in His Mss. Flora Indica, but not yet introduced into the Botanical Garden" (Carey ii).

39 In the explanatory notes that come before the introduction of Hortus

Bengalensis, the author explains that although universal nomenclatures are advantageous, the column of English names has been supplemented with names of plants in Bengali, Hindustani, Sanskrit and many other Indian languages in order to make the catalogue more accessible to all readers. In the explanatory remarks Carey explains the importance of familiarizing

Indians with the Linnaean nomenclature"

All the nations of Europe know well the advantages they derive from the general knowledge of the same figures, or characters in Arithmetic, Chemistry etc. etc. Botanists, particularly those who are not masters of the science, must derive equal advantages from a general knowledge of one universal nomenclature." I will therefore endeavour to contribute my mite, to render a more general communication of Botanic knowledge less difficult, by omitting, in this Catalogue, the usual column for English names, and consign the few used, to that appropriated for the Asiatic names." such as the Sanskrit, Hindoostani, Bungali, Tamul, Telinga etc. etc. provincial, or vernacular names, whenever they can be ascertained with any tolerable degree of certainty.

Here Carey assumes that Indian languages lack a degree of certainty that

English possesses. Later in the introduction, Carey stresses this education further by saying that there are very few "Natives of the East" (Carey vii) who think of documenting the productions of nature and who find it surprising that anyone would spend time in pursuing a study of nature that is so "useless and unentertaining". Carey obviously thought of Indian culture

40 as stagnant because it did not have an inclination toward scientific learning as in the West. He goes on to say "the whole number of plants enumerated in their most approved vocabularies, and books on Materia Medica, does not exceed four or five hundred" (Carey vii). He then turns his attention to the

Europeans and says that they will have much to benefit and learn about new species from this catalogue as many of the Indian species have not been studied by Europeans.

For example, beside the systemic name Curcuma Reclinata, the author puts in a Marathi synonym - Amba Haldi for Nigella Indica. The synonym in

Hindi is Kala Jeera>'ior Justicia Polysprema the synonym in Bengali is

Choota Mecheta. Following are the categories documented in Hortus

Bengalensis- Systematic names, Synonyma and remarks Native Place, Donors and time etc., Duration and Habit, Time of Flowering, Time of Seed

Carey used this catalogue to promote the Botanical Gardens of the East India

Company in Calcutta and he encouraged botanists and plant enthusiasts from across India to contribute their discoveries and species to the Botanical

Gardens. The following image is a page from Carey's catalogue and gives a general idea of the way he presented the information collected by William

41 Roxburgh, M.R Smith and other botanists and attendants of the East India

Company:

CLASSIS I.

MONANDKtA MONOGYNU. Stephen T'ifitf 6$ habit, ffe&relt't. H. B. ctaar-i. Aowrica* W, Uamtltac, fcjq. 1733, ». I-.. Iietio, to. IT05. Mili-'or. Or, =1. Amlepmi. l&t?. 51 tl lmbriaMirai» R. Ciifiuwu*. Sit*. J. It. Ihtrt. ptnifliirecv, tt» BSIKJ. Ur. P. Bialiius, 1553. n, s. B, K«tahr.4 Brazil. Dr. I'. Hacikiijia, 1TW. c. s BrCwo lJSl. air. a.». fcii*.KM . attnMifdlitua, E. B. BtwofeHJa. Mtert. Sir. M.ll, ,^...h„ BW. mcttr»R. B. Kaitea iLitlcar. fctflWl. Mr. in. H.MiUB, MM. it. s. MPtfKttU, *,*;.' lisi. C. 8. K, ljJio«>f-cliaap-'B? India, MK'.R. I(M. WUttHMfalU, H. Kairtrj^hsts, ITgfi, Sli.W. It. 1KB. II. E. 1L L. CURCUMV ; . Srav. r. fyikia Literal H. E. StH-Cir..., ft, I;«, F. iiatfeSflM, 1J5S. U. K. f SaAflHff&l^, ft, Aaitsttyfis Mr. C. SsilJttJ, 1ISIS. II. t> elaia, ft. u. i;. B. Ne«Mcw&'Ett.l3 B".tpi. Br. V.ftRT, 1SW. n. v- manj£la&a, R. Sic. r. Care>, l™3- H. K. IVjRt. H. E. UwUtfii'fEtt. tt. I). & CQOUU, ft. BPMTJ.U Mr. (?. Pnn-y,1S». II. »i II. E. VaxttfAza, EL19 feral.Kructl . I. Itla-.v l.yt- l>^l. II. E U. Tc:t>7.1l HinuWui. ll.loii.l]Ml.c, L*).liO:.H. L 1 R-ll.l!.]l.ti S.nfAto. BrtbrelTM. U.K. It. S. I Anu'U« K. a loiilc Bra ;J. Dr.«'. Cirey. I6» II. K. R. S. liiriMw.-i, ft. SlHi-Tiw.ima!>plriar. Suusaira. Ite L'. CjiaplwH, liiOl. H, K. R. S. pBMtaii, (1. &ru«uiiM. H. K. It, S. 1 H. II. Aatei-baMi. IlioJuaMaa. II. C^lfhtwiRr. I'^. US3, II. !•;. B. * oirttl.KtiK SI. I'egfl. Mr. *°. t^re^, Ibiitf. tl. I» R. !-. AMnvn w . cardj: 1'istnuu.l'j Miilaaqsear. Capl^iin Tmnool, lg83. •tt g. C. S. ttctdfiuout, It. 1*0. Cbtito-iliiriaesi. Mtrineai. Mr' W. R. IHH. it r.. It. B. •oawmsu, R. SIH. tiaob'^a. MOIUTE^. Brfor*. lifl*. •ff K. II. ». »* ^altuiiL-,^ St ISIBWDOS. Mr. J. R. BOO. •S r. 11. S. R BiiiEnl.Vl.iriire. ««!!»>. K. Snlld, l-t Mlft. •tt J- U.S. SJiimtkui s, £5, II. >t(jf !P(r<;l!iftwe. Aliiruaa, &e. Kr.7t.ll, .VTiilit. ISU. •a r. II. K lerirruut. It. B. D^^^Cis. U.irrow ElHIs. Mr. It. R. Sdilil, 1&12. 11. S. ZlNC5I0r.lt. it E. I- Hj>& i write! B(lf.Qiii,.]:i H. & 8. AJa. > S754. H. E. 3BPiumb«n.I{] II. II^A. ladla. ! ITS*. II. E. u.: 141 J S, Vaao-kdl. Jt. LT.I^ahjB?a, T. Krfttmalaaars. 2 H. Sabjrnra, S8. Swlutw-milrdui. ». A. 4, L 7. * • t. M. It i. 31. i>. 3 vw. e S. dtcmdHf JBOnliti 7 S. liiWaeiM-tiHrnptiiin. tl H. K.iwjroi-hfiwra. 9 H. A.& tfA f. I- II.M. It. 1.10. We tvbrrs v/ftbt) C:Jf M? -t'.^J'-jiks'-^ the ult&k/aab

Fig.3. page from Hortus Bengalensis, courtesy, Center for Study of the Life and Work of William Carey, D.D. (1761-1834), William Carey University, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, USA. httpV/www.wmcarey.edu/carey/hortus/hortus.htm

42 In publishing scientific data they were creating a public awareness as well as building thought ideologies that catered to a European way of thinking. In printing catalogues like the one discussed earlier, they were making sure that the natives inferred the European way of understanding science. This catalogue was first published in 1814, which is before the first Agricultural

Society was formed in India. This catalogue recorded the species, their local names, their native place, donors as well as their life spans and seeding cycles.

This is a record of a crucial shift where knowledge was being transferred with the intention of infusing the Indian mind with European ideas. Since the 16th century, science was the foundation for progressive cultural ideals in the

Western society. Francis Bacon was an extraordinary figure of the English

Renaissance who is in his New Atlantis described an ideal society in which

"pursuers of something closer to the modern notion of science and engineering played a central role in the running of a prosperous and healthy society" (Dusek 41). It is this European idea of progressive thinking that

William Carey was trying to disseminate through publications like Hortus

Bengalensis. Carey's press functioned in creating a scientific awareness and this catalogue is an example of how the Serampore mission press was a vehicle of introducing social change in the Indian society.

43 One can observe an effort to integrate common local knowledge into a scientific documentation, so this catalogue becomes a reference for Europeans as well as Indians. In doing so, there was an effort to not just transliterate ideas but use existing local knowledge to understand foreign concepts and language and also to make the catalogue less threatening to an Indian audience. According to Heidegger's discussion on technology, this catalogue is an example of revealing partially, an invitation to revealing where local knowledge is presented side-by-side with foreign knowledge. It is not an interpretation of what Indians see, but synonyms from Indian languages are presented alongside European classifications of plants offering the Indian audience a chance to learn and interpret as well. This catalogue is an important example of a publication which catered to expand knowledge but also a publication which is intended to hide an agenda, as seen in the discussion of the Mahratta-English dictionary. Both publications use local languages to make Evangelical and European ideas of science less threatening.

Carey's intention to integrate scientific knowledge becomes clearer in his address published in The Transactions of the Agricultural and Horticultural

Society of India, published at the Serampore mission press in 1829. Carey stressed the importance of involving local intelligentsia in the newly formed

44 agricultural society and the following passage from his speech shows Carey's progressivist agenda:

It is peculiarly desirable that Native Gentlemen should be eligible as members of the Society, because one of its chief objects will be the improvement of their estates, and of the peasantry which reside thereon. They should therefore not only be eligible as members but also as officers of the Society in precisely the same manner as Europeans. (Smith 229)

Digdarshan and Samachar Darpan:

The publications discussed until now show Carey as an Evangelist and a scientist, but the publication that really started the vernacular press movement in Bengal is the first Bengali newspaper Digdarshan. Many scholars attribute the beginning of the vernacular printing movement to the

Serampore Mission Press and its two main Bengali publications—

Digdarshan and Samachar Darpan.

Both these newspapers were printed at the Serampore Mission Press and edited by Joshua Marshman. The monthly, Digdarshan, was first published in April, 1818. The topics discussed in Digdarshan exposed the Bengali audience to a whole range of subjects. It published popular articles on history, politics and science. Smarajit Chakroborti has documented and translated articles from the Digdarshan and gives us a comprehensive list of

45 the topics included in the newspaper as seen in the following passage from

The Bengali Press (1818-1868)-

Among such topics discussed in the monthly were discovery of America by Columbus, an account of Alexander the Great, arrival of the Portuguese in India, Alfred the Great, history of the world from the birth of Christ, the Eastern Empire, rise of the Muslim power and Muslim empires in the different parts of the world etc. It also published "annals of Europe" giving an account of the principal events in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Prussia, France and England. In addition to these, the Digdarshan published articles on many other scientific and allied subjects such as division of the earth, the use of compass, Sadler's journey in a balloon, mount Vesuvius, the discovery of Asia, the trees in India, the steam boat, Socrates, chronology of the world, progress of knowledge in Europe, the origin of printing, the fixed stars, the natural history of the Camel, the city of Babylon, barbarism, and manners of ancient Britons, the laws of Sparta, the elephants, the comets, bees, etc. The paper also contained interesting economic notes on the trade of Hindustan, Portuguese trade, the great famine of Bengal, the coal mines of England, the pearl fishery in Ceylon and the salt mines near Cracow in Poland. (19)

From the range of the articles published in Digdarshan, it is obvious that young Bengali minds were being stimulated to think differently and the diffusion of new education was taking place. The range of exposure to

European science, technology, geography, history and philosophy promoted an extended intellectual thinking. This new education contributed greatly to the Bengal renaissance in that it induced a sense of questioning, support for

46 intellectual inquiry, and a birth of documenting and looking critically at

Indian science, history and philosophy.

Digdarshan also contributed significantly to the acceptance of Bengali prose.

The School Book Society purchased many copies of the journal for distribution and "requested the editor to publish an English version of the journal" (Chakraborti 20). Obviously the papers had sparked interest in the

Bengali intelligentsia and the East India Company alike. The Digdarshan was mainly educative in its content and refrained from making any criticisms that would displease the British government. In later years though, both

Digdarshan and the Samachar Darpan did not hesitate in making critical comments against the government when the editor felt it necessary

(Chakraborti 21).

The weekly Samachar Darpan was started on May 23, 1818, soon after the publication of Digdarshan. Both Digdarpan and Samachar Darshan were given instant approval by the British government because a large part of

India had been brought under the British supremacy and the ruling authority now "required the support of a subservient and loyal press".

Citation? The Samachar Darpan created a momentum for political awakening in Bengal. Articles were published criticizing the shortcomings of the East India Company's government. The political agitations of Raja Ram

47 Mohan Roy found expression in Samachar Darpan. The subject of "wider employment of Indians in the higher offices of government, which soon became a major issue culminating in the historic Civil Service Act of the

1870s was thoroughly discussed in the pages oi Darpan" (Chakraborti 22).

The Samachar Darpan was critical of the British government and at the same time they were very keen to condemn native landlords and police systems. It called the darogas (policemen) 'dacoits', who looted people in broad daylight. The local landlords were responsible for maintaining law and order in their areas but failed to do so. In exposing both the British and oppressing systems within the Indian administrative areas, Darpan educated the masses about their rights. This weekly newspaper was also instrumental in mobilizing public opinion in support of the empowerment of women and their education. "The Samachar Darpan held that little could be accomplished unless English education was brought to the doors of the people in villages and the study of that language was encouraged" (Chakraborti 26).

The downfall of Samachar Darpan was its religious agenda. It attacked

Hinduism in some of its columns. This irked the Bengali intelligentsia and foremost among the people who retaliated was Ram Mohan Roy. In this argument, Roy is a perfect illustration of how Indians embraced new knowledge while safe keeping their own traditions. Mohan Roy was one of the

48 most affluent leaders at the turn of the nineteenth century and well versed in many languages, a rarity even among the Bengali intelligentsia of the time.

He is most well known for the creation of the Brahmo Samaj and spearheading the movement to end the practice of Sati, a custom where a recent widow would immolate herself on her husband's funeral pyre.

Ram Mohan Roy was a close associate of the missionaries. Later, in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, he was keenly interested in the education imparted by the Serampore missionaries and Fort William College.

Roy embraced the missionaries as agents of the new learning (Crawford 119).

Roy supported the building of schools for many missionary sects. He was greatly impressed by the Unitarians and Presbyterians of America and these missionaries had Roy's fervent support.

Roy was instrumental in getting the Presbyterian Board to send Alexander

Duff to India, and met him upon his arrival. The motives of these two people were entirely opposite. Duff wanted to convert the "pagans" and Roy wanted to restore the knowledge of the Vedas which had been corrupted by idolatry.

The two joined hands to promote Western learning in India. Roy donated generously toward this new education:

In 1822, at his own expense, he opened the Anglo-Indian school for imparting free education in English to Hindu boys. He suggested to the

49 Unitarians of America that they send a few teachers, "well qualified to teach English literature and science, and noted for their moral conduct," to help educate the children of the poorer classes.

The Presbyterian missionaries seemed to have impressed him the most by their talents in education, and therefore received his enthusiastic support.

The most outstanding educator of this group was Alexander Duff (1806-1878).

He inaugurated a new phase of missionary work in India. In his bid to reach the influential classes and members of the upper castes, he promoted

Western education communicated through the English language. In his judgment the English language "is the lever which, as the instrument of conveying the entire range of knowledge, is destined to move all Hindustan."

(Crawford 119)

Roy was influenced by the teachings of the missionaries. He remained a

Hindu but coined the word Hinduism to express in a very Western way the idea of India, intact in its ancient glory. It is in this time he formed the

Brahmo Samaj where the teachings centered on the knowledge of the Vedas and one God. Among Indians it was Raja Ram Mohan Roy who spearheaded the movement for modern European education in India. He believed that this education would deliver India from "medieval darkness". To take her place among the enlightened nations of the world, India needed the same knowledge that made Europe great (Crawford 117).

50 While Roy pushed his educational agenda, his retaliation toward missionary attacks on Hinduism became quite fervent. When the editor of Samachar

Darpan refused to publish some of Roy's letters, he, under the name of

Shibprasad Sharma, brought out the bHingual Brahmanical magazine, the

Missionary and the Brahman No. 1. (Brahman Sebadhi, Brahman O

Missionary Sambad, in September 1821.* Chakraborti 28). This newspaper had a very short life but it heralded the beginning of a long debate between

Hindu and Missionary journals. The Samachar Darpan was elemental in bringing political and intellectual change, where it allowed an open critique and dialogue to begin within the Bengali literati.

This final example of Carey's newspapers is an example of complete revealing. In this revelation there is a complete understanding of one another's thought as well as an invitation for debate. Here these newspapers were not published just to preach or interpret Indian culture or values but the thoughts were opened to the wider public with an invitation for a dialogue. The fact that these dialogues gave space for communication and an exchange for ideas make them examples of the platforms that became powerful resources for technology to reveal.

51 The Serampore Mission Press as an Agent of Change

The three publications by the Serampore Mission Press bring forth qualities by which technology can hide or reveal. Progressively the examples show how the press published by becoming more democratic. The Mahratta dictionary hid the truth by disguising Carey's Evangelical agenda, Hortus Bengalensis started integrating Indian terms for European botanical terms and the

Bengali newspapers, finally revealed truly. According to Heidegger's essay, the Bengali newspapers reveal the most truth, because a whole new understanding of various situations and topics occurred, inviting Indian minds to discover other forms of truth.

Had it not been for the Serampore Mission Press and the seeds of westernization, nationalist ideas and the Bengal Renaissance would not have been possible. We would possibly not have Gitanjalihy the first Indian Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore and the now famous verse from it that each and every Indian associates with the birth of renaissance ideas in India:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow

domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection,*

52 Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the

dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought

and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake. (Tagore 27)

In this chapter language as a technology was my main concern in discussing

William Carey's Serampore Mission Press and the role it played in precipitating the Bengal Renaissance. In the next chapter I want to explore art and see how art 'brings forth' the truth instead of 'challenging forth' the truth. Does the order in 'bringing forth' differ from the 'challenging forth' as in language? These questions lead us to the knowledge of how India was represented in art through visual media technologies.

53 Chapter 3: Visual Media Technologies and the Shaping of the Bengal Renaissance in Art

Textual media technologies were not the only technologies that helped shape the Bengal Renaissance. Visual media technologies represented India in a way that inspired the artists of the Bengal Renaissance to develop their own style and created a powerful Nationalist movement within the artistic avant- garde in India. The aquatints that are the main concern in this chapter are complementary in technique to the textual media technologies from the early nineteenth century. The Bengal school of art rejected academic art styles promoted by the British and Indian artists like Raja Ravi Verma, who created representations of Indian mythology through very European techniques. As compared to the quick response to, and influence of textual media technologies, visual technologies took a longer time to metamorphose into a nationalist art movement that was influenced by British sensibilities.

The Bengal Renaissance in art came to real power only in the early twentieth century with the birth of the Bengal school of art. What caused the birth of this nationalist movement in art can be seen in the aquatints from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century by Thomas and William

Daniell and Balthazar Solvyns. There were many artists before them who mainly represented India through painting and pencil drawings. These were the first artists to use printing technology to produce their art.

54 Brief biographical sketches of Thomas and William Daniell and Balthazar Solvyns

Thomas Daniell (1749-1840), a little known artist from England, decided to go to India with his young nephew William (1769-1837) in 1784 (Archer 9).

He was very interested in the works of other artists like William Hodges, who had made his name and fortune by painting pictures of India. As a keen observer, Thomas Daniell was aware of, and wanted to take advantage of, the new categories at the time that were becoming popular in England such as the 'sublime', the 'picturesque' and the 'exotic' (Archer 10).

According to Mildred Archer, in 1784 Thomas Daniel decided to go to India with his young nephew William. Their aquatints have been hugely popular ever since their publication between 1795 and 1810. They offer a very idyllic and enchanted view of India and are important for this study as they were created in the same period when William Carey and Joshua Marshman were establishing their printing press in Bengal. Around 1788 the Daniels published an album based on twelve original etchings called 'Twelve Views of

Calcutta'. These aquatints were well received by British officers and

European tradesman living in Calcutta, as these aquatints provided them with 'landscape' images of the land acquired by the East India Company.

These also became extensions of the 'picturesque' they saw in British landscapes. The aquatints naturalize British incursions by creating

55 picturesque views of India. Archer describes the demand for these aquatints as follows^

The British serving in India purchased these aquatints for their libraries or framed them for their houses, offices and clubs. In the early nineteenth century connoisseurs of art and architecture eagerly acquired them for their celebration of the 'sublime', the 'picturesque' and the 'exotic', as well as for their recording of antiquities. (Archer 7)

Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824) was a little-known Flemish artist who lived in

Calcutta from 1791 to 1803. He published his work A collection of two hundred and fifty coloured etchings'- descriptive of the manners, customs and dresses of the Hindoos in 1796 and 1799. This project proved to be a financial failure (Hardgrave Jr. 9), because by contemporary standards the etchings were crude and did not present the 'picturesque'.

In contrast to the work of Thomas and William Daniel, the etchings of

Francois Balthazar Solvyns were hardly recognized until the 1980s and have been researched and documented by Robert L. Hardgrave Jr. These etchings provide very detailed and realistic depictions of the people. Robert L.

Hardgrave Jr. describes Solvyns's work aptly:

In portraying the Hindus, however, Solvyns is not simply recording ethnographic types. He gives his figures individual character and places them in time and space, with narrative interest and in doing so, he provides the viewer intimate access. This separates him from purely

56 encyclopedic interest, for with artistic purpose, he combines the ethnographic and the aesthetic. He conveys "art as information". (9)

Comparing Techniques and Subjects

The prints by the Daniells have an agenda which parallels that of William

Carey! they represent India through a very European style, acceptable to the

European audience who would form the Daniells' main clientele. It is a contention of this thesis that although the Daniells were not under the constant direction of any Governor General or parliamentary Act, they embodied a quality approved by British rule: to represent India through a

European point of view.

On the other hand, Balthazar Solvyns' prints do not follow any canons of

European art. They represent India to the world as it looked to him in reality.

This made his representations of India alien to the British and was the main reason why Solvyns failed as an artist in the eyes of his potential clientele.

By making India more palatable to the British taste in art the Daniells succeeded. It can be argued that since Solvyns was a European who refused to place a British perspective on India, his art was rejected as alien by both the British and the Indians.

57 Nineteenth-century European visual media introduced Indian artists to new techniques and in doing so made Indian artists realize that they needed to find their own original style. In this way they could assert their nationalist agenda within the larger context of the Bengal Renaissance. Art, like technology, has an agenda. To return to Heidegger's essay on how art reveals or hides, in the case of Solvyns' prints it acts as a safe-keeper of truth.

In his essay 'The Question Concerning Technology' Martin Heidegger sees technology and poetry as two ways of revealing. This revealing occurs because of the technique that is a collective result of the material, the form, and the need for the form and the creator. However, the modes of revealing for technology and poetry are different. For Heidegger, poetry or art is a revealing that brings forth the 'truth' at once, lnpoiesis there is an ordering, but this ordering reveals no matter in what sequence one sees this order.

Heidegger describes enframing in relation to men as^

Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging-forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he exists, in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed, so that he can never encounter only himself.

But enframing does not simply endanger man in his relationship to himself and to everything that is. As a destining, it banishes man into the kind of revealing that is an ordering. Where this ordering holds

58 sway, it drives out every other possibility of revealing. (Scharff et al. 261)

He describes the Fine Arts as belonging to techne. They bring forward an immediate understanding of the matter, and in doing so they perpetuate the safekeeping of truth. Heidegger's concern is more with the way technology and poetry reveal, in the sense that they have the same essence but yet are fundamentally different. Art is fundamentally different from technology because it reveals and lays a claim on the viewer which is direct and unconcealed. It reveals immediately what it has to show and offer.

The works by Solvyns and the Daniells are essential to the arguments presented in this thesis, as these three artists created works that document

India. The main theme in the work of Thomas and William Daniell is the architecture of India. The works of Balthazar Solvyns are a minute recording of the people of Bengal and their daily lives, customs and rituals.

Balthazar Solvyns lived in Calcutta from 1791 to 1803 and created a rich portrayal of the people of Bengal: their daily lives, costumes and occupations.

What is remarkable about Solvyns' aquatints is that they represent a true image of the natives in Bengal, in contrast to the work of the Daniells. The two Daniells created very picturesque images of India. The Europeans did not

59 value Solvyns' prints because they thought his prints represented a very mundane view of India. They did not follow any of the much-valued idioms in art from European Renaissance artists. Nothing about his prints was either

'picturesque' or 'exotic', as the Daniells' prints were.

Defining the Picturesque

The 'picturesque' is a genre in art that rose out of depicting the English landscape garden. Artists used it very often to improve the real landscape. In the picturesque, the observer at once gets the most advantaged view, guided by the gaze of the artist. The view is composed in the small space of a canvas and is the most pleasing view that captures the nuances and characteristics of each and every object in the composition, in linear perspective. Trees, people, buildings, the sky and the landscape, each one of these elements is captured in its spirit rather than its reality. Uvedale Price, one of the most prominent eighteenth-century debaters on the qualities of the 'picturesque' characterizes two kinds of artists — one who captures the beauty in a landscape and the other who is an improver, who sacrifices some inferior beauty in order to give greater effect to those of a 'higher order' (Price 9).

According to Price:

"A painter or whoever views objects with a painter's eye, looks with indifference, if not with disgust, at the clumps, the belts, the made water, and the eternal smoothness and sameness of a finished place. An improver, on the other hand, considers these as the most perfect

60 embellishments, as the last finishing touches that nature can receive from art". (15)

Price was convinced that the two opposite qualities of roughness and sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity were the two most "efficient causes of the picturesque" (51).

Perceiving nature as represented through these qualities and characteristics is the most effective way of recognizing the picturesque in the work of the

Daniells. On the other hand, Solvyns does not use the laws of linear perspective or techniques of representing shade and light dramatically. His aquatints are almost flat in rendition and his characters appear as he would have observed them in real life. The focus is on the people, while the landscape and surroundings are mere objects to place them in space.

Images, Travels and Interpretation

In the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century many artists were producing fine print-sets of the scenery in India but the prints of the

Daniells were the finest and their projects were ambitious. They generated a high interest in the sophisticated circles and exemplified the Orientalist agenda of the 'picturesque', the 'sublime', and the 'exotic'. Their works were conventional and presented a classical ideal. Their aquatints also provided

61 connoisseurs and scholars of the Orient with accurate details of scenery and architecture.

One of the first major works by the Daniells was 'Twelve Views of Calcutta'.

Mildred Archer attributes the Daniells' success to their choice of subject.

There was a huge market among British in Calcutta for engravings of the city. In 1786, Thomas Daniell placed an announcement in the Calcutta

Chronicle proposing to publish twelve views of Calcutta at twelve gold mohurs per set. When the Daniells arrived in Calcutta it was a prospering city with new buildings and what follows is Thomas Daniell's account:

The splendour of British arms produced sudden change in its aspects! the bamboo roof suddenly vanished, the marble column took the place of brick walls! princely mansions were erected by private individuals, (qtd. in Archer et al. 14)

Clearly, the Daniells' Calcutta was prosperous and picturesque, and their aquatints represented a very romantic view of India. In the picturesque, the image allows the spectator to mentally configure and appropriate a series of objects as a landscape under the guidance of the viewing artist. Uvedale

Price, who wrote at length about the techniques of the picturesque, describes the process of how the onlooker studies copies of nature, even though the original is in front of the onlooker as:

62 "Many of those objects, that are scarcely marked as they lie scattered over the face of nature, when brought together in the compass of a small space of compass are forcibly impressed upon the eye, which by that means learns how to separate, to select and combine." (Price 5)

The Daniells chose architecture and a majority of their work highlights old and new buildings and ruins, presenting India through the effects of time and weather. Nature and architecture dominate their work, making the aquatints more a production of nature than a production of culture. This representational technique was influenced by the works of their peers and more established artists like William Hodges, who were in India before the

Daniells.

There is no doubt that the Daniells were influenced by the works of William

Hodges, who had introduced the style of representing India through the motif of an English garden, and as the acquired land of the British. In 1783 Hodges published Travels in India during the Years 1780, 1781, 1782 and 1783, a description of his sojourn to India, complete with engraved illustrations

(Tobin 117). In this book he describes the techniques of the artist to represent culture and power. Hodges describes how General Hastings had asked him to draw the countryside, in particular the various cities and forts, often under siege by British forces. None of Hodges' landscapes hint at the violence and the destruction of the British forces and present a very serene and

63 picturesque India. Hodges used the same idioms as the seventeenth-century masters like Claude Lorrain, Poussin and Dughet —idioms "that create an illusion of a timeless serenity that mimics an Arcadian past" (Tobin 120). In

Travels, Hodges describes his initial lack of interest in painting India as all

Indian landscape did not always represent the European ideas about the tropics. Hodges encoded his drawings and paintings with spatial techniques derived from the seventeenth-century masters, and in doing so, he

"domesticated India, creating pleasing images that made this land palatable to educated English tastes" (Tobin 121).

To create the 'picturesque' and the 'exotic', Daniells improvised their techniques but embedded all known idioms and techniques used by sixteenth- and seventeenth- century masters like Leonardo Da Vinci, Raphael and

Titian, as well as Hodges. We see here how strongly European techniques in art were pushed forward by the British rulers. Eventually the art schools and the art education that was introduced in Bengal in the late nineteenth century popularized European techniques in art. This led to a movement to rediscover roots of Indian art forms. What emerged was individualistic and original artistic techniques. In recognizing the need to create an original identity in Indian art, artists of the Bengal Renaissance rebelled against using these idioms in their art.

64 Thomas Daniell had seen rich imagery of other parts of India in works of fellow painters and artists. However, he was tied down to Calcutta, which was the Presidency town. The Daniells did not have time to explore the

'Indian India'. Instead they collected data about India from numerous friends, fellow artists, and visiting Orientalists like Sir Charles Wilkins. When they were finally able to tour India, the Daniells planned that first tour economically! they chose to stay with friends and to partner with a traveling military contingent that was about to move to a relatively unknown area and that would give them a chance to explore an unknown countryside. They traveled from east to west and from north to south, documenting the varied scenery of different parts of India. William Daniell kept a journal of their travels in India and Thomas Daniel published notes along with their aquatints when the Daniells returned to England.

Thomas and William Daniell arrived in Calcutta in 1776 and started their journey to tour and document India in 1788. They completed their journey from the East to the North in three years. In 1792 they started their journey to the south and the west and were back in 1794. In the same year they returned to England and Thomas Daniel undertook plans to publish Oriental

Scenery. Twenty-Four Views in Hindoostan, Taken in the Year 1792,

Oriental Scenery. Twenty-Four Views in Hindoostan, Taken in the Years

1789 and 1790 (London: 1797), A Picturesque Voyage to India by the way of

65 China (London: 1810,) and Oriental Scenery-' Containing Twenty-Four views of the Architecture, Antiquities and Landscape Scenery ofHindoostan

(London: 1812).

The following pages are a selection of aquatints that capture India, taken from Mildred Archer's book Early Views of India and through these I mean to discuss the techniques of Thomas and William Daniell.

The first major project that the Daniells undertook was "The Twelve Views of

Calcutta" and it covered historic old sites like the Old Fort, The Old Court

House and the Writers Building, The Old Tank and the Gentoo Pagoda and

House. They showed their fascination with the new buildings like the New

Court House and Esplanade Row and Council House and architectural delights like St. Johns Church. The Daniells often juxtaposed the old and new British buildings with the daily life of the streets and ghats along the river Hoogly. However, the activity in the foreground is always less important than their backgrounds and sometimes it seems that the background becomes the foreground. The objects that make the most prominent and impressive background or foreground are the sky, trees and ruins. The following aquatint (Fig. 4) shows a view of the old court house street, described verbally by Archer this way:

66 Old court house street ran north-south from the Old Court House in Tank square along the Eastern side of Government House to the Maidan. Its comfortable mansions of many different designs are set in compounds on either side of the road. The street is busy with varying forms of Indian and British transport - an elephant, a canopied bullock cart, sedan chairs, palanquins and carriages. People of many types, including and ascetic, mingle in the road. (Archer et al. 30)

Fig.4. "View of the Old Court House Street', from Archer, Mildred, Thomas Daniell, and William Daniell. Early Views of India '• The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, 1786-1794 • The Complete Aquatints. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Image reproduced by the permission of British Library, London, (c) British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

67 This aquatint is striking because it fulfills all the qualities of an image representational of the 'exotic' and the 'picturesque'. The ascetic, over in the middle of the road, along with various very Indian modes of transport at the time, make this image 'exotic'. In this aquatint, the treatment of the landscape is very 'British'. The sky dominates the image, making it a very important part of the genre of the European 'picturesque'. The buildings are the second most important component of the scene, and although the people represent the 'exotic' in their dress and appearance, they are part of the landscape and not individuals with expressions. Nature dominates this image, making it more a production of nature than culture. It is a political representation because the architecture and the people are under the rendition of a very 'European' sky. What is meant by a very 'European' sky will become clear once we look at the painting below by Claude Lorraine called Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba.

68 Copyright © 2003 The National Gallery, London. All rights reserved.

Fig. 5. Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba by Claude Lorraine 1648. Image reproduced by permission of the National Gallery London. © The

National Gallery, London.

In this painting Lorraine is much more interested in the rendition of the sky, the reflection of light on water and on the buildings than in the story of the

Queen of Sheba, which seems to become secondary. Lorraine captures the activity of the people on the port but the primary focus is on representing nature and also the toll that nature takes on buildings. The ruins on the left

69 side of the painting contribute in making the painting 'picturesque', as they give a degree of roughness that is appealing and add to the variety of tint.

In representing nature in a European way, the depiction of India became an extension of the British Empire. For example some of the cities did not represent the Eurocentric notions of tropicality because of their "highly cultivated landscape, densely populated cities and beautifully and elaborately built palaces and fortifications" (Tobin 121). To make them look European, the artists encoded them with familiar spatial dynamics derived from seventeenth-century masters. Two completely opposite cultures are represented under one style to appease the taste of the educated British, as well as to represent more subtly the conquest of India. Beth Fowkes Tobin has contended that the images created by European artists participate in the

"construction of a particular kind of a British imperial identity, one grounded in aesthetics and connoisseurial expertise, which was to gain ascendancy in the Raj during the nineteenth century" (Tobin 121).

In Early Views of India, Mildred Archer describes the Daniells' work sympathetically. She describes their work as 'picturesque' and 'exotic' but there is no hint that these works represented a colonized India (Archer 7).

Before we discuss these aquatints further, it will be interesting to look at a few more works by the Daniells. The aquatint 'Calcutta from the River

70 Hoogly' (Fig. 6) is another good example of using the technique of the

'picturesque'.

In this image the general idea of a shore is captured beautifully and one can see the different kinds of vessels. The main ship in the centre attracts attention, and this might have been the kind of ship that the Daniells sailed in. To the right there are ruins, which are contrasted by newer buildings in the background. In this picture too, the sky is vast and the tints create no harsh light.

Uvedale Price described the two opposite qualities of 'sudden variation, joined to that of irregularity" as the most efficient causes of the 'picturesque'(5l).

When I focus on the foreground, this image brings to mind any other port in a river town in India. It has a lyrical quality! it captures the life of the boats and the water and a port that has no concrete edges, which can still be found in smaller fishing communities and villages in India today. The whole picture, on the other hand, has a very European touch. One can't help but think of Claude Lorraine's painting 'Seaport at Sunset'. It is this contrasting of elements along with the treatment of the subject that make this image

'picturesque'.

71 •W"

Fig.6. 'Calcutta from the river Hoogly', from Archer, Mildred, Thomas Daniell, and William Daniell. Early Views of India '• The Picturesque Journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, 1786-1794 : The Complete Aquatints. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980. Image reproduced by the permission of British Library, London, (c) British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

In viewing these images, my first reaction was to view India and it is the

Indianness and the immediate familiarity that is most attractive to me. But these images do not reveal at once. This is in complete agreement with

Heidegger's essay where he speaks of poiesis as something that brings forth.

The Daniells' aquatints bring forth their view of India -the ideology of the

n artist - the art here is making a "claim" upon the viewer through the artists' ideologies.

In the 'picturesque' and 'exotic' representations of India, the people and the culture are not subjects but become objects of the landscape, which in turn is represented using very European painting techniques. In case of the Daniells, it is difficult to deduce what their ideology was. Art does not always bring forth, it also hides. It does not hide in its ordering of things but it hides in the representation of things. The only difference is that this representation is layered and does not have to follow a sequence. Everything is revealed slowly and every layer has a new or added meaning. No meaning is destroyed in uncovering these layers one by one. In particular instances art does bring forth and becomes the safe-keeper of truth, which we will see further in this chapter in the discussion of the aquatints of Balthazar Solvyns.

Other than their bias toward the classical styles of European representation, the Daniells showed a bias toward the Hindus, as is seen in their commentary about the famous Bodhi tree under which the Buddha is supposed to have attained enlightenment:

73 THE SACRED TREE AT GYAH IN THE PROVINCE OF BIHAR (No. XV)

By the natives this favourite Tree is called the Bhur, and by Europeans the Banyan. It is a species of the fig, and bears a small red fruit. In every village they are to be met with. Small temples we usually built under them, where frequently may be observed fragments of mutilated idols, the work of Mahommedan intolerance, which are again often collected by the patient Hindoos, and, though defaced, are still regarded with veneration.

This Tree, the Brahmins assure the people, proceeds from another more sacred one, which is growing within a very ancient temple, under ground, in the fort of Allababad; and, notwithstanding the distance is not less than two hundred miles, the story obtains an easy belief from credulous devotees, who cheerfully pay the sacred fee that admits them to a ceremonial adoration of it. Gyah is near three hundred miles N.W. from Calcutta (Daniell et al. n.p.)

The commentary stresses the 'intolerance' of the Muslims and the 'patience' of the Hindus. It is only after the authors have made clear their bias toward the Hindus, do they proceed to describe what they think of the Hindu devotee who blindly believes the Brahmin. Here their commentary carries an element of ridicule and shock. The commentary is sympathetic toward the ruin and the invasion and destruction of Hindu architecture by the Moghuls.

74 The Daniells, however, begin their commentary by introducing the audience to the Banyan tree which they encounter as the Bhur tree in Bihar. They want their audiences first to feel familiar with the tree and then they will present the local beliefs. The shrine in the picture (Fig. 7) is quite diminutive as compared to the mighty Banyan tree and the figures of the men in and around the shrine even smaller. Once again the 'picturesque' qualities of the

European garden are at play and dominate the style of rendition.

Fig. 7. The sacred tree at Gyah in the province of Bihar from Daniell, Thomas, William Daniell, and British Library. Oriental Scenery. London-' Printed for Thomas and William Daniell... and published by William Daniell ... etc., 1812. Empire Digital. British Library. Image reproduced by the permission of British Library, London, (c) British Library Board. All Rights Reserved.

75 What is most appealing about this aquatint though, is the fact that Banyan trees are revered all over India even today, and form a very impressive image. They are an inherent part of folklore and religious mythology, an example of which is the modern city of Baroda, which gets its name from the

Sanskrit Vatodar which means 'in the heart of the Banyan tree'. They can be found everywhere and have many customs and traditions built around them.

This aquatint captures that quality of reverence. So, if one is not looking at this aquatint as part of the 'picturesque' repertoire, this aquatint could represent any small village in India.

Thomas Daniell was evidently attracted by the wilderness, old forts and ruins and he would have never discovered these if not for his travels. They feasted with the Nawabs, joined the Rajas in their forts and lived meagerly on jungle terrains. This is what made their aquatints absolutely unique. Their engagement and zeal to tour and document India given any conditions added much more appeal to their work than compared to their contemporaries.

The artworks of the Daniells' are like hybrids as far as their use of the techniques goes. While making India more familiar to the Europeans they simultaneously made it less familiar to the Indians. This is a powerful example of why the nationalists from the Bengal Renaissance rejected the influence of European artistic techniques. For them it represented that India

76 would never be free from the influence of the British. In forming their own techniques in art they were in search of a strong Indian identity. European visual media technologies represented India in art with techniques that familiarized the Indian landscape to British tastes. Even though the artists resided in India and made their drawings from first-hand knowledge of the scenery, the compositions never really showed the actual landscape.

In a sharp contrast to the work of the Daniells, who documented the land and its buildings, Balthazar Solvyns documented the people of Calcutta. He was able to observe Calcutta as a city and not only as a settlement of the East

India Company. He roamed both 'towns' of Calcutta, the white town and the black town. He was a keen observer and was very sympathetic toward the natives. In his aquatints, people and culture are not merely objects of a landscape but become subjects on their own.

Like the Daniells, he created a very ambitious body of work, especially his work Les Hindous, which he published in three parts in a folio size (43 x 54 cm) in Paris, between 1808-12. Unlike the Daniells, Balthazar Solvyns was not recruited by the East India Company. In the register of Europeans residing in Calcutta in the year 1794, Solvyns is registered as a non-official

European.

77 Solvyns, unlike Hodges, Zoffany and in all probability, the Daniells— came without letters of introduction to the Governor-General or high East India Company officials. As a "foreigner", without formal introduction and often pressed by financial need to pursue work, Solvyns was unable to secure entry into Calcutta society. And perhaps most galling was his failure to gain membership in the Asiatic Society of Bengal. (Hardgrave Jr. 20)

He was made a pariah, much like the Indians in the black part of town.

Perhaps this separation was a factor in his sympathy toward the native population. Calcutta also provided rich ground for his work, as there were people from all walks of life and many parts of the world.

Sometime in 1793 Solvyns began working on drawings which consumed him for the rest of his life. He drew portraits of the native people in all their occupations, their different dresses, smoking equipment, religious rites and rituals, their boats and even native trees and animals. He provided a view of

India very unlike that of the Daniells. His portraits are nowhere close to a romantic representation of people, and include rare documentation of many women as well. His images show a real view of India that many Europeans did not want to see. For this reason, his imagery of India did not satisfy

European tastes.

78 Before 1800, Solvyns was the sole person to take on such a large printing project in India. The number of aquatints he produced were far more in number than the aquatints of the Daniells. His work Les Hindous that he reprinted in Paris was first titled 250 Coloured Etchings'- Descriptive of the

Manners, Customs, Character, Dress, and Religious Ceremonies of the

Hindoos. He published print editions in India in 1796 and 1799. It is interesting to note that the preface to these prints changed. His first preface for the imprints in 1796 was very personal and positioned the prints for people who were interested in India and were not able to travel to India, or for those who carried memories of India from their travels. He has also thanked his subscribers and patrons profusely. The preface for the 1799 edition is less personal and he changes his tone to express his devotion to the portrayal of the people he has spent a lot of time with.

We can see in Solvyns' work why he was rejected by the British and never revered by the Indian artists. He did not represent the Indian people through the eyes of the British, as he always rendered his subjects through his own personal experiences and his work remained too anthropological to engage

Indian interests or patrons of the time.

The preliminary discourse for Les Hindous (see vol. imprinted in Paris is remarkably different as Solvyns did not have to offer it to the East India

Company or the British Crown.

79 In the course of the last two centuries, it is true, the closer connection of the Europeans with this country seems to have made some impression upon the primitive character of the Hindoo nation. Not only are their numbers considerably lessened, but many of them have been insensibly incorporated with other nations, new manner and new forms of worship have been introduced, where formerly the name of Brahma only was revered. But it will not escape the attentive observer that the different changes the country underwent, by the introduction of a new people, foreign to all their ancient habits, never reached the genuine race of the Hindoos! diminished indeed in its number and extent, but still unaltered, still constant it its manners, its opinions and its beliefs.

Here, there is a similarity between the thought of the Daniells and Solvyns! they were both partial to the Hindus as compared to the Muslims. Solvyns goes on later in the introduction to stress on the importance of his study where he found it necessary to reside among the people for sufficient time so that he would have enough opportunity to observe them in all their habits of life, their customs, domestic manners, daily occupations, civil and religious ceremonies, amusements, feasts, games and modes of transport.

The following examples illustrate the dedication and variety in Solvyns' work. All images are from Les Hindous (see vols. 1, 2, 3 and 4). The commentary before each image is Solvyns', preceded or followed by my observations of the print and the technique used by Solvyns.

80 GARY (Vol. 3, plate 7.3)

The Gary is the Hindoo hackney-coach. In the large towns and frequented bazars there are always Garies ready to carry people, for a trifle, to all parts in the neighbourhood. These carriages are drawn by horses, but are hard, inconvenient, and liable to many objections. They carry many persons! and it is not uncommon to meet them on the high roads, on their return from some festival or party of pleasure loaded with passengers inside and out, expressing their joy by loud cries, while the drivers, drunk and overcome by fatigue, are scarecely able to guide their horses. I shall only repeat here curiously, that none but the lowest ranks of the people among the Hindoos are ever seen drunk in public. The lassitude brought on by the heat of the day, followed by the cold nights, seems to excite a taste for the drinking, more particularly in the labouring classes.

81 m

Fig. 8. GARY (Vol. 3, plate 7.3) from Solvyns, F. Baltasar, XXX Solvyns, and G. -B Depping. Les Hindous. Paris, L'auteur etc.:, 1808. Photograph, courtesy of Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

In the aquatint above, Solvyns records historical evidence verbally and visually. His images are starkly realistic and almost flat in rendition. They do not follow any classical styles as in the works of the classical masters or the laws of linear perspective, very evident in the works of the Daniells. Neither does his work glorify ruins of nature or architecture. His commentary is not merely a description of the image but an intimate description of what happens when you ride an animal-driven cart from one village to another. He is not just an onlooker who has assimilated on a canvas what he has observed, but he has expressed through the means of his commentary and art

82 what his experience was. This gives him an advantage of being in the picture rather than being out of the picture, as an observer.

Thus Solvyns' work becomes a safekeeper of history and culture. The animals and the cart-man look tired in his aquatint and bring about a feeling of deja vu. Every Indian or any keen observer of Indian culture will note that the aquatint above not only brings to mind the familiarity of an Indian laborer's hard day where he or she has toiled hard and then rejoices at the end of a day by playing or singing loudly and merrily with a smoke and a drink with fellow laborers. This is a common experience or sight anywhere, in any locality in India, and it shows that ways of rejoicing for the poor haven't changed much in two hundred years. In Solvyns' work there is clearly no hidden agenda.

The photograph below (Fig. 9) shows another aspect of the continuity one feels through the aquatints of Solvyns. The photograph below was taken in

2007 in Dadar, Mumbai, India, which is one of the most crowded and busy market areas in the city. A colorful bullock cart is parked by an old building completely undeterred by the passing traffic. While the sighting of Bullock carts is rare in big cities in India, people from nearby villages often come to sell their produce in Mumbai.

83 ^^

*£"•

Fig. 9. Bullock Cart in Dadar, Mumbai, India. 2007 by Swati Nagar.

It is surely this kind of art that is poiesis that brings forth the meaning of life and the meaning of things, while working as a safekeeper of truth. Just one example will not suffice to demonstrate the safekeeping in Solvyns works, so following are some more examples of his work with a short explanation for the reason I was so drawn to these particular works.

84 MAHABAURUT-ER-SHOBHA

OR

THE EXPLAINING OF THE TEXT AND COMMENTARIES OF THE MOHABAURUT BY A BRAHMIN

(Vol. 1, Plate 1.1)

The Brahmun, adorned with red flowers, is seated on an eminence or little hill of earth, holding in his hands the poitahs [pothiijor leaves of trees upon which is engraved the text of the Mohabaurut, one of the sacred books of the Hindoos. Upon a stool before him are other poitahs, and opposite to him the salgram stone, the sunk or shell, and the guntah fghantajor bell.

In the morning, the Brahmun reads the sacred text to the public, with a loud voice, in the shanscrit tongue; but as this learned language is understood by few, there is hardly any one at this first reading. In the afternoon, or late in the evening, a numerous audience attends another explanation of the Mohabaurut in the bengalee language, or in some other common idiom of the country. This is the reading which this plate represents.

This sort of religious ceremony is always performed before the front or in the first court of their houses. Separate places are reserved for the rich, and the higher ranks of the women of the family can neither see nor be seen but through a grating made of bamboos crossed. The print represents these different arrangements. The original drawing as well as all those which compose this collection was taken on the spot from nature by Solvyns.

85 The Brahmin in the present context, or any learned men for that matter, are highly revered in the Indian society. This aquatint (Fig. 10) takes us back to the past and shows the Brahmin in the highest seat. There is no hidden symbolism in this. The Brahmin has the highest seat because he is the speaker and his raised hand shows that he is in control of what he wants to say and what he wants his audience to understand of the religious text. Solvyns explains the social structure of this gathering, including that women of the higher ranks cannot be seen and have to hear this commentary through a screen, and it is only the men and the women of lower ranks who are allowed to sit in front of and around the Brahmin. The

Brahmin in the image is an example of the ritualistic mood that is built around such a gathering where one can almost smell the flowers and the incense and see small figurines of the Gods.

86 Hhl^

•AJf-

Fig.10. MAHABAURUT-ER-SHOBHA (Vol. 1, Plate l.l) from Solvyns, F. Baltasar, XXX Solvyns, and G. -B Depping. Les Hindous. Paris, L'auteur etc.:, 1808. Photograph, courtesy of Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

87 Again in this aquatint, Solvyns is not merely an observer. He is able to capture, with the help of his commentary, the essence of this religious gathering. Whether he was documenting a group of people, modes of transportation, various professions or musical instruments, they all have the same quality that bring forth the experience of the artist.

In the following commentary and aquatint, Solvyns documents the life of flower sellers. In India, flower shops are not a part of a big departmental store or a niche market. Everybody has access to flowers. The smell of marigolds, the champa flower and jasmine fill the air of almost every bazaar. Small roadside shacks are shops for these flower sellers and these flowers are in huge demand. The lord Ganesha loves marigolds, the

Goddess Laxmi loves hibiscus and nothing good commences without the breaking of a coconut. Solvyns captures all this in the roadside stall of his flower sellers. The coconuts hang from the canvas shade of the building and one flower seller arranges his wares on a raised wooden platform while the other stands on the road to sell flowers and leaves, considered auspicious for decorating entrances of temples and homes. He also documents the dhoti and gamcha that the flowermen wear, which is worn to this day in rural India. It is not uncommon to spot this dress even in big cities. Solvyns describes the close relationship of this profession with the

88 Brahmins and suggests a business partnership between the two as flowers were in high demand for every ritual and each religious ceremony.

MAULYS, FLOWERMEN (Vol.1, Plate 9.2)

It is a common error to confound the Maulys with the Chassah- Khyberts or gardeners whereas these last are merely retailers of flowers. They are to be met in all the bazars,' and so great is the demand, that their business suffers little interruption. Flowers are used in the sacrifices which the Hindoos are constantly offering, not only as ornaments on these occasions for their gods, their brahmuns and the assistants; but they form also a part of the dress of persons of distinction, who wear them in their hair. Red flowers are preferred, but every species of flower is generally liked by the Hindoos! another proof of the simplicity of their taste and the mildness of their manners.

Although the Maulys look upon themselves as a high cast, they are nevertheless but a subdivision of the Byces or merchants, or of the Sooders or servants. They are strict observers of primitive customs, and have preserved the outward appearance of the true Hindoo. Naturally attached by the interests, of their profession to the ceremonies of religion, they are well acquainted with all the festivals, and live in habits of frequent intercourse with the brahmuns.

89 Fig. 11. MAULYS, FLOWERMEN (Vol.1, Plate 9.2) from Solvyns, F. Baltasar, XXX Solvyns, and G. -B Depping. Les Hindous. Paris, L'auteur etc.:, 1808. Photograph, courtesy of Bruce Peel Special Collections Library, University of Alberta.

90 The remnants of Indian history and culture are fast disappearing in the globalizing world and one wonders for how long these unique remnants will survive. Solvyns' prints are priceless in the fact that they offer this visual recording of the country's culture more than two hundred years ago. I would like to stress again the connections in history to present day India, and for this reason I would like to discuss the image below taken in 2007 near the

Siddhi Vinayak temple of Lord Ganesha in Dadar, Mumbai. This photograph is a recent recording of a flowershop in Dadar and one can tell that not much has changed in the demand for the flower shops. It still has flowers, garlands and coconuts. The wooden platform has been replaced by a table, the baskets are made of plastic and a helmet can be seen in the background suggesting that this modern flower-man rides to work on his motorbike.

Fig. 12. 'Roadside Flower Stall', Dadar, Mumbai, India. 2007 by Swati Nagar.

91 Representation in poiesis

Heidegger reminded us that it is essential to discuss the layers of meaning created through representation. More often than not, representation becomes a subjective activity. This is most obvious through the work of the Daniells and Solvyns. For the Daniells, discovering India was an adventure and there was a thrill added to their art. They had the benevolence of the East India

Company and found themselves favoured wherever they went. Solvyns, on the other hand, did not have financial means to traverse the length and breadth of India, exploring the landscape, but instead cultivated an interest in discovering and understanding the people and their culture.

Representation in text or in art becomes a very subjective issue. It is driven by the artist's personal experiences, intentions and the technique of representation. In the images discussed here there was no agitation to what was represented. From the point of view of the British, the images made great decorations for the walls, reminiscent of times spent in India. Not only that, the techniques they appreciated in the works of their artists actually did represent India as an extension of the European ideal.

The technique made the images even more precious. Aquatints were prized possessions representing a new technology and the Daniells excelled at their

92 art, making their prints extremely popular. Solvyns, on the other hand, was not as successful as the Daniells in his time. Audiences saw no novelty in

Solvyns' images. What were these images? Only representations of what their life was each day? The Europeans did not value his prints as much as the

Daniells because they thought his drawings were not of superior quality and they represented a very mundane view of India. Nothing about them was either 'picturesque' or 'exotic'. It is only now that one can appreciate the importance of his work. In early nineteenth century India these images made no significant impact. Moreover Solvyns' representation of the other was almost like a representation of the self. He mentions time and again how varied, strange and delightful he finds the way of life in India but to him it was just another way of looking how life is lived differently in a different part of the world.

The roots of the Bengal Renaissance in art can be seen forming in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The different techniques used by the Daniells and Solvyns were very different but both contributed to a surge of nationalist ideas in the minds of artists who wanted a free India with arts that represented the true Indian spirit. In the eyes of the Indian artists the idea of seeing India either represented as an 'exotic' extension of

Europe, as seen in the work of the Daniells, or the country's representation as though there is nothing extraordinary about it, as seen in the work of

93 Solvyns, were both unacceptable. The direct response to the change in representation of India in visual art can be seen 1850 onward with a surge in stylistic woodcut prints created by Calcutta artists and in the images of the

Battala book industry. The Battala book industry was the commercial market for cheap printed books which "comprised of the native town called Battala, which was also the heart of the general book market in Bengal " between

1857 to 1900 (Power in Print 119).

In this chapter we saw how early nineteenth-century visual media technologies were a major force in changing the way Indian artists sought to represent India. Textual and visual media technologies were both responsible in bringing about social change and the birth of the nationalist ideas that were supported by the Bengal Renaissance.

94 Chapter 4" The Bengal Renaissance and Information Technologies in Early Nineteenth-Century India

Throughout the previous chapters we saw how textual and visual media technologies influenced the beginnings of nationalism and the introduction of

Western ideologies in India. These new beginnings were foundational in the birth of the Bengal Renaissance. Although European media technologies and education are considered to be the cause of what is viewed as the modernization of a traditional Indian society, works of William Carey's

Serampore Mission Press and aquatints of Thomas and William Daniell and

Balathazar Solvyns have never been studied together to see how both textual and visual media technologies influenced Bengali Renaissance minds.

The introduction of scientific knowledge and ideals of the European

Renaissance combined with a powerful discourse on Christianity and

Hinduism created an atmosphere of learning and constant questioning from both sides. The prefect setting for this exchange was the college of Fort

William where William Carey was appointed one of the first Professors.

In Chapter Two, we saw that Fort William College was extremely important for the Serampore Mission Press and the access it allowed Carey to the governance of the British as well as his contact with Bengali intelligentsia.

95 However scholars always discuss the Serampore Mission Press in light of the

College and due credit is not given to the publications of the press itself, as can be seen in the quote below:

It was that college, established in 1800, which seemed to afford the almost perfect institutional setting for studying the results of British- Indian contact and accommodation. The college was the first European-created institution of higher learning in India to welcome Indians as faculty members and to encourage cultural exchange between Europeans and South Asians. By enlisting the support of qualified Orientalist scholars to improve its educational program, this college also transformed the famed Asiatic Society of Bengal and William Carey's Serampore Mission into highly effective agencies for the revitalization of an Indian culture. (Knopf 6)

The Serampore Mission Press played a vital role in precipitating ideas of nationalism and modernism in the early nineteenth century. Through the four publications we saw how textual media technologies became agents of social and intellectual change in Indian society. The Mahratta dictionary,

Hortus Bengalensis and the two Bengali newspapers Samachar Darpan and

Digdarshan published between 1810 and 1818 changed the way in India was interpreted and represented to its own people. The publications are a proof that Carey realized that only using ideological tools to sway the opinion of people was not enough. Through these examples we can also see how Carey changed his roles as Professor, scientist and social reformer. Carey hid his

Evangelical agenda in the Mahratta dictionary. This dictionary acted as an

96 ideological tool because it represented the knowledge on Maratha culture only for words that could be useful for the propaganda of Christianity. Hortus

Bengalensis, published in 1814, used Indian words for European botanical terms and created a path for educating Indians in European science but the intention was a one-way transfer of knowledge. The Bengali newspapers, published in 1818, finally provided a ground for dialogue and debate between the British and the Indians because European ideas and representations were presented to the Bengali audience in their own language and gave them a chance to question what was presented to them.

In Chapter Three we saw how textual media technologies were not the only technologies that helped shape the Bengal Renaissance. Bengal Renaissance art was the cause of years of teaching of academic art styles promoted by the

British, who encouraged the representations of India through very European techniques. The aquatints from the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century by Thomas and William Daniell and Balthazar Solvyns are examples of what started this representational style of India by European artists. The prints by the Daniells have a similar ideological agenda which is similar to that of William Carey! they represent India through a very

European style appreciated by European audiences. In their picturesque representations India is represented through European artistic rendering techniques. Balthazar Solvyns' prints do not follow any classical European

97 art techniques and represent India to the world realistically. This made India alien to the British and was the main reason why Solvyns failed as an artist for the British. By making India more palatable to the British taste in art the

Daniells succeeded and Solvyns failed.

There is a contrast in the previous chapters between technology and art.

Martin Heidegger's essay "Question Concerning Technology" helps us to bridge the gap that exists in understanding art on the same plane as technology. Heidegger helps us to look at the past and the future and art and technology, side-byside. As compared to the quick response to textual media technologies, visual technologies took a longer time to metamorphose into a nationalist art movement. This phenomenon can be explained by looking at the fundamental differences between art and technology. In the 'challenging- forth' claim that Heidegger makes about technology, he says that technology presents itself in a way to us that we have to respond to it immediately. It is true because art seeks an aesthetic response as compared to technology that seeks knowledge and understanding. It is because art is based on intuition and emotion whereas technology is based on reason. In art the values "break with tradition" (Wilson 18) while in technology there is a "systematic building on tradition" (Wilson 18).

98 Nineteenth-century European visual media technologies introduced Indian artists to new European techniques in art and representational styles, and in doing so agitated many artists of the time. This agitation gave rise to a

Nationalist movement in art. Solvyns' prints alienated India to the British but did not present anything particularly spectacular to his Indian audience.

For the Bengali nationalist avant-garde artists it was important that their art imbibed qualities of Indian-ness and that it helped in creating a unique artistic identity as was later promoted by Rabindranath Tagore and by many artists who studied and created art in the years of the Bengal School of art.

What is unique in understanding the social reforms through textual media technologies is that the rise of the Copernican and Newtonian systems in

India did not haste the decline of the Puranas or other religious mythologies.

"On the contrary, Hindus began to adopt the mental technique, already common among Christians, of hiving off mythology and belief into a separate, transcendent sphere" (Empire and Information 261). While this is true of textual media technologies, in Bengal Renaissance art it can be seen otherwise. Artists did not "hive off mythology and traditional beliefs but used them as metaphors to create a new art.

99 End of the Bengal Renaissance and its Place in Modern India

We started with talking about textual and visual media technologies and it is apt to end this chapter with Rabindranath Tagore. The period of the Bengal

Renaissance ends with Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the founder of

Shantiniketan (1901), the University town. His writing, philosophy of education and ideas of nationalism have inspired and continue to inspire

Indians from all walks of life. Without him there would not be 'Jana Gana

Mana'-India's national anthem.

In Shantiniketan, Tagore's beloved school, we see a confluence of textual and visual media technologies. He worked both as a writer and an artist, and worked endlessly to make education an enjoyable experience. Rabindranath

Tagore spent much of his life developing the school at Shantiniketan (Sen

114). The Bengal Renaissance started and ended with all the main renaissance leaders investing their time and money into creating better educational institutions for Indians. The subject that was very important for

Tagore was the need for education in science as well as in literature and the humanities.

At Shantiniketan, there were strong local' elements in its emphasis on Indian traditions, including the classics, and in the use of Bengali rather than English as the language of instruction. At the same time there were courses on a great variety of cultures, and study programmes devoted to China, Japan, and the Middle East. Many

100 foreigners came to Shantiniketan to study or teach, and the fusion of studies seemed to work. (Sen 115)

The quote above is from the Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen's book The

Argumentative Indian, where he gives an account of Tagore's many visions for India. In his book Sen also gives us an insider's view of Shantiniketan.

Tagore's school has given India numerous intellectuals and artists including

Amrtya Sen himself and the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray.

In giving these examples I want to emphasize the influence early nineteenth- century media technologies had on the tradition of the Bengal Renaissance.

Although the Bengal Renaissance had a huge influence on the people of

Bengal, its contribution to Indian society at large is enormously significant to the development of a modern Indian nation.

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