ROSEMARY Raza is a British scholar who has spent many years in Pakistan and she continues with her exploration of the British engagement in the subcontinent in her new book Representing Sindh: Images of the British Encounter, which portrays British illustrations of the region across two centuries. These are accompanied by an informative text. Raza describes how changing political realities and strategic interests influenced the portrayal of Sindh by British artists and were also shaped by the development of different techniques and technologies including watercolours, lithography and photography.

Raza reveals that the arrival of early British traders in Sindh during the 17th century was followed by some travel accounts, but there is no surviving record of illustrations before the early 19th century. By that time, British priorities in Sindh had changed from trade to politics: Sindh’s proximity to Russia, Afghanistan and Iran assumed great strategic significance. Britain’s determination to control Sindh led to information-gathering by British traders, officials and administrators and others, which also created “an explosion of literary and visual information” revealing Sindh to Western audiences.

Raza explains that in Britain, the new fashion for watercolour painting was followed by the commercial manufacture of portable paints and related equipment which artists could carry outdoors and on their travels. In 1808, a 22-year-old army officer, Lieutenant Robert Melville Grindlay, accompanied the first British mission to Hyderabad.

Grindlay (later founder of Grindlays Bank) was also a skilled artist and some of his now-famous watercolours are reproduced in Raza’s book, as is his oil sketch providing “the earliest known view by a European of the Hyderabad fort, seen across the Indus”. Grindlay also contributed aquatints to Henry Pottinger’s Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde and to Mountstuart Elphinstone’s An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul and its Dependencies in Persia, Tartary and India. In 1834, Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara reproduced some of Grindlay’s original 1808 sketches, as lithographs.

Raza provides a historical context to the early British missions which brought these British writers/artists to Sindh and points out that the Talpur emirs were “justifiably suspicious” of their intentions. Raza discusses each of these books as well as the increasing importance given to illustrations “to capture the imagination [of their readers] and to provide exact visual images of the scenes, people and objects described in the text”.

She includes the skilled art work of Lieutenant Edward Del Hoste, a surveyor, who “had little opportunity to make any commercial use of his sketches and drawings” of Sindh, though they enjoyed an extensive, private circulation. She writes of the Western fascination with “the Orient” which also encouraged travellers not connected to officialdom; they included the dubious Charles Masson, who fabricated both his name and identity but nevertheless built up an important portfolio of writings and drawings on Sindh.

The use of images to record wars and military encounters led to a large number of illustrations of Sindh: fortresses, troops, camel caravans, Sindhi men (and the occasional woman), General Charles Napier on horseback and mounted British soldiers, are all represented. Furthermore, the development of lithography radically changed book illustration. Lithographs provided an easy and comparatively cheap method of reproduction: publishers could draw on the extensive “sketchbooks of officers, doctors and even clergymen attached to the army”.

Raza’s discussion on military campaigns leads up to the Battle of Miani in 1843. The subsequent annexation of Sindh introduced a new dynamic. British artists could now explore the region at leisure. Lieutenant William Edwards’s Sketches in Scinde was a particularly significant collection of lithographs which “paid tribute to the country’s monuments and sights”. By this time the art of steel engraving and photogravure facilitated the production of prints and illustrated articles; the latter proved an important platform for Captain Thomas Postans, a military artist, who also who illustrated his own books on Sindh. Other books by military men such as E.B. Eastwick’s Dry Leaves from Young Egypt and Richard Burton’s Falconry in the Valley of the Indus were illustrated by different artists, including army officers.

Raza goes on to discuss the development of Karachi under Napier and Sir Bartle Frere, and the changing artistic representations of Sindh by the increasing number of British civilians. Many of them enjoyed drawing and painting, including Commis­sioner Augustus Fortunatus Bellasis. While the arrival of British women as wives, such as the adventurous and observant Marianne Postans, Lady Alicia Hope and Louise Lawrence — all skilled artists in their own right — brought a new feminine perspective to the albums they compiled.

Raza devotes considerable space to the art of photography and its development, and the way in which it influenced illustration. She reveals that as British Raj consolidated its power after 1858, it was eager to compile information on a wide range of subjects by using the then-new photography “to illustrate them and establish visual categories”. This coincided with Europe’s fashionable, academic interest in ethnography.

An eight-volume work, The People of India, included photographs of Sindh by Captain William Houghton and Lieutenant Henry Tanner. They had no access to well-born zenana women of course, but Sindhi sardars, courtesans, fishermen and others were diligently portrayed, albeit in a makeshift Victorian studio, far removed from the sitters’ natural environment. The British also employed photography to build up a valuable record of costumes, textiles, jewellery, pottery, leatherwork and much else.

Raza discusses the British eagerness to provide a systematic record of India’s architectural riches. This was impeded by changing official priorities, until the Archaeological Survey of India appointed its own photographers, including “the highly gifted” Henry Cousens. His focus on Sindh led to “a magnificent record of its monuments”. Raza includes his photographs of the Sathbain tombs, Isa Khan’s zenana tombs and of tile work from Cousens’s Portfolio of Illustrations of Sind Tiles.

Raza also describes the significance of Sir John Marshall’s excavations in the 1920s and “the use of photography to popularise the findings of archaeology” which Marshall incorporated with great effect into Mohenjo-daro and the Indus Civilisation. Books on Sindh’s flora and fauna, engravings and prints of hunts, durbars and dinners which appeared in widely circulated publications such as the The Illustrated London News and The Oriental Herald are all discussed here.

Raza goes on to tell of the the growing importance of Karachi and its rapid development: Parsis, Hindus, Muslims, Christians were drawn into its civic framework and its commercial photographers included R. Jhalbhoy of Elphinstone Street (now Zaibunissa Street). The “craze” for picture postcards by the end of the 19th century “led to a production of a range of images which had no equal in any single printed source”: Frere Hall, Lady Dufferin Hospital, and Empress Market are all depicted here. She leads up to representations of British administrators/soldiers and the respective Talpur Mirs of Hyderabad and Khairpur. This rich and fascinating book has much to offer historians, collectors, and the general reader alike.

Representing Sindh: Images of the British Encounter

(ART HISTORY)

By Rosemary Raza

The Marg Foundation, India

ISBN 978-9383243058

140pp.