British Art and the East India Company

Quilley, Geoff

doi:10.2307/j.ctvrdf11p

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…However, the tiger on the medal represents Tipu Sultan's tiger-organ (a musical instrument), often referred to as Tipu's Tiger, which was looted by British troops after the siege of Seringapatam was over and Tipu was killed (Quilley, 2020). This work of art shows a British soldier lying on his back while a Bengal tiger jumps over him and attacks by pushing its teeth into the soldier's chest (Figure 2).…”

Section: Visual Sources: Their History Descriptions and Content Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

Das

2023

PIJSSL

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This article shows how the allegory of British-tiger rivalry became a distinct feature in 19th-century British imperial visual culture to imagined imperial attitudes over India. After the second Anglo-Mysore war (1799) between the East Indian Company and the Tipu Sultan, in 1808, a visual description of lion-tiger bloodshed was issued as a medal by the East India Company to reward its troops. Such a description shows a lion, representing the British nation’s suppression over a Bengal tiger, the royal emblem of Tipu Sultan. After this, the same imagery served to be imagined and visualised the British dominance and control over ruthless and unwilling India. Moreover, in such an allegory, a fiction of dead white women was added to invoke nationalism among Britons. This raises a feminist issue of how this fictional image of victimised women fulfils the British masculine agenda of imperialism and nationalism while the women remain deprived.

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Section: Visual Sources: Their History Descriptions and Content Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

Das

2023

PIJSSL

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“…Devis' project failed to materialize, however, despite the artist adapting a comparative historical framework that Orientalists like Jones had applied to the study of India. 37 Financial difficulties plagued another synoptic attempt to taxonomize the peoples of South Asia prior to the establishment of lithography: Balthasar Solvyns' (1760-1824) Manners, Customs, Character, Dresses, and Religion of the Hindoos, first published in 1796. 38 Working in India without official permission, and beyond the elite institutions in which his project might have secured patronage, Solvyns' returns were meagre; a subsequent attempt to republish the work with L'Institut de France bankrupted its publisher and forced the artist into penury.…”

Section: Colonial Lithography and Its Forms Of Knowledgementioning

confidence: 99%

Colesworthy Grant's Portraits of Colonial Society in India: Lithography, Liberalism, and the Global Making of Middle‐Class Culture, c. 1833–57

Young¹

2022

Art History

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The bourgeois class is international: it must necessarily wield across national differences. 1 (Antonio Gramsci, 1918) Art's role in the making of middle-class culture over the long nineteenth century has primarily been studied through a national or European lens. Yet middle-class 'culture' in the broad, Thompsonian sense of the word was not formed within Europe and then exported, but rather emerged coterminously and transnationally across a world increasingly integrated by European imperialism, the penetration of global capitalism, and technologies affording faster transportation and communication. 2 The homogeneities distinguishing middle-class culture across various national contexts reflect a material history of global integration, as transnational material conditions afforded shared forms of cultural practice, experience, and representation. 3 At the same time, patterns of homogenization indicate the severe asymmetries of power that structured nineteenth-century globalization, with 'hegemonic' forms of middleclass culture rooted in, and reconfiguring in turn, local distinctions of rank, race, and gender. 4 To explore how art histories focused on the national making of middle-class culture might be decentred and placed within this transnational framework, this article explores a case study from nineteenth-century Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), tracing how the changing class interests of British society in India determined fraught negotiations over the representation of race and gender in South Asia's colonial print culture. 5 This art-historical account is grounded in the material history of global integration by foregrounding the relationship of artistic practice to a technological force driving nineteenth-century globalization: lithographic printing.Lithography fundamentally reshaped the international field within which print culture was produced and consumed during the first half of the nineteenth century. Named after its ability to multiply marks made directly onto stone, by 1820 the medium had spread from Bavaria, where it was invented in 1796-98, to territories across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. 6 Liberating print culture from a dependence on metropolitan investment and established traditions of artistic expertise, lithography flourished within globalizing commercial and scientific networks, reshaping visual public culture within so-called peripheral, provincial, or colonial territories. 7 Cities like Calcutta became nodes within an international circulation of illustrated periodicals, magazines, scientific manuals, and diverse visual ephemera. As James Gelvin and Nile Green have demonstrated in modern Islamic contexts, this artistic culture was promoted in turn by the expansion of steam

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Revealing the Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies through law and the painted moment

Talbot

2024

Business History

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British Art and the East India Company

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

Colesworthy Grant's Portraits of Colonial Society in India: Lithography, Liberalism, and the Global Making of Middle‐Class Culture, c. 1833–57

Revealing the Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies through law and the painted moment

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