Empire: World History - 226. The Rise and Fall of East India Company Painting (Ep 2)

Episode Date: February 4, 2025

Calcutta in the late 18th century was a chaotic, fast-growing city, filled with fortune seekers, towering mansions, and an ever-present sense of impermanence. Inspired by the botanical and zoological paintings they encountered in Lucknow, Sir Elijah Impey, the first Chief Justice of Bengal, and his wife, Lady Mary Impey, brought this style to Calcutta, where they assembled an artistic salon and commissioned Indian artists to document the natural world in beautiful detail. Lady Impey, a passionate naturalist, became the unlikely patron of some of India's greatest animal painters, including Sheikh Zayn al-Din, Bhawani Das, and Ram Das. Working with delicate squirrel-hair brushes, these artists captured birds, mammals, and even bats with stunning precision. Their art, once viewed merely as scientific record-keeping, is now recognized as some of the finest examples of Indian painting from the colonial period. Listen as William and Anita trace the journey of this artistic tradition from Lucknow to Calcutta and beyond, exploring how European patrons influenced Indian artists - and how, in turn, Indian artistry left an indelible mark on Western botanical and zoological illustration.  Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Senior Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arlen. And me, William Droompool. So the last episode, which you were more hilarious than you've ever been, where this is all serious about gardens and you came to the garden part of it

in the last three minutes it's a record of preamble even for you it was interesting it was fascinating and I really loved it but the brief the brief man the brief we are now going to Calcutta because we had a little bit of a

sort of a mini relay race really with luck now handing over to Calcutta if we can put it that way and that is really through the personality of two men, Matta on one side, and a man called Sir Elijah Impi on the other. So, Willie, just like we did with Lucknow, and we painted a picture of this great Rome of India, the magnet of all artists, music, all high culture. What was Calcutta like in the 1700s, around about the same time? So Calcutta was an extraordinary mess.

It's the best possible description of it. There's a French general who turns up at this time. And he says, if you took all the towns of England and threw them up in the air and jiggled them around, they would fall down rather as Calcutta has. How is it, he says, that a town this rich, so full of fortunes, is unable to have a single straight street. That's brilliant. No crescent is crescent shaped, but wiggles in the middle. And it's basically a town full of people on the make. It was the eastern equivalent of one of those gold rush towns in California.

where everyone had come to try and make a fortune as quickly as possible and leave with their money. Even Robert Clive, who is one of the most ruthless of them all, is appalled by the ruthlessness of Calcutta. He says, well, that's saying something, yeah. Calcutta is one of the most wicked places in the universe, rapacious and luxurious beyond conception. Are that something on TripAdvisor? Even Robert Clive found this a little too much. I mean, this is a city. Why was it so sort of messed up? Is it because it got rich very quick and there just wasn't the planning to keep up with it? Yeah, it got rich very quick, but people

died even quicker. And if you go to South Park Street Cemetery in Carcutta, as I did two weeks ago, you see these enormous tombs with obelisks and pinnacles and sort of odd mogul domes all mixed up in a mess together on a vast scale. So everyone is rich. But it is, but it's it's a city where great wealth could be accumulated, you know, in a matter of months, then lost in a minute at a wager at the whist table. And death was always there. Someone was always arriving, new and going straight to the auction house where the person who just died was having his goods auctioned off to send back to his relatives in England. And there were enormous palladian mansions, but no one was sort of caring for them. And it was just a place

on the make. It's a brilliant picture you painted, but I'm just reminding you, this is a series about gardens and in a place that is so unplanned and chaotic, one assumes that actually parks and gardens and that kind of thing

is not foremost in people's minds in Calcutta. No, and it's totally unplanned. And the only park is associated with the hero of this episode, who is a character called Sir Elijah Impi. And the park's which is at the centre of Calcutta to this day, where I went to a literary festival last week

in Calcutta at Park Street, and where South Park Street, Cemetery that I was just talking about, backs off. That park was created by one man, so Elijah Impi, who is the man that takes the flame of this style of painting we're talking about from Lucknow all the way to Calcutta. And he's from Hammersmith. And in fact, if you ever go... Not a local lad. We're just in all local references. is southwest London. If you go to Hammersmith and get stuck on that terrible roundabout, you are going round and round, Sir Elijah Impi's not only his house,

which is sort of beneath the underground station, but you know the church on that roundabout, on the Hammersmith roundabout, there's got a spy that you can see. Yes, yes, yes. Well, as you're grumbling about the traffic, yes, I do. They're all grumbling about the traffic and stuck. Well, Elijah MP's in there.

He's buried in an enormous monument that survives to this day. built of elaborate white marble with wonderful statuary and inscription, remembering his time when he was the first chief justice of the new Supreme Court. And he was a very controversial figure from the beginning because he got his job because his friend, Warren Hastings, was appointed the Governor General and Impe had been at Westminster with him. They were school friends from London, posh. The old boy network again. Boy Network, surprise, surprise. We're talking about the English and what do you find. And in due course, he actually exonerates Hastings when he's brought to trial. And then, of course, both of them

impeached and both are accused of corruption. Both eventually get off, but not before being dragged into a lifetime of legal horror. The reason he goes to Bengal at all is because of the Regulating Act of 1773. Now, this is a really interesting time. because it's the first time the East India Company is brought under the partial control of the crown. And who do they turn to to sort of birth this new baby? It's Impe. He takes it very seriously. He's not a man who does the job in half measures. He's quite a serious, earnest kind of guy. In Calcutta High Court to this day, there is a spectacular picture of Impe as this enormous plump, sort of Georgian, he looks like an Old Testament prophet. He looks like John Adams, actually, the portrait of John Adams. It was sort of a bolding, wispy white hair, potato face.

In the one in Calcutta High Court, though, he's sort of standing with his hands raised as if sort of a priest about to make a sacrifice or something. Dustily bewigged, hands raised portentously above him like some sort of Hanoverian reincarnation of an Old Testament prophet. Yes, I mean, he sounds like sort of a colonial nightmare, but, I mean, he was, in the same. enamored of his time in India. He loves it. That's right. And like Hastings and unlike Clive in the generation before him, he is super impressed with the civilization of India, both the ancient Sanskritic Hindu culture. And we're going to hear more in the second half about another person in the circle, who is William Jones, who's the person who begins the study of Sanskrit and realizes it's one of the Indo-European languages, but also the whole Muslim.

and Mughal world, and in fact, it is Urdu and Persian that Impe studies on his boat out. They all have these six-month-long voyages from England, and the more diligent among them don't just do skittles and bridge. Gamble away their fortunes before they've made it. They learn the languages. And so Impi arrives fluent in Bengali, Urdu and Persian by the time that he has turned up. Which makes him rare, but does perhaps explain why he becomes friends with Claude Marta, who we talked about in the last episode,

who was also an indophile. So he does, I mean, this is actually happenstance, isn't it? He does go to stay with him in Lucknow in 1781. Is this the time where, you know, Matar goes, Hey, do you want to see my etchings? Is that where this romance with Indian art start? And this particular set of etchings is the second. Remember I said how there'd there'd been two sets of Claude Martin's commissions.

First of all, he commissions the birds. And then at the end of his life and indeed the end of last episode, finally we got to the fact that he one of the great commissioners of flower paintings and begins this whole tradition of East India Company sponsored botanical painting in India. And are these against the white background again? Are they sort of, you know, more portraits than pictures? I mean, what are we talking about? So what Impe does is he goes to stay with Claude Martin in Lucknow.

And we have surviving in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin one picture that has, has the stamps of both men on the back. It's the missing link, if you like, between the teeth. What is it? What is it? It's a gorgeous mogul iris. It's beautiful, beautiful painting. You would get plants in this episode. Thank God. Okay. It's a beautiful iris. And it seems to belong initially to Martin and to be given to Elijah MP. But what we also know is that Impeer arrives with Warren Hastings while Martin's in the middle of this whole botanical moment. His house is full of Indian painters scribbling away, copying flowers in this sort of half-mougal, half-enlightenment style. And Impe is particularly excited because as a middle-aged and not particularly attractive man,

he has married a much younger woman in a kind of Jane Austenie way. And his wife, Mary, is from Whitney in Oxfordshire. She is half his age. When she was 19, she married the 36-year-old, Elijah. at Impe. And she was this absolute lover of nature. We have her childhood diaries when she's walking along the Windrush River in the Cotswolds, collecting salamanders and frogs and painting little sort of pictures of ducks, feathers that she finds by the side of the windrush. And when she comes out to India with Impi, she continues this on a massive scale. Well, I'm going to allow you,

just because of her, because I'm slightly enamoured with her, to talk about animals for a while. even though this is all about gardens. But Lady and Pete, I mean, she does look like, you know, one of those rosetti portraits. I mean, I imagine her hair to be red, or those are black and white I'm looking at right now. But, you know, sort of a great cascade of curls. This very sort of long, swan-like neck, you know, very sort of porcelain skin. And these very intense eyes, clever eyes. It's a lovely portrait of a lovely looking woman.

There's another picture of her, which is by an Indian artist, which is far more revealing. And what it is is an image of Lady Ineatine. Impe with all her Indian artists and household around her. She's in the middle. I think she's choosing a hat. She's got a milliner, an Indian milliner who's brought her a variety of different hats to choose from, and she's choosing one. But the artist has drawn the whole household with all these different people,

some sitting here making furniture, others sort of copying miniatures, others stitching gorgeous things or making chairs. It looks like in this or enormous workshop. I'm looking at it right now. I'm looking at the industry of it. And there she is, sort of slightly, with the name, impishly, looking directly at the artist. And then the nicest thing is that there's also a picture of her children. And the Indian artist is sort of obviously horrified by the pale colour of these white children of MP and Lady MP.

And they're almost ghosts. They're some albinos running around with these beautiful ires who are painted perfectly normally. and these children are painted literally white. They're kind of looking if they've just been drained of all colour. Do you know what I was describing, the Lady Impie that I was describing, just found the coloured version of this. And it is attributed to Gainsborough, no less. So, I mean, you know, she was important enough and interesting enough for Gainsborough

to be bothered to paint. And now, the reason I'm going to allow you to talk about animals is because she had a rather spectacular menagerie, and that makes her even more interesting. Tell us about Lady MP's menagerie. So in the park, which is now commemorated by Park Street, though the park itself has almost completely disappeared, Lady Impi began to collect wonderful Indian animals. And I think her first was a shawl goat,

which is one of these wonderful shaggy, Himalayan goats with very long hair and wonderful horns. And the painting of that, which is probably the first to have been made, is in the VNA and it's one of the masterpieces of their connection. And what happened is that when Impe went up to that now to see Claude Martin got the idea of using Indian Mughal painters to paint botanical and zoological specimens, he got down from the old capital, Patna, which had briefly been next to one of the capitals of Bengal, three incredibly talented Indian artists who should be remembered if there was any of the capital of Bengal, three incredibly talented Indian artists, who should be remembered, if there was Justice as the greatest animal painters of Indian history alongside Mansour. When we had this exhibition of Company School painting at the Wallace Collection five years ago, the Guardian art reviewer saw the picture of Sheikh Zanlind's Cheetah. Oh yes. And said in his review that

nothing that Stubbs had painted even began to match the brilliance of these pictures. And they are images of sheer genius. No one again ever again painted pictures as gorgeous. We ought to name the three because, I mean, in your excitement, we haven't. So Sheikh Zainaldin is one that you've mentioned, but there's also Bawani Das and Ram Das, who are both Hindus. So these are Hindus and Muslims sort of working together on the same kind of project. Can I just say the one that I am absolutely in love with, though, is the great Indian fruit bat. That is just the most amazing, full of attitude portrait of an animal. It's the bat with one wing out stretched and the other one coquettishly waving at the artist.

So, you know, but again, such detail with a squirrel brush, every hair on the torso of this bat, every expression is so beautifully captured. It's amazing. I thought when I saw it first, it looked like a sort of caped commendatory ushering a woman into a Venetian opera hats or something. It's flirty. It's a flirty bat. It also has to be said it's a very male bat. The artist has made a point. of drawing in no uncertain manner at the tackle of the bat. There are bits and bobs on display, indeed. So, I mean, how many of these pictures?

I mean, she had many animals. So is she the patron of zoological drawing as we sort of respect it now from company paintings? Yeah, this is the great masterpiece of this genre. No one ever again painted as beautifully. And when she died, this whole set of paintings were left to the Linnaean society. who at some point sold them off. And so they're split up now among collections around the world.

And they are some of the most expensive and sought-after bits of Indian art anywhere. The fruit bat, the pair of that came up at auction a couple of years ago, the girl of this very male. Mrs. Bat. Mrs. Bat, I think, went for a third of a million pounds. Wow. And these were produced on a vast scale. There are two or three hundred surviving.

the single best collection is the Ashmolean in Oxford. And last year, when I was living in Oxford, I made a long, advance appointment to get the whole lot out. Oh, how lovely. How lovely. So we spent a whole morning with me perched on a chair, peering down at these things, trying to photograph them from above to get perfect shots of them all.

Lady Impe then and Lord Impe, were they the creators or enhancers of the park and therefore habitats for, you know, these animals and, you know, creating, if you like, their own supply of subjects to be painted. I mean, how much can we credit them for their ecology as well as being interested in this menagerie? I mean, were they green as we think of it today? Yes, I think they were. I think this was their hobby.

This is what they loved. And this, I think, united the two because we know that MP was interested in particularly plants. And we know that Lady MP had been keeping a nature diary from her childhood. So this pair who I think were possibly, you know, slightly different generations, she was so much younger than him. And she's an attractive and beautiful woman. And he's this old sort of potential, this old booby. They bonded, as far as they did bond, over their menagerie and their animal paintings. And what's lovely is that Lady Impe inscribes everyone, not just in English, but in Persian.

She learnt the Persian letters. Like her husband. Gosh. And so we know who painted each one of these paintings. There's a clear hierarchy. Sheikh Zainu didn't get to do all the really lovely fluffy mammals like the shawl goat, while Bawani Das gets given the reptiles. And he has to do the kind of snakes and the salamanders.

And Ram Dass gets given the fish. And there's a wonderful collection of fish and insects now in the Welcome Collection. The Wellcome Collection is free to use. Anyone who hears this podcast can go to the Welcome Collection in London and demand to see the amazing Impe paintings by Buwanis Das and Ram Dass. And there are about 200 or 300 in the Welcome Collection. We are heading towards a break, but just before the break, were they recognised in their time as being so important to the art world,

or was it only centuries later? I think not. I'd love to say that they were appreciated. And clearly, Lady Impi took great pains to build up this collection, and this was her passion project. But I think they were regarded as important records of beautiful and important birds and animals and plants rather than the artist themselves. How interesting. Look, let's take a break.

And after the break, we've got some more really fascinating people to introduce you to. Welcome back. So, William. Are we going to another William for our next instalment? And remember, it's about gardens. Did he like plants? William Jones of the Asiatic Society. William Jones, I'm glad to say, has quite a lot of other interests other than the garden plants.

And now, he's a fascinating character. William Jones comes out on a boat called The Crocodile. And we should really have a whole episode on him another time because he's one of the most important figures. So Jones arrives on the 15th of January, 1784. He's also part like Impi of the Legal Apparitus. He's setting up the courts with Impe in Calcutta. And within a kind of couple of weeks of his arrival, he set up what he calls a society for inquiring into the history, civil and natural, the antiquities, arts, sciences,

and literature of Asia. And this becomes the Royal Azadic Sarty, the Asiatic Society of Bengal in its first incarnation. Warren Hastings is the patron and soon arrives before the society and declares, in truth, I love India a little more than my own country. Really? That's a good quote. And under this pair of Jones and Hastings, the Asiatic Sartier-Vengal quickly becomes a catalyst for channeling the scholars in the British community, of which there's very few compared to the number of people who are just out to make a lot of money.

But they catalyze the curiosity of the entire community. And they bring in Munchis and Indian members from the very beginning. And as Hastings puts it in his opening speech, he says, such studies, independent of utility, will diffuse the generosity of sentiment and will survive long after British dominion in India has ceased to exist. And when the sources which it once yielded of wealth and power are lost to remembrance. That's prescient, isn't it? That is prescient. I love that. So I also have another question. So, you know, with this sheer volume of material that's being created, I mean, particularly just through two families, you know, you've got the Martans and you're, you know, you've got the impies, and now you've got William Jones in the mix as well. So, I mean,

you seem to be describing quite a bookish, scholarly, you know, quite decent fellow, William Jones. How does he fit into the cutthroat mercantile world that Clive described as pretty despicable and, you know, so rapacious? How does he exist in this world? Well, he doesn't. This is the lovely thing about him. He decamps quite early on to a place called Krishnagar, 60 miles up the Ganges from Kalkata, where he adopts the local Indian dress of loose white cotton and rents a bungalow that he describes as being entirely of vegetable materials. And he surrounds himself with Brahmins to help him finish his study of Sanskrit, a language which he describes as being more perfect than Greek, more copious than Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either. And as he begins to discover Sanskrit literature, which no one in Britain up to this point, the Brits have been in India a couple of hundred years. years now, and no one has bothered with the stuff. And suddenly he's now reading the Mahabharata and the

Ramayana. He says, I'm in love with the Gopis. I'm charmed with Krishna, an enthusiastic admirer of Rama, Arjun, Bima, and the warriors of the Mahabarata. They appear far greater in my eyes than Ajax or Achilles appeared when I first read the Iliad. So here we have the man who's pulling all this stuff together. And he goes down to the Ganges. He says, in paying. adoration to springs and rivers. I'm going upstream to Marganga, to the holy banks of the river Yamuna. He starts learning Hindustani airs, which is his attempt to try and make sense of Indian music. And what he realizes is that Valmiki is the new Homer, the Ramayana is the new Odyssey. And he makes this crucial breakthrough that they are alike in their lexicon to Greek and Latin.

and it's he who first comes up with the idea of Indo-European languages. He seems very enlightened. He's also a catalyst for great change, because, you know, after Jones found the Asiatic Society, that comes into being, it's only two years later that the Calcutta Botanic Garden is founded by a Scottish soldier called Colonel Robert Kidd. So, you know, again, you've got a discipline that sort of springs out of the earth there. And in 1804, I mean, I love this sort of Wellesley, if all roads lead to Wellesley at some point, with the encouragement of the then Governor General, the Marcus of Wellesley,

an Institute for Promoting the Natural History of India is established outside Calcutta, Barakpour. And what is that exactly? What is in this natural institute for promoting the natural history of India? So this is attached to the Botanic Gardens. And the Botanic Gardens are the other crucial place where this painting of plants is taking place. The first guy to found at the Botanic Garden is a guy called James Kerr of Kramm. Mark, who's another Scotsman. He's originally a surgeon in Bengal, and he is sending pictures of Indian plants back to his naturalist friends in Scotland as early 1773. And he seems to have used

Bawainidas and Ram Dass, maybe even before Lady MP. There's a couple of gorgeous images of a spray of unripe mangoes, which my friend Henry Nolte discovered in the Q collection, that he's to predate even the impede. So there's all these Scots botanists out there, and they're increasingly hanging out with either Brahmins or to learn Sanskrit or Mughal painters who are going to paint the botany. And you get this whole world, which, I mean, it's only a small portion of a very Philistine city, but you get this science and literature and art all revolving around this circle that Jones has started in Park Street. Because it is such a small circle, you know, everyone knows everybody.

And so therefore, you know, it's an even more fertile ground. You always find this, you know, sort of a salon culture exists. And then there's an accelerated culture, if you like. You know, people are sort of swapping ideas. Can I ask you one question? I often wondered, these paintings that were done of plants and animals at this time, the company paintings, would they have been held in folios in books, or would people have displayed them on walls?

because, I mean, they are exquisite. But would Lady Impi have been sitting on a huge pile of papers, if you like, or would they have been hung on her walls? I don't think she'd have hung them on her walls. I think they were done on loose leaves, and then at a later date, were bound. And today, we have, in the sense, the undoing of this, because when these things come on the market,

they tend to get broken and sold again as an individual piece, which now, as I said, go for a third of a million pounds apiece. So you have these artists coming down from the mogul sentence, particularly Mosheedabad to the north and Patna to the west. And by the 1790s, it becomes a thing that you do when you get to Calcutta. You employ one of these artists to paint. But other people use the artists to record their daily life. So, you know, them sitting at table, them going upstream in an Indian boat.

It's like having a personal photographer, isn't it? It's just having somebody tip-pap you every day of your life. And there are one or two characters that stand out. amazing man called Major James Nathaniel Rind. And he is a zoologist, and he paints particularly weird animals. And in the Met collection, there's a wonderful pair of images of flatfish. They look like sort of kippers. But again, in that mogul style, every scale is painted. And the mogul artists almost can't help but give personality to these fish and to these beasts and birds and locusts and all these different things. And even a figure like Marquist

Wellesley, Richard Wellesley, who is far from an EC, commissions 27 volumes of natural history paintings. Ah, which explains why, you know, he backs the Botanic Garden and the Society. Okay, that's interesting. So his gateway drug was pictures. That's so interesting. And again, by studying these pictures, we can get some idea of the painters who actually painted them. And when we put the Forgotten Masters show together, there was one particular artist who had never been heard of before, who sort of came to the fall. And Mullenie Roy, who's this wonderful scholar working in the British Library, identified a Bengali painter called Haluda. and Haluda paints with very few colours.

He paints in black and white with this sort of Indian equivalent of a rotaring pen almost. You know, there's very fine little ink work. And every scale, every feather, every tuft of an animal's fur is shown. And my favourite is one that we had in the show, which was of a sloth bear.

Oh, that's spectacular. That is a good one, yeah. It looks as if he stepped on electricity cable or something. Yeah. He doesn't look happy. He doesn't look comfortable. It's true. Oh, how wonderful.

So all of this Western patronage that is coming to these Indian painters, do we have any indication that people like Lady MP or others say to their painters, I would like you to do it in this kind of style? Do they have a hand in an evolution of style? Clearly, someone is showing them European Botanic Gardens from that period, just like Claude Martin in Lucknow who had showed Les Voiso de France to his artists. Clearly, in the Botanic Gardens, there are sets of Western Botanical pictures, because you get the template of Western Botanical painting,

which is the white background, which is the highlighted individual flower, removed almost sort of anesthetized from its context. When our friend Mansour was painting his turkey, The turkey's in a landscape or the flowers have butterflies on them. But the European style is isolated. And I think the sad thing, as you say, is that while the Europeans clearly liked these paintings and were prepared to spend large sums of money commissioning them, they didn't regard the artists as of great worth.

Of great masters, which they were, clearly. The clearest example of this is in Delhi, where my wife's forbear. William Fraser is commissioning huge numbers of masterpieces from the artists in the mogul court. And again, these paintings today go for half a million pounds, the best ones on the market. But we know from James Fraser's diaries that he regarded these pictures only as polarites. Just like a photographer today will start when he's doing a shoot with test shots of the model or whatever it is, as far as James Fraser is concerned, these utter masterpieces, which are now worth a hundred times what his own pictures are worth, they were just setting the data of costume,

of rank, of type for his own paintings. And he planned to do a whole series of lithographs in the manner of the Daniels, this uncle and nephew. Oh, I love the Daniels, yeah. They're very much part of this world too. Well, we need to do an episode on Daniels because I find them fascinating. Look, just very briefly, does this period of company painting end with the end of the East India Company, when suddenly you have this sort of different revision of how the British should treat the natives? You know, all of these people who were involved in company painting liked India. They talked about Sanskrit. They learnt Persian. They dressed like Indians. They married Indian some of them. But then you have this after the mutiny, 1854, you have this whole backlash

against, you know what, we want to keep them at arm's length, we don't want them to get ideas above their station. Does the art guillotine at that point too? It's a changing perspective in all these different ways. So you get, the peak of it is really the 1780s, is this period of Claude Martin of Sir William Jones of MP. And there is the period when you get the most into marriage. At this period, about one in three Brits is married to a living with an Indian woman. At this period, two, you're getting the most natural history painting taking place. But already by the 1820s, the number of marriages is going down. We know this from the Wills, which are in the Indyrofis Library. And the style of the paintings is becoming less and less

Mughal and the painters are encouraged to become more and more European in their styles. It's a shame, isn't it? Because this hybrid was amazing. It is a shame, and you can see this in a single individual's work. There's a wonderful, brilliant painter called Sita Ram, who brings this story, in a sense, to a conclusion. And at the beginning, when he's a young man, he's painting very detailed micro-Mougal style of locusts or insects, and he's been commissioned to produce these natural history paintings in the Mughal style. And then he is watching clearly what European artists like James Fraser are doing and how they're getting paid far more to produce works in a European style. So Sita Ram over the course of his career alters his style and begins to paint in a quasi-European way and becomes less and less Mughal.

He could do the Mughal stuff and in these youth he did it. But he, whether by personal choice or by just realizing where the money was. Economic compulsion. Yeah, with economic compulsion. He begins to paint more. And he accompanies the Marquist Hastings, who's different from Warren Hastings. The Markquis Hastings is a later governor-general who goes up, the Ganges and the Yamuner and visits Delhi in the 1820s, 1830s. And some of his pictures looks almost like Turner.

He's sort of channeling that early 19th century fascination with light and washes of color. and there's a famous picture, I think, that's marking the defeat of Napoleon. It must have been 1815. And appropriately enough, it's an image of Claude Martin's Constantia, where we started the first episode of this little miniseries. And it's the Treaty of Amiens. And there are fireworks and lights all around the lake in front of Constantia and in front of the obelisk that was raised in Martin's memory.

And it's all just a wash of colour with lights exploding. So very turner. Very Turner-esque. And that is the future. Indian artists are encouraged not to paint in their own style, but the next generation, you get John Lockwood Kipling coming out to Lahore and starting the first imperial art school in, what, 1870s, 1880s, and people are being trained to paint like pre-raphalites. And right up to the present day, when you go to the Delhi Art Fair today, people are looking over their shoulder, not at Mansour or Sheikh Zainu Dio. they're looking over their shoulder to Damien Hurst or to Picasso or whatever. And I think it's only in Pakistan with the Academy of Painting that's grown up in the art school in Lahore that's produced artists like Shazia Secunda that we've begun to find South Asian artists looking back to Indian inspiration, to the indigenous traditions of Indian art. And that has to be the future.

That is the stuff that really interests me. Well, listen, well down for mentioning plants at least a few times in this episode. That's all we've got time for. Join us again next time when we are going to be talking a lot about plants and gardens as built. Anita being the good head girl has done her homework. And there's two episodes for you. And let him off the leash, man. This is going to be plant-tastic.

This is a story of a really unknown man, Herman Gustav Kronbegel, who is, the Maharajas gardener. It's a really cracking story and I've just loved researching it. Anyway, till the next time we meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnain. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.