Violence, Colonialism and Empire in the Modern World

by Philip Dwyer

  With this advice at hand, readers likely considered the deep passages of shadow that cast the mountain into relief, and the amber colour of the print. Like Gilpin , Colin Mackenzie chose warm tones to depict Savandurga, suitable for imitating the sun’s first or last rays of day. Similarities in the approaches of these artists to their respective subjects might lead some to suggest a causal relationship between them, but in fact the aesthetic training of Gilpin as well as Mackenzie drew deep from the well of eighteenth-century British military representation. 7

  Like Mackenzie, professional artist Robert Home , in Select Views in Mysore, the Country of Tippoo Sultan; From Drawings Taken on the Spot of 1794, relied on picturesque principles to construct views of sites for which Britain contended for military dominance. 8 Home, who received permission from the East India Company to produce imagery in ‘the Carnatic’ during the Anglo-Mysore Wars , downplayed military accoutrements and action, and focused instead on elements of nature that could be handled by means of picturesque formulae. In an etching by William Byrne (Fig. 4) that carefully followed the composition and details of an original drawing by Home , View of Shevagurry from the top of Ramgaree, it is apparent that Home sought to provide viewers with the experience of standing on a hilltop, as if taking in an expansive view. Indeed, an accompanying text directs viewers to look deep into the landscape, where the walls of a fortress on a rocky outcropping can be made out. But unlike Mackenzie ’s drawing, which relied on the use of a Claude glass, Home ’s composition calls attention to the specificities of the foreground, to the extent that it is clear that he positioned himself within a fort. Its walls are visible in the upper third of the picture plane, a heavy gun situated at the lower left.

  Fig. 4 William Byrne after Robert Home View of Shevagurry from the top of Ramgaree. ©British Library Board, London, Shelfmark W2567(19)

  As if to justify his decision to include an explicit reference to weaponry, Home noted that the ‘sterile soil’ at the site was rich in iron, ‘and applied to that worst of purposes, the fabrication of implements of war’. The terrain he described as ‘wild and savage…abounding with barren rocks, and extensive thickets, the abode of tigers and other beasts of prey’. Of the presence of British soldiers, Home acknowledged that on 22 December 1791, troops ‘attacked the lower fort and pettah,’ after which the fort was surrendered, adding that ‘it was found to be well provided with guns, provisions, and stores’ and had recently been strengthened. 9 But the artist eliminated soldiers from the scene, and even the cannon is marginalized to the extent that it is only partially represented, a diminutive object in a landscape where rocks and clouds play more dynamic (visual) roles. As with Mackenzie ’s drawing, it is a severe, uneven terrain that lends an idea of danger to Home ’s composition, more so than accoutrements of battle. Lest it is assumed that the printmaker, Byrne , reduced the impact of the heavy gun in the landscape, comparison with the original drawing confirms that Home did not intend for it to be visually prominent. The cannon is easy to overlook in both images.

  Scholars have suggested that picturesque imagery produced in the course of the Anglo-Mysore Wars aided viewers in practices of memorializing and imagining. The modes of artists’ training in combination with their personal experiences of war may have resulted in the production of battle sites as landscapes ‘where memory could subsequently be located and invoked’ by individuals or collectively, 10 the ‘now vacant battlefields’ stimulating viewers to construct imagined histories for the troops. 11 That picturesque imagery by Colin Mackenzie and Robert Home may have served these purposes is neither debated nor suggested here. Offered instead is a demonstration of ways in which such images were useful to the purposes of colonial conquest, first through a consideration of the ideas of writers about aesthetics whose texts relied heavily on matters of land and landscape. The ideas of Reverend Gilpin , Uvedale Price , and Richard Payne Knight , metropolitan theorists who took the picturesque to heart, are deserving of special attention in this light. Each explored subjects as disparate as nature and property, art and imagination, and politics and violence—all factors of colonial wartime representation in South India and Sri Lanka. Second, to highlight the complicit nature of the picturesque when it is applied to a colony, the career of Sri Lanka’s first British governor, Frederic North , is briefly contextualized vis-à-vis testimonies of specific incidents of violence on the island, and in relation to imagery produced in close proximity to Britain’s campaigns against Kandy.

  Men of ‘Polite Imagination’

  Since the picturesque required practitioners and viewers to consider landscape by means of particular patterns of representation, the roots of this discourse must be examined, to identify the values passed on to image makers in the colonies, especially with regard to conceptions of land. The three most influential metropolitan thinkers about the picturesque were personally preoccupied with issues concerning land ownership and maintenance. Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight , both of whom published their ideas about the picturesque as early as 1794, owned large properties in Herefordshire and managed them zealously. Reverend William Gilpin (whose aquatint of Cumberland was noted previously) was born at Scaleby in Cumbria, and while he did not inherit that estate, he maintained an affection for the property and visited it throughout his life.

  William Gilpin ’s ideas about land were shaped by the values of property owners, to the extent that he assigned the boys at the Cheam School in Surrey, where he served as headmaster, with the task of managing individual garden plots. The ‘more popular boys would sometimes possess very large estates’:portions of which they would either sell or let out as their affairs required. All however were obliged to cultivate their gardens. It was a law of the state, that whatever was neglected, escheated to the Lord; who gave it to those who would make a better use of it. 12

  Along with Price and Knight , Gilpin was an enthusiast of art and its history, as well, and devoted much attention to the matter of aesthetic taste, imposing his opinions about beauty upon the natural environment, sketching it according to picturesque rules.

  Prior to the heyday of picturesque practice in Britain but leading directly to its door are the ideas of Joseph Addison , an early eighteenth-century writer, publisher, and politician. Addison contributed an essay to The Spectator in 1712 in which he addressed the subject of the imagination through a discussion of taste and nature. 13 In a passage that seems to anticipate picturesque discourse, Addison determined that ‘visible objects’ could take many shapes, including ‘agreeable visions of things that are either absent or fictitious’ and in this way ‘[a] man of polite imagination is led into a great many pleasures’. 14 This ‘man of polite imagination’ is of interest to this study, he who, according to Addison , could ‘converse with a picture, and find an agreeable companion in a statue’. Such a man ‘often feels greater satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows, than another does in the possession’:It gives him, indeed, a kind of property in every thing he sees, and makes the most rude uncultivated part of Nature administer to his pleasures: so that he looks upon the world, as it were, in another light, and discovers in it a multitude of charms, that conceal themselves from the generality of mankind. 15

  Addison defined imagination in one conversant with art as an ability to see the world differently from others, to the extent that even ‘the most rude uncultivated part of Nature’ could charm and satisfy him.

  It is as if Addison had foreseen the life of William Gilpin , who was insatiable in his consumption of art and who found every evidence of pleasure in applying art’s principles to the natural environment of Britain while sketching out of doors. The clergyman grew so attached to the idea that each element in the landscape must bolster the effect of the scene as a ‘picture’ that he could be dismissive of local inhabitants, even though ‘by far the largest number of people were employed on the land’ during the decades that Gilpin published his guidebooks. 16 He occasionally expressed interest in the people he encountere
d on a picturesque tour, such as a suffering individual he met at Tintern, a woman who could ‘scarce crawl; shuffling along her palsied limbs, and meagre, contracted body, by the help of two sticks’. 17 But Gilpin avoided producing sketches of scenes that included references to discomfort or to sharp disparity of social privilege. Departing from the countryside around Tintern, which he described as ‘a solitary, tranquil scene’, he came upon ‘great ironworks; which introduce noise and bustle into these regions of tranquillity’. 18 Gilpin produced aquatints of Tintern for his book about the Wye Valley, but did not acknowledge the ironworks or the suffering woman in the images.

  Gilpin had brought out several books on the picturesque by 1794, when Uvedale Price , a baronet, classicist, and the owner of a large estate, Foxley, published An essay on the picturesque, as compared with the sublime and the beautiful; and, on the use of studying pictures, for the purpose of improving real landscape. 19 With this three-volume work Price threw his hat into the ring of writers who contributed to the literature of taste in eighteenth-century Britain, and used the project to register concern about the widespread employment of ‘improvers’—professional gardeners hired by landowners to refashion private property according to changing taste. To Price , improvers did a great deal of damage when they modified the environs of an estate so extensively that the property no longer looked natural. He once observed the rebuilding of a lane near a ‘gentleman’s pleasure grounds’ only to find ‘a great many labourers wheeling mould to this place; by degrees they filled up all inequalities, and completely covered the roots and pathways’. 20 Horrified by the gardeners’ disregard for the natural face of land, with its irregularities that ‘time only, and a thousand lucky accidents can mature’, Price labelled their work ‘the rash hand of false taste’. 21

  Yet to a greater extent than nature it was art that dictated Uvedale Price ’s sense of taste. Work by seventeenth-century landscape painters he admired, including Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin , served as the authorities for his picturesque principles, against which he compared and dismissed the ideas of popular landscape designer Capability Brown . According to Price , Brown had been ‘bred a gardener, and having nothing of the mind, or the eye of a painter’. 22 Since Brown lacked a gentleman’s education as well as a painter’s formalist training, in Price’s eyes the celebrated designer could do little more than meddle with nature.

  As with Gilpin and Price , practitioners of the picturesque in India and Sri Lanka relied upon imagery by seventeenth-century artists to dictate their approach to representation of the natural environment. While the compositions of colonial artists such as Mackenzie , Home , and Lyttleton were rooted in the prototypes Price admired, their views betrayed enough local detail to recall geographically identifiable places in South Asia. It may seem that Price had little in common with colonial artists other than particular tenets of taste, but his writing is linked to their work in poignant ways. For example, the idea of violated land led Price to think about the colonies. In the second volume of An essay on the picturesque, he recalled with regret his decision to destroy an ‘old-fashioned garden’ on his estate, giving way to ‘prevailing opinion’:I doomed it and all its embellishments, with which I had formed such an early connection, to sudden and total destruction; probably much upon the same idea, as many a man of careless, unreflecting, unfeeling good-nature, thought it his duty for demolishing towns, provinces, and their inhabitants, in America. 23

  By comparing the elimination of his old garden with the destruction of ‘towns, provinces, and their inhabitants’ by colonizers in the New World, Price cautioned readers about the danger of fashionable ideas. He considered the picturesque as an aesthetic that would weather time since it was grounded in the principles of art and anchored by an appreciation of nature. But the discourse also provided Price with a way to frame ideas about land, not only in theoretical but in material terms, since the practice of the picturesque led him to an awareness of the types of violence that threatened his property. Price wrote little of violence in colonized places. It was not his aim. Yet when he desired to articulate violence upon land in the strongest terms (‘sudden and total destruction’), he relied on a version of material violence that he associated with the colonies, that is, violence that he considered to be ‘careless, unreflecting, unfeeling’.

  The same year Uvedale Price published An essay on the picturesque, his friend Richard Payne Knight responded with a poem dedicated to Price. The son of a clergyman, Knight inherited his property, Downton, from an uncle. Like Price , he was enamoured of seventeenth-century European landscape painting and managed his lawns and gardens accordingly, finding the work of improvers distasteful. And in The Landscape, a didactic poem, Knight , like Price , extended discussion of aesthetic taste to political matters, as he considered the domestic landscape in relation to European politics, concluding with France’s Reign of Terror. 24

  Because Knight contextualized picturesque discourse in relation to contemporary political events, ideas of nationhood figure prominently in his poem, as in the following excerpt, in which he praised the English landscape:

  Hail native streams, that full yet limpid glide!

  Hail native woods, creation’s boast and pride!

  Your native graces let the painter’s art,

  And planter’s skill, endeavour to impart;

  Nor vainly after distant beauties roam,

  Neglectful of the charms they leave at home.

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  Enthusiastic about the ‘charms’ of home, Knight lauded the domestic landscape in a series of comparisons with ‘distant beauties’. He countered Peru’s ‘vast Maragnon’ (Rio Marañon) with the ‘wide wand’ring Wye’ in Wales. Against those impressed by Ontario, where ‘Niagara roars’, he offered ‘Tiber’s broken, wild cascade’, unapologetically appropriating Italy’s geography as an extension of ‘home’. 26 Knight could claim Italy as part of the domestic landscape because of the large number of Italianate paintings that hung on the walls of town and country houses throughout Britain.

  Richard Payne Knight positioned land to serve as a source of national pride but he did not require that art serve this lofty role. In an essay published in 1805, An analytical inquiry into the principles of taste, Knight cautioned men not to look to art ‘to correct national manners’ or ‘social virtue’: ‘as if men ever applied to such sources of information for directions how to act in the moral or prudential concerns of life, or ever looked at pictures for any thing other than amusement.’ Instead, the role he assigned to music, art, and poetry was that of ‘civilizing and softening mankind, by substituting intellectual, to sensual pleasures; and turning the mind from violent and sanguinary, to mild and peaceful pursuits’. Those drawn to the arts, he explained, ‘seldom or never disturb the tranquillity either of kingdoms or families; and if their lives are not very useful, they are always harmless, and often ornamental to society’. 27 Knight ’s emphasis on tranquillity—that, as a result of being well-versed in the arts, a man of taste would be unlikely to ‘disturb the tranquillity of either kingdoms or families’—strikes the chord of the colonial picturesque. Surely, Knight was describing the life of a country aesthete like himself, but what if such a man were appointed governor of a colony?

  Warscapes of ‘Ceylon’

  Frederic North , the first British governor of Sri Lanka, was, like Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight , an ardent classicist and an aesthete. Upon being named the Fifth Earl of Guilford in 1817 he would also become a man of property. 28 Examination of the letters, dispatches, and proclamations Frederic North generated during the years he governed ‘Ceylon’, from 1798 through 1805, indicates that his primary goal was the production, maintenance, and, finally, the restoration of ‘tranquillity’ on an island in contention by two polities: Britain and Kandy.

  Near the conclusion of his tenure as Sri Lanka’s governor, Frederic North surmised that his governorship had yielded positive results:…the course of the law unobstructed; the revenue
extremely increased; the country flourishing, beyond all former example, in industry, commerce, and interior tranquillity; the enemy reduced to the lowest pitch of misery and impotence; the stores tolerably provided; and the military force amply sufficient in numbers and in efficiency for all the service which it can be called upon to perform;…. 29

  Yet North had engaged the Kandyan kingdom in war, and had worked systematically to reduce it ‘to the lowest pitch of misery and impotence’.

  By ‘interior tranquillity’ North likely referred to the commencement of a process whereby the Kandyans and Kandyan land would eventually become subsumed under British law. But North failed to anticipate the cost of attempting to impose tranquillity—a term he associated with ‘good order’ 30 —upon a people who practised land management and ordered society in a manner differently from himself. While there is not opportunity here to discuss with sufficient complexity the events that led to his decision to send troops to invade the inland provinces, it is possible to juxtapose North ’s claim to have established ‘interior tranquillity’ on the island against the testimonies of some who experienced violence as a result of that decision. Memoirs by Major Arthur Johnston of the Third Ceylon Regiment and Bombardier Alexander Alexander of the Royal Artillery both relay the suffering of troops who were profoundly outmanoeuvred while engaged in armed conflict with the Kandyans. 31

  In what reads as a survival narrative, Arthur Johnston , who in 1810 published Narrative of the operations of a detachment in an expedition to Candy, in the Island of Ceylon, in the year 1804, recounted that, as a result of miscommunicated orders, he and a detachment under his command found themselves without reinforcements in Kandy, a situation that required a hasty retreat. During the descent to the island’s north-east coast the troops met with one mishap, misstep, or misfortune after another. 32 Eventually, many of the soldiers reached Trincomalee, where Alexander Alexander , a non-commissioned officer, recorded their condition, upon arrival:cold, wet, dirty, and lousy; almost all naked, many barefoot and maimed; officers and all were alike starved and shrivelled, their countenances haggard, forming an assemblage of the most miserable looking men it is possible to conceive. All had to go to the hospital, on their arrival; their strength appeared only to have endured to this point, then to have utterly deserted them. 33