Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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a contributor to the Encyclopédie; at least two of the same uncle’s daughters, Polier’s cousins, would follow their father into the world of letters. And there was an obvious respect in which collecting opened doors for Polier. Shut out from Company hierarchies because of his foreign (Swiss) birth, Polier could use collecting and connoisseurship as an alternate way up the ladders of India’s European society. He had the same pandit as the illustrious Orientalist Sir William Jones, whose discovery that Sanskrit shared a common parent with Greek and Latin (Indo-European) helped to raise the stature and status of Indic studies in the west. Polier’s taste for rare Asian manuscripts brought him close toWarren Hastings. He was on friendly terms with both men, and cannily sent them gifts of “fine Oriental writings”—”as a small token,” he told Hastings, “of my gratitude and regard.”51 It also could not hurt that he was a friend and patron of Zoffany. Polier must have been delighted to be voted a member of the Asiatic Society of Bengal just two weeks after its founding.52
But there was another way in which Polier’s collection was a social investment, a form of self-fashioning. This second face of Lucknow Orientalism comes to life in a strikingly different image of Polier relaxing at home, a 1780 miniature by the Lucknow painter Mihr Chand. It is evening now, and out on the verandah Polier rests against the plump cushions of a yellow settee. A pair of dancers performs for him, accompanied by four musicians. The warm, low light of glass lanterns turns the dancers’ bodies into elastic shadows beneath their violet and crimson skirts. The sky behind them is alive with fireworks and whorls of ocher smoke. Polier, though, is not distracted. He nurses his hookah and studies the dance. His crisp muslin robes are edged with heavy golden embroidery, his scarlet turban banded with a jeweled sarpesh and spiked with a bristling black feather ornament. His face is the plump, serene profile of a Mughal nobleman.53
Mihr Chand’s miniature is an exact parallel to Zoffany’s painting: a celebration of Polier’s gentility. It is also, if anything, more accurate. Polier may have studied Hindu scriptures and Sanskrit, and traded manuscripts with his European friends. But he led his everyday life in Lucknow, in Persian, with his two Indian wives, a daughter, and two sons. His Persian name, given to him by Emperor Shah Alam, was Arsalan-i Jang (Lion of Battle). His jagir (revenueproducing land grant) was near Aligarh. He was a Mughal nobleman.
The details of Polier’s life in Awadh appear with marvelous intimacy in the pages of his surviving Persian letters, the I’jaz-i Arsalani, bound into letterbooks according to a Persian literary convention.54 They lead the reader into a world where personal relationships across cultural lines not only were a part of professional life in India, or even (as they had been for Elizabeth Plowden) after-hours sociability, but also infused every aspect of private affairs. Many of the letters gathered here were fired off to a wide network of Indian agents (Hindu, Muslim, and Christian), all across Awadh and Bengal. On Polier’s instructions, these men would buy and sell for him everything from guns, elephants, and steel, to opium, oranges, gold lace, and dried fruits. While Polier was on campaign with the nawab in the winter of 1774, his agent Mir Muhammad Azim sent him such essentials as tobacco, wine, paper, and ink, while in the meantime getting his mirrors polished, supervising the embroidery of a tent and an elephant canopy (”the embroiderer is a bastard,” Polier wrote, “please be strict with him and have it sent soon”), searching out sugar candy “of high quality, oil free and crystal clear,” and traveling to Faizabad bearing hookahs, shawls, and birdcages for Polier’s household, and a bag of toys for his young son.55
These agents also supplied him with various items for his collection. “I have learnt that a boat full of books and other papers and a wilayati chariot with musical instruments for me have gone astray towards Chunar,” he complained to two deputies from Calcutta. “As soon as you receive this letter, send a harkara [messenger] to bring this boat from there to Faizabad. Unload it and keep my things in place.”56 Some months later, he wrote to thank another agent for sending a copy of the famous Persian poem the Gulistan and a fresh batch of pictures—as well as some chutney and mango pickle. “I relished the [chutney and pickle],” he said, “and enjoyed reading the book and going through the album. You write that there are other good pictures in Murshidabad. I would like to have a look at them on my arrival there.” In place of the rather formal officer of Zoffany’s painting, one can just imagine Polier lounging around in his long muslin jama, nibbling on pickles and Indian snacks, while thumbing through the pages of his latest Persian book.57 One can imagine also, reading Polier’s letters to Mihr Chand, a little of what it may have been like to work for him. “I fail to understand why you are sitting idle,” Polier chastised Mihr in one letter. “Prepare some more similar portraits if you have finished the ones you were engaged with so far. This…is your work, and it is meaningless to sit idle.” On another occasion he ordered Mihr to “prepare a draft of the painting of the dance. I will see the draft when I come back and then you can finalize it as per my instructions.”58 Could this be the very painting that still survives?
The I’jaz also recorded deeply personal matters. Polier had two Muslim wives, about whom little is known beyond their names, Bibi Jawahar and Bibi Khwurd. (Even here there is some disagreement: Claude Martin referred to them as Jugnu and Zinat.) But in his letters to them, and to his household steward, Lal Khan, it is possible to peer into a cross-cultural domestic ménage of a kind not often opened to view. There was nothing at all unusual about a European man living with one or more Indian mistresses, or bibis, during this period. (The best-known relationships involved men, and often women, of high rank; but these were merely the most visible.) It was also not considered particularly scandalous. Even Elizabeth Plowden—a white Englishwoman, whom one might expect to be “protected” from knowledge of such things—knew about Polier’s half-Indian family and visited his children at Claude Martin’s house. While she was in Lucknow, another of her friends and his bibi had a baby girl; Elizabeth went to see them, too, pronouncing the baby “the fairest and smallest Child I ever saw born of an Hindostauny Woman.”59 (Tragically, the infant died two days later.) These relationships were a normal feature of European society in India right up until the late eighteenth century, especially in Lucknow and Hyderabad, outside the more segregated society of the presidency towns.60
Later generations responded to interracial liaisons with such horror—and tried so vigorously to cover up their traces—that it is still often difficult to get a sense of these families as living, breathing, feeling groups. But Polier’s letters nicely animate his own domestic sphere. On learning that Bibi Khwurd, the younger of the two women, had been suffering a difficult pregnancy, Polier instantly wrote to Lal Khan to insist that she have constant attendance, fresh clothes, and a clean room. Bibi Jawahar got a sound scolding for not telling him about her co-wife’s discomfort. “Your welfare is linked to hers. I therefore write to you to remind you that it is your responsibility to take care of her. Make sincere efforts to please her. I will be delighted if she is comfortable and if I hear anything contrary to this I will keep her separately. Since I love you,” he concluded, “I am happy that you have now made up [with her]. Rest assured that I am fond of you, and forget the heart-burn.”61 Tension between the wives lingered for some months but evaporated when Bibi Khwurd had her baby: a girl.
Polier was a devoted father, constantly concerned about the health and well-being of his children. When they were ill, he called not on Lucknow’s