Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff
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Giant mirrors multiplied every twinkle of the chandeliers overhead. The space was alive with the whir, tick, and chime of dozens of clocks and watches.
Stunning it absolutely was—and to most Western visitors, in stunningly poor taste. Nobody doubted the quality of some individual items. But taken together, the collection was remarkable chiefly “for its ridiculous assemblage of finery and trumpery jumbled together.”72 “He is fond of lavishing his treasures…above all, on fine European guns, lustres, mirrors, and all sorts of European manufactures, more especially English,” explained one Englishman,
from a two-penny deal board painting of ducks and drakes, to the elegant paintings of a Lorraine or a Zophani; and from a little dirty paper lantern, to mirrors and lustres which cost £2000 or £3000 each…Asuf-ud-Dowlah is absurdly extravagant and ridiculously curious; he has no taste and less judgement…[B]ut he is nevertheless extremely solicitous to possess all that is elegant and rare; he has every instrument and every machine, of every art and science; but he knows none.73
This particular observer reckoned that Asaf ud-Daula spent some £200,000 per year on his collection. (The observer, for his part, collected a tidy annual salary of £1,800 from the nawab with “nothing to do but to enjoy his frequent entertainments of shooting, hunting, dancing, cock fighting, and dinners.”) Altogether, the Aina Khana offered yet another sign—as if any were needed—of the nawab’s excess.
But what most European visitors did not know was that the Aina Khana wasn’t just an expression of what they saw as Asaf ud-Daula’s incurable childish whimsy. It was part and parcel of the culture of Indian kingship. Kings make collections, and collections make kings. To own rare, precious, sacred, or just plain numerous things is a virtually universal emblem of royal power.74 In many parts of the Muslim world, collecting meaningful and valuable objects enhanced a sovereign’s personal charisma, or barakat, and with it, his ability to command the loyalty and admiration of his subjects. In much the way that European princes assembled cabinets of curiosities, the Mughal emperors formed libraries and treasure-houses, called toshkhana. Elsewhere in India, regional rulers followed suit; the nizams of Hyderabad, for instance, started a toshkhana in the eighteenth century that would develop into India’s finest collection of jewels.
Never one to be modest where immodesty would do, Asaf ud-Daula embraced the genre with characteristic extravagance. Elaborate weapons crammed his armory, his jewel house shimmered with gorgeous stones. In his library, album after album of miniature paintings confirmed his princely cultivation. “Most of them are antique productions,” noted one British visitor, who generously allowed that “though widely different in manner from European matters, neither taste nor elegance are wanting to these compositions.”75 For £1,500 (about twenty times the price of an expensive Old Master painting in contemporary London), the nawab acquired one of the finest Mughal illuminated manuscripts ever produced, straight out of the Delhi imperial library: the Padshahnama, a history of Shah Jahan’s rule, made for the emperor Shah Jahan himself. In 1797, Asaf ud-Daula presented the sumptuous manuscript to the new governor-general, Sir John Shore. “It was fit for a Royal library,” said Shore, declining the gift for his own collection; he forwarded it to King George III’s library at Windsor, where it remains today.76
Asaf ud-Daula was certainly not the only Indian ruler to collect European objects. As early as the 1750s, for instance, the Maharaja of Bhuj, in Gujarat, built an extraordinary “European” palace (in truth, about as European as chinoiserie was Chinese) in order to house a collection of European art. The collection had been formed for him in part by his chief artisan, who had studied painting in Holland, and returned there several times to buy art for the king.77 Tipu Sultan of Mysore, also questing for barakat, had European objects in his toshkhana, too. But Asaf was surely the only Indian ruler to see a major European collection up close, and that, of course, was Claude Martin’s. From cladding his walls with paintings by Zoffany to enthusiastically acquiring clocks and mechanisms of all kinds, Claude Martin was Asaf ud-Daula’s closest model, and one of the nawab’s key suppliers. He was also Asaf ud-Daula’s greatest rival. Collecting seems to have been something of a competitive sport between the nawab and the nabob. The nawab, it was said,
could never bear to hear that any person possessed any thing superior to his own. He had a large room filled with mirrors, amongst which were two of the largest size that could be made in Great Britain…The Colonel [Martin] seeing them, immediately wrote to France where plate glass is cast of larger dimensions…and procured two of the largest size, which he sold to the Vizier at a very extraordinary high price.78
Asaf ud-Daula had good reason to compete with Claude Martin, a king of his own minting. He had to show the world who was really king.
So maybe the nawab was not such a dupe after all. Most kings collect to assert and display their power. Asaf ud-Daula collected to compensate for his lack of power. His hands were tied by the Company in virtually everything else, but in the sphere of art and culture he was free. Collecting was also a way to put Awadh on the map. Attracted by talk of the nawab’s lavish acquisitions, “merchants of large property from all parts of India” swept into Lucknow with curiosities to sell.79 Even in distant Europe, Asaf’s desires were attended to: the Raikeses sent him objects, at Martin’s request; Polier procured him an elaborate organ, “a precious and rare gift in India, which in the hands of inexperienced people will go [to] waste.”80 When his ministers chastised him for spending so much, Asaf ud-Daula smiled wanly and said, “how could he refuse one who had taken the trouble of travelling all the way to Oudh having heard of his generosity!” After all, he had a reputation to uphold.81
In the eyes of some outsiders, Martin and Asaf personified everything that was wrong with Lucknow. They, and their collections, were like the city itself: debauched, corrupt, extravagant. One civil servant (a thoroughly pompous young man of nineteen) found it “impossible to see without pain and shame the evidence which the Inah Khanah alone afforded of the weakness and extravagance of the Vizier, and of the dishonourable cupidity and deception with which this injurious dissipation was encouraged principally by British subjects…”82 Asaf ud-Daula could not possibly be a connoisseur because he was ignorant about European taste, value, and art—because, in a word, he was Indian. Claude Martin did not even have that excuse. He was accused not just of taking criminal advantage of “the Nawaub’s idiotical propensities” by selling him objects at usurious rates. In the words of his most savage critic, the aristocratic traveler Viscount Valentia, who visited Lucknow three years after Martin’s death:
With affluence to which he had never been brought up, and which, of course, he knew not how to enjoy, he never did a generous act, and never had a friend…[I]f he is handed down to posterity as a man who raised himself to riches and power…it will also be added, that his riches were contaminated by the methods employed in obtaining them, and that his character was stained by almost every vice that can disgrace human nature.83
Martin was no connoisseur because he was unscrupulous, opportunistic, and a crook—and, above all, because he was nouveau riche. (So, incidentally, was Valentia, who will reappear in these pages.)