Lucknow was the art capital of India, a Rome of the East. The reason for its thriving trade was sad but simple. In Delhi and the Mughal heartlands, the old aristocracy was in terminal decline. Their lands ravaged and their incomes no longer secure, many were reduced to selling off their family heirlooms—libraries and art collections included. In Lucknow, though, there was a nouveau riche elite ready and able to buy. Dealers, calligraphers, and artists left Delhi to find a better market among Lucknow’s new consumers. Manuscripts and paintings were prized in Mughal India in much the way that libraries, antiquities, and Old Master paintings were valued in contemporary Europe. So it made good sense that Asaf ud-Daula and his courtiers—many of them, like him, relative newcomers to affluence and power—should wish to buy the trappings of the Mughal nobility. As collectors and patrons, they were doing in Awadh just what Robert Clive had done in Britain: buying cultural capital to bolster their social positions.
And many Europeans in Lucknow followed suit. Antoine Polier was probably the most vigorous manuscript collector; others included Nathaniel Middleton, East India Company resident from 1777 to 1779; John Wombwell, appointed paymaster to the Company troops in 1782; and Richard Johnson, who lived in Lucknow as head assistant to the resident from 1780 to 1782. Johnson collected about as avidly as Polier, and his collection, preserved almost intact today in the British Library, attests to the range—and sheer beauty—of items circulating in the Lucknow art market. He bought many of his books in the bazaar; some of them still have prices marked in raqam. (In fact, since owners often stamped manuscripts with their seals—the Indo-ersian equivalent of a bookplate—it is sometimes possible to reconstruct the movements of a single manuscript over a period of several hundred years.) Johnson was also an active patron. During his two years in Lucknow he commissioned more than two hundred fifty paintings, including five complete ragamala series, which illustrate Indian musical modes. Johnson’s commissions to poets and writers included works not just in Persian—India’s premier literary language—but also in Urdu, which was rapidly gaining literary stature, thanks not least to the support of Asaf and his court.46
What drew Europeans into this rarefied world? Plain curiosity, to some extent. They had come of age in Enlightenment Europe, and many approached India with a broad interest in the human and natural sciences. They were Orientalists in the traditional sense of the word: amateur students of Indian history, languages, religion, music, medicine, or whatever else their intellectual predilections steered them toward. Of course, Orientalism has come to mean something quite different since Edward Said’s pathbreaking book of that title. By no means a mere pastime, Said argued, Orientalism was bound up in the pursuit of imperial power. Gathering knowledge about the Orient was a prerequisite, and sometimes a substitute, for gaining authority over it. Legal codes, maps, political intelligence, population statistics, history books, religious texts—all of these helped imperial rulers infiltrate the cultures they confronted, and devise ways of governing them. By collecting knowledge, the East India Company really was collecting an empire.
Warren Hastings was a prime specimen of the Orientalist in both the contemporary and the postcolonial senses of the term. Wellborn and well educated, steeped in the classics, tending toward deism, and convinced of the intrinsic merits of ancient cultures, Hastings was a dedicated and accomplished student of the Orient. He knew Urdu and Persian, took an interest in Sanskrit and in Hindu doctrine, and, not coincidentally, collected manuscripts.
Not for show alone was he invited to become the first president of the Asiatic Society; and though he graciously deferred the honor to Sir William Jones, he gladly accepted the title of patron instead. But as governor of Bengal, Hastings also harnessed scholarship to imperial rule. A good case in point was his patronage of Nathaniel Halhed, whose A Code of Gentoo Laws (1776) came to serve as a foundation for Company-administered Hindu courts. The aim was to rule India by its own laws, but the effect was to impose a British interpretation of what those laws were, to split Bengal’s (and later India’s) population into rigid categories, to essentialize cultural difference, and to sow the seeds of religious communal division.47
Antoine Polier and the other Lucknow collectors were Orientalists in both senses too, devoted students of Indian culture as well as agents embedded in the workings of imperial expansion. While Hastings, however, was born a gentleman and became a governor, Polier and his friends stood closer to the margins of social and political power. Orientalism, for them, included a powerful dose of frank self-interest. Sentimental aesthetes these men were not. They were hardheaded careerists on the make. (Not for nothing was Richard Johnson’s nickname “Rupee”—more, it must be said, for his talent at making rupees for others than for earning them for himself.) And as a trip to the bazaar would quickly show, collecting seriously was a very expensive business. This was certainly not just a hobby. But neither was it part of a job, or a wider program of imperial rule. Collecting was a personal, social investment. And for Polier, its rewards were of two striking, and dramatically distinct, kinds.
The Janus-faced profile of Lucknow Orientalism is beautifully captured by two portraits of Antoine Polier at home. The first, by Johan Zoffany, offers a fine glimpse of the erudite society that flourished among Lucknow’s European residents. Painted in 1786, shortly before Polier left Lucknow, the canvas shows Colonel Polier and His Friends—Claude Martin, John Wombwell, and Zoffany himself—relaxing one cool morning at Polierganj, Polier’s Lucknow house. Martin eagerly leans behind Wombwell to point out a detail in a watercolor of the Lucknow house he had designed for himself some years earlier. Zoffany is painting away at his easel. And Polier, looking over some of his beloved Indian manuscripts on the table beside him, has just been distracted by his gardeners, who are bringing in the morning produce for his inspection. Legs splayed, belly protruding from his uniform jacket, Polier surveys the fruit of his land with proprietorial care. Cabbages, onions, mangoes, papayas, tomatoes, bananas: his eye roams; his hand dangles loosely from its long lace cuff; and he points, delicately, at his choice. This, Zoffany seems to say, is a true lord of the manor. And a nabob from the neck up; with his drooping mustache, sagging jowls, and fur hat, Polier looks uncannily like his employers, the nawabs.
Altogether, the picture resembles the British conversation pieces for which Zoffany was known (if, that is, one can look past the turbaned Indian servants, the scampering monkey, and the huge branch of bananas on the floor). Like those paintings, which often posed families in front of their rolling, well-tended acres, this picture celebrates comfort, comradeship, property. Polier lived richly and well. Nudged out of Company service in Bengal, he had found lucrative employment in Awadh as a military engineer under Shuja and then Asaf ud-Daula. He even received, in 1782, a courtesy appointment as brevet colonel from the East India Company (though with the stipulation that he not serve in any corps). He had rank. He had land, the critical indicator of social status. And, of course, he had a collection.
The painting also pays tribute to gentlemanly erudition, a theme Zoffany had addressed some years earlier in a well-known picture of the leading antiquarian Charles Townley. Antoine Polier was definitely an Orientalist. Not long after this painting was finished, Elizabeth Plowden “saw a very curious collection of all 3 Gods which Col. Polier has procured paintings of,” and noted that “he has also inform’d himself of their history which he has an idea of putting in some persons hands for publication. It will be a very curious and interesting compilation and is to be embellished with prints from the ninety he has in his possession.”48 Polier had been studying Hindu texts with the aid of his pandit (teacher) Ram Chand, and did eventually commission a book on Hinduism. (Ram Chand was Sikh, not Hindu, but he “had two Brahmins always attached to his suite, whom he consulted on difficult points.”)49 Polier also contributed to Europe’s “Oriental Renaissance” by sending the first full copy of the Sanskrit Vedas (ancient sacred Hindu texts) back to Europe.50
Polier’s intellectual interest in Indian religion was not altogether