Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850. Maya Jasanoff

farmer, inventor, architect, Claude Martin really was one of those Enlightenment jacks-of-all-trades for whom nothing was too dull or difficult to try. Curiosity sparked in him. And for every interest, there was an object to own. Most of all, Claude Martin was a passionate collector. Acquisition was his addiction. The best surviving testament to Martin’s obsession resides in an inventory of all his belongings, compiled when he died. Five or six pages would be more than enough to list all the possessions that the average European in India owned. For Martin, it took eighty. In column after column of this inventory, what comes through so powerfully is the sense of a man whose life was lived in and through objects. Every one of Martin’s interests is reflected in his things—and none more conspicuously than his quest for European refinement.⁶⁵

Some of what Claude Martin owned would not have been out of place in Robert Clive’s Indian chest: the keepsakes of a soldiering career, acquired in the line of duty. While on campaign in Bhutan in 1773, for instance, he picked up some “Bootan books pictures reliques etc.” by rather proactive means—according to a French officer, who later saw “many rarities that [Captain Martin] appropriated to himself by pillage from several temples of the Bhutanese. He even gave me several manuscripts that he pulled from the hollows of statues.…”⁶⁶ Like his friends Wombwell and Polier, Martin also collected Indian manuscripts in Lucknow, of which he owned some five hundred. Indeed it was even said—by a critic, who accused Martin of doing all this for the sole purpose of finding things to bribe people with—that Martin “ransacked the remotest tracts of Cashmere, Nepaul, Candahar, and other regions, from the frontiers of Oude to the confines of Tartary” for objects, using “Catholic missionaries, Hindoo merchants, Mussulman caravans” as his agents.⁶⁷

      But the really unusual items in Martin’s collection came from a more distant, if less exotic, source. For Martin did not acquire only the sorts of weapons, manuscripts, paintings, and decorative objects that many Europeans collected in India. He also managed to collect everything that a European gentleman connoisseur would possess back in Europe. It was a staggering assemblage. There were enough paintings to fill two houses, to say nothing of the thousand-odd fashionable prints and caricatures or the extensive assortment of coins and medals. Martin decorated his rooms with Wedgwood medallions, marble busts (of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, no less), and a gleaming array of mirrors, clocks, and chandeliers. He owned cutting-edge scientific apparatus and a substantial cabinet of natural history specimens. And alongside his collection of Indian manuscripts, Martin could set what was probably the largest European library in India, some 3,500 volumes in English and French. In short, Claude Martin had all the trappings of a European connoisseur and man of fashion. Only he had them in Lucknow.

Four or five times a year, in an office on a Bloomsbury side street,William and Thomas Raikes, agents, would break open Martin’s wax labore et constantia seal, decipher his erratic syntax, and set about fulfilling their client’s latest wishes. Raikes and Company soldMartin’s indigo, bought him East India stock, handled his bills of exchange, and managed his cash account. They also fulfilled his insatiable demand for objects, shipping him everything from “some caricature prints to the amount, as by invoice, about ten pounds sterling. And also some colored prints of the best sort…”; to glass lampshades: “Send me about forty dozens,”Martin ordered. “My servants break one with another about 30 to 40 per month, what makes about that number for the year.”⁶⁸ On Martin’s orders, Raikes often handed twenty or thirty pounds to Johan Zoffany (who had returned to Britain from Lucknow in 1789) to pick up “any curious thing he may think curious to buy for me.” Zoffany also vetted scientific instruments for his old patron, which were invariably the most troublesome items onMartin’s wish lists. A pair of Herschel telescopes arrived in Lucknow missing “the terrestrial apparatus…which without I can’t make any use of them.” A “philosophical instrument for making oxygene air” had “no book of instructions with it; by what mean, I must find out how to make it.” As for the steam enginesMartin ordered, “I can’t manage to make the two you sent me to play at all.” There was one serious drawback to being the only man in Awadh with such equipment: nobody was around to show Martin what to do with it. (ButMartin did manage to launch hot air balloons in Lucknowin 1785, just two years after the first balloon ascent by the Montgolfier brothers in Paris.)

Zoffany, and other Lucknow friends who had returned to Europe, did more than send Martin collectibles. They invited him into an international network of connoisseurs. Through them, through letters, and through the constant traffic of objects across the seas, Martin was able to join an elite brotherhood of collectors, even at thousands of miles’ remove. That the noted antiquarian Charles Townley was one of Martin’s correspondents and suppliers shows how high his contacts reached. (Townley, for his part, owned several pieces of medieval Hindu sculpture, which made him one of only a handful of British connoisseurs collecting Indian objects—though antiquarian interest in ancient India was to be heightened by Jones’s discovery of Indo-European.) If Martin had brought his collection back to Europe, speculates his biographer, he might have been another Sir John Soane, the earlynineteenth-century architect and magpie collector, whose vast and various collection can still be seen, virtually unchanged, in his house in London’s Lincoln’s Inn.⁶⁹

      Yet in Lucknow Martin remained. As an archetypal man of the Enlightenment on an imperial frontier, Claude Martin invites comparison with another inveterate collector and polymathic gentleman: Thomas Jefferson, who carved out his own patch of Enlightenment on the edge of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. It was the sheer anomaly of the setting—this island of European connoisseurship in the center of India—that made Claude Martin’s collection so remarkable. He lived at a time when it took an average of six months for letters to pass between Calcutta and London, and longer still from Lucknow, several hundred miles inland, which was neither on the Ganges nor the Grand Trunk Road. If, that is, they got there at all. Ships could sink. (Lloyd’s of London—and with it, the modern insurance industry—was founded for just this reason.) They could be wildly blown off course. Cargo could be jettisoned in storms. And if the rats and weevils didn’t get to it, perhaps the water would. Even if you were lucky enough to receive your chests, you might unpack them only to find a mess of sea-stained splinters and shards. Yet in spite of all the hazards and delays, transcontinental crossing went on regularly, vigorously, and profitably. Claude Martin’s collection offers splendid material proof that “globalization” of a sort was alive and well centuries before the word was coined.

A Frenchman in British and Indian service, and a newcomer to wealth, Claude Martin was another of those men on the margins for whom collecting provided a means of reinvention and made a public statement. Martin did not collect in the way that Antoine Polier so remarkably had, effectively living like a Mughal aristocrat. His own ambitions more closely resembled Robert Clive’s, in that he sought the life and status of a European nobleman instead. Nevertheless, Martin also very consciously intended to make his collection work for him within India as well as among Europeans beyond it. “Here I am at present among the Great Ones,” he boasted to the Bengal councillor Philip Francis in 1780: general Sir Eyre Coote, who in 1760 had held the renegade young Frenchman’s fate in his hands, was now Martin’s houseguest.⁷⁰ And while collecting helped make Martin a king among his peers, it bound him ever more closely to the king next door: Asaf ud-Daula.

Claude Martin’s collection would have been impressive even in Europe; encountering it in Lucknow left some visitors rubbing their eyes in disbelief. But the incongruity of Martin’s collection was nothing compared with the greatest museum in town: Asaf ud-Daula’s own. To enter the Aina Khana, or “Mirror Hall,” of the nawab’s palace was to encounter yet another of those fabulous Lucknow fusions. From floor to ceiling, the place was packed with “English objects of all kinds—watches, pistols, guns, glassware, furniture, philosophical machines,