Art and Imperialism in India c. 1750-1920

Overview

This course will explore the intersections of art and imperialism in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It not only examines the work of British artists who travelled to the Indian subcontinent, but considers the transformations in artistic production, patronage, and publics for indigenous South Asian artists.  We will think about the ways in which aesthetic practices were active in the wider strategies of British power and Indian resistance, and how the fraught Anglo-Indian encounters in this period sparked new visual forms, artistic identities, and spaces of production. In doing so, we will look at a wide range of visual material (photographs, prints, sculpture, architecture, painting, and drawing), utilise different methodological and theoretical perspectives which can help us address the intertwined indigenous and imperial visual cultures of South Asia, and talk about the relevance that this material has for thinking about the projection of global power in today’s world. 

This module is one of our Tate Britain modules. As part of this module, we will therefore be engaging closely with Tate Britain’s rich holdings on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial art in India, and talking with curators at the museum about the politics and the aesthetics of displaying imperial material today.

Aims

By the end of the module students should have acquired the following:

• A familiarity with a range of artworks and other visual and material forms produced in and of South Asia between c. 1750-1900
• An understanding of current methodological and theoretical approaches to imperialism and colonial cultures.
• A good knowledge of the history of British colonial rule in South Asia
• An ability to articulate ideas about South Asian and British art orally in class and in a written assignment.
• An ability to develop an original topic for the written assessment.