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Bombay Pottery: a fusion of Indian and Western art technologies
by:
Julie Rosenberg
Bombay pottery
A fusion of Indian and Western art technologies
Julie Rosenberg
The development of glazed Bombay (now Mumbai) pottery in the late nineteenth century demonstrated the British orientalist attitude toward Indian art; that it could be appropriated and moulded into a superior style, fit for the European market.1 At the same time, the British revered Indian arts and crafts for their classical elegance and British officials who came to India to study its art were mesmerised by the effortlessness with which Indian craft workers created these marvels. A fusion of Indian and Western art technologies, Bombay pottery was an experiment for the British art teachers in India, as they hoped it would provide new design models for artists at ￔhomeￕ.
Bombay pottery was one of the most popular products sold at international exhibitions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum) in London collected samples of Bombay pottery; the museum was a major repository for Indian arts and crafts in the nineteenth century and a source of artistic inspiration for art students all over the United Kingdom.2 Consumer demand for Indian pottery was also driven by the tourist industry; tourists from the United Kingdom sought portable mementos of their tours of the South Asian subcontinent. They marvelled at the sight of Indian potters in their workshops, who were romanticized in drawings such as those published in the exhibition catalogue for the 1903 Indian art exhibition at Delhi.
Bombay pottery developed from within the British imperial art education system in India, which established workshops set up to reorganise Indian artisans for the mass production of Indian handicrafts.3 The techniques and styles were derived from Indian glazed pottery traditions in Delhi in northern India and at Multan and Sind in modern Pakistan. These traditions had existed since approximately the twelfth century, when Islamic rulers brought artisans from Persia to decorate both secular and religious buildings with painted tiles. The most popular examples of this style are the blue and white glazed tiles that decorated the mosques in northern India and Pakistan; the same techniques were used by local potters to create ceramic vessels that were typically glazed in monochromatic shades of bright green, yellow, purple and blue.4
In addition to Sind and Multan, major sources of design motifs for the Bombay pottery were the painted frescoes at Ajanta, the fifth century Buddhist cave complex in modern Maharashtra, which had been abandoned and subsequently left in a dilapidated state until its ￔre-discoveryￕ by soldiers in the employ of the British East India Company soldiers in 1819. The murals were copied by artists from the Sir J J School of Art in Bombay in the 1870s and then widely circulated to art schools across India for study.5 British orientalists admired the Ajanta frescoes for their high degree of naturalism and characterised them as the ￔclassicalￕ Indian painting style.
In the 1870s Wilkins Terry established a pottery workshop in Bombay and this later became the pottery department of the Sir J J School of Art.6 Terry hired potters from Sind to work in Bombay and teach the traditional glazed ceramic techniques of the north to local potters of the khumbar (potter) caste of west India. A system of apprenticeship allowed the technique to be passed from one class of students to the next.
Glazing materials for Bombay pottery were initially sent south from Sind. Eventually a local potterￕs clay was developed in Bombay that closely matched the mixtures used to make Sind pottery. The vessels were made by khumbars on traditional potterￕs wheels. Once the clay was dried and burnt, painters from the Bombay School of Art who were trained in Western painting techniques were enlisted to decorate the pots, which were then burnt again to create a glazed finish. Since there was a major concern to prevent the Indian artists mixing European and traditional Indian motifs in an unflattering combination, the painting of the pottery was carefully surveyed by Terry and other British teachers assigned from the school to ensure that the finished product appeared ￔauthenticallyￕ Indian.
A comparison of two ceramic water vessels (surahi) in the South and Southeast Asian art collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art exemplifies the influence of Sind pottery on the Bombay style. Both were made approximately in the same era; one is from a traditional workshop in Sind while the other is from the Bombay school. The Sind surahi is glazed in a brownish-yellow colour and decorated with a typical flowering vine motif around the base and foliage on the neck. The Bombay surahi is smaller in size and has a similar motif; however, the colours are dramatically different with a blue and white flowering vine motif painted over a reddish-brown glaze. In colour and shape the flowers more closely resemble those found in the
blue and white tiles and pottery from Multan.
By contrast, a plate and vase in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum illustrate the strong influence of the Ajanta frescoes; the animal and floral design motifs painted in red-orange, yellow and green echo the painted ceiling decorations of the Ajanta caves.7 The flying geese painted on the rim of the plate and the swirling lotus flower motif depicted on the vase are both close facsimiles to those painted in registers on the ceilings of the Ajanta caves. Both motifs became extremely popular in Bombay pottery as well as in local Maharashtran textiles, particularly those made for the tourist market.
The development of this eclectic Bombay pottery style could not have occurred in India without the intervention of the British. It is an unique style that was highly influenced by orientalist sentiment of the late nineteenth century and was, in actuality, a collaborative process between British instructors and Indian artisans. The re-discovery of the Ajanta murals had a far reaching impact on Indian art throughout the twentieth century, not only on its arts and crafts but also on modern painting, as they later became a model for a new national ￔIndianￕ art style.
Notes:
1. Also known as ￔWonderland Art Potteryￕ.
2. The inclusion of Indian pottery at the Great Exhibition of 1851, held at the Crystal Palace in London, was a watershed inspiration for British designers searching for new design motifs to invigorate domestic design. Susan Stronge has described the impact in Britain of Indian material shown at international exhibitions and disseminated through publications, such as The journal of Indian art which reproduced chromolithographs of Indian arts and crafts, including Indian pottery. See: Susan Stronge, The decorative art of India, (London: Studio Editions, 1990), p. 8.
3. In addition to Bombay, important pottery workshops were established in imperial art schools at Jaipur in northern India and at Madras in southern India.
4. Examples of monochrome glazed ceramics also existed in the western Indian village of Pattan, in modern Gujarat. See ￔBombay potteryￕ, The Journal of Indian Art, vol. 2, no. 17, (1888), pp. 2-5.
5. Opened in 1857, the Mumbai-based Sir J J School of Art was financed by the Parsi philanthropist, Sir Jamshedjee Jeejeebhoy, Bart, in hopes of reviving traditional Indian arts and crafts.
6. Wilkins Terry was founding principal of the Sir J J School of Art.
7. For comparative images of the Ajanta style paintings see Benoy Behl, The Ajanta Caves: artistic wonder of ancient Buddhist India
(New York: Harry N Abrams, 1998). |
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