Tigers and dragons

What connects the histories and cultures of India and Wales?  As it turns out, a complex nexus of links that have intertwined for centuries and continue to do so today.   This is the theme of Tigers and dragons, a truly ambitious exhibition in the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery.  It’s a great visual feast for the eyes (and ears), with its vibrant mix of objects from Wales and India (and Pakistan). But it also gives you a brisk mental workout, challenging you to think afresh about how different cultures collide and converse.

The show, many years in the making – its genesis was a series of successful online seminars during Covid – was conceived and planned by Zehra Jumabhoy, lecturer in the history of art at Bristol University, in collaboration with Glynn Viv’s Katy Freer.  Zehra brings to the project a fierce, penetrating intelligence and a wide knowledge of the field, reflected in the theming of the show and the clustering of its objects.  Through her rich network of personal connections she’s gathered a really impressive, varied collection of items, lent by numerous public and private sources, supplemented by objects from the Glynn Vivian’s own collection.

The curators explore two broad themes: the part Wales played in the colonial process, both in the period of the East India Company and in the state-controlled Raj, and the parallels between the experiences of colonised Indians under English rule and Welsh people living (for many centuries longer) in the shadow of political, economic and especially cultural domination by England and ‘Britain’.

If people in Wales today think about the role of their ancestors in the colonising of India, it’s just possible they might recall the missionaries, like Thomas Jones and others who evangelised among the people of the Khasi Hills – an episode described by Nigel Jenkins in his book Gwalia in Khasia, and in greater depth by Andrew J. May in Welsh missionaries and British imperialism.  But the Welsh connection with much bloodier deeds was just as strong.  The Clive family, early exponents of imperialism in India, amassed, in the wake of military victories, a huge collection of material they bought, or, more usually, stole.  This loot ended up in the family home, Powis Castle, and is now cared for by the National Trust (it formed the basis of a powerfully critical artwork by Daniel Trivedy in 2024, represented by photos in the show).

In Room 3, which deals with British conquest and domination in India, Robert Clive glares sternly down at us, in a portrait borrowed from Powis Castle.  In the background, on either side of his plump belly, we can make out the blazing guns and galloping cavalry that he unleashed on his Indian victims to win the battle of Plassey.  Memory of him is alive today in India.  In Shahzia Sikander’s beautiful and witty animated video The last post (2010), a cartoon Clive figure, enthroned like a Mughal emperor in an elaborate architectural setting, is made to crack apart and explode into small fragments.  Clive also features in the room’s showpiece, a recent double-sided tapestry by Adeela Suleman, a Karachi artist, called Imperium amidst opium blossoms.  Clive shares this huge space with Britannia, a Welsh dragon, a black man, several tigers and scenes from a different British imperial project, the Chinese opium wars.

Another belligerent coloniser was Lieutenant General Sir James Hills-Johnes.  Attacking the enemy, a painting of 1893 by Frank Nowlan from the National Library of Wales (I’d never seen it before) shows him slicing Indians to pieces at the siege of Delhi during the 1857 rebellion.  His reward was a Victoria Cross.  Later he married a Welsh woman, settled at Dolaucothi and became of pillar of Carmarthenshire society.  The painting’s very naivety accentuates the viciousness of the slaughter.  In the background, paled almost to invisibility, are palm trees and a temple minaret, emblems of the Indian culture Hills-Johnes was intent on eliminating.

Indian artists, like their Welsh counterparts, memorialised the defeated.  There are several tributes to Tipu Sultan, the ‘Tiger of Mysore’, killed by the British at his capital, Srirangapatna, in 1799.  They include a painted wooden sculpture by Adeela Suleman which features a ship, a tiger mauling a British soldier and a fish.  The (preferably dead) tiger was later adopted by the colonisers as a symbol of India, ‘tamed’ by a civilising force.  (As a child I remember reading Man-eaters of Kumaon by Jim Corbett, a book entirely devoted to stories of killing tigers.)  In other ways the British took over the roles and symbols of the Mughal leaders they’d suppressed.  In 1876 Parliament decided that Queen Victoria would be given the additional title ‘Empress of India’: ‘empress’, foreign to British nomenclature, was borrowed from the Mughals.  A work of 2021 by Amna Walayat transplants Victoria into a Mughal miniature, where she (instead of a Mughal prince) hunts a Bengal tiger with a bow and arrow.

Welsh people helped administer British rule in India.  Miniature painters, previously employed by Mughal rulers, were used to produce ‘Company paintings’ of characters and scenes from everyday life, to be bought by East India Company and Raj officials.  One set of these was presented in 1885 by a Welshman, presumably such an official, to his son, Evan Meredith Thomas.

Room 7 looks at the national symbols of Wales, specifically the dragon.  Dragons are still extant in Wales today, though the one featured in Iwan Bala’s characteristic work The hare, the Mari, the dragon is hardly the proud martial animal of the past.  Instead, he’s labelled ‘ymffrostgar’, and he’s given to vain boasting, as if he’s on the rugby terraces.  ‘Vizit Wales’, reads the caption, ‘and hear the locals discourse on colonialism’.  Perhaps he means us?

In Room 8 ‘The mother’ as a comparative national symbol is rather more illuminating.  The Welsh Mam’s mutations are well known.  Rebecca is represented here by Kathryn Campbell Dodd’s costumed figure (and video), and Mother Wales, a violent and visceral collage by Paul Davies, founder of the Beca Group.  There’s also Christopher Williams’s androgenous Ceridwen, recently cleaned by Jenny Williamson.  New to me is the process of how ‘Mother India’ has been Hinduised by the Modi government to exclude other communities and claim ownership of the whole subcontinent.  Pushpamala N.’s large print Motherland stands as a warning about this.  Nations as mothers, argues Zehra, are highly problematic.

‘Bridges and Borders’ in Room 9 introduces a new theme, not so easy to negotiate without commentary.  One of the constant concerns of colonial projects was the need to map occupied land, and especially to create borders.  In the Indian subcontinent a critical border was the one drawn up to divide India and Pakistan in 1947 – the cause of much strife and immense loss of life.  This line was designed by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a Wales-born lawyer ‘who had never been east of Paris’.  W.H. Auden’s ironic poem ‘Partitition’ describes his task and ends with the lines

The next day he sailed for England, where he could quickly forget
The case, as a good lawyer must. Return he would not,
Afraid, as he told his Club, that he might get shot.

Several works in the show ponder the Radcliffe Line and its dire effects.  But colonialism also nurtured cultural conversations that opened new doors for artists.  The designs in Owen Jones’s influential book of 1868 The grammar of ornament are still inspiring Pakistani artists 150 years later.  Other artists were amazed to discover the miniature paintings hidden in the collections of London museums.  One of the best collections of nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings is kept in the National Museum of Wales.

Many activities surround the exhibition before it comes to an end in November.  A book of essays is due shortly, and a series of talks has begun.  The first, by Hadi Baghaei-Abcooyeh, looked at the life and work of a remarkable Welshman, Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a republican and radical who nevertheless became a senior judge in Calcutta.  He mastered Persian, Sanskrit and a host of other languages and first theorised what we now call the Indo-European family of languages.

Jones was an outlier.  Michael Hechter’s idea of ‘internal colonialism’ to characterise the historical position of Wales and other ‘Celtic fringe’ countries in relation to England may no longer hold sway, but there’s no denying that cultural attitudes of the dominant power have often had a decisive effect on the colonised or peripheral cultures.  Thomas Macaulay, in his ‘Minute on Indian education’, wrote, ‘I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia’.  This was in 1835, twelve years before the ‘Blue Books’ attack on the Welsh language and Welsh language culture. 

Culture, on the other hand, is one area that’s often resistant to external political and economic control, as so many works in this exhibition here show.

The Swansea region has its own Indian connections.  Maybe the best known is Tata’s ownership of the Port Talbot steelworks, and in the atrium is a large view, painted on cloth, of the dying steelworks from the east – a product of a performance piece by the Goa-based artist Nikhil Chopra on themes such as the colonial artist in India – they included Richard Glynn Vivian, who spent time wandering through India, sketching, collecting and dressing up as a native.

Tigers and dragons is one of the most exciting recent exhibitions I’ve seen in the Glynn Vivian.  Like Peter Lord’s large exhibition No Welsh art in the National Library of Wales, it lets us see artworks that are seldom on view, and it makes us think hard about the culture, conflict and cooperation.