Discovery Of Colonial India

Lord Hastings 1814 journey from Calcutta to Punjab with painter Sita Ram is a discovery of Colonial India through lives mundane and magical.

- Shreya Ray

The annals of official history —echoed in schoolbooks and newspaper headlines— seldom concerns itself with the wholeness of stories it professes to tell, filling it up as it does with wars, dates, monarchs and murders. The greatest or most evil of rulers make an appearance, as do political achievements and disasters. An entire people’s stories exist within these subjective, caricatured polarities.

On the other side is a personal, microhistory which concerns itself with the minutae, the mundane, the crayon that colours in the black lines of official history. Personal history humanises even the political figure; it distances him from his treaties and battles, offering a window to his mind; it shows us the stunning views that surrounded him, the animals he saw, and if the author is English, his observations on the weather. Where recorded history shows disregard for these details, personal history returns the favour by existing as a parallel stream of reality, rarely punctuated with ‘The Big Picture’.

One of these political figures in Indian history textbooks is Lord Hastings—often memorised by schoolchildren as one of seven governor generals to have served India before Independence. It is a less known fact that Lord Hastings’ travels across the country were accompanied and documented by one of the greatest Indian artists of the pre-modern era, Sita Ram.