Some years ago when I was at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi I was intrigued by a peculiar example of royal portraiture. Hanging in the gallery's first floor I found a portrait of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. During the British Raj portraits of the current British monarch must have been mass produced. But most of them must have depicted the monarch dressed in British royal regalia. What made this particular portrait remarkable is the fact that the king and queen were shown to be dressed in Punjabi royal regalia! Indeed the NGMA attributes this portrait to the "Punjab School". The portrait set me thinking not only about the way in which it tries to effect a mixture of British and Indian royal regalia on the bodies of these two royal personages, but also about how Queen Victoria - the mother of Edward VII - would have been deeply amused to see her son and daughter-in-law depicted in this particulat fashion. This blog entry is an attempt at contexualizing this unique portrait and assessing its iconographic significance. Seen above is the portrait that I've been talking about. In the course of this blog entry I shall point several elements in this portrait, so I thought it a good idea to post a detail of the portrait too.
This painting seems to be telling us a rather ordinary story about the way in which British royals were Indianised iconographically, evidently as a sycophantic colonial exercise. What seems to be more interesting is the way in which the Indianisation is effected on the bodies of the two royal personages. The painter of this particular portrait took great care to incorporate into his work as many markers of British royalty as possible. If we look at the figure of King Edward VII, we find him wearing the blue sash, on his left chest is the Star of the Garter. He wears the Maltese Cross as a pendant at his throat. Just before the quilted green cushion on which he and his Consort are seated we can see the Orb, which is given to a monarch during their Coronation. It is meant to symbolize the dominance of Christianity over the whole world. As a part of his head dress is the prominently displayed arrangement of three ostrich feathers or "The Prince of Wales feathers". This is interesting because King Edward had visited India during his mother's reign. He was then the Prince of Wales. The feathers therefore can be seen as a souvenir painted in to remind the viewer of the monarch's visit to India as the Prince of Wales.
If we turn to Queen Alexandra, the portrait is accurate in one crucial detail: she is wearing pearl chokers. It is believed that the Queen Consort always wore chokers or high-necked dresses in order to hide a small scar on her neck! She is also given a tiny crown, much like the one preferred by her mother-in-law. She is wearing a red sash and her left chest is crowded with several decorations. Much of the jewellery on her chest may have been copied from reproductions of royal portraits widely available at that time.
What is interesting is the way in which these markers of British royal status are overwhelmed by Indian items of dress and adornment. The King may be wearing the Prince of Wales feathers but they are pinned to a turban and behind the feathers lurks a paisley-shaped turban adornment, identifiably Indian. His half-sleeved coat is also stridently Oriental as indeed is his style of sitting. The sword he holds in his left hand and the 'kirpan' tucked into his cummerbund function as items of Indian regalia.
No attempt has been made to produce any likeness of the face for the Queen. Indeed, as I shall show in my next post, Queen Alexandra looked nothing like the woman seated beside the King in this painting. She is a generic Indian 'rani'.
Let me go back to the Orb placed just in front of the cushion on which the royal couple are seated. The fact that it is placed on the floor tempts one to read the positioning of it as a semiotic undercutting of the power of Christianity in Edwardian India. E. M. Forster does something similar in his short story "The Life to Come". In that story he also critiques the project of evangelicalism in India.
So, why would all this have amused Edward VII's mother? Because she had dressed little Bertie (as he was called in the family) in Punjabi clothes and had taken photographs of him dressed like that. This was in the 1860s when Queen Victoria had all but adopted the young Maharaja Duleep Singh as her son!
It is all this (and doubtless much more) that makes this ordinary and yet extraordinary royal portrait such an interesting object of study!
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