The Case Of Rudolf Swoboda And Ravi Vas

The nineteenth century is associated with the rise of the West where unprecedented power came to be concentrated in Britain and France. Considering that in 1800 Western powers held approximately 35 percent of the earth’s surface which had risen to 67 percent by 1878 and a staggering 85 percent by 1914 illustrates how the world, like never before, was united into a single interacting whole by the Western imperial powers (Said 6). The use of the term ‘interacting whole’ to describe the world in the nineteenth century signifies that even in Europe itself there was scarcely a corner of life which was untouched by the facts of empire. Until recently, academic and intellectual discourse tended to separate and divide the connection between national …show more content…
Looking at the case of the artists Rudolf Swoboda and Ravi Varma can better elucidate the notion of ‘discrepant experience’ and its implications. Rudolf Swoboda was a nineteenth century Austrian painter who was requested by the Queen of England to paint five portraits of the Indians on display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. Swoboda’s paintings helped to reinforce and grant the seal of official approval to an idealized image of the village craftsman (Mathur 89). This native artisan however was in sharp contrast to the European style professional painter who was being trained in the techniques of oil and easel in the colonial art school in the colony. Ravi Varma from Kerala was amongst these native professional artists but he was a self taught artist and had never attended a colonial art school. He submitted a consignment of ten Indian portraits titled “The Life of Native Peoples” to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1892 to portray the beauty of the Indian people on a national and international level. However, not only were these portraits relegated to the ethnographic section of the exhibition instead of the pavilion of fine arts but were in fact appreciated as works of ‘ethnographic value’ and an example of British progress in the ‘instruction of Art’, ironic …show more content…
London’s East End in the 1880s was the neighborhood of the urban poor characterized with severe overcrowding, an acute housing crisis and as the location where railway terminals, jails and the East Indian docks were situated. It was a world apart from the spaces inhabited by the middle and upper class Londoners and was thus conceived of in imperial terms as the foreign, dark and forbidding other, the opposite of the West End which represented the triumph of imperialism (Mathur 61). However the mapping of the city’s social divisions in terms of imperial geography was not a wholesale replication of the creation of boundaries that was carried out in the colonies because while strategies of separation there reflected deep seated racial and sexual anxieties, urban degeneration in London was seen as a threat to the vitality of the imperial race (Mathur