Book Review: Tigers & Dragons: India and Wales in Britain

Desmond Clifford      

This book accompanies the “Tigers & Dragons: India and Wales in Britain” exhibition at the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea.

It’s been running since May and goes for just a little longer, until 2 November, so my top tip is to get there and see it in person if you can. If you can’t do that, this sumptuous book from the H’mm Foundation preserves a sense of the exhibition in perpetuity.

The exhibition is curated jointly by art historian Zehra Jumabhoy and Katy Freer from the GlynnVivian.

The exhibition comprises the work of artists whose work, imaginatively, connects Wales and India.

The art is diverse and colourful, as is India. The two national symbols, the tiger and the dragon, are deployed to reference a relationship based on art, history, encounter and interpretation.

The artwork photographed for this book is accompanied by essays from artists whose work features prominently in the exhibition and who offer context to thinking about Wales and India together.

Giant tapestry

The centrepiece of the show is a giant tapestry, Adeela Suleman’s “Imperium Amidst Opium Blossoms: A Kashidakari on the era of the East India Company”.

The stunning work illustrates a basis for the relationship: ships, sailors, traders, gorgeous art, soldiers, princes, imperial symbols, all crested by the tiger and the dragon – and dominated by that celebrated private-enterprise conqueror of the eighteenth century, Robert Clive (“private enterprise” because he worked and conquered for the East India Company; only in 1858 did the British crown, approaching the high point of imperialism, formally take over running India).

Clive is a central figure in any consideration of Wales and India. He was born in Shropshire; his father was the MP for Montgomery. Powis Castle was built with the proceeds of the vast wealth he extracted from India in the service of the East India Company.

He was a gifted soldier and proved brilliant (not in a good way) at the manipulation and subjugation of India’s nominal rulers under the control of the Company.

In Britain he become one of the first imperial heroes and was showered in titles and honours; even today, a street and a pub round the corner from me in suburban Cardiff are named after him.

Powis Castle wasn’t alone; many other massive British fortunes were extracted from India.

Tortured history

The exhibition brings together representations of this tortured history, including the celebrated portrait of Clive in his posing finery (and a broad pot belly, also paid for by India).

The images cover different media – paint, photography, textile, embroidery – traditional and contemporary, and imagine different aspects of history and encounter. They are rich, varied and sometimes provoking, occasionally surreal.

Iwan Bala contributes contemporary substance to the exhibition. He writes interestingly on maps as guides to the imagination as well their traditional literal use of seeing the proximity of A in relation to B.

I am interested to learn that the Mappa Mundi (circa 1300) places Hereford inside Wales; it would have gone back there – along with Shrewsbury, Chester and Ludlow – if Glyndwr had triumphed.

He suggests, “provocatively” he admits, that the dragon should be replaced by a “domestic cat” as a Welsh symbol, reflecting Wales’ ambivalent relationship to its “owner” – an “imagined independent state of being” rather than the real thing.

His paintings of the shape of Wales as a woman – the “hon” of Welsh usage – are striking, and just slightly unnerving.  His “Map for Nigel”, based on the writings of the celebrated poet, Nigel Jenkins, on India in the 1990s, is great – and part of the permanent collection at the Glynn Vivian, so don’t take my word for it.

Shared experience

There’s a focus through this book on the extent to which Wales and India have a shared experience with Britain.  It is sometimes posited that India was Britain’s “external colony” while Wales was/is Britain’s “internal colony”.  Britain’s dominance of India was remarkable and crazy and, for a time, a defining issue of British politics.  Along with the Caribbean islands, it contributed mightily to the wealth of Britain, including Wales.

The question of Wales as a “colony” is divisive and I have some difficulty with it.

The relationship between Wales and England is more complex than that, and it seems unarguable that the Welsh participated very actively in Britain’s imperial experience (albeit that Wales lacked any means of autonomous decision-making).

The wealth in Wales generated by empire is visible all around us.

I’m more comfortable with Daniel G Williams’ observation that the idea of Wales as “internal colony” should be seen as a “metaphor rather than explanatory concept”. This conveys something of the condition of Welsh cultural complexity – maintaining a dynamic identity in proximity to a big and powerful neighbour – rather than a full-on case for “Wales-as-colony-victim” preferred by some (but not me).

Complexities

Few countries stir imagination like India. It is so vast, in terms of population, identities, complexities, colour, spirituality, grossness, luxury, unfairness.  Everything about it is cast in epic terms. Yet the vast literature on India in English seems only to emphasise its elusiveness and defiance of capture.

Wales, on the other hand, is a miniaturist culture, compact, defined, small, enduring, equivocal, ambivalent: there’s a lot squashed into that small space.  The contrast is compelling.

Wales and India have encountered each other through Britain, a state and a concept which has heavily marked both.

This book, and the exhibition which it records, peels back some layers and glimpses a different encounter, based on imagination rather than the confines of the history book, and which has capacity to refresh as both countries confront their future.

Tigers and Dragons is published by the H’mm Foundation and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops