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The Lady who sketched from a Howdah

What is it about Charlotte, Lady Canning? Why should we be interested in a woman who died more 150 years ago, one who came from a privileged background that is hard to imagine today?Actually, for those of us who are lucky enough to have got to know her a little through her diaries, drawings and watercolours, particularly those of her time in India, which is the subject of this book, what we feel for her is more than just interest.

The Lady who sketched from a Howdah

As she saw it: ‘Palace of the Sikh Gooroo at Kartarpur’, Punjab.



BN Goswamy

What is it about Charlotte, Lady Canning? Why should we be interested in a woman who died more 150 years ago, one who came from a privileged background that is hard to imagine today? Actually, for those of us who are lucky enough to have got to know her a little through her diaries, drawings and watercolours, particularly those of her time in India, which is the subject of this book, what we feel for her is more than just interest. It is something closer to admiration, affection even. So, what is it about her that inspires those feelings? — David Lascelles, Earl of Harewood

Hauda; haudaj: A litter carried by a camel, in which the Arabian ladies travel (it is made of wood, or cloth stretched upon a frame, and is either open or covered at top); also any canopy, veil or curtain, which conceals women when travelling; a seat to place on an elephant’s back. — Steingass, Persian-English Dictionary

WHEN Faqir Syed Aijazuddin — who has written distinguished books on Henry Kissinger’s secret visit to China, on Pak-US relations during the Presidency of President Nixon, Rare Maps of Pakistan, the history of Lahore, and several volumes of his collected essays — writes another book, it is an event. Not only does one need to sit up and take notice, one also needs to remind everyone that apart from the vast terrains he has covered in these books, he also remains at heart an art historian. Pahari Paintings and Sikh Portraits in the Lahore Museum was the book with which, more than 40 years ago, he made his entry into this magical domain, and he has never really stepped out of it. Other works have followed of course, and his interest in art continues to burn like a steady flame.

Writing on Lady Canning and her tours in India as the wife of the Governor General, later to be the very first Viceroy — ‘Clemency Canning’ is how her husband came to be known, called upon as he was by Queen Victoria, to treat the ‘colony’ sensitively and with sympathy after the Great Uprising, the Indian War of Independence, of 1857, had cast a long shadow over everything in sight — was the perfect thing for Aijaz to do. For not only could he, through Lady Canning’s eyes, cast a look upon the length and breadth of India as it was then: he could also bring in, to his and our great delight, a very large number of her ‘Sketches’, the Lady being a painter of no mean merit in her own right and kept painting what she saw even as she wrote entries, almost on a daily basis, in her Journals and Letters.

A fair amount  had been written about Lady Canning by others — including a couple of biographies or studies which Aijaz mentions with respect and enthusiasm — but he went about putting material together in this book of his in his own fashion: scouring every possible source: collection after collection, museum after museum. And to all that, which helped him to sum Lady Canning’s life and career up in 30 odd crisp pages of Introduction, he adds those paintings of hers that one has spoken of. The Introduction over, he lets us hear Charlotte Canning’s own voice, quoting directly from her letters and journals as he does while joining those passages with helpful ‘bridging’ notes. A period comes alive, as does a life. One sees Charlotte, belonging herself to an aristocratic family, serving the Queen as the Lady of the Bedchamber for 13 years before she moved to India; one hears her talk disparagingly of her own skills as a painter; one imagines through her descriptions, the lavishness, the ‘savage splendour, of the countless ‘durbars’ held in India by her husband; one feels for her as her relationship with her dry, business-like husband flickers and then virtually dies out. And all the time one keeps seeing her watercolours, the counterpart of her journals, for they appear on virtually every page of this book: Sketches from a Howdah, as Aijaz has titled it.

For all her self-doubt as an artist — “I am discouraged to find my drawing powers are limited to bad out of door sketches”, she wrote to her mother once — Charlotte Canning turned out some highly sensitive, delicate work. She had on occasion the company of a thorough professional, like the painter William Simpson, and she knew George Landseer who has left some very perceptive portraits of people and princes of India. But entirely on her own as she travelled — from the Nilgiri Hills in the south one year to Khyber Pass in the northwestern corner in another; from Meerut to Ambala and then on to Amritsar and Lahore; from the Kangra hills and Nurpur to Shimla and Chini — she kept at it. She saw things with a very sharp eye and responded to delicacy with enthusiasm. One sees this as much in a passage describing the Taj or the bazaars of Amritsar which she visited, as in her impressionistic, as if enveloped in fog, distant view of the ghats of Haridwar. Not everything comes off, and there is certainly no talent that she had for drawing figures or portraits, but every now and then one comes upon a sketch — the vast expanse of the bed of a river, the unforgiving rocky peaks on which forts had been built a long time ago, views of old abandoned towns seen from a height — which startles one. 

Aijaz writes at one place of Charlotte Canning’s ‘untiring brush and her fluent pen’. Here, in this work, he brings both within our reach.  But he also leaves us a note of sadness as he describes her last days; weary and tired and longing to get back to England, she died of the ‘Purnea Fever’ at Barrackpore in 1861. Those ‘small, delicate, and exquisitely beautiful features’, as Col Stuart recalled, ‘that most lovely, bright, and intellectual countenance, sometimes radiant, more often sad …” — were all gone.

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