A Pictorial Journey

Val C. Prinsep
Asian Education Services                                                    
Edition: Hardcover
ISBN: 8120620496
Pages: 360
Price: Rs 1250

A rare delight where the author is commissioned to paint a picture of India, Val C. Prinsep embarks on a journey for Her majesty on the Indian assemblage on the occasion of her assumption of the title of the Empress of India. The HH Sujjan Singh, Maharana of Odeypoore, sits resplendent on the cover in embossed details of brass, gold and silver against a rich midnight blue backdrop. It sets the tone for what’s to follow. It’s a delightful journey as a true son of the Raj meets lonely planet India.

Five pages into the book, no actually five lines into the book, and you shake your head and grunt at the man’s arrogance and naiveté about the Indian subcontinent. But as you labour on you realise it’s a rare and generous man who’s conceded to give you a window into his world and the India that was a loosely stung principality at best. He goes about his business with languor in no particular hurry, misses trains and hopes and prays that the one following is late too. He embarks on a journey to discover the India that his fellow countrymen have only looked at perfunctionarily as a province to rule. This man has the sensitivity to engage with its vastness of size, flavour, colour and texture. India’s sights, smells and sounds delight him; the Taj doesn’t.

Penned between 1876- 1877 and illustrated by numerous sketches taken at the courts of the principal chiefs of India, the book is a delight from the Asian Educational Services of India. Prinsep is both saucy and irreverent and delights us with his “Oh! horror, what have I to paint?,” when he remarks on the monstrosity that the engineers of the Raj have assembled for the occasion and wonders out loud why the Jumma Masjid couldn’t serve as the venue in all its Mughal splendour. That’s Prinsep for you.

There are roughly twenty-five etchings, from Sir Salar Jung who also personally shows him around, to the Maharaja of Gaekwar in his regalia and a Kashmiri nautch girl Begoo. He paints a picture of India, really does and rues the fact that it isn’t in technicolor because time wouldn’t permit him the luxury to do so. This is a retelling of a man who is organised and meticulous enough to keep a journal and recreate for us his journey over the years across India, from Madras to Kashmir, the central provinces, Mysore, Oude, Panjab, Gujarat, Rajasthan, NWFP (North West Frontier Province) and of course Delhi. The trolls would troll and shriek if they cared to look at this ‘relic and say it isn’t representative it isn’t even objective.’ I agree; but then what is?

If Midnapore spelt with an ‘or’ isn’t your thing, I urge your goodself to not bother with this one. It’s a lazy read, an indulgent one too with strains of Nat King Cole for company. Priced at Rs 1250/- I urge you to get your hands on this one if you’d like to know what it feels like to experience a fine dusty layer of red soil on all your belongings or call a peon or putteewallah to just be that way; it’s a delight.

I sure do like a man who mistakes a clergyman for a lawyer and whose friend and fellow traveler is an American for a part of the voyage, whom he describes as one of the youthful appearance but with consummate self-possession, a “smile childlike and bland” (he’s being kind here or may be not) but with the shrewdness of his nation.

Like I said, if you can get over your own prejudices against the man and a nation that rubbed your nose in your mistakes for two long centuries, you’d certainly enjoy the book but you’d have to be the bigger person and I don’t just mean that in bulk when I say that.

For make no mistakes; his dedication is also the disclaimer. This is a book from the son of a man who was one of those members of the Honourable (rolls eyes) East India Company’s civil service who have made our Indian empire what it is (exasperated smile).

The icing on the cake is this man’s ability to put the nail on the head fair and square. Let’s face it – at the time he undertook the journey – the Indian art scene was pretty much non-existent. There were no galleries and no cliques. The more fortunate countries were Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Arabia. Towards the fag end of his memoirs, Prinsep makes an impassioned appeal to his fellow painters to brave the heat and dust of this vast empire for India is a country that lives up to the wildest fantasy of even Decamps and Jérôme.

If this was reality TV and thank God it’s not, I’d thump my desk and give this one a huge thumbs up. This is no Chicken Soup for the Soul, but comes with its own breath of fresh air in the days of the very pretentious journalism-is-literature-in-a-hurry genre of writing (it’s not). This is.