In Company Style: Illustrations from James Skinner’s Kitāb-i tashrīḥ al-aqvām (1825)

The only English text in the manuscript is on one of the opening leafs, where someone has added a looping pencil inscription below the neat columns of Persian text. It records a gift: “History of the origin and distinguishing marks of the different Castes of India, compiled by Lt. Col. J. Skinner, CB, whose gift it is to the present possessor, JW.” The book itself looks more like a restrained version of the painting and calligraphy albums produced at the height of Mughal splendor than any contemporary European book.

Lieutenant Colonel James Skinner (1778–1841), its compiler, was an enigmatic figure of the early British Raj, responsible for helping expand its dominions even as he was excluded from its inner sanctum. The son of a Scottish East India Company officer and (he claimed) a kidnapped Bhojpuri noblewoman, he was initially excluded from EIC service on account of his race but was brought back into the fold following the successes of his irregular cavalry, Skinner’s Horse, in the service of the Mughal Empire.

Yet Skinner, who spoke Persian better than he did English, was also an enthusiastic participant in late Mughal intellectual and artistic culture, as the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām shows. There are 120 paintings here, interspersed in the Persian text composed by Skinner though likely in the hand of a professional scribe. The English title given in the inscription provides a sense of its classificatory ethos, and the growing British interest in the Vedic caste system. Yet al-aqvām, in classical Persian, refers more broadly to “ethnicity”; the captions on the images obscure this potential distinction. As his Memoirs makes clear, Skinner was often leaned on as a “native informer” by arriving British commanders, likely because, despite his British education and loyalties, his race continually excluded him from full belonging. One could see the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām as an instantiation of that informant role; the inscription, commemorating a gift to the British officer J. Watkins, reinforces that impression.

An 1830 portrait of Skinner in Tazkirat al-umara (“Biographies of the Nobles”), a biographical dictionary he commissioned of the princely families of the Punjab, Rajasthan, and Haryana, shows him in British uniform, sitting in a lacquered chair with his spurred ankles crossed, looking steadily but slightly quizzically out at the viewer. The cartouche beneath contains the title given to him, as a recognition for his service in the war against the Maratha Empire, by the Mughal emperor Akbar Shah II (r. 1806–1837): Nasir al-dawlah, Kirnil Jams Iskinar, Bahadur, Ghalib Jang (Defender of the State, Colonel James Skinner, Lord, Victorious in War). Both his clothing and his chair distinguish him from the indigenous nobility depicted in the rest of the Tazkirat, who wear traditional clothing and are more often than not sitting on the ground, bolstered by cushions. The message is clear: Skinner might well have been the son of a Bhojpuri woman and celebrated by the Mughal emperor, but he was a Company man, through and through. In his Memoirs, written after his death by the Scottish travel writer James Baillie Fraser (1783–1856), only three laconic pages are dedicated to his life before joining the military.

The miniatures of the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām are some of the most famous expressions of the “Company Style” invented by the Mughal court painters Ghulam Murtaza Khan (1760–1840) and his nephew ʿAlī Khan (fl. 1817–1852), who were sponsored by the East India Company. In their enthusiasms for Mughal culture, Skinner and his best friend, the EIC officer William Fraser (James Fraser’s brother, assassinated 1835), helped foster a brief moment of genuine interchange between local powers and the British, which would be soon ended by Orientalist condescensions. It was likely ʿAlī who created the paintings of the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām, working in the watercolors that had become the preferred European alternative to traditional gouache. His and his uncle’s styles have a strong family resemblance, but the younger ʿAlī’s work, especially in the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām, is a bit more vernacular, his figures less rigid in both pose and outline.

The figures are ethnographically engaged in “typical” work against “typical” backgrounds, wearing “typical” clothes and in “typical” poses. There’s the bear hunter, carrying his prey on his back, the dyer leaning over his pits, the ear cleaner, and the young ploughman whipping his cattle. The shawl and lute of a kalavānt, a musician (from Urdu), is reproduced in loving detail, down to the tiny duck at the bottom of his instrument. Another painting, of a woman, is perhaps-euphemistically labeled bīwa (“widow”), but seems to show a sex worker negotiating with a client; she smokes hookah with her head uncovered, a white cat lolling on the ground behind her. A painting labeled “bazaar” shows a man being offered a handful of snakes or some birds in a basket, and snakes reappear in the conversation between a snake charmer and an upper-class man. Like skin color, hairstyles vary, from the long curly hair of the drunkard to the bristling sideburns of an aristocrat; clothes do too (though everyone, it seems, loves hookah).

We learn so little about Skinner himself from his Memoirs that it is hard to know how he felt about these books he commissioned, and about the expansion of British epistemological as well as military might that they represented. His mother, he tells us, killed herself when he was twelve, unable to live with the shame of her daughters being sent from her home to an English-style boarding school; after her death, he too was sent away to school. James Fraser leaves barely any room for Skinner’s intellect or his artistic pursuits; the Memoirs are almost entirely devoted to his military achievements.

On Skinner’s death, his son Hercules was rewarded for his father’s service by being allowed to join the elite Nizam’s Contingent, whose officers were required to be British. Lord William Bentick (1774–1839) had applied for an exception on his behalf: “[Hercules] is lately returned from England, where, for the last seven or eight years, he has been receiving the education of an English gentleman.” James had earned his son’s promotion: he would never be one of the figures in the Tashrīḥ al-aqvām.