How a British suffragist brought Ajanta’s ancient paintings into the light of modernity

“The flesh tones of the prince are pale and silvery. The queen is nearly black. In the general colouring, sober reds and some vivid pale blues and good bluish greens are introduced among greys, browns and whites. The effect is rich and quiet.”

This vivid account of the Bodhisattva Padmapani mural from the Ajanta caves in Aurangabad by Christiana J Herringham appeared in a June 1910 issue of The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. At the time, such detailed verbal descriptions was one of the only modes of representing these hidden frescoes to a world that had not yet seen them.

The other mode was, of course, copying the images onto portable mediums like canvas and paper so they could be exhibited and printed for viewers. Herringham attempted to deliver on that front as well, leading a historic project, involving some of India’s greatest artists, to bring ancient paintings into the light of modernity. Indeed, the story of her endeavour encapsulated some of the intertwined phenomena which this luminous modernity was marked by: revivalism, suffragism and swadeshism.

Before Herringham, the Ajanta caves were not unknown. Richard S Cohen, a scholar of Buddhist studies, notes that Abu’l Fazl mentioned them in Ain-i-Akbari in the 1590s. But it was only in the 19th century that the world “rediscovered” the series of 30 excavations in the Deccan cliffs which constitute Buddhist religious architecture dating from between the Satavahana 2nd and 1st centuries BCE and the Vakataka 5th and 6th centuries CE. Cohen recounts the almost-folkloric narrative of rediscovery by a retired British officer called John Smith who, while hunting a tiger in 1819, apparently stumbled upon the caves. How we know the date and name is because the amateur archaeologist scratched his name and date across the chest of a Buddha in one of the caves.

Since their resurfacing, the caves attracted the attention of the colonial administration and its cultural institutions such as the Royal Asiatic Society and Archaeological Survey of India. Prior to Herringham’s expedition, two other major attempts to record the Ajanta murals had taken place, the results of both coincidentally perishing in fires.

In her 2007 essay Copying Ajanta: A Rediscovery of Some Nineteenth Century Paintings, Divia Patel, senior curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum, discusses both these projects. From 1844 to 1863, Captain Robert Gill of the Madras Native Infantry worked on an assignment by the Madras Government to eventually make 27 “facsimiles” of the Ajanta cave paintings, along with architectural drawings, sketches and photographs. In 1866, a fire destroyed them at the Crystal Palace where they were being exhibited, leaving only five surviving ones (four currently at the Victoria & Albert Museum) that had not been dispatched there. In 1872, John Griffiths, teacher of decorative arts at the Bombay School of Art, was commissioned to undertake a mission to “substitute” Gill’s lost paintings. Over the next 13 years, Griffiths and a changing roster of students, including future stars like Pestonji Bomanji and MV Dhurandhar, created a total of 335 paintings. Of these, 170 were also destroyed in fires, first in 1885 at their repository at the Victoria & Albert Museum and then in 1887 at the Antwerp International Exhibition. The remainder were published in a landmark two-volume book, Paintings in the Buddhist Cave-temples of Ajanta (1896).

Patel notes that replacing this second lot of Ajanta reproductions, “...it is remarkable…was actually mentioned as a possibility”. Later commentators would claim that they were finally replaced. They were, in fact, not. Interestingly, one of the people who made this incorrect assertion turned out to be the very organiser of the third attempt to copy the old murals – Christiana Herringham herself. Her Ajanta venture turned out to be closer in spirit and logistics to Griffiths’ in that it comprised a group of promising young Indian artists who would go on to become pioneers of, and participants in, the movement for anticolonial modernism.

Feminist vocation

A Victorian woman whose identity was closely tied to her relationships with the men in her life, Christiana Jane Herringham, born in 1859, was the daughter of a stockbroker, wife of a physician and mother of two sons, both of whom she outlived. But she was also an artist, an independently wealthy patron, a suffragist and appears to have been a supporter, if not a strident one, of the challenge to imperial dominance from within the British colonies.

At a time when women were still excluded from the upper echelons of the artistic establishment, Herringham was unsystematically trained. In an article titled Christiana Herringham: the overlooked artist, patron and feminist campaigner, art historian Michaela Jones mentions Herringham’s education at the newly-opened Slade School of Art and in the more liberal environment of Paris, where women were allowed to draw from the nude. Her single biography, Mary Lago’s Christiana Herringham and the Edwardian Art Scene, mentions a couple of girls’ schools in London and Brighton and stints at the National Gallery, where “she joined the ranks of earnest students and amateur copyists. The gallery became her classroom.” Copying seems to have been an acceptable feminine artistic vocation of the time, Lago says, “because supposedly it eliminated the emotional strain imposed by original artistic creation”. Conforming to the womanly ideal of fragility, Lago adds, Herringham “made copying the tempera masters her profession”.

It was in the wake of her older son’s sickness and death at nine that Herringham immersed herself in the study of quattrocento tempera – the 15th-century technique of Italian Renaissance painting in which the paint pigment was bound using an egg-based emulsion. Her breakout moment as a cultural practitioner was her translation of Il Libro dell’ Arte o Trattaro Della Pittura, a text on fresco and tempera written by Cennino Cennini in 1399/1400. This established Herringham as what American art historian Daniel Varney Thompson called “the arch-priestess” of the British Tempera Revival, co-founding the Society of Tempera Painters in 1901. It was a twain – her approach to making copies and her use of tempera in composing them – that limned her Ajanta project with a subversive sheen.

But why and how did a wealthy white woman like Herringham come to India to take on a project such as this?

Tireless worker

Herringham travelled to the Ajanta caves during her very first India trip in 1906, with her husband Wilmot, to visit their surviving son Geoffrey, an army officer posted in the country. Lago attributes their initial visit to Ajanta to the behest of Laurence Binyon of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. In an essay titled The Expedition in the book Ajanta Frescoes, Wilmot reports that on this first trip, she made “a rough sketch of a large Buddha”, which generated interest in Binyon that “added to her own”. Writing about Ajanta publicly and thinking about it privately, she returned to the site in 1909 for six weeks and again in 1910 for more than three months, with fellow artist William Rothenstein.

A member of the India Society in 1910 alongside founders EB Havell, Rothenstein and AK Coomaraswamy, and the only woman in its executive committee, Herringham had become part of a network of personalities who were inclined to resist the imposition of colonial British value systems on indigenous cultural productions. Through her connections in both the India Society and the British administration, she obtained an arrangement from the Nizam of Hyderabad himself (under whose jurisdiction Ajanta was) for a camp at Fardapur village, 8 kilometres from the caves. Five Indian students from Government Art Schools joined her – Syed Ahmad and Fazl ud Din (“drawing masters trained at the Bombay school and on loan from the industrial arts school in Hyderabad”) and “three Bengali students of Abanindranath Tagore”: Nandalal Bose, Asit Kumar Haldar and Samendranath Gupta. There was a young lady among the painting party – Dorothy Larcher from the Hornsey School of Art, whom Herringham had hired as an assistant.

Larcher provides a particularly detailed account of their intense artistic labour in her essay for Ajanta Frescoes titled Note on the Manner of Taking Copies. Deploying a combination of acetylene lamps and a motor lamp on a tripod, makeshift ladders held by “coolies”, tracing paper and adhesive slips, the artists devised ways of working with the discoloured murals. She explains, “When the painting was very much darkened with age, the best way of tracing accurately was to fasten the two corners of the tracing paper with adhesive slips, roll it up quickly from the bottom with the left hand, look at the outline, roll the paper back, and trace…to copy the various thicknesses of line…When the coloured copies were made, a fairly rough tracing was done first and transferred to the painting paper on the frames, and the outline accurately copied from the fresco afterwards, but in the case of those intended to remain as outlines, the exact tracing was made on the wall. The coloured copies were executed on thick cartridge paper, canvas-backed, and stretched on wooden frames. For travelling the paper was taken from the frames, rolled, and packed in cylindrical tins.”

An observation of Herringham’s own commitment comes from a source she did not particularly get along with, a Frenchman called Charles Müller, secretary to an affluent Russian collector of Southeast Asian art named Victor Goloubew who was travelling with a photographer to document the murals. They had, by the Nizam’s leave, interloped into Herringham’s party and stretched their resources, both physical and intellectual. Despite their mutual antipathy, Müller seems to have respected Herringham’s work ethic almost in spite of himself: “...she worked tirelessly in the fiery furnace of the days and the freezing night air, travelling three hours daily to the caves where she perched on a ladder in the gloom and the stench of bat droppings, ruining her eyes and her health to piece together fragments of heads, hands, feet and animals.”

As for Herringham’s work itself, her engagement with the past suggests a sympathy with contemporary British art’s investment in their retrieval of mediaeval colour and content, as seen in Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts movements. Observing that each of the seven artists in Herringham’s party had their own distinct style (borne out by their later ascent as modernist vanguards), Jones characterises Herringham’s copies as “naturalistic…the brushstrokes are visible, which is perhaps due to her choice of medium”.

In her own words, Herringham shares her approach to the project: “Previous copies have shown all the blemishes and holes in the plaster. We have thought it advisable, for the sake of the beauty of the composition and of intelligibility, to fill up the smaller holes. But, though some people may call this restoration, altering our work from literal copies to studies…this omission of damage has been done very cautiously, and the unfinished look of the copies is the consequence of our restoring so little…” Thus, in contrast to the previous reproductions of the Ajanta murals, Herringham and her group were not so much recording as reinterpreting. Jones writes that “Herringham intended her Ajanta project to not only create a record of [in her words] ‘this most interesting, but slowly perishing, ancient picture gallery’, but also demonstrate to both Indian and British audiences the beauty and worth of Indian fine art.”

Imperialist aesthetic

As suggested earlier, Herringham’s renderings of the Ajanta murals were part of a decisive, cultural nationalist moment when Indian art and aesthetics were being revalued, to quote art history Partha Mitter. The so-called Indian Renaissance was unfolding alongside another sort of political agitation in which Herringham was deeply invested both materially and ideologically – the suffragist movement. An associate of the activist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, co-founder of the Ladies Residential Chambers Co, Herringham was an ardent campaigner for numerous pro-suffrage societies and embroidered banners used in their processions, Jones says. She was also, Lago says, a sponsor of The Englishwoman, a magazine of the Women’s League of Suffrage Societies, to which she contributed articles about Ajanta. Through her work at Ajanta, we can gauge an entwinement of the codes of anticolonialism and feminism, for instance in the act of copying.

Copying was not always looked down upon. Indeed it was once considered a core part of the European artist’s training. Jones links this degradation or feminisation of the copyist’s skill to the rise in the cult of the male genius in the 18th and 19th centuries. Around the same time, Europe’s economic and political dominance over other lands was rapidly prevailing, devaluing the practice of copying along another axis. As art historian Saloni Mathur points out in her book India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, copying became embedded in the colonial art curriculum as a way to test Indian artists – if they failed “to draw correctly”, they would be considered deficient according to the Eurocentric ideal of an artist. Curiously, Mathur gives the example of the “slavish copying” that attended Griffiths’ Ajanta project, which alienated many of his students due to its suppression of originality.

While working on the murals Herringham averred that “a copyist must be more than a competent replicator and must understand the fundamentals of good art”, considering the method superior to photography as the latter “distorted the scale of the monuments and, crucially, were not in colour”. Even though scholars like Patel have criticised Herringham for her lack of fidelity to the original murals, in comparison to Gill and Griffiths, other such as Rupert Richard Arrowsmith observes in a talk titled Repainting Ajanta: The Global Impact of the Frescoes and their Copies that, on the contrary, due to their implication within a swadeshi configuration engineered by figures like Coomaraswamy and Rothenstein, who organised Herringham’s expedition, “they were not as Europeanised as the earlier ones had been”, with tendencies towards European-style volumetric shading, vanishing point perspective and Academic Realism.

The other aspect of Herringham’s work which allowed her to challenge the hierarchies of value at play was her use of tempera, unlike the oil paint of her predecessors. Just as tempera signalled a pre-oil, pre-industrial idyll in the case of Western revivalist movements like the British Arts & Crafts one, here too it signalled the swadeshi pre-colonialism championed in their radical way by the young Bengal School watercolourists that she had been working alongside. As Jone notes, “By using tempera, Herringham appears to have not only been aiming at an authenticity of medium, but she was also making a connection between ancient Indian art and the art of the West. She was building on the comparisons she made elsewhere between the Ajanta frescoes and the art of fifteenth-century Italy. By linking early Italian art, which was widely admired by both art historians and the public, and Indian art, which was largely overlooked, Herringham likely hoped to encourage the public to reconsider Indian art with these comparisons in mind.”

Ironically, for all their subtle material and formal transgressions of imperialist aesthetic paradigms, Herringham’s copies were displayed at the Festival of Empire at the Crystal Palace in 1911, bringing the Ajanta projects of the 19th century full circle as symbols of colonial control over India’s cultural heritage. It is also worth remarking that in the Ajanta Frescoes book published by the India Society, no reflections by the Indian artists who had accompanied Herringham were included, though of the same age as Larcher, who was granted a page.

Nevertheless, Herringham seems to have had her redeeming moments: Jones cites Herringham’s caution against consuming the images without the context of the walls their inspirations were made on, and also a letter to her husband in which she resigns from the Festival committee due to her discomfort with the framing of her works. They were also shown the same year at the Allahabad exhibition of the Indian Society of Oriental Art founded by Abanindranath Tagore, perhaps a more appropriate venue for their exhibition. On her final return from India in 1911, Herringham started experiencing persecutory delusions, convinced that the sacrilege she had committed would lead to her assassination by Indian spies or that her Ajanta copies would meet the same fate as her predecessors’, cursed with fire. She soon declined almost completely, withdrawing from her once-active artistic and political life and dying in 1929 at St George’s Retreat at the age of 76.

Her legacy continued in the careers of her young associates. Syed Ahmad contributed to Ajanta again, as an artist for the Nizam’s photographic survey of the caves beginning in 1930, led by archaeologist Ghulam Yazdani. Nandalal Bose drew on her translation of Cennino Cennini during his experiments with colour and tempera. According to Jones, all but one of her Ajanta copies are apparently still intact in India, untouched by fire at the Telangana State Museum, where they were transferred in 1930. Earlier this summer, there was news that paintings from its Ajanta Gallery are being restored. If Herringham’s works are among them, they ought to be exhibited again, for us to consider how Ajanta might be a kind of visual meter of history, a single postcolonial century transforming our ways of seeing more than 14 centuries of its hidden wonders.