In the early 1700s, the prolific Dutch publisher Pieter van der Aa compiled travel accounts from the previous three centuries into multivolume sets that documented the world with the aid of engraved maps and illustrations. These two prints, which faced each other in the book, are from a section devoted to the voyages of the English, or Voyagien der Engelsen. They specifically illustrate the Dutch translation of Journey to India over-land by the British merchant Ralph Fitch, published in 1583. Fitch interpreted the scenes in the left-hand print as "strange ceremonies," such as Indian pilgrims bathing in the river Ganges and performing "penance" through "prostrations" to the sun and earth. The right-hand print actually shows Fitch observing an ascetic "who never spake," likely having taken a vow of silence. Though naming him a "monster among the rest" of the "beggars," Fitch intimately detailed the ascetic's figure, describing him as having "hair... so long and plentiful, that it covered his nakedness" and "nails... two inches long, as he would cut nothing from him."
In the early 1700s, the prolific Dutch publisher Pieter van der Aa compiled travel accounts from the previous three centuries into multivolume sets that documented the world with the aid of engraved maps and illustrations. These two prints, which faced each other in the book, are from a section devoted to the voyages of the English, or Voyagien der Engelsen. They specifically illustrate the Dutch translation of Journey to India over-land by the British merchant Ralph Fitch, published in 1583. Fitch interpreted the scenes in the left-hand print as "strange ceremonies," such as Indian pilgrims bathing in the river Ganges and performing "penance" through "prostrations" to the sun and earth. The right-hand print actually shows Fitch observing an ascetic "who never spake," likely having taken a vow of silence. Though naming him a "monster among the rest" of the "beggars," Fitch intimately detailed the ascetic's figure, describing him as having "hair... so long and plentiful, that it covered his nakedness" and "nails... two inches long, as he would cut nothing from him."
The renowned engraver Bernard Picart numbered vignettes on this print to correlate with a descriptive key at the bottom. Below is the English transcription of the key printed on Claude du Bosc’s copy of Picart’s engraving. It includes descriptions of three temples, which Picart called “Pagods.” He noted that the central temple was dedicated to “Mamaniva,” a local goddess. Inside appears to be only the head of a sculpture, rather than a full figure. It is possible that a shrine was built around this fragment, as depicted in the print, or that it was an invention of the engraver. The other temples are dedicated to Rama, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu and hero of the epic Ramayana.
Picart sought to give specific designations to the renouncers depicted in the print. “Faquir” (fakir) typically denotes a Muslim religious mendicant, while “Bramin” (Brahmin) refers to a member of the highest of the four Hindu castes or a Hindu priest. However, here Picart used both terms more broadly or misapplied them. He seems to use “faquir” as a general term to describe ascetics including Hindu devotees, and the term “Brahmin” is applied to a figure from the Jain religion.
Read the text related to this print in Picart’s fourth volume in English, beginning on page 1.
The British East India Company official John Holwell claimed that the second volume of his Interesting Historical Events was a translation of an ancient Indian text, “Bramah’s Chartah Bhade.” This text has not been located. It is possible that Holwell was working from a text no longer extant, that he combined texts or oral histories, or that he simply invented a new work.
This print merges, and perhaps confuses, different acts of creation related to the Hindu god Vishnu. In the upper register stands the third of Vishnu’s ten avatars, the boar Varaha, who was sent to rescue the earth from a demon in the cosmic ocean. To his left is likely an abstraction of Vishnu’s second avatar, the turtle Kurma, who here stabilizes a snake to balance the earth. This refers to a story in which the gods (asuras) and demons (rakshas) wrap the snake Vasuki around the mountain Mandara to churn the ocean. This action elicited various magical matter, such as the elixir of immortality, amrita. Holwell, however, interprets Vishnu’s boar and turtle avatar as “the preserver,” who was “transformed into a mighty boar, emblematically signifying the strength of God in the act of creation. The tortoise mystically denotes the stability and permanency of the foundation of the earth, and the snake the wisdom by which it is supported.”
Read more from Holwell’s Interesting Historical Events.
This hand-colored engraving is based on a drawing by the British East India Company official James Forbes, who was also an amateur artist and writer. It depicts the “celebrated statue” of Parshva, one of the twenty-four Jain masters known as tirthankaras, or “ford-builders” (across the ocean of suffering). Forbes drew this image by candlelight in a “subterraneous temple” in Gujarat and published it in his Oriental Memoirs (1812).
Hand-colored engraving with etching on paper
From an English copy of Thomas Maurice (1754–1824), The History of Hindostan, vol. 2 (London: printed by H. L. Galabin, 1798).
Robert J. Del Bontà collection, E004
In this print, Gautama Buddha, the fifth-century BCE founder of Buddhism, is depicted as the ninth of the Hindu deity Vishnu’s ten avatars that made intercessions on earth. The Reverend Thomas Maurice interprets this Buddha as a reformer of Hindu ritual sacrifices. Maurice included this print, along with the other avatars, in The History of Hindostan, in which he sought to understand the religions of India while aligning them with Christianity. He, along with many early modern scholars, struggled with the relationship between Buddhist and Hindu rituals, texts, deities, and holy men.
Read a portion of The History of Hindostan related to this print.
In 1822, the British travel writer and artist Fanny Parks traveled to India with her husband Charles, an East India Company civil servant. They lived first in Calcutta and then moved to Allahabad. Throughout her extensive travels in India, Parks wrote and sketched fastidiously, fueled by an avid curiosity that at times mixed with “disgust” at the scenes she witnessed. The ceremony of charak puja, in which devotees were lifted by hooks threaded through their backs, elicited such a response. Read Parks’ description of the scene, which she acknowledged both stimulated her interest and made her “sick.”
The historian Edward Henry Nolan published his Illustrated History of the British Empire in India just after the Indian Rebellion of 1857–58, which led to the dissolution of the British East India Company and left India under the rule of the British crown, called the Raj, until 1947. In the section that discusses charak puja, Nolan critiques Christian missionary writings that were widely assumed to have instigated the rebellion. In particular, he weighed the Christian missionaries’ impulse to suppress what they interpreted as “abominations,” such as the “swinging ceremony,” with the colonial government’s political need to respect the religious customs of the populace.
Read a section of Nolan’s Illustrated History.
In 1792, Jonathan Duncan, the British East India Company resident at Benares (Varanasi), interviewed two renowned “fakeers” and employed an Indian artist to draw them “from the life.” Duncan published his “Account of Two Fakeers” in Asiatic Researches 5 (1799). One of his interviewees, Puran Puri, fascinated Duncan with tales of his travels, his choice of penance (arms held upright for years on end, or urdhvabahu), and his espionage for the Company. Puran Puri’s image was reprinted in numerous publications, such as this print from 1822. View another iteration in the Yoga exhibition that was published in the Encyclopedia Londinensis (1811), as well as its descriptive text,.
The East India Company official Edward Moor based the illustrative engravings in his Hindu Pantheon (1810) on Indian works of art in his collection. This hand-colored lithograph of the Hindu deities Shiva, also known as Mahadeva or the Great God, and his wife Parvati is from the third edition of Moor’s publication (1864). It is based on a painting from Jaipur that is now at the British Museum.
The Italian publisher Dr. Giulio Ferrario relied on publications by the artist Balthazar Solvyns as one of his main sources on India. In the late eighteenth century, Solvyns lived in Calcutta. He published a lengthy tome of 250 etchings “descriptive of the manners, customs, character, dress and religious ceremonies of the Hindoos” in 1799, as well as a four-volume French edition, Les Hindoûs, between 1808 and 1812. Solvyns described this etching as the festival of Ruth-Jatrah (Ratha-Yatra), which involved “the riding of the Gods in their Carriage, drawn by thousands of fanatics, some of whom throw themselves under the cart, with the persuasion that their death will secure them immediate bliss in heaven.”
This engraving and text (transcribed below) from the American journal Harper’s Weekly discusses the pilgrimage to the confluence of the Yamuna and Ganges Rivers, near the city of Allahabad. In a secular, if not cynical, tone, the author draws attention to the class distinctions between pilgrims and to the potential economic rewards of selling Ganges water in distant locales.
“Not far eastward of the city of Allahabad lies the ‘Plain of Almsgiving,’ at the confluence of the Jumna and the Ganges, which from remote ages has been regarded by the Hindoos as a most sacred spot. Thither, in ancient times, kings and princes repaired to distribute alms, and to this day it is visited by thousands of pilgrims from all parts of India, to bathe in the sacred waters. These pilgrims generally wear a uniform costume, made of coarse linen, to prevent the rich from being distinguished from the poor. The latter are more numerous than the first, as many of the wealthy pay to have the pilgrimage performed for them, as the richer class of Mahommedans make the long and tedious journey to Mecca by proxy. One class of pilgrims visit Allahabad to obtain the sacred water of the Ganges, which they sell in remote villages. This water, in small vials, marked with the seal of the Brahmins of Prayaga, is sold at a very high price, to be used for the lustrations recommended at certain periods by the sacred writings.”
In this hand-colored lithograph, the Hindu deity Vishnu manifests cosmological time in his all-pervading form of Narayana or Vatapatrasai, literally, “one who sleeps on water or a leaf.” From the navel of a bejeweled child, who suckles his toe while afloat on a leaf in the cosmic ocean, the four-headed Hindu deity Brahma ascends on a lotus flower to create, and re-create, the world in cyclical time. The image refers to the sage Markandeya, who longed to know the secrets of existence and became lost in Vishnu’s cosmic ocean. At last, he came upon the child Narayana, crawled into his mouth, and witnessed the continuous creation and dissolution of the world.
The designer of this chromolithograph likely used a painting or print as a model, such as this painting, in the Freer’s collection, of the Hindu deities Shiva and Parvati from the Punjab Hills.
The Bengali text on this page refers to aspects of the Hindu god Shiva—his liberation, propriety or prestige, and inebriation—as well as to the playing cards that it packaged.
A visual compendium of global religious practice, Simon de Vries’ seventeenth-century Dutch engraving juxtaposes and disparages spectacular acts of self-mortification, religious figures and practices, and deities from non-European cultures. As detailed in the text on the print, it includes Japanese mendicants, lepers, muck-eaters, acts of self-immolation, the bathing of “Brahmins and fakirs,” Mexican human sacrifice and deities, and a Turkish dervish.