The famous sheep-eating fakir, Jurah Geer Berah Geer

Calcutta, circa 1800

Footnotes

Provenance
General Sir George Nugent, 1st Bt. (1757-1849), Commander-in-Chief, India, 1811-13, & Maria, Lady Nugent.
Thence by descent via the Nugents to the current owners.

The fact that several depictions exist of this bizarre figure and his macabre rite (and/or performance) is testament to the fascination he held for the British in India. We might compare the interest shown in 'Mr Flowery Man', a fakir well known in Delhi (actually Sardhaj, a Brahmin from Gokal), who wore a towering headdress made of flowers. Some of the British took a more scholarly approach to Indian religions: while the meaning of the ritual remains obscure, it is thought that the fakir was a devotee (bhakta) of Vishnu, emulating the boar (one of the god's avatars) by disembowelling with his mouth). But inevitably this figure must have become an object of interest purely because of his oddness, and the Nugents were clearly no exception to this. Early in her time in Calcutta, in a letter to Lady Temple (Cohen, p. 362), Lady Nugent wrote: 'I am making great preparations for a journal and intend to get a person to make drawings for me of anything curious'. Just outside Monghir, she noted in her diary that 'There were two fakiers, in green dresses, covered with garlands, their faces daubed with all sorts of colours, and spiral feathers in their turbans. I have two in my collection of drawings, exactly like them'. (Cohen, p. 98).

He seems to have been attracting attention from the late 18th Century: a Major-General Hardwicke watched him at Fategarh on 3rd March 1796, and gave a lecture on the subject to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1832, later published and illustrated with a lithograph after 'original sketches made on the spot by a native artist'. He later presented a oil painting to the Society, perhaps used at the lecture. Other British gentlemen saw the feat at Lucknow, and Indian artists produced various versions at Murshidabad and Calcutta for British consumption. A version dated Calcutta, circa 1800 is in the V&A (see M. Archer, Company Paintings, pp. 82-83, no. 46, with the same seven stages as our painting, but with a key and other inscriptions. Other examples appear in S. C. Welch, Room for Wonder, p. 44, no. 11 (from the collection of James Nathaniel Rind), ascribed to Farrukhabad, circa 1785-90, and another in the Kasturbhai Lalbhai Collection, Ahmedabad. The British Library possesses another (illustrated in W. Dalrymple (ed.), Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company, London 2019, p. 134, no. 75), and there was a Lucknow example (depicting the third stage only) as part of a set of 'occupations' (see J. P. Losty, 'The sheep eater of Fategarh', South Asian Studies, 4 (1988), pp. 1-11); for a Lucknow painting of circa 1810, showing the fakir approaching the sheep menacingly, see Christie's, Visions of India, 5th June 1996, lot 6.