An album of twenty-nine paintings of tradespeople and other figures, processions and ceremonies

Company School, South India, probably Pondicherry, circa 1830

Footnotes

The subjects include:

A flower-seller and his wife.
A cotton carder and his wife.
A fisherman and his wife.
A butler and his wife, the latter cradling a European boy.
A palanquin bearer and his wife.
A potter and his wife.
Dyers of cloth.
A man ploughing with oxen.
Men operating an irrigation system.
A man transporting a water barrel on a carriage drawn by oxen.
A blacksmith and his forge, with large bellows.
A wedding scene with a groom on a horse, musicians and other guests.
A burial party.
A temple at Pondicherry.
A religious fire festival.
A procession to the festival, with the image of a deity carried in a palanquin.

For two paintings very similar to the last two subjects, from an album depicting religious processions, see J. P. Losty, Indian Life and People in the 19th Century: Company Paintings in the Tapi Collection, New Delhi 2019, pp. 166-167, no. 41. In the first, men carry the image of a deity in a palanquin, while others carry flags, drums, trumpets and parasols: the French inscription reads Fete d'Ellama. The other illustration shows the palanquin brought next to the fire-pit seen in our album, with men similarly prepared to walk through it and into the pool of water beyond. Losty comments: 'The fire-walking ceremony of Timiti in Tamil is held in honour of the goddess Drapaudi Amman, Drapaudi being the common wife of the five Pandava brothers in the Mahabharata. In Tamil Nadu she is considered an incarnation of the goddess Mariamman' (whose image is borne in the palanquin in the Tapi painting). Losty also notes the depiction of the ground in these paintings, a slab of earth appparently unconnected to the background, a feature also seen in our album (and, too, in an album of trades and castes in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, of this date).