From the Christie's Auction of An Eye Enchanted: Indian Paintings from the Collection of Toby Falk
This portrait of "A Tanbur player", attributed to Mir Chand and produced for one of Antoine Polier's albums in late 18th-century Lucknow, demonstrates how colonial knowledge operated through visual ordering. It became a mechanism through which bodies became legible, classifiable, and collectible. The anonymous musician is detached from performance and social context. Instead, she appears as a stable cultural type, framed within an elaborate floral border that transforms the living subject into an archival specimen. The image functions less as a portrait of an individual than as a document of difference. Polier albums assembled with the assistance of Mir Chand, thereby, reduced syncretic indigenity into European recognisable categories of musicians, ascetics and courtiers fixing identity within a visual taxonomy. Ultimately, Mir Chand's collaboration with Polier further complicates the narrative of authorship as it reveals how colonial archives emerged through indigenous artistic labour as much as European patronage.
In addition, a clear distinction becomes particular within the colonial archive. Artistic authority took up varied terminologies. Male performers were recognised as "ustads", i.e., the custodians of aesthetic knowledge. Female performers, despite equivalent training and participation in elite court culture, were reduced to the colonial category of the "nautch girl". Their artistic labour was eclipsed by narratives of spectacle and eroticism. This distinction reveals how colonial classification distributed authority hierarchially, rendering women's performances as objects of voyeuristic consumption.
In this artwork, you're not actually looking at a standard portrait of an individual; you're looking at a highly structured data entry for a colonial database. Attributed to Mir Chand in late 18th-century Lucknow for Antoine Polier's albums, the composition operates as a strict mechanism for visual ordering.
The anonymous tanbur player is completely decoupled from her actual performance environment and social context. Instead, she is boxed inside this massive, elaborate floral border that essentially functions as a rigid UI wrapper, locking a living subject down into a static archival specimen. The entire piece is engineered to strip away complex, syncretic identity and reformat it into neatly readable European categories. By assembling this album, Polier and Mir Chand built a visual taxonomy—sorting people into predictable, hardcoded classes like musicians, ascetics, or courtiers. It is a fascinating look at how colonial archives were compiled, relying heavily on indigenous artistic labor to execute the classification of their own culture.
But the most glaring system bias in this colonial framework is how it processes gender. Within this archive, male performers were granted top-level authority as "ustads," recognized as the actual custodians of aesthetic knowledge. Meanwhile, female artists—despite running the exact same high-level training and court execution—were downgraded and tagged with the colonial category of the "nautch girl." Their actual artistic labor was entirely eclipsed by voyeuristic, spectacle-driven metadata.
To me, this artwork perfectly visualizes how a classification system distributes hierarchical authority, ultimately rendering women's performances not as active artistic outputs, but strictly as flat objects for visual consumption.
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By: Kshitij Lariwal
What I find most compelling about this portrait is the contrast between the dignity of the musician and the way she is presented as a carefully categorized subject. Although she is shown holding a tanbur, there is no sense of performance or sound, only a quiet, composed presence. To me, the painting invites reflection on how art can both celebrate and simplify identity. While the refined details and elegant composition honour the sitter's cultural role, they also remind us that people are often remembered through the labels imposed upon them rather than through the richness of their individual lives.
