The Courtauld Institute of Art
Supervised by Alice Insley, Curator, British Art c.1730–1850, Tate; Amy Concannon, Senior Curator, Historic British Art, Tate; Dr Tom Young, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Art Histories, The Courtauld Institute of Art; Dr Esther Chadwick, Lecturer in Art History, The Courtauld Institute of Art.
October 2025–
Johan Zoffany
Colonel Blair with his Family and an Indian Child (1786)
Tate
The history of the East India Company lies at the heart of more expansive stories about Britain and its place in the contemporary world: the history of imperialism, globalisation, liberal reform and the making of the modern state. Yet, in many of these stories, the actual lives and experiences of individuals – both British and Indian – appear faintly. This project will use the extraordinary array of portraits produced in connection with the East India Company between 1757 and 1857 to uncover new narratives about a wide array of individuals involved in, or impacted by, British imperialism in South Asia. Addressing a gap in the scholarship, the project will include portraits produced by Indian artists or company school paintings to holistically understand life under imperial rule and diversify the understanding of empire in canons of European art history.
Curatorially conceived in its scope, the project will recover the lives of forgotten – and often deliberately marginalised – people, attempting to reconstruct their personal beliefs, motivations and experiences. In doing so, the project will demystify the empirical from the factual through an intersectional examination on how caste, gender, race and other overlapping systems of power have informed both representation and exclusion within British portraiture.
By locating the research within the private and personal domains of household life – one that often enabled intimate moments of encounter between the coloniser and colonised – the project has the potential to generate sophisticated new thinking about the phenomenology of portrait practice, as well as the capacity of scholars to recover and narrate these intimate imperial encounters.
About Upmanyu A. Magotra
Upmanyu A. Magotra is an art historian, lawyer and advisor whose research explores transasiatic cultural exchanges and the intersections of material culture, identity, and politics. He holds an MA in Early Modern Asian and Islamic Art from The Courtauld Institute of Art, where he graduated with High Distinction for his master’s thesis, and a dual bachelor’s degree in Law and Liberal Arts from Jindal Global University in India. A recipient of the Princess Diana Award for art-led social entrepreneurship, he has worked with leading collections and institutions worldwide, including the Art of Heritage Collection in Saudi Arabia, Eka Archiving Resources and India Art Fair.
Instagram @upmanyu.magotra