Making Love

Appropriating the visual forms and mythological language of Hinduism, Thomas Banks’ sculpture Camadeva and his Mistress on a Crocodile (c. 1794, plaster, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London) is the most sustained attempt in British art before the twentieth century to inhabit the imagined hands, minds and hearts of a non-European culture. Kamadeva is the armed Hindu god of love, the analogue of Cupid, and his invocation here – as also the poem on which it draws, written by Sir William Jones shortly after his inauguration as high court judge to Kolkata – is an example of love’s significance within the discourses on India at a time of assiduous imperial expansion in the Indian subcontinent. In Jones’ writings and legal pronouncements, and in the policy statements of Warren Hastings (the former governor-general of Bengal and Banks’ contemporary patron), ‘love’ was instrumentalized as both a weapon and a justification in the assault upon Indian subjects. Indian concepts of romantic love were therefore mined in an ideological campaign through which (it was thought) Indian subjects could be made to love their imperial governors. Incurring heady submission in the victims of its darts and yet distinguishable in intent from cruelty, ‘love’ provided adherents of democracy, such as Jones, with a way of promoting, and legislating for, a compromised version of democracy abroad (a ‘soft’ despotism) under the guise of benevolence and freedom. Banks’ sculpture gives form to love’s charged role within contemporary languages of imperial conquest – but does so in ways which foreground that love’s limits and contradictions. For the spectres of violence, sexual desire and aggressive power haunt Camadeva and suggest that this radical artist struggled with the implications of his materials. Through a close reading of its sculpted forms and their relationship to Jones’ poem as well as late eighteenth-century attitudes to Indian sculpture and eroticism, this article describes Camadeva as a sculpture in which the jagged relationship between love, power and desire is weighed

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