ong before photography became commonplace, British women artists travelling through the subcontinent documented its people and places through sketches and letters. This series revisits the overlooked presence of 19th-Century British women artists in South Asia, examining how they recorded cross-cultural encounters and helped shape the region’s modern artistic canon.

Emily Eden was one such figure: a quiet observer, a recorder of courtly splendour and a painter of life itself. Though she stayed in Lahore for only 10 days, her personal narratives have endured.

Imperial life in Lahore reached its apex during the 1830s under the flamboyant rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh. He had a particular interest in Western expertise, especially in military organisation and visual culture. The Hungarian-Austrian artist Theodore Scheofft, along with French military officers such as Jean-François Allard and Jean-Baptiste Ventura, served at his court, where Persian was the official language.

In this evolving political and cultural environment, George Eden was appointed governor general of India in 1836. Maharaja Ranjit Singh subsequently invited him to Lahore on a state visit. George Eden, accompanied by his sisters, Emily and Frances, visited the city in 1838.

Through her letters and sketches, Emily Eden documented the grandeur, imperial life and colonial patterns of Lahore, leaving behind a record of the city unparalleled more than 180 years later.

Emily was neither a professionally trained artist nor an expert historian. Her work possesses an intuitive and spontaneous quality, whether she recounts her experiences through letters or portrays princes, courtiers and commoners in her sketches.

Her compilation of sketches, Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India (1844), along with her letters collected in Up the Country (1866), remains the principal source of her observations and encounters. As a foreign traveller, she journeyed across the vast landscapes of the subcontinent, recording her
experiences through illustrations and letters between 1837 and 1840.

Eden’s early impressions of Lahore, described mainly through her letters, read like observations from a cautious theatrical spectacle unfolding at the court of Ranjit Singh.

“We went on the elephants through the great gateway, in a Timour the Tartar fashion, into the court. Such torches and spearmen and drums and crowds, like a melodrama magnified by a solar microscope…” (Eden, Up the Country, p. 39)

She comments, as a social activist, on the contrasting social classes she noticed in Lahore: the luxuries of the royal family and courtiers, and almost no facilities at all for the working staff. “All these things are grandly imagined, but with the silver chairs there are boatmen in dirty liveries or no liveries at all! It is all discrepant, or generally so.” (Eden, Up the Country, Page 38)

Her words and lines paint a picture of Nineteenth-Century Lahore as a spectacle of grandeur and authority, constituting a recorded sensory experience of a British traveller who documented it both verbally and visually.

Apart from two volumes of letters, Up the Country in 1867, and Letters from India, published posthumously in 1872, Emily has two novels to her credit: The Semi-Detached House (1859) and The Semi-Attached Couple (1860). The former is often aligned with and compared to the writings of Jane Austen, based on social satire, observations of domestic life and marriage, wealth, decorum, and courtship.

The hand-drawn visuals of Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India depict life at the royal court and its culture. In her portraits, she records the subtle details of the royal attire, ornaments, swords and headgear against the lavish ambience of the regal environment.

Eden not only captured the facial and postural details of her subjects but also wrote notes that corresponded to the specific portraits. For instance, she describes the Maharaja’s physical condition, kinesics and sitting habits so meticulously while reconstructing a scene based on her observation.

The plate with a caption of Late Maharaja Runjeet Singh carries an artistic visual description of the physically frail, yet authoritative, dignity of the Maharaja, without any idealisation or exaggeration. The textual details add to the significance of this document for understanding the personality and traits of the ruler of Lahore.

“He [Ranjit Singh] had a curious and constant trick, while sitting and engaged in conversation, of raising one of his legs under him on the chair, which he used in compliance with the customs of his European visitors, and then pulling off the stocking from that foot.” (Eden, Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India, p. 13)

This pictorial compilation by Emily Eden presents a broader social spectrum, illustrating visual encounters with figures such as Maharaja Ranjit Singh, Prince Sher Singh, Raja Heera Singh, other courtiers and warriors and fakirs, servants and traders.

By implying binary opposites between court and everyday life, Eden frames the sovereign authority alongside commoners’ lives, with the notable presence of a few colonial figures in Ranjit Singh’s Lahore. These letters and sketches by Emily Eden offer a political and anthropological reading of power, culture and the gradual erosion of royal and indigenous identities.

Through her pen and brush, Emily Eden preserved the political and anthropological patterns of power and culture in 19th-Century Lahore, where the Sikh Empire was about to fall.

The writer is an art historian, a critic and a curator teaching at the College of Art and Design, University of the Punjab, Lahore. He may be reached at [email protected].