…pow!…

You’d see India for the first time and you’d fall in love with her as she lay across your lap in miniature.

Artists like William and Thomas Daniell, Thomas Boys, and William Pursor were in India in pursuit of capturing the apogee of the Romantic sentiment:

the ‘sublime.’

A powerfully resonant, aesthetic experience of the unknown -

a heightened awareness experienced by an individual,

caused by what Edmund Burke described as a mix of 'terror' and 'awe.'

The idea of the sublime in Romantic thought helped frame India as the epitome of British imperial desires.

These Romantic images of India were constructed for maximum effect.

They blended fact and fiction to become what Hermione de Almeida describes as 'official fiction.'

Drawings like this were a kind of soft agitprop to make cold-weary Westerners daydream

about a very warm place

like this place:

A place you feel you should possess.

A place where you sip ‘nimbo pani’ (lemon water) out on the veranda until the sun goes down.

Where your Bori Nani sits in her sari like a boulder wrapped in silk as she gives you Hindi lessons.

And later that evening, as the stars begin to fill the sky, you hear the young girl -the one Nani calls 'Kallu' - whispering to Anjali as they watch the pantomime you so cleverly cast on their window curtain using just scraps of wood, wire, and candlelight…

…etc.

In other words, to the white-skinned Romantics, Delhi itself in the late 1700s was simply sublime.