'Connected and interwoven': Transculturality and the performance of identity in the Mughal Court of Awadh

In Faizabad in 1772, French army colonel Jean Baptiste Joseph Gentil borrowed from the nawab of Oudh (Awadh), Shuja-ud-Daula, a painting of the nawab and his son that Shuja had commissioned of the first professional English painter to work in India, Tilly Kettle. Gentil employed an Indian miniaturist to make a copy, so that he might take this copy back to France. Upon seeing the facsimile, the nawab gave Gentil the original oil, refusing to allow the miniature to leave his possession. This paper will examine the complexities of Shuja-ud-Daula’s personal identity formation and performance. The anecdote reported by Gentil in his Mémoires, is not the only instance in which the nawab and Grand Vizier of the Mughal Empire manipulated, moved, transformed, dispatched, an image of himself that reflected the transculturality of the vision of his own identity. On numerous occasions the Nawab of Oudh affected the medium, the aesthetic, the very intention of the objects, to create a personal transcultural narrative that suited the local purpose to which the object would be put. Not only do these objects reflect the robust and complex exchange of ideas and objects between Europe and India, they also reveal the deployment of transculturality as a means for Shuja-ud-Daula to perform a personal identity.