Les Hindous, ou Description de leurs mœurs, coutumes et cérémonies

Le peintre et ethnographe anversois Frans Balthazar Solvyns (1760-1824) passa de longues années aux Indes. Il quitta la Belgique à la suite de la révolution brabançonne et s’installa à Calcutta en 1791. Il avait réuni une documentation exceptionnelle sur les cultes, les mœurs et les costumes de l'Hindoustan peu avant que la compagnie anglaise des Indes ne prenne l'entier contrôle de cette région. Nombre de ses dessins sont aujourd’hui conservés au Victoria and Albert Museum. Il en publia certains en 1796 à Calcutta sous ce titre : A Collection of Two Hundred and Fifty Coloured Etchings : Descriptive of the Manners, Customs and Dresses of the Hindoos. Ayant regagné l’Europe en 1803, il s’installa à Paris pour y publier son splendide livre sur les Hindous qui fut un échec commercial.

“The project proved a financial failure. The etchings, by contemporary European standards, were rather crudely done, and they did not appeal to the vogue of the picturesque. In 1803, Solvyns left India for France and soon redid the etchings for a folio edition of 288 plates, Les Hindoûs, published in Paris between 1808 and 1812 in four volumes. Even these sumptuous volumes failed commercially, victim to the unrest of the Napoleonic wars and to the sheer cost of the publication. When the Kingdom of the Netherlands was formed in 1814, Solvyns returned to his native Antwerp, where William I appointed him Captain of the Port in recognition of his accomplishments as an artist. Solvyns died in 1824.

Solvyns's life is itself fascinating, and his portrayal of India constitutes an unrivaled visual account of the people of Bengal in the late eighteenth century. The prints in themselves are of importance in a tradition reaching back to the early seventeenth century, and even earlier, with encyclopedic efforts to represent systematically both the unfamiliar, as in costumes of foreign lands, and the familiar, as in the typologies of peasants, craftsmen, and street vendors. In portraying the Hindus, however, Solvyns is not simply recording ethnographic types. He gives his figures individual character and places them in time and space, with narrative interest, and in doing so, he provides the viewer intimate access. This separates him from purely encyclopedic interest, for with artistic purpose he combines the ethnographic and the aesthetic. He conveys "art as information."

As an artist, Solvyns provided a prototype for the genre of "Company School" paintings of occupations, done by Indian artists for the British, that became popular in the early nineteenth century. But more significantly from an historical and social perspective, Solvyns's work, with its accompanying descriptions, constitutes "the first great ethnographic survey of life in Bengal." Moreover, in his ordered, hierarchical portrayal of Hindu castes in Bengal, however problematic it may be, Solvyns may well be the first European to provide a systematic ranking of castes. Yet this contribution has never been recognized, and historians and anthropologists have rarely drawn upon Solvyns for an understanding of society in Bengal in the late eighteenth century (…) In most of the etchings, Solvyns's portrayal of his subject is its first visual representation, and the etchings and Solvyns's accompanying text thus provide an enormously rich--and untapped--resource for our understanding of Indian society” (Robert L. Hardgrave)