ORIENTAL GRANDEUR: (From top) Calcutta and its environs by James Baillie Fraser; Sotheby’s catalogue; the Dakhil gate, from The Ruins of Gour, by Henry Creighton; the city as it was by Charles D’Oyly

Picture this. On a hot, humid tropical summer afternoon sometime in the late 18th century, an English ship drops anchor at the bustling port of Calcutta. Among the many who trudge out of the sea-weathered vessel is an artist, who comes to India in search of fresh fodder for his imagination. An exotic country has just been taken. And people have been flocking eastward in search of new avenues. There’s something for everyone in the land of spices, the artist has been told. Perhaps there’s something there for him, too.

More than 200 years later, some of the artist’s works, now branded antique and carrying a fat price-tag, find their way to an auction house. Along with many of their kind, collected over four decades by American businessman Robert Travis and his wife, Maria. Come May 26, and about 300 antiquarian books from the couple’s library that comprise a “pictorial record of India” will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London. Needless to say, the books would find more than their share of takers. It couldn’t be otherwise, going by the ?20,000-plus bids that some of the copies are expected to fetch.

Veteran editor and book-lover B.N. Uniyal asserts the rarity of the collection. “Never before in my living memory have I seen such a splendour of antiquarian books on India come into public view,” says the New Delhi-based bibliophile, who boasts of quite a collection of antiquarian books himself. “Very few copies of such books remain in the world today, and it’s not often that so many of them go up for grabs at once,” says Uniyal.

The Travises’ collection started 40 years ago, when Robert first came to India on his way from Tehran to Colombo. It was this one-day stop-over in Bombay that sparked a desire in him to learn more about the Orient, writes Robert Travis in the catalogue for the auction. A visit to the Elephanta Caves had the Harvard businessman floored by the knowledge his guide possessed of the site. This incident, Travis reflects, “further kindled” his enthusiasm to know more about India’s culture and religions, and compare the present with the past.

Since then, the Travises have been searching for and picking up old books that detailed the rich past of the Indian subcontinent. The books in their collection are mainly illustrative, depicting life, traditions and scenery in the subcontinent in the late 18th and early-19th centuries. To many scholars, the era marks an initial effort on the part of the coloniser to learn more about the colony he had come to dominate and make his own. “The Battle of Plassey [in 1757] had just been won,” observes art-historian Geeti Sen. “The victory, in a way, had asserted the supremacy of the British in India, making them feel that they finally owned the place.”

But the fact remained that they still knew little about its people, culture or topography. Myths abounded, writes author-historian William Dalrymple in the foreword to the catalogue for the auction. While “some said that the Hindus were a lost... tribe of Israel, or even a stray party of ancient Egyptians... the Himalayas... were widely believed to be a chain of active volcanoes,” he notes.

It was on these lines ? and on being spurred by the pioneering efforts of Royal Asiatic Society founder William Jones ? that the 1780s saw the settlers develop an interest in all things Indian. Hence, despite having been a presence in the subcontinent for decades, it was only after Robert Clive’s routing of Siraj-ud-Daula’s troops at Plassey that military concerns made way for exploration.

Visual travelogues form an important part of the Travises’ library. Works by prominent British artists such as Thomas and William Daniell, William Hodges, Charles D’Oyly, Thomas Kaye and Emily Eden, along with those by Frenchwoman S.C. Belnos and Russian traveller Prince Alexis Soltykoff feature in the collection. Most of the works are on India, while a few bring into the picture other Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Indonesia.

A few written journals ?there’s one on the Himala Mountains by James Baillie Fraser, brother of William, the Company Resident at the Mughal court in Delhi ? fill in when and where the illustrations fall short. Printed maps, such as the Bengal Atlas by surveyor-general Maj. James Rennell (1781), come as essential companions. Retrospective works, including Henry Creighton’s The Ruins of Gour (1817), cast a glance at the relics of empires long lost to the spoils of time. Some books are rare ? only two copies of the first-edition lithographed Views Around Kolapore by D.B. Herald (1845) are believed to be still around today.

Experts agree that a number of works from the Travises’ library stand out as firsts of their kind. “The first view of the Taj Mahal in print appears in William Hodges’s Select Views (1785-1788), in the background of a plate depicting A View of the Fort at Agra,” confirms Richard Fattorini, deputy director, books and manuscripts, Sotheby’s. “The aquatints on Calcutta by Thomas Daniell were the first series of topographical views to be printed in India. They were also the first prints to be published by a European artist,” he adds.

The Daniells ? uncle and nephew ? came to India in 1786 and embarked on a nationwide journey to produce their monumental work, the six-volume Oriental Scenery, comprising aquatints made on various places across the country. It was, in Calcutta-based art historian Pranab Ranjan Roy’s words, “the first major visual travelogue” of India. Several of these works are slated to go under the hammer next week. A rare first edition of Thomas Daniell’s Views of Calcutta [1786-88], consisting of 12 hand-coloured aquatints on the city, is expected to fetch anything between ?10-15,000.

Art historians also value works of this age for the evidence they bear of prevalent and changing trends. In a 2003 essay, Susan S. Bean, curator at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, writes about the works of Belnos that focused on “Hindoo and English Manners in Bengal” (estimated bid ?2-3,000). Bean writes that in 1832, Belnos drew a picture of an image of Shiva in the Kalighat style on the wall, an indication that “workshops producing the [Kalighat] paintings were well established [by then]”.

Nonetheless, for all their documentary value, the works from this period also entail a substantial amount of debate. To several critics, they mark the beginning of what Roy says could be called ‘visual’ Orientalism. In accordance with Edward Said’s seminal theory about how the West always studied the Orient on its own terms, Roy proceeds to give an example. “Of the 12 aquatints that Daniell made on Calcutta, 11 featured a part of the city that was essentially British,” he points out.

Was it a prejudiced portrayal, then? Possibly, and in more ways than one. If Roy speaks about the discrepancy of content, Kavita Singh, associate professor of arts and aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, focuses on the form. The exotic East perhaps gave the travelling landscape artists ? high on Romantic ideology ? enough inspiration to break away from an orderly Renaissance perspective. “But in their attempt to evoke a Romantic effect, they veered from mainstream documentation, focusing instead on dramatising their works,” she says. “It was the final effect that mattered, even if it meant compromising on detail.”

Singh is also critical of the European artists’ tendency to focus on ruins, hinting at the antiquity of the culture they were portraying. “Even the native people were shown to be a non-doing, passive folk in these works,” she observes. “Somehow, the landscapes tried to conjure an image of a desolate and archaic terrain that had lost its vitality and was waiting to be colonised, civilised and rescued.”

That more or less translates to an act of fashioning an India tailor-made to suit their own needs and aspirations. Dalrymple, however, argues that it would be wrong to collectively judge the whole body of travel writing and art of the period as a latent desire to dominate. “Opinions in the Empire then, as now, were strongly divided, and most of the books of the time seem to be driven above all by intellectual curiosity,” he writes.

With divided opinions, it is only obvious that the argument will continue. But for the collectors of the world, that is hardly any cause for concern. Uniyal, for one, is packing his bags for the London auction. Surely, there are many others, like Uniyal, who are gearing up for the showdown at the New Bond Street auction house. For the sake of looking at ? if not buying ? a piece of history.