Early Modern Notes

This particular painting at the V & A Encounters exhibition caught my attention, and I have to take issue with the curators on this one:

Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match , Johan Zoffany, Lucknow 1784
(Note: this should now open in a new window so you can easily switch between the image and my scintillating prose…)

According to the label, in “Europe cockfighting was considered cruel”. Thus, the painting represents “part of the racy and relaxed lifestyle of many Europeans in India”. It would seem that the V & A has directly lifted this from the Tate (which owns the painting), so I’m not entirely blaming the V & A for this. And if anything the Tate’s commentary is worse. (Or, let’s say, there’s an interesting difference of nuance in which the Tate’s tone is distinctly more moralising…)

This picture shows an unruly sporting event at the court of the Nawab (governor) of Oudh in northern India. It highlights the looser moral codes of colonial life. In Britain, cockfighting was frowned on as cruel, but in colonial India the ‘normal’ rules of morality did not apply.

It would be accurate to say that some late eighteenth-century Europeans considered cockfighting (and other activities such as bullfighting and bearbaiting) cruel, and that it was increasingly controversial. It was still extremely popular, however. The Europeans depicted in the painting could easily have attended cockfights at home, certainly in major cities like London.

Some may have had mixed feelings about them. James Boswell apparently attended one that lasted for more than an hour in December 1762. He wrote that he felt sorry for the cocks; but nonetheless he went, and stayed to watch (see the article by Tobias Hug). But even ambivalence was not a new feature of the later eighteenth century. (And not all of the controversy was about ‘cruelty’; for many opponents, it was the disorderly behaviour of the audience that was to be most abhorred.) It’s clear that cockfighting remained a popular activity in Britain, across the social spectrum, until the nineteenth century: see this article (I will try to look for more references online and at home this weekend).

So the museums’ interpretation of the painting make no sense. It seems to be quite simply anachronistic; reading the painting through a nineteenth-century (and later) lens, not a contemporary one. Indeed, it might be possible to invert the reading in some ways: cockfighting would in fact have been something familiar and immediately recognisable to Europeans amidst the unfamiliar sights and sounds of Indian society and culture - so the painting might be taken to highlight similarities rather than contrasts.

Besides, can we really assume that European visitors took none of the controversy over cockfighting with them when they went out to India? You can’t really see the detail at this scale, but I wasn’t convinced that all of the Europeans in the painting were equally enthusiastic about being there. And look at them, huddled together under their canopy. One or two have ventured forward slightly to speak to the fat man handling the bird on the right; but the only one who can be said to fully enter into the spirit of things is Colonel Mordaunt (the man in white) himself.

The view that Europeans in India led a ‘racy and relaxed lifestyle’ with ‘looser moral codes’ than at home may be accurate, but this particular painting cannot justifiably be utilised to illustrate it. I don’t know how the painting should be interpreted; it intrigues me, but I’m not an art historian; and I don’t know that much about eighteenth-century India either. It may have come to mean that to later generations. But, for the time at which it was painted, I do know as a social historian of Britain that what the V & A and the Tate were trying to tell me simply won’t wash.

Update
I now have my copy of Keith Thomas’ splendid book Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800 in front of me (mainly ch. 4). It can be argued that there was a growing social divide over this one (in Britain anyway): opposition to cruel sports and pastimes was by the end of the eighteenth century ‘the orthodoxy of the educated middle classes’; but it would seem that the plebs and the gentry alike felt differently about it (Thomas sees a parallel between opposition to animal sports and to the aristocratic duel). Cockfighting lasted longer than some (such as badger-baiting, bull-baiting or bear-baiting) ‘because it could be defended as the spontaneous expression of the birds’ natural instincts’. Cockpits did not become illegal until the 1830s, and cockfighting was banned outright in England and Wales in 1849 - though not until 1895 in Scotland.

All of which adds to my feeling that there are much more interesting things waiting to be said about the meanings of Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, and how the painting might have contributed to British/European ideas about India - both at the time it was painted and subsequent developments.

And Welsh connections…
By the way, one of the most popular forms of cockfighting was known as the ‘Welsh Main’, a ‘knockout’ competition. There is an article by Iorwerth Peate about cockfighting in Wales (I can supply the full reference for anyone interested). There were cockpits throughout Wales, and the old Denbigh cockpit is one of the exhibits at the Museum of Welsh Life.