Patronage, Learning, Innovation
Prasanta Chakravarty The career of poet Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) is a powerful instance of how a poet might succeed through patronage, quite independent of his considerable talent. After his education at Oxford, he was taken up by Sir Edward Dymoke, the Queen’s Champion, which led his establishing a connection with Sir Edward Stafford, the English ambassador in Paris in the 1580s. With Strafford he went to Italy and upon his return, now enthusiastic to write poetry, Daniel soon came to the notice of Mary, Countess of Pembroke. She was enthusiastic about his European experience and offered him financial support, banking on his concern for the condition of the English letters. Of course, educated Englishmen and women of eminent families had appreciated by then that talented men of letters should be championed and rallied as a matter of patriotic pride. In the year 1600, Daniel made a gainful move into the household of Lady Margaret Clifford, Countess of Cumberland where he tutored her daughter. Circa 1604/5 he added the patronage of the rich Earl of Hertford to his portfolio. By this time literate aristocrats were vying for an allocation in the works of Samuel Daniel. He acquired a house in the City of London, became a Groom of the Queen’s Privy Chamber sometime in 1607, advancing to Gentleman Extraordinary in 1613 with a salary of £64, and remained in her household until the Queen’s death in 1619. Daniel, of course, kept lines of communication open to old patrons, dedicating Musophilus to Sir Fulke Greville in 1611, for example. His attentive patrons continued to care for him even after death: Lady Anne Clifford fashioned a memorial inscription for him and paid for his monument in the parish church. The immediate trigger for this lengthy preamble is the Man Booker long-list and the rather predictable unfolding of a network, which pushes and lobbies the case for an author of Indian origin. The mode is kosher. In fact, such care and diplomacy is part and parcel of our existence. There is indeed not much ground to speak from any righteous vantage point—for all of us, surely, must operate within certain finite circles and regardless of our finest professional attitude, we reserve our liking and disliking for this ideology or that style. Yes, the give-and-take in circles of patronage is a subtle art. You play by the rules, and if possible, play with certain élan and nonchalance. But the nature of creating networks and working within a coterie culture also means that you fully appreciate the rules of that particular culture or faction, as the case may be. To understand the inner workings of a faction is an art in successful communication and speech-act exchange. In India, a section of the highly feudal parliamentarian left has been the most scientific practitioners of the art of patronage. Fellow travellers have been richly and routinely rewarded from time to time. In Bengal, one has seen this phenomenon play out as a drill, almost. But there has also been a powerful and small cosmopolitan section which has kept itself out of any strict political ideology but has changed tack from time to time, morphing pragmatically as the circumstance demanded. This group of people has always used their cultural capital for advancement in life. And tried to erect a stout support system. Working within a very closed and dedicated circle of mutual dependency. Academics, artists and writers, publishers and journalists of such a dispensation have often closed ranks—for they have no other way but to rely on patronage since they have kept themselves out of the political arena. The footloose writer or artist, from the other side, has depended on structures of patronage at all times. Indeed, in Bengal, Raja Krishna Chandra heavily patronized artists like Bidyapati and the sakta writings of Ramprasad, just as Raja Naba Krishna did with the likes of Haru Thakur. But what we are talking about is the patronage of an alien lettered class, developed much later and imbued with new ideas and novel methods. Over a period of time they have gotten entrenched in building institutions and have been given to using and circulating the benefits of their own new familial networks. Though far removed in time and space, a superb analysis of how a select group of gifted and cosmopolitan artists around Giotto di Bondone emerged under the patronage of the mendicant Franciscan friars and mercantile bankers has been meticulously studied by Julian Gardner in Giotto and His Publics: Three Paradigms of Patronage. The study goes far beyond the clichés of Giotto as the founding father of western art and illuminates the complex interplay between mercantile wealth and the iconography of poverty. The Franciscans were intensely local, many of them members of the leading civic families. True, the Florentines, much like the group of Bengalis we are talking about, are also often truly international and not merely global. But in practice, the internationalism of such coterie is marked by local preferences and traditions. In fact, any international success by way of an award or any other form of recognition of a member augments the imaginative cultural stature of the local patrons and the artist, who in his turn, would ideally return the favour, given a platform, by paying rich and nuanced tributes to the circles of local influence. The lonesome and precarious life of writing and art practice patiently await such recognition and patronage. The idea of the prodigal turns into a circulating and negotiating ideal. It is rather intriguing to speculate how this class of people who primarily rely on the twin pillars of learning and piety might negotiate with the emerging values of New India—heavily consumptive and nationalistic at the same time. Since this class has immense faith in its own capacity—creative, analytical or argumentative— and on the networks of the select, the first moves to enthuse the government or other funding bodies inevitably begin with a subtle form of paternalism: the view that taste can be created by