Posted on: 8 March 2014

Two workers are shown carrying an opium crate away. One of a series representing the processes in the manufacture of opium at the Opium Factory at Gulzarbagh, Patna, in Bihar.
ca.1857

By Shiva Lal

Painting; gouache on mica

This Company Painting (a painting made by an Indian artist for the British in India) is done on mica (talc) and comes from a series of nineteen illustrating processes in the manufacture of opium at the opium factory at Gulzarbagh in Patna, Bihar. According to the artist Ishwari Prasad, his grandfather, Shiva Lal (c.1817-1887), began to make the designs for these paintings in 1857. They were commissioned by Dr D. R. Lyall (the personal assistant in charge of opium-making) for a series of wall paintings in the Gulzarbagh factory. However, Lyall was killed in 1857, during the so-called Indian Mutiny, and the scheme was abandoned.

This picture shows two men carrying a pole over their shoulders to which a crate is attached by means of a rope. The crate is marked 'PATNA OPIUM', followed by an East India Company stamp and a stock number.

Copyright: © V&A Images.


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Peter Moss..attention

Destined, no doubt, for the factories in the Pearl River. As Lord Gladstone said in Parliament: Does he know that the opium smuggled into China comes exclusively from British ports, that it is from Bengal and through Bombay? If that is a fact-and I defy the right honourable Gentleman to gainsay it-then we require no preventive service to put down this illegal traffic. We have only to stop the sailings of the smuggling vessels; it is a matter of certainty that if we stopped the exportation of opium from Bengal, and broke up the depôt at Lintin, and checked the cultivation of it in Malwa, and put a moral stigma upon it, that we should greatly cripple, if not extinguish, the trade in it .

Typical of Gladstone. Moralistic, self righteous rhetoric.