Add Or 1816-1835

Add.Or.1816-1835

20 drawings depicting various processes in the manufacture of opium at the Gulzarbagh Factory, Patna.

By Shiva Lal (c.1817-c.1887), Patna, 1857.

Inscribed on back by W.G. Archer: ‘Shiva Lal. Sketch for an opium set, c.1857.’

Unfinished; pencil, apart from the first in pencil and water-colour; 9.25 by 7.25 ins.

Presented by Mildred and W.G. Archer, 1 May 1961.

Note: Obtained at Patna in 1948 by W.G. Archer from Ishwari Prasad, grandson of Shiva Lal. According to him they were first mde by Shiva Lal in 1857 as part of a scheme for a series of wall-paintings in the Gulzarbagh Factory at Patna to illustrate the manufacture of opium. They were prepared, he said, at the suggestion of ‘Lyell Sahib, a personal assistant in charge of opium, Bihar’, who was later killed in the Mutiny riots at Patna. According to Ishwari Prasad, his grandfather, Shiva Lal, went weeping to his house and ‘painted his portrait as he lay dead’. When the scheme for the murals did not materialise, Shiva Lal used the designs for stock sets on paper and mica for which these were preliminary drawings. Add.Or.1820 showing an Englishman testing opium, may well be a portrait of Lyell.

Ishwari Prasad’s information based on oral family tradition is remarkably in line with what is known of Dr Robert Lyell (1825-57) as officially, recorded. He had come to India as a member of the Bengal Medical service in 1845. After being posted as an Assistant Surgeon in the Punjab and on the North West Frontier, he went in 1854 as opium examiner and first assistant to the Benares Opium Agency, and in February 1856 was transferred to Patna as principal assistant to the Opium Agent, Bihar. He was shot by members of a Muslim mob in Patna on 3 July 1857 when boldly riding towards them in the hope that a resolute act would disperse them. Lyell was the author of ‘Notes on the Patna Opium Agency’, 1857 (see D.G. Crawford, ‘Roll of the Indian medical service 1615-1930’ (London, 1930), p.133). Lyell’s suggestion for wall-paintings may have been prompted by earlier sets of drawings on paper and mica. When the botanist, Joseph Hooker, visited the Gulzarbagh factory on his way to Sikkim in March 1848 he watched the manufacture of opium there and was given a complete set of specimens, implements and drawings of the process. They were exhibited at Kew in the Museum of Economic Botany (see Mea Allen, ‘The Hookers of Kew: 1785-1911’ (London, 1967), 163).