Raja Ravi Varma - Indian painter

Orientalism was not a one way street. Typically, we think of it as a situation where European artists depicted oriental subjects. Some of the more interesting cases, however, are where oriental artists adopted European conventions and practices and joined the fun. This again undercuts the simplistic (Saidean) characterization of orientalist art as exploitative. The fact is, rather, that many artists in the colonial era admired and aspired to European standards. One particularly stunning example of this is the great Indian artist Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906). Here we have an Indian artist living under the British Raj who admired and then acquired the skills of European (orientalist) painting and then applied those skills to subjects from Indian (Hindu) mythology.

 Ravi Varma's works have now become the classical depictions of Hindu mythology in modern times. They are copied and reproduced and you will find them not only in books but in many Indian homes. They have had a profound impact upon the Indian imagination - when Hindus think of scenes from their mythology do tend to do so through the filter of Ravi Varma's idealised depictions. Here below are some examples of his work, including perhaps his most famous and copied work 'Dhamayanthi and the Swan'.

The Sandhurst Coffee Palace - some local history

This article has been hoisted from another of my ill-fated blogs. As I discontinue that blog, bits I deem worth saving will migrate here. This is one such bit. 

The picture above shows the Sandhurst Coffee Palace, Bendigo, 1890s. You might suspect that the coffee was fairly ordinary in those days; it is hard to imagine that you'd get a decent coffee in a dusty goldmining town in far away southern Australia. But you'd be wrong.

Local coffee production began in Australia in the northern parts of Queensland in the 1880s. Australian soils produced a good flavoured coffee bean with distinct caramel qualities. The venture was so successful that Australian grown coffee won awards in Europe in the late 1880s. The industry prospered and supplied high quality beans to food stores throughout Australia until the coffee growing region was hit by a tsunami in the early 1900s. By then there was a lack of labour needed to rebuild and coffee growing - and coffee drinking - went into decline in Australia.

But our photograph is from 1890s, before the death of the industry. And it is in Bendigo, then one of the wealthiest cities in the country. We can therefore assume that the coffee served at this illustrious establishment was probably quite good. The usual practice was to roast and grind beans on the premises. These would have been Queensland-grown beans which were world-class.

We tend to think that coffee drinking is a relatively new trend in Australia. In the post-war period, certainly, tea-drinking was the norm in working class and middle class Australia. There was instant coffee, but more sophisticated versions of the beverage were associated with Italians and other post-war migrants ("wogs"). Coffee drinking and a coffee culture has only emerged from the 1980s onwards, that is in the last few decades. But actually, there was a thirty year period, from about 1880 to 1910, when coffee drinking (with good beans) was popular in Australia. Our photograph is evidence of it. The Sandhurst Coffee Palace is as big as a hotel. It is a picture of coffee drinking on a grand scale. It is not a shop, not a cafe, it's a "palace"!

How was the coffee prepared? Microfoaming wasn't developed until the second half of the twentieth century, so any frothing, either of coffee (for creme) or of milk would have been done by hand whisks or by drawing air between cups, a method you can still see being done in India and other ploaces today. Sugar was plentiful in Australia, also being grown in Queensland, so we can gather that coffee was drunk with sugar to taste. Or perhaps it was only consumed black? It is hard to establish what modes of coffee were available to the paying customer. The large number of Germans in Bendigo, suggests that the Viennese ways of enjoying coffee were probably preferred.

Another point to note: Coffee drinking in this period was a distinctly "Orientalist" activity. Coffee drinking was first developed in the Islamic world, initially among the Sufi brotherhoods. In the 1890s, the time of our photograph, Europeans had a sympathetic fascination with the "Orient". We can see this in the art produced and collected at this time which is still on display in the Bendigo Art Gallery; orientalist paintings. At this time, coffee drinking would have been a part of that aesthetic.

In the second wave of coffee drinking - the contemporary wave - coffee has been associated with "multiculturalism" and post-war immigration Australia, not with the "orientalism" of the British Empire. This is the important difference between the two waves. To schematize it, there are several styles or schools of coffee drinking. There are oriental styles (like Turkish coffee) and then there are the European appropriations, specifically through Vienna and through Italy (Venice). Coffee in Australia today is predominantly of the Italian school. If you train as a barista, it is Italian coffee making you learn. The cappuccino, espresso, machiato – these are all italian. In the 1890s, though, the oriental styles and the Viennese appropriations would have been in vogue. Or so we can surmise.

The Sandurst Coffee Palace is long gone. Australia and the world at large have changed. Thankfully, though, Sandhurst is now Bendigo and Bendigo is once more a place where enthusiasts and aficionados can again enjoy a decent cup of coffee, the so-called “wine of Islam”, the world’s most popular drug.