How art is helping Britain finally open up to its imperial past

From the 1960s onwards, Britain consciously turned its back on its imperial past, driven by a combination of embarrassment and political correctness. While the Left has treated the imperial legacy as a sort of war crime, the Right has been reluctant to accept Britain's post-imperial responsibilities for asylum and immigration. The result is that a whole generation of younger Britons has grown up with hardly any collective memory of their own quite recent imperial history. There's far more knowledge and awareness of Britain's role in the two world wars than in the century before, when it was the world's leading superpower.

But recently, the way history is looked at in Britain has been changing, especially under the present Conservative government under David Cameron that emphasises the need for more and better history teaching in schools, including the Empire. So it's no coincidence that the major "Artist and Empire" exhibition at the Tate, one of Britain's foremost art galleries, has emerged out of this new space for a more open and less guilt-ridden debate on the imperial past.

Appropriately for an art collection, the focus of the Tate's exhibition is not so much the Empire itself, but on how artists perceived and represented it and were themselves shaped by it. The art represented across seven large rooms is panoramic, assembled from the four corners of the globe and spanning four centuries.

It begins with the early British cartographers who mapped the world as it unfolded, thanks to pioneering explorers and traders, and then moves on to the official and society portraits, history paintings and "conversation pieces" that made the Empire such a favourite subject for British artists.

One of the most exciting paintings on display, and one which would readily strike a chord with Indian visitors, is titled "Colonel Mordaunt's Cock Match". Commissioned by the first governor-general, Warren Hastings, and painted by one of London's leading society painters, Johann Zoffany, it was painted in the 1780s from "real life" scenes in Lucknow, at the court of the Nawab of Awadh, Asaf-ud-Daula.

The Nawab, though a great patron of the arts, was notorious for both his extravagance and debauchery, and was rumoured to have maintained a male harem. The Zoffany painting shows him in an almost supplicant pose towards his personal favourite and captain of guard, the slim and dashing Colonel Mordaunt, while their respective cocks do battle. They are surrounded by Indian and European notables, mingling on remarkably easy and equal social terms.

The painting is full of surprises and ambivalences, including according to Tate conservators, an erection hidden under the Nawab's bulging pyjama. What is most remarkable is the freshness and liveliness of the entire composition, which owes some of its colour and detail to indigenous Mughal miniature styles. The Indian figures, including humble musicians, servants and water-sellers, are painted with an individuality that avoids ethnic stereotypes.

It's a work that epitomises the cultural curiosity and openness of Zoffany's patron, Warren Hastings, and the first generation of British administrators, compared with the far more formal and racially segregated approach of imperial artists half-a-century later.

Perhaps the most interesting room in the exhibition focuses on cross-dressing, in the form of British Empire-builders dressing up in "native" costumes, while prominent "natives" do the reverse. The most memorable and outlandish image is of a British officer decked out from head to toe in the regalia of a Canadian Indian chief, complete with heavy nose-rings and earrings.

More predictable are the often enormous canvases of battles, treaties and ceremonial durbars. We see British visitors at the jewel-bedecked courts of Mughal emperors and Maratha peshwas, but also the human costs of empire to both rulers and ruled.

There are paintings of the Atlantic slave trade, of the last stand of General Gordon at Khartoum, and of British women and children at Kanpur about to be massacred by Indian sepoys during the Great Revolt of 1857. Most haunting and heartrending of all is the return of the sole survivor of the Afghan wars of the 1840s. In stark contrast, we also see Britannia, personified by a huge, very muscular goddess, slaying the ferocious tiger of Indian sepoy rebellion.

True to its multicultural objectives, the exhibition includes miniatures by Mughal and Company school artists, commissioned by British patrons like Warren Hastings and Sir Elijah Impey, the first chief justice of the Indian Supreme Court. Their work contains a remarkable fusion and invigoration of Indian miniature techniques with Western colours and perspective.

The creative interaction between indigenous and Western art styles is also illustrated by the paintings of Raja Ravi Varma, Rabindranath Tagore and the Bengali renaissance, and later by the nationalism and modernism of painters like Jamini Roy.

The final section takes in the art of the postcolonial and postmodern period, ranging from work by Krishan Khanna to the contemporary British Asian, twin Singh sisters, with their hugely entertaining pastiche of modern and Indian miniature styles in their works about migration to multicultural Britain.

The exhibition was launched with a conference of art curators, anthropologists and historians, to which I was invited as a panellist. It was opened by the octagenarian black Guyanese painter, Frank Bowling, who frankly admitted that he regretted the transition from colonial British Guyana to the new, independent Guyana. He explained that the Empire gave him opportunities to study and perfect his modern art in ways which would never have been open to him otherwise.

A recurrent theme of the conference was whether imperialism destroyed indigenous artistic traditions, appropriated them for its own ends and supplanted them with Western impositions. The role of the Raj's newly established art schools in the major Indian cities was a case in point. Their aim was to combine the excellence of Indian decorative arts with the scientific and geometrical accuracy of Western naturalism.

Much of what emerged was imitative and mediocre; but on the positive side, were the wonderful Indo-Saracenic friezes decorating Bombay's Victoria Terminus, sculpted by students of Rudyard Kipling's father at the JJ School of Art.

Many of the European art teachers who staffed these new schools found Indian temple sculpture alien and grotesque, but they still loved the frescoes at Ajanta and saved some of them for posterity by copying them before they faded.

The conference had its fair share of those who still adhere to the very crude and simplistic anti-Orientalism of the late Palestinian-American academic, Edward Said. And so we argued about what someone called "the horny old chestnut of colonial gaze". Were the Western artists who painted colonial subjects, the linguists and anthropologists who studied the languages, literature and customs of the Orient and the British museums who collected Oriental art inspired by a desire to expropriate or appropriate for imperialist ends? The consensus was that cultural curiosity and a lust for knowledge were at least as important driving forces as a desire for ownership.

In the case of India, there was no indigenous tradition of excavating or conserving cultural heritage until the British came along. Muslim dynasties, of course, had no interest in preserving idolatrous Hindu temples, and those not in worship disappeared like Khajuraho into the surrounding jungles.

It was left to enlightened colonial civil servants like Sir Walter Elliot of Madras to discover and excavate the wonderful Amaravati marbles, now in the British Museum. Later, it was viceroy Lord Curzon who set up the Archaeolical Survey of India, legally protecting historic cultural sites.

Anti-imperial conspiracy theorists have constructed a rather far-fetched scenario to explain such cultural patronage. Imperialists like Curzon, they allege, wanted to "re-discover" India's classical heritage in order, by comparison, to denigrate the country's more recent, decadent past and thereby legitimise their own rule. But if that was really their aim, couldn't they have saved themselves a lot of expense and bother by simply ignoring India's past cultural riches?

And surely it was the re-discovery of that classical heritage, through Western education, that inspired indigenous art historians like Ananda Coomaraswamy, cultural revivalists like Rabindranath Tagore and even nationalist leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru.

The conference ended with a plenary session, in which a member of the audience asked if we on the panel were sitting on the fence by not condemning the Empire as "bad". My response was to point out that, prior to the 19th century nation-state, the Empire had been the default mode of governance for several millenia, to which every civilised society across the globe aspired, from the Maya in Central America to the Han in China.

We in India had the Mughal and Maratha empires immediately before the British, and before that the Guptas, Kushans and Mauryas. Should we condemn them all as "bad", instead of recognising that many were hugely creative and productive in creating multi-ethnic and multicultural societies that prospered with free trade and good governance?

Of course, there have been empires, or periods of empire, less tolerant and humane and more oppressive than others; one has only to compare the British and Spanish models to see that. But by the same token, would we condemn all nation states as "bad", because the record of 20th-century ethnic cleansing and holocausts in some has been worse than that of any past empire?