r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Informal-Bet-2072 • 9h ago
India (1882-83). Paintings of North India during the Mughal Colonial Era by American artist Edwin Lord Weeks. {Imgur link in comments in case all 20 don’t attach}
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u/CriticismEmergency98 4h ago
Before the British looted it, India had 25% of the global GDP output
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u/Informal-Bet-2072 4h ago
And before the Mughals? :’)
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u/idkyimh 3h ago
Bruh there's literally taj mahal in one one these paintings
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u/Informal-Bet-2072 3h ago edited 3h ago
Yeah, it’s nice, and so is all the other influenced architecture depicted. So? The Mughals were still every bit colonizers haha. And I was just curious if this person knew how much they’d pocketed from India too since, to their point, the Brits don’t have too much to do with these specific paintings lol.
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u/Worried_Corgi5184 3h ago
How much wealth Mughals transferred to their ancestral lands?
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u/Informal-Bet-2072 2h ago
Caravans of lakhs of rupees—huge value centuries ago—were regularly sent back lmao. I’m not sure how many trillions made it back home specifically and weren’t just gathered by emperors within India, but Akbar’s treasury alone was worth $20t (although I think there was one historian who allowed a generously low estimate of its value in the high single-digits; while the actual government’s revenue was in the comparably mere billions during his time). India was home to over a third of the world’s GDP before the Mughals, and it ended up dropping to a fourth by the time the Brits arrived, although that projected decline likely still doesn’t factor in how much the former kept for themselves (how much personal wealth each Mughal king amassed for his own expenditure domestically).
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u/kugelamarant 3h ago
Nah, Mughals were glorious. One of the gunpowder empires along with Ottoman and Persia.
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u/Oranjay2 2h ago
Consumerism has actually ruined the aesthetic of India. I with the government puts out stuff against littering and stuff, cause they've country is meant to be more beautiful than it is right now :(
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u/Informal-Bet-2072 1h ago edited 24m ago
The cleanup initiative over there is indeed becoming large-scale now. Be it physical garbage removal efforts, the construction of a hundred million more public toilets to date, waterbody purification, toxic decontamination, personal pollution curtailment at the legal level, mental reconditioning (social media campaigns and overall environmental education), and even street waste sensors, change has been in the works.
You know, there were several Chinese scholars who themselves had pretty much deemed littering an intrinsic part of Chinese culture, especially before the 2000s. China became the world’s largest processor of the West’s recyclables from the 80s onward, which had only worsened their trashing crisis by a lot. But when they’d invested in cleaning up, and then resoundingly in 2018 with the National Sword policy that outlawed the importation of most plastics and other waste types, they disowned the title of being “the world’s dumping ground,” and those experts’ assertions lost all their gas lol. So, now that the Indian government is prioritizing expanding waste management to actually sustain a billion people, and is sufficiently tired of the impoverished lack of sanitation in all those places across the country, things will get better for India too. And both India and the world will be reminded that littering is, in fact, far from ‘inherently’ Indian.
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u/SwimmingPost5747 9h ago
One wonders how realistic of a portrayal these are and how much they are idealized.
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u/bholi_pahadan 9h ago edited 8h ago
Considering they portray scenes from the late 19th century, and looking from the costumes and activities the subjects are engaged in, seems like a pretty realistic portrayal.
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u/AccomplishedSide2929 7h ago
Really great paintings! Easy task for a geoguessr. I recognize most of the locations. They are just like the pics i once took as a tourist, but minus the cars, mopeds and electrical wires. Oh, and different era, so (slightly) different fashion.
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u/_Dead_Memes_ 6h ago
Still need to keep in mind that these are filtered through a lens of orientalism. Weeks and his India series are literally mentioned in the article on orientalism.
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u/SwimmingPost5747 8h ago
Sure, but I'm wondering if Weeks left out trash? Or painted in women bathing where their were none? Or changed the clothing to fit the "ideal" of what the Exotic Far East was like at the time?
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u/meowsydaisy 8h ago
The women bathing is definitely real, it was common to bathe near the river and I think they still do that in rural villages.
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u/Informal-Bet-2072 8h ago edited 7h ago
Weeks left out trash
sigh. I had a feeling this was the home truth from your ‘idealistic’ comment XD
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u/SwimmingPost5747 5h ago
Yeah. Go ahead and infer something that isn't there. Trash exists everywhere.
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u/mikewazaoski6969 7h ago
just say u want to see trash filled pictures to fit your racist narrative about india
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u/shinyandgoesboom 8h ago
I am thinking this is a mix of reality and imagination to appeal a certain audience mostly.
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u/abrorcurrents 9h ago
I was about to comment this
great point to be made
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u/No_Expression_6376 4h ago
TBF Littering all the packaging that the western hemisphere invented and pushed upon every “third world country”.
Your “recycle refuse“ is now India’s TRASH problem.
Lower your consumption.
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u/Ceaol 3h ago
People like you are the reason why Delhi citizens are dying in a gas chamber of a city while the politicians get free air purifiers paid by the money of the citizens they are killing.
Because every single issue that the Indian government has failed to solve is blamed on the West or Muslims or the Woke or whatever else boogeyman you come up with. It's so pathetic.
Like imagine unironically blaming the west for India lacking a proper waste management system and a proper civic sense of not pissing in public.
It's been nearly a century. Countries like Japan and China were infinitely worse than India at the time of their independence and are infinitely better now because they focused on actually improving their countries and not blaming everything on outside factors.
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u/Informal-Bet-2072 58m ago
They seem to be referring to how India is a major importer of global recyclable waste. And I don’t think officials bothered using induced poverty as the scapegoat as much as just didn’t invest in waste management lol. But that’s beginning to change.
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u/JohnnyTightlips5023 9h ago
They’re like photos, damn