X-Social Science-picture based Questions History

X-Social Science-picture based Questions

History

1. The Rise of Nationalism in Europe.

Picture

Description

v In 1848, Frédéric Sorrieu, a French artist, prepared a series of four prints.

v visualising his dream of a world made up of ‘democratic and social Republics

v The cover of a German almanac

v by the journalist Andreas Rebmann in 1798.

v The image of the French Bastille being stormed by the revolutionary crowd has been placed next to a similar fortress meant to represent the bastion of despotic rule in the German province of Kassel.

v Accompanying the illustration is the slogan: ‘The people must seize their own freedom!’

v Rebmann lived in the city of Mainz and was a member of a German Jacobin group

v The Planting of Tree of Liberty in Zweibrücken, Germany.

v The subject of this colour print by the German painter Karl Kaspar Fritz is the occupation of the town of Zweibrückenby the French armies.

v The plaque being affixed to the Tree of Liberty carries a German inscription which in translation reads: ‘Take freedom and equality from us, the model of humanity.’

v This is a sarcastic reference to the claim of the French as being liberators who opposed monarchy in the territories they entered

v The courier of Rhineland loses all that he has on his way home from Leipzig.

v Napoleon here is represented as a postman on his way back to France after he lost the battle of Leipzig in 1813.

v Each letter dropping out of his bag bears the names of the territories he lost.

v The Club of Thinkers, anonymous caricature dating to c. 1820.

v The plaque on the left bears the inscription: ‘The most important question of today’s meeting: How long will thinking be allowed to us?’

v The board on the right lists the rules of the Club which include the following:

v ‘1. Silence is the first commandment of this learned society.

v 2. To avoid the eventuality whereby a member of this club may succumb to the temptation of speech, muzzles will be distributed to members upon entering.’

v Giuseppe Mazzini and the founding of Young Europe in Berne 1833.

v Print by Giacomo Mantegazza.

v The Massacre at Chios, Eugene Delacroix, 1824.

v The French painter Delacroix was one of the most important French Romantic painters.

v This huge painting (4.19m x 3.54m) depicts an incident in which 20,000 Greeks were said to have been killed by Turks on the island of Chios. By dramatising the incident, focusing on the suffering of women and children, and using vivid colours, Delacroix sought to appeal to the emotions of the spectators, and create sympathy for the Greeks.

v Peasants’ uprising, 1848.

v The Frankfurt parliament in the Church of St Paul.

v Contemporary colour print. Notice the women in the upper left gallery

v The proclamation of the German empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, Anton von Werner.

v At the centre stands the Kaiser and the chief commander of the Prussian army, General von Roon. Near them is Bismarck.

v This monumental work (2.7m x 2.7m) was completed and presented by the artist to Bismarck o the latter’s 70th birthday in 1885.

v Caricature of Otto von Bismarck in the German reichstag (parliament)

v from Figaro, Vienna, 5 March 1870.

v Garibaldi helping King Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia-Piedmont to pull on the boot named ‘Italy’.

v English caricature of 1859.

v Postage stamps of 1850 with the figure of Marianne representing the Republic of France.

v Germania, Philip Veit, 1848.

v The artist prepared this painting of Germania on a cotton banner, as it was meant to hang from the ceiling of the Church of St Paul where the Frankfurt parliament was convened in March 1848.

Meanings of the symbols

Attribute	Significance
Broken chains	Being freed
Breastplate with eagle	Symbol of the German empire – strength
Crown of oak leaves	Heroism
Sword	Readiness to fight
Olive branch around the sword	Willingness to make peace
Black, red and gold tricolour	Flag of the liberal-nationalists in 1848, banned by the Dukes of the German states
Rays of the rising sun	Beginning of a new era

The fallen Germania, Julius Hübner, 1850

Germania guarding the Rhine.

v In 1860, the artist Lorenz Clasen was commissioned to paint this image.

v The inscription on Germania’s sword reads: ‘The German sword protects the German Rhine.’

A map celebrating the British Empire.

v At the top, angels are shown carrying the banner of freedom. In the foreground, Britannia the symbol of the British nation is triumphantly sitting over the globe.

v The colonies are represented through images of tigers, elephants, forests and primitive people.

v The domination of the world is shown as the basis of Britain’s national pride.

2. Nationalism in India

Picture	Description
	v 6 April 1919. v Mass processions on the streets became a common feature during the national movement.
	Indian workers in South Africa march through Volksrust, 6 November 1913. v Mahatma Gandhi was leading the workers from Newcastle to Transvaal. v When the marchers were stopped and Gandhiji arrested, thousands of more workers joined the satyagraha against racist laws that denied rights to non-whites.
	v General Dyer’s ‘crawling orders’ being administered by British soldiers, Amritsar, Punjab, 1919.
	The boycott of foreign cloth, July 1922. v Foreign cloth was seen as the symbol of Western economic and cultural domination
	Chauri Chaura, 1922. v At Chauri Chaura in Gorakhpur, a peaceful demonstration in a bazaar turned into a violent clash with the police. v Hearing of the incident, Mahatma Gandhi called a halt to the Non-Cooperation Movement.
	Meeting of Congress leaders at Allahabad, 1931. v Apart from Mahatma Gandhi, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel (extreme left), Jawaharlal Nehru (extreme right) and Subhas Chandra Bose (fifth from right).
	The Dandi march. v During the salt march Mahatma Gandhi was accompanied by 78 volunteers. v On the way they were joined by thousands.
	v Police cracked down on satyagrahis, 1930.
	Women join nationalist processions. v During the national movement, many women, for the first time in their lives, moved out of their homes on to a public arena. v Amongst the marchers you can see many old women, and mothers with children in their arms.
	Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Maulana Azad at Sevagram shram, Wardha, 1935.
	Bal Gangadhar Tilak, an early-twentieth-century print. v Notice how Tilak is surrounded by symbols of unity. v The sacred institutions of different faiths (temple, church, masjid) frame the central figure.
	Bharat Mata, Abanindranath Tagore, 1905. v Notice that the mother figure here is shown as dispensing learning, food and clothing. v The mala in one hand emphasises her ascetic quality. v Abanindranath Tagore, like Ravi Varma before him, tried to develop a style of painting that could be seen as truly Indian.
	Nehru is here shown holding the image of Bharat Mata and the map of India close to his heart. v In a lot of popular prints, nationalist leaders are shown offering their heads to Bharat Mata. v The idea of sacrifice for the mother was powerful within popular imagination.
	Bharat Mata. v This figure of Bharat Mata is a contrast to the one painted by Abanindranath Tagore. v Here she is shown with a trishul, standing beside a lion and an elephant both symbols of power and authority.
	Women’s procession in Bombay during the Quit India Movement

The Making of a Global World

Picture	Description
	v Image of a ship on a memorial stone, Goa Museum, tenth century CE. v From the ninth century, images of ships appear regularly in memorial stones found in the western coast, indicating the significance of oceanic trade.
	v Silk route trade as depicted in a Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave 217, Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China.
	v Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods, from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels, fifteenth century.
	v The Irish Potato Famine, Illustrated v London News, 1849. v Hungry children digging for potatoes in a field that has already been harvested, hoping to discover some leftovers. v During the Great Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1849), around 1,000,000 people died of starvation in Ireland, and double the number emigrated in search of work.

Print Culture and the Modern World

Picture	Description
	v Book making before the age of print, from Akhlaq-i-Nasiri, 1595. v This is a royal workshop in the sixteenth century, much before printing began in India.
	v A page from the Diamond Sutra.
	v Belonging to the mid-13^th century, printing woodblocks of the Tripitaka Koreana . v Collection of Buddhist scriptures. They were engraved on about 80,000 woodblocks. v They were inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2007.
	v Kitagawa Utamaro, born in Edo in 1753, v Widely known for his contributions to an art form called ukiyo (‘pictures of the floating world’) or depiction of ordinary human experiences, especially urban ones.
	v A morning scene, ukiyo print by Shunman Kubo, late eighteenth century. v A man looks out of the window at the snowfall while women prepare tea and perform other domestic duties.
	v The Jikji of Korea is among the world’s oldest existing books printed with movable metal type. v It contains the essential features of Zen Buddhism. About 150 monks of India, China and Korea are mentioned in the book. v It was printed in late 14th century. v While the first volume of the book is unavailable, the second one is available in the National Library of France. v This work marked an important technical change in the print culture. v That is why it was inscribed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2001.
	v A Portrait of Johann Gutenberg, 1584.
	Gutenberg Printing Press. v Gutenberg developed metal types for each of the 26 characters of the Roman alphabet and devised a way of moving them around so as to compose different words of the text. v The Gutenberg press could print 250 sheets on one side per hour.
	Pages of Gutenberg’s Bible, the first printed book in Europe. v Gutenberg printed about 180 copies, of which no more than 50 have survived.
	A printer’s workshop, sixteenth century. v This picture depicts what a printer’s shop looked like in the sixteenth century. v Compositors are at work, v galleys are being prepared and ink is being applied on the metal types; v The printers are turning the screws of the press, proofreaders are at work.
	J.V. Schley, L’Imprimerie, 1739. v On two sides of the goddess, blessing the machine, are Minerva (the goddess of wisdom) and Mercury (the messenger god, also symbolising reason). v The women in the foreground are holding plaques with the portraits of six pioneer printers of different countries. v
	The macabre dance. v This sixteenth-century print shows how the fear of printing was dramatised in visual representations of the time.
	The nobility and the common people before the French Revolution, a cartoon of the late eighteenth century. v The cartoon shows how the ordinary people – peasants, artisans and workers – had a hard time while the nobility enjoyed life and oppressed them.
	Frontispiece of Penny Magazine. v Penny Magazine was published between 1832 and 1835 in England by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. v It was aimed primarily at the working class.
	Advertisements at a railway station in England, a lithograph by Alfred Concanen, 1874. v Printed advertisements and notices were plastered on street walls, railway platforms and public buildings.
	Pages from the Gita Govinda of Jayadeva, eighteenth century. v This is a palm-leaf handwritten manuscript in accordion format.
	Pages from the Diwan of Hafiz, 1824. v Hafiz was a fourteenth-century poet whose collected works are known as Diwan.
	Pages from the Rigveda. v This manuscript was produced in the eighteenth century in the Malayalam script.
	Raja Ritudhwaj rescuing Princess Madalsa from the captivity of demons, print by Ravi Varma. v Raja Ravi Varma produced innumerable mythological paintings that were printed at the Ravi Varma Press
	The cover page of Indian Charivari. v The Indian Charivari was one of the many v journals of caricature and satire published in the late nineteenth century. v The Indians are being shown a copy of Punch, the British journal of cartoons and satire. v You can almost hear the British master say – ‘This is the model, produce Indian versions of it.’
	Ghor Kali (The End of the World), coloured woodcut, late nineteenth century. v The artist’s vision of the destruction of proper family relations.
	An Indian couple, black and white woodcut. The image shows the artist’s fear that the cultural impact of the West has turned the family upside down. v The move towards women’s education in the late nineteenth century created anxiety about the breakdown of traditional family roles.
	A European couple sitting on chairs, nineteenth-century woodcut. v The picture suggests traditional family roles. v The Sahib holds a liquor bottle in his hand while the Memsahib plays the violin.
	Lakshminath Bezbaruah (1868–1938) v He was a doyen of modern Assamese literature. v Burhi Aair Sadhu (Grandma’s Tales) is among his notable works. v He penned the popular song of Assam, ‘O Mor Apunar Desh’ (O’ my beloved land).