Can one really fail to see colonialism in almost everything as a South Asian? Sathnam Sanghera, author of Empireworld, and I would disagree. As I wrote in an earlier blog, ‘Cursed with Context: A historian’s lament’, bliss belongs to the ignorant; historians inherit contexts, and occasional sleepless nights.

Sanghera recounts how, in an attempt to take a break, he once travelled to Barbados for a beach holiday, only to find himself unable to stop thinking about how the island had been a ‘leading sugar colony and the jewel in the crown of England’s western empire’. It is a familiar affliction based on the inability to un-see history once you have learnt how to look.

I digress. Or perhaps not entirely.

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When I decided to visit Delhi Art Gallery’s recent exhibition, The Indian Picturesque: Landscape Painting 1800–1850, I did what most historians do out of habit, I read about it first. What struck me immediately was its willingness to revisit the fraught relationship between colonial ‘ways of seeing’ and our own enduring aesthetic attraction to these images.

Postcolonial scholarship has long taught us to read British landscape painting in India as more than benign representation, but as a visual technology of empire. These works rendered land legible, mappable, and therefore, in a sense, ownable. They aestheticised the ‘Orient’ even as they participated in its control.

And yet, the exhibition poses a more uncomfortable question: why do these images still resonate?

Part of the answer, I suspect, lies in what they offer us—a version of the landscape stripped of the visual noise of the present. No concrete flyovers, no glass towers, no metro lines slicing through old neighbourhoods. What they present instead is a composed, harmonious world that aligns uncannily with our own aesthetic longing. To admit this is not to absolve their politics, but it does complicate them. It tempts us, however cautiously, to extend a certain ‘benefit of doubt’.

This tension deepens when we consider that the ‘picturesque’ (from the theme of the exhibition) was not merely a colonial imposition but also a circulating aesthetic. The landscape school that emerged in this period went on to influence Indian artists themselves, unsettling any easy reading of art as a one-directional tool of imperial control.

The exhibition leans into this ambiguity by returning to the eighteenth-century meaning of the term ‘picturesque’, literally, ‘like a picture’. Emerging in the 1790s, it referred not simply to beauty, but to a particular kind of visual harmony, that is, architecture nestled within a bewitching landscape, composed for the eye. It was, in effect, a way of seeing that would go on to shape painters, architects, and even landscape gardeners of the successive centuries.

But can such images, so entangled in the history of empire, really be granted the ‘benefit of doubt’?

I had to see for myself.

And what did I conclude? That I could not quite shake off the colonialism embedded in these works. If the landscapes invited a certain aesthetic generosity, the people within them resisted it. They appeared as rustic, simplified, and at times almost staged in their ‘backwardness’, quietly reinforcing the same visual logic that made the land seem available for intervention, even justifying, in subtle ways, the so-called ‘white man’s burden’ to civilise.

If anything, the exhibition left me exactly where it found me, caught between admiration and unease.

Perhaps that is the historian’s predicament: to recognise beauty, but never without its baggage; to look, but never innocently.

The picturesque, in the end, does not let us choose between aesthetic pleasure and political critique. It demands that we sit with both and accept that some ways of seeing can never be entirely unlearned.