पटण्यातील अफूच्या कारखान्याची, शिवलाल (साधारण १८१७-१८८७) यांची १८५७ च्या सुमारास काढलेली १९चित्रे आहेत.
अमिताव घोष त्यांच्या कलेबद्दल लिहतात:
"... The war may also have played a part in imparting something else to Shiva Lal’s images: a subtle, almost involuntary, subversiveness that is strangely incongruent with the intense colonial loyalties that he is said to have displayed in 1857. Whereas both Sherwill and Sita Ram had, each in their own way, portrayed the Opium Factory as a testament to Empire, highlighting the buildings and their monumentality, Shiva Lal’s focus is almost exclusively on the workers and the tasks they perform. The built environment seems scarcely to exist, apart from a few walls and doorways in the background. Much of the factory’s work seems to be happening out of doors, in conditions that are all too grimily familiar in India.
Unlike Sherwill and Sita Ram, Shiva Lal is also attentive to the surveillance that was ever-present in the factory: one of his paintings shows workers being checked as they leave the factory. Even more subversive, perhaps, are his depictions of Indians working in the factory’s chemical laboratories. As Childers points out in her insightful article, to portray Indians as skilled technicians working in a laboratory was to flout colonial conventions, which typically represented natives as technologically inept. This was even more pointedly true of opium factories, where chemical tests had a specifically racial dimension in that they were intended to prevent underpaid Indians from adulterating the product. The success of the tests was thus held to be entirely dependent on ‘strict European superintendence’ because Indians ‘could not altogether be relied upon’.
In their simplicity Shiva Lal’s compositions are representative of the firqa genre; in no sense do they aspire to the perspectival grandeur or pictorial complexity of Sherwill’s and Sita Ram’s paintings, even though the artist was by no means lacking in technical proficiency. Yet, it is instructive to compare Shiva Lal’s pictures with later images of the Patna and Ghazipur opium factories
There are several such photographs dating from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. They mainly show the workers labouring outdoors in grimy, crowded conditions, bare-bodied and clad in dhotis, just as they are in Shiva Lal’s pictures. The buildings that are visible in the background are by no means monumental: they look like low sheds, of the kind that can be seen in any workshop or mill in India. Stranger still, even in the most recent photographs, the processes of production seem to be much like they were back when Shiva Lal painted them.
In short, Shiva Lal’s images may have been exceedingly simple but they were more true to their subject than the highly sophisticated pictures produced by Sherwill and Sita Ram."
('Smoke and Ashes: A Writer's Journey Through Opium's Hidden Histories')
