Caves of Elephanta Bombay

Initialled "R.W Arrad, H.M.S Hydra" (verso)

1868

Watercolour on paper

6.75 x 9.75 in   |  17 x 24.5 cm

ENTRANCE TO THE GREAT CAVE, ELEPHANTA — R. W. ARRAD, 1868

The album that contained this work is signed by the crew/artist: 'R.W Arrad, H.M.S Hydra'. The Royal Navy was launched in 1838 and decommissioned in 1870.

Arrad’s on-the-spot watercolour belongs to a much longer arc of fascination with Elephanta (Gharapuri). Even in the early eighteenth century, when the island remained under Portuguese control, curiosity about its “subterranean caverns” drew the attention of company officials: Governor Charles Boone of Bombay secured special permission to send a small party to examine the celebrated antiquities (Elephanta and nearby Kanheri), producing what is now regarded as the earliest written notice of the caves. As political stability returned to the Bombay region in the later 1700s, company-related excursions became almost routine; Elephanta doubled as a site of polite sociability and wonder, with one resident recalling that an English guest, despite high expectations, “however highly he had raised his imagination, on entering this stupendous scene he was so absorbed in astonishment and delight as to forget where he was.”

Dated 1868, Arrad’s sheet sits precisely at the cusp between this tradition of enlightened curiosity and the arrival of formal archaeological study. It records the approach to the Great Cave (Cave 1)—the track from the shore, the columned portico and fenced forecourt—rendered with a surveyor’s clarity that reflects the draughtsman’s naval training (H.M.S. Hydra was paid off that same year). Within a few years James Burgess would publish the first monograph on the site (1871), and the Archaeological Survey of India would standardise documentation; in this light, Arrad’s intimate monochrome wash complements early photographs by Bourne, Murray and Burgess, preserving the site’s nineteenth-century setting before later interventions.

More than a traveller’s souvenir, the drawing bridges three centuries of looking at Elephanta—from early Company forays and Georgian picnic parties to Victorian scholarship—while quietly affirming the island’s enduring power to astonish.

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