A 'huqqa-burdar'

The pictures made by Indian artists for the British in India are called Company paintings. This one comes from a set. The other pictures are in the British Library. Shaikh Muhammad Amir, who painted this picture around 1845, was a distinguished Company artist who worked in the Karraya suburb of Calcutta. From about the 1780s British residents began to move out of the city centre to the pleasant new suburbs of Chowringhee and Garden Reach. Here local artists found plenty of work. Shaikh Muhammad Amir specialised in depicting the houses and domestic staff of British suburbanites. The man in the painting is a huqqa-burdar ('huqqa-bearer'). This was 'a servant whose duty it was to attend to his master's hooka [huqqa], and who considered that duty sufficient to occupy his time' . The definition comes from Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary (first published 1886).