You, looking at me? I see you too

Standing there in a gallery.  Or at your screen.

Well, can't you see I have mine and I am painting 

You. 

No doubt you are writing. 

I am too.  

Your 'art history'. 

Yes that's it. Your art will be history.

Mine is ever a present.  You can take your time unwrapping my present.

Not my time - you can't steal that. 

Though you have. Making your regency bucks

Going native while

your lady sips  tea with her pride in the finest china

gunboat opium - fair-trade, what?

news travels faster than you think

your prejudiced

legacy of brown-sahibs and bleached mughals

loving the romance exotic

Just look into my eyes. You are blanked out.

My assistants know that look. Your orders through them.

Wait. I have not finished scrutinising you.

I am Yellapah of Vellore.

Reference:

||Yellapah of Vellore, whose fantastic ochre-pigment "Self-Portrait" (ca. 1832-1835) greets visitors to Forgotten Masters, was Zain ud-Din's opposite in many ways. The first was geographical; Yellapah hailed from South India. He was also a "picture moochie" — a member of the leather-working caste that many Tanjore school artists belonged to. Yellapah did not train in Mughal ateliers but had an equally brilliant style and an astute sensitivity to the changing cultural focus of his European patrons.  Yellapah painted in the first decades of the 19th century – a time when the cosmopolitan Orientalist obsession with India's antiquarian past had been replaced with a contemptuous and racialized desire to document its people. His depiction of "Three Ascetics" (ca. early 19th Century) recalls the ethnographic photographs commissioned by the British Raj, with the mendicants classified into archetypal figures of Vaishnavas and Saivaites (devotees to the Hindu gods Vishnu and Shiva respectively). Interestingly, he never depicted Europeans in his work; perhaps a subtle show of resistance.// https://hyperallergic.com/544531/remembering-indias-forgotten-artistic-masters/