Sikh Priest reading the Granth, Amritsar

Seeing the commercial opportunities of a subject which had aroused so much attention during the Mutiny, Simpson went to India 'for the purpose of making drawings for a large and important work that should do justice to such a subject' (Autobiography). He arrived in Calcutta in October 1859 and was invited to join Lord Canning's viceregal camp for their triumphal progress through the country in which the Mutiny had taken place. In three years he 'travelled all over India -- to Lahore and Peshawar and up the Khyber Pass; to Simla and, sixteen marches beyond it, to the Sutlej. He sketched Thugs in Jabalpur and then set off in a dooley (a sort of light palanquin) for the wild in-between places ("It is in these spaces that the real India exists"). He travelled to Bhilsa, to find Buddhist architecture, and to the source of the Ganges in the Himalayas, and to out-of-the-way Chitor, before the railway. All the while, he was sketching. He estimated that on his Indian journey he covered 22,570 miles.' (P. Theroux in M. Archer and P. Theroux, op. cit., p.6).

Simpson was upcountry at Amritsar in March 1860, just ahead of his first Himalayan tour. The present watercolour, worked up on his return to England in 1864, was included in the May 1864 exhibition of 200 of his Indian watercolours. With the collapse of Day and Son, which spelt the end of Simpson's grand scheme to publish three richly-illustrated volumes on India, the watercolour was one of 50 finished works included in Sir John Kaye's India Ancient and Modern, ('most of the subjects ... poorly reproduced'), published by Day and Son's liquidators. Further exhibitions of Simpson's Indian work followed in 1866 (50 more drawings) and 1869 (189 watercolours), priced at £15 for the large and 10gns for the small ones and sold off 'as a sort of bankrupt stock'.