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Indian Art and Imperialism: The Collections of the V&A
From: The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Partha Mitter |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The ambivalence of British attitudes toward India--"the jewel in the crown" of the Empire--can be traced through the development of the Victoria and Albert Museum's Indian collections. Partha Mitter explores the changing relationships between imperial ideology and acquisitions and display at the museum. |
 he Indian collection of the V&A served as a perfect tool for constructing cultural difference and reinforcing racial hierarchy. The evolution of the collection and its display reveal
--to a degree that few Western collections can--the British ambivalence toward India, especially Hindu India, as evoked by E.M. Forster in A Passage to India. India's size and complexity, its extremes and its seeming lack of understatement have both fascinated and repelled the West. Just when one felt confident that India was under control, it suddenly reverted to its true nature: eluding understanding, escaping into its own world of disgusting cults, weird customs and lascivious fakirs. And no other aspect of India evoked more fascinated horror in the West than the sculptures of Hindu "monstrous" gods. |
The nucleus of the Indian collection, the rich array of Indian applied arts, goes back to the Great Exhibition of 1851, where Indian textiles and other applied arts were admired for preserving a traditional sense of design and used as exemplars for students. Owen Jones pointed out that in "the equal distribution of the surface ornament over the grounds, the Indians exhibit an instinct and perfection of drawing perfectly marvellous" (p. 2, The Grammar of Ornament, London: Day & Son, 1856), while Richard Redgrave used Indian design to challenge the Victorian weakness for illusionist patterns, agreeing with Jones that decoration should not be constructed but construction should be decorated. |
Paradoxically, this new appreciation only helped reinforce the prevailing antipathy toward Hindu sculpture and architecture. Sir George Birdwood, a great champion of Indian decorative arts and an advisor to the Museum, spoke for the educated Victorian when he declared that the "monstrous shapes of the Puranic deities are unsuitable for the higher forms of artistic representation; and this is possibly why sculpture and painting are unknown, as fine arts, in India." |
Hindu art could, however, be of antiquarian interest. The commissioning of the model of Tirumal Nayak's Pudu Mandapa and related drawings
--among the earliest examples of Hindu art to arrive in Britain--illustrates not only the curiosity shown by antiquarians but also the burgeoning interest in Hinduism prompted by the Enlightenment. Another "mirror of Hindoo life held up to Englishmen," showing India's "venerable civilisation and native artistic genius," was a group of Mughal hard stones, among the finest objects from the imperial household. This impressive collection was assembled by Colonel Seton Guthrie, a wealthy officer in the Bengal Engineers, and included Shah Jahan's exquisite white nephrite wine cup, which was shown at the Paris exhibition in 1867. Part of the collection was acquired by the Museum the following year, although the Shah Jahan wine cup remained with Guthrie and, in fact, did not reach the Museum until 1962. |
The India Museum
Both the model and the Guthrie hard stones came to the V&A with the contents of the India Museum, formed by the East India Company. From the early nineteenth century the India Museum, located in the nation's capital, had been a showcase for the manners and customs of India, "the jewel in the imperial crown." The busts of British conquerors and the spoils of the Indian wars were proudly displayed alongside art manufactures and natural products of India. Tipoo's Tiger, an organ in the form of a tiger mauling an Englishman, originally belonged to one of the great adversaries of the Raj, and its display vindicated Britain's "civilizing mission" by emphasizing the sadistic nature of an Oriental despot. |
In this museum of curiosities, religious sculptures, Richard Johnson's fine collection of miniatures and other art objects jostled for attention with wood and metalwork, textiles, carpets, furniture and assorted crafts. Even Hindu sculptures were included on the grounds that they were "the idols [that were] given up by their former worshippers from a full conviction of the folly and sin of idolatry." Finally, the display of artificial and natural products of India was meant to underline the protective role of the British Raj in shielding traditional India from the threat of Western progress. The India Museum was essentially an ethnographic one, paralleled by the Royal Danish Cabinet of Curiosities with its fourteen Chola bronzes acquired in 1799, or the collection of Indian paintings in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, used by Denis Diderot in his Encyclopédie (1751-72) to illustrate the manners and customs of mankind. |
The India Museum drew large crowds to the pageant of empire. Yet, despite its importance and popularity, it had a checkered history, shunted from the premises of the East India Company to Whitehall and then to the galleries opposite the V&A on the other side of Exhibition Road in South Kensington. From the 1860s, many of the objects in its collection were loaned to international exhibitions periodically held in South Kensington. In 1878-80 the collection was broken up, for it could no longer be maintained on the premises of the India Office. Following a power struggle within the British Raj, the objects were divided between the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum. Significantly, the magnificent early Buddhist reliefs from Amaravati were sent to grace the hallowed portals of the British Museum rather than transferred to South Kensington, even though the reliefs had already been displayed in the latter's Eastern Galleries in 1875. Mistakenly identifying them as "marble" sculptures, though in a "debased" Hellenistic style, the British Museum accorded the Amaravati reliefs a place adjacent to the Elgin Marbles. |
In 1880 the holdings of the India Museum were formally transferred to the Cross Gallery in South Kensington, although many objects from the collection had already been moved there. With the addition of Near and Far Eastern art, the Cross Gallery became a showcase for Oriental art. Indian textiles, metal and wood objects and carpets exhibited at South Kensington had already been used for the teaching of design. It is ironic that while these same Indian industries had been fatally damaged by mass-produced goods from Britain, they were then extolled as the product of Indian "village republics," ideal communities untouched by modern technology. Two other key institutions on the South Kensington site propagated this same image of the Indian collection: the Imperial Institute and its close ally, the Society for the Encouragement and Preservation of Indian Art--together acting as Victorian guardians of the "authentic" Indian tradition. |
Imperial attitudes
If the India Museum was intimately bound up with colonial imperatives of power and control, we may learn much about that imperial ideology through the ways the collection was presented to the English public and described in contemporary guidebooks. Murray's 1874 guide, for example, recommended the India Museum, just before its move to South Kensington, "not only [for its] antiquities and historical relics, but also as an assemblage of the chief and natural productions of India, with specimens of the arts and manufactures, and illustrations of the industry, manners and customs of the various races." |
In the Eastern Galleries of the South Kensington Museum itself, the most striking exhibit was a massive plaster cast of the Eastern Gateway of the Great Buddhist Stupa at Sanchi. Henry Cole's son Henry Hardy Cole, the writer of the first "history of Indian art," arranged the Indian collection into three different periods--Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic--to indicate the contributions to Indian art attributed to the different races, although such a racial classification is not supported by evidence. |
Public response to the Eastern Galleries at South Kensington can be sensed from a report in the American journal Harper's New Monthly Magazine (1875). Seeing the displays as a triumph of Western rationality and order over Oriental superstition and chaos, the writer commented that it "is wonderful indeed that it should be left to this age and to England to appreciate the romance of the East, and to revise, correct and estimate the traditions of the Oriental world concerning its own monarchs." |
In a further paean to Western science, the writer continued, "[T]he large casts of Oriental objects which occupy a grand building to themselves ... will probably be of paramount interest to an American. It is here shown that the most notable and interesting objects in the world can be copied with the utmost exactness and in their actual size, [and] brought within the reach of the people of any country ... Here we have the grand topes of India ... brought before us in full size." Accompanying photographs showed how the casts were made and transported with the "aid of astonished Orientals." |
In 1880 the newly opened India Museum in South Kensington attracted huge crowds, and the curator, Caspar Purdon Clarke, set about augmenting the collection with thousands of additional items imported from India. As the 1885 Baedeker guide indicates, the display was once again based on an ethnographic taxonomy that explicated the cultures of alien races. Apart from eye-catching objects like the Sanchi Gateway and Tipoo's Tiger, fragments of architecture ranging from residential buildings to Mughal public monuments and palaces were featured, along with a wide variety of fabrics and objects of everyday use, as well as information on Indian mores provided by models of domestic scenes and festivals. The arrangement in the nine rooms and the landing continued ethnographic convention by burying Gandharan sculptures among the applied arts. |
When the V&A's Committee on Re-arrangement reported in 1908, this whole display was threatened by the recommendation that the India Museum be abolished and its collections transferred to the main building. Following a vigorous press campaign and the intervention of Lord Curzon, the former viceroy of India, the India Museum was left intact until the 1950s, although the Islamic and Far Eastern collections were incorporated into the V&A. But a grand Oriental Museum combining the resources of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum never ceased to be the dream of the old India hands--most of whom were former members of the imperial civil service, many of whom took up academic or cultural posts upon their return from India--and who became an informal lobby of paternalists deeply committed to preserving traditional Indian culture as they defined it. |
Changing perceptions of Indian art
The same period also marked a watershed in Western perceptions of Indian art. A small group of influential writers, led by E.B. Havell and Ananda Coomaraswamy, aimed at undermining the sacrosanct character of the Western fine arts by arguing that all "true" artistic traditions (i.e., medieval European and Indian) were decorative, the function of other arts being to serve architecture. Havell turned to Indian art as the ideal product of a traditional society. He influenced nationalist artists of Bengal during his tenure as an art teacher in Calcutta (1896-1906). After a stormy meeting at the Royal Society of Arts in 1910 at which Sir George Birdwood made disparaging remarks about Indian art, William Rothenstein, a founder of the New English Art Club, joined with Havell and Coomaraswamy to found the India Society, which, with the support of cultural nationalists such as the poet Rabindranath Tagore, propagated the merits of Indian art. |
A shift of attitude was signalled by a 1918 guidebook's reference to the "important and varied collection of Indian antiquities and modern art in the India Museum," as well as by the clear separation of fine and applied arts in the display of the collection.
Sculpture, pictorial art and calligraphy were assigned separate rooms in the museum, and the elegant Sanchi Torso (mistakenly identified as Gandharan) was given pride of place. However, despite the prominent display of Indian paintings from 1918, Coomaraswamy's reevaluation of Rajput and Pahari miniature painting, the expansion of the sculpture section in 1923 and the eloquent pleading for Hindu art by Havell, pieces such as the Nepalese Bodhisattva, Padmapani, the Lotus Bearer, still hardly qualified as art. The archaeologists continued to carry the day. |
In 1935, K. de B. Codrington, historian of ancient art, took charge of the collection, inaugurating an archaeological approach to Indian art that brought to an end the dominance of decorative art. The thirties were crucial in that under Codrington's influence, Buddhist art was thematically displayed, and, as photographs show, many of the aesthetically important objects were clearly on view. In the same decade, a Chola bronze, an important piece of Hindu sculpture, came to the Museum as part of the Ampthill bequest. Lord Ampthill was governor of Madras in the last century. Among the objects acquired in the 1930s, the large Fremlin carpet is especially significant for its association with colonial history. Produced probably in Lahore for William Fremlin, an official of the East India Company between 1626 and 1644, the carpet was identified in 1882 by its owner as Spanish. Indeed, identifying Indian carpets has been fraught with difficulties. |
Indian independence in 1947 was marked by an ambitious exhibition of Indian art at the Royal Academy (1948-49), in which the V&A played a major part; with the Museum's appointments of W.G. Archer and the textile scholar John Irwin in 1949, the Indian art collection began a new life. As a district officer in Bihar in India in the 1940s, Archer had published on primitive Indian sculpture, collected Indian miniatures and translated Indian poetry. He had also met modern Indian artists in Calcutta. He set about transforming the Indian Section into "a true art museum" by getting rid of ethnological material accumulated from industrial exhibitions over the years, which, he felt, obscured the art objects. To make the art objects intelligible, Archer initiated a regime of specialization, with John Irwin investigating Indian textile styles and their relationship to European designs, and he himself working on miniatures. The latter could be studied particularly profitably at the V&A which, with the acquisition of William Rothenstein's collection in the 1950s, had exceptionally rich material. |
In 1955 the India Museum was transferred to the main Museum premises, and by 1965 the collection attained virtually its present status and shape, with the best-known objects prominently displayed. The latest twist in the dream of a separate Oriental art museum was the St. Georges Hospital site proposed in the 1980s, but this too fell by the wayside. During the heyday of the Raj, the preservation and display of Indian traditional arts was deemed to be an obligation owed to its Indian subjects as part of the imperial trusteeship. With the loss of empire and the ensuing economic decline, that motivation no longer existed. |
This story is an extract from pages 222-229 of "The Imperial Collections: Indian Art," by Partha Mitter, in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, edited by Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson, published by V&A Publications. The exhibition "A Grand Design" was organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art in association with the Victoria and Albert Museum. © The Baltimore Museum of Art and The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1997. |
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