The India Museum Revisited

Front matter

THE INDIA MUSEUM REVISITED

ARTHUR MACGREGOR

Arthur MacGregor

Contents

List of figures ix Foreword by Tristram Hunt xvii Preface XX Acknowledgements xxiii The ‘India Museum Revisited’ project XXV Part I: Historical introduction 1 1. An ‘Oriental Museum’ at the India House 2

Part II: The collections of the India Museum 50 3. Historical relics: their role in the collection 51

4. Trading with and within India: material culture of commerce and control Z7 5. Industry and technology: inorganic materials 100 6. Industry and technology: organic materials 143 7. The mirror of India: clothing, dress and ornament 165 8. Making war: weapons and defensive armour 208 9. Religious observance: introducing Indian devotional practice 256 10. Culture and recreation 277 11. Imaging India 305

Foreword

No other object in the East India Company’s Leadenhall Street Museum could rival ‘Tippoo’s Tiger’. This almost life-size semi-automaton — showing a tiger mauling a man in European clothes — was one of the Company’s most popular exhibits (as it remains at the V&A today). An organ inside the tiger’s flank created sounds intended as either ‘the low growl of the tiger, or the half-suppressed agony of the sufferer’, which echoed eerily around the galleries.

The Tiger was dispatched to the Company headquarters in 1800, after the storming of the Mysore capital, Seringapatam, and the bloody British suppression of the charismatic ruler and resistance leader, Tipu Sultan. The Tiger was seized from the palace’s music room alongside Tipu’s royal treasury, which was valued and divided among the victorious army.

Nowadays, the spoils from Seringapatam, and the circumstances of their seizure, can easily be located within the history of imperial loot and, inevitably, for a museum founded as a government institution during the height of the British Empire, how the South Kensington Museum was enveloped in such exercises of colonial acquisition. Given their historical prominence, it is unsurprising that objects such as these have come to frame much of the debate surrounding the India Museum. Yet, as Arthur MacGregor explains in this rich and fascinating account of the India Museum’s collections — compiled from in-depth research drawing on previously unstudied resources — the story of the India Museum is more complex:

It matters whether items ultimately placed on display [at the India

Museum] in London were acquired in the course of conquest, were purchased in the bazaar, produced in school classrooms,

FOREWORD xvii xviii gathered by proto-ethnographers after use or while still in use, commissioned by European officials according to more or less detailed specifications, or submitted directly or indirectly by Indian manufacturers for display at international exhibitions in the West.

Today, the public is rightly curious about how objects were acquired, who they belonged to and where they came from. If the V&A has traditionally foregrounded design history, there is now a stronger focus on histories of ownership. But it can be astonishing to realize how little museums sometimes know about the provenance of items in their collections. This is all the more surprising given how much we can learn about an object and the worlds it has inhabited over time by understanding who made it and whose hands it subsequently passed through. MacGregor’s valuable sourcebook attempts ‘to give a voice’ to the collection as a whole — over 19,000 objects transferred from the India Museum to the South Kensington Museum in 1879 — providing the provenance detail that has, until now, been largely invisible. MacGregor is clear in his ambition of ‘reuniting the exhibits with the Indian milieu’, sharing object provenance that pre-dates the colonial past and revealing, where records allow, the craftspeople, production methods and societies of origin that gave rise to such an array of artefacts. He seeks to enrich these objects with the world they inhabited before they were obscured by empire.

Yet for many, the contents of the India Museum - the product of East India Company ‘collecting’, whether purchase, gift or loot — will be all too entwined with the history of colonial violence that subdued and seized an entire sub-continent. As MacGregor makes clear, the collection can never be considered an objective representation of Indian culture given the unequal context in which it was developed.

As a museum born of the colonial moment, some of whose collections can be traced back to the East India Company’s repository, it is right that the V&A is fully engaged in this debate, with all its implications for our contemporary role as a place of welcome in the multicultural present. The V&A’s collections expanded in line with the growth of the British empire, in its official and unofficial guise, across southern Asia, showcasing Indian textiles, Burmese lacquerware, Chinese porcelain and Persian carpets — as well as a remarkable range of British industrial designs and European Renaissance treasures. Beginning with the object, and involving as many voices as possible, one key role of the contemporary museum is to unleash more insight and more context into the discussion of this complicated past and its impacts on the present. As we might expect, analysis of the India Museum collection has thus far been largely confined to its colonial history. MacGregor’s detailed survey offers a new and scholarly lineage to these remarkable and beautiful objects that opens the door for future researchers to revisit the India Museum once again. Tristram Hunt Director, Victoria and Albert Museum

FOREWORD xix

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