material fantasy: the museum in colonial india

40

MATERIAL FANTASYThe Museum in Colonial India

KAVITA SINGH

Introduction

It is generally assumed that the great

knowledge-producing project of the British empire

was primarily one of control. We understand that

by surveying and mapping lands, by conducting

censuses, and by collecting and classifying specimens,

the colonial power was able to take hold of its

possession with a more than military might. We

have also learned that, in this dynamic of knowledge

and control, what was being effected was not just

knowledge for control, but knowledge-control; where

scientific and Enlightenment forms of knowledge

displaced other ways of knowing the world and

established themselves as the best, indeed the only,

way to study and describe reality.

If the “total knowledge” that this project sought

remained a chimerical idea, the information it did

collect was a physical entity, harboured in files, letters,

sketches, maps, specimens, artefacts: all of which

needed to be kept, ordered, and preserved; and we

recognize that Victorian Britain devoted considerable

care and resources in developing institutions that

would house and support this physical corpus of the

ever-growing body of knowledge. We recognize that

the Archive and the Museum are places where this

knowledge-fantasy congeals to take physical shape.

The above paragraphs summarize, if they also

caricature, the Foucauldian frame through which we

tend to study the colonial museum. Believing in the

absolute nexus between knowledge and power, this

approach seems to leave no room for a gap between

the colonizer’s intention and effect; there is nothing

that is provisional, or improvised, or not dictated

by a predetermined design. But, as Gyan Prakash

says, “To fall prey to [colonialism’s self-description]

is to suggest that the exercise of colonial power

produced only mastery, that British India’s history is

nothing but a record of submission ....”1 Instead of

retelling the history of the colonial museum as an

illustration of a conscious and knowing knowledge-

power nexus, in this essay I will suggest that there

was a different and fuzzier relationship between

intention and accomplishment. I will rely not only

on the confident and self-congratulatory statements

made by museum directors, but also the more erratic

histories of their institutions, to delineate a career for

the colonial museum that is full of interrupted plans

and retrospective justifications, where grand projects

face a chronic lack of funds; and where museum-

makers struggle not just with the colonized populace,

but with their own authorities. Further, I hope to

show the power of local responses to reshape the

idea of the museum: through local politics that stood

in the way of the metropolitan dream; or a jubilantly

resistant, ineducable public; or competitive claims,

from unexpected quarters, to owning the knowledge

that the West was marking as its own. For if, as

Thomas Richards says, the Imperial Archive was

primarily a fantasy,2 then others too had the power to

dream, or to dispute the dream.

But the first question we must ask the colonial

museum in India is how it comes to be located within

2

FINAL Pages 001-161.indd 40 12/26/2008 9:42:33 AM

41

1Case full of broken hands, collected from Sahr-i-Bahlol. From the ASI Frontier Province Album, 1914–15. Courtesy Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.


42 KAVITA SINGH

India. If the colonial knowledge-project was meant

to “take away” knowledge of India to empower the

colonizer, why was it building, and hoping to build,

so many museums in India? Whom, within the colony,

would these museums address?

In the Company’s Keep: Museums in India

before 1857

As one would expect, the very first museum of

India was indeed one that “took away” knowledge

and treasures of India under the sign of colonial

control. This earliest museum was the India Museum,

which the East India Company maintained in its

headquarters in London. Born out of the collections

sent back by East India Company officers who had

developed scholarly enthusiasms beyond the line

of duty, the Company’s India Museum started as a

motley collection of scientific samples, manuscripts

and antiquities, curiosities and military loot, which the

Company Board agreed to house. These collections

were built up gratis: as the Board’s announcement

said, “It is not our meaning that the Company

should go into the expense of forming a Collection

.... But Gentlemen might chuse gratuitously to lodge

valuable Compositions ....”3 What was acquired was

kept in storage for many years, until a retired official

persuaded the Company to appoint him “Librarian”

to the Repository in 1801. Over the next 78 years

the India Museum had an erratic history in which the

zeal of some scholars and officials was pitted against

the resentment of Company bureaucracy that had to

provide space, manpower, and finances to support the

growing accumulation of objects. The India Museum

functioned – inadequately staffed, inadequately

housed, and inadequately publicized, according to

some observers – until 1879 when, with the demise

of the East India Company, the museum too was

dissolved and its collections distributed amongst

several London institutions.4

The India Museum’s dispersed collections are

today the core of the Indian material in the British

Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the

2Buddhist and Hindu sculptures in a gallery modelled in the “Middle Eastern Islamic style” at the East India Company’s India Museum, at the Company’s headquarters at Leadenhall Street, London. From The Illustrated London News,March 6, 1858.


43THE MUSEUM IN COLONIAL INDIA

British Library (including the India Office Collection).

If this important collection could have had such an

accidental beginning and such a provisional life, one

would not expect the careers of the museums set up

on Indian soil to be much different.

By the time the Mutiny/Uprising of 1857

brought Company rule to an end in India, there were

museums in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, all capital

cities of British presidencies. It would appear that the

East India Company was greatly invested in gathering,

organizing, and storing knowledge, since it sponsored

museums in all the principal cities in its dominion.

Yet a closer look at the histories of these institutions

suggests that the first museums of India were not, in

fact, intentionally conceived by the colonial power,

but were rather foundlings thrust upon it for its care.

The three venerable museums in Calcutta,

Madras, and Bombay were not started by the

government, but by amateur scholars functioning

within its realm. What is now the Indian Museum

in Calcutta was begun by the Asiatic Society; the

Government Museum in Madras owes its origins

to the Madras Literary Society; and the Victoria

and Albert Museum (now renamed Dr Bhau Daji

Lad Museum) in Bombay was likewise started by a

circle of private individuals. In each case, when the

collections built by these private societies became

unwieldy, they appealed to the government to take

them over and maintain them. Yet only the Madras

Literary Society succeeded in having its museum taken

over by the Company-period administration in 1851;

the Asiatic Society, which made its appeal in 1814,

had to wait till 1865 for the governmental take-over,

and the museum in Bombay was taken over by the

municipality only in 1886. Thus the Madras museum

is the only museum in India that the Company

supported during its rule.

What was in these museums? The ambitious

statements made by museum keepers who asserted

that the museum would “serve as an illustrated

record of the accumulated knowledge of India”5 are

taken today as evidence of their intention to create

an Encyclopedia Indica, a place where all knowledge

about India could be lodged.6 But if we consider

that the museums were the depositories for groups

with wide-ranging interests, it is natural that these

collections should be not “encyclopedic” but varied

and even hotchpotch. Museums of this time would

have some botanical specimens, some zoological

ones (including living animals which had to be de-

accessioned as they died), some sculptures, books

and inscriptions, some manuscripts, a few “economic

products” and ethnographical specimens, not to

mention curiosities like hair balls from the stomach of

a goat, or the skull of a thug, all jostling for space on

the shelf.

When the government stepped in to give

support to these museums, it did not necessarily

give direction. Witness the appeal of the Madras

3Economic Court in a 19th-century exhibition. Botanical products such as corn cobs and fruit form the decorative framework within which serried rows of rectangular samples – probably also of botanical resources – are seen. Unidentified photographer, c. 1883. Courtesy the Alkazi Collection of Photography.


44 KAVITA SINGH

government for the public to gift specimens to its

newly taken-over museum:

In the extension of a Museum of this

nature every person may have it in

his power to aid, and every point of

information, and every specimen that may

be sent will be acceptable.7

Starting with a bewildering array of items

gathered by the scholarly societies, rapidly expanding

through an acquisition policy that welcomed every

item as long as it was free, we might take the idea

of the museum’s self-proclamation as an Encyclopedia

Indica as a retrospective justification of its tentative

and non-disciplinary beginnings. Couple this with the

reluctance with which Company support was given to

museums – or the tenacity with which it was withheld

– inevitably, we must alter our perception of the

museum’s centrality in a colonial knowledge-power

nexus.

The Raj: Museum Economies

It is after the transfer of power to the British

Crown that we begin to see the emergence of

something like a coherent museum policy for India.

It is well known that in the Great Exhibition held

in London in 1851, British products were reviewed

unfavourably for their poor design; by contrast,

Indian craft products were hailed as models of good

design and taste. The appreciation of Indian crafts

at the Exhibition suggested immediate economic

possibilities – but perceptions of these possibilities

were split along the fissure between the colony and

the metropole. On the one hand, the Government

of India8 saw the possibility of capturing a global

market for Indian products; on the other hand,

the Government of Britain set up the Department

of Science and Art (DSA) – reputedly the largest

bureaucratic apparatus in the country9 – to harness

Indian and Oriental design to improve the quality of

British-manufactured goods.

The institution of the museum acquired new

valency in the race to exploit the potential of Indian

design. Both governments took action to collect

high-quality artefacts from India, preserve them in

museums, and set up art colleges contiguous to the

museums where artists could learn by consulting the

museum collections. If the Government of Britain

bought up Indian and Oriental objects from the Great

Exhibition to stock its new Museum of Ornamental

Art (est. 1852, eventually to become the Victoria and

Albert Museum), provincial governments in India set

up at least nine museums to showcase local crafts,

and developed plans for many more.10 While the

DSA set up the South Kensington School of Art and

Design in London (est. 1857; this eventually became

the Royal College of Art), between 1850 and 1875

the provincial governments in India set up art schools

in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Lahore.11

The British government hoped that by studying

Indian objects in museums, British manufacturers

would improve their design; the Indian government

hoped that huge orders for Indian goods would

soon be rolling in for Indian craftsmen to fulfil. Both

governments were thus engaged in similar actions

at the same time, but with opposed and competitive

intentions, for the benefit of different circuits of the

economy. Each government saw its own domain as

the producer, and the other as the market for its

produce. In the end, as we all know, British industry –

with its mechanized production and biased tax regime

– won over the only advantage that was left to India,

the advantage of cheap labour. At the time, however,

the Raj museum makers wrote confidently of the

economic miracle that was about to come to India

via their museums; today, we read their optimistic

proposals with the foreknowledge that their project

will fail.

Museums set up in the first 50 years of

the Raj era were primarily Economic or Industrial

museums whose remit was to collect samples and

information about any item or process in India that

had a potential use. Minerals and metals which could



be mined; rocks, which could be used for building

material or crushed for gravel; soil, different types of

which could support different crops; timbers; flowers

whose essences yielded perfume or medicine; grains

and legumes and fruits and vegetables; insects which

produced silk or honey or wax or dye … nothing

was without economic possibilities. The museum was

the place where a sample of each resource would be

displayed, along with maps showing their occurrence

and charts describing techniques for their extraction.

But these museums demonstrated not just the raw

materials present in India but also the craftsmanship

that was available to transform them into products.

A typical display in these museums might juxtapose a

lump of ore with a filigreed necklace, or a sample of

timber with a carved chair.

The new Utilitarian purpose of museums in

India was stated thus by the government department

responsible for them:

The main object … is not the gratification

of occidental curiosity, or the satisfaction of

aesthetic longings among foreign nations,

but a development of a trade in these

products, whether raw or manufactured,

rough or artistic.12

Sample Rooms of Empire

If the museums were the point where artefacts

were collected to form an inventory of available craft

skills, art schools were the point where these skills

could be disciplined and adapted for international

tastes, and international exhibitions were the

marketing opportunity that formed the third point in

this triangular relationship. From the 1860s onward,

the Government of India began vigorous participation

in international exhibitions, expecting that Indian

products and raw materials would attract orders

throughout the world.

It was the exhibition’s promise of profits and

trade that drove the governmental engine to invest

in the apparatus of art schools and museums:

permanent institutions in the service of ephemeral

ones. And in fact, the government’s detailed plan for

a fully expanded Museum–Art School–Exhibition sector

envisioned the whole country as a network supplying

exhibitions-in-the-making. The scheme drawn up by

the government intended to place a School of Art in

every province; it would be the school principal’s task

to survey and collect every pattern and design of every

art manufacture in his province. Designs approved by

him would be included in the provincial museum and

each design would be given a registration number.

A duplicate collection of all the objects from all the

museums, bearing the same registration numbers,

would be kept in a museum in London, and also

published in widely distributed catalogues. Anybody

who wished to buy any of these objects would simply

have to send an indent quoting the registration

number. Whole exhibitions could be swiftly ordered

by these means; if time was very short, the provincial

museums could ship off their own collections to an

exhibition, for the museum could always re-stock by

ordering fresh examples of the same goods from the

nearby artisans.13 And once the large orders did come,

artisans would not be able to let their standards drop,

because their new work could always be compared

with the original samples held or documented by the

museum.

Never fully realized, this scheme remained

a dream for the most part. It was in essence a

precocious fantasy for a mail-order business, with

India as the Manufactory, and the Government as

the Department Store. As the official who drew up

this scheme noted with no small satisfaction, “It will

be seen … that the already existing museums will

be called upon to fulfil a new function, that of trade

museums, or to put it more simply, sample rooms.”14

Monuments in the Museum

When one visits the august Raj-era museums in

India today, one sees scant traces of the institutions

I have described above. Seldom does one encounter


46 KAVITA SINGH

a Gallery of Economic Botany with its cataloguing of

timbers and carving styles; instead one sees hall after

hall filled with imposing, intricate, ancient sculpture.

In this essay I choose to speak about things one no

longer sees, and remain silent about the things one

does see.

This is because it is not my intention to write an

account of the colonial museum simply to “explain”

the avatar it has taken today – how the museum

in Calcutta came to possess the Bharhut railing, or

why the museum in Madras has so many sculptures

from Amaravati. This kind of account would suffice

if one were tracing the histories of these objects;

but if one is writing the history of the institution,

it becomes necessary to show that these museums

were profoundly different institutions 120 years

ago. It is true that even while administrators were

collecting crafts and expecting museums to serve the

economy, they did acquire the great collections of

antiquities that we value today. But these were not

the prime focus of the museums or the reason for

their establishment. They held no promise for the

rejuvenation of the Indian economy. Instead, they

made a troublesome claim upon the government’s

resources, and were received with less enthusiasm

than we would imagine.15 For instance, when the

Amaravati sculptures now in the British Museum were

shipped to London they lay unclaimed in a dockyard,

and then in a coach-house, for seven years;16 and

when the Begum of Bhopal offered to dismantle

a gateway from the Sanchi stupa and gift it to be

placed in a museum in London, her offer was politely

refused.17

That the Government of India had a duty to the

monuments within it, that the government should

establish a permanent institution and invest in their

care, was a battle bitterly fought and perpetually

lost by the passionate amateurs who were the

4Carved screen on rear wall of Sidi Sa’id’s Mosque, Ahmedabad, 1572 CE.Photograph: Sushil Sharma, American Institute of Indian Studies, Gurgaon.

5 (opposite)“Carved Cabinet from Ahmedabad” exhibited in the “Bombay Court” of an unidentified exhibition, c. 1883. The upper section of the cabinet imitates the famous 16th-century carved screen in the window of the Sidi Sa’id Mosque in Ahmedabad. Historical references found in 19th-century crafted objects, such as this one, are evidence of the efforts made by art schools to “improve” the tastes of the native craftsmen. Courtesy the Alkazi Collection of Photography.



early archaeologists of India. If the history of Indian

archaeology up to the 1880s seems dominated

by certain forceful personalities – Alexander

Cunningham, James Fergusson, Henry Hardy Cole – it

is because these enthusiasts caused the field and its

apparatus to come into existence by the sheer force

of their personalities.18 And if the prime archaeological

institution in India is called the Survey – a verb, and

not an Institute – a noun, it is because from 1861

to 1901 the Archaeological Survey was an activity

rather than an institution – consisting of an occasional

series of expeditions to examine, document, and

retrieve monuments out in the field. For these

early archaeologists, “saving” the antiquities they

discovered was effected by transporting enormous

quantities of movable objects from find-spots to

the India Museum in London and (after the India

Museum’s demise) to museums in Indian cities. These

objects were being saved not just from the elements,

they contended, but from the Indian people, who

were bound to plunder them for building materials,

or destroy them in iconoclastic acts.19 Since, in their

view, the native Indian could not understand the

proper worth of ancient artefacts, their place was in

museums and repositories close to the scholars who

would study them.

To protect and maintain Indian monuments in

situ was unimaginable in the 19th century; it would

have required a different sense of the connection

between ancient monuments and contemporary

Indians, and it would have demanded an investment

from the government that was beyond anybody’s

dreams.20

It is at the start of the 20th century, with the

arrival of Lord Curzon as Viceroy (1899–1905) that

the turning point came. Under him the Archaeological

Survey was reorganized into a permanent institution

that had a duty to not just study but to protect the

monuments of India. And these were to be protected

in situ. Curzon famously reconfigured the relationship

of British authority to Indian monuments as the duty

of a civilized power towards the “greatest galaxy of

monuments in the world”.21 As an extension of this

philosophy, loose objects that needed to be protected

from theft or the weather were no longer to be

taken away to the metropole but were now to be

housed at museums built at the site, removing and

yet not removing the object from its context. The


48 KAVITA SINGH

site museum was an important Curzonian innovation

which ensured the end of the era when museums

in faraway cities could expect to acquire hundreds

of artefacts after every excavation. Instead, in a turn

anticipating nationalist sentiment, site won out over

museum as the land was seen as having a special

claim to the monuments found upon it.

Outside the Raj but Near It: Museums of the

Princely States

Adjacent to the Raj regions, and deeply

intertwined with them, were the Princely States of

India – some 266 kingdoms, covering 40 per cent

of the territory that would eventually become the

India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh of today. Managing

to evade annexation by the British through treaties

and promises of cooperation, the Princely States were

nominally independent though most of their political

actions were carefully supervised by the British.

Inevitably, the close association between the

government of British India and the Indian Princes

resulted in an emulation of Victorian progressivism

and social engineering within the Princely States.

In the late 19th century, many Princely States built

hospitals, sanitation systems, colleges and universities

to mark their entry into enlightened modernity.

Museums were another emblem of enlightenment

that gained currency in the Princely States at this

time.

Most of the turn-of-the-century museums

established in the Princely States followed the model

of the Economic museums in the Raj regions. Further,

the Princes frequently hired Europeans to make and

run their museums. Were these museums merely

derivative institutions of a mimic modernity? Or did

the Princely States in any way alter or extend the

Raj’s Economic-museum paradigm? I look briefly

at two important museums of Princely India, the

6General view of the excavation underway at Sarnath, 1904–06. The sculptures visible here were eventually accommodated in the Sarnath Museum, the first Site Museum established by the Archaeological Survey of India, UP Album Vol. 6, 1904–06. Courtesy Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.



Jaipur Museum and the Baroda Museum and Picture

Gallery, to gain a sense of what these museums were

and what they meant within the emergent field of

museums in India.

The moving force behind the Jaipur Museum

– sometimes called the Albert Hall and formerly the

Jeypore Economic and Technical Museum – was the

remarkable Colonel Thomas Holbein Hendley, Chief

Surgeon of Jaipur, who was also a great enthusiast

of Indian “art industries”. Hendley persuaded

the Maharaja of Jaipur of the economic utility of

museums and exhibitions, and was asked in 1880 to

make a museum for Jaipur.22

The galleries in Hendley’s Jaipur Museum,

completed in 1887, seem to have been the usual

round of arts-by-industry with galleries for metalware,

pottery, wood-carving, and textiles. But these galleries

collected not just locally made items, but international

examples as well. For instance there was Persian

metalware and Japanese and Chinese porcelain

in the relevant sections. Unlike the Raj museums’

desire to hold samples of good design to arrest the

Indian craftsman’s alleged propensity to deteriorate,

the Jaipur galleries seem to want to inspire the

craftsman by showing him the wider possibilities of

his medium.23

When Rudyard Kipling visited Jaipur, he

rhapsodized about the Museum:

Hear this, O Governments of India, from

Punjab to Madras! The doors come true

to the jamb, the cases which have been

through hot weather are neither warped

nor cracked, nor are there unseemly

tallow-drops and flaws in the glasses

.… These things are so because money

has been spent on the Museum, and it

is now a rebuke to all other museums

in India, from Calcutta downwards … a

Museum … built, filled and endowed with

royal generosity – an institution perfectly

independent of the Government of

India....24

7View of a gallery in the Sarnath Museum, the first Site Museum to be set up by the Archaeological Survey of India, UP Album Vol. 16, 1911–12. Courtesy Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi.


50 KAVITA SINGH

Kipling’s close attention to the museum’s

furniture and fittings is unsurprising, for he practically

grew up in a museum. Rudyard’s father, Lockwood

Kipling, had been Principal of the Mayo School of

Art and Curator of the Lahore Museum. When the

son ruefully compares the Jaipur Museum with the

museums of British India, and finds the British-run

museums wanting, he is no doubt venting some of

his father’s spleen at having had to function with

limited funds and excessive bureaucracy. Here then

is the Indian Princely State, hiring British men to

make a British institution upon the native soil – and,

improving upon the original, to the extent that

its excellence becomes a “rebuke” to the British.

Ironically, while British officials and museum keepers

draw up grand plans for the kind of institutions they

would like to make, it is the “royal generosity” of a

native prince that allows the full flowering of a British

conception. In its time, the Jaipur Museum was hailed

as the finest museum in India.

If the Jaipur Museum improved upon the Raj

museums by being better built, better fitted, and

better maintained – “the same but better” – the

Baroda Museum displayed a deliberate and even

audacious desire to exceed any museum in British

India even in its conception.

Under Sayaji Rao Gaekwad III (r. 1875–1939),

Baroda was known as a progressive and modernizing

state. Embarrassingly for the British, this Baroda ruler

was often more progressive than the government

of British India (for instance he introduced free

universal education in 1906) and a discussion in

British Parliament even suggested that the colonial

government emulate this native state’s reforms.25

It seems as though the Maharaja embarked on his

most radical reforms precisely as his relationship

with the British government deteriorated. Sayaji

Rao’s espousal of the good governance practices

recommended by the British stood as a reproach

and a challenge to British attempts to unseat him

because he was not subservient enough to them.26

When Sayaji Rao instituted the Baroda Museum

in 1887, it began by following a Raj-type model of

surveying the state’s resources, where its citizenry

were treated as economic objects. In the 1890s it

widened its pedagogic remit by adding the sciences

and a children’s section, addressing its citizens as an

educable public; and by the 1920s with the addition

of the Museum’s fine art sections it addressed its

visitors as an enlightened audience, capable of

enjoying the high civility of good art.27

Although I would hesitate to draw too straight

a line between Sayaji Rao’s larger and more pressing

political concerns and the career of his Museum, it is

significant that it is in around 1910–11, when Sayaji

Rao’s guarded acts of resistance towards the British

were reaching their peak, that his Museum underwent

its most ambitious expansion.

Towards the end of 1910, Sayaji Rao

commissioned a popular London art critic to purchase

for him a collection of European art.28 The result was

“the best collection of old masterpieces of European

painting … in Asia”,29 with originals by Veronese,

Caracci, Zurbaran, Fragonard, Constable, and Turner –

to name just a few artists in the collection. Before the

collection was shipped to India, the Royal Academy

in London borrowed some works for an Old Masters

exhibition; the Victoria and Albert Museum put

the whole collection on show, and the art journal

Connoisseur printed the entire catalogue. By the time

this collection reached Baroda, the most prestigious

art institutions of London had already ratified its

value.30

What is most significant about Sayaji Rao’s act

of making this collection is not just that Sayaji Rao

was sufficiently steeped in Enlightenment values to

appreciate European art. It is not even that he had

the means at his disposal to make these works his

own. It is that he alone in India invested in purchasing

the best European art and then gifted this collection

to his public. For all the claims made by the British

about the superiority of Western over Eastern art, on



the one hand, and their professed desire to educate

and civilize Indians, on the other, they nowhere

attempted to give their Indian citizenry access to high

European culture. Once again, a reformist maharaja’s

generosity exposed the half-heartedness and

insincerity of colonial progressivism.

Although the critic who had assembled the

collection had wanted to arrange it in strictly

chronological order to show a singular line of

progress through European art, the second British

expert who actually wrote the catalogue and

installed the collection in Baroda broke it up into

“national schools” such as “Italy”, “the Netherlands”,

“France”, and “Britain”.31 The catalogue followed

the Victorian practice of assigning a moral value to

the work, and by extension, to the age and nation

that produced it. For instance, the writer praised

the old masters of Italy and the Netherlands, found

France to be the leader in modern art, and denigrated

the art of Germany.32 This approach might have

been common enough to a European audience, but

would ring rather differently in colonial ears. The

very arrangement by “nation”, which encouraged

audiences to compare and give rankings to different

European countries, punctured the myth of an

aggregate European culture whose superiority over

Eastern culture was absolute. As a scholar archly

observes, through the deployment of this collection,

“Sayaji Rao made European culture a specimen in an

Indian-controlled museum.”33 Sayaji Rao’s purchase of

a large European art collection at this time should be

read not as a slavish imitation of European practices,

but as a competitive gesture of collecting Europe.

Viewers and Wanderers in the Museum

The British colonial museums we have so far

seen seem designed to serve two specialist interests:

of the administrator, who hoped to make “sample

8Albert Museum, Jeypore, by Gobindram Oodeyram, c. 1900. Courtesy www.harappa.com.


52 KAVITA SINGH

rooms” that would garner export orders and thus

stimulate the economy; or of the antiquarian, who

collected inscribed stones and potsherds to construct

a learned account of ancient Indian history.

The museum’s site and architecture attracted the

lay public. It was usually part of a new and planned

colonial extension of the city and was situated in a

park, or was part of a complex that included botanical

garden and zoo. Some of these parks had bandstands

with weekly concerts. Entrance to the museum was

kept free or at nominal cost. The museum buildings

were usually attractive, and sometimes flamboyant,

structures. In some cases smaller, jewel-like buildings

were themselves the museum’s prime exhibit.34 To its

audiences, the beauty of the museum’s building and

environs held out a promise of pleasure and diversion,

rather than industry and education.

Into these inviting settings, the crowds streamed.

The Indian Museum, Calcutta, and the Victoria and

Albert Museum, Bombay, claimed over 800,000

visitors in 1913; these were the largest museum

attendance figures in the world.35 Madras claimed

over 400,000, and Baroda, 300,000 visitors each year.

Particularly large numbers arrived on feast days – in

Madras on Kannul Pongal, the Museum would receive

up to 70,000 visitors. Many of the museums arranged

for zenana days every month for the convenience of

ladies who kept purdah; on these days the watch and

ward staff was exclusively female.

The museum keepers’ pride in the large numbers

who visited was moderated with disappointment

in the quality of this audience. Perhaps due to the

paucity of other grand yet freely accessible public

spaces in the colonial city, the museum soon became

a place for the poorer, lower-caste Indians to visit

on festivals and holidays. The presence of enormous

subaltern crowds marked the museum as a place of

lower-class amusement, which in turn, the keepers

believed, kept the better class of native away from

the museum.36

Condemned to having a large but illiterate

audience, keepers complained of how visitors came

to be entertained by jugglers and singers in the

grounds, and then swarmed all over the museum,

rushing through carefully arranged galleries full of

rare things only to stop and shriek out the names

of what was already familiar to them – clay models

of fruit, or stuffed figures of common animals and

birds.37 Theorists have told us of the way working-

class audiences in Victorian Britain were awed into

better behaviour by the museum’s fine building and

watchful guards; the museum visitor’s body re-enacted

Victorian ideologies of evolutionism and progress

in its disciplined itinerary through the succession of

galleries.38 On the other hand, the Indian audience

seemed to come not to be educated but to celebrate

itself: to eat and drink and be entertained in the

fine grounds and foyers, to ignore the lessons the

museum was trying to give, and to notice what the

museum showed only when it allowed one to take

pleasure in recognizing oneself.39 It would be going

too far to speak of this as the audience’s resistance to

disciplinary power; but certainly we may think of it as

a robust immunity to it.

After the Raj: A New Museum for a New

Nation

Few major museum projects were taken up in

India after the outbreak of World War I,40 and the

chief event in Indian museum-making in the first

half of the 20th century was the introduction of the

Curzonian archaeological site museums discussed

above. But already, in the way these site museums

mark the presence of the great monuments rising

everywhere out of the Indian soil, they anticipate

that ultimate paean to soil as bounded territory, and

history as local heritage: a National Museum.

It was inevitable that the coming of

Independence would demand the founding of at

least one more museum, this one to inaugurate the

postcolonial era in the cultural life of the new nation.

Today the National Museum stands prominently in the



ceremonial heart of New Delhi’s capitol complex, and

its galleries present the history of Indian art through

a succession of masterpieces. It is here that we see

Indian artefacts celebrated as proofs of a continuous

and continuously high civilization.

Once again, however, a closer study of the

institution’s history brings surprises. In its location,

building, and organizational structure, it turns out

that the National Museum brings to fruition a colonial

plan for an Imperial Museum on the very same spot;

and the initial collection with which the Museum

was inaugurated was gathered not for the National

Museum but for a great exhibition of Indian art in

London. The National Museum turns out to have

colonial roots.

New Delhi was built as a new capital for the

British in India, and the city’s heart was planned

for imperial pomp and show. Its centrepiece was

Kingsway, a ceremonial avenue that swept down

from the Viceroy’s Palace, past a vast formal park, to

terminate at a memorial for the Indian soldiers who

had died loyally fighting British battles. At the halfway

mark of this avenue was a crossroads; and in the

four quadrants marked by this, New Delhi’s architect

Edwin Lutyens had planned to build four institutions.

These were to be a Records Office and War Museum;

a Medical Museum; an Ethnological Museum; and

an Imperial Museum. The institutions around this

hub would simultaneously house and symbolize the

knowledge of India that had been accumulated by the

Raj over two centuries.

Of these four institutions, the only one to be

built as planned was the Records Office, the National

Archives of today. The other projects were postponed

due to the outbreak of World War II and the resulting

paucity of funds. But planning for these museums

continued intermittently, with committees meeting

and discussing the Imperial Museum, its purpose and

organizational structure, as late as 1946.41

Another project affected by the War was the

proposal of the Royal Academy, London, to host an

exhibition of Indian Art in 1939. Initiated by a group

of scholars before the War, the project was revived

by them after the War in 1945, only to have it taken

over by the Foreign Office and British art officials. By

this time, the inevitability of India’s Independence,

and the creation of Pakistan, was clear for all to see;

with the groundwork already done years before, this

exhibition could be mounted expeditiously and serve

as a gracious gesture of a colonial power welcoming

its former colonies into the comity of nations. The

Exhibition of The Art of India and Pakistan was

held in the Royal Academy from November 1947 to

February 1948 and it brought together an enormous

collection from British and Indian collections both

public and private.

When the Indian loans to the Exhibition were

shipped back to India in 1948, it was decided –

reputedly on the recommendation of the new Indian

Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru – to give Indian

audiences an opportunity to see the assembly of

masterpieces. A temporary exhibition was arranged

in the Viceroy’s Palace (now Rashtrapati Bhavan)

in the winter of 1948. The fortuitous collation of

9Exhibits from The Art of India and Pakistan, on view at the Durbar Hall of the Viceregal Palace (Rashtrapati Bhavan) in New Delhi, Winter, 1948–49. From the Archive of the Photo Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.


54 KAVITA SINGH

masterpieces from private and public collections all

over India proved to be an opportunity too rich to

resist: and soon Prime Minister Nehru and Education

Minister Maulana Azad were mooting a plan to

hold these objects permanently for a new National

Museum to be built at the site Lutyens had earmarked

for his museum complex. The government “appealed”

to the lenders to surrender their objects for this new

and prestigious project.42

Published accounts of the founding of the

National Museum have tended to end at this point,

with the Nation exercising its absolute prerogative

over its cultural heritage, rendering the private

ownership of these things as an irrelevancy to be

brushed aside. These accounts do not pursue the

story to record the anger and resentment that this

action caused. Nor do they follow the National

Museum’s history another four years into the future,

by which time most lenders, whether private, princely,

or provincial museums, have successfully wrested their

objects back from a Centre which regretfully realizes it

has no legal claim or jurisdiction over them. We leave

the National Museum now in 1952, nearly emptied

of the collection with which it had announced its

foundation. The government is realizing for the first

time that it may need to purchase objects to fill the

halls of the grand building it is planning to erect, for

other, older museums have refused to participate in

the national dream.43

In this abbreviated account of the museum in colonial

and newly postcolonial India I have not attempted

to survey the field. Instead, I have tried to engage

with it dialogically, presenting both known and

unknown facts about selected institutions. If my

shifting perspective defamiliarizes many well-known

institutions, it also, I believe, offers us the opportunity

to go beyond historical clichés fostered by those “self-

descriptions of mastery” issued by the museums or

the governments themselves. By attending closely to

the particular histories of the institutions we become

able to compare what the museum says, with what

the museum does. The gift that this brings us is the

recognition that even this presumed locus of absolute

authority was an arena of improvisations.

NOTES

1 Gyan Prakash, Another Reason, Science and

the Imagination of Modern India, Princeton University

Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1999, p. 19.

2 “From all over the globe the British added

information about the countries they were adding to

their map. In fact they could do little more than collect

or collate information, for any kind of civic control was

out of the question.” Thomas Richards, The Imperial

Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, Verso,

London, 1993, p. 3.

3 India and Bengal Dispatches, March 16, 1777,

quoted in Ray Desmond, The India Museum 1801–79,

HMSO, London, 1982, p. 5.

4 For a detailed history of this institution, see

Desmond, op. cit.

5 T.H. Hendley, “Indian Museums”, Journal

of Indian Art and Industry, Vol. XVI, No. 125, 1914,

pp. 33–63, see p. 45.

6 See for instance, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Ch.

2, “The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving,

Classifying”, in Monuments, Objects, Histories:

Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India,

Columbia University Press, New York, 2004, pp. 43–84.

7 Notification dated August 14, 1851, signed

by H.C. Montgomery, Chief Secretary to the Governor,

Fort St George. Quoted in Dr A. Aiyappan, “Hundred

Years of the Madras Government Museum”, in Madras

Government Museum Centenary Souvenir, published

by Principal Commissioner of Museums, Government

Museum Chennai, (reprint) 1999, pp. 1–58, see p. 6.

8 Although the Great Exhibition took place

during the Company’s rule, the elaborate apparatus of

museums, art colleges, etc. to improve Indian crafts,

promote their manufacture, and make them easily

accessible for trade, was instituted only from the 1860s



onward, gathering momentum in the late 1880s after

Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.

9 See Arindam Dutta, The Bureaucracy of

Beauty: Design in the Age of its Global Reproducibility,

Routledge, New York and London, 2007. This is a full-

length study of the Department of Science and Art and

its impact upon design in the British empire.

10 “Economic” or “Technical” museums were

set up in the second half of the 19th century at Faizabad

(1867); Delhi (Municipal Museum, 1868); Calcutta

(Economic Museum, 1872); Madras (Victoria Technical

Institute Museum, 1887); Rajkot (Watson Museum,

1888); Poona (Lord Reay Industrial Museum, 1890);

Bezwada (Victoria Jubilee Museum, 1894); Lahore (initially

set up as the Technical Institute in 1864, renamed Jubilee

Museum in 1894, now called the Lahore Museum);

Bhavnagar (Barton Museum, 1895); Trichinopoly (Natural

History Museum, St Joseph’s College, 1895). And of

course, the great Indian Museum in Calcutta was taken

over by the government, and given a new building, and

its collections expanded by amalgamation with the items

collected for the Calcutta International Exhibition of

1883–84. I am excluding, in this list, the museums set

up in Princely States by or under the influence of British

Residents, as I will deal with the subject of Princely State

museums in a separate section of this article.

11 Dates of establishment for these schools are:

Madras School of Art (1850); J.J. School of Art, Bombay

(1851); Calcutta School of Art (1854); Mayo School of

Art, Lahore (1875).

12 Secretary to the Home Department, “Note on

Arrangements for Exhibitions”, the National Archives of

India, File 1882: Home Department Public Branch A July

188 no. 157: Subject: distribution of business between

the Home and Revenue Departments.

13 E.S. Buck, “Note on the exploitation of Indian

Art-Manufactures in connection with the Museums and

Exhibitions, Provincial and International”, September

3, 1881. National Archives of India, File 1882: Home

Department Public Branch A July 188 no. 157: Subject:

distribution of business between the Home and Revenue

Departments.

14 Ibid., p. 4, para. 16.

15 Elsewhere, I discuss at greater length the

way the colonial administration’s valuation of Indian

“art” was the precise inverse of our hierarchy of values

today. Today’s “craft” objects were the prime focus,

while antiquities were seen not as art but as a source of

information about the past. See Kavita Singh, “Museums

and the Making of an Indian Art Historical Canon”, in

Shivaji K. Panikkar, Parul Dave Mukherji, and Deeptha

Achar, eds., Towards a New Art History: Studies in Indian

Art, D.K. Printworld, New Delhi, 2003, pp. 333–57.

16 Upinder Singh, The Discovery of Ancient India:

Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology,

Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2004, pp. 259–60.

17 Ibid., p. 201.

18 This early history may be gleaned from:

Upinder Singh, op. cit.; Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Archaeology

in the Third World: A History of Indian Archaeology

since 1947, D.K. Printworld, New Delhi, 2003; Tapati

Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, op. cit.;

and Sourindranath Roy, The Story of Indian Archaeology,

1784–1987, Archaeological Survey of India, New Delhi,

1961.

19 Despite the narratives of native ignorance

or religious prejudice that threatened monuments, the

chief threat to these monuments seems to have come

from the temptation to reuse ancient stone as a building

material, by public projects initiated by the colonial

state. Nayanjot Lahiri describes entire temple complexes

being reduced to rubble by railway contractors who

needed gravel to lay their railway tracks. This is quite

apart from the damage done by the early archaeologists

themselves whose digs often took the form of clumsy

treasure hunts. See Nayanjot Lahiri, “Sanchi: Destruction,

restoration, restitution” in H.P. Ray and Carla Sinopoli,

eds., Archaeology as History in Early South Asia, ICHR

and Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2004.

20 Although Henry Hardy Cole, who was Curator

of Monuments, 1881–83, did argue forcefully for just

this, he was well ahead of his time.


56 KAVITA SINGH

21 See Thomas Raleigh, ed., Lord Curzon in

India: Being a Selection from His Speeches as Viceroy,

Macmillan, London, 1906, p. 192.

22 T.H. Hendley, Report on the Jeypore Museum

1888–98, Calcutta, 1898; Giles Tillotson, “The Jaipur

Exhibition of 1883”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,

Vol. 14, 2004, pp. 111–26.

23 This brings the Jaipur Museum close to the

purpose of the metropolitan museums set up by the

DSA: British manufacturers had the opportunity to study

artefacts from across the world in order to learn from

their designs.

24 Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque, quoted in

S.F. Markham and H. Hargreaves, The Museums of India,

Museum Society, London, 1936, pp. 8–9.

25 Manu Bhagavan, “Demystifying the ‘Ideal

Progressive’: Resistance Through Mimicked Modernity

in Princely Baroda, 1900–1913”, Modern Asian

Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 385–409. This discussion in

Parliament is mentioned on p. 392.

26 Sayaji Rao’s troubled relationship with the

Raj reached its nadir when his behaviour at the 1911

Durbar (for the coronation of King George V) caused

a sensation. The Gaekwad was accused of publicly

disrespecting the royal couple, through lapses in

protocol. Film historian Stephen Bottomore, however,

studied Durbar footage to find that the Gaekwad’s

behaviour was not very different from that of other

princes. It seems that the Durbar controversy was

manufactured by British authorities. Sayaji Rao’s

popularity, progressivism, and outspokenness made the

British government extremely insecure and the secret

service spent years trying to find evidence of sedition

against the Gaekwad, so that he could be removed

from the throne. See Bhagavan, op. cit., particularly the

section on the 1911 Durbar, pp. 399–408, where he

discusses Bottomore.

27 It is also relevant that the Curators of the

Baroda Museum were almost always Indian or German,

but not British.

28 Space does not permit a full treatment of this

institution’s history, but it is interesting that the drive

to collect European art followed four years after the

Baroda Museum had begun collecting Asian “fine art”,

purchasing important examples of painting and sculpture

from China, Japan, Mongolia, and India. When European

art was finally presented, it was one of several world

civilizations.

29 Hermann Goetz, Handbook of the Collections,

Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery, 1952: quoted in

Gulammohammed Sheikh, “A Rich and Varied Fare”, in

Saryu Doshi, ed., A Royal Bequest: Art Treasures of the

Baroda Museum and Picture Gallery, IBH, Bombay, 1994,

pp. 20–29, see p. 24.

30 The history of this collection is traced and

analysed in Julie F. Codell, “Ironies of mimicry: the art

collection of Sayaji Rao III Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda,

and the cultural politics of early modern India”, Journal

of the History of Collections, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2003, pp.

127–46.

31 This was the work of E. Rimbault Dibdin,

an art critic and director of the Walker Art Gallery in

Liverpool. He wrote the catalogue of the collection and

travelled to Baroda in order to supervise the installation

of the galleries. This was done in 1921; for nearly ten

years the collection had lain in storage in Britain due to

the First World War.

32 For instance, Codell quotes Dibdin’s withering

comment on German art: “the Teuton genius has,

with rare exceptions, been more active in adapting and

rendering sterile the conceptions of other nations”. See

Codell, op. cit., pp. 138–39.

33 Codell, op. cit., p. 141.

34 This is certainly true of the Albert Hall

Museum in Jaipur whose carved pillars and doorways

testified to locally available skills. The master carvers were

even asked to “sign” the pillars they made by carving

their names onto them. Hendley, “Indian Museums”,

p. 56. Similarly, the Mathura Museum was an elaborately

carved sandstone building housing antiquities from

the time of Kanishka “down to the Victorian period,

which would be illustrated in perfection by the building



itself”. J.Ph. Vogel, Archaeological Museum at Mathura,

Indological Book House, Delhi and Varanasi, 1971 (1st

ed. 1910), p. 3. Vogel is here quoting F.S. Growse, under

whom the Museum was established in 1881.

35 Hendley, “Indian Museums”, p. 56.

36 This impression was voiced by Dr Vogel of

the Mathura Museum, at the Conference of Orientalists

in 1911. See Government of India, Conference of

Orientalists including Museums and Archaeology

Conference held in Simla July 1911, pp. 117–18.

37 Markham and Hargreaves, op. cit., p. 61.

38 Tony Bennett, Ch. 7, “Museums and Progress:

Narrative, Ideology, Performance”, in The Birth of the

Museum: History, Theory, Politics, Routledge, London and

New York, 1995.

39 For a fine discussion of audiences at museums

and scientific exhibitions in India, see Gyan Prakash, op.

cit., Ch. 2.

40 The Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay,

founded 1921, is an important exception.

41 A committee, under the chairmanship of Sir

Maurice Gwyer, Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, was

appointed to make detailed plans for a Museum of Art,

Archaeology and Anthropology. The Gwyer Committee

submitted its report in 1946. When the National

Museum was set up in 1949/50, its departments and

organizational structure were as envisaged by this

committee. See Government of India, Report of the

Gwyer Committee Central National Museum of Art,

Archaeology and Anthropology, New Delhi, 1947.

42 For a detailed account of the transition from

London Exhibition to germinal National Museum, see

Tapati Guha-Thakurta, op. cit., Ch. 6, “The Demands of

Independence”. For an interpretation of the museum

as installed in its building in 1961, see Kavita Singh,

“The Museum As National”, in Geeti Sen, ed., India: A

National Culture?, Sage, New Delhi, 2003, pp. 176–96.

43 National Archives of India, File No.

f 51-14/50 D III 1950 National Museum of Art,

Archaeology and Anthropology – Purchase of Art

Collections for Ministry of Education. I would like to

express my gratitude to Vidya Shivadas, who as a

researcher on a project co-directed by Saloni Mathur and

myself excavated fascinating material on the history of

the National Museum.


material fantasy: the museum in colonial india

Documents