Abstract
Victorian and Edwardian Britain has been persuasively remapped by recent scholarship1 as an imperial contact zone, shaped as much by what Edward Said has described as the ‘intertwined histories’ of the colonial encounter, as the colonized territories overseas.2 Empire was not simply something ‘out there’, operating in the far- flung regions of the British imperial world, but was also lived and experienced ‘at home’ in British cultural life. As a result, an increasing amount of attention has been given to the cultural networks through which Britain came into contact with imperial subjects, ideas, images, materials and things. Elleke Boehmer, also a contributor to this volume, has written evocatively about the global networks of the British imperial world circa 1900. Sustaining and ‘imaginatively reinforcing’ the grids of the British imperial world, she writes, were ‘nets or “webs of language”, intertextual webs of common metaphors and shared images, including the webs of interrelationship’ which ‘registered the operations of imperial networks’ through both fictional and non- fictional writings.3 These international, cross- colonial networks were ‘created through contacts between imperial and native colonial elites, which were themselves facilitated by the cross- hatched, cable- linked communication, military and administrative grids of the Empire.’4
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Edward W. Said, ‘Overlapping Territories, Intertwined Histories’, in Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994).
Elleke Boehmer, ‘Global and Textual Webs in an Age of Transnational Capitalism; or, What Isn’t New about Empire’, Postcolonial Studies 7: 1 (2004) 17.
Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: inIVA and MIT Press, 2005), p. 8.
For a recent discussion of the development of modernist literature and art in relation to Asian, African and Pacific art in London’s museums, see Rupert R. Arrowsmith, Modernism and the Museum: African, Asian and Pacific Art and the London Avant-Garde (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reaction to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 270.
and Richard Davis, The Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), p. 177.
George Birdwood, ‘Preface’ in Portfolio of Indian Art (London: South Kensington Museum, 1881).
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993).
A. K. Coomaraswamy, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art: Being a Monograph of Mediaeval Sinhalese Arts and Crafts, Mainly as Surviving in the Eighteenth Century, with an Account of the Structure of Society and the Status of the Craftsman (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1908).
A. K. Coomaraswamy, Indian Drawings, Series 1 (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1910), p. vii.
Sister Nivedita and A. K. Coomaraswamy, Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists (London: George G. Harrap, 1913).
A. K. Coomaraswamy, Selected Examples of Indian Art (Broad Campden: Essex House Press, 1910), p. v.
Christopher Pinney, The Coming of Photography in India (London: British Library, 2008), p. 103.
Saloni Mathur, India by Design: Cultural History and Colonial Display (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 130.
E. B. Havell, Ideals of Indian Art (London: John Murray, 1908), p. 25.
See Osman Jamal, ‘The Art and Politics of Indianness: E. B. Havell’, Third Text 39 (1997), 3–19.
Osman Jamal, ‘E. B. Havell and Rabindranath Tagore: Nationalism, Modernity and Art’, Third Text 53 (2000–1), 19–30.
Osman Jamal, ‘Debashish Benerji’s Havell’, Third Text 60 (2002), 313–16.
Tapati Guha Thakurta, The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c.1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Intellectual Fraternity’, in The Dance of Siva: Fourteen Indian Essays (New York: Sunwise Turn, 1918), p. 112.
Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin- de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 164.
Laurence Binyon, ‘Homage to India’, Indian Arts and Letters 14: 2 (1940), 111.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2013 Sarah Victoria Turner
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Turner, S.V. (2013). Crafting Connections: The India Society and the Formation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. In: Nasta, S. (eds) India in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230392724_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-35201-2
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-39272-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)