Abstract
In the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the famous Crystal Palace in London (see fig. 1.1), the East India Company brought together a lavish assemblage of goods intended to represent British holdings in the subcontinent. Composed of “such specimens of the products and manufactures of that country as may tend to illustrate its resources,”’ the prominently placed Indian Court combined very disparate things into a single display. One section detailed the raw materials, vegetable, and natural resources of the subcontinent, with cases filled with samples of iron, copper, tin, lead, and other minerals, on the one hand, and crops suitable for export, on the other. Another section was devoted to the tools and machines used in agriculture and manufacture and contained models of plows and harrows, an oil mill, a pottery wheel, looms for weaving cloth and carpets, and models of various artisans at work. Some cases near the transept displayed richly decorated clothes and ornaments: a coat with pearl epaulettes, an emerald and diamond-studded gold girdle, ruby-encrusted armlets that had once belonged to the Mughal emperors, and various necklaces of gold and precious stones. Other cases were draped with plain and patterned fabrics in cotton, silk, and wool, with woven, printed, tie-dyed, and embroidered designs. Counters lining one of the bays offered up the weapons of the subcontinent—everything from inlaid silver matchlocks to swords with enameled hilts, leather shields, chain mail, bows and arrows, and battle axes.
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Notes
Carol Breckenridge, “The Aesthetics and Politics of Colonial Collecting: India at World Fairs,” Comparative Studies of Society and History 31 no. 2 (1989): 205.
For early European attempts to document Indian dyeing and printing see the work of Paul R. Schwartz, including Printing on Cotton at Ahmedabad, India, 1678 (Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, Museum Monograph No. 1, 1969); “French Documents on Indian Cotton Painting: The Beaulieu ms., c. 1734,” Journal of Indian Textile History 2 (1956): 5–23; and “The Roxburgh Account of Indian Cotton Painting, 1795,” Journal of Indian Textile History 4 (1959): 47–56.
See also George Watt, “Note on a Red and a Yellow Dye Said to Have Been Prepared in Bombay During 1787,” in Selections from the Records of the Government of India, Revenue and Agricultural Department, vol. 1, part 1:1888–89 (Calcutta, 1889): 53–58.
Buchanan’s survey was only finally edited and published some thirty years later by Montgomery Martin as The History, Antiquities, Topography, and Statistics of Eastern India (London: Wm. H. Allen & Co., 1838).
Carla Sinopoli, The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c. 1350–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), chap. 5;
Tripta Verma, Karkhanas Under the Mughals from Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Economic Development (Delhi: Pragati Publications, 1994).
C. A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, ca. 1750–1850,” in Globalization in World History, ed. A. G. Hopkins (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002), 50–51.
C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
David Ludden, “India’s Development Regime,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 252.
Bernard Cohn, Colonialism and Its Form of Knowledge: The British in India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 5.
Quoted in Lala Baji Nath, “Some Factors in the Industrial and Commercial Development of India,” in Report of the First Indian Industrial Conference Held at Benaras on Saturday, the 30th December, 1905 (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1906), 299.
Manu Goswami, Producing India: From Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
See, for instance, David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth Century India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995);
James Mill and Satadru Sen, eds., Confronting the Body: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (London: Anthem Press, 2004).
For a more extended discussion of the emergence of a new definition of what constituted “traditional” Indian design, see Abigail McGowan, “All That is Rare, Characteristic or Beautiful’: Design and the Defense of Tradition in Colonial India, 1851–1903,” Journal of Material Culture 10 no. 3 (2005): 263–287.
John Forbes Royle, On the Culture and Commerce of Cotton in India and Elsewhere (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1851), Appendix: “Papers Referring to the Proposed Contributions from India for the Industrial Exhibition of 1851,” 590–591.
Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988);
Lara Kriegel, “Narrating the Subcontinent in 1851: India at the Crystal Palace,” in The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Louise Purbrick (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 149;
Lara Kriegel, Grand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 115–117.
Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue, vol. 2, 857; Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 100.
John Forbes Royle, “Lecture XI: The Arts and Manufactures of India,” in Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: David Bogue, 1852), 397.
Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day & Son, 1856).
The Cambridge scientist William Whewell spoke for many when he dismissed the beauty of India’s crafts as a sign of barbarism. Thus he argued that, within India, “the arts are mainly exercised to gratify the tastes of the few; with us, to supply the wants of the many. There, the wealth of a province is absorbed in the dress of a mighty warrior; here, the gigantic weapons of the peaceful potentate are used to provide clothing for the world.” William Whewell, “The General Bearing of the Great Exhibition on the Progress of Art and Science,” in Lectures on the Results of the Exhibition: Delivered before the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (London: David Bogue, 1852), 14.
Matthew Digby Wyatt, “Orientalism in European Industry,” Macmillan’s Magazine 21 (1870): 553.
Matthew Digby Wyatt, The Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century: A Series of Illustrations of the Choicest Specimens Produced by Every Nation at the Great Exhibition of Works of Industry, 1851, 2 vols. (London: Day & Son, 1851, 1853).
Larry D. Lutchmansingh, “Commodity Exhibitionism at the London Great Exhibition of 1851,” Annals of Scholarship 7 no 2 (1990): 207, 208.
Gottfried Semper, “Science, Industry and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition,” in The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989 [1852]), 142.
John Ruskin, Modern Painters (vol. 3, 1856) as quoted in Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: History of European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 240–241.
Other major Indian exhibitions in the nineteenth century included Madras (1855), Hyderabad (1856), Coimbatore (1857), Calcutta (1864, 1873, and 1883), Lahore (1864, 1881, and 1893), Nagpur (1865), Jubbulpore (1866), Agra (1867), Akola (1867), Karachi (1869), and Mysore (1888). For a discussion of Indian incorporation into a global exhibitionary project, see Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 21.
S. F. Markham and H. Hargreaves, The Museums of India (London: Museums Association, 1936), 6–7.
See John Forbes Watson, The International Exhibition of 1862: Classified and Descriptive Catalogue of the Indian Department (London: Her Majesty’s Commissioners, 1862), iv; Report on the Jubbulpore Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Produce, December 1866 (Nagpur: Central Provinces Printing Press, 1867), 2; General Report of the North-West Provinces Exhibition, Held at Agra, February 1867 (Roorkee: Thomason Civil Engineering College Press, 1868), 20; and Dr Birdwood to Government of Bombay, July 14, 1880. MSA: ED 1880: v. 21, c. 277.
T. C. Hope, Report on the Broach Exhibition of 1868–69 (Bombay: Education Society’s Press, 1869), 8–9.
David Washbrook, “Agriculture and Industrialization in Colonial India,” in Agriculture and Industrialization, ed. Peter Mathias and John A. Davis (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 168.
Italics in the original. John Forbes Watson, The Textile Manufactures and the Costumes of the People of India (reprinted by the Indological Book House, Varanasi, 1982 [1866]), 3.
Deborah Swallow, “The India Museum and the British-Indian Textile Trade in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Textile History 30 no. 1 (1999): 29–45.
C. Bernard, Report on the Arts, Manufactures and Produce at the Nagpur Exhibition (Nagpur, 1866), 22.
Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). chaps. 7–10.
Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, ed., Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Mill and Sen, eds., Confronting the Body.
Thomas Holbein Hendley, London Indo-Colonial Exhibition of 1886: Handbook of the Jeypore Courts (Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press, 1886), 26.
George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India (London: Chapman & Hall, 1880), 1–2.
Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XVIII, Part II: Poona (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1885), 173–210.
Government of Bombay, General Report on the Administration of the Bombay Presidency for the Year 1871–72 (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1873), 364–368.
See, for instance, H. J. R. Twigg’s monograph on carpet weaving in the Bombay Presidency, the first chapter of which summarizes information on carpet weaving from all the district gazetteers of the presidency. H. J. R. Twigg, A Monograph on the Art and Practice of Carpet-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 1908 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages: Monograph Series on Bombay Presidency [New Delhi: Navrang, 1976]). As the Diwan of Baroda, Kazi Shahabudin, argued in 1881, because crafts changed little from year to year, “a description of them once given will hold good for a long period.” (Kazi Shahabudin to P. S. Melvill, February 24, 1881. BPRO: Huzur English Office, Rev. Dept. section 238, file 1.)
Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. XX: Sholapur (Bombay: Government Central Press, 1884), 269.
J. R. Martin, A Monograph on Tanning and Working in Leather in the Bombay Presidency, 1903 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 318–319);
E. Maconochie, A Monograph on the Pottery and Glass-Ware of the Bombay Presidency, 1895 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 263);
R. R. F. Kirk, A Monograph on Paper-Making in the Bombay Presidency, 1907? (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 306, 309).
C. G. H. Fawcett, A Monograph on Dyes and Dyeing in the Bombay Presidency, 1908 (reprinted in Art and Industry Through the Ages, 87).
Thomas Holbein Hendley, Memorials of the Jeypore Exhibition 1883, vol. 1 (London: W. Griggs, 1884), v.
G. H. R. Tillotson, The Tradition of Indian Architecture: Continuity, Controversy and Change since 1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 66.
Quoted in “The Opening of the Albert Hall and Museum at Jeypore,” JIAI 2 no. 19 (1888): 21; Thomas Holbein Hendley, Handbook to the Jeypore Museum (Calcutta: W. Griggs, 1895), 2.
For a similar description of the carving work at the Jaipur Museum, see Rudyard Kipling, Letters of Marque (Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co., 1891), 23.
For an analysis of its role in documenting and defining traditional design see Deepali Dewan, “Scripting South Asia’s Visual Past: The Journal of Indian Art and Industry and the Production of Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Press, ed. Julie Codell (London: Associated University Presses, 2003), 29–44.
B. A. Brendon, “Woollen Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency,” JIAI 10 no. 82 (April 1903): 17–18;
S. M. Edwardes, “Silk Fabrics of the Bombay Presidency,” JIAI 10 no. 81 (January 1903): 1–6.
Clare Wilkinson-Weber, “Women, Work and the Imagination of Craft in South Asia,” Contemporary South Asia 13 no. 3 (September 2004): 296–297.
Sanjay Seth, Subject Lessons: The Western Education of Colonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 4, 30, 31.
Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 133.
Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure and Objectification in South Asia” in An Anthropologist among the Historians, and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 228–229.
John Styles, “Product Innovation in Early Modern London,” Past and Present 168 (August 2000): 124–169.
“Deshi Karigarine Uttejan Aapva Vishe” [Regarding encouragement to be given to native arts and crafts], Buddhiprakash 23 no. 8 (1876): 170. To give but one example, the 1879 government gazetteer noted that Muslim paper makers in Ahmedabad bound community members to secrecy on production matters, while in other crafts parents refused to teach their daughters for fear that the latter would divulge family secrets to their husband’s household after marriage. (Government of Bombay, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, Vol. IV: Ahmedabad [Bombay: Government Central Press, 1879], 134.)
Michele Archambault, “Blockprinted Fabrics of Gujarat for Export to Siam: An Encounter with Mr. Maneklal T. Gajjar,” Journal of the Siam Society 77 no. 2(1989): 71–74. For other examples of such family pattern books, see Jim Masselos, “The Artist as Patron: Women’s Embroidery in Gujarat,” in Popular Art in Asia: The People as Patrons, ed. Jim Masselos (Sydney: University of Sydney, 1984): 34–46.
Tirthankar Roy, “Music as Artisan Tradition,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32 no. 1 (1998): 21–42.
Saloni Mathur, “Living Ethnographic Exhibits: The Case of 1886,” Cultural Anthropology 15 no. 4 (2001): 507.
T. N. Mukharji, A Visit to Europe (London: Edward Stanford, 1889), 99.
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© 2009 Abigail McGowan
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McGowan, A. (2009). Demanding Knowledge, Documenting the Body. In: Crafting the Nation in Colonial India. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623231_2
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