8 Indian crafts and imperial policy: hybridity, purification, and imperial subjectivities (original) (raw)
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Art History
At the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1880, Val Prinsep’s vast group portrait of British officials and Indian potentates was singled out for virulent criticism because of its apparently aggressive interaction with the surrounding display. One critic claimed that the portrait of the Anglo-Indian crowd at the ‘Imperial Assemblage’ held in Delhi in 1877 ‘suffers terribly from its discordancy with everything in the exhibition, while it ruins the effects of every other picture, not only in the vicinity, but while the glare of its colouring haunts the vitiated eye’. As well as upsetting the visual harmony of the RA, Prinsep’s painting (the result of many tense sittings with recalcitrant Indian royalty) made an uncomfortable political point. It was the demographics of the Raj that seemed to cause offence: the visually disjunctive interaction of the ‘many-tinted actors’ whose portraits comprised the work was said to ‘violate’ artistic ‘laws and ordinances’. A key political reality of empire – cross-cultural interaction – therefore undermined acceptable aesthetic conventions. This paper argues that the disorientating aesthetics of Prinsep’s The Imperial Assemblage held at Delhi was encoded as a crisis of imperial governance, disrupting the sober visual strategies that had emerged in British portraiture to secure social cohesion. Prinsep’s commission – the most prestigious and expansive issued to a painter by a nineteenth-century colonial government – provides a privileged contrapuntal point from which to interrogate the politics of interaction in High Victorian portraiture (frequently overlooked in favour of the swagger portraits of the Georgian and Edwardian eras). The colourful heterogeneity of the Indian rulers’ regal dress stood in marked contrast to the monochromatic palette that dominated Victorian portraits – an aesthetic uniformity that in numerous instances had pictured a fraught parliamentary system in terms of an overarching political stability. There was thus a great amount at stake in portraits interacting in harmonious ways; and yet, within the available framework of colonial aesthetics, the ruling classes of the Raj could not be pictured interacting coherently. Consequently, I argue, there was a sort of aesthetic insurgency at the RA in 1880, as Prinsep’s motley assembly registered as an unruly visual assault.
Visions of “India”: Creating Nationalist Identity at Indian National Congress Exhibitions, 1901-6
This paper focuses on the annual industrial, artistic, and agricultural exhibitions associated with the Indian National Congress between 1901 and 1906. These exhibitions were the first of their kind to be primarily organised and managed by South Asians. There were over fifty thousand articles, including examples of local trades, “classic arts” of India, and goods manufactured using Western methods. Through a detailed analysis of sources such as the Indian National Congress proceedings and South Asian journals and newspapers like The Indian Textile Journal, I consider how the Congress appropriated western and traditional forms of display to construct its vision of the “modern” nation of India. The Indian National Congress became a driving force behind India’s nationalist movement in the early twentieth century. During this formative period in nationalist identity, it used exhibitions to legitimise its standing as a representative for “modern” India. In this paper, I discuss the ways in which the staging of these exhibitions served as a catalyst for the public in the subcontinent to examine a variety of issues, ranging from the importance of industry and its relationship to craft to a consideration of the landscape of the Indian city in terms of sanitation. I examine the 1905 Congress exhibition in Benares, in which many important nationalist figures, such as Gopal Krishna Gokhale, debated the future and parameters of design, particularly as industrial change was considered essential to the salvation of craft and an important element in the development of Swadeshi. While these Congress exhibitions and the era immediately before the Indian independence movement are not widely discussed in current scholarship, I argue that they are a defining moment that reveals the importance of modernity
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2004
The exhibition of decorative and industrial arts that was held in Jaipur in 1883 under the patronage of Maharaja Sawai Madho Singh II (1880–1922) brought together the work of artists and craftsmen from many regions of India, but gave special treatment to the neighbouring states of Rajasthan, and to the pupils of Jaipur’s own recently established School of Art. It led to the establishment of a permanent museum of industrial arts in Jaipur, which still exists and continues to hold many of the original exhibits. One of many ambitious exhibitions that followed in the wake of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Jaipur Exhibition was the first such to be held in an Indian state, coinciding with the International Exhibition in Calcutta and preceding the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London of 1886. The widely canvassed view of such events is that they projected a distinctively colonial perception of Indian tradition, arts and even society. An examination of the nature and objectives of the Jaipur Exhibition, however, suggests that such consideration of the British perspective alone is inadequate to explain it fully, overlooking as it does the agency and motives of the Indian participants. This article considers the Exhibition within the broader context of the arts and their institutions in late-nineteenth century Jaipur. It also examines the role of the Jaipur court, of the participating artists, and of the local audience, to suggest that the Jaipur Exhibition may be interpreted as an instrument that was intended to change perceptions of Rajasthani identity and the Jaipur State.
Art versus Industry? New Perspectives on Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, 2016
The historian Peter Hoffenberg referred to the Calcutta International Exhibition of 1883-4 as ‘India’s own Great Exhibition’, that is ‘a South Asian version of the first international exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851’ and as ‘the largest, most comprehensive and popular Indian exhibition of its day’. It was financially successful and the colonial government in India celebrated its achievements in terms of numbers of exhibitors, articles on display, awards bestowed, and its approximately one million mainly Indian visitors, claiming this native interest in this ‘Exhibition for India’ as its primary aim while citing the furthering of trade with Australia as secondary objective. I argue these claims as a belated face-saving exercise adopted when the original but ultimately unsuccessful ambition of the Calcutta International Exhibition to be a true world fair had failed and it became apparent that the world was not only not going to descend on Calcutta in droves as had been anticipated, but that it had decided instead to ignore the exhibition altogether. The discussion explores the political and colonial contexts of this failure in relation to the larger phenomenon of international exhibitions.