The Museum in the Colony (PDF)

## museum ### The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving, Classifying Tapati Guha-Thakurta In Rudyard Kipling's novel *Kim*, the comprehensive knowledge upon which English hegemony rests is represented by the museum, and the "Wonder House" frames the story's beginning and end in a variety o...

## museum ### The Museum in the Colony: Collecting, Conserving, Classifying Tapati Guha-Thakurta In Rudyard Kipling's novel *Kim*, the comprehensive knowledge upon which English hegemony rests is represented by the museum, and the "Wonder House" frames the story's beginning and end in a variety of ways. Kipling's narrative begins with the Lama expressing his desire for Kim to become a museum curator, and *Kim* ends with the Lama squarely within the confines of the museum, for in his enlightened state, he reminds Kipling of "the stone Bodhishat... of the Lahore museum." The Lahore museum should not be mistaken for the British Museum. The Lahore museum is a member of the knowledge-producing state apparatuses called the imperial archive, but it contains only local knowledge pertaining to a limited zone of empire. This chapter explores the inception of the museum in colonial India. If Kipling's *Kim* stands as the archetype of Indian "imperial fiction," the "Wonder House" of Lahore has come to embody the quintessential image of the colonial museum. This chapter examines the first museum to be instituted in India in the capital of colonial power, Calcutta (still known locally as the *Jadu Ghar*), conceived over time as an Imperial Museum that would hold a representative "Indian" collection. The Calcutta museum is about the differences in form, functioning, and location that separated such a body from its metropolitan counterpart - the British Museum. The essay is highlighting the issue of "local knowledge"; that is, the knowledge that was specific to the needs and the context of the Indian empire. The goal is to see the museum in India not simply as part of the extensive knowledge-producing apparatus that was so central to the experience and the "fantasy of empire," but also to study how the project of producing and disseminating this knowledge was fractured in the course of its enactment in Indian history. The story here is built around the formation and self-definition of one particular discipline, archaeology, within the space of the museum. The history of museums in India has two starting points: the founding of the first "museum" in India, within the premises of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the first systematised British initiatives towards the survey and documentation of Indian antiquities. Both the museum and archaeology arrive in the colony already well-formed as practices and disciplines. Their objects were already a part of what Thomas Richards argues are, while the 19th-century British Empire was more productive of knowledge than any previous empire in history, the idea of a composite, comprehensive imperial archive was, in essence, a fantasy. This chapter studies the first museum in colonial India as a case study of how museums in India failed to effectively transform themselves from 'Wonder Houses' to new centers of disciplinary specialization. Though there was a concerted drive in this direction since the 1870s, archaeology's attempts to carve a niche in the colonial museum in Calcutta's main spread of "natural history," "ethnography," and "industrial art" exhibits remained a problem. The essay argues that the issue of "failure" or "incompleteness" can be reconceptualized as one of "hybridity" and "difference" and placed in the hiatus between the intended role of the museum in India and its many unintended meanings throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. ## The First Museum of Colonial India When museums first began to be planned in British India during the mid-19th century, a European model of museums as state institutions for the collection of historical, scientific, or artistic artifacts was already well established. The British Museum, founded in 1753, by the early 19th century had emerged as the exemplary metropolitan institution, a magnificent repository of antiquities of all civilizations of the ancient world. Foremost of the knowledge-producing institutions of the Empire, the museum exemplified the idea of "the imperial archive," an entire epistemological complex for representing comprehensive knowledge whose reach extended across the globe. As its main rival, after being established in 1792 in the galleries of the old royal palace of the Louvre, the Museum Francais evolved as a holder of both the nation's antiquities and of antiquities scoured from all over Europe and the Near East. By the 1830s, various other monastic and private collections of French antiquities were being reorganized into disciplinary and period museums. The museum in Europe, as has been extensively studied, had its precursors in the large royal collections, the Renaissance galleries of paintings of Italian princes, and the thriving antiquarian tradition of "cabinets of curiosities" of the 17th and 18th centuries. As visual invocations of a historical past, the museum in the early 19th century began to share the space of the great scenographic spectacles that were introduced in that century. The dioramas of medieval architectural sites and history scenes, the panoramas of colonial India, and the world exhibitions all contributed to the production of "reality effects" and the imagining of a new "history" and "antiquity." The world generated its own hierarchies of genres and representations, and the museums, as the most ordered and complete replications of the past, transformed old treasure troves and curio-cabinets into scientifically classified displays of the art and antiquities, history, and ethnography of nations. By the middle years of the 19th century, composite collections had given way to separate disciplinary museums of "art," "antiquities," "ethnography," and 'natural history,' each worked out as distinct fields of knowledge and opened to further divisions and sub-divisions. The first museums in colonial India were conceived in the earlier 17th and 18th centuries' sense of assembling a complete and unified corpus of knowledge under one roof. The early ideal of a museum was that it should represent the universe by means of a systematic classification of all subject matter. Thus, India's exotic universe in its entirety - in its past and present, in its natural and human wealth, scientific and civilizational resources - offered itself to the space of the museum. To the Western antiquarian, India could figure as a single unified site where her flora and fauna, her fossils and minerals, her cultures and customs, her diverse people, and, no less, her arts and antiquities, could all feature within the same collective constellation, even as each had their own classificatory labels. ## Tracing the Genealogy of the Museum in India Tracing the genealogy of the museum in India does not lead us back to any princely collection of the Native States, nor to private colonial collections of relics and curiosities (although both existed in large numbers, and the latter, in particular, would filter into the museums once they came up). The beginnings are to be found, instead, in the most prestigious organ of Western Orientalist scholarship, Sir William Jones' Asiatic Society, founded in Calcutta in 1784. The proposals to form a museum within the Asiatic Society in 1814 were part of a broader attempt at the time to place the Society on a solid institutional footing. The Asiatic Society had been transformed under H.T. Colebrooke into a more concrete organisation with its own premises and housing its own library and museum. Construction of a building for the Society was occasioned mainly by the need to set up a museum within it. Amateurish and antiquarian passions for collecting were to be processed into a systematic cultivation of knowledges. The idea was to order and organize the vast material India offered Western scholars for the advancement of the different natural and human sciences. The absence of a learned material archive was seen to be the major deficiency within the Asiatic Society, for all its path-breaking work with Sanskrit texts. It was to remedy this deficiency that the Asiatic Society was now "called upon to adopt active measures for... collecting from the abundant matter, which India offers, a Museum that shall be serviceable to history and science." The museum that was to be "collected," was to consist of "all articles that may tend to illustrate Oriental manners and history, or to elucidate the peculiarities of art and nature in the east." The central constitutive urge was that of collecting, not of displaying. The collection was to exist only for that small initiated circle (then, an exclusively Western one) who perceived its need and appreciated its value; its display before a larger public was yet to feature on the agenda. Throughout its early history, the museum in India would remain locked in the specialist gaze of the scholar and collector, never adequately opening itself to the wondrous gaze of the lay spectator. A learned, scholarly domain was bounded off as the space of the museum, and its "public" utility constituted within it. In its quest for knowledge, the first museum had its twin concerns both with "objects of science" as well as with "reliques which illustrate ancient times and manners." Accordingly, it solicited contributions that ranged from ancient monuments, sculptures, coins, and inscriptions to utensils, tools, weapons, and musical instruments to animals (dead or alive), plants, minerals, and metals. One can presage the fields of "archaeology," "ethnography," and "natural history" already forming themselves around this intended gathering of objects. ## A Storehouse of "Natural History" and the "Industrial Arts" The museum in India was primarily organized around the country's "natural history." Although her ancient past remained an alluring mystery, waiting to be deciphered from texts, coins, inscriptions, and material remains, the peculiarities and varieties of her botanical and zoological specimens more easily absorbed the amateur scholar. From the late 18th century onwards, we have several examples of small menageries and botanical collections built up by the East India Company's civilians, with native artists employed in the visual documentation of these "natural history" specimens. On the one hand, India's strange medley of tribes, trades and castes; and, on the other hand, her equally exotic non-human array of plants, flowers, fruits, birds, insects, and animals produced the whole new genre of "Company paintings." Pictorial representation went hand in hand with systematic collection and schematisation. Well before archaeology marked out its sprawling field in India, India's "natural history" began to emerge as a prime subject of scientific knowledge within the institutional sites of museums. Even within the Asiatic Society, a stronghold of philological and textual scholarship, the move for a museum had been initiated by an amateur botanist, Dr Nathaniel Wallich, with his own private collection of botanical specimens. Wallich became the first Honorary Curator of the Society's museum, to which came his own and a few individual collections. The museum was divided into two main sections: the archaeological and ethnological, and the geological and zoological. Due to the contribution of a vast collection of geological specimens, a Museum of Economic Geology was set up in 1856 under a separate curatorship, which henceforth received all samples of minerals and fossils. Over time, the botanical specimens acquired by the museum began to be farmed out to the Botanical Gardens for a separate conservatory that was planned there. The steady death and depletion of the museum's holdings of live animals called for their transference to other menageries, where the animals could be better kept alive with the museum retaining a claim to their skins on their death for its Taxidermy department. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, however, the museum in Calcutta remained largely the domain of Naturalists and Zoologists, with much of its expenses and expertise invested in the science of taxidermy. New acquisitions continued to consist of different species of mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, insects, and molluscs, examined and preserved by the Taxidermy laboratory. The same focus on the "natural sciences" determined the structure of similar institutions as they first emerged in the other presidencies of British India. For instance, the next government museum that came up in Madras in 1851 resulted from a prior campaign to organize mainly a scientific collection of 'Economic Geology' and a 'Museum of Natural History' in the region. Under its first superintendents, Edward Gren Balfour, Jesse Mitchell, and George Biddie (all medical surgeons), the collections of the Madras Museum remained confined almost entirely to Geology and Natural History, the latter section including a zoological garden. On much the same pattern, the museum that was established in Bombay in 1855 began largely as a museum of what was classified as 'Economic Products', designed for specimens of Natural History, Economy, Geology, Industry, and Arts. Parallel to the abiding interest in 'natural history', we can see a growing interest in the products and manufactures of the empire spreading into the same space of the museums. Out of this interest now, another major category of objects was targeted for collection and display, those that were variously termed the "industrial" or "decorative arts" or the "art manufactures" of India. On the one hand, a concerted drive to improve the quality of English industrial design; and, on the other hand, a nostalgic impetus to revive the dying pre-industrial traditions of craftsmanship, had made the "decorative arts" a focal point of commercial and aesthetic interest in England. This interest found its ideal locus in India. The empire offered itself as a great untapped source of riches and redemption for English industry and design, a locale for both commerce and art ("art" implying the newly-valued genre of the "decorative arts"). It was the discovery of the country's "living traditions" of craftsmanship and decorative design that had assigned India her pride of place in the circuit of the world fairs and international exhibitions. In its spread of crafts, designs, and exotic regalia, the Indian Court had been among the most sumptuous displays in London's first Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851, The Great Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations. India was laid out, here, as an exotic pre-industrial entity against which the modern industrial nations defined their inadequacies and their advances. At the Crystal Palace, for the first time, a carefully choreographed ensemble of Indian artifacts transcended their "curiosity" value to stand as superior examples of "industrial arts" and 'decorative design' on an international arena. Just as the botanical specimens acquired in museums, the craft objects now were subjected to the same orders of identification, organization, and classification according to a variety of schemes (according to period, place of origin, nature of the raw material, production process, or style of design). These exhibitions directly opened out into the domain of the museums, establishing close co-relations and synonymities. While museum collections were occasionally tapped on for exhibitions, more often, the exhibition items, which were searched out, gathered and grouped for the event, found a permanent place in the museums. The Great Exhibition inaugurated a pervasive trend of displays, collections, and publications in England and India centered around the "decorative arts" of the empire. In the 1850s, it was under the direct impetus of the Great Exhibition and the interest and concerns it aroused that museum committees were constituted in Madras and Bombay to draw into the museums representative samples of all the art-manufactures of the Presidency. At the same time, the museum project also found a place within the first Schools of Art in India during the 1860s and 1870s, as they too made the existing art-industries of each region a central target of tutelage. The schools functioned primarily as Schools of Industrial Arts, as centers for the promotion of various artisanal skills of design and craftsmanship. And museums were intended to function as close adjuncts of the Schools of Art in fulfilling the main objectives of British art education in India: "in storing up the best examples of Oriental design and processes, in instructing the working artisan in these, and in restraining them against the facile imitation of European designs and methods." In short, museums were to stand as "a register of progress and improvement as well as a repertoire of traditional forms and designs." It is in this choice field of the "decorative arts" that the museum first evolved its dual identity - as a storehouse of tradition and as forum of visual instruction. It came to be situated within an extensive institutional network of conservation and collection. Now, the museum moved from being repositories of "history" and "science" to becoming, in addition, a repository of the nation's "art." We can see this in the case of the Indian Museum in Calcutta, which was directly roped into the wider schemes of promotion of the industrial arts from the 1880s. The hosting of the Calcutta International Exhibition in the premises of the museum during the winter of 1883-84, led to the creation of a new Economic and Art Section within the museum, under the curatorship of T.N. Mukharji. This consisted of the entire complex of Art-Ware Courts of the exhibition. A large collection of crafts and manufactures were transferred from the old Economic Museum of the Bengal Government to the Indian Museum. Around the same time, proposals were submitted for amalgamating the museum, with its newly-acquired art-ware section, with the Calcutta School of Art and its adjoining Art Gallery. The intention was to establish in Calcutta an integrated Department of Science and Art on the model of South Kensington, London, where the museum and art school would work together in a comprehensive project of technical and art education. This proposed merger would have brought under a single instructive domain the collection of European "fine arts" of the Art Gallery, the specimens of old architecture and sculpture, and the large array of arts and crafts gathered at the museum, balancing the "science" section with an adjacent "art" section. The proposal remained a matter of debate; its implementation was stalled by fears of sacrificing the "individuality" and "scientific character" of the museum and reducing it to "a curiosity shop." Nevertheless, the Economic and Art Section that came about within the museum, with its "pure art specimens" (i.e., artistic crafts as distinct from economic products), would form the basis of the later Art Gallery and Art Section of the Indian Museum. Into this section came, then, the new-Indianised collection of design, "decorative" and "fine arts" which the Reformist art teacher E.B. Havell had collected to replace the earlier collection of European casts and copies in the Art School. When in 1914, the Indian Museum completed its centenary, it considered as one of its highlights this Art Gallery that included by then a special wing devoted to the Indian painting, mainly to Mughal miniatures and the works of Abanindranath Tagore and his school, surrounded now by the new 'aesthetic' aura that the nationalist art movement had generated. ## The Need and Lack of Archaeology Over a century of its existence, a museum filled with scientific specimens and historical relics had acquired, in a small specialized niche, an additional status as an "art" museum. What is instructive is the way the museum, in the organization and gradation of its collection, itself fostered a particular definition of "art" in the Indian context. Throughout the 19th century, while it assigned to Indian art an exclusively "decorative" and "craft" value, placing it in the realm of the "industrial arts," the museum had continuously sifted out of the field of "art" another category of objects, which it classified as "antiquities" and allocated to the different discipline of archaeology. Between "natural history" and the "decorative arts," archaeology emerged over the mid-19th century as the other major constituent field of knowledge within the museum. It became central in the new thrust towards disciplinary specialization and scientific ordering of collections within the institution, as it attempted to expand its scope from the "natural" to the "human sciences" of history and ethnology. Right from the beginning, historical "reliques" (specified as ancient monuments, sculptures, inscriptions, and coins) had been a main group of objects to be solicited by the Asiatic Society's museum. Collections like those of Colin Mackenzie (particularly, his holdings of temple inscriptions, sculptures and stone remains) or the findings from sites of the first creed of "traveling antiquarians," had been presented on and off to the museum. Yet, both in quantity and status, such historical antiquities remained secondary to the geological or natural history collections of the museum. And even when received, such items frequently escaped the requirements of "safe-keeping," proper registration, and classification that were their due. Thus, for instance, a stone box recovered from the mounds of a stupa at *Sarnath*, which had been handed over to the Orientalist scholar, Jonathan Duncan, in the 1790s and passed on by him to the Asiatic Society's museum, was no longer to be found there when Cunningham searched for it half a century later. And Cunningham noted with equal consternation that objects which he himself had excavated from *Sarnath* in 1834 and presented to this museum stood falsely labeled as belonging to the Manikyala "tope" in Punjab. We also know of the case of two massive ancient statues which Francis Buchanan had "rescued" from the vicinities of Patna in 1812, which came soon afterwards to be deposited in the Asiatic Society's Museum, but which lay unknown and abandoned in the backyards for five decades, before Cunningham "rediscovered" them and had them installed in the new premises of the Indian Museum in 1870. As the archaeological project took on its new institutional guise from the 1860s, a similar need for "system" and "care" began to press itself on the body of the museum. It was a part of the museum's increasing concern with augmenting its "scientific character" that it now aspired to invest all its historical objects with the same methods and orders of the natural sciences. It was also a part of the Indian Museum's new self-image as an imperial institution. Delinked from the Asiatic Society and transformed in 1866 into a separate imperial body, the museum in Calcutta saw itself committed to a new cause of public education and enlightenment. The steady accumulation and classification of scientific specimens required balancing by a parallel corpus of organised knowledge on the history and culture of the land. There were two disciplines which the Indian Museum picked out as potentially rich target areas, where it saw itself to be particularly deficient and lagging. One discipline was ethnology for which India offered herself as a prime locus. Yet, the subject was said to have been barely touched upon at home compared to the exhaustive manner in which science was being handled by the museums of Europe and the South Kensington Museum, London, all of which could "boast of more complete collections of the Ethnology of India than the Calcutta Museum itself. The South Kensington example of a thorough collection of Indian arts and crafts and all kindred objects was recommended to fill this vital gap in the Indian Museum. The other science, closely allied to and complementary to ethnology, was archaeology, for which again India provided a wealth of material. The past in India lay open as the terrain of archaeologists, waiting to be revealed from every monumental or material remain. But the museum, it was regretted, lay outside the orbit of the researches and discoveries of the Archaeological Survey of India. Its excavated treasures seldom found place and preservation within the museums. And archaeological items, so far as they randomly made their way into museums, remained distinctly lacking in order and completeness. By the early 1880s, the museum authorities were pressing hard for making the ethnology and archaeology collections in Calcutta "worthy of a Museum which claims to be Imperial." In particular, they urged a closer link and co-operation between the Indian Museum and the Archaeological Survey of India, requesting that the former be made a necessary depository of all objects excavated, preserved, and studied by the latter. Let's turn, at this point, to the parallel story of the maturing and expansion of the colonial archaeological project in the same years. Let me focus attention, in particular, on what emerges as a distinct shift in orientation in the archaeological programme in the period immediately following Cunningham's retirement from the Archaeological Survey. The extensiveness of Cunningham's tours and the thoroughness of his survey reports had laid out a comprehensive pool of archaeological knowledge, "comprehensive enough to include every site that was of promise, every antiquity that was of interest." In 1885, Cunningham was succeeded, in the post of Director General for a brief period by James Burgess, known for his equally exhaustive survey work in Western India. The post-Cunningham phase, however, would be marked by a folding up of the apparatus of archaeological research. The official focus in archaeology shifted grounds from fresh excavations to the task of conservation and documentation of what was already known, surveyed and classified. The latter was upheld as the more urgent need of the time, the pre-requisite for any further research. And it is in this change in priorities that we can trace, over time, a new space of convergence and collaboration between the two establishments of archaeology and museums in late 19th-century India. What is important to note is the way the imperatives of conservation now figured as a new domain of state intervention and legislation. There were, it seems, two main preventive thrusts that determined the nature of official custody over monuments and relics. One concerned the decay and destruction of India's ancient monuments, their susceptibility not only to the ravages of time, but also to human pillage and vandalism. The other concerned a category of objects, which archaeologists classified as "movable antiquities" (prime among them being loose sculpted figures and panels), objects, which formed a large haul of every excavated site, but whose indiscriminate removal, theft or sale within and outside the country was seen to rob the empire of its great historical and artistic "treasures." In the one case, what called out for protection were standing structures which needed as far as possible to be preserved and refurbished in their original locations. In the other case, what demanded attention were items whose future lay inevitably in their removal and preservation off site, over which the government now needed to assert its institutional rights vis-à-vis all other claimants. If in the first case the "natives" could be targeted as chief culprits in foraging for stones and bricks, in the latter case, the finger of accusation turned equally. Following Burgess' retirement in 1889, the Director General's appointment failed to be renewed; regional survey departments, reduced and decentralised, were relegated to local governments; and, even in this much truncated form, survey establishments were sanctioned for no more than five years, in anticipation that, by then, the survey work, so far as the government was concerned, would be completed. ==End of OCR for page 12==