Museums & Colonial Representations of South Asia
Introduction
We tend to think of museums as neutral spaces for the appreciation of art and historical artifacts. However, the history of museum-making shows that they can also be cultural, educational, and political spaces that are often tied to very specific histories and agendas. They had, and continue to have, immense power to shape how visitors view and experience different histories, geographies, and political affiliations. While we spend time in museums reading object labels and admiring displays and curation strategies, what often goes unnoticed is the history of museum collections, as well as the rationale behind organizing and assigning these collected objects to specific galleries and departments around the world.
This essay will discuss the establishment of the earliest museums in South Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how these emerged as British imperial projects to secure colonial interests. By collecting and displaying works of Indian history, art, and culture, the colonial museums of South Asia became knowledge-producing institutions where this information was scientifically classified and organized within Orientalist tropes, then exhibited and disseminated to a wider public. Many of these museum and curatorial practices continue to be used today. It is hence critical to discuss and shed more light on possible strategies for reframing museum narratives and decolonizing museum practices going forward.
Collecting And Archiving Knowledge
By the 19th century, the English East Indian Company (EEIC) had managed to gain control over large parts of the Indian subcontinent, and undertook an extensive intellectual campaign to gain knowledge of its newly acquired domains. Various surveyors, geographers, antiquarians, and civil and military officers of the Company were deployed to map, document, and conduct ‘statistical surveys’ of the different parts of the subcontinent. During this phase of the British ‘rediscovery of India,’ the colonial officers surveyed and listed historical remains, carried out amateur excavations, and collected archaeological artifacts, including sculptures, manuscripts, paintings, and architectural fragments. Europe’s comprehensive observation and codification of the non-European worlds was done in “so thorough and detailed a manner as to leave no item untouched, no culture unstudied, no people or land unclaimed.”1
Examining the writings of 18th and 19th century surveyors and antiquarians from South Asia gives us an idea of their surveying and collecting practices. These include those of James Rennell, Collin Mackenzie, and Francis Buchanan Hamilton, to name a few, who traversed different parts of the subcontinent. Their surveys were meant to provide the colonial government with a historical, economic, and social understanding of India, which would ease British administration. The itinerary of surveyors was greatly informed by the mention of place names and locations in ancient Indian treatises, the travelogues of two Buddhist Chinese monks who traveled to India between the 5th and the 7th centuries, as well as Greek texts and travel accounts of Alexander’s army. These texts became a guiding beacon for the colonial surveyors in their historical discovery of the subcontinent and the identification of its historical geography. By comparing these ancient travel accounts to the 19th century political and social landscape, the colonial discourse of a ‘decayed’ and ‘corrupt’ India was formulated to provide a justification for the colonial government to protect, recover, and restore the territory. Moreover, a political history of India was constructed based on the names of rulers provided in the historical texts and the inscriptions found on coins, copper plates, sculptures, and on the walls of temples and shrines. Both epigraphic translations and the collection of inscriptions and coins belonging to Indian rulers and ruling dynasties were central to the colonial project of historical documentation. The picture that was presented of India was one of “Oriental despotism,” with a succession of the rise and fall of various ruling dynasties.2 Archaeological sites, religious monuments, and the enshrined sculptures came to be classified in terms of chronology and political patronage.
Within this Orientalist enterprise, a major focus of the colonial historical scholarship and archaeological excavations was to ‘rediscover’ the history of Buddhism, which was perceived as the original and pure religion of the subcontinent. Following the publication of Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia in 1879, Orientalist scholars wanted to explore the sites associated with the life of the historical Buddha and the pristine homeland of Buddhism. This aspiration marked the beginnings of archaeology in South Asia, where colonial officers started to identify the sites mentioned in the Buddhist texts, opening up Buddhist stupas, collecting Buddhist sculptures, and excavating archaeological sites on the pretext of scholarship and conservation. For instance, sites such as Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, and Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first discourse, became treasure troves, subject to extensive, unscientific excavations and collection of antiquities. Most importantly, these sacred spaces were no longer seen as living places of worship, visited by large numbers of devotees and pilgrims, and instead became historical sites and monuments.
The finding of monuments and antiquities relating to other faiths remained only incidental to the project. One name which stands out in the practice of colonial archaeology is Alexander Cunningham, who later went on to become the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India, established in 1861. Unlike his colleagues, Cunningham’s practice of archaeology primarily focused on religious sites, their identification and listing, and making collections. What set him apart from his colleagues was that he tested his deductions in the field by breaking open Buddhist stupas and collecting the relics enshrined inside, as well as reorganizing artifacts and structures on the site as per what he conceived as the ‘original’ layout of the site, thus completely denying the agency of the native population. In the pursuit to unravel Buddhist history, the interconnectivity between the different religions and chronological periods of South Asia was lost. The focus remained on a certain ‘moment’ in history, the Buddhist tradition, without taking into account its relationship with other periods or cultures.
Along with collecting archeological material such as sculptures, manuscripts, inscriptions, and coins, the latter of which was a priority, the surveyors and officers also gathered specimens of botanical and zoological material, rocks, and minerals. The collections became valuable visual records of India’s diverse geography and rich history. However, within the Orientalist discourse, the British also took custodianship of India’s material artifacts, which they argued were being lost and destroyed due to native apathy. A large part of collected materials was shipped to Britain as souvenirs of the Empire, and also to be studied, translated, and interpreted within Orientalist scholarship. Objects were initially displayed at the India House Museum of the English East India Company in London, and after its dissolution, in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. During the long journey overseas, historical objects were often lost. At other instances, they sat in the packing boxes and crates in which they had been shipped. An interesting instance is of the Buddhist stupa, a ceremonial burial mound, at the city of Amravati in South India, which was dismembered for its exquisitely carved sculptural panels depicting stories of Buddha’s life. Collin Mackenzie, the first surveyor general of India, shipped a large collection of the fragments of the Amravati stupa to be preserved at the Oriental repository in London in 1821. However, these sculptures were coldly received at the India Museum where the focus was to acquire manuscripts to further Orientalist scholarship. As a result, the Amravati panels remained in the packing boxes in which they had arrived, and stored in the stables of the EEIC for the next half a century.3 Although surveyors and officers were collecting for the ‘Crown,’ they also amassed huge private collections, some of which are now found scattered in museums and private collections around the world with little or no provenance or context of where they were collected from.
A second option was to keep the antiquities and other collected specimens within India to allegedly ‘educate’ the native population about their geography, history, and religion through such visual tools. Hence, the early museums established in South Asia were not merely storage and display facilities, but also served as centers of knowledge production. It was against this backdrop that the first public museum in South Asia, the Indian Museum in Calcutta, was established in 1814.
Museum-Making in South Asia
The beginning of museums in India can be traced to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, an institution promoting Orientalist scholarship, founded in Calcutta by Sir William Jones in 1784. The Society put forward a proposal in 1814 to form a museum that would house the collection of artifacts and natural specimens that had been acquired by the Company’s officials as well as private collectors. With the establishment of a museum, it was hoped that the “amateurish and antiquarian passions for collecting” could be processed into a systematic collection of knowledge and organized as a science within British scholarship.4 The museum 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.”5 The museum’s first curator was Dr. Nathaniel Wolff Wallich, a surgeon and botanist by training. It was divided into two main sections: the archaeological and ethnological, and the geological and zoological. The central constitutive urge of the museum was that of collecting, not displaying, as the collection was meant for scholarly study and was not open to the public.
The Indian Museum would function as the Imperial Museum of India, which was representative of the Indian collection, and be different from the museums in the metropole such as the British Museum. The museum of the colony became the knowledge apparatus that would logically arrange the natural and historic wealth of the subcontinent, viewed as both exotic and chaotic, into neatly classified and organized branches of knowledge. The Viceroy Curzon believed that it was the duty of the British “to dig and discover, to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and decipher and to cherish and conserve.”6 By the middle of the 19th century, with the shift of governmental focus on the conservation of archaeological sites, museums also came to be established in Madras, Bombay, and Lahore.
Museums in India have been considered as extensive knowledge-producing institutions, which scientifically studied, classified, and disseminated knowledge. That said, an aspect which has not received much attention in academic discussions is how the taxonomies developed by 19th century museums resulted in the fragmentation of collections into narrow disciplinary boundaries such as natural history, archaeology, and art collections. Instead of presenting archaeological sites comprehensively and in conjunction with the communities who lived around them, museum display and cataloging, combined with the Orientalist zeal for classification, divided this information according to disciplinary boundaries, chronological periods, and religions, to name a few categories. Moreover, the objects from the same archaeological sites were often not collected at the same time nor traveled together, and often, they did not end up in the same museum. There is evidence that in some cases fragments of the same sculpture were divided and ended up in different museums.7 How this knowledge was classified and organized in colonial museums has impacted our present-day understanding of the objects and the sites from where they were collected. At the same time, this has also resulted in the conversion of living sites into archaeological monuments devoid of their complex realities as lived spaces.
What were some of the organizing principles and taxonomies adopted for 19th century museums in South Asia? The first and most convenient category was the use of religious denomination. Within each religious group, the objects were further classified around myths, personalities, and the great moments of the mythological universe. For instance, since Buddhist art was of primacy at the time, the museums made a conscious effort to collect Buddhist images from the different sites which the Buddha is believed to have visited, depicting him in various forms such as sitting, standing, preaching, and reclining. Similarly, sculptural panels illustrating stories from the Buddha’s life incited great curiosity as they were believed to record historical events. The Buddha images were then assessed for their aesthetic beauty, the material of fabrication, and artistic innovation.8 The religious images were thus stripped of their sacred value in becoming art objects, and the temple sites from which these were collected came to signify the various ‘schools of art,’ such as the Mathura school, the Gandhara school, and so on. These schools continue to be used as convenient categories even in present-day scholarship. The emphasis on aesthetics and materiality in the early museums also aided the foundation of new academic disciplines in South Asia, such as archaeology and art history. The museums soon came to have art schools attached to them, for example in Lahore and in Mumbai.
A second visual strategy was devised on the primacy attached to textual knowledge within Orientalist scholarship. Sculptures and artifacts were studied as illustrations, and their value was measured by how accurately they represented related ancient texts.9 Religious texts and mythologies were thoroughly read and sculptures were placed as portrayals of the texts, thus concretizing a visual canon. There was no scope given to artistic deviation and innovation or exchange of artistic tradition between the different religions. Once these images were relocated into museums, they were isolated and decontextualized of their ritual and architectural setting, and devoid of their participation in contemporary ritual and social processes. The museums became the first step in the spatial relocation of sacred icons from the realm of the sacred to the profane; in their temporal relocation as a motif from the past to the present and more so in a shift from being a cult object to an exhibition piece.10
The third kind of display arrangement was around the great epochs of history and dynastic achievements, where artifacts were grouped under broad chronological and dynastic labels. Royal patronage seemed to provide the only kind of explanation for the production of art with little or no lay participation. A cyclic progression to Indian art was presented with apogee points of the great and dark ages, and styles of execution and aesthetics became the only criteria of analysis. It is still common to find sculptural galleries in various South Asian museums referred to as Mauryan art, Gupta art, and Chola art, in honor of the great ruling dynasties. Is it possible that such a large corpus of art and building tradition evident in South Asia had only royal patrons and no lay participation? What can we thus deduce as the impact of colonial collecting and the subsequent organization of this knowledge on later scholarship?
The intellectual campaign initiated by the British in India in the 19th century found its logical fulfillment in the establishment of institutions and academic disciplines, which systematized this knowledge pool. The museums in South Asia emerged as one such institution. The removal of icons and antiquities into museums marked a significant break in the history of the site and led to the loss of crucial historical evidence. The Orientalist fervor for scientific documentation and academic scholarship overlooked India’s living history, removed the sacred icons to museums, and transformed shrines into monuments without taking into consideration the viewpoint of the natives whose history was being ‘discovered.’ Any holistic understanding of the space or its connected history was thus lost.
For the Western scholars at the time, it was only through surveys, archaeological explorations, and cartography that true knowledge of this ancient land could be produced, which would then be used to educate the natives supposedly ignorant of their past. The colonial discourse which was framed in the 18th and 19th centuries under the garb of knowledge production constructed certain stereotypes that set the parameters within which successive generations of historians and archaeologists have worked. The British historians and archaeologists wanted to present an India which was degenerate and inferior, a pretext to be colonized. They hence focused on highlighting aspects that they considered “original” to India, any aberration to this was seen as negative, decadent, and indicative of the need for foreign rule.11
The neatly categorized galleries in the 19th century museums that were organized on the basis of religion – as they still continue to be in South Asian museums – obscured the ground realities of the multicultural landscape of India, where the Buddha is seen and worshipped as an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu since at least the 9th-10th century CE. Similar is the overlap and sharing of sacred spaces between the worshippers of the Hindu deity Shiva and Buddhists at archaeological sites par significance such as at Bodh Gaya, as I found during my extensive fieldwork.12 More recently, scholars have also examined how the artists’ workshops where the religious images were carved remained common to Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain religions, which also explains the artistic overlap and the sharing of ideas, an aspect that the scholars chose to overlook. The concept of establishing the ‘difference’ in 19th century scholarship completely obliterated the importance of continuity in history, as well as the traditional practice of sharing religious space and ritual praxis by the disciplines of the different religions. The 19th century museums of South Asia thus emerged as cultural texts which presented a limited viewpoint, yet set the visual paradigm in which we continue to look at the past.
Taking Ownership of The Past
Ever since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, scholars have been engaged in a continuing debate on the connection between knowledge collection, information gathering, and the strengthening of the British Empire in South Asia. Said described Western Orientalist scholarship which was established in the 18th-19th centuries as a discursive strategy developed by the West to dominate the East both as a cultural system of (mis)representation of Otherness, and an inherently political project of colonial domination. Of particular significance has been the work of Bernard Cohn and Nicholas B. Dirks who have argued that colonial rulers exercised dominance over indigenous societies not just by military conquest but also by commanding knowledge over them in diverse ways.13 Cohn described these structures and practices of knowledge compilation as “investigative modalities,” which included historiography, travel, observation, surveys, museology, surveillance, and enumeration that made colonial power operational.14 The 19th century museums in South Asia set the aesthetic standards and paradigms of viewing the past which had little connection with the present. Interestingly, most museums even today continue to present history through the colonial lens. Museum labels and catalogs continue to use the same nomenclatures. This also speaks of the colonial ways of ordering, classifying, and labeling, as well as the manner in which these collections were used as tangible evidence to produce knowledge about India’s past. How can we decolonize museum practices and narratives? How do we make museums more inclusive and diverse instead of continuing to perpetuate the 19th century viewpoint?
In recent years, most museums in the West have taken up projects of provenance research with a focus on art that is known to have entered Europe between 1933 and 1945 in order to identify and repatriate items that were circulated in markets and collections after being subject to looting and trade under Nazi occupation. This focus has also expanded to encompass research into the provenance of cultural objects that are known to have originated from a place that has suffered heritage loss during war and conflict, or because of theft, illegal excavation, and unlawful trade. In the case of South Asia, however, the issue of provenance research is much more complex due to colonial collecting and 19th century museum practices.
Provenance research can be the first step in our attempt to decolonize museums by giving an idea of the original landscape from where an object was acquired, and the different ways in which it changed hands and eventually ended up in a museum. While museum labels give vivid descriptions of objects based on their physical attributes, they give no indication of the collection histories of objects, especially the contested histories or the possible stories of cultural and political trauma in acquiring these objects. How did the ‘natives’ react when the colonial officers carried away their objects of worship? When and how was such an object first displayed in a museum? What is its relation to other objects in the collection? Museum narratives and curation strategies need to shift focus from looking at the physical attributes of objects to understanding their social value, architectural placement, and ritual use. In recent years ‘object biographies’ have revealed that the identity of an art object, artifact, or museum piece is not fixed at the moment of its creation. If we move away from the academic discourse and exhibition spaces a lot more complexities and identities begin to emerge.
In the context of colonial South Asia, such questions will especially help us to visualize the original historical landscape, the long-term usage of temples and sacred spaces, and the ways in which the living communities engaged with, preserved, and maintained them. There is a need to acknowledge that in the long history of South Asia, the same historical and religious sites were reused throughout different periods, causing artifacts from various time frames and communities to coexist and intermix at the same sites. The purpose of establishing museums was the preservation of objects, paying no heed to the traditional methods of preservation of objects by communities, temples, and other religious places. This is the knowledge that museums need to acknowledge.
A second, more audience-engaging strategy may be the recording and display of oral histories. The focus on artistic appreciation has overshadowed the fact that these museum objects were not meant as art but were instead used by communities as objects of worship, ritual, funerary, and even family heirlooms. There is no universal way to exhibit cultural objects; each has its own biography. The Orientalist narratives, without taking into account the voice of the communities who produced and used these objects for centuries before their final relocation into museums, completely obliterated this data. How do we bring this knowledge back into the museum spaces? In my fieldwork in eastern India, I discovered how communities living in the vicinity of archaeological sites, even around the UNESCO World Heritage Sites, have their own memory of these sites, which are interlaced with history and mythology. In South Asia, there are various regional and traditional notions of the past encapsulated in ideas such as kaal (time), yuga (age or epoch), and stories of the ithasapurana (legends of important historical events). How can we incorporate these stories in the academic versions of history told in museum spaces? This traditional knowledge of historical processes will provoke scholarly dialogues and reinterpretation, encourage cultural diversity by incorporating the voices of the communities to whom these objects belonged, and further academic collaborations and museum interrelatedness. We need to acknowledge the disparity of who is consulted and given a voice, and hence the chance, to write object histories in the first place.
Proponents of the ‘universal museum’ have often argued against provenance research. They feel that the aesthetic and cultural value of an object outshines its archaeological context. However, the debate is far more entangled than universal versus historical. The issue is also how objects are classified and organized in museums and placed in relation to each other. Provenance information allows museums to tell more nuanced stories about objects and people who came in contact with these objects. The dissemination, accessibility, and sustainability of provenance research are also challenged by the insufficiency of the current museum database systems to record available information.
Museum taxonomies and classifications continue to be dominated by 19th-century Western scholarship. How do we reframe these taxonomies? One way forward may be found in digital technologies, where these classifications can be reorganized to suit native voices and viewpoints, and also to provide accessibility to scholarship. For instance, the name and identity assigned to an object might also be different from its traditional identity, as scholars have discussed elsewhere that Orientalist attempts at translation and interpretation often led to the loss of context. Museums need to rethink how collections are managed. Digital asset management and digital content publishing tools can work together to meet the needs of 21st-century museum operations. Once the digital information from an artifact is produced and shared, the knowledge the artifact represents is no longer locked up in a single museum, and the knowledge process can be democratized by involving different groups of people.
The question of repatriation is tricky and involves prolonged individual and diplomatic negotiations. For objects from the same geography and archaeological context which may be scattered in museums around the world, advanced technologies can open up the possibility of sharing cultural heritage and creating alternative meanings by different groups of people. Moreover, it would also mean that cultural institutions should not hold on to controversial artifacts which ended up in museums as a result of imperialist greed. Museums can hence be transformed into dynamic and diverse learning spaces which can encourage public interaction and participation rather than being relics of the past.
Decolonization does not simply mean doing away with the museum institution as some critics argue. Rather, we need to rethink and reformulate museum narratives so as to decolonize museum practices. The contexts in which museums were established in 19th century South Asia and the practices that were systematized have completely changed. Why do we still continue to use them?
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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.
