Enfilade

This publication is one of the outcomes of the research project The India Museum Revisited, which aims to reconstruct the museum’s history (c.1800–1879) with special reference to V&A’s collection. From the V&A’s description of the project:

At the dispersal of the India Museum in 1879 the 20,000 objects transferred to the South Kensington Museum (later the V&A) were inventoried in a catalogue printed for internal use in the following year. That list forms the basis of the analysis and reconstruction presented here, augmented where appropriate by objects surviving in the collections, in order to reunite the contents and their supporting documentation in virtual form and to set them in context.

From UCL Press (and note that digital copies of the book are available free of charge) . . .

Arthur MacGregor, The India Museum Revisited (London: UCL Press, 2023), 472 pages, ISBN: 978-1800085725 (hardback), £60 / ISBN: 978-1800085718 (paperback) £45 / ISBN: 978-1800085701 (PDF file), free.

The museum of the East India Company formed, for a large part of the nineteenth century, one of the sights of London. In recent years, little has been remembered of it beyond its mere existence, while an assumed negative role has been widely attributed to it on the basis of its position at the heart of one of Britain’s arch-colonialist enterprises. Extensively illustrated, The India Museum Revisited provides a full examination of the museum’s founding manifesto and evolving ambitions. It surveys the contents of its multi-faceted collections—with respect to materials, their manufacture and original functions on the Indian sub-continent—as well as the collectors who gathered them and the manner in which they were mobilized to various ends within the museum. From this integrated treatment of documentary and material sources, a more accurate, rounded and nuanced picture emerges of an institution that contributed in major ways, over a period of 80 years, to the representation of India for a European audience, not only in Britain but through the museum’s involvement in the international exposition movement to audiences on the continent and beyond.

Arthur MacGregor is Andrew W. Mellon Visiting Professor at the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Research Institute.

c o n t e n t s

Foreword by Tristram Hunt
Preface
Acknowledgements
The India Museum Revisited Project

Part I | Historical Introduction
1  An ‘Oriental Museum’ at the India House
2  The Objects Themselves: Restoring an Identity to the Collections

Part II | The Collections of the India Museum
3  Historical Relics: Their Role in the Collection
4  Trading with and within India: Material Culture of Commerce and Control
5  Industry and Technology: Inorganic Materials
6  Industry and Technology: Organic Materials
7  The Mirror of India: Clothing, Dress, and Ornament
8  Making War: Weapons and Defensive Armour
9  Religious Observation: Introducing Indian Devotional Practice
10  Culture and Recreation
11  Imaging India
12  Collections of Individuals and the Emergence of Ethnography
13  The India Museum (partly) Recollected

Appendix: Glossary of Indigenous Terms as Transcribed in the Catalogue of 1880
Bibliography
Index