The Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 Art Journal
"Gilded Brocade Weavers," Colonial Indian Exhibition
"Woodcarvers," Colonial Indian Exhibition
[Illustration i: "Gold Brocade Weavers." "Colonial Indian Exhibition: The Indian Empire." Illustrated London News 17 July 1886: 84. Courtesy of the Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine]
[Illustration two: "Woodcarvers (Courtyard of Indian Palace)." "Colonial Indian Exhibition: The Indian Empire." Illustrated London News 17 July 1886: 84. Courtesy of the Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine]
Britain's myriad voices call,
'Sons, be welded each and all
Into one royal whole,
1 with Britain, center and soul!
1 life, one flag, 1 fleet, one throne!'
Britons, hold your own![1]
The Colonial and Indian Exhibition opened in 
South Kensington on 4 May 1886, lasted over half dozen months, and accommodated 5.5 million visitors (Barringer, "South Kensington" 23). Featuring improvident displays from British colonial holdings, the exhibit was organized by the Prince of Wales as an "imperial object lesson" in England'south power and grandeur. In the words of an article from the Sabbatum Review, "At present if any man can look at this and non come away with a new and a lively sense of the greatness of the country he belongs to, he must exist a fellow of a very ho-hum imagination and a very stupid temperament" ("Royal Object" 633). The exhibition was intended to provide ocular proof of the "commercial wealth and power of England beyond the seas" (Peripatetic 511), the "solidarity of a globe-wide Empire, its unity of involvement, and its manifold resources" ("Colonial and Indian," Saturday Review). The fact that it was located in Due south Kensington, an "exhibitionary complex" that, since its establishment in 1857, had get a monument to "Victorian high imperialism" (Kriegel 6), confirmed its dedication to perpetuating the colonial projection. The Indian section consisted of the nearly spectacular and largest of the displays, measuring at five times the size of the Indian Pavilion at the 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition and costing an impressive £22,000 (Mathur 57; Greenhalgh 59). Accessed through the richly sculpted Gwalior Gateway, which had been a central component of the 1883 Calcutta International Exposition, it displayed traditional Indian artworks and crafts in fantastic showcases, including an Indian palace and bazaar, as well every bit the reproduction of a jungle through whose leafy spaces visitors could wander.[2] As the introduction to the Art Periodical supplement devoted to the exhibition explained, these Indian displays must "occasion to usa and to all truthful lovers of their state a sense of joy and gratitude for what has been done by these, our far-off children, in the most past, and a glad anticipation of the triumphs in store for them and for u.s. in the non afar future" (ii). This undeniably paternalistic rhetoric reflects the sense of colonial proprietorship that pervaded the exhibit, and which justified by and future majestic ventures. The introduction continues: "Our own minor and comparatively insignificant island has little room for expansion, except in these broad lands across the sea we have fabricated our ain" (2). The exhibit symbolically collapsed the distance betwixt England and its "furthermost children" through the inclusion of a display of Indian craftsmen.[three]
Showcasing thirty-four artisans working at a range of crafts, the Indian court was one of the most popular destinations of the 1886 exhibit. In Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, Frank Cundall writes:
They are genuine artisans, such every bit may be seen at work within the precincts of the palaces of many of the Indian Princes. . . .Weavers of gold brocade and kinkhab, tapestry and carpets, an ivory miniature painter, copper and silverish smiths, a seal engraver, a dyer, a calico printer, a trinket maker, a goldsmith, rock carvers, a dirt-figure maker from Lucknow, a potter [who was allegedly 102 years onetime], and forest carvers, were all daily to be seen at piece of work as they would be in
Cundall'south account is typical in stressing the authenticity of these artisans, who were often depicted every bit un-self-consciously executing the type of piece of work they would otherwise exist doing in whatsoever given marketplace in India: "Ii Panjabi carpenters may exist seen hard at piece of work, lilliputian heedful of the curious throng which attentively watches them" (Banfield 668); "Here are the carpet-weavers, iv in number, mingling piece of work and song, their chant barbaric and not without fascination" ("Colonial and Indian," Sat Review); "The native artificers, who, in the court of the Indian palace, pursue their diverse callings in native fashion, are eagerly watched by crowds daily; but they can never be rivalled by English workers, for their work requires not only delicacy of manipulation, simply patient labour, merely possible in a land where workers are numerous and wages extremely low" ("Colonial and Indian," Westminster Review 33). T.N. Mukharji, 1 of the three Indian men commissioned to help organize the exhibition, commented on the wonder produced by these workers: "A dense oversupply always stood there, looking at our men as they wove the gold brocade, sang the patterns of the carpeting and printed the calico with the paw. They were every bit much astonished to meet the Indians produce works of fine art with the assistance of rude apparatus they themselves had discarded long ago, as a Hindu would exist to see a chimpanzee officiating as a priest in a funeral ceremony" (99).[4] The exhibition instilled the fantasy of a privileged, unmediated, and even voyeuristic view of "real" Indian work. Patrons were invited to observe this labor and then purchase samples to take domicile with them, thereby going on to consume the authenticity on display.
Of course, this presentation of authenticity was staged; the artisans were at that place to perform labor. Despite the Prince of Wales'due south alleged exclamation, "Why you have Bharat itself here!" (qtd. in Spear 916), the exhibit was only a "simulation" (Spear 916). Nigh of the workers were prisoners from the Central Jail in Agra, where they had been trained in diverse crafts equally part of their rehabilitation. During the course of the exhibit, they labored under the close supervision of Dr. John William Tyler, the superintendent of the prison house (Mathur 63-66). The coerced nature of their performance, the fact that the skills they demonstrated were "likely to accept been learned through the industrializing processes of prison house reform rather than through the ancient, timeless practices of the hamlet" (Mathur 66)—every bit well as the theatricality of the exhibition as a whole—undermined the authenticity of the display. As Nicky Levell reminds us, "Reconstructed mimetic environments replete with 'exotic' life exhibits, were in authenticity, occidental imaginaries, idealised visions of the Orient, that had been devised and designed by the W" (seventy).
To visitors of the 1886 exhibition, however, the mere presence of the workers may have offered a sufficient degree of authenticity. In Julie Codell's words, "Whatsoever Indian hands, fifty-fifty of . . . prisoners, were legitimized under British re-definitions of authenticity and tradition" (160). The artisans' laboring bodies provided direct evidence of 18-carat handicrafts of the blazon that England had supposedly forsaken in its industrial plough. The 2d one-half of the nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of an Arts and Crafts discourse that lamented the shift from manual labor to the mechanizations of manufacture. As John Ruskin famously wrote in "The Nature of Gothic" (1853), "Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their deportment. If yous will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them" (161). The 1851 Not bad Exhibition was instrumental in associating Indian artifacts with the type of ideal craftsmanship that England had supposedly lost to the machine. Prior to the opening of the Crystal Palace, the Illustrated London News enticed its readers with images of Indian craftsmen producing works for the exhibit, and the completed Indian pavilion featured sixty clay figures from Krishnagur representing Indian artisans at work (Kriegel 113, 117). Tim Barringer explains that the resulting admiration for Indian fine art was "securely corrosive of widely held mid-Victorian assumptions concerning national and racial superiority, progress, and mechanisation" (Men at Work 260). He goes on to fence that "the procedure of labour, the handcrafting of the complete object by the skilled and creative individual, provides an alternative, and superior, form of piece of work to that of the division of labour under mechanized industrial capitalism" (Men at Work 261). The fascination with Indian production increased in intensity following the Crystal Palace Exhibition, every bit evidenced by the South Kensington Museum'due south acquisition of the East India Visitor'due south collection of Indian art in 1879 (Kriegel 144) and the inception of the Journal of Indian Arts in 1884 (renamed the Journal of Indian Art and Industry in 1894), which regularly featured images of laboring Indian artisans.[5] One of the most influential treatises on the value of Indian craftsmanship was George Birdwood's The Industrial Arts of India, which he wrote for the 1878 Paris Universal Exhibition and which subsequently served as a handbook for the South Kensington Museum (152). Birdwood contrasted the downfall of Western manual product with the proliferation of Indian artistry:
The very word industry has in Europe come up at last to lose well nigh all trace of its true etymological meaning, and is now by and large used for the process of the conversion of raw materials into articles suitable for the use of homo by machinery. . . . In Republic of india everything is manus wrought, and everything, downwards to the cheapest toy or earthen vessel, is therefore more or less a work of fine art. (131)
Through its presentation of artisans, the 1886 exhibition conflated the authenticity of "native" crafts with the presence of "18-carat" Indian bodies.
Accounts of the display emphasized the humanity of these workers, the fact that they were men rather than machines. In Mathur'due south words, "The external features of [the worker's] body—his wearing apparel and beautification, his racial markings, his movements and gestures—were all historic every bit part of an indelible tradition of artisanship that was somehow perfect and historically pure" (58). Articles like Frank Banfield'south in Time emphasized this actuality by giving readers an "inside" view of the workers' positions and perspectives. Banfield writes that "The crowd gazing at these silent workers is apt to be misled by their apparent stolidity, and to forget that they are non automatic or dirt figures. . . . These Indian artisans are more chatty when their own countrymen are well-nigh." He cites an "Indian gentleman" who interviewed ane of the workers: "'He says that about of the visitors do not run across their work, but but look at them and their movements. He as well quietly told me that he did non quite like the very audible remarks of some visitors, who seem to look upon them as animals'" (668). While the inclusion of the workers' perspective may seem discordant in an commodity that otherwise sensationalizes them, it is allegorical of the particular type of humanization that Banfield and others seek to convey. This humanization resides on a scale of authenticity rather than ideals, focusing less on the fact that these artisans are objectified by visitors than that they are real, human examples of Indian craftsmen. Abigail McGowan unravels the motives behind such displays: "By the end of the century, exhibitions that otherwise reduced cultures to their objects and obscured labor at present besides tried to offer visual show of product. But they did and then not out of respect for Indian technologies, but out of a sense that production in India could not be abstracted from the male artisanal body" (61). The laborers' humanity increases their condition equally fascinating objects of the gaze and examples of the successes of imperialism: "In decision, I may venture to remark that the Indian and Colonial Exhibition is admirably adapted to impress English people with the reality, and the splendour, and magnitude of the inheritance with which our race has been entrusted" (Banfield 672; italics added).
The focus on the authenticity of the Indian worker'due south torso filled in for the absence of the British laborer from public brandish. If one of the effects of industrialization was to replace the human torso with the motorcar, the Indian artisan became a prime visual signifier of physical labor (Hoffenberg 184-86; Barringer, Men at Work 248). This "cult of the craftsman" (Mathur 19), which extended well beyond the 1886 exhibition, was inseparable from the colonial project. England's responsibility was to regulate the work of Indian artisans, who might otherwise misuse their talents. Deepali Dewan argues that "The 'native craftsman,' . . . as a symbol of tradition and nonindustrialization, became a site of contention and justification for Empire. He embodied qualities that were, on the i hand, to exist praised and, on the other hand, to be condemned, controlled, and improved" ("Scripting" 41). An article on the exhibit from the Westminster Review reflects the need for continued intervention: "This is not the brandish of an effete nation sunk in Oriental lethargy, with no thought relieve of luxury and tranquility, neither is it the tribute of a conquered nation laying its best gifts at the feet of the conqueror, but it is the work of a Power acting the office of a regenerator, guiding the myriad hands in paths of reproductive industry" (35; italics added). If England had lost its hands to the machine—both literally, through the rise in industrial accidents, and metaphorically, through the turn to machine-made fine art—information technology had the responsibility to guide the hands of India's workers. As Arindam Dutta points out, this royal system of production was at chance of reproducing the distinctly dehumanizing aspects of industrial labor: "The artisan'southward customary skills become a cultural analogue of the machine, conceptually blind but corporeally productive. The hand of the traditional artisan is similar the glitch in the metallic roller that churns out pattern in spite of itself" (140). The 1886 exhibition contributed to the necessary illusion that Indian easily were in that location for the guiding, set to continue weaving the cloth of the British Empire.
The image of the artisan was as pliable as it was powerful. By 1905, information technology had been seized past the Bengali swadeshi entrada, which advocated a return to traditional crafts equally a resistance to British imperialism. Representations of traditional labor were central to the movement, which "created a new prestige for such indigenous symbols as the handloom, the spinning bicycle, and the craftsman himself" (Mathur 43). Mahatma Gandhi later appropriated this epitome of traditional manual labor in his campaign for Indian independence: "Merely as nosotros cannot alive without breathing and without eating, so it is incommunicable for us to reach economical independence and banish pauperism from this aboriginal country without reviving dwelling-spinning. I hold the spinning cycle to be every bit much a necessity in every household as the hearth" (297).[6] Jeffrey Spear traces the historical significance of this image to its Arts and Crafts past: "The iconic image of Gandhi with a spinning bike, which resonated in the West too as in Bharat, owes at least as much to the efforts of Birdwood, the South Kensington arts administrators, and their successors to promote the village artisan equally a signifier of essential India as it does to the fact that Gandhi actually read Ruskin" (917). The adjustability of the artisan image from these seemingly antithetical contexts, shifting grade imperialist symbol to liberatory icon, not only attests to its power but to what postcolonial theorists have identified as the mutability of imperial soapbox. It is yet another reminder of Sara Suleri's claim that "colonial facts are vertiginous. . . . They frequently fail to cohere effectually the master-myth that proclaims static lines of demarcation betwixt imperial power and disempowered culture, betwixt colonizer and colonized" (3).
HOW TO CITE THIS Branch ENTRY (MLA format)
published January 2012
Briefel, Aviva. "On the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition." BRANCH: United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History. Ed. Dino Franco Felluga. Extension of Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net. Web. [Hither, add your last engagement of access to Co-operative].
WORKS CITED
Banfield, Frank. "The Colonial and Indian Exhibition." Time (Jun. 1886): 662-72. ProQuest. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
Barringer, Tim. Men at Work: Fine art and Labour in Victorian Great britain. New Haven: Yale Upwardly, 2005. Print.
—. "The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Projection." Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum. Barringer and Flynn 11-27.
Barringer, Tim and Tom Flynn, eds. Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Cloth Culture and the Museum. London: Routledge, 1998. Impress.
Birdwood, George M. The Industrial Arts of India. 1880. London: Reprint Press, 1971. Print.
Codell, Julie F. "Indian Crafts and Imperial Policy: Hybridity, Purification, and Imperial Subjectivities." Textile Cultures, 1740-1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting. Ed. John Potvin and Alla Myzelev. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009. 149-70. Impress.
"The Colonial and Indian Exhibition." Fine art Periodical (Dec. 1886): Supplemental department (1-32). Print.
"The Colonial and Indian Exhibition." Saturday Review 22 May 1886: 707. ProQuest. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
"The Colonial and Indian Exhibition." Westminster Review seventy (July 1886): 29-59.ProQuest. Spider web. 24 October. 2011.
"Colonial Indian Exhibition: The Indian Empire." Illustrated London News 17 July 1886: 84. ProQuest. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
Cundall, Frank, ed. Reminiscences of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. London: William Clowes, 1886. Google Book Search. Spider web. 24 October. 2011.
Dewan, Deepali. "The Body at Work: Colonial Art Education and the Figure of the 'Native Craftsman.'" Against the Trunk: The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India. Ed. James H. Mills and Satadru Sen. London: Anthem Press, 2004. 118-34. Print.
—. "Scripting South asia's Visual Past: The Journal of Indian Art and Industry and the Production of Noesis in the Tardily Nineteenth Century." Imperial Co-Histories: National Identities and the British and Colonial Printing. Ed. Julie F. Codell. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2003. 29-44. Print.
Dutta, Arindam. The Bureaucracy of Beauty: Pattern in the Age of its Global Reproducibility. New York: Routledge, 2007. Impress.
Gandhi, Mahatma. "The Duty of Spinning." 1921. Factory Production in Nineteenth-Century United kingdom. Ed. Elaine Freedgood. New York: Oxford Upwardly, 2003. 297-98. Print.
Greenhalgh, Paul. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World'south Fairs, 1851-1939. Manchester: Manchester Upward, 1988. Print.
Hoffenberg, Peter H. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Dandy War. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Impress.
"The Imperial Object Lesson." Saturday Review 8 May 1886: 632-33. ProQuest. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
Kriegel, Lara. Thousand Designs: Labor, Empire, and the Museum in Victorian Civilization. Durham: Duke UP, 2007.Bowdoin College. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.
Levell, Nicky. Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel, and Collecting in the Victorian Age. London: Horniman Museum and Gardens, 2000. Print.
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McGowan, Abigail. Crafting the Nation in Colonial Republic of india. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Print.
Mukharji, T.N. A Visit to Europe. Calcutta: W. Newman, 1889. Google Volume Search. Web. 25 Oct. 2011.
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Ruskin, John. "The Nature of Gothic." The Stones of Venice. Vol. 2. London: Smith, Elder, 1853. 151-231. Google Book Search. Web. 24 Oct. 2011.
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Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English language India. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. Print.
Eat, Deborah. "Colonial Compages, International Exhibitions and Official Patronage of the Indian Artisan: The Case of a Gateway from Gwalior in the Victoria and Albert Museum." Barringer and Flynn 52-67.
Tennyson, Lord Alfred. "Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen: Written at the Request of the Prince of Wales." The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1898. 525. Google Book Search. Web. ix Dec. 2011.
ENDNOTES
[1] Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition past the Queen, 1886: Written at the Request of the Prince of Wales" (35-forty).
[two] For more than on the significance of Gwalior Gateway in this and other exhibits, see Spear and Consume.
[3] In 1885, Freedom's Section Store attempted to reproduce an artisan village as a promotional campaign; Mathur provides an engrossing account of its failure (36-42). Run across Chapter 4 in Greenhalgh for an overview of "Human Showcases" in international exhibitions.
[four] For more than on Mukharji, see Mathur threescore-61, 67-69.
[5] Dewan writes that illustrations of these artisans "authenticated the textual information written therein" ("Scripting S Asia's Visual Past" 42).
[6] As Dewan writes, "Nationalist images, specially pictures of Gandhi spinning cotton, can be traced genealogically to the before art-school images of the native craftsman" ("Torso at Work" 131).
Source: https://branchcollective.org/?ps_articles=aviva-briefel-on-the-1886-colonial-and-indian-exhibition
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