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Modelling India. Unfired clay figurines and the East India Company's collections: from devotional icons to didactic displays
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 March 2023
Abstract
A well-known series of miniature figures produced in India from unfired clay, appropriately clothed and in many instances represented carrying out their respective secular or ritual duties, enjoyed a period of particular popularity on the world stage in the nineteenth century when they were appropriated as illustrative devices in museum displays and international exhibitions. Over the previous half-century or more they had emerged as products of a dynamic industry that responded to changes in taste as well as religious and artistic practice within Indian society, before being taken up by the West to serve new colonial imperatives. There they received perhaps their most enthusiastic reception at the India Museum, established in the headquarters of the East India Company in London in the early 1800s, and surviving beyond the suppression of the Company itself until they were dispersed to a number of other institutions in 1879. From an early appearance at the Great Exhibition in 1851, the figures also became a regular feature of the international exhibitions of the latter part of the century. Initially they celebrated the traditional crafts and practices of India but gradually were recruited to communicate other messages of Western industrial dominance and perceived artistic and industrial superiority. Although comparatively few of these figures survive intact in Western collections, the history of their considerable impact on the European stage can be enlarged upon with the aid of the documentary record.
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References
1 The museum at East India House in Leadenhall Street, London, lacked a formal title in its earlier years; by the mid-century it was commonly referred to as the India Museum and is generally so designated today. For the later history of the collection, see note 22.
2 ‘A visit to the East India Museum’, The Leisure Hour 7.344 (1858), pp. 469–473.
3 Ghose, Benoy, Traditional Arts and Crafts of West Bengal. A Sociological Survey (Calcutta, 1981), pp. 44–51Google Scholar. The models of fruit and vegetables mentioned incidentally below may also have had their origins in the offerings accompanying these tableaux before finding a wider market.
4 The exact origins of these potters, previously thought to be Dacca in East Bengal and Natore in North Bengal, is now a matter of dispute.
5 Whether the India Museum received life-size figures, such as survive most spectacularly at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is unclear. Bean, Susan S., ‘The unfired clay sculpture of Bengal in the artscape of South Asia’, in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture, (eds) R. M. Brown and D. S. Hutton (Chichester, 2011), pp. 604–628CrossRefGoogle Scholar. One candidate might be a figure of the ‘Nawab Schurff’ of Lucknow, described as occupying a niche at the end of one gallery: ‘There he sits, as large as life, and just as natural, smoking his hookah under his awning of crimson velvet, with his legs crossed beneath him on the mat, and surrounded with all the elements of wealth and splendour becoming his condition’: ‘A visit to the India Museum’, p. 471. The material of which the nawab's likeness was constructed is unfortunately not recorded.
6 All such figures tend to be unfired, and certainly for those produced for religious purposes this was an essential feature, allowing for their ultimate disintegration and the return of their raw materials to their natural state: see Blurton, T. Richard, Bengali Myths (London, 2006), pp. 28–37Google Scholar. For the attendant revelries surrounding the annual Durga and Kali pujas, see McDermott, Rachel Fell, Mother of my Heart, Daughter of my Dreams. Kali and Uma in the Devotional Poetry of Bengal (Oxford, 2001), p. 409CrossRefGoogle Scholar, note 53.
7 Dallapicola, A. L., Hindu Visions of the Sacred (London, 2004), pp. 70–71Google Scholar. Schaffer, Holly, ‘An architecture of ephemerality between South and West Asia’, Journal18 4 ‘East-Southeast’ (Fall 2017), https://www.journal18.org/2054 (accessed 9 February 2023)Google Scholar; doi: 10.30610/4.2017.1, traces the contemporary emergence of a parallel trend towards more inclusive forms of ritual observance in Shia communities, notably in Lucknow and Awadh. Similarly backed by the nawabs with a view to encouraging social cohesion, these were celebrated with the production of essentially ephemeral architectural structures of a memorialising nature (ta‘zyia). I am grateful to the JRAS's anonymous referees for drawing my attention to this publication.
8 Watt, Sir George, Indian Art at Delhi, 1903. Being the Official Catalogue of the Delhi Exhibition, 1902–1903 (Calcutta, 1903)Google Scholar, mentions that ‘every village has its potter who turns out idols and toys in clay’ (pp. 88–89), while George Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India (London 1880, new edn 1884), vol. ii, p. 145, states that these figures—no more than summarily painted—‘are thrown away every day after being worshipped’. See further Stephen P. Huyler, ‘Terracotta traditions in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India’, in From Indian Earth. 4,000 Years of Terracotta Art, (ed.) Amy G. Poster, exh. cat., Brooklyn Museum (New York, 1986), pp. 57–66. For the wider terracotta tradition, see Pratapaditya Pal, Icons of Piety, Images of Whimsy. Asian Terra-cottas from the Walter-Grounds Collection, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum (Los Angeles, 1987). For an account (and a detailed 3-D scan) of a painted terracotta figure of a trooper of Skinner's Horse, dated circa 1819–1820, see Malini Roy, ‘Sketchfab 3-D modelling of trooper Ami Chand of Skinner's Horse’, at https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/ (accessed 9 February 2023).
9 These general observations are based on Smith, Charlotte H. F. and Stevenson, Michelle, ‘Modeling cultures: 19th century Indian clay figures’, Museum Anthropology 33.1 (2010), pp. 37–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Their observation on the use of metal armatures with unfired figures is of particular interest: Susan Bean observes (personal communication) that by the later phases of production, when some figures, at least, were kiln-fired (see below), use of a metal armature would become more critical.
10 In a wide-ranging article on the practice of art at the court of the peshwas in Poona, Holly Schaffer mentions the attachment of the influential minister and statesman Nana Fadnavis (1742–1800) to the worship of Durga: see Shaffer, Holly, ‘“Take all of them”: eclecticism and the arts of the Pune court in India, 1760–1800’, Art Bulletin 100.2 (2018), pp. 61–9CrossRefGoogle Scholar3, at p. 69.
11 Mukharji, T. N., Art-Manufactures of India (Specially Compiled for the Glasgow International Exhibition, 1888) (Calcutta, 1888), p. 73Google Scholar.
12 Ibid. Figures from Surat sent to the same exhibition were of ‘camels, horses, cows, and other familiar animals and birds’, suggesting perhaps some regional variation in manufacture. Tonk and Gwalior also contributed.
13 See Reports of the Juries on the Subjects of the Thirty Classes into which the Exhibition was Divided (London, 1851), class XXIX, p. 649. Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, p. 72, mentions Delhi and Ambala as further production centres (Ambala, at least, being a very recent producer), while life-size models made at Jaipur were contributed to the Glasgow exhibition.
14 Henry Morris, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Godavery District in the Presidency of Madras (London, 1878), p. 77. Fruits and vegetables—impossible to preserve and to present in their natural forms—are also represented in fired clay in the exhibition context. These models seem likely to have originated as ancillary elements in ritual installations (that is, as offerings) before they too were taken up by souvenir-hungry Europeans.
15 At an average of about 14 cm high, the Lucknow models are also among the larger examples of this type. Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, 1903, p. 89, singled out the Lucknow models sent to the Delhi exhibition for special praise, mentioning that those submitted were considered of such merit that they were exhibited under the category of Fine Art, where they won a gold medal.
16 Smith and Stevenson, ‘Modeling cultures’, p. 43, quote the Reverend Henry Polehampton who at this time bought in Lucknow a very Western-sounding ‘pair of boys, about eight inches high, carrying baskets of flowers on their heads’ which had in fact been copied from an illustration in the Art Union Journal.
17 Personal communication.
18 Lieutenant H. H. Cole, Catalogue of the Objects of Indian Art exhibited in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1874), p. 109.
19 Science and Art Department, India Museum. Inventory of the Collection of Examples of Indian Art and Manufactures transferred to the South Kensington Museum (London, 1880). The catalogue—produced for internal use within the museum—records the work of two teams, working independently to list all the relevant material in a succinct manner: one team compiled an inventory numbered from 1 to 9821 and the other a separate listing numbered from 01 to 09245—hence the bipartite structure of the catalogue. The entire text has recently been made available online by the National Art Library: see https://archive.org/details/india-museum-inventory-of-the-collection-of-examples-of-indian-art-and-manufactu (accessed 9 February 2023).
20 Ibid.
21 See Caroline Cornish, ‘Kew and colonialism: a history of entanglement’, https://www.kew.org/read-and-watch/kew-empire-indigo-factory-model (accessed 9 February 2023).
22 By the later nineteenth century, however, it seems that those figures destined for export to the international fairs, at least, could be fired to render them more durable—representing not only a technological development but a significant conceptual shift away from the ethos described above. See Bean, ‘The unfired clay sculpture of Bengal’, pp. 615–622.
23 At the winding-up of the EIC in 1858 the museum collection (with much else) passed to the control of the India Office: it was moved from East India House in 1858 to Fife House in Whitehall, in 1869 to an attic storey in the India Office, and in 1875 to the ‘Eastern Galleries’ adjacent to the South Kensington Museum. In 1879 the collection was divided between a number of institutions, with most of the clay figurines passing to the South Kensington Museum (today the Victoria and Albert Museum). See Ray Desmond, The India Museum 1801–1979 (London, 1982), passim; Arthur MacGregor, Company Curiosities. Nature, Culture and the East India Company, 1600–1874 (London, 2018), pp. 168–235.
24 T. N. Mukharji, A Handbook of Indian Products (Art-Manufactures and Raw Materials) (Calcutta, 1883), p. 15.
25 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, pp. 59, 62. At one point Mukharji describes Jadunath as ‘the Government modeller’ and mentions that copies of his work were available through the Revenue and Agriculture Department in Calcutta at 40 rupees each, ‘exclusive of arms, dress, and other appurtenances’ (p. 67). A complete collection of his work was deposited in the Indian Museum at Calcutta and copies were sent to the Imperial Institute in London. The Amsterdam models were displayed in context within a row of reconstructed Bengali shops, an arrangement repeated with success at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886.
26 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, pp. 67–68. He produced several of the tableaux sent to the Glasgow exhibition and was said to charge ‘a very high price’—clearly having nothing further to do with the popular craft that gave birth to the genre.
27 Formerly a Company surgeon and naturalist in India, John Forbes Royle (1798–1858) was later appointed professor of Materia Medica at King's College, London, from which time he formed a close association with the India Museum, designated ‘Correspondent relating to the Vegetable Productions of India’. He was a commissioner for the 1851 exhibition in London and was made an officer of the Légion d'honneur for his role in superintending the Oriental department of the Paris exhibition of 1855.
28 John Forbes Watson (1827–1892), a former surgeon in the Bombay Army Medical Service, was placed in charge of the India Museum at its transfer to the India Office in 1858. He was an energetic supporter of the international exhibition movement, an industrious author on Indian matters, and an keen promoter of trade, both import and export.
29 Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852), pl. V.
30 The Crystal Palace and its Contents: being an Illustrated Cyclopaedia of the Great Exhibition of the Industry of all Nations (London, 1852), p. 102. Among the figures sent to the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1888 were some illustrating ‘irrigation by swing basket’, ‘irrigation by lever’, ‘well irrigation by leathern bags’, and ‘irrigation by Persian wheel’: Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, p. 71.
31 Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations, List of Awards Granted by the Juries (London, 1851), p. 44.
32 Messrs Hoggart, Norton and Trist, A Catalogue of … by far the greater Proportion of the valuable and interesting Collection as exhibited by the Honourable the East India Company at the Great Exhibition in 1851 (London, 7 June 1852), lots 2043–54 (Native Trades, Habits and Costumes), 2055–60 (Wood figures illustrating Native Customs), 2061–72 (Figures curiously carved in Wood, Models, &c.), and 1962–7 (Artificial Fruits and Vegetables).
33 Messrs Christie and Manson, Catalogue of the Celebrated Collection of the Works of Art and Manufacture of British India exhibited by the Hon. The East India Company at the Exposition Universelle at Paris in 1855 (London, 9 March 1857), lots 3320–34.
34 J. Forbes Watson, International Exhibition of 1862. A Classified and Descriptive Catalogue of the Indian Department (London, 1862), pp. 275–257.
35 J. Forbes Watson, New Zealand Exhibition, 1865. A Classified List of Contributions from British India … forwarded … from the India Museum (London, 1864), p. 45.
36 J. Forbes Watson, Vienna Universal Exhibition, 1873. A Classified and Descriptive Catalogue of the Indian Department (London, 1873).
37 In the exhibition catalogue (ibid.) the device is described as ‘a metal roller, which, with the aid of a wooden slipper, is worked by the foot backwards and forwards amidst the cotton and the seed, so that, by degrees the seeds become loosened and separated from the fibre’. Other ‘toys and waxworks’ shown at Vienna included ten figures in carved wood from Belgaum illustrating various trades and classes, and a further 26 ‘wood figures of animals’ from Surat.
38 J. Forbes Watson, India. A Classified and Descriptive Catalogue of the Collections from the India Museum and Exhibited in … the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876 (London, 1876).
39 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, p. 72. Use of the term ‘terra cotta’ would seem to suggest that they illustrate the transition from unfired to fired clay, in response to Western demands.
40 See Wintle, Claire, ‘Model subjects: representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886’, History Workshop Journal 67 (2009), pp. 194–207CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
41 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, p. 63. Rather than forming a neutrally academic exercise, it may be suggested that these and other forms of surveys stemmed from a growing conviction that the Uprising of 1857 had been fuelled by inadequate understanding of the diversity of local groups and societies by the colonial administration: see McGowan, Abigail, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India (New York, 2009), pp. 26–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
42 The India Museum possessed a complete set of these. See Driver, Felix, ‘Face to face with Nain Singh: the Schlagintweit collections and their uses’, in Naturalists in the Field. Collecting, Recording and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century, (ed.) MacGregor, A. (Leiden and Boston, 2018), pp. 441–469CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Zimmerman, Andrew, ‘Die Gipsmasken der Brüder Schlagintweit: Verkörperung kolonialer Macht’, in Über den Himalaya. Die Expedition der Brüder Schlagintweit nach Indien und Zentralasien 1854–1858, (eds) von Brescius, M., Kaiser, F. and Kleidt, S. (Cologne, 2015), pp.241–249Google Scholar.
43 Watson, J. Forbes and Kent, J. W., The Costumes and People of India (London, 1868–1875)Google Scholar.
44 Henry H. Locke, principal of the Calcutta School of Art, quoted in Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, p. 59.
45 Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, 1903, p. 89.
46 Birdwood, The Industrial Arts of India, p. 302. Birdwood is unusual in applying the term ‘artists’ to these manufacturers, and he is indeed dismissive of Indian sculpture on a larger scale: ‘Nowhere does their figure sculpture shew the inspiration of true art. They seem to have no feeling for it.’
47 Watt, Indian Art at Delhi, 1903, pp. 453–454, pls 62, 65.
48 There was, however, more than aesthetics at stake, as a curiously carping note, seemingly prompted by innate nationalism, also creeps into contemporary criticism. Mentioning representations of the ‘soft and delicate-limbed Bengallee’ and the ‘tall and slender inhabitant of Southern India’, even the Great Exhibition Official Catalogue jibes that ‘all are not so effeminate-looking’, contrasting them unfavourably with the ‘well-clothed inhabitants’ from Belgaum and the North-West, and even with the Thugs modelled in an exhibit submitted by a Captain Reynolds. See Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations 1851. Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue (London, 1851), vol. ii, section IV, class XXX, p. 930. Others professed themselves positively ‘repulsed’ by the emaciated and (again) ‘effeminate’ figures: Kriegel, Lara, Grand Designs. Labor, Empire and the Museum in Victorian Culture (Durham, NC, 2007), p. 117CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
49 Mathur, Saloni, India by Design. Colonial History and Cultural Display (Berkeley, 2007)Google Scholar.
50 Dewan, Deepali, ‘The body at work: colonial art education and the figure of the “native craftsman”’, in Confronting the Body. The Politics of Physicality in Colonial and Post-Colonial India, (eds) J. H. Mills and S. Sen (London, 2004), pp. 118–134Google Scholar. The chapter is developed from Dr Dewan's doctoral thesis, ‘Crafting and Knowledge of Crafts: Art Education, Colonialism and the Madras School of Arts in Nineteenth-Century South Asia’ (University of Minnesota, 2001). I am grateful to Dr Dewan for sharing both texts with me.
51 Dewan, ‘The body at work’, p. 119.
52 Birdwood, Industrial Arts of India, p. 144, for example, comes close to implying that these hereditary skills were acquired genetically rather than exclusively by hands-on training: ‘the patient Hindu handicraftsman's dexterity is a second nature, developed from father to son, working for generations at the same processes and manipulations’. In The Crystal Palace and its Contents, p. 101, present-day Hindus were characterised as the inheritors of ‘an unbroken legacy of the agricultural and manufacturing arts of the ancient Egyptians’.
53 McGowan, Crafting the Nation in Colonial India, especially chapter 1.
54 Mukharji, Art-Manufactures of India, p. 74.
55 Buck, Sir Edward, ‘Empire of India’, in Colonial and Indian Exhibition 1886. Official Catalogue (London, 1886), p. 12Google Scholar. An example from a century earlier shows Sir Charles Warre Malet, Resident at the court of the Peshwa in Poona, in 1789 receiving 26 sculptures in response to his request that the East India Company send ‘some pieces of workmanship in plaster of Paris and a Suit of Armour . . . for Nanna Furneze [Fadnavis], the Principal Minister of the Poona Durbar’. Quoted in Schaffer, ‘“Take all of them”’, pp. 74–75.