“The best South Asian holdings outside London”: Opportunity and Challenges in a dependent relationship, 1854 to 2023
Resource type
Conference paper (unpublished)
Creator (person)
Voigt, Friederike
Abstract
The paper compares the life and significance of the South Asian collection at the Scottish National Museum in the second half of the 19th century and in the 21st century. From its founding and over the first thirty years, the Edinburgh Museum, similarly to Dublin, experienced a largely dependent relationship to the South Kensington Museum, London. For example, at the sale of Colonel Guthrie’s collection of Indian jade and rock crystal, the most valuable pieces stayed in London, while Edinburgh was able to afford only a few generic samples of these crafts. Well into the 20th century the Edinburgh Museum seems to have followed the calls of the former imperial centre, such as the exhibition of Asian sculpture for the Royal Asiatic Society’s sesquicentennial celebration. Yet right from the beginning, some independent shaping was possible, from items donated by Scots in the East India Company service; the second register entry, for example, listed 50 specimens of minerals from India presented by Lieutenant Aytoun in October 1855. A challenge to this model became increasingly apparent after the establishment of a Scottish Parliament in 1997. It has become more difficult to continue celebrating (implicitly or explicitly) the Imperial provenance of the South Asian collection; a reconsideration of what these collections mean has become imperative. I illustrate this, using examples of my curatorial efforts to find new ways of making these collections relevant to Scotland in the 21st century.
Event title
Others Within And Without: Art, India, and Britain's ‘Internal Colonies’ session
Publisher
Association for Art History
Rights statement
In Copyright