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India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display , by Saloni Mathur

Article  in  Victorian Studies · October 2008

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Victorian Studies, Volume 51, Number 1, Autumn 2008, pp. 143-145 (Review)

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 143

felicity as a critic tracing the movements of narrative and its intertextual resonances: in the
case of Campion these include Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter [1850]), the great
narratives of Empire, and twentieth-century theory. Kaplan places the film in ironic
dialogue with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s account of the origins of language in the primitive
exchange of women. As the reading of Campion suggests, Kaplan’s book is significant
because it makes theory a living part of the field of Victoriana: if the now-dominant turn to
historicising has, in some quarters, led to a tendency to evade or temper theory, Kaplan’s
supple readings remind us how it might be used, in dialogue and not as authority.
Kaplan’s distinctively wide-ranging perspective has produced a book in
which the nineteenth-century literary inheritances of Britain and America echo back
to us polyphonically: Hawthorne and James are as compellingly present “in providing
the mythic structures of the early staging of our own modernity” as Charlotte Brontë
and Charles Dickens (133). In doing this, Kaplan presents us with critical writing that is
rich in the recognition of modernity’s paradoxes. But in Kaplan’s writing these para-
doxes are never merely elegant. They are historical, political, and they involve ethical
dilemma and choice. As Kaplan puts it, the experience of reading Victoriana “is usually
complicated, not always obvious, and not always nice” (11).
David Amigoni
Keele University

India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, by Saloni Mathur; pp. xi + 219.
Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007, $50.00, $19.95
paper, £29.95, £11.95 paper.

Studies of the role of the visual in empire have focused on museums, collecting, adver-
tising, and fine arts. In India by Design, Saloni Mathur expands these studies to look at
trajectories of India’s cultural production in the West in department stores, exhibi-
tions, popular painting, and postcards. Going beyond the politics of display, her inno-
vative study explores a broad imperial design discourse that criss-crosses commercial,
ethnographic, and visual content. Debates about design, sparked by the Great Exhibi-
tion, made aesthetics an imperial concern. Victorians interpreted a disjunction between
Indian objects’ extraordinary beauty and Indian craft manufacture, considered “medi-
eval.” This disjunction fueled struggles between Raj administrators and Swadeshi
nationalists—who advocated Indian economic self-sufficiency—over both economic
and discursive control of Indian crafts from the 1880s.
Mathur looks backward from two current events: high sale prices for contempo-
rary Indian paintings and a design book series drawn from Indian art. Mathur sees these
as consequences of 150 years of meanings created through cultural encounters between
India and Europe. The current market for Indian culture echoes British mania for Indian
things from the eighteenth century on. She uses case studies situated at the junction of art
history, anthropology, museum studies, and postcolonial theory to historicize India’s
Victorian commodification. The case study approach avoids totalizing narratives and
focuses historical and theoretical lenses on a telling incident that refracts multiple mean-
ings. An anthropologist and art historian, Mathur explores how images were produced,

Autumn 2008
144

consumed, and reproduced to write a truly interdisciplinary study that views design,
empire, and modernity as conjoined products of imperial anxiety and incoherence. This
nexus, in turn, demonstrates how transglobal consumption shaped national identities
through circulations of goods, bodies, imperial ideologies, and epistemologies.
She first pairs the display of artisans sponsored by Liberty’s department store
and the store’s sale of Indian goods and their imitations, a “dramatic encounter
between industrial society and the preindustrial craft traditions” (29). This encounter
was part of broader discourses saturated with economic policies, aesthetics, and
national identities reflected in the Arts and Crafts movement’s handicraft aesthetic.
Mathur defines a dialectical “cult of the craftsman” framed by concepts of primitive
and modern (29), both proving to be elastic terms. George Birdwood’s influential writ-
ings essentialized India as a producer of crafts, not fine art, rooted in village life, a
nostalgic invention that denied the burgeoning anti-imperial professional classes of
urban India. Building on Birdwood and on European oriental fantasies, Arthur Liberty
opened his shop in 1875. At Liberty’s, imitations were considered improvements,
making “authenticity” a multivalent commercial term, exemplified by the Umritza
cashmere, an imitation shawl from non-existent Umritza. Liberty organized an event in
which nautch dancers, acrobats, and artisans performed for crowds in a created village
in Battersea Park. A commercial and publicity failure, the event provoked both the
newly formed Indian National Congress and the Home Office of the Indian govern-
ment. Liberty soon replaced Indian imitations with home goods.
Against this debacle Mathur pits R. C. Dutt’s The Economic History of India (1904),
which attacked British commercial policies and the presumed imperial unity promoted
by Liberty’s display and by international exhibitions. Swadeshi leaders advocated boycot-
ting British goods. Citing Ananda Coomaraswamy and E. B. Havell, Mathur presents the
movement’s “spiritual and ethical” aesthetic arguments. But others, like Aurobindo
Ghosh, promoted industrial swadeshi so India could compete for global markets.
Mathur’s second case is London’s 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition with
its living display of “artisans”—really prisoners taught rug-making in prison; children;
a potter over one hundred years old; Tulsi Ram, a homeless Punjabi man who was in
London to petition the Queen over a land dispute; and Indian workers. These people,
falsely identified as artisans, inadvertently exposed “authenticity” and “modernity” as
meaning only what the British claimed at the moment. The Queen opened the exhibi-
tion seated on Ranjit Singh’s throne, taken when Britain captured Lahore.
Using newspaper descriptions, official reports, and the conflicted account by
the upper-caste Indian curator T. N. Mukharji who supervised the exhibition, Mathur
contrasts the West End exhibition with the East End pandemonium created by Ram,
who refused to leave London. Indian elites, lascars (sailors), and ayahs (women domes-
tics) had traveled to London since the eighteenth century, but subaltern Indians
confounded the urban geography projected and contained by the 1886 exhibition.
Contradictions between official and subaltern exposed imperial vulnerabilities and the
polysemy and intertextuality of public events.
Mathur’s third case is that of Rudolf Swaboda. Commissioned by Queen
Victoria, he went to India, where he produced portraits that were sensitive to sitters’
individuality but persistent in placing them in a collection that nullified individuality
and made them types. Mathur contextualizes Swaboda’s portraits vis-à-vis the rise of oil

victorian studies / Volume 51, no. 1

painting in India, part of the realism promoted by British art schools in India. Into
these endeavors, Mathur folds the successful international career of realist painter Ravi
Varma, whom she insightfully reassesses as having deployed orientalism for national
purposes, reevaluating this painter once despised by Indian modern artists.
The study of postcard images of Indian women collected by British women
addresses gendered orientalism. Rejecting the male gaze explanation, Mathur explores
these cards’ epistolary origins, production, circulation, and collection. She examines
relations among imperial “native views” of romanticized landscapes, ethnography,
British monuments in India, printed titles and captions, written messages, “lowbrow”
uses, and feminized collections.
India by Design’s final case study focuses on the repatriation of two Indian
Buddhas from the Victoria and Albert Museum to India. These objects’ histories and
their relations to Britain and India changed in what Mathur calls “microprocesses of
social interaction” (160), including varying judgments of their worth and explanations
of their retention in Britain. Repatriation undermines the claims of European
“universal” museums, which in reality disrupt colonies’ historical narratives.
Mathur suggests the inadequacies of some postcolonial theories for the social
history of cultural encounters. Mimicry does not adequately explain Indian artists’
appropriation of oil painting, for example. She concludes that, despite modern postco-
lonialism, colonial and pre-colonial histories still mark cultural products and their
interpretations in shifting terrains of imperialism, nationalism, and postcolonialism
that continually recede and reemerge to shape and define culture and its conflicts into
our own century.
Julie F. Codell
Arizona State University

Realism, Photography, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, by Daniel A. Novak; pp. xv +

While those of us who study nineteenth-century fiction have been turning to the peri-
od’s photography for insight into the real life of Victorians and the realism practiced by
many of their novelists, Daniel Novak has developed a counter-approach—arguing that
photography can also be said to represent what is not real and that literary realism itself
relies as much on typicality as on particularity and individuality. Novak starts out by
asking the leading question, “what if we read photography and its interchangeable
subjects as a ‘model’ for how we read character and identity in the realist novel?” (6),
and he finds answers by looking especially at the composite or art photography of
pioneer photographers Henry Peach Robinson and Oscar Gustav Rejlander. There he
uncovers instances of how they manipulated their composite images to construct what
(for them) was more true than real, in a manner akin to the project of the realist
novelist. The “erasure of identity and particularity” made possible by the “openness of
the photographic frame” (21) thus exposes an “unlimited source for production of
novel bodies and photographic narrative” (29). Novak’s text unfolds through a series of
chapters focused on reading the fictions of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Oscar

Autumn 2008

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