Chapter 7 - Collecting India

Summary

When Devis brought his series of paintings of Indian culture and society back for exhibition and publication in London; or when McKenzie's volumes of records were deposited in East India House in the 1820s: this transfer of the material culture of knowledge about India was part of a much larger, informal pattern through which ‘Britain itself collected an empire, in India and beyond’. A substantial part of the Company's activities, in addition to its core trading and governmental functions, was the accumulation not only of written research and records – formally inaugurated in Jones's Asiatick Society – about the increasing territories and peoples under its jurisdiction, but also, and equally importantly, the cultural artefacts that provided the material evidence of its entitlement to authority. In his important account of such collecting practices, Bernard Cohn identified the acquisition of material culture with the accumulation of knowledge that enabled imperial control to be asserted through systems of classification, subordination and documentation by which India and its people could be ‘known’. In this chapter, I want to build on this insight, as well as developing the implications of the discussion of Devis's pictorial series in Chapter 5, to consider collecting and collections not just as integral to the ‘empire of knowledge’, but as intimately entwined with – and to some degree determinant of – the changing history of the East India Company itself during the nineteenth century, above all after 1858 when its authority over India was transferred to the British state and its commercial power effectively at an end. Picking up on Nicholas Dirks's account of the rehabilitation of the Company in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, following its demise, I will argue that the remarkable turnaround in its reputation intersected closely with the history of its collections, and the disentangling of the ambiguities over the Company's public and private faces enabled through them.