Perspectives of/from India in Salem: The Peabody Essex Museum’s Indian Art Galleries
When one thinks of India … Salem, Massachusetts is not likely the first thing to come to mind. And yet, the port city served as a vital node in the transoceanic trade networks of the 18th and 19th centuries, connecting the newly independent United States of America to important trading centres in India, China, Japan, Zanzibar, and other regions across the globe. Today, the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) serves as a visual testament to the city’s legacy of global connectivity. In November 2020, PEM opened a reinstalled, permanent display of selected artworks from the museum’s collection of Indian art, curated by Siddhartha V. Shah, Director of Education and Civic Engagement and Curator of Indian and South Asian Art. Showcasing a range of artworks from the 19th and 20th centuries, the new galleries offer a vibrant and complex picture of India’s artistic cultures shaped by global trade, cross-cultural exchanges, and the historical transition from colonialism to postcolonial nation-building.
No longer prohibited by the British East India Company’s commercial monopoly on overseas trade, from the mid-1780s American merchants embarked on long-distance voyages to major port cities in India such as Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras to bring back cotton and silk textiles, sugar, indigo, leather, paintings, souvenirs, and countless tales of their adventures abroad. In the new Prashant H. Fadia Foundation and Deshpande Foundation Gallery, visitors can view the types of objects collected by early American travellers to India; objects that would subsequently form the basis of PEM’s collection of Indian art: Kalighat and mica paintings, clay figurines, and papier-mâché busts of Indian men. At the time, these paintings and artefacts would have been proudly displayed as personal mementos in the homes of American merchants, given as gifts to friends and family, or donated to be exhibited in the glass-fronted cabinets lining the walls of the original East India Marine Hall (established 1825). We can only imagine the powerful and intriguing presence of these collections for the residents of Salem—for many, these objects would be their only source of experiencing and understanding the world outside of Massachusetts or the United States.
In the redesigned gallery, visitors first encounter a group of 19th century paintings on mica laid out in a display case. The artworks depict a range of figures engaged in daily activities and labour, from ascetics to basket weavers to metalsmiths. In addition to these paintings, one encounters a number of smaller-sized 19th century clay figurines that also portray a range of caste and occupational types. By illustrating and identifying various caste groups and occupations, styles of dress, and regional craft traditions, these commercial genres of paintings and crafts provided Western audiences knowledge about India, its peoples, and its cultures. The collecting and display of visual representations of Indian people as decorative objects and museum artefacts underscores the perceived exoticism and the objectification of non-Western cultures in the 19th century.
The thoughtful curating of paintings and artefacts from India, along with the informative wall texts, elucidates how India was imagined, presented, and understood by Americans at the time, including the ways that perpetuated racial and geographic hierarchies of power between the West and the non-Western world. The intent behind the displays is to prompt visitors to question the origins of the stereotypical narrative of India as a mystical and strange land, untouched by modernity, that emerged during the time of colonial occupation. To that aim, visitors today could also benefit from a greater description of the contexts in which these objects were made and consumed. For example, one of the most conspicuous displays in the gallery is a collection of large papier-mâché busts of Indian men, likely made by artists in the erstwhile royal city of Jaipur (now the state capital of Rajasthan) known for its doll-making and other craft industries. The figures are startlingly individualized and realistic. One even displays the lingering marks of smallpox. The wall text at the opening of this gallery asked visitors to consider, ‘Whose perspectives do we see in these objects?’ From the perspective of 19th century Western viewers, the sculptures would have conveyed information about Indian customs— for example, the distinctive styles of turbans from different regions—and even supported stereotypical notions of India as a place of disease. However, from the perspective of contemporaneous Indian artists and patrons, the papier-mâché models were evidence of evolving artistic techniques, patronage structures, and art pedagogy in the city of Jaipur, which had emerged as a major centre for arts and crafts by the late 19th century. Indeed, for many Indian cities, the 19th century was a period of great artistic development, driven by modern technologies of art, an expanding commercial art market, and the global circulation of people, ideas, and objects. The attempt to highlight the role of Indian art in shaping colonial discourse about India is, of course, a critical intervention. Nonetheless, in the absence of information about the local, certainly very dynamic, Indian contexts in which these objects were produced, does their display continue to reinforce a Western, or even colonial, perspective?
A number of examples from PEM’s collections of Indian art, in fact, gesture to an interconnected visual economy in the 19th century marked by artistic exchange and parallels between Indian and American visual practices. An 1846 portrait of the Indian merchant Raj Kissen Mitter (1811–1872), presented by the Mitter family to Boston writer John T. Morse (1840–1937), not only marks a close personal relationship that had developed between American and Indian individuals, it also reflects the desire of Indians to represent themselves to the West. Mitter’s portrait is remarkably similar in style and composition to 18th and 19th century portraits of American merchants found in PEM’s Maritime Art gallery, in which the subject is portrayed seated at a desk with various accoutrements of maritime trade—maps, inventories, and ledgers—in front of a window in view of a nautical scene. Mitter’s portrait, now displayed in the Asian Export Art gallery, is an important reminder of the agency of Indian patrons and artists who had adapted the visual language of European and American art to imagine and articulate their own relative position in an increasingly transcultural world connected by global trade and travel. This missed opportunity to highlight the coterminous nature of American and Indian cultural encounters stems largely from limitations imposed by the skewed division of PEM’s collections—whereby portraits of Indian merchants are categorized as ‘Asian Export Art’ while those of American merchants are displayed in the Maritime Art gallery. As a result, American merchants are portrayed as active agents of maritime trade in the 19th century, while Indian merchants are presented as the subjects of decorative and ethnographic objects. Only when seemingly disparate artworks are seen in relation to one another can we recognize cross-cultural affinities and historical connections between artists, patrons, and ideas from diverse contexts.
In contrast to the 19th century gallery, the new Chester and Davida Herwitz Gallery squarely foregrounds Indian artists’ engagement with art as a means of self-definition. Following India’s Independence in 1947, artistic practice was inextricably linked with the impetus to create a modern Indian identity and visual language to represent the new nation, a project reflected in PEM’s expansive collection of modern Indian art. The museum not only has one of the largest collections of modern Indian art outside of India, due to the benefaction of the Massachusetts-based art collectors Chester and Davida Herwitz, it is also the only US-based museum with a permanent gallery devoted to post-Independence art from India.
Anchoring the Herwitz gallery are five spectacular paintings from M. F. Husain’s ‘Mahabharata’ series, made for the 1971 São Paulo Biennial. The paintings are arranged in a semicircle at the centre of the gallery, leading the viewer through a circumambulation of the ancient epic. The story of the Mahabharata, which details the destructive war between two factions of the Kuru family, the Kauravus and the Pandavas, is made familiar to museum audiences in an animated retelling by FableVision Studios projected on a gallery wall. Pictorial elements from Husain’s painting are even woven into the animation. In the restaging of the Mahabharata in expressive painterly form, Husain’s paintings oscillate as modernist renderings of India’s mythological past to meditations on the political turmoil of the present. Evocative of the monochromatic colour palette and formalist visual language of Picasso’s Guernica (Museo Reina Sofía DE00050), Duryodhana Arjuna Split depicts two nude female figures on the left and a nude three-headed male figure on the right, separated by the split halves of a black circle. These splits, fractures, and breaks, which demarcate several of Husain’s paintings in the gallery, both symbolize the conflicts and divides that devastate the Kuru family in the Mahabharata and resonate with the ostensibly fratricidal conflicts in India’s history, such as the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan.
The theme of divisions and conflicts, both internal and external, underpinning the Mahabharata also runs as a leitmotif across other works in the gallery. For instance, Sudhir Patwardhan’s social realist cityscapes reflect the alienation of India’s rural and working classes and their growing divide from the urban middle class in the 1970s. Other artists consider the growing communal conflicts and sectarian violence of 1990s India in their works. While Atul Dodiya’s 1990 self-portrait offers a deeply intimate and self-reflective portrayal—he’s depicted standing on the porch of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad, as if quietly contemplating the shifting currents of India’s political and social landscape—Vivan Sundaram’s Protecting the Dead memorializes the anonymous victims of communal violence that erupted across cities in India following the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. Poverty, economic stagnation, and religious strife in postcolonial India can be identified as some of the central concerns situated by modern Indian artists in their works.
One cannot help but notice the primacy of the human figure across the artworks displayed in the Herwitz gallery. A small section on abstract paintings by Sayed Haider Raza, Nasreen Mohamedi, Biren De, and others frames the history of modernist abstraction through the lens of spirituality. In their colourful renderings of abstract forms, artists such as Gulam Rasool Santosh derived inspiration from the nonfigurative traditions of Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic art.
Overall, the new Indian art galleries at PEM use a diverse range of artworks as a prismatic lens through which to explore shifts in the imagining, display, and consumption of India, with the hope that visitors will reflect on and even question their own knowledge of India and how that knowledge has been shaped. At a time of widespread cultural dissonance and social division in the United States, this project is both timely and important. The Indian art galleries at PEM offer a rare comprehensive view of both 19th century and modern art from India and will undoubtedly inspire new scholarly research and public engagement.
Shivani Sud is a PhD candidate in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley.
Orientations July/August 2021, pp 84-89
This article first featured in our July/ August 2021 print issue, pp 84-89. To read more, purchase the full issue here.
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