Maharaja exhibition at the Victoria & Albert museum

Above: leaflet they gave out at the Maharaja exhibition.

One of the exhibitions I went to see late last year was the Maharaja exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. I meant to go and see it again, but it closed last week so that chance is gone. I also meant to buy the full catalogue, but at £35 I'm not sure if I can justify the expense.

The exhibitition was about "royal" India, the semi-autonomous princely states that made up two thirds of the sub-continent prior to 1947. The exhibition was publicised and reviewed as a display of extravagant bling, but it was much cleverer than that. It was really an explanation of how power is communicated.

Power is projected through two main channels: abstractly through written laws (interpreted and enforced) and visually through physical displays. Both of these conceptual manifestations interest me. I was fascinated by the exhibition's practical demonstration (in pictures and objects) of the Hindu idea of darshan which explained so much that previously was not clear.

One of the great historical puzzles is how British rule in India lasted so long. Viewed objectively, it seems ridiculous that a tiny country the other side of the world could subdue and dominate a vast territory containing many hundreds of millions of people. "Divide and rule", superior weapons technology, ferocious intimidation - none of these arguments are convincing (and would subdue a country for ten years maximum before back-firing on the occupiers).

The Maharaja exhibition illustrated how notions of darshan were incorporated into the way British imperial power displayed itself, which seemed a new way of looking at things.



Above: not all of the reviews of the Maharaja exhibition have been good. This article, which appeared in The Guardian, said it was patronising. Other reviews have dismissed it as just glitter (which makes me wonder whether the reviewers bothered to read the captions).



Above: this book (by political scientists Susanne Hoeber and Lloyd Rudolph) is one of the most interesting I have ever read. As India reinvents itself as an economically powerful and confident nation it will have to come to terms with its history (currently mostly interpreted through juvenile expressions of nationalism). Like France (only more so) they will have to cope with the realisation that during an extended period of foreign domination a very large minority (perhaps even the majority by a small margin) of their population were collaborators.



Above: immediately after reading Reversing the Gaze I read this memoir by a British official employed by the state of Hyderabad in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It illustrated the way in which very ordinary people from Britain could enter the ruling class in India (an intoxicating process that most of them never really recovered from). The British rule of India was on the whole bad for the United Kingdom, but became impossible to stop once once it had gained momentum.