Abstract
Photographs, when reproduced in a work of history, are usually ‘illustrations’ for the text. This book of 346 pages is different—it is inspired by a single photograph—a half-page image printed in the L’Illustrazione Italiana of 13 December 1885, based on a group photograph, captioned ‘Professor Angelo de Gubernatis with the Brahmans of Bombay’ (the ‘Brahmans’ were identified as Gerson da Cunha, a Catholic from Goa, Shyamji Krishnavarma, who had returned to India in 1885 after a long stint studying Sanskrit at Oxford, and Pandit Bhagwanlal Inderji, who presented his reading of the Hathigumpha Inscription at the 1885 Conference of Orientalists). The last two scholars do not figure in the book, which guides us through the interactions between the Tuscan and the Goan, and the enthusiasm in Florence for ideas and artefacts Indian.
The author traces the journeys to and from Europe and India, of Gubernatis from Florence and his friend da Cunha from Goa. Gubernatis had the interest and the resources to journey to the Americas and to Eastern Europe. He was a scholar of Sanskrit, whose great moment was the one commemorated in the photograph, when he was tricked out in an Indian outfit, invested with the sacred thread and pronounced a Brahmin. Also interested in other aspects of Indian culture, and in fostering trade between the two countries, he found in da Cunha an ideal collaborator, who wished to exhibit his own collections in Europe, and also locate markets for Indian crafts. He in turn was in touch with Buhler in Bombay, Griffith in Benares, the indefatigable Leitner in Punjab, who had access to the treasures of Gandhara and in Madras Burnell whose nightmare was that Vedic texts could easily become extinct.
In a leisurely progression, this book takes us through the landscape of the subcontinent stirred by ideas that looked back as well as forward—to creating histories by studying artefacts, epigraphy, texts, monuments; to a unifying anti-colonial nationalist movement inspired in part by the Italian Risorgimento. It was in the studio of a Parsi photographer in Bombay that the group photograph was taken on 10 September 1885. It is possible that a few months later he was commissioned to take photographs of the delegates to the first session of the Indian National Congress.
The 1860s, 1870s and 1880s was a time of international and national conferences, as well as of short sharp wars. The nation called Italy came together to form a state, while in India the concept of the country as a nation took shape. At the historic Congress of Berlin in July 1878 the European ‘Powers’ ‘settled’ the future of Turkey. Two months later, in September 1878, delegates from the same countries met in Florence as the International Conference of Orientalists, where one of the themes discussed was India’s past. If 1877 was the year when imperialism was celebrated at the Delhi Durbar, the following year could be called the Year of Indian Art, featured in newspapers, and imprinted on people’s minds. It was in 1878 that the Indian Museum in Calcutta was opened, and the idea of an Indian Museum in Florence was mooted. In 1878 the Universal Exhibition at Paris had a spacious ‘Anglo-Indian’ Pavilion, and Florence organised an Oriental Exhibition, which was flooded with contributions from India in such abundance that the catalogue could be published only six years later.
Florence, with a rich artistic tradition and identified as the city of the Renaissance, was the culture-capital of the newly-united Italy. It is not surprising that it was there, rather than in Rome (the political capital after 1870) that an academic as well as a popular interest in cultures covered by the wide umbrella of ‘the Orient’ developed. The city had encountered exotic/modern India only a few years earlier in a piece of public art—the bust called ‘The Indian of Florence’, of 21 year old Rajaram Chhatrapati, Maharaja of Kolhapur, who was on a visit in 1870 when he died suddenly and tragically. His ashes were immersed in the Arno which explains the name of the bridge, the Ponte all’Indiano. The bust is still in place, but the interest in India’s history and culture in the 1870s and 1880s has vanished.
The Orientalist Conferences became a regular event from 1873, and that of 1878 was hosted by Florence. The redoubtable Rajendralal Mitra planned to attend but could not go (else he might have been for India’s archaeology and history what Vivekananda was for Hinduism fifteen years later at another international conference).
To the delegates, the ‘Orient’ was a wonderful catchall category, stretching from north Africa to southeast Asia, through languages, artefacts, anthropological enquiries and music. The objective was to collect and bring back trophies to be discussed and written about in the serenity of a European library or museum. The notion of paying extravagant sums for these would have surprised both the donors and those who acquired them (many objects were acquired by bargains struck at distress sales in India during the terrible famine of 1876–1878). Assigning responsibilities as in the recent case of the Nataraja bronze bought by the Canberra Museum would never have been an issue (cf. p. 296—’Gubernatis publicly displayed in the Indian Museum…items that had been purchased, donated or even stolen’). The randomness of the Museum’s collection led to it being impatiently dismantled, as more sophisticated museum-design became common, and the exhibits became the raw material for anthropological studies. By the end of the First World War, there was no memory of the Museum. The clues to its existence are scattered or hidden in archives and storage-basements. Vicente’s achievement is her persistence as a detective bringing these to light, as well as the Gubernatis–da Cunha correspondence, and analysing what ‘Orientalism’ meant to Florentine scholars at a particular point of time.
The obverse of the fascination with Indian art and culture was the ingrained belief in the benefits of European civilisation. Italy was not immune from this (despite Gubernatis recognising the ‘clear contrast between the quality of Indian objects and the banality and poverty of those from Europe’ (p. 257), and there is reference to suggestions of the desirability of a civilising mission—by establishing Italian colonies in Asia. This did not happen, but at the Congress of Berlin in 1884, Italy was one of the countries who benefited by the Partition of Africa.
An unusual book, written with care, with a wealth of almost Dickensian detail—Indian priests, shopkeepers and scholars jostle in its pages, and the transactions between the collectors and the custodians are delineated with great fidelity and the text is refreshingly free of jargon.