Diving into East India Company Collections: A Focus on the British Library

During the nineteenth century, the British East India Company spearheaded many initiatives that launched a flow of goods between Great Britain and its colonies in India. British officers participated in geographical surveys for the Company as well as building their own private collection of artifacts/objects from India and Asia at large.

After the liquidation of the East India Company in 1858, the collection changed hands multiple times. The power to rule India was now transferred over to the British Crown. With the establishment of national museums, what were formerly private collections of East India Company officers became entities of the public.

Where did these collections go? The history of these numerous artifacts and natural specimens provide insights into how knowledge – specifically, scientific knowledge – was organized and distributed. The construction of museums, during and after the era of International Exhibitions, facilitated the centralization and institutionalization of knowledge that we experience now.

            Through the Laidlaw program, I work with Professor Jessica Ratcliff at the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University. Professor Ratcliff’s main research is on nineteenth century British museums and science culture. Along with three other undergraduate students, I collected data about collections that came from the East India Company in order to trace the Company’s collections after 1858.

            While my colleagues focused on the British Museum, the British Natural History Museum, and the Victoria and Albert museum, I investigated the collections of the British Library.

It is a bit difficult to sketch exactly the number and journey of items related to the East India Company. Although it has significant overlaps with the collection of the India Museum that was built in 1858, as well as the India Office and India Library, it is not synonymous with any of these entities. After temporarily being housed at Leadenhall Street and in Fife House, former East India Company collections found their homes among a number of different locations. Before being dispersed to the museums mentioned above, the India Office also housed part of that collection. Official records and reports from British officers that worked for the East India Company, along with collected crafts and artisan items, were all under jurisdiction of the India Office.

            Much of the British Library’s collection of Arabic manuscripts come from the India Office. In fact, in the British Library Archive & Manuscript Catalogue, manuscripts that had been transferred from the India Office bear the searchable label “IO Islamic.” In my search to estimate the number of East India Company collection items currently in the British Library’s possession, I observed many different ways information was organized. Before the twenty-first century’s digital catalogues and advanced search bars, catalogues were printed volumes like dictionaries containing categorized, numbered entries. This was the work of managing librarians, many of whom were scholars of their collections before they took on the role of steward and librarian. Scholarship in the 19^th century, in the context of the East India Company, meant scholars of the Orient. Many East India Company officers were Orientalists, translators of Asian languages, and those who dedicated significant time to studying India and South Asia at large trained to be Indologists and Sanskrit scholars. It is helpful to note that by tracing the legacy of the East India Company, we are nevertheless working with a legacy of colonialism and Orientalism.

Though the British Library has a well-equipped, searchable digital catalogue, many items in the archival and manuscript collections are better accessed on site. A portion of the British Library’s collections, including many manuscripts, are still in the process of becoming digitized and digitally accessible. For the most part, researchers can apply for and request a reader’s pass, and request files and documents to be delivered to the British Library’s reading room. I have held assistant positions at two different archives, where my job was mainly to digitize fragile material and papers from the archive so the archive could theoretically be digitally available to researchers in any location with internet.

The transition to digital access in terms of cataloguing, however, may not always be smooth. The British Library’s collection, containing over 170 million items, span from the 16^th to the 21^st century, and there is no singular rule that dictates the categorization of these items. The same item might be curated in different exhibits, and thus serve different purposes in constructing the curatorial narrative. We must also realize that, these items being removed from their places and contexts of origin already creates a layer of (mis)interpretation by the original surveyor or officer that collected it.

Despite the fact that many British scholars studied South Asia and its languages, most of the 19^th century manuscripts in the British Library’s collection remain in their original language. There are research guides organized by language – Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese etc., but often the ongoing digitization makes it hard to think of the entire collection as one coherent array. It is not always straightforward, as we go from various print catalogues to the digital catalogue, what the overlap between the print volumes are, and whether or not everything has been entered into the digital catalogue. The reality is, however, that the process of archiving and managing library collections is not a cut-and-dry process, and the decisions regarding categories, labels and periodicity will change as we come to regard history differently.

For my inquiry into the British Library, I contacted curators by email to find out what proportion of British Library manuscript holdings are related to the British East India Company. I investigated manuscripts of Arabic languages as well as Sanskrit manuscripts. Though it is hard to reach a specific number for these manuscripts, I managed to work out an estimate with the British Library curators. There are approximately 4000 Arabic language manuscripts, and they are rounded up from individual private collections by Company officers. In the case of Sanskrit manuscripts, though only two out of four catalogues are published online, the estimate of manuscripts is also around 4100.

Some of the collectors, like Warren Hastings, were significant government officials in the 19^th century. Officers like Hastings were sent by Great Britain to oversee the prosperity of India and carry out the colonizing mission as intended. Other manuscripts in this outlined group come from the collection of Tipu Sultan, who died in the Fourth Mysore war in 1799.

There was a great deal of entanglement between aesthetics and economics within this context. The colonizing mission is driven by trade, commerce, and capitalist profit. Spices, calico fabrics and silks were marketed as “Oriental” goods because they came from afar.

The interest in Asia and Asian goods originate from a crisis within the newly industrialized Britain. European markets looked to/sourced from Asia as part of a search for authenticity and essence. In so doing, however, the Orient wholly served the purpose of self-exploration in the alienated/alienating conditions of modernity in 19^th century Europe.

The creation of the India Museum was, in itself, partly a scheme to improve “taste” of the British population. With the expansion of the foreign market, as well as foreign goods entering the British market, many people felt that “Britishness” was under siege. In a market economy, goods are associated with desire. An exotic, artisan good becoming the desired seemed like a challenge to native British goods. Those who prided themselves on being British were confronted by the possibility of cosmopolitanism, and the attraction of having the world at hand.

Private collections and surveyed specimens became centralized and absorbed into museums in the 1850s. Various International Exhibitions reaffirmed interest in the raw materials and other products from the Indian subcontinent, and the India Museum was established in 1858 primarily in the interest of trade. British manufacturers could now learn about the types of cotton plants that grew in India, for example. Being in addition to the existing British Natural History Museum and the East India Company Library, the India Museum took on an exhibitory function, highlighting the importance of the Indian subcontinent.

John Forbes Watson was a British surgeon who conducted research on food and climate in India. His publications on natural resources in India gained him recognition from the British Society for Arts. Shortly after the India Museum opened, he was appointed as director of the India Museum. In 1876, Forbes Watson advocated for creating an India Institute, an academic adjunction to the India Museum.

There were three aspects relating to taste that John Forbes Watson put forth as reasons to establish an India Institute “for Lecture, Enquiry, and Teaching.” The formation of artistic taste in the British people; the study of Indian art and craft, originating from an “intuitive artistic taste” in Indian people; and to conduct consumer research, understanding the tastes of consumers in India.

There was a sense that British design was bad and needed improvement. Exaltations of Indian artistry as coming from an “essence,” being “true,” “organic,” or “arising naturally” reflected British insecurities about the automation of industry and the alienation that came as a byproduct of industrialization and capitalism. Post Industrial-Revolution Britain inhabited a significant amount of insecurity. In the face of its own expanding global figure, British manufacturers had to compete with goods from other countries. The opposition between industrial Britain and artisanal India suggest a sense of loss and longing in the early days of industrialization.

The obsession over taste, which drew significant attention to all aspects of design, especially British design compared to Indian design, was partly a reflection of the anxiety around the rapid industrialization in Britain. India was seen as “artisan” – antithetical to the automation, machinery, and repetition that produced identical goods. It is somewhat of an ironic move to suddenly glorify Indian artisanal crafts, because it was the industrialization of fabric production that lowered the costs of fabric, and in India, cheaper cotton fabric from Britain became popular over artisan handwoven fabrics. The atrophy of handwoven fabrics was a result of competition from the industrialized Britain. This was not without intention – apart from supplying the exchange of goods like spices and tea, India was also a significant market for British industry. For British goods to secure a place within the Indian market was greatly beneficial for the British economy. From the first colonial missions, to the establishment of the East India Company as an enterprise, a profiting project, India has always served as an outlet, subject to the whimsicalities of Great Britain.

Great Britain’s domination was expressed through pricing out the handwoven textile market in India. Taste is always linked to the production of goods. In fact, taste functions as a marker of class. While British journalists and reviewers admired Indian textiles, consumers in Asia were purchasing British sourced fabric because it was manufactured at a significantly lower cost. The preference for Indian handwoven textiles – and all the fad around organic, “authentic,” handmade items we still see today – is a class-based taste.

The attempt at pinning down taste and educating the public is a project proposed by the social elites in 19^th century Britain, and their goals are very much to turn the newly emerged middle class into a bourgeois class, one that is worldly and tasteful. Knowledge of and curiosity in the rest of the world became real and a tangible goal with Britain’s colonial projects.

After the liquidation of the East India Company, what was formerly an economic project became a project of political economy and science. Surveyors mapped out the geography of India to figure out how to maximize profit from the land, like where best to grow and harvest rice. The natural specimens they brought back were used to create a more complete sense of the natural world. Wiped of their colonial connotations, thousands of fish and plant specimens that currently reside in the British Natural History Museum come from the East India Company.

The fact that thousands of manuscripts from South Asia, East Asia and Middle Asia are in the possession of the British Library points to a kind of plunder of knowledge. Conducting research with primary sources and working with archival materials has made me think critically about the construction and preservation of archives, and the silence or nonexistence of certain other archives. All in all I greatly enjoyed the research, and getting to see all that I did. There is still much work to be done!