A legacy of empire – British sculpture in India

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British Sculpture in India: New View and Old Memories

By Mary Ann Steggles and Richard Barnes

This period between the last decade of the 18th century up to the 1930s was a time when, some believe, British public statuary ‘was the most original British contribution to Western culture’. This is a quotation from Benedict Read’s gem of a preface, which seeks to justify this notion by arguing that it was the British, not the French, that started the ‘statue mania’ of the 19th century, in particular to commemorate the death of Robert Peel in 1851. Peel was the hero of the British bourgeoisie, people who for the previous century or so had been generating prodigious wealth by a combination of industrial ingenuity and imperialism. This bourgeoisie had quite recently taken political power through the Reform Act of 1832, and were intent on celebrating their power and wealth when their hero, Peel, died.

We are used to the 19th- and early 20th-century commemorative sculpture in Britain. Our cities are full of it. Less well known are the products of British statue mania throughout the British Empire, and particularly in India. Most of this sculpture was commissioned by the rulers of India, mainly the British, from leading British artists, made in Britain and shipped out to India. We may feel either queasy or proud about British Imperialism, but either way we must acknowledge that much of the best art of all ages was produced out of wealth and empire. Think Greek, Roman, Venetian. Even the best artists are only human. They follow the money. There is no doubt that these statues were more than commemorative of individuals. They were part of the wider creation of an ideology supporting the British occupation of India. This makes them more rather than less worthy of study.

The book is based on the scholarship of Mary Ann Steggles, who first visited India in the 1980s and 1990s as part of her studies for a Masters and a Doctorate. To her surprise, although there was a widespread belief that an independent India had destroyed most of these works, she found that much remained, particularly in the Christian churches and cathedrals. In the book Steggles provides a summary history of the Indian statuary starting from the work commissioned by the East India Company in the early 19th century. After the ‘Indian Mutiny’ or ‘War of Independence’ of 1857 the British government took over direct rule of India until Indian Independence in 1949. In this latter period there was even more statuary commissioned.

Steggles concludes by considering the question ‘Was there an iconoclasm?’, meaning: were British statues destroyed in large numbers after Independence? Her overall view is that they were not. Much remains in cathedrals and on important buildings such as the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, but much has been removed to other sites, the most fortunate to museums or repatriated to Britain. But much on these other sites is sorely neglected or has disappeared. The sorriest, and perhaps the most famous, is Coronation Park in Delhi, known as ‘The Graveyard of the Statues’. Here there are statues from the interwar period made for New Delhi by Charles Sargeant Jagger, William Reid Dick and others, but many empty plinths presumably for missing statues, all in a park in a sadly overgrown area. There are, however, strong reports of a plan to turn the park and its statues into a cultural tourist attraction.

The Indian scholar Tapati Guha-Thakurta contributes ‘A view from Calcutta’: a wry, entertaining view. He discusses the ‘musical chairs’ whereby ‘a series of Indian Nationalist leaders took their stands in spots emptied of the colonial masters. He also discusses the influence of British sculpture on Indian post-independence sculpture, as in the portrayal of Ghandi at Chowringhee.

Finally, and the great strength of the book, is the extensive catalogue of British sculptural works in India, or which had been in India and since repatriated, compiled by Richard Barnes, using Steggles’ researches, his own, and that of others. Each statue has a brief but scholarly description of origin and most are illustrated with a fine set of images. There are almost 300 photographs accompanying this catalogue and the various texts. It is this great overview of previously almost unknown works that makes the volume a must for scholars of this period of British sculpture. In this respect it is a worthy  companion to Benedict Read’s Victorian Sculpture and Susan Beattie’s The New Sculpture.

British Sculpture in India: New View and Old Memories  by Mary Ann Steggles and Richard Barnes, with  preface by Benedict Read and a view by Tapati Guha-Thakurta is published by Frontier Publishing 2011. 320 pp., 288 colour illus. ISBN-13: 978 1 872914 41 1