Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands 9780857459428

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Colonial Collecting and Display

Museums and Collections Editors: Mary Bouquet, University College Utrecht, and Howard Morphy, The Australian National University, Canberra As houses of memory and sources of information about the world, museums function as a dynamic interface between past, present and future. Museum collections are increasingly being recognized as material archives of human creativity and as invaluable resources for interdisciplinary research. Museums provide powerful forums for the expression of ideas and are central to the production of public culture: they may inspire the imagination, generate heated emotions and express conflicting values in their material form and histories. This series explores the potential of museum collections to transform our knowledge of the world, and for exhibitions to influence the way in which we view and inhabit that world. It offers essential reading for those involved in all aspects of the museum sphere: curators, researchers, collectors, students and the visiting public. Volume 1 The Future of Indigenous Museums: Perspectives from the Southwest Pacific Edited by Nick Stanley Volume 2 The Long Way Home: The Meanings and Values of Repatriation Edited by Paul Turnbull and Michael Pickering Volume 3 The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display Louise Tythacott Volume 4 Colonial Collecting and Display: Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Claire Wintle

Colonial Collecting and Display Encounters with Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

Claire Wintle

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2013 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2013 Claire Wintle All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wintle, Claire. Colonial collecting and display : encounters with material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar islands / Claire Wintle. -- 1st ed. p. cm. -- (Museums and collections vol.4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-85745-941-1 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-85745-942-8 (ebook) 1. Material culture--Collectors and collecting--India--Andaman and Nicobar Islands. 2. Museums--Collection management--Great Britain. 3. Great Britain--Colonies--Asia. 4. Andaman and Nicobar Islands (India) --Colonization. 5. Andaman and Nicobar Islands (India)--Description and travel--British. 6. Andaman and Nicobar Islands (India)--Antiquities-Collectors and collecting--Great Britain. I. Title. GN635.I4W56 2013 930.1--dc23 2012033465 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-85745-941-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-942-8 (ebook)

For Dad, with love.

Contents List of Figures

ix

Acknowledgements

xiv

List of Abbreviations

xvii

Map of the Andaman Islands

xviii

Map of the Nicobar Islands Introduction: Imperial Encounters and Material Culture

1

2

xix 1

Objects and Empire

2

Island Hopping: From South Asia to England’s South Coast

3

The Life of a Collection

6

A Note on Community Delineations and Terminology

9

Objects, Images and Text

10

Production, Use, Exchange: Spheres of Influence in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

18

Contested Trajectories: Making and Trading for Export in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

22

In the Andaman Islands: Objects as Cultural Envoys

23

In the Nicobar Islands: Objects and Self-Representation

36

Conclusions

46

Colonial Perspectives on Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

57

Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

59

Edward Horace Man: Scientific Collecting Revised

62

Contents

viii

3

Richard Carnac Temple: Collecting for Professional and Social Status

77

Katharine Sara Tuson: Women Collectors in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

90

Conclusions

101

Wider Spheres of Influence: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands in Victorian and Edwardian Britain

113

Illustrated Periodicals and Visual Representations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands

115

Representations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at International Exhibitions: The Case of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886 129

4

Something ‘Spicy’ and ‘Dramatic’: Representations of the Andaman Islands in Popular Literature

139

Conclusions

145

Public Property: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands at Brighton Museum, 1900–1949

155

All Change? Official Interpretation of World Cultures at Brighton Museum

158

Provincial Museum Ethnography: Science vs Pragmatism

168

Multiple Choice: The Andaman and Nicobar Collections at Brighton Museum 175

5

Democracy in the Museum: Patterns of ‘Unofficial’ Interpretation

183

Conclusions

195

Objects and Encounters Today

208

Towards a Postcolonial Display of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands 212 Bibliography

217

Manuscript Collections

217

Object and Photographic Collections

219

Interviews

220

Newspapers

220

Published Sources

221

Index

238

List of Figures I.1

Hentakoi, Nicobar Islands, c. 1850, wood, paint, 710 mm × 500 mm. xx

1.1

Small pot, Chaura, Nicobar Islands, c. 1900, clay, 110 mm × 100 mm, one of four donated to RPMBH.

20

Wrapped skirts, Nicobar Islands, c. 1885, coconut leaf, 223 mm × 85 mm and 130 mm × 100 mm.

41

Model of circular bundle of wood, Nicobar Islands, c. 1900, wood, cane, 170 mm × 40 mm.

42

E.H. Man, Photograph of Nicobarese group with a life-sized bundle of wood at Malacca village, Nancowry Harbour, Nicobar Islands, c. 1880, 115 mm × 187 mm.

42

1.5

Hentakoi board, Nicobar Islands, c. 1850, wood, ink.

43

1.6

Hentakoi board, Nicobar Islands, c. 1850, wood, ink.

44

1.7

Model of a kareau, Nicobar Islands, c. 1880, wood, paint, 235 mm × 90 mm.

45

Pair of waistbelts, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, pandanus leaf, plant fibre, a: 600 mm × 240 mm; b: 600 mm × 260 mm, with nail holes and dust gathered in Temple’s home while on display.

58

Catalogue entry for chū-kai, from E.H. Man. 1887. ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, 21, handwritten manuscript held at the Centre for Anthropology, British Museum.

68

‘Lady’s Dress’. Waistbelt, Little Andaman, c. 1890, plant fibre, orchid bark, 520 mm × 140 mm × 65 mm, donated to Brighton Museum by E.H. Man, 1920.

71

1.2 1.3 1.4

2.1

2.2

2.3

List of Figures

x

2.4

Man’s reinterpretation of Andamanese design, from E.H. Man. 1883. ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 12, 371. 72

2.5

Two waistbelts, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, pandanus leaf, cockle shells, a: 529 mm × 28 mm; b: 348 mm × 26 mm, flattened.

74

Unknown photographer. Photograph of A.F. Man and E.H. Man, c. 1914.

75

Unknown photographer. Photograph of the drawing room, Government House, Ross Island, Andaman Islands, c. 1900.

82

2.6 2.7 2.8

Philipe Adolphe Klier. Photograph of the ball room and dining room with Temple’s Burmese Nats, c. 1895, Government House, Ross Island, Andaman Islands. 83

2.9

M.V. Portman. Photograph of two Andamanese men posed to demonstrate their departure, c. 1890.

85

2.10 Philipe Adolphe Klier. Photograph of the hallway with Andamanese and Nicobarese ‘trophies’, ‘Indian arms’ and ‘pistols of the Burma War of 1824–7’, c. 1985, Government House, Ross Island, Andaman Islands.

86

2.11 Richard Durrand Temple [?]. Photograph of the hallway, The Nash, c. 1904.

88

2.12 Unknown photographer. Formal group portrait of a ship’s crew, including a number of British women, Andamanese men and some Nicobarese kareau and hentakoi carved figures. Presumably taken around the Andaman or Nicobar Islands, c. 1900.

92

2.13 Unknown photographer. Photograph of a display of hentakoi and kareau, c. 1900.

93

2.14 Unknown photographer. Photograph of Katharine Tuson with unknown Andamanese women, c. 1900.

95

2.15 Unknown photographer. Photograph of an unidentified group of Indian servants, European men and women, Nicobarese women, men and children and an Andamanese man on the Nicobar Islands, c. 1900.

96

List of Figures

xi

2.16 Unknown photographer. Photograph of Port Blair’s Amateur Dramatic Society, including Katharine Sara Tuson (second row, fourth from right, marked ‘KST’) dressed as a nurse, c. 1900.

98

2.17 Unknown photographer. Photograph of an interior, presumed to be Katharine and F.E. Tuson’s home on Ross Island, c. 1900.

99

3.1

ILN. 1858. ‘Expedition to the Andaman Islands’, 27 March, 316.

117

3.2

ILN. 1870. ‘The Nicobar Islands’, 15 January, 68.

118

3.3

ILN. 1870. ‘The Nicobar Islands’, 15 January, 69.

119

3.4

ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601.

120

ILN. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands: Hope Town, with Mount Harriet, showing the pier, where Lord Mayo was stabbed’, 24 February, 181.

121

ILN. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands: North End of Ross Island, Head-Quarters of the Penal Settlement’, 24 February, 188.

121

3.7

ILN. 1872. ‘Back of Ross Island, Port Blair’, 24 February, 188.

122

3.8

ILN. 1872. ‘Viper Island, Andaman Islands’, 16 March, 27.

122

3.9

ILN. 1889. ‘A Village in the Nicobar Islands’, 5 October, 443.

123

3.5

3.6

3.10 ‘The Equatorial Camera’, ‘Browning’s Reflector & Spectroscopic Camera’, and ‘Sig[nor] Tacchini’s Observatory’, from ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601.

126

3.11 ‘Village of Malakka’, from ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601.

127

3.12 ILN. 1867. ‘New Iron Lighthouse, Table Islands, Cocos Group, Andaman Islands’, 18 May, 489.

128

3.13 J. Dinsdale. 1886. Sketches at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London: Jordison & Co.

130

3.14 Graphic. 1886. ‘Group of Andaman Islanders’, 15 May, 540.

131

List of Figures

xii

3.15 Graphic. 1886. The Bamboo Trophy at the top end of the Imperial Court, from ‘The Indian Section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, 15 May, 536.

136

3.16 ILN. 1886. ‘Andaman Islander’, 24 July, 92.

137

3.17 Frederick Henry Townsend, from A.C. Doyle. 1903. The Sign of Four, souvenir edn, London: G. Newnes Ltd.

144

4.1

4.2 4.3

Ground floor, Brighton Museum, with three archaeology and ethnography rooms in enfilade, from County Borough of Brighton. 1900. Popular Guide to Brighton Public Museum, Brighton, frontispiece.

159

Boar’s skull, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, bone, cane, 275 mm × 140 mm × 110 mm, with prominent accession number in red ink.

162

Leg adornment, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, pandanus leaf, twine, 350 mm (full length); 100 mm × 30 mm (band), with small green identifying label attached.

162

4.4

Unknown photographer. Group portrait, 19 June 1914. Back row, from left to right: F.E. Tuson, Thomas Cadell, E.H. Man, H.G. Tayler. Front row, from left to right: Mrs Tayler, K.S. Tuson, possibly taken in the garden of Man’s home, 251 Preston Road, Brighton. 166

4.5

Ground floor plan, Brighton Museum, from County Borough of Brighton. 1913. Official Guide to the Public Library, Museum and Fine Art Galleries, 5th edn, Brighton, 4.

169

Postcard, Room I, Archaeological Room, Brighton Museum, c. 1912, showing a series of comparative displays, with ‘Modern Savage Stone Tools’ in the table case at the far end.

170

4.6

4.7

Postcard, Room I, Archaeological Room, Brighton Museum, c. 1912, showing a series of comparative displays. The label ‘Modern Savage Stone Tools’ is partially visible behind the Wild Flower Table. 171

4.8

Postcard, ‘Wooden Figures For Scaring Devils (Nicobarese)’, 1928.

179

4.9

Unknown photographer. Photograph of the new ethnography gallery, 1949.

181

List of Figures

xiii

4.10 E.H. Man. Photograph of members of the Brighton and Hove Archery Club, from Brighton Season. 1906–7. ‘Toxophilites of the Twentieth Century: The Brighton and Hove Archery Club’, 22.

184

4.11 Unknown photographer. Photograph of E.H. Man, from Brighton Season. 1906–7. ‘Toxophilites of the Twentieth Century: The Brighton and Hove Archery Club’, 23.

185

4.12 E.H. Man. Photograph of a group of Andamanese people at Port Blair, c. 1880.

186

4.13 Miss Mavis Bennett as Minnehaha, Mr Joseph Farrington as Hiawatha and ‘Chief Os-ke-non-ton’ as the Medicine Man, from Herald. 1933. ‘“Hiawatha” as Spectacle, Impressive Scenes in the Dome, Music, Colour and Action’, 2 December, 14.

188

5.1 5.2

John Barrow. Photograph of the Nicobar case, ethnography gallery, Brighton Museum, 1974.

211

Nicobar hut built by Obed Heunj, commissioned by the Anthropological Survey of India’s Anthropological Museum, Port Blair.

214

Acknowledgements I have benefited immensely from the intellectual stimulation and support of many friends and colleagues at Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove, the University of Sussex and, later, at the University of Brighton. In particular, I would like to thank Meaghan Clarke at the University of Sussex and Sarah Posey, Head of Collections and Interpretation, RPMBH, both of whom provided opportunity, guidance and tireless encouragement at all stages of this research. Tracy Anderson, Prasannajit de Silva, Flora Dennis, Gareth Farmer, Geoff Quilley, Angelica Groom, Maurice Howard, Alun Howkins, Roger Johnson, Alexandra Loske, Chloe Nicholson, Helen Rufus-Ward, Dan Rycroft, Kevin Bacon, Andrew Barlow, David Beevers, Kate Elms, Jenny Hand, Harriet Hughes, Paul Jordan, Shona Milton, Krystina Pickering and Kate Richardson, Denise Gonyo, Yunah Lee, Lara Perry, Annebella Pollen, Louise Purbrick and Lou Taylor have variously provided advice, assistance or general cheerleading at different moments of the process. I am especially indebted to Helen Mears, Keeper of World Art, RPMBH, for her unstinting support and friendship, and for her valuable and always constructive criticism. As I traced the biographies of the collections discussed in this book, I benefited from fruitful periods of investigation at a variety of other institutions and from rewarding discussions and exchanges with many individuals. I would like to thank the librarians, archivists and curators of the Africa, Pacific and Asia Collections at the British Library; the American Museum of Natural History, New York; the Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata; the Anthropological Museum and Library at Port Blair, particularly Anstice Justin; the Asiatic Society, Kolkata; the Bankfield Museum in Halifax; Brighton History Centre; the British Museum, particularly Jim Hamill, Brian Durrans and Anouska Komlosy; Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, particularly Rachel Hand, Anita Herle, Imogen Gunn, and especially Mark Elliott for his kind hospitality; Glasgow Museums, particularly Pat Allan; the Horniman Museum and Library, London, particularly Fiona Kerlogue; Hove Library; the Indian Museum, Kolkata; Kew Gardens, particularly Mark Nesbitt; the Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig; the Manchester Museum; the National Art Library; National Museums Liverpool, particularly Emma Martin; National Museums of Scotland; the Pitt Rivers Museum, particularly Alison Petch, Jeremy Coote, Marina De Alarcón, Elin Bornemann, Michael O’Hanlon and Chris Morton; the

Acknowledgements

xv

Royal Anthropological Institute; and the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna, particularly Heide Leigh-Theisen. A number of other people have also offered academic and personal support. I am very grateful to Vishvajit Pandya and Simron Jit Singh for their encouragement and for the time they have taken to answer my enquiries about the Andaman Islands and the Nicobar Islands respectively. I owe a unique debt of gratitude to Simron, and to Globus, Captain Justin Simon and Chandra Dev from Hitui village, and Daniel Richardson from Kakana village on Kamorta Island, for their efforts in identifying RPMBH’s collections from their islands, and their willingness to share their vast knowledge. Former members of staff from the Brighton Museum, including George Bankes, Anthony Shelton and Winifred Patchin, have also been generous with their time. Richard Toms supplied useful answers to my questions about his grandfather. Brenda Bennett of The Nash and L.E. Tuson (with his wife and daughters, Amanda Sheppard and Nicola Porter) have welcomed me into their homes and have been generous with their personal possessions and memories. I acknowledge the inspirational work and kind support of Clare Anderson whose encouragement has been gratefully received. I am indebted to members of the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, staff and students at the Centre for Museology at the University of Manchester, and many other conferences and organizations for providing a wide academic forum in which to debate my research interests. I was particularly inspired by comments offered by the participants of my ‘Objects, Images and Imaginings: New Perspectives on the Material and Visual Culture of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands’ symposium at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery in 2007. Some of the ideas in this book have been published in different forms in History Workshop Journal, Victorian Studies, Journal of Museum Ethnography and Sarah Longair and John McAleer’s Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). My thanks go to the anonymous referees and editors of those publications for their suggestions on earlier versions of material included here. Thanks are due to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the trustees of the James Henry Green Charitable Trust whose funding made this research possible. A field trip to Kolkata and the Andaman Islands was generously facilitated by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage. I am grateful for the financial contribution of Cambridge University’s Crowther Beynon Fund towards my review of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’s collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and their associated archives. Toby Amies took the photographs of RPMBH objects reproduced here. I am also grateful to Mark Stanton at Berghahn Books and the readers of this manuscript, whose close readings and constructive commentaries were invaluable. Finally, the help, encouragement and respite that my friends and family have provided has been inestimable. Special thanks to Mum, Sarah and Tom, and particularly to Dad, to whom I dedicate this book. His ever-generous supply of

xvi

Acknowledgements

academic guidance and moral support has been a constant source of inspiration and motivation. Lastly, few words can express my gratitude to Phil who has supported me in so many ways. His belief, strength, calm and cooking have formed the foundations for this research and all the other important things in life. Thank you.

List of Abbreviations ACHL

Autograph Collection, Hove Library

ACUMAA

Archive, Cambridge University, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

APAC

Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library

APEBM

Archive, Department of Prehistory and Europe, British Museum

ARBM

Accession Register, Brighton Museum, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove

Herald

Brighton Herald and Hove Chronicle/Brighton & Hove Herald

HML

Horniman Museum, London

ILN

Illustrated London News

Proceedings Home

Proceedings of the Home Department, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library

Proceedings Revenue Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department/Proceedings of the Department of Agriculture, Revenue and Commerce, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library Proceedings Port Blair Proceedings of the Superintendent of Port Blair and the Nicobars, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library RPMBH

Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove

Sub-Committee

Museum Sub-Committee Meeting Minutes, Brighton Museum, in the Archive of the Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove

xviii

Map of the Andaman Islands

Map of the Nicobar Islands

xix

Figure I.1 Hentakoi, Nicobar Islands, c. 1850, wood, paint, 710 mm × 500 mm. RPMBH, WA509307[R2467/1]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

Introduction Imperial Encounters and Material Culture This book starts with an object. A beautiful, frightening, squatting wooden figure, with eyes of shell and tin, a hooded head painted red and white, and an open, grinning mouth full of pointed teeth. Probably carved in the early nineteenth century, the figure represents a mythical tortoise-like animal – a kalipau – said to be bigger than a human, and to have once existed on the central Nicobar island of Katchal. Known in the Nicobar Islands as a hentakoi, this object is likely to have begun its life at the hands of an artisan who, under the guidance of a doctorpriest, would have carved it as an instrument with which to bring back an ailing person’s soul and cure his or her specific disease. Later stages of its life may have seen it suspended in the hut of the original patient, eyes twinkling in the fire, and reactivated every new moon to ensure continued good health. But this object is no longer in the Nicobar Islands. Its feet are later additions, and its left arm, once broken at the shoulder, has now been repaired by the glue of a museum conservation officer. Since its original production, this object has been physically and conceptually reframed, first in the personal possession of a member of the colonial community on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at the turn of the twentieth century, and then, since 1923, in the anthropology collection of a provincial museum in the UK. A number of immediate questions arise: how did the hentakoi make these geographical and temporal transitions? What are the wider social and economic processes that shaped its trajectory? What impact did this arresting object have on the people with whom it came into contact? And finally (perhaps a slightly less conventional query), if this object could talk, what would it reveal about these processes and peoples? Colonial Collecting and Display follows the compelling history of a particular set of objects, including the hentakoi, as amassed by British travellers in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the late nineteenth century, and then accessioned into the collections of the museum service in Brighton & Hove. Objects have the potential to produce insights into the lives of those excluded from the written colonial archive. In tracing the points of production, collection

2

Collecting and Display

and display of these objects, this book reconceptualizes imperial relationships between Andamanese, Nicobarese and British individuals and communities, both in the Bay of Bengal and on British soil. Through a focus on material culture, it develops new analyses of colonial discourse, acts to decolonize written forms of representation and to deconstruct the power relations circumscribed by imperial historiographies.

Objects and Empire Since the late 1970s, a wide-ranging set of scholarship has problematized the categories and hierarchies of race, gender and class which were mobilized by empire. During this time, histories of dominance, subordination and resistance have come to be rewritten, and the choices and discourses enacted by colonized subjects have been recognized for their contribution to the social, economic and political processes of modern history. The colony has been removed from its lowly position on the geographical and political periphery of empire, and scholars have successfully placed both metropole and colony in the same analytical field, recognizing the two-way nature of the traffic in ideas and influences across these domains.1 Mary Louise Pratt’s reframing of the colonial encounter as ‘contact zone’, where cross-cultural meetings and their tangible and intangible effects are acknowledged for their improvisational and interactive status albeit often within radically asymmetrical relations of power, has been particularly influential in this respect.2 These broad reassessments with an emphasis on interaction have also been tempered with an insistence on historical specificity, a focus on the localized nature of the practices which supported colonial encounters, and a recognition of the contingent and changing categories of ‘colonized’ and ‘colonizer’.3 Simultaneously, and as part of this wider intellectual movement, the tangible ‘object’ has been conceived of by some as fundamental to postcolonial critique, increasingly occupying a central space in the emerging literature on colonial identities, imperial networks and cross-cultural exchange. Material culture clearly has a particular position at the heart of empire in that much of the colonial project was about material exploitation; imperialism was largely manifested in the material acts of ‘consumption, ingestion and decoration’.4 Increasingly, however, three-dimensional objects have also come to be seen as central to the forging of social relationships across empires, newly recognized for their ability to act as intermediaries between individuals and communities of different cultures, construct or deny identity and cultural difference, and, as part of a wider visual culture, facilitate cultural awareness and comprehension across communities.5 As part of this growing recognition of the causal role of material culture in empire formation and development, an emerging group of scholars have come to advocate the particular use of object-centred research to reveal unique insights into imperial histories. Pointing to the literary orientation of postcolonial studies, and voicing the concern that its methodology makes the colonial project seem ‘a largely textual one’, the study of material culture has been identified as having

Introduction

3

the potential to add new depth and context to postcolonial critique.6 The facility to leave a material mark on the world is not subject to the same class, gender and race restrictions which dictate opportunities to contribute to colonial archives or published documents, and accordingly the study of objects has the potential to produce insights into the lives of those peoples who are excluded from these modes of representation. The particular qualities of objects – their tangibility, longevity and ability to travel and thus link people across temporal and geographical distances – allow new questions to be posed, and new answers to be provided.7 Palimpsest-like, the erosions, alterations and surface patinas represented in the physicality of an object, formed through its long-term use and interpretation, can help to provide lingering insights into the multiple layers of histories that its form has encountered.8 Objects constitute and bring imperial relationships into being; they possess social power and efficacy through their materiality and the demands that they make on the senses and emotions, but objects also remain highly reflective of the ‘regimes of value’ and specific historical and cultural milieus through which they pass.9 Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has described them as ‘polysemic’, highlighting the ways in which a single material entity can contain multiple and incongruent meanings through its contact with different people and varying situations.10 It is in this capacity that they become most useful to the postcolonial project: the ‘mutability of things in recontextualization’,11 along with their physical endurance and aptitude for movement across spatial and temporal realms, positions objects as key tools with which to interrogate the many imperial routes, institutions and contact zones that they traverse. By focusing on the similarities and contradictions in a single object’s shifting meaning, formed within these different constituencies, it is possible to reveal multifarious and nuanced subject positions embodied in the imperial process. By foregrounding object-based research on those artefacts which have been implicated in projects of empire – traded in colonial encounters, amassed in colonial collections, and/or displayed and interpreted in Europe’s museums or ‘temples of empire’12 – these historical processes, and their legacies, can be addressed and interpreted in new ways. This book takes a position at the intersection of these re-evaluations of colonial power relations and imperial representations, and promotes the potential of object-centred research in postcolonial projects. It enquires into the ways in which objects such as the Nicobarese hentakoi are implicated in histories of empire, and aims to connect objects’ capricious significances with key processes of imperialism. What, we may ask, do specific objects and their changing meanings reveal about imperial histories and practices?13

Island Hopping: From South Asia to England’s South Coast In response to petitions for historically specific accounts of colonialism and its cultures,14 this central question will be addressed through an extended examination of a specific set of objects produced in the Andaman and Nicobar

4

Collecting and Display

Islands, transported to the UK at the turn of the twentieth century, and finally accessioned and displayed by Brighton Museum. Brighton Museum, now part of Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove, has an outstanding holding of ethnographic material; its ‘World Art and Anthropology’ collections have been designated a pre-eminent collection of national and international importance by the Arts Council England.15 The quality of the collection stems in no small part from the museum’s position at the heart of a prominent centre for the retired and returned colonial elite, many of whom donated the tangible remnants of their careers in the colonies to their local cultural repository. Accordingly, RPMBH’s ethnographic collections have many regional strengths, and have the potential to act as a conduit to numerous imperial excavations. Their 413 manufactured objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, however, have particular potential for research into imperial histories and processes, not only due to their ‘designated’ status, but also because they shed light on an exceptional microcosm of late nineteenth-century colonial collecting. In 1858, following the Indian Mutiny-Rebellion, the Andaman Islands were chosen by the British administration in India as the location for a major penal colony in which to incarcerate hundreds of ‘mutineers’ and other prisoners from the Indian mainland. British settlement was also designed to negate the ongoing threat posed by the region’s hostile indigenous populations to shipwrecked crews and refuelling traders on the lucrative shipping routes between India, Australia and the Far East.16 In 1869, a small, subsidiary penal settlement was established on the nearby Nicobar Islands; this was permanently staffed until 1888, after which contact and authority was maintained through regular visits from officers based on the Andamans. This colonization facilitated new levels of engagement between the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples and outsiders, creating a unique contact zone in which distinctive social and economic relationships were forged. During these encounters, after some investigation and speculation by European scientists, the indigenous peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were allocated two of the very lowest rungs of the imagined evolutionary scale which governed scholarship of the time. As a result, information about the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples’ lives, including their material cultures, was in great demand by anthropologists and museum professionals and seen as crucial ‘evidence’ of wider theories of social evolutionism. Aware of this demand, various materially minded figures amassed and exported great numbers of Andamanese and Nicobarese objects, sending them to cultural institutions across Europe and beyond. Large collections now reside in the university museums of Cambridge, Oxford and Manchester, the British Museum, National Museums Liverpool, the National Museums of Scotland, the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, the Indian Museum in Kolkata, and major anthropological museums in Leiden, Vienna, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, New York and Washington D.C.17 For curators and scholars of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands there are various key figures associated with the material culture of the Andaman and Nicobar

Introduction

5

Islands today: the colonial administrator Maurice Vidal Portman is particularly famed for his photography of the Andamanese, but also donated consignments of objects to the British Museum in 1886 and 1895.18 Between 1906 and 1908, a young A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, now known as a founding father of modern social anthropology, carried out his doctoral fieldwork amongst the Andamanese and donated collections to Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Field Museum in Chicago.19 However, while these and other donors merit much attention, the vast majority of the major collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands currently held in Europe were instigated by the indefatigable Edward Horace Man (1846–1929). Man was a colonial administrator in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands between 1869 and 1901 and instrumental in the creation of most of the collections listed above. He and his senior colleague Richard Carnac Temple (1850–1931), also a major donor of island material to UK museums, were particularly concerned with objects, publishing widely on the material culture and anthropology of the region. As is widely acknowledged, and as later sections of this book will explore in more detail, it was their public collections and academic writings that had a major impact on how the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were perceived by the scientists and curators of Europe.20 With ‘scientific’ objectives in mind, Man and Temple amassed and donated specifically designed sets of material culture to leading museums specializing in human cultures throughout their career, shipping them to Europe and mainland India directly from the islands. Their last major donations were made to museums in Edinburgh, Kew and Liverpool in 1901. What is fascinating and instructive about the collection at Brighton Museum, however, is that this institution’s large selection of Andamanese and Nicobarese material was donated by Man and Temple years after their respective retirements – between 1916 and 1925 – and to a museum that was much smaller and more generalist than previous institutional recipients. In fact, the Brighton objects are the unique remnants of Man and Temple’s private collections; as such, they remain the product of the developing anthropological discourse that concerned these famous collectors and showcase their public, professional ambitions; but they also reveal fascinating insights into their personal and private motivations. Equally importantly, the Man and Temple donations at Brighton are supplemented by the collections of Katharine Sara Tuson (c. 1864–1955),21 a close friend of Man who was based on the Andaman Islands with her husband, a colonial administrator, between 1889 and 1905. Man, Temple and Tuson knew each other intimately and would all go on to donate to Brighton Museum around the same time. Thus the compact size of the two island groups, combined with the frenzied collecting in the region and particular donation patterns of these three individuals, provides an unusual opportunity to explore a concentrated moment of colonial collecting and a range of practices marked by disparate categories of gender, class and profession. An investigation of the collaborative donation patterns of these figures also offers a fascinating insight into the networks and networking of collectors in the early twentieth century. In illuminating these

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unusual and revealing circumstances, we can review the dynamics of wider modes of colonial collecting, and, given the far-reaching donation patterns of Man and Temple, shed light on Andamanese and Nicobarese collections amassed in similar circumstances at other institutions across Europe.

The Life of a Collection Since the 1970s, museum scholarship and practice has come to acknowledge and problematize the cultural and political agendas informing exhibition display and reception, and democratize the curatorial and visiting experience. Inspired by this reassessment, recent research agendas have positioned the processes of collecting and museum representation at the centre of the British imperial project. Analyses of the mechanisms of cross-cultural contact have typically formed a crucial place in postcolonial critique, but increasingly the collection and the museum are being similarly assessed as ‘committed participants’ in colonial histories, and as sites ripe for decolonization and postcolonial interrogation.22 Just as scholars have begun to displace essentialist assumptions about the colonial encounter, they have increasingly sought to link the hierarchies of value inherent in the selection and exclusion of collection formation and display with imperial agendas, explore how the personal predilections of individual collectors and curators were able to and continue to mediate popular perceptions of other cultures, and document the potential for the agency of colonized peoples in colonial collecting and museum practice.23 The sets of material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands now held at RPMBH have all been implicated in the processes of contact, collecting and display at the centre of these pertinent and ongoing enquiries. By means of these objects – through their physicality and the particularly rich set of contextual documentation that illuminates them – it is possible to supplement and progress these postcolonial literatures, adding an extended, localized case study to complement and critique research on these matters in other regions. In particular, tracing the intertwined ‘lives’ of these objects can be used to re-examine the imperial history of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and provide insights into the ways in which objects mediate the cultural and political dynamics of colonial encounters and representations. The exploration of the shifting trajectory of a specific set of objects to illuminate human and social context was first advocated by Arjun Appadurai and Igor Kopytoff in their contributions to the seminal volume, The Social Life of Things.24 Here, it was recognized that in their mobility (as a result of trade, conquest, donation, inheritance, or any other form of changed access and ownership), objects are like humans in that they acquire new experiences and are conceptually reinvented in different social and economic circumstances. More recent scholarship has moved to collapse the rigid distinctions between the human and material world, emphasizing the materiality of the body and the

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material and social agency of the object,25 but the tracing and analysis of such a ‘life history’ continues to be recognized as a fruitful mode of research, and can be particularly revealing of the efficacy, importance and complexity of objects.26 This book employs the ‘methodological fetishism’27 of Appadurai and Kopytoff, but constructs the ‘social life’ or ‘biography’ of a whole collection as it moves through various spatial, temporal and ideological arenas, exploring and deconstructing the ‘regimes of value’28 through which it passes. Indeed, the structure of the book follows the same group of objects through their chronological ‘careers’, asking how, and in what conditions, they were made variously meaningful, from their inception in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to their display in a museum on the south coast of England. Five central chapters analyse various stages in the lives of RPMBH’s collections, exploring the central contested imperial arenas though which they pass. First, Chapter 1 examines the objects in their original homes in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, specifically situating them as embedded in and constitutive of the social, political and economic circumstances of their creator communities between 1858 and 1905. The manufacture and indigenous use of two specific items of material culture – body adornment in the Andaman Islands and clay pots in the Nicobar Islands – are examined as indicators of the ways in which community cosmologies, trade systems and approaches to personal property impacted upon material culture in the two island groups; they also act as a contextual foil against which to contrast the later twists and permutations which mark these objects’ colonized ‘social lives’. Here, the objects are also employed as a lens through which to uncover traces of their makers’ and traders’ perspectives on the British presence in the region, highlighting the agency, facilitation and resistance of indigenous peoples during collection formation. We will see that the structures of these collections, while bound for foreign export, were affected by local cultural and political agendas. Chapter 2 then travels with the objects to uncover their encounters with three British collectors at the turn of the century, first in South Asia, and then in the UK. Through an examination of the objects, as well as their associated written archives, the private and professional agendas of Edward Horace Man, Richard Carnac Temple and Katharine Sara Tuson are surveyed and the common assumption that ‘salvage ethnography’ was the only motivation for collectors in the region is critiqued. The second half of the book traces the objects to the public realm, engaging with the objects in their long-term home at Brighton Museum after 1920. Arguing that local audiences would have necessarily informed their understanding of material collections in public museums through information garnered from other sources, Chapter 3 explores the literary and artistic interpretation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and their material cultures between 1858 and 1949 outside the museum, in popular British culture. Here, examining illustrated periodicals, international exhibitions and popular literature also acts to facilitate a close appreciation of the impact made by different media on cultural representation. Building on this context, Chapter 4 then charts the ‘official’ ways in which

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the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects were made meaningful in Brighton Museum, detailing the impact of accession, conservation and display on the collections’ ideological and physical trajectories. Critiquing current museological understanding of the museum as a powerful machine for the ‘decontextualization’ of an object’s previous significances,29 this chapter argues for a recognition of the continued influence of collectors and donors in provincial museum practice and for a blurring of the formal boundaries between private collections and public accessions. In a second section, early twentieth-century audience responses to the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects at Brighton and the museum’s wider ethnographic collections are explored. Tracing public perceptions through research in local newspaper archives, and building a picture of the other ways in which provincial audiences engaged with empire and non-European cultures away from museums, current Foucauldian thinking about the pervasive nature of curatorial control on audience reception is queried, and it is suggested instead that museum visitors form their own responses to cultural heritage, inspired by wider cultural references and experiences. This focus on the Brighton collections supplements recent scholarship which focuses on the importance of the provincial museum in disseminating representations of colonized cultures,30 and is the first to consider this particular museum in this context.31 Indeed, it is the first to subject the documentation, conservation and display of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture to close analysis,32 and is designed to inform the current treatment of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture in the museum at Brighton and beyond. The final chapter summarizes the results and issues raised and developed by this research, confirming the ability of the late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury trajectories of these objects to inform current understanding of processes of contact, collection and display. Finally, after a brief account of the most recent history of the collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a set of suggestions for the contemporary and future documentation, collection and museum display of the objects, as informed by this research, are outlined. It is through this in-depth exploration of the diverse interpretations and significances negotiated by these collections that important imperial histories and practices are particularly revealed. By following the trajectories taken, and by starting with the object, new voices are uncovered. These objects, supported by a rich textual and pictorial archive, allow us to engage with locale-specific factors and the instances of indigenous agency which impacted on the personal and professional collecting programmes of British administrators, and, in the process, wider imperial projects. Through them, we gain new insights into how island life, for both ‘colonizer’ and ‘colonized’, was lived and arbitrated. We can query the assumption of a unified approach to collecting on the islands and gain insight into how indigenous groups reinvented their material cultures both physically and conceptually for a foreign trading market. The narratives evoked by these objects also allow us to nuance our understanding of early twentieth-century museum display, and particularly provincial museum practice. Focusing on the

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collection at RPMBH between 1900 and 1949 provides an insight into how the practicalities of running provincial museums impacted on wider scientific and professional agendas, and how, as with all museums, audience engagement interrupted curatorial intent. At various points throughout Colonial Collecting and Display, the stories of other images, people and places noticeably take centre stage alongside the material collection at the heart of this book: Chapter 3, for example, examines a host of alternative visual culture, and Chapter 4 investigates the perceptions of museum audiences who never came into contact with the objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. However, even here, the ‘object biography’ methodology is still at work; arguably, it was excavating the imperial archive for traces of the objects’ presence that uncovered these alternative perspectives and this new material. As Chris Gosden and Frances Larson have recently claimed, ‘objects collect people’: they spark chains of connection, and mobilize certain communities.33 It could also be said that they mobilize certain kinds of research. In this case, a group of objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands brought the lives of Man, Temple, Tuson and the staff and visitors of Brighton Museum, as well as many others, together. This book, then, will use material culture to explore empire formation; it exploits object-based research techniques to interrogate the imperial processes of contact, collection and display, using the tangible and palimpsest-like qualities of objects to inform its argument, and the trajectories of a distinctive collection to establish its scope.

A Note on Community Delineations and Terminology Sometimes objects (and wider political projects) create strange bedfellows. It is important to note that the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples are entirely culturally and ethnohistorically distinct from each other; their languages, world systems and material cultures, developed over long periods of geographic isolation, clearly mark them as entirely unrelated societies. Further, within the two island groups there are clear linguistic and cultural variations within particular communities. Among the Nicobarese, there are six distinct dialect groups scattered across twelve of the twenty-four islands, while another distinct indigenous group, the Shompen, inhabit the interiors of Great Nicobar. In the Andaman Islands, prior to British settlement the indigenous inhabitants comprised thirteen autonomous communities, each with a distinct language and territory, that were amalgamated and redefined as ‘the Andamanese’ within imperial terminology only. The impact of outsiders’ programmes of resettlement and deforestation and the introduction of diseases such as measles and syphilis have contributed directly to a dramatic decline in their populations. Today, there are only four Andaman autonomous communities: the Ongee of Little Andaman, the Sentinelese of North Sentinel Island, the Ang or ‘Jarawa’34 of South and Middle Andaman and the surviving Great Andamanese, currently

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resettled on Strait Island. The divisions between the Ongee, Ang and Sentinelese tend to be identified throughout the colonial archive, and the ten distinct communities (Aka-Cari, Aka-Kora, Aka-Bo, Aka-Jeru, Aka-Kede, Aka-Bol, Oko-Juwoi, A-Pucikwar, Akar-Bale, Aka-Bea)35 now described collectively as the ‘Great Andamanese’ also continued, if sporadically, to be distinguished by name. Increasingly, however, the close proximity of the Great Andamanese to British settlements, their comparative cooperation and engagement with settlers, and the impact of the British presence on established community delineations meant that the cultural and linguistic specificities of these distinct groups had become much abridged, even by 1901.36 Consequently, throughout the source material employed, and in the discussion here, the groups and their material culture are often referred to as ‘Andamanese’, ‘Great Andamanese’, or in relation to a geographical location, such as ‘South Andaman’, or ‘North Andaman’. These terms, however, refer to fluid structures of social organization and representation. The various peoples and societies of the Andaman and the Nicobar Islands were brought together only by external political constructs,37 and, accordingly, a research project which continues to contain the two island groups within the same analytical frame could be seen as replicating the divisions and groupings produced under historical and contemporary imperial regimes. However, in the context of this book, much of which seeks to deconstruct the hegemonic processes which have created those structures, the analysis requires ‘working with’ the colonial archive in many respects, and engaging with established configurations in order to redraw them. Indeed, as the visual and material cultures of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands have both been subject to relative neglect, and continue to tolerate entangled material legacies and shared colonial archives, it has been judged expedient to divide the analysis along geographical lines where necessary, but to discuss both island groups fully throughout.

Objects, Images and Text The RPMBH’s collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands delimit the scope and provide the main source for this book. Similar collections and objects from other public museums in Europe have also provided contextual and comparative information. But the material world does not, of course, exist in a vacuum. Textual and visual archives continue to provide rich context for objectled research: close readings of private papers, museum archives and government proceedings can illuminate the varying contexts of our central collections, and help uncover the ways in which multiple individuals and groups engaged with these objects between 1858 and 1949. Objects in their physical manifestations are crucial evidence of historic process, but Colonial Collecting and Display also relies on photographs and illustrations as source material with which to interpret the various phases of these objects’ careers.

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In fact, while the project is directed by material culture, its temporal boundaries are based on wider political and cultural events. Spanning the period between 1858 and 1949, this time frame is inaugurated by the year of the second British colonization of the Andaman Islands, when the Andamanese peoples and British colonizers began their relationships in earnest, and culminates shortly after the official independence of India from British rule in 1947. This later date allows scope for the analysis of records and information produced up until the closure of the Andaman penal settlement in 1945, and includes the entire careers of Henry Roberts and Herbert Toms, two influential curators at Brighton Museum, who retired in 1935 and 1939 respectively. It also facilitates discussion of the museum’s approach and reception up until the major redisplay of the ethnographic galleries in 1949, when the collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were removed from display for a number of years. This book is a study concerning non-European material culture as subject to the cultural, social and economic processes of the British imperial project, and not an ethnography of the Andaman or Nicobar Islands. In any case, there are considerable difficulties in obtaining extensive anthropological knowledge of the islands at this time. There is currently no access to the Nicobar Islands for British citizens, and anthropological research amongst any of the indigenous Andamanese peoples would involve partaking in the highly problematic dynamics of access, exchange and communication which currently exist between these communities and all outsiders, including the Indian Government.38 Contact with outsiders has resulted in a dramatically depleted population: the Great Andamanese, numbering an estimated 3500 individuals in 1858, were recorded at a mere 579 in 1901;39 today only approximately 50 remain.40 The practicalities of contact are fraught with political, economic and ethical dilemmas and debates: the current furore surrounding new levels of settler and tourist contact with the Jarawa, caused by the building and sustained use of a main thoroughfare running through their territory, is a topical case in point.41 A field visit to the Andaman Islands undertaken in February 2008 did not attempt to access the ‘tribal reserves’, but was primarily an opportunity to inform the understanding of Andamanese and British interaction presented in this book through an appreciation of the geography of South and Middle Andaman. Recent focus on the indigenous manufacture and use of material culture on the Andaman Islands and the Nicobar Islands has been led by Vishvajit Pandya and Simron Jit Singh respectively. The anthropologies produced during British occupation of the islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by individuals such as Edward Horace Man, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown and Marcel Mauss continue to provide some of the closest descriptions of historic methods of object production and use to date, but Pandya and Singh have moved to apply contemporary anthropological theory and reflexive methods to their studies of the region, providing invaluable detail and balanced analyses on which to draw.42 Interviews with Pandya and Singh have produced additional valuable material.

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In December 2004 the Nicobar Islands were devastated by a tsunami which killed hundreds of residents and washed away almost all of the Nicobarese peoples’ holdings of tangible heritage. Many of the artists and craftspeople who had continued to practise or have an understanding of traditional methods did not survive, and many of the natural materials used in these processes were literally ripped from the soil and swept away. As part of the research for this book a set of photographs of some of RPMBH’s Nicobarese collections were sent to the Nicobar Islands and considered by a small group of people with a good understanding of their community’s history. Simron Jit Singh used the images to conduct a focus group session in the village of Hitui, on Nancowry Island (chosen in part for its accessibility) in March 2007. His main informants were Justin Simon (48), the village captain of Hitui, whose support was a prerequisite for the interview, and Globus (60), a well known village elder. Globus was recommended to Singh by other village elders as being particularly knowledgeable about cultural issues and material culture. Another younger man from Hitui, Chandra Dev (40), also contributed to discussions as an interested participant who offered his time, and Singh’s field assistant Daniel Richardson (30), from Kakana village on Kamorta Island, supported with translation.43 This informal ‘visual repatriation’ seems to have made a small contribution to much wider projects, led by Singh, which aim to support Nicobarese post-tsunami rehabilitation; Singh has suggested that discussions amongst elders, prompted by outsiders’ requests to describe the manufacture and use of the region’s historic material culture, have acted as a form of ‘therapy’.44 It is hoped that this research may also help to provide further material with which to facilitate the Nicobarese peoples in the post-disaster negotiation of their cultural identities. This book is about encounters. It is about meetings, often conflicts, between multiple sets of objects, and between objects and people. In parts, it explores the roles that material culture can play in mediating encounters, whether casual or designed, between geographically and temporally dispersed individuals and societies. We will follow the Nicobarese hentakoi with which we began our narrative and a variety of other objects through diverse contexts and encounters as we traverse the following pages. The tales of whom they encountered, why, and the implications of these meetings all begin in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the nineteenth century. It is here that we start our investigations.

Notes 1. N. Dirks. 1995. ‘Introduction: Colonialism and Culture’, in N. Dirks (ed.), Colonialism and Culture, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 6; A.L. Stoler and F. Cooper. 1997. ‘Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda’, in F. Cooper and A.L. Stoler (eds), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 4; J. Codell and D. Macleod (eds). 1998. Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate.

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2. M.L. Pratt. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge, 7. 3. N. Thomas. 1994. Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Cambridge: Polity Press, ix–x; A.L. Stoler. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, Berkeley: University of California Press, 13 and 23. 4. E. Rappaport. 2008. ‘Imperial Possessions, Cultural Histories, and the Material Turn: Response’, Victorian Studies, 50(2), 289. 5. Nicholas Thomas has pioneered the use of material culture to challenge our understanding of the cultural and political dynamics of colonial encounters, particularly in the Pacific. See especially, N. Thomas. 1991. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture and Colonialism in the Pacific, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture. C. Gosden and C. Knowles. 2001. Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change, Oxford: Berg; R.B. Phillips and C. Steiner (eds). 1999. Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press; and J. MacKenzie (ed.). 1986. Imperialism and Popular Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, are among the others who have also explored some of these themes. 6. C. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer. 1993. ‘Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament’, in C. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 5; P. van Dommelen. 2005. ‘Colonial Matters: Material Culture and Postcolonial Theory in Colonial Situations’, in C. Tilley (ed.), Handbook of Material Culture, London: Sage, 113. 7. Van Dommelen, ‘Colonial Matters’, 112; A. Henare. 2005. Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 6; Gosden and Knowles, Collecting Colonialism, 24. 8. E. Hooper-Greenhill. 2000. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, London: Routledge, 50. 9. A. Gell. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, Oxford: Clarendon Press; C. Gosden. 2005. ‘What Do Objects Want?’ Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 12(3), 198; S. Dudley (ed.). 2010. Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, Abingdon: Routledge; S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison and R. Torrence (eds). 2011. Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, New York: Springer; A. Appadurai. 1986. ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 4. 10. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, 51. 11. N. Thomas. 1989. ‘Material Culture and Colonial Power: Ethnological Collecting and the Establishment of Colonial Rule in Fiji’, Man, 24(1), 49. 12. A. Coombes. 1994. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, New Haven: Yale University Press, 109. 13. I mean here to refer to ‘colonialism’ and ‘imperialism’ as two separate entities in line with the distinctions put forward by Edward Said: ‘“imperialism” means the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan centre ruling a distant territory [although here, to be clear, I would also include the practice, theory and attitudes of the colonizers living in that territory]; “colonialism”, which is almost always a consequence of

14

14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

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imperialism, is the implanting of settlements on distant territory’ (E. Said. 1992. Culture and Imperialism, London: Chatto & Windus, 9). Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, ix–x. When discussing the institution in the historical context of this book (1858–1949), this museum will be referred to as Brighton Museum, as it was then known. Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove (RPMBH) will be used when referring to the organization in its current form. C. Anderson. 2007. The Indian Uprising of 1857–8: Prisons, Prisoners and Rebellion, London: Anthem Press, 129–131. In 1789, a similar British attempt had been made to colonize the Andaman Islands, also with the purpose of establishing a harbour for use during naval conflict or distress. The settlement had to be abandoned in 1796 due to the effects of malaria on the settlers. These major museums are the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna, the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Leipzig, the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington D.C. This list is not comprehensive, but introduces the most prominent collections. See appendices in Z. Cooper. 2002. Archaeology and History: Early Settlements in the Andaman Islands, New Delhi: Oxford University Press and B. Carter and A. Herle. 1996. Layers of Meaning: Andaman Islands: Costume and Cosmology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology for more detailed lists of museums with holdings from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The Portman donation was first displayed at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington in 1886. Although his collecting practices have yet to be fully considered, Portman’s contribution to the British imperial project and his photography have been the subject of extended research by Satadru Sen in S. Sen. 2009. ‘Savage Bodies, Civilized Pleasures: M.V. Portman and the Andamanese’, American Ethnologist, 36(2), 364–379 and S. Sen. 2010. Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean: Power, Pleasure and the Andaman Islanders, London: Routledge. See D. Tomas. 1991. ‘Tools of the Trade: The Production of Ethnographic Observations on the Andaman Islands, 1858–1922’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; Carter and Herle, Layers of Meaning. V. Pandya. 2009. In the Forest: Visual and Material Worlds of Andamanese History (1858– 2006), Lanham, MA: University Press of America; Z. van der Beek and M. Vellinga. 2005. ‘Man the Collector: Salvaging Andamanese and Nicobarese Culture through Objects’, Journal of the History of Collections, 17(2), 135–153. In her last will and in correspondence at the Horniman Museum, Tuson inscribed her first name ‘Katharine’, although in her husband’s will and on her gravestone it is noted as ‘Katherine’. Here, ‘Katharine’ will be employed throughout. T. Barringer and T. Flynn. 1998. ‘Introduction’, in T. Barringer and T. Flynn (eds), Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, London: Routledge, 4. See, for example, S. Price. 1989. Primitive Art in Civilized Places, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds). 1991. Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press; A. Shelton (ed.). 2001. Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, London: Horniman Museum and Gardens; Coombes, Reinventing Africa; S. Longair and J. McAleer (eds). 2012. Curating

Introduction

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

35.

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Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press; M. O’Hanlon and R. Welsch (eds). 2000. Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s–1930s, New York: Berghahn; L. Peers and A. Brown (eds). 2003. Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, London: Routledge. Appadurai, ‘Introduction’; I. Kopytoff. 1986. ‘The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process’, in A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. See S. Pearce. 2010. ‘Foreword’, in S. Dudley (ed.), Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, London: Routledge, xiv–xix, and P. Joyce and T. Bennett. 2010. ‘Material Powers: Introduction’, in T. Bennett and P. Joyce (eds), Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, London: Routledge, 1–15 for summaries of these ideas. Despite the impact of this methodology on material culture and museum studies, as Louise Tythacott notes, few extended object biographies have been attempted (L. Tythacott. 2011. The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display, Oxford: Berghahn, 8). See also R. Davis. 1997. Lives of Indian Images, Princeton: Princeton University Press, for two fascinating exceptions. J. Hoskins. 2005. ‘Agency, Biography and Objects’, in C. Tilley (ed.), Handbook of Material Culture, London: Sage, 75. Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, 4. B. Durrans. 2000. ‘(Not) Religion in Museums’, in C. Paine (ed.), Godly Things: Museums, Objects and Religion, London: Leicester University Press, 70. See, for example, K. Hill. 2005. Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850– 1914, Aldershot: Ashgate; C. Loughney. 2005. ‘Colonialism and the Development of the English Provincial Museum, 1823–1914’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Newcastle. However, there are a number of short reviews: A. Shelton. 1993. ‘Re-presenting NonWestern Art and Ethnography at Brighton’, Royal Pavilion & Museums Review, 1, 1–4; G. Bankes. 1981. ‘A Note on the Early Collections in the Brighton Museum’, Museum Ethnographers Group Newsletter, 12, 60–61; and D. Beevers. 1985. ‘The Pride of Brighton’, Royal Pavilion & Museums Review, 1, 6–7. However, note Emma Poulter’s description of the historical display of Andamanese material culture at the Horniman Museum and brief suggestions for contemporary treatment of such objects. E. Poulter. 2004. ‘New “Ways of Seeing”: A Re-examination of Anthropological and Museological Representations of the People of the Andaman Islands’, unpublished master’s thesis, University of Manchester, 34–38 and 46–51. C. Gosden and F. Larson, with A. Petch. 2007. Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1884–1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 65. The Ang are more commonly known as the ‘Jarawa’, a name coined by the British as an interpretation of the Aka-Bea (one of the Great Andamanese communities with the closest relationship to the British) word for ‘stranger’. This Andamanese group refer to themselves as Ang, meaning, roughly, ‘human’. I would prefer to use the term ‘Ang’, but for ease of reference with regards to colonial sources, I have used ‘Ang’ and ‘Jarawa’ interchangeably throughout. A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. 1922. The Andaman Islanders: A Study in Social Anthropology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13.

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36. R.C. Temple. 1903. ‘Andaman and Nicobar Islands: Report on the Census’, in Census of India, 1901, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 1. 37. Influenced by British administrative structures, the Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands are now a single union territory of India with a single capital town in Port Blair. 38. There are a number of commentaries documenting and questioning the behaviour of the Indian Government towards various communities on the two island groups. Examples of such criticism include M. Mukerjee. 2003. The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders, London: Houghton Mifflin Co, see especially 60–61, and the campaign mounted by the charity Survival International in relation to the Jarawa peoples (Survival International. n.d. ‘The Jarawa’, Survival: The Movement for Tribal People. Retrieved on 12 May 2012 from http://www.survival-international.org/tribes/jarawa). 39. Temple, ‘Andaman and Nicobar Islands’, 10 and 30. 40. As of 2005, cited in A. Abbi. 2006. Endangered Languages of the Andaman Islands, Munich: Lincom GmbH, i. Today, the Great Andamanese have practically no memory of their languages or cultural histories (see ibid., i and 20, and V. Pandya. 1999. ‘The Andaman Islanders of the Bay of Bengal’, in R.B. Lee and R.H. Daly (eds), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 244). 41. The Andaman Trunk Road was inaugurated in 1978 and runs from South to North Andaman, directly through an area of land which was designated as a Jarawa ‘tribal reserve’ in 1956. The road forged new opportunities for contact between settlers and the previously hostile Andamanese group, leading to increased mortality amongst the Jarawa, their coming to the road side in order to beg for consumer goods and food, and violent conflict. In May 2002 a Supreme Court Order ordered the closure of two significant stretches of the road for environmental reasons and for reasons related to the welfare of the Jarawa. To date, this order as not yet been implemented. For a discussion of conflicting stakeholders’ positions regarding the sustainability of the road, and an exploration of the politics of contact and the implications for the Jarawa, see V. Pandya. 2002. ‘Jarwas of Andaman Islands: Their Social and Historical Reconstruction’, Economic and Political Weekly, 37(37), 3830–3834. 42. E.H. Man. [1885] 1932. On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands with a Report into the Languages of the South Andaman Island by A. J. Ellis, London: Royal Anthropological Institute; E.H. Man. 1932. The Nicobar Islands and their People, A.F. Man (ed.), Guildford: Royal Anthropological Institute; Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders; M. Mauss. [1950] 2002. The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls, London: Routledge, 25; V. Pandya. 1993. Above the Forest: A Study of Andamanese Ethnoanemology, Cosmology, and the Power of Ritual, Delhi: Oxford University Press; Pandya, In the Forest; S.J. Singh. 2003. In the Sea of Influence: A World System of Perspective of the Nicobar Islands, Lund: Lund University Press; S.J. Singh. 2002. ‘Ethnographic Objects from the Nicobars: Its Use and Current Status. A field study undertaken with the help of the Nicobarese Collection belonging to the Museum of Ethnology in Vienna’, unpublished manuscript; S.J. Singh. 2005. The Nicobar Islands: Cultural Choices in the Aftermath of the Tsunami, Vienna: Czernin Verlag. 43. Singh used images of objects from RPMBH’s collections and also was kind enough to ask some specific questions I suggested. The discussions and the answers to my questions, where resolved, were related to me in an interview with Singh in May 2007 (in Brighton). 44. Simron Jit Singh (Institute of Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt), in an interview with the author, Brighton, 19 May 2007. See Singh, The Nicobar Islands and S.J. Singh. 2007. ‘Helping the Helper: Nicobarese Delegation in Vienna’, paper presented at

Introduction

17

Objects, Images and Imaginings: New Perspectives on the Material and Visual Culture of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands symposium, Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, for details of these wider projects.

Chapter 1

Production, Use, Exchange Spheres of Influence in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Carefully wrapped in tissue paper and packed in an acid-free box in the stores of RPMBH are two body adornments from the Andaman Islands made from exhumed human remains.1 The first is a double necklace composed of two thick lengths of cord bound together and flanked by evenly spaced, short segments of human bone, each bound neatly and tightly to the necklace with fine twine. A single cockle shell is affixed to the end of the necklace and each segment of bone is painted with red clay. The second object, also a necklace, is made of four thick lengths of twisted cord adorned with ten separate bunches of dentalium shell strings and small pieces of human bone daubed with red clay. In the Andaman Islands, in the first stage of their ‘careers’, these objects would have been prized by their original owners for their ability to emit a signal or ‘smell’ that could instigate communications with the spirit world and initiate important life events such as a successful hunting trip, the birth of a child, or the seasonal relocation of a settlement.2 Made up of plant-fibre strings, clay paints and shells bartered at intercommunity gatherings,3 in their original context, the necklaces would have been firmly rooted in the social networks of the Andaman Islands. The incorporation of these organic materials also identified them as products of their owners’ reliance on the resources provided by the environment in which they lived. In accordance with social dictates regarding the handling of the remains of the recently deceased, the ornaments would have been made by male members of the community, and viewed within accepted gender roles specific to Andamanese society.4 Formed from the bones of a close relative and produced as adornment for a specific mourner’s body,5 in this early sphere of influence these objects would also have been intensely personal items, relative to the individual’s physical form and representing defined relationships and personalities. Objects like this were often offered to others as an act of concern or generosity during illness,6 and accordingly garnered meaning as symbols of

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wider bonds between families and community members. As Vishvajit Pandya has indicated, such objects are ‘texts of Andamanese history’.7 Each of the individual objects at the heart of this book was created on the Andaman or Nicobar Islands during a period which roughly corresponds with British colonization of the region. However, the first stages of their biographies can be situated within the socioeconomic structures of the Andamanese or Nicobarese cultures from which they came, and are largely unrelated to the presence of these outsiders. Like the necklaces, many of the Andamanese objects now in the care of Brighton Museum were produced for everyday and/or ceremonial use, and employed to mediate and assist in the social practices enacted by their original owners: indigenous cosmologies, the everyday practicalities of living, interisland trade systems and individual personalities were all implicated in and supported by the production of specific items. In the Nicobar Islands, material culture was also closely integrated into various aspects of ritual and secular life. In their original context, many of the Nicobarese objects represented in Brighton Museum’s collections were originally entwined in the community histories of particular island groups: for example, Hitui village legend still remembers coconut-shell vessels, filled with stinging bees and presented to the enemy, as the device used by the ancestors to clear the homeland of its previous hostile inhabitants.8 Similarly, the pointed corners of the kamilee, a cloth hood with two adorned peaks, continue to be regarded as symbolic of the ears of the dog from which the Car Nicobarese believe they originate.9 In the nineteenth century, the relationship between the Nicobarese and their spirits was implicated in the production and use of certain objects: canoes, for example, were fed with the flesh and blood of chickens and pigs, and sheltered when not in use, in order to appease the spirits; carved hentakoi (zoomorphic) and kareau (anthropomorphic) figures and painted boards, though diverse and complex in their attributes, provided a mode of repelling or attracting spirits and the errant souls of sick Nicobarese men and women.10 Most of the objects now in Brighton would have been contextualized by the intimate relationship between the Nicobarese and their natural environment: the shells, husks and leaves of the coconuts that grow plentifully on the islands have long provided the raw material for many of the household tools and clothes used in daily life.11 This chapter considers the early biography of the RPMBH’s collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. The set of four small, innocuous, clay cooking pots made at Chaura island in the Nicobar Islands, donated to RPMBH in 1923 (Figure 1.1), are likely to have had particularly rich early careers. In examining their production and indigenous use as a case study, we can hint at some of the wider meanings once associated with Brighton’s collections in their original context. Although aluminium pans and containers are now preferred,12 in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries clay pots were produced by the women of Chaura and used for cooking and heating food throughout the Nicobar Islands. Made in six different sizes ranging from approximately 7 cm to 70 cm

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in diameter, such pots were shaped from layered rolls of clay obtained from the neighbouring island of Teressa, dried and hardened in the sun, trimmed and smoothed with shells and bamboo strips, fired in a kiln, and stained with unripe coconut husks for decoration.13 Prior to firing, some artisans signed their wares with a maker-specific hallmark on the inner rim of the pot with a sharp knife or spear.14 Notably, the Brighton pots were not marked in this way; their materiality suggests that the status of some Chaura pots as unique objects specific to the creative abilities of individual artisans did not apply here.15 Following this production process, the clay pots were generally sold by the men of the island to consumers from across the Nicobars at annual events where the people from Car Nicobar, in particular, would visit Chaura in accordance with a specific set of rites and customs.16 According to Edward Horace Man, who observed this process during his time on the islands, the smallest pots (tafal), such as those donated to Brighton, were one of the less frequently used sizes; they were bound together with lengths of fibre ‘in neat little bundles’ and sold in kamintap, or ‘sets of five’.17 Once sold, but before use, they would necessarily be stored upside down on the lattice-work platform in the roof of their new owner’s hut, so that the heat and smoke of the environment could properly season them, and prevent their disintegration upon first use.18 The pots had a clear utilitarian role: the smallest examples were used for boiling water and cooking eggs.19 They were also, however, instilled with other

Figure 1.1 Small pot, Chaura, Nicobar Islands, c. 1900, clay, 110 mm × 100 mm, one of four donated to RPMBH. RPMBH, WA509400[R2468/3]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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local meanings: the pots represented the tabooed monopoly that Chaura had on production in both the pottery industry and canoe making across the Nicobar Islands. Death or disease were thought to come to those who employed similar utensils manufactured elsewhere; equally, food cooked in a Chaura pot was believed to bring fortune and prosperity.20 Various sources record explanations for the success of the Chaura people in the sale of their manufactures, and for the fear that other Nicobarese groups had of breaking this taboo: Chaura was thought by some to be the first inhabited island of the archipelago, and therefore, as ‘the cradle of the race’, its people were considered to wield a certain superiority.21 Others noted the convenient geographical position of the island in the direct route between Car Nicobar and the central and southern islands of the group, and the residents’ purported ‘control of magical forces and of the evil spirits’.22 Although the specific concerns and thought processes of the Nicobarese at this time are distorted by a generalized colonial vocabulary which presupposes the irrational superstition of the ‘native’, this last notion seems to have been predominant.23 Today, in the Nicobar Islands, as Singh asserts, the Chaura pots continue to be ‘inextricably linked to black magic that Chaura alone had mastered’.24 As objects intended for use and ownership, in normal circumstances many of the pots produced at Chaura would have been made meaningful as the personal possessions of Nicobarese individuals. Selected by members of the colonial community and accessioned into a British public collection, the pots at RPMBH had limited opportunities to develop such bespoke trajectories. However, for most pots, it was only as a personal possession that the production process itself could be completed since smoke from the home fire was required to season the container before use. Moreover, in the central Nicobar Islands, it was often in death that an ultimate personalized meaning was projected onto a specific object: Man observed that the deceased’s selected possessions, including spears, paddles and Chaura pots, were regularly broken or damaged and placed upon the grave as part of the mourning process and as a marker of sincere grief.25 In the case of the pots, small holes were made in the base, rendering the objects unusable by others, and cementing a final and irreversible personal interpretation upon the object. People in both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, then, like people all over the world, were ‘indelibly linked’ with their material cultures.26 While the names and identities of the precise makers of specific objects in the collections at RPMBH have largely been lost, in the first phases of their trajectories these objects were clearly subject to personal and culturally specific appropriation. As these brief examples have shown, in both production and use, Brighton’s objects took centre stage in complex formations of Andamanese and Nicobarese individual and community ownership.

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Contested Trajectories: Making and Trading for Export in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands However, at a particular point in their early careers, for some of the objects produced in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a new, specifically foreign owner came to impact upon their biographies and move them away from this first, quotidian sphere of influence. A limited but diverse stream of outsiders visited the islands in the nineteenth century; some, like Man, Temple and Tuson, selected and reframed particular objects, incorporating them into private or institutional collections. It is at this point that much of the existing scholarship on this subject begins to focus on the collection process as a specifically ‘Western’ or British product of an individual (British) collector’s agency. Here, collecting becomes framed as dependent on the British individual’s personal tastes, or as controlled by the requirements and conventions of European institutions, such as the discipline of anthropology, or the British imperial project.27 However, in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, British collectors were not the only parties interested in trade. As this chapter will show, for indigenous peoples of both island groups, the British fascination with their material culture provided an opportunity for control, agency and influence on both collecting practices and wider colonial encounters. There are, of course, ways in which these collections could be characterized as ‘British’ structures: Bernard Cohn has noted how the selective amalgamation of historical and anthropological information in India ‘was seen as the most valuable form of knowledge on which to build the colonial state’ itself.28 On the Andaman and Nicobar Islands particularly, certain ethnographical pursuits were considered within the remit of government employment: attempts to foster a shared cultural awareness between colonizer and colonized were an integral part of the British strategy to placate continued Andamanese hostility towards ship-wrecked crews and refuelling traders.29 The report of the government-appointed committee charged with the initial assessment of the islands’ suitability for colonization in 1857, for example, contained numerous references to Andamanese ‘manners and customs’, and stressed the importance of such knowledge for successful British settlement in the region.30 Throughout the entire period of British colonization, anthropological endeavours were officially sanctioned by the Government of India: formal requests were made for the collection of objects for display at international exhibitions,31 and publications and collections referring to and documenting the islands’ indigenous groups were carefully logged in official proceedings.32 The link between the state and anthropology in the region was ultimately cemented by the arrival of Temple in 1894 as Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands: drawing on experiences formed during his long military and administrative career in India and Burma, and an advanced interest in human cultures, he particularly advocated the benefits of anthropological researches for men of empire, arguing, ‘if you are to have influence, you must have anthropological knowledge’.33

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In this way, these collections were endorsed by the colonial state and produced within a framework dictated by Western requirements. However, sweeping claims regarding the overarching relationship between imperialism and anthropology are difficult to sustain.34 In the first place, collections in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were founded upon the diverse personal and professional collecting rationales of a variety of British colonizers, as subsequent sections of this book will make clear. Secondly, the notion of a ‘state-sponsored’ approach must also take into account the impact of the colonized subject – here the indigenous Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples – on the production of anthropologies and collections. Scholars have increasingly rejected the idea that the state structure is unaffected by ‘ordinary forms of struggle’, or acts as ‘a formidable, autonomous force impressing itself on subordinate groups’;35 on both the Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands, colonial collecting as ‘state structure’ was firmly influenced by such ‘subordinate groups’. Cultural practices bound in ritual or lifestyle have only recently been considered as ‘arenas of struggle’,36 but the ways in which individual Andamanese and Nicobarese men and women facilitated or frustrated ‘British’ collecting practices often translated into forms of autonomy and agency, symbolic of a wider resistance to the imperial presence. ‘Agency’ is a complex phenomenon, and it is difficult to argue that in making and trading objects the indigenous communities in this region consciously shifted the course of action instigated by the British, or mitigated against the long-term impact of outsider encroachment on their existence. However, just as the objects now in the collections at RPMBH were once bestowed with a meaning rooted in their indigenous production and use, the transfer of these objects into a European sphere of influence must also be recognized as having been understood from an indigenous perspective, and impacted upon by local processes of authorization and opposition. Here, the production and exchange of material culture is seen as evidence of Andamanese and Nicobarese community dynamism and counterhegemonic agency within wider colonial frameworks.

In the Andaman Islands: Objects as Cultural Envoys Undoubtedly, many examples of indigenous material culture amassed by the British, particularly in the Andaman Islands, were appropriated in highly problematic circumstances. A small part of the collection at RPMBH was extracted in March 1918 during an attack on an Ang camp site, the official purpose of which was ‘to intimidate them … to travel through the tracts inhabited by them, destroy their huts if found, and drive them away from the vicinity of the Settlement’.37 The skewed political and economic relationships created during British colonization of the Andaman Islands, the legacies of which are all too visible today, provide a thick layer of inequality and ‘unrepresentability’ which can be difficult to penetrate.

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However, As Michael O’Hanlon has suggested, where ethnographic collections have commonly been envisioned as ‘cultural hostages’, their source communities may have regarded or continue to regard them within more constructive frameworks.38 Susanne Küchler, for example, has described cases in New Ireland where ritual artefacts were sold to collectors as an astute alternative to casting them into the bush at the end of the ceremonial process; similar ‘intentional feats of “riddance”’ have been noted elsewhere.39 Indeed, in the formation of ‘British’ collections of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture, it is also possible to ‘read “plenitude” and “creativity”’, to borrow a Subalternist phrase, where ‘“lack” and “inadequacy”’ have come to form the dominant narrative.40 The official colonial archive contains monthly ‘Andaman Home Reports’41 for the period which corresponds with the postings of Man, Temple and Tuson, and there are various published accounts by visitors to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands available.42 Here, numerous references highlighting the agency and resistance of particular communities on both the Andaman Islands and the Nicobar Islands can be identified. Further, examining the collected objects themselves in conjunction with an understanding of their indigenous value, and investigating the specific configuration of the RPMBH collections, can also reveal the impact that individual makers and traders had on collecting practices. Through these objects we can explore how, on both island groups, specific contributions of particular objects reveal semblances of a ‘hidden indigenous order’ to the collections now at RPMBH.43 As we will see, the structures of most collections made in the region were affected by local cultural and political agendas, and, through processes of material exchange, both Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples were able to engage in European commodity systems for their own benefit in a variety of ways. Naturally, the written sources from which these arguments will be drawn have their own conditions of use. The products of a paper-shuffling imperial project, obsessed with the notion of a unified archive as a convenient substitute for power, have been identified as ‘cultural artifacts … that erased certain kinds of knowledge, secreted some, and valorized others’.44 Similarly, the extensive studies produced by anthropologically minded residents such as Man and Radcliffe-Brown, cautiously employed here to investigate the original context of particular objects, have been acknowledged as sources constructed on the basis of now discredited ‘scientific’ approaches and hierarchies, while populist, narrative accounts by fleeting visitors to the islands must be read as potentially sensationalized compositions.45 Others who have sought to interrogate the dominant narrative for alternative perspectives, resistance or ‘subaltern consciousness’ have spoken of the difficulties of reading hidden histories in the colonial archive. There has been concern over the impossibility of fully recovering the direct subaltern voice from the selective, ideological texts of elite domination, while the essentialist act of defining ‘a subaltern consciousness’ – of seeking out a consolidated presence, resistance or creativity for any homogeneous ‘people’, ‘class’ or ‘cultural group’ – has also raised debate.46 Gayatri Spivak, however, has addressed these essentialist tendencies, rationalizing such actions as a necessary

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‘strategy for our times’.47 There are growing calls for the recognition of indigenous agency in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands,48 and while very little information about named individuals’ histories and opinions exists, a reflexive use of these sources, combined with local oral histories and the material culture itself, is the only alternative to ‘total unrepresentability’.49 Clearly, however, any story of indigenous activity, agency and perspective can only be a partial one.

‘Tourist Art’ and Self-representation in the Andaman Islands Nicholas Thomas has raised the rarely acknowledged but important point that much of the non-European material in museum collections was not ‘extracted from daily use or ritual life … but, rather, was produced on commission’.50 In the Andaman Islands, some of the objects made available to Man, Temple and Tuson, and other British visitors to the region, were in fact made for trade with outsiders. Such commercial manufactures were obtainable by the early 1870s and produced by the Andamanese communities with the closest geographic and diplomatic contact with the British, namely those residing on South Andaman and eventually amalgamated into the ‘Great Andamanese’ group. Many of these objects were manufactured and sold from within a network of residential ‘homes’ which were built by the British for the haphazard accommodation and political control of various, interchangeable groups of Andamanese peoples. However, although the homes were established and influenced by the British regime, the production and sale of Andamanese objects made in these institutions represents an important form of indigenous agency, both at the point of object manufacture and when projected onto processes of collection formation. Originally founded on Ross Island in July 1863 as a ‘small house’ in which four captured Andamanese were ‘watched by a strong guard of Natives’,51 the government homes soon became a series of stations located at over sixteen different sites around South Andaman. Despite the generic descriptive term and their generalized presence in the existing secondary literature, the homes were seemingly rather fluid institutions which differed greatly in longevity, size and purpose: some were short-lived, mentioned in the colonial archive only once or twice, whereas others were more substantial. The main home at Haddo, according to the monthly ‘Report on the Andaman Home’ for June 1887, averaged about 95 residents at this time.52 Some of the more remote homes, such as that at Kyd Island, were established so that the settlement officials could ‘extend our acquaintance with the more distant tribes to the north’ and apprehend runaways from the penal settlement.53 Elsewhere, for the homes located in closer proximity to the British settlements around Port Blair, their central purpose was to manage the Andamanese and utilize their skills. In the view of J.N. Homfray, a long-serving Officer in Charge of the Andamanese (in office between 1864 and 1874), the primary aim of the homes was to ‘civilise’.54 Accordingly, in some of the homes, and under certain Officers

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in Charge, residents were sporadically required to wear Western clothes, learn the English language, and adopt a grain diet in place of the usual pig and fish.55 From the mid-1870s onwards, Western medical aid was also liberally distributed through the homes and their attached hospitals.56 ‘Constructive’ employment was considered to be one of the most useful tools in this civilizing mission: it was Homfray, supported by his superintendent, Henry Man (father of Edward Horace), who first opined that the ‘lazy, quarrelsome, and dishonest’ residents of the homes around Port Blair ‘ought to take to agriculture and supply their wants by their own labour’.57 Increasingly, to supplement their long-standing efforts in catching convict escapees, the Andamanese inhabitants were encouraged to collect and sell shells, eggs and honey, produce thatching leaves and make examples of their own material manufactures for sale.58 Homfray established a shop on Ross Island ‘for the sale of their commodities’ in January 1875,59 and although it seems that this specific site was shut later that year in favour of an enduring ‘system of house to house sales’,60 an institution described as a ‘little semi-shop, semimuseum’ selling bows and arrows and skull and shell ornaments was still trading in 1909.61 The monthly reports for the homes noted the production of such items for sale, and E.H. Man donated miniature model canoes to various institutions, which were presumably obtained from this source.62 The cash income from these sales went largely to the ‘credit of the Government’,63 and more specifically, to the maintenance of the homes.64 Objects were also exchanged directly with the Andamanese for goods such as clay pipes, iron, textiles, beads, mirrors, sugar, grain and cooking utensils, but the value of some of the commodities traded, such as tobacco, relied on dependencies purposely fostered by the British who stood to gain from regular contact with Andamanese.65 Given the context of their production and some of the imported commodities exchanged, the objects produced in the Andaman homes have generally been framed as the unnatural product of forced labour.66 Certainly, the manufacture of this strand of material culture was part of a wider employment encouraged and regulated by British officers, and, in the earlier years of the system, enforced by police guards or prisoner-overseers from the penal settlement.67 By 1900, the situation had changed somewhat: the Andamanese seemed to come and go subject to their own requirements, visiting at certain times and removing themselves from British control and influence at others.68 However, despite the shifting ways in which the homes were managed, it is clear that at certain stages Andamanese individuals were forcibly detained and, through a campaign of persuasion, pressure and forced addiction to tobacco, compelled to engage in general labour which included the production of their material culture. As a stable context for intertribal communication and marriage, the homes have also been widely recognized as the principal site for the transformation and homogenization of the indigenous population during the second half of the nineteenth century.69 Tragically, these sites also acted as the breeding ground for infectious disease; extreme demographic change and particular cultural permutations have certainly been the long-term result of the atypical situation

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they facilitated. Due to unprecedented intercommunity contact brokered within the framework of the homes, the Ongee were observed as having ‘begun to copy the bow of the South Andaman Group of Tribes, and to use it in preference to their own pattern’,70 or as rejecting processes of manufacture analogous to Great Andamanese practices in order to assert their own uniqueness.71 Particularly within the various communities of the Great Andamanese, social delineations became ‘thoroughly mixed up’,72 with Radcliffe-Brown noting how ‘some tribes have adopted customs of other tribes and have abandoned their own’.73 The extent of this amalgamation of both social divisions and creative styles is suggested in the grave observation that by 1899 the only Great Andamanese encampments in South Andaman were in the homes.74 By the turn of the century all South Andamanese material culture was seemingly produced in these institutions, or within a cultural framework subject to their influence. However, while Vishvajit Pandya has suggested that the homes resulted in the loss of Andamanese dignity and identity,75 and Satadru Sen has argued that they stripped the Andamanese ‘of their right to represent themselves’,76 here it is suggested that the manufacture and sale of Andamanese material objects to a non-indigenous market should be recognized as a creative and positive response to new requirements, requests and impositions from external sources. Despite the highly ambivalent circumstances of their production, and the lack of financial reward received by their producers, these manufactures can be seen as an enduring, ‘everyday’ form of resistance,77 and as tangible indicators of Andamanese influence and agency against British domination. At a basic level, if creativity is identified as one of the most potent attributes of humanity,78 these crafted objects can be seen as markers of Andamanese life and as affirmation of their producers’ talents, traditions and histories. Even in the homes, creating objects would have required the maker to participate in active processes of selection, experimentation, disposal, discovery and problemsolving that required individual input and thought. As sociologists have begun to make clear, ‘making is thinking’,79 and while employment demands made of the homes’ inmates and the conditions of British collecting conventions may have formed the catalysts for the production of some objects, those external forces should not be credited with all the commitment, imagination and creativity inherent in their development. David Tomas has identified the objects produced for sale in the homes as ‘“curios” of nominal touristic value’, and as ‘reproductions’ which are different from ‘the real thing’,80 but it could also be argued that these continue to be objects firmly rooted in Andamanese design histories and worldviews. Indeed, it is unlikely that Great Andamanese material was ever mass-produced for a large market. A statement of the earnings of the Andamanese attached to the homes between 1876 and 1882 demonstrates that the sale of ‘bows, arrows, &c.’ made an average of 125 rupees out of a total average income from other activities of 1724 rupees per annum.81 While there are no complete statistics for later years, the monthly reports for the Andaman homes after 1882 do not paint a picture of

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constant industry and prolonged, forced labour, but rather present the homes as spaces of sporadic production. Particular objects were available on commission for both individual travellers and the government,82 but tourists did not visit the islands en masse, and while most major ethnographic collections in Europe contain Andamanese material forwarded by enthusiastic colonial officials, these tend to contain one or two examples of each ‘specimen’ of Andamanese material culture. Objects were speculatively produced and stored in small numbers to meet this demand,83 but the production of Andamanese material culture for an outside audience cannot be said to have moved to a stage where desire for profit or economic necessity superseded long-term aesthetic and cultural standards of manufacture.84 Direct comparison of objects collected in the early stages of the British imposition on Andamanese production, between 1858 and 1878, and objects collected later in the century and made in the context of the homes, demonstrates how similar materials, techniques and modes of construction continued to be used in the creation of material culture, even in such circumstances.85 The Great Andamanese objects that make up the Temple donation at Brighton Museum, all collected between 1894 and 1904, are key examples of the continued care and attention that went into the production of these objects under British supervision: the waist adornments in this collection, for example, retain the carefully etched outer layers of pandanus, strings of dentilium shells, and clay residue present in earlier examples.86 Whether for sale or personal use, the production of such objects would still have been created through sequences of operation which were socially learnt and culturally embedded. The manufacture of these everyday body adornments, for example, would continue to be rooted in a worldview which saw the painting and decorating of pandanus leaf strips as gendered acts which ensured the wearer’s safety and assistance from the spirits.87 Great Andamanese creation myths about the first man and woman incorporate material culture as signifiers of gender;88 these perceptions and the significance of binding and tying, valued as acts which impact upon spirit–human relations through transforming the state of the human body, would also have continued to influence the making process.89 Richard Sennett and Christopher Tilley have argued that through systems of craft and manufacture, people both construct and comprehend their social selves:90 an alternative final purpose would not necessarily have erased these culturally situated, long-term practices. The homes were undoubtedly British institutions, infiltrated by the political, social and economic demands of outsiders, but the very presence of the indigenous residents and the cultural processes which were enacted there also ensured that the homes had identities as Andamanese spaces. As Homfray acknowledged, even within the barn-like constructions of some of the more central homes, the Andamanese chose to modify the apparatus of British control in accordance with their own routines, and ‘always built their own huts in addition inside’.91 In 1869, a visitor to the home at Port Mouat described his encounter with a woman who ‘possessed great influence over the tribe, and acted as arbitrator in all disputes’,92

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hinting at the ways in which well established indigenous systems of community mediation continued to retain effect in conjunction with British structures of authority.93 He also described how the homes’ residents engaged in long-standing methods of maintaining personal hygiene, cooking and mourning, and how they continued to produce the items of material culture traditionally associated with these processes.94 Significant aspects of the framework surrounding existence on the islands had changed, but within these new circumstances the Andamanese continued to enact everyday processes of living, and as such, their objects continued to be produced within some semblance of a communal ‘Andamanese’ social structure and creative identity. Moreover, where new stylistic and functional strains of Andamanese material culture did emerge from the new intercommunity networks facilitated by British intervention, or in reaction to the demands of outsiders, they should not be simply dismissed as ‘simulated elements’95 of Andamanese culture. To reject those aspects of Andamanese production which diverge from the externally identified ‘traditional’ standard as ‘inauthentic’ is to continue to place the Andamanese in the state of arrested evolutionary development devised by nineteenth-century anthropology. Despite the continued use of descriptive labels which dub the Andamanese ‘Stone Age Islanders’,96 their cultural development has never been stagnant: the use of salvaged iron as a replacement for bone in the manufacture of tools and equipment during the nineteenth century is but one material example of the adaptive nature of Andamanese society. In 1906–1908, Radcliffe-Brown observed the diversity in the design of body painting and the competition amongst women to produce novelty and innovation in their work.97 As Pandya notes in his fascinating study of the complex ways in which the Andamanese continue to incorporate nonindigenous textiles into otherwise organically formed body adornments, shifts in object production have always been an important part of negotiating changes in Andamanese culture.98 The production of ‘tourist art’ within the homes can thus be seen as an instance of Andamanese vitality and fluidity, here in the face of British subjugation. In many respects, to draw on Ruth Phillips’ work on souvenir wares, these can be termed ‘autoethnographic expressions’, which represent their makers, even while engaging with externally imposed terms.99 There is also the possibility that at the point of their production some of these objects were made with a foreign owner in mind. Some Andamanese individuals had occasion to learn of the context in which their bartered and sold manufactures would eventually be displayed: visits to museums or international exhibitions were frequently on the agenda during the regular ‘educational’ trips to Calcutta organized by Portman as Officer in Charge of the Andamanese for various groups of his charges.100 Apparently, in 1893 the Andamanese visitors to Calcutta were ‘much interested in the Ethnographic Gallery, and particularly in the Andamanese Court’ at the Indian Museum,101 where they were presumably able to see the donations of Andamanese material culture made by Man in 1877 and 1879. Up to ten Andamanese individuals visited Calcutta each year, but many more may have been able to encounter their objects within a British

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‘regime of value’, since from 1890 Portman had a ‘home’ for the Andamanese at his own house on Ross Island and regularly mentioned the various numbers of ‘Andamanese living with me’.102 Chapter 2 will illustrate some of the ways in which colonial officers openly displayed Andamanese material culture within their houses on the islands, and although Portman’s abode and interior decoration practices are undocumented, this situation may also have provided the producers of these commercialized goods with an understanding of the treatment that their objects would receive once sold. In terms of the collections at RPMBH, it is likely that some of the Great Andamanese objects were made meaningful within the framework of indigenous creativity and involvement outlined above. While Man and Tuson’s collecting opportunities were relatively broad in terms of their geographical access and length of time spent on the islands, by the time Temple arrived in the Andamans in 1894, the production of the Great Andamanese was almost entirely confined to the homes. Certainly, those Great Andamanese components of his collection (namely those not specifically identified as Ongee or Ang), and perhaps parts of those amassed by Man and Tuson too, were produced in these institutions.103 A necklace of cockle shells, a pair of waistbelts made from pandanus leaf, and six large bows, all from South Andaman, are just a sample of such objects included in his donation. Accordingly, these items and others amassed in similar circumstances can be seen today, and in this phase of their ‘social lives’, as a creative affirmation of their makers’ lives and identities. They are ‘Andamanese’ objects, produced within a space influenced by long-standing indigenous cultural and social norms and in relation to a specifically ‘Andamanese’ as opposed to ‘British’ view of the world.

Intercommunity Warfare and Collecting Despite execrable working conditions and severe subjugation under British rule, then, the Great Andamanese residents of the government homes managed to actively engage in ‘European’ collecting practices by way of their innovation and cultural creativity. However, the distinctive and complex relations between the Great Andamanese peoples, their new British neighbours and other indigenous groups on the islands also led to the Great Andamanese having an influential role in shaping additional elements of British collections from the region. A number of individuals from those Great Andamanese communities most closely allied with the British actively assisted and directed the processes of assembling objects originating from other, more hostile groups. Caught within the strictures of colonialism, and engaged in established political and social interisland rivalries, the act of facilitating British collecting processes provided some Great Andamanese men and women with a short-term method of strengthening their position within the tentative dynamics of a colonial situation. Here, there were further opportunities for Andamanese agency.

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Despite initial hostility and conflict104 and clear ongoing disputes throughout the entire ‘British period’, during the late nineteenth century a working relationship between British officials and some inhabitants of South Andaman slowly developed.105 Portman, in his encyclopaedic A History of our Relations with the Andamanese, highlighted the emergence of new, ‘friendly overtures’ made by some of the Great Andamanese peoples residing around the Port Blair area in 1860, particularly those of the Aka-Bea community; he asserted that relations between the British settlers and some indigenous groups were founded ‘on a more intimate and better footing’ from this time.106 Clearly, these positive reports are likely to have been influenced by the need for British officials to present the success of their diplomatic endeavours to their superiors: as noted, one of the central motivations for the colonization of the Andaman Islands had been to make the region safe for passing traders and government ships, and such reports may well have been designed to amplify their authors’ capabilities, successes and reputations in this area. Throughout the entire ninety years of British occupation, many of the so-called ‘friendly’ Andamanese were subject to extreme coercion, intimidation and repression, and recorded as displaying much resentment and direct opposition to British behaviour, even within the confines of this apparent ceasefire. However, by 1872, some of the Great Andamanese communities were being referred to as ‘our Andamanese’107 (usually in contrast to the hostile Ang and Ongee communities) and working for the British in various projects around the islands in the capacity of guides, trackers, translators and security guards.108 Almost immediately, this new, tentative alliance became bound up with established indigenous intercommunity disputes, particularly those shared between the Aka-Bea and the Ang peoples. It was long-standing rivalries over land claims that apparently engendered initial conflict between the Aka-Bea and the Ang,109 and when the British arrived, slowly forging amicable relations with the Aka-Bea and other Great Andamanese communities rather than the more distantly located Ang, the Aka-Bea reportedly ‘prejudiced’ the British against their established adversaries, ‘whom they described in the blackest terms’.110 Equally, the association between the British and the Aka-Bea has been partly blamed for the hostility, resentment and distrust with which the Ang treated the British during their occupation of the islands.111 More recently, scholars have credited the British entry into this delicate equation with stimulating further conflict between indigenous groups,112 and the colonial officials certainly had their own agenda regarding the Ang, using any established disagreements to their advantage and specifically exacerbating the situation on numerous occasions. Throughout their occupation, the British made many expeditions into Ang territory, initially hoping to establish ‘friendly communications’, but increasingly to avenge Ang raids on their settlement. Great Andamanese individuals were regularly drafted in as assistants during these missions, either employed as subordinate members of official tracking parties, or as independent informants. Often, tensions between indigenous groups increased as a result. Such was the case in March 1895, when Temple intensified hostilities,

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first relocating a group of Great Andamanese to Rutland Island, a known area of Ang territory, in an honest attempt to avoid their contracting the strain of measles that was affecting the British settlement, and then ordering these recently transferred Andamanese to make a ‘thorough and continued search’ for the Ang, capture them and facilitate their imprisonment at Port Blair.113 This command was made in no uncertain terms, as leading members of the relocated group were ordered onto Temple’s boat, and informed that ‘in return for the many benefits conferred upon them, they were bound to assist us in such matters … [or] the supply of articles of luxury to them would be stopped’.114 In such cases, by ordering the Great Andamanese to contravene established territory delineations and invade Ang land, and by charging the temporary residents to hunt down and kidnap indiscriminately the Ang, the British clearly aggravated existing mistrust and furthered conflict amongst the indigenous inhabitants of the region. Within this complex framework of inter-Andamanese and British hostility, however, the Aka-Bea and other Great Andamanese groups moved to facilitate and direct the British amalgamation of Ang material culture. An understanding of the British demand for tangible evidence of far-flung indigenous groups, combined with an existing fear of and aversion to some of these communities, resulted in numerous cases where ‘friendly’ Andamanese delivered the material remnants of their skirmishes with the Ang into British hands: examples include ‘the Chief of Góp-l’áka-báng’ (probably a man named Riala) presenting a British officer with an abandoned Ang bow and bucket following a failed attempt to capture their owner in 1876,115 and the delivery of ‘a few baskets, a marble-wood bow, and 2 buckets’ which had been discarded in Ang encampments following a search by sixty Great Andamanese through their territory in 1879.116 It is likely that these objects were set aside by their British recipients and eventually entered into personal or institutional collections bound for Europe. Temple’s donation to Brighton Museum, for instance, contained numerous examples of Ang material culture which, without Great Andamanese assistance, would have been difficult to procure.117 As with the Rutland Island example detailed above, this indigenous input was undoubtedly the product of British influence, but the Great Andamanese facilitation of British collection formation seems also to have been born of a more shrewd, self-interested desire to retain favour with certain officials. As Nicholas Thomas has found in other imperial situations, the gifting of such objects appears to have formed ‘a crucial index’ of the level at which particular relations were ‘sustained or disfigured’.118 Portman, for example, noted how ‘Lepa’, a leading member of a community based on Middle Andaman, brought in individuals from ‘far tribes, and also takes care to collect their bows and arrows &c., to give me’.119 Certainly, if Lepa’s conduct was the result of an intention to foster positive relations with the British, he was successful: he was considered ‘to be the most friendly chief among the Middle Andamans, that we know’, and his ‘very good service’ was formally recorded in Portman’s monthly report on the Andaman homes.120 In addition to this ‘tribute’, while the Ang were subject

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to intimidating treatment and regular raids on their territory by British parties, Lepa and his group were presumably spared such overtly hostile threats, instead becoming the recipients of the ‘articles of luxury’ referred to above. Certainly, these ‘honours’ bore their own problems, some of which have been hinted at throughout this chapter – South Andamanese reliance on British ‘luxury’ goods such as tobacco, and the spread of disease through ‘friendly contact’ with British visitors and other foreigners, contributed to rapid decline in population. Nevertheless, the material exchanges which fostered the relationships between British and Great Andamanese individuals and communities must be seen as a part of an active indigenous contribution to the formation of ‘British’ collections born of self-interest. As Satadru Sen writes, in most instances, docility in the jungle was ‘a useful fiction’ created by the Andamanese to lull the British into a false sense of security, and performed as part of ‘a mixture of resistance, acquiescence, and opportunism’.121 The active collecting of the Great Andamanese on behalf of the British can be seen as a part of this performance.

Authorization and Obstruction: Exchange between British and Andamanese Traders Much of the accumulation of material culture from the Andaman Islands was the product of a direct dialogue forged between indigenous producers and interested parties from overseas. For visitors to the islands and more long-term European residents, there were multiple opportunities for contact with Andamanese individuals either during tours around the archipelago (which were conducted both for pleasure and for professional reasons),122 or simply in the British settlements, around the Andaman ‘homes’. As noted, these direct meetings often led to the exchange of goods; tobacco, iron, textiles, beads, mirrors, grain, cooking utensils and cash were amongst the commodities used to barter for Andamanese material culture. Sympathetic colonial officials characterized these dealings as unequal encounters in which asymmetrical power relations and the simplicity of the ‘native’ were unfairly abused: Portman detailed how, ‘taking advantage of the ignorance of the savages, the English residents and others used to obtain valuable articles for a few cheroots’.123 Early reports dismissed any Andamanese aptitude in the art of barter: despite the paternalistic attempts of the British to ‘educate’ the Andamanese in this area, it was judged that no progress could be made because of their apparent inability to estimate the value of their own goods and successfully secure a fair return for them.124 More recent attention has characterized Andamanese interest in and partial adoption of the ‘alien material culture and physiological habits’ of European visitors as an ‘erosion of [their] incentive and integrity’.125 Implicit in these descriptions of the trade relations between colonized and colonizer is an assumption that in their desire to obtain European property the Andamanese were compromising themselves and their culture, and overvaluing basic commodities which were really of little worth.

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As European luxuries and activities made ‘insidious inroads on Andamanese life styles’,126 the Andamanese were considered helpless, naïve participants in an encounter which they could not possibly control. Certainly, the addictive nature of some of these commodities created modes of exchange born of a dependence on narcotics that is beyond the possibilities of postcolonial reframing. However, particularly given the range of other goods exchanged, in some respects Andamanese traders were authoritative partners in their exchanges with British visitors. The skewed power dynamics of the wider imperial encounter must be acknowledged, but the moment of material transaction between indigenous producer and foreign collector was not entirely dictated by the colonizer and the ‘irresistible lure’ of his or her offerings. In the first instance, the British did not ‘teach’ the Andamanese either the skill or the will to barter – the islands were already home to a vibrant intercommunity trading system. There are numerous depictions of situations where Andamanese rather than British parties instigated bartering sessions for a variety of commodities: on a visit to Cinque Island, British officials encountered a group of Ongee who, having exchanged a bow and three arrows for beads, sugar and tea, tried to encourage the foreigners to accompany them to their main camp on Rutland Island, making ‘signs telling us that they … had many bows and arrows there’.127 Elsewhere, it was noted that ‘a good many Andamanese have visited the Viper Home bringing in a canoe and bows and arrows for barter’,128 or that groups of Andamanese had spontaneously brought bows, arrows and baskets into Port Blair for sale.129 Certainly, their advances were inevitably encouraged by British officials, who coveted the commodities on offer, and credited this ‘new’ willingness to exchange as a marker of their success in ‘civilizing’ the Andamanese. But the Andamanese did not need a British ‘education’ in this area: they played a proactive role in the exchange process, initiating their own frameworks for barter and performing as equal partners in that trading system. Furthermore, where Andamanese participation in trading relations with the British has been characterized as the product of innocence and inexperience, there is no reason not to assume that some Andamanese people used these moments of exchange to assist in their own cultural agendas.130 The ‘old tins’131 that the Andamanese ‘blindly’ accepted in the ‘sacrifice’ of their possessions cannot be categorized within British value systems: for the Andamanese, iron was a highly valued commodity, its successful procurement facilitating the development of effective new tools for hunting and canoe making. On the Andaman Islands, giftexchange had long been seen as an expression of alliance,132 and as an invitation to establish communications between factions.133 The gifting rituals of the Great Andamanese had, after all, informed Marcel Mauss’s seminal theories on the inalienability of the gift (namely its continued link to the giver) and the ways in which gift-exchange establishes personable associations. Describing details from Radcliffe-Brown’s anthropology of the Andaman Islands, Mauss used the Andamanese rite of parents exchanging presents throughout their children’s marriages to explore how material exchange created ‘an intermingling’ of lives and

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souls.134 Certainly, the relationship of exchange as forged between Andamanese groups and outsiders was not constructed within the same framework as the demonstrative gift-exchange engaged in between different Andamanese groups.135 But for some Andamanese, in the short term, attempting to forge an amicable relationship with the British may have been preferable to the harassment, punitive raids and theft that they would otherwise be subject to.136 Moreover, within these moments of exchange the British were surprised and dismayed to find that the Andamanese actually drove a hard bargain. Irrespective of any diplomatic relationships that the Andamanese may or may not have wanted to establish, there were occasions when the entire process of trade was dictated by Andamanese demands and terms of exchange. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the personal attachments to and social significance bestowed upon such objects by the source community, the highly sought-after Andamanese human skull ornament was particularly difficult to procure. One prospective British trader found herself ‘very depressed at being asked three or four pounds for one which we wished to purchase’.137 Elsewhere, another found the skulls ‘impossible to obtain’, engaging in a trading session where his potential trading partner repeatedly refused his offers, ultimately concealing the skull in question in one of her canoes, where ‘it was evident that nothing would tempt the owner to part with it’.138 Man was reduced to sneaking around in unattended burial sites in order to fulfil his commitments to colleagues back in the UK;139 tellingly, there is only one such object in the collections at Brighton.140 Undoubtedly, in many circumstances, material was prised away from individuals without their full consent: in 1863, Henry Corbyn, an officer with particular responsibility for the Andamanese in 1863 and 1864, reported on the ways in which his charges hid their property when foreigners approached, as so much had ‘been taken from them in former times’.141 Elsewhere, however, exchanges were made on the Andamanese traders’ terms. Interested European parties were forced to invest their time and money: Violet Talbot Clifton, an explorer visiting the Andaman Islands with her husband, wanted a skull, but it was only ‘by waiting [that] we finally managed to get one in exchange for a pair of khaki knickerbockers’.142 In another example, geologist Valentine Ball found himself engaged in a transaction where his trading partner was undoubtedly in charge. During discussions over her two necklaces, Ball determined that the interests of an Andamanese woman’s family ‘were not likely to suffer while under her management’: ‘not only did she take the cheroots agreed upon; but also suddenly snatched from my left hand those which I had intended to reserve for further transactions’.143 While specific histories regarding the trade of individual objects at RPMBH do not exist, it is likely that some of them were traded within this fabric of indigenous control: in cases where Temple and Man were unable to use direct force or political influence, especially with indigenous groups from the north, they would have traded using the type of commodities valued by the Andamanese. In recent years, surviving Andamanese have expressed their regret at these encounters: one of Pandya’s Ongee informants, Raja Nappikute, has described

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how his ancestors’ ‘getting too many things from outsiders’ resulted in a breakdown in relations with the spirit world, and population decline.144 Indeed, short-term amicable relationships with colonizers and visitors, actively cemented through these moments of material exchange, have undoubtedly exacerbated and accelerated these devastating problems; to attempt to conceptualize the agency of some Andamanese traders is not to deny these long-term consequences. It is, however, important to establish the fact that at the point of material exchange, the Andamanese were not just naïve, subordinate participants, imposed upon by the demands of colonizers. Where popular commentary and scholarship has consistently focused on the inevitability of Andamanese acquiescence under British force and rule,145 material transactions between cultures were often instigated and led by Andamanese participants, and the results of these transactions, both material and social, were highly valued within the cultural and political systems of the Andamanese. Such moments of authorized exchange must accordingly be recognized as another example during which indigenous producers were able to facilitate, dictate or obstruct the contents of ‘European’ collections such as those now housed at Brighton.

In the Nicobar Islands: Objects and Self-Representation Collected objects, the imperial archive and supplementary contemporary oral histories also hint at the ways in which late nineteenth-century Nicobarese individuals and groups conceptualized their trade relationships with the British, and how they influenced the content and form of the material collections assembled in their country. Again, as with the Andamanese, most opportunities for collecting by European visitors in the Nicobar Islands were regulated by indigenous producers or their representatives during one-to-one trading sessions. Despite the very different circumstances and peoples involved, the collecting processes in the Nicobar Islands were no more exclusively ‘European’ than those executed in the Andamans. Again, at a moment of political instability and imperial influence in the region, the Nicobarese contribution to and control of colonial collection formation can be seen as a counter-hegemonic act, embodying Nicobarese agency, and cultural and economic endurance. At this stage of their object biographies, the collections at Brighton were made meaningful within indigenous-led frameworks of manufacture and trade.

Facilitation and Frustration: Nicobarese Agency in Collecting When the British formally occupied the Nicobar Islands in April 1869, the inhabitants of the various island clusters had already been participating in dynamic regional trade relations for many generations. Simron Jit Singh has surmised that the Nicobars’ position in the centre of the Bay of Bengal implicates a Nicobarese

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involvement in the extensive maritime trade which passed through the area from the first centuries of the Christian era onwards.146 Initially, commodities such as iron and cloth were traded in exchange for the simple replenishment of passing sailors’ supplies of food and water, although later, the Nicobarese were documented as trading with sea cucumbers, swiftlet nests and an aromatic resin called ambergris, used across Asia in medicines and in perfumes. By the time that the British arrived, a systematic trade in coconuts, particularly with traders from Burma and India, had also been established on the Nicobar Islands.147 Singh has persuasively argued the ways in which the Nicobarese ‘played their own important role in negotiating their frontiers with the outside world’, exercising agency over their commercial trading relations.148 With British colonization and the establishment of a permanent penal settlement at Nancowry Harbour on Kamorta Island in 1869, an alternative, more sporadic trade began between the central islands’ indigenous residents and foreigners in search of a souvenir of their trip or for anthropological information to be used as scientific evidence back home. Here, again, the Nicobarese worked to regulate and retain an element of control over these transactions. Personable dealings with a group of so-called ‘headmen’ or ‘captains’ have been identified as one of the most common ways in which British collections were amassed.149 In a system formed over years of frequent trade with the outside world, these individuals played an active role in maintaining fair trade by acting as the chief negotiator for the village or island when foreign trading ships arrived.150 Shrewdly acquiring letters from clients that attested to their honesty in trade transactions and assuming European names, clothes and vocabulary during trading in order to facilitate the bargaining process,151 these ‘headmen’ used centuries of experience to forge successful transactions with outsiders. In the main, the role of the headman of any group was to preside over larger, commercial transactions, of coconuts, for example,152 but they also negotiated the trading of cultural objects. Cecil Boden Kloss, a British zoologist who visited the Nicobar Islands in 1901, describes such an encounter with Tanamara, a headman of Malacca village on Nancowry Island, who, upon receipt of a watch, given ‘to spur him to further efforts in collecting curiosities’, brought Kloss’s party ‘a canoe-load of dishes, spears and charms’ to exchange for ‘old clothes, wine and rice’.153 Again, on Katchal, Kloss successfully traded with a larger group through the advice and influence of Yassan, an appointed spokesperson for the village.154 Certainly, during the late nineteenth century, the traditional role of ‘headman’ was utilized and adapted by British colonizers, who benefited from the simplified procedure of dealing with only one person rather than a whole village; eventually the colonizers became involved in the appointment of these individuals, endowing them with a new social authority and presumably selecting those willing to favour their benefactors’ demands.155 Yet, despite the apparent political influence that the British increasingly held over these ‘headmen’, the parameters of this role, developed through centuries of trading experience with various outside communities, continued to be rooted in Nicobarese social

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practice. In the 1920s, the missionary George Whitehead assessed the situation, highlighting that ‘a mere [government] appointment’ would not add any credibility to ‘one who was not himself personally acceptable to the [Nicobarese] people’.156 The headmen continued to represent their own people and their cultural standards, not always pandering to British influence: despite his best attempts in his dealings with Tanamara, Kloss was unable to secure a carved figure of great personal and community value belonging to his contact.157 Indeed, until 2004, when it was tragically washed away by the Indian Ocean tsunami, Tanamara’s kareau retained an important place on display in Malacca village.158 Just as the agency of independent indigenous ‘collector-agents’ has begun to be recognized elsewhere,159 their authority and impact on trade relations and collection formation on the Nicobar Islands can be acknowledged here. The importance of the headmen appears even clearer when the difficulties in obtaining desirable items through other means are noted. Valentine Ball detailed how, upon his arrival on Kondul Island (off the coast of Little Nicobar), spear heads and carved wooden images ‘as we usually found to be the case, had been already concealed’.160 Elsewhere, on Nancowry Island, Ball’s Nicobarese associates dictated the terms of their trade relationship, as they ‘presented us with a couple of pairs of polished cocoa-nut water vessels; but were unwilling to part with any of the spears which were arranged on the walls of their house’.161 Similarly, the iron hooks which he had hoped to barter with were firmly refused as suitable payment on Trinket Island,162 and on Kamorta, a bottle of rum and some silver coins were not accepted in exchange for a fishing spear.163 For Man, particularly, despite the emphasis that both he and his biographers placed on his systematic, comprehensive collecting abilities (see Chapter 2), in practice his success was dictated by the Nicobarese peoples’ productivity and willingness to exchange. Unable to entice his Nicobarese contacts to make up the entire contents of his standard donation in time for inclusion in his initial gift to the British Museum in 1887, for example, a discreet supplementary consignment had to be sent in 1888.164 Marginalia in his Descriptive Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands disclosed that, for entry no. 60, en rung (a leaf receptacle), ‘a poor specimen made by a Car Nic. youth is supplied as a proper specimen (as made by women) cannot meantime be procured’.165 Later, after 1888, when the British abandoned their penal settlement at Nancowry Harbour and Man’s regular contact with the Nicobarese peoples had significantly diminished, his collecting capacity was further dictated by Nicobarese support: he complained to the curator at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden that since the removal of the government settlement, ‘it is extremely difficult to get them to make anything’.166 Henry Balfour, from the Oxford Museum, saw that he ‘must give up the idea of a flattened skull, [as] it would certainly be dangerous to attempt to procure one’.167 Such disappointments reveal the impact and positive influence that Nicobarese support had on Man’s collecting successes, or lack thereof. Notably, the indigenous values placed on particular objects also had an important influence on how such items would come to be regarded during later

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stages of their biographies. The ritual carved figures, particular to the central and southern islands, are a valuable case in point. The anthropomorphic, carved figures known as kareau were made in order to represent the form of a deceased doctor-priest, in the understanding that his image could continue to convey some of the spiritual assistance he had delivered during his lifetime. They were also carved in order to represent the head of a family, in the hope that the figure would scare away malevolent spirits when that person was away from home. During life, and even after their owner’s death, these objects continued (and continue) to be highly revered by the owner’s descendants and important to community history.168 In contrast, the zoomorphic figures and engraved boards known as hentakoi had more variable associations. Hentakoi were regarded as important tools in both the curing of disease and the further maintenance of good health, and, if effective, highly valued by the owner and not easily given up. However, once the owner had died, their value diminished dramatically, and they were simply disposed of, or buried under a tree. These hierarchies of changing value in the hentakoi might explain why some visitors to the Nicobar Islands found such objects difficult to obtain,169 whereas on other occasions, other henkatoi, presumably no longer fit for purpose from a Nicobarese perspective, were easy to access and ‘did not seem to be very highly valued by their owners’.170 As such, these Nicobarese systems of value and natural disposal came to dictate the shape and biography of foreigner’s collections, including those currently at RPMBH. The collections of Nicobarese material culture that Man donated to Brighton Museum in 1916 and Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in 1892 demonstrate an indicative absence of both hentakoi and kareau figures; of the sixteen wooden figures donated to Brighton Museum by Tuson, only one is an authentic kareau. Moreover, the consistently high value placed on the kareau by their Nicobarese owners and their limited tradability also affected the treatment these objects received once a foreign collector did manage to procure one. It was their rarity, as well as their aesthetic and anthropological appeal, which made Temple so proud to be able to gift a set to the British Museum: he was referring to the hentakoi and kareau included in his donation when he described ‘a number of curios from the Nicobars, some of which are so novel that Mr E.H. Man, the authority on the subject, had never seen them before’.171 As he explained to the museum’s staff, ‘Others are of a kind not likely to have been sent home to any Museum’.172 Accordingly, the biographies of Nicobarese objects such as those currently at RPMBH were shaped by exchange processes central to the economic and political agenda of their Nicobarese producers or owners. The collections were either actively formed by the adding of authorized contributions, or negatively shaped by indigenous resistance to certain demands and a reasoned unwillingness to exchange specific objects.

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British Commissions as Nicobarese Identity and Heritage During British colonization of the Nicobar Islands, and particularly between 1869 and 1888 when a staffed settlement was maintained at Nancowry Harbour, British officials had the opportunity to engage directly with Nicobarese artisans and commission specific items for their collections. Throughout this period, should there be a particular item they specifically required, it seems that foreigners were able to request its special production, and also suggest physical amendments for their own practical reasons. These items would not be employed in the daily life or rituals of Nicobarese owners, and while some of these commissioned objects were produced using the same techniques and materials as standard articles, they could appear to be divorced from any indigenous meaning or significance. But these Nicobarese contributions to European museums and private collections cannot be seen as objects born purely of the colonial encounter, or as objects made meaningful only within a European framework. These ‘British’ commissions, although made at the request of British visitors and conceptually divorced from indigenous use value, can be linked to a wider set of well established Nicobarese practices relating to object production and foreign trade. Annie Coombes and Nicholas Thomas have stressed how moments of culture contact and their associated material outcomes are often highly contingent on complex cultural, economic and political infrastructures at a local level.173 Here, such ‘hybrid’ objects were specifically shaped by the historic Nicobarese practices of using and developing material culture to mark and contextualize contact with other nations. Similarly, it is the case that many of the specific requests made by foreign visitors were actually perfectly in tune with the cultural practices of the Nicobarese. As with ‘tourist art’ in the Andaman Islands, commissioned items which diverged from those objects ‘traditionally’ used by the Nicobarese must be acknowledged as one of the many re-formations and permutations expected of any dynamic, progressive society, but in the Nicobar Islands they also formed part of a long heritage in design and technology. As Officer in Charge of the Nicobar Islands for significant periods during his colonial service, Man amassed some of his objects through a process of commissioning, requesting specific types of objects to be made in order to fill the ‘gaps’ in his ‘comprehensive’ collecting programme.174 With certain items, the objects themselves suggest that he may also have stipulated alterations to the physical makeup of a required ‘specimen’ for practical purposes. In the case of a pair of coconut leaf skirts eventually donated to Brighton Museum, for example (Figure 1.2), he appears to have requested an unusual wrapping technique for ease of storage and transport: while images of similar, but unfolded skirts were recognized by a group of Nicobarese informants in conversation with Simron Jit Singh in 2002,175 members of the focus group conducted at Hitui village in March 2007 were unable to identify the folded and wrapped skirts at Brighton Museum.176 Similar skirts at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the British Museum are unwrapped or loosely bound

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Figure 1.2 Wrapped skirts, Nicobar Islands, c. 1885, coconut leaf, 223 mm × 85 mm and 130 mm × 100 mm. RPMBH, WA509361[R2483/2] and WA509360[R2483/1]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

with European string. The comparable strips of coconut leaf used to both make and wrap the skirts suggest that they were bound by the indigenous producer at the point of their manufacture, but given the enigmatic status of the objects today, on this occasion it may well be that this technique was a special request made by Man. Both Man and Temple also commissioned miniature versions of Nicobarese material culture, such as small canoes, houses and ritual items for transport to Europe.177 RPMBH has one such item, gifted by Temple in 1923. It consists of a diminutive example of a ritual bundle of wooden sticks, lashed together with a length of cane to form a cylinder (Figure 1.3). In its standard form (see Figure 1.4), the full-sized object would have been (and continues to be) produced by guests attending the funeral festival Tanoiny, where it is offered as a gift to the festival’s hosts and used as firewood. The care, time and difficulty expended to produce the large, neat and complex shape, irrespective of its imminent destruction, are seen as indicative of the respect and sadness felt by the guest over the family’s loss.178 At 170 mm in diameter, compared to the typical, larger object, the miniature bundle commissioned by Temple was of no specific indigenous use value.179

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Figure 1.3 Model of circular bundle of wood, Nicobar Islands, c. 1900, wood, cane, 170 mm × 40 mm. RPMBH, WA509398[R2468/2]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

Figure 1.4 E.H. Man, Photograph of Nicobarese group with a life-sized bundle of wood at Malacca village, Nancowry Harbour, Nicobar Islands, c. 1880, 115 mm × 187 mm. RPMBH, WA900328. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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Although these commissions might appear to have been instigated by interested British parties, or produced in response to a unique market specifically activated by the British presence on the islands, such objects must be placed in the context of other cases of Nicobarese creativity also generated by and created in response to cross-cultural contact. Centuries of trade relations and encounters with other cultures had already led to the development of a self-conscious creative framework within which Nicobarese artisans appropriated and engaged with the outside world. Traded articles such as iron and linen have been observed as fundamental

Figure 1.5 Hentakoi board, Nicobar Islands, c. 1850, wood, ink. British Museum, As1972,Q.2684 © Trustees of the British Museum.

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components of Nicobarese tools, weapons and clothes since the seventeenth century.180 Nicobarese artisans also incorporated their experiences of social and economic contact with non-Nicobarese peoples into the design of their hentakoi boards, etching European sailing ships, umbrellas, compasses and similar subjects into their work (see Figure 1.5 and Figure 1.6).181 Commissioned objects, such as the items ordered by Man and Temple, were not the only the creations to stem from foreign influences and they were not a unique, spontaneous outcome of the British colonial encounter. Rather, they can be seen as one of the many responses of Nicobarese artisans to ongoing alien presences. Moreover, miniaturization and model making were, of course, not foreign imports: George Whitehead noted how toy canoes were frequently used by the Nicobarese in racing across narrow bays, and Man included a miniature bow and arrow used as toys by Nicobarese children in his donation to the British Museum.182 Tuson’s donation to Brighton Museum includes an example of a model-sized kareau (Figure 1.7); whereas kareau were often life-sized, models were produced for indigenous use as toys or decoration in the home, or as practice during an artisan’s training.183 The various model objects exported by

Figure 1.6 Hentakoi board, Nicobar Islands, c. 1850, wood, ink. British Museum, As1897,1215.39 © Trustees of the British Museum.

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people like Man, Temple and Tuson, then, can also be seen as deriving from an established creative infrastructure which existed long before British agents made their requests.

Figure 1.7 Model of a kareau, Nicobar Islands, c. 1880, wood, paint, 235 mm × 90 mm. RPMBH, WA509402[R2467/4]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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Conclusions From the moment of their inception in either the Andaman or the Nicobar Islands, then, the biographies of the objects at the centre of this book were closely affected by the attitudes and actions of their producers and users. In both regions, the physical and conceptual composition of objects such as those now at RPMBH was intimately tied to the people who made and used them. In most cases their object biographies began at the hands and in the homes of Andamanese and Nicobarese individuals. The affective processes of production and use, however, were not the only ways in which the Andamanese and Nicobarese influenced the trajectories of these objects or indeed the meanings and interpretations that would be projected upon them during their biographies. On both the island groups, indigenous makers, consumers and other mediators greatly impacted upon the collecting process both in their facilitation and obstruction of exchange, and in their formulation and endorsement of particular contributions to specific projects. In both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands the objects were conceptualized in relation to specific circumstances of trade, but often made meaningful as cultural envoys traded in indigenous-led encounters. Collecting on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has been intimately associated with the destruction and devastation caused to the region’s indigenous populations by its colonizers. Much of the literature on the subject, including nineteenth-century writings of the individuals involved, has described the collections amassed in the nineteenth century as either colonial captives or saved mementos of two dying races. We cannot deny the suffering and discord of colonialism in either the Andaman or Nicobar Islands, nor the many occasions where Andamanese or Nicobarese objects were the equivalent of cultural hostages, stolen or appropriated by British visitors on their terms only. It is important, however, to seek to restore a balance to the popular conception of these transactions, documenting the agency, resistance and facilitation consistently executed by Andamanese and Nicobarese owners, artisans and traders. Objects such as the clay bowl from Chaura Island donated to Brighton Museum by Temple thus started their lives as integral parts of their makers’ societies. The trajectories of the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects donated by Man and Tuson began in a similar way. But these extraordinary objects would go on to find new spheres of influence at crucial points in their careers, influenced by the radically different perspectives of their colonial collectors. It is to this sphere that we must now turn.

Notes 1. The objects’ accession numbers are WA509344[R2468/41] and WA509414[R2129/8] respectively. I have chosen not to reproduce images of them here, given the potential sensitivities concerning their collection (see Chapter 2), and out of respect to their creator communities and the ancestors of the deceased.

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2. Pandya, In the Forest, 113–115. 3. From an interview with ‘Woi’, a member of the Oko-Jawai group of Middle Andaman, conducted by and transcribed in E.H. Man. 1882. ‘On the Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects Presented to Major-General Pitt Rivers’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 11, 280. See also contemporary trading events on Little Andaman in Pandya, Above the Forest, 13. 4. Vishvajit Pandya (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology), in an interview with the author, 16 October 2008. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Pandya, In the Forest, 135. 8. Globus of Hitui village, cited in S.J. Singh. 2001. ‘Winds over the Nicobars’, in G. Sen and A. Banerjee (eds), The Human Landscape, Delhi: Orient Longman, 128. Approximately thirteen sets of these vessels were donated to Brighton Museum in 1923. Today, following an evacuation of the collections during the Second World War (see Chapter 4), three of them remain (WA509405[R2468/4]; WA509406[R2468/4]; WA509407[R2468/4]). 9. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 85. 10. N.K. Symachaudhuri. 1977. The Social Structure of Car Nicobar Islanders: An Ethnic Study of Cognation, Calcutta: Anthropological Survey of India, 32; Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 96 and 143–148. RPMBH have a selection of these objects donated by Katharine Tuson in 1923: these include one kareau (WA509408[R2467/2]) and eight hentakoi (WA509307[R2467/1], see Figure I.1; WA509391[1][R2467/7]; WA509391[2][R2467/7]; WA509391[3][R2467/7]; WA509391[4][R2467/7]; WA509391[5][R2467/7]; WA509403[R2467/8]; WA509395[R2467/9]). Another hentakoi (R2467/5) was originally donated, but is now missing (see object on the far right of Figure 4.8). 11. Such items in the collections at RPMBH include a brush (WA509362[R2468/93]), two skirts (WA509360[R2483/1] and WA509361[R2483/2], see Figure 1.2) and a fighting hat (WA509370[R2468/10]). 12. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 297. However, clay pots are occasionally made for particular festivals (Simron Jit Singh (Institute of Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt), in an interview with the author, Brighton, 08.09.2008). See E.H. Man. 1894. ‘Nicobar Pottery’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 23, 22 for details regarding the increased preference for imported utensils, even by 1894. 13 Man, ‘Nicobar Pottery’, 22–25. Despite the difficulties of relying on his ethnographic writings (see Chapter 2), at some point during the his many tours of duty or during his more extended periods as Officer in Charge of the Nicobars between 1879 and 1880, and in 1883 and 1888, Man was given the unique opportunity of observing this now little known process. His detailed examination of the production of Chaura pottery is one of his more thorough and well qualified articles on Nicobarese material culture. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. In comparison, Chaura pots at the British Museum (As1936,0720.298) and at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (E1936.780) can be attributed to the same maker, not only through their donor (Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, 1880–1944), but by the identical incisions on their rims. 16. See Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 147–148, for a wider history of trade in and with the Nicobar Islands.

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17. Man, ‘Nicobar Pottery’, 26–27. The objects themselves suggest otherwise: Man donated sets of four (rather than five), complete with the fibre frame which would have bound them together, to UCMAE and the British Museum. Similarly Temple donated a set of four tafal to RPMBH, but three have since been disposed of. We will examine the circumstances of the separation of this particular set in later stages of their object biographies. 18. Man, ‘Nicobar Pottery’, 27. 19 Ibid., 23, and Father Sylvanus, of Chaura Island, cited in Singh, ‘Ethnographic Objects’, 22. 20. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 147. 21. Man, The Nicobar Islands and their People, 33. 22. G. Whitehead. 1924. In the Nicobar Islands: The Record of a Lengthy Sojourn in Islands of Sunshine & Palms amongst a People Primitive in their Habit & Beliefs & Simple in their Manner of Living, with a Description of their Customs & Religious Ceremonies & an Account of their Superstitions, Traditions & Folk-lore, London: Seeley, Service and Co., 18. George Whitehead was a missionary based on the Nicobar Islands between 1912 and 1914, and 1916 and 1921. 23. See C. Boden Kloss. 1903. In the Andamans and Nicobars: The Narrative of a Cruise in the Schooner “Terrapin”, with Notices of the Islands, their Fauna, Ethnology, etc., London: John Murray, 106, and R.C. Temple. [1909] 1994. Imperial Gazetteer of India Provincial Series: Andaman and Nicobar, New Delhi: Asian Educational Services, 41. 24. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 146. 25. Man, The Nicobar Islands and their People, 138–139. 26. C. Tilley. 2005. ‘Introduction’, in C. Tilley (ed.), Handbook of Material Culture, London: Sage, 4. 27. This has particularly been the case with discussions of Man’s collecting practices and his apparent reliance on the anthropology establishment’s advisory booklet for travellers, Notes and Queries. See, for example, E. Edwards. 1992. ‘Science Visualized: E.H. Man in the Andaman Islands’, in E. Edwards (ed.), Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, London: Yale University Press and Royal Anthropological Society; Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’; A. Petch. 2007. ‘Notes and Queries and the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Museum Anthropology, 30(1), 27. See also elements of my own discussion of Richard Carnac Temple’s collecting practices in C. Wintle. 2008. ‘Career Development: Domestic Display as Imperial, Anthropological, and Social Trophy’, Victorian Studies, 50(2), 279–288. 28. B. Cohn. 1996. Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 5. 29. M.V. Portman. 1899. A History of our Relations with the Andamanese: Compiled from Histories and Travels, and from the Records of the Government of India, Vol. I, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 186, and L.P. Mathur. 1968. History of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 1756–1966, Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 69. 30. Report from the Andaman Committee addressed to C. Beadon, Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, reprinted in Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. I, 233–234. 31. Request from the Government of India for ‘ethnology and forest products of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands … [for] the London Exhibition of 1886’ recorded in, ‘Museums and Exhibitions’, Proceedings Revenue, June, 1885, P/2528, 10. Throughout the British Empire, most commissioners of international exhibitions relied on government networks

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32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

42.

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to enhance exhibits sent by businesses, although private collectors were also engaged; this was particularly so in India. In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, however, the export of material for such exhibitions seems to have been particularly dominated by the colonial state. This was arguably due to the monopoly that the government had over trade in the region: collectors on the islands, especially in the nineteenth century, tended to be government employees, as few tourists ventured to the archipelago and the missionary presence was negligible; major business opportunities such as the lucrative deforestation programme there were also managed by the government. See Portman’s A History of our Relations with the Andamanese repeatedly noted in Proceedings Home, September 1900, P/5881; his dispatching of the collection of objects for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition recorded in the ‘Report on the Andaman Home for August, 1885’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1885, P/2446, 75; and Man’s shipment of Nicobarese collections to the British Museum, the Oxford Museum, and the Imperial and Royal Museum of the Court at Vienna, as noted in the ‘Report of the Nicobar Settlement for the Month of May, 1887’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1887, P/2829, 34. R.C. Temple. 1904. ‘On the Practical Value of Anthropology’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 11, 231. This message was broadly repeated in various other presentations he gave elsewhere: R.C. Temple. 1914. Anthropology as a Practical Science: Addresses Delivered at Meetings in Birmingham, Cambridge and Oxford, London: G. Bell. See Chapter 2 for further details. L. Schumaker. 2001. Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 7. D. Haynes and G. Prakash. 1991. ‘Introduction: The Entanglement of Power and Resistance’, in D. Haynes and G. Prakash (eds), Contesting Power: Resistance and Everyday Social Relations in South Asia, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 18. Ibid., 12. M.W. Douglas, Superintendent of Port Blair, in correspondence to the Secretary of the Government of India, 6 February 1918, Proceedings Home, February 1918, No. 47, P/10368, 53. M. O’Hanlon. 1993. Paradise: Portraying the New Guinea Highlands, London: British Museum Press, 12. The concept of collections as ‘envoys’ is also borrowed from O’Hanlon. See also C. Knowles. 2011. ‘“Objects as Ambassadors”: Representing the Nation through Museum Exhibitions’, in S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison and R. Torrence (eds), Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, New York: Springer, 231–247. S. Küchler. 1997. ‘Sacrificial Economy and its Objects: Rethinking Colonial Collecting in Oceania’, Journal of Material Culture, 2(1), 39–60, cited in M. O’Hanlon. 2000. ‘Introduction’, in M. O’Hanlon and R. Welsch (eds), Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency, 1870s–1930s, New York: Berghahn, 3. D. Chakrabarty. 1992. ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’ Representations, 37, 8. These reports, as detailed in the Proceedings of the Superintendent of Port Blair and the Nicobars (hereafter ‘Proceedings Port Blair’) held in the Asia, Pacific and Africa collections at the British Library, are also entitled ‘Reports on the Andamanese’ and, from 1894, ‘Reports on the Andamanese Department’. See, for example, S. Coxon. 1915. And That Reminds Me: Being Incidents of a Life Spent at Sea and in the Andaman Islands, Burma, Australia, and India, London: John Lane;

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43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

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V. Talbot Clifton. 1911. Pilgrim to the Isles of Penance: Orchid Gathering in the East, London: John Long Limited, and other references used throughout. The phrase is from O’Hanlon, Paradise, 12. See also R. Torrence. 2000. ‘Just Another Trader? An Archaeological Perspective on European Barter with Admiralty Islanders, Papua New Guinea’, in R. Torrence and A. Clarke (eds), The Archaeology of Difference: Negotiating Cross-cultural Engagements in Oceania, London: Routledge, 104–141 and S.M. Davies. 2011. ‘Plumes, Pipes and Valuables: The Papuan Artefact-trade in Southwest New Guinea, 1845–1888’, in S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison and R. Torrence (eds), Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, New York: Springer, 83–115, for particularly interesting methodologies which use material-culture led research to reframe trading relations. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 17. See also T. Richards. 1993. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire, London: Verso, 4–6. On the academic context of scholarship by Man and Radcliffe-Brown see Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’. R. Guha. 1983. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 15; G. Spivak. [1997] 2006. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge Classics, 279–280; B. Parry. 1987. ‘Problems in Current Discourse Theory’, Oxford Literary Review, 9, 27–58; G. Spivak. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, London: Macmillan. Spivak, In Other Worlds, 285. See those made by Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 24–29; Pandya, In the Forest, 20; Wintle, ‘Objects, Images, Imaginings’, 151, and C. Anderson. 2011. ‘Writing Indigenous Women’s Lives in the Bay of Bengal: Cultures of Empire in the Andaman Islands, 1789–1906’, Journal of Social History, 45(2), 480–496. Spivak, In Other Worlds, 287. N. Thomas. 2000. ‘Epilogue’, in M. O’Hanlon and R. Welsch (eds), Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870–1930s, New York: Berghahn, 276. R.C. Tytler, Superintendent of Port Blair, 1862–1864, cited in Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. I, 381. ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for July, 1895’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1895, P/4725, 56; ‘Report on the Andaman Home for June, 1887’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1887, P/2898, 50. D.M. Stewart, Chief Commissioner of the Andamans and Nicobars, 1872–1875, cited in M.V. Portman. 1899. A History of our Relations with the Andamanese: Compiled from Histories and Travels, and from the Records of the Government of India, Vol. II, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 590. J.N. Homfray cited in ibid., 550. Edward Horace Man instigated the adoption of Western clothes in 1876 (ibid., 606); the teaching of English was instigated under Henry Corbyn in 1863, but had been condemned by Portman by 1899 (ibid., 377–378). The reliable, consistent supply of food was apparently one of the most enduring reasons for Andamanese attendance at the homes. The use of grain as a supplement to their regular diet is particularly referenced as having occurred under Homfray’s care (B. Ford cited in ibid., 540) but was probably a constant throughout the British period.

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56. S. Sen. 2000. Disciplining Punishment: Colonialism and Convict Society in the Andaman Islands, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 151–157. 57. Cited in Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 564. 58. Man lists these products in ‘Appendix N’ of Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, 216. See Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, chapter 4, for an analysis of how the relationship between work and the rhetoric of civilization shifted subtly during the second half of the nineteenth century. Eventually, it was considered that the Andamanese could not be ‘civilized’ and therefore hard labour, especially agriculture, was stopped. The production of indigenous manufactures for sale continued throughout this time, however. 59. ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for January, 1875’, Proceedings Revenue, 1875, P/528, 27. 60. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 601. 61. Clifton, Pilgrim to the Isles of Penance, 86. In her travel memoirs, Rosamund Park describes the site as a ‘museum’ which displayed the ‘poisoned arrows and spears’ of the Jarawa ‘with one of which a policeman was killed’. R. Park. 1916. Recollections and Red Letter Days: Being the Sojournings of Two Pilgrims in the East, privately printed, 56. 62. For example, ‘Andaman Home Report for August 1878’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1878, P/1144, 37. Man published a chart of the profits in his On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, 216. For an example of these models see the miniature outrigger canoe sent by Man to Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers in 1879 and now at the Pitt Rivers Museum (1884.54.55). 63. ‘Andaman Home Report for August 1878’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1878, P/1144, 37. 64. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 700. 65. Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, 20 and 68. 66. See D. Tomas. 1987. ‘An Ethnography of the Eye: Authority, Observation, and Photography in the Context of British Anthropology 1839–1990’, unpublished doctoral thesis, Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 299–300; Venkateswar, Development and Ethnocide, 102, and Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 232–234. 67. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 597. 68. See S. Sen. 1999. ‘Policing the Savage: Segregation, Labor and State Medicine in the Andamans’, Journal of Asian Studies, 58(3), 753–773 on the ‘pathetically inadequate and irrelevant’ (763) level of British control over the indigenous population, and how the ‘Andamanese tended to drift in and out of the grip of the state’ (765) during British occupation. 69. Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’, 81. 70. ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for February, 1897’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1897, P/5155, 178. 71. Vishvajit Pandya (Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology), in an interview with the author, 26 September 2008. Pandya’s Ongee informants have explained that after the British visited Little Andaman Island with their Great Andamanese ‘assistants’ in the late nineteenth century, they no longer produced ornaments such as those made with human skulls. This was in order to assert their distinctiveness from the Great Andamanese who were seen as co-opted by British colonial administrators. 72. R.C. Temple. 1930. Remarks on the Andaman Islanders and their Country, Bombay: British India Press, 62. 73. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 19.

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74. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 700. 75. V. Pandya. 2005. ‘Deforesting amongst Andamanese Children: Political Economy and History of Schooling’, in B. Hewlett and M. Lamb (eds), Hunter-Gatherer Childhoods: Evolutionary, Developmental, and Cultural Perspectives, New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine Transaction, 395–396. 76. Sen, Disciplining Punishment, 157. 77. This form of resistance is similar to that identified in the behaviours, traditions and consciousness of the subordinate in J. Scott. 1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, New Haven: Yale University Press. 78. D. Gauntlett. 2007. Creative Explorations: New Approaches to Identities and Audiences, London: Routledge, 19. Here, I draw on Gauntlett’s broad definition of creativity which involves the ‘physical making of something, leading to some form of communication, expression or revelation’ (ibid., 25). 79. E.g., D. Gauntlett. 2011. Making Is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to Youtube and Web 2.0, London: Polity; A. Harrison. 1978. Making and Thinking: A Study of Intelligent Activities, Hassocks: Harvester Press. 80. Tomas, ‘An Ethnography of the Eye’, 299. 81. Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, 216. 82. E.g., A. Thomson. 1881. ‘Description of Andamanese Bone Necklaces’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 11, 304. 83. In 1899, it was noted that arrows were produced and kept in the ‘Home Godowns for sale as curiosities’ in ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for January 1899’, Proceedings of the Superintendent of Port Blair and the Nicobars, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, British Library, 1899, P/5616, 171. 84. On Nelson Graburn’s scale of the ‘arts of acculturation’, this stage of production is termed ‘commercial fine arts’, where objects are for sale, but still culturally embedded (N. Graburn. 1976. ‘Introduction: The Arts of the Fourth World’, in N. Graburn (ed.), Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 5–7). 85. See for example, Oscar Mallitte’s photograph of ‘John Andaman’, a South Andamanese man kidnapped in 1858, pictured with a basket and bow (amongst other items), both of which compare directly with baskets donated by Temple to Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in 1892 and South Andaman bows donated to Brighton in 1923 by Temple (but collected between 1894 and 1904) (the photographs are in the Royal Collection and are reproduced in C. Anderson. 2009. ‘Oscar Mallitte’s Andaman Photographs, 1857–8,’ History Workshop Journal, 67(1), 160). See also a South Andamanese waist ornament donated to Kew, via the Huntarian Museum in Glasgow in 1877, compared to similar objects again collected by Temple after 1894 and now at Brighton Museum. See also comparisons between Man’s first gift to Pitt Rivers in 1878 and later collections donated to Brighton Museum, amongst others. 86. See, for example, WA509343[R2468/47]; WA509337[R2468/45]; WA509336 [R2468/44]. See C. Wintle. forthcoming. ‘Negotiating the Colonial Encounter: Making and Trading Objects for Export in the Andaman Islands, 1858–1949’, in J. Helland, B. Lemire and A. Buis (eds), Craft, Community and the Material Culture of Place and Politics, 19th-20th Century, Farnham, Ashgate for further comparative analysis. 87. See Pandya, Above the Forest, 130; Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 323. 88. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 195. 89. Pandya, Above the Forest, 255.

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90. R. Sennett. 2006. The Craftsman, London: Allen Lane, 8; C. Tilley, ‘Introduction’, 61. 91. Cited in Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 597. 92. V. Ball. 1874. ‘Visit to the Andamanese “Home,” Port Blair, Andaman Islands’, Indian Antiquary, 3, 171. 93. See Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 47 for details of the roles women played in community relations. Clare Anderson has also described Andamanese challenges to internment in the homes and other British attempts to ‘civilise and instruct’ in C. Anderson. 2011. ‘Colonization, Kidnap and Confinement in the Andamans Penal Colony, 1771–1864’, Journal of Historical Geography, 37, 79. 94. Ball, ‘Visit to the Andamanese “Home”’, 171–172. 95. Tomas, ‘An Ethnography of the Eye’, 299. 96. See, for example, D. McDougall. 2006. ‘How a “Stone Age” Tribe is Keeping the Modern World at Bay’, The Week, 18 February, and Mukerjee, The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders. 97. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 122. 98. See Pandya, In the Forest, 117 and 151–199. 99. R.B. Phillips. 1998. Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700–1900, Seattle and Montreal: University of Washington Press and McGill-Queen’s University Press, 17. In turn, Phillips draws on M.L. Pratt. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge. 100. See, for example, a visit to the Calcutta Exhibition in January 1884, documented in ‘Report on the Andaman Home for January, 1884’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1884, P/2197, 143, and a visit to the Asiatic Society’s Museum in mid-October 1863, referenced in Anderson, ‘Writing Indigenous Women’s Lives in the Bay of Bengal’, 485. 101. ‘Report on the Andamanese for February, 1893’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1893, P/4322, 224. 102. ‘Report on the Andamanese for June, 1890’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1890, P/3625, 52. 103. It is suggested that all those objects not specifically labelled ‘Onge’, ‘Jarawa’, or ‘Little Andaman’ (the Ongee homeland) would have been produced by the Great Andamanese (in most colonial literature, members of the once-disparate Great Andamanese communities are typically referred to as ‘Andamanese’ by default). 104. The Battle of Aberdeen, which took place on 14 May 1858, is perhaps the most notable of these events: this collision, and others which took place around the same time, involved organized Andamanese attacks on the British Settlements around Port Blair. High levels of fatalities amongst the Andamanese were rumoured. 105. It should be noted that this section refers only to some of the ‘Great Andamanese’ groups: the Ang and Sentinelese refused to engage with the British during the entirety of their occupation, and the Ongee community only broke their direct hostility in 1886 (Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 813). 106. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. I, 299. 107. See, among the many examples, J.N. Homfray, ‘Andaman Home Report for May 1873’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1873, P/527, 418; Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 550. 108. It was common practice for groups of Andamanese men and women to accompany British officers on trips around the islands, but, by way of example, sixteen Andamanese men were selected to accompany three British officers, their servants and a police constable on a mission to search for Ang encampments in the South Andaman jungle in February 1901. During the mission they advised officers on locating the camps,

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109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

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facilitated raids by providing information on likely Ang conduct, and took part in the attacks on these camps (see Temple, Remarks on the Andaman Islanders, 92–121). Sen (‘Policing the Savage’, 766) has referred to this working relationship as ‘assistance from the margins’, accurately stressing that this ‘casual economic relationship … did not involve any acceptance by the Andamanese of the social and political hegemony of the settlement’. See also Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 13. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 704. Ibid. R. Kelly. 2000. Warless Societies and the Origin of War, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 89. ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for March, 1895’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1895, P/4725, 192. Ibid. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 718. ‘Andaman Home Report, November 1879’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1879, P/1292, 163. See several Ang bows and adzes in the collections of RPMBH, collected between 1894 and 1904 and donated in 1923: R2468/51 (now destroyed, see Chapter 4); WA509630[R2468/51]; WA509426[R2468/36]; WA509427[R2468/36]; WA509428[R2468/36]; WA509429[R2468/36]; WA509430[R2468/36]. Thomas, Entangled Objects, 19. ‘Andaman Home Report, December 1879’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1879, P/1292, 171. Ibid. Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, 109 and 118. See, for example, the experiences of Mrs Violet Talbot Clifton in Pilgrim to the Isles of Penance; Coxon, And That Reminds Me; and V. Ball. 1880. Jungle Life in India, or the Journeys and Journals of an Indian Geologist, London: Thos. de la Rue & Co. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 546–547. Ibid., 540 and 586. Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade, 89. Ibid., 90. ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for November, 1902’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1902, P/6321, 120–121. ‘Andaman Home Report, December, 1881’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1881, P/1604, 125. See, for example, ‘Report on the Andamanese for November, 1892’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1892, P/4088, 124, and ‘Report on the Andamanese Department, December, 1901’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1901, P/5849, 142. Pandya has made similar claims with regards to the Ongee and Ang in more recent trade situations. In the Forest, chapters 2 and 5. ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for November, 1902’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1902, P/6321, 121. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 237. Ibid., 81. Mauss, The Gift, 25. Pandya, Above the Forest, 276. See the overt maltreatment of the Jarawa, who continually refused to engage in any relationship with the British, either through personal contact or material exchange (for

Production, Use, Exchange

137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

146. 147. 148.

149. 150. 151. 152. 153.

154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

160. 161. 162. 163.

55

a particularly instructive case study, see details of attacks against the Jarawa and their country in February 1902 in Temple, ‘Andaman and Nicobar Islands’, 92–121). Clifton in Pilgrim to the Isles of Penance, 165. Ball, Jungle Life in India, 366–367. Mukerjee, The Land of Naked People, 69. Donated in March 1920: WA509413[R2129/1]. Cited in Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. I, 411. Clifton in Pilgrim to the Isles of Penance, 165. Ball, Jungle Life in India, 366. Cited in Pandya, Above the Forest, 244. See Pandya, In the Forest, 29–70, for more on Ongee conceptualization of contact today. See for example, Ian Tattersall, author of Extinct Humans and curator of physical anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, who describes the Andamanese as ‘a people who never stood a chance’ (cited on the back cover of Mukerjee, The Land of Naked People). On the ‘discourse of extinction’ surrounding the Andamanese, see Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, Chapter 1. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 131–133. Ibid., 136. Ibid., 307. Unfortunately, by the early twentieth century, these mutually successful trading relations had deteriorated, leading to a devastating level of Nicobarese debt (see Singh, In the Sea of Influence, Chapter 7). Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 148. These ‘headmen’ are also referred to as ‘captains’. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 307. Ibid., 303–307. Ibid., 91. C.B. Kloss. 1903. In the Andamans and Nicobars: The Narrative of a Cruise in the Schooner “Terrapin”, with Notices of the Islands, their Fauna, Ethnology, etc., London: John Murray, 88–89. Ibid., 116. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 92 and 209. Whitehead, In the Nicobar Islands, 50. Kloss, In the Andamans and Nicobars, 85. See Singh, The Nicobar Islands, 171. See Ruth B. Phillips’ discussion of the influence of ‘Native agents’ as collectors in North America, in R.B. Phillips. 1995. ‘Why Not Tourist Art? Significant Silences in Native American Museum Representation’, in G. Prakash (ed.), After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, Princeton: Princeton University Press, and the acknowledgement of the status of Kwakiutl George Hunt as a major collaborator in the formation of Franz Boas’ and other significant North American collections in the American Museum of Natural History’s exhibition, Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch (1991), reviewed in J. Berlo and R.B. Phillips. 1992. ‘“Vitalizing the Things of the Past”: Museum Representations of Native North American Art in the 1990s’, Museum Anthropology, 16(1), 29–43. Ball, Jungle Life in India, 377. Ibid., 197. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 374.

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164. Correspondence from A.W. Franks to A.F. Man, 18 February 1889, and correspondence from E.H. Man to A.W. Franks, 12 April 1888, APEBM. 165. E.H. Man. 1887. ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands Presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, handwritten manuscript held at the British Museum, 15. 166. Correspondence from L. Serrurier to E.H. Man, 5 May 1890, Rijksmuseum voor Volkekunde, Leiden, ARA-201-93. 167. Correspondence from H. Balfour to E.H. Man, 11 February 1897, ACHL. 168. Singh, The Nicobar Islands, 144–147, and Simron Jit Singh (Institute of Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt), in an interview with the author, 8 September 2008. 169. See, for example, comments made in Ball, Jungle Life in India, 378. 170. Ibid., 387. 171. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to C.H. Read, 31 July 1897, APEBM. 172. Ibid. 173. A. Coombes. 1994. ‘The Recalcitrant Object: Hybridity and the Question of Culturecontact’, in F. Barker, P. Hulme and M. Iversen (eds), Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 111; N. Thomas. 1999. Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture, London: Thames and Hudson, 8. 174. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 148, and see Chapter 2 of this book. 175. Yehad and Hatsokngori, Malacca village, Nancowry Island, and Mark Paul, Champin village, Nancowry Island, cited in Singh, Ethnographic Objects from the Nicobars. 176. Hitui village focus group in communication with Simron Jit Singh, 29 March 2007. 177. See the model hut (As1887,1015.1), canoe (As1887,1015.2) and many similar items donated to the British Museum by Man in 1887, and Temple’s model house (As1897,1215.40) and canoe (As1897,1215.41), again at the British Museum. 178. Hitui village focus group in communication with Simron Jit Singh, 29 March 2007, see also Man, ‘Descriptive Catalogue’, 136. 179. Hitui village focus group in communication with Simron Jit Singh, 29 March 2007. 180. Singh, In the Sea of Influence, 301. 181. Ibid. 182. Whitehead, In the Nicobar Islands, 61. At the British Museum see As1887,1015.32.a and As1887,1015.32.b. 183. Hitui village focus group in communication with Simron Jit Singh, 29 March 2007.

Chapter 2

Colonial Perspectives on Material Culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands There are currently two sets of Great Andamanese body ornaments in the collections at RPMBH. They were both collected around the same time, in the years around 1900, and made in similar social contexts by Great Andamanese women from looped layered or bound strips of pandanus leaf. Despite this common origin, today the objects can easily be divided into two separate categories: while the first group of belts and bands are largely pristine (see, for example, Figure 4.3), and show little sign of use or handling, either in the Andaman Islands or in later stages of their lives, the others have distinctive physical characteristics which hint at more lively careers. Significantly, some of these body adornments have been neatly pierced at one point in the belt, so that a hole of approximately four millimetres in diameter ruptures the smooth continuity of the loop (see Figure 2.1); others are damaged, the loops ripped from their once-secure fastenings. On each of these objects a thick strip of dust is now affixed to a discreet section of the inside circumference of the belt.1 These material irregularities could be perceived as minor alterations, but what can they reveal about the trajectories of these objects, and the significance they evoked at certain points in their lives? How does the changed materiality of these objects unveil the relationships they forged with the people they encountered, and their roles in imperial histories of collection and display? Edward Horace Man, Richard Carnac Temple and Katharine Sara Tuson each collected and transported Andamanese waistbelts from the Andaman Islands to the UK in the first years of the twentieth century. The basic structure of these objects reveals the vagaries of their creation – in some cases the neat incisions on the outer layer of pandanus and the clay decoration and shell appendages reveal the innovation and creativity of their makers and their divergent uses in ceremony or the everyday (see Figure 2.5 below) – but their erosions, alterations and surface patinas also disclose hints of their histories after this point, and the different lives and perspectives of their British owners. We know from a photograph buried in

Figure 2.1 Pair of waistbelts, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, pandanus leaf, plant fibre, a: 600 mm × 240 mm; b: 600 mm × 260 mm, with nail holes and dust gathered in Temple’s home while on display. RPMBH, WA509357[R2468/43]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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the archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum (Figure 2.11 below) that at some point after his return from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Temple displayed his set of body adornments in the anteroom of his ancestral home in Worcestershire, but the objects themselves tell us that some were displayed using large nails, and all remained in situ for some time – long enough to acquire the dusty residue of everyday life. Their physical properties also indicate that they were not necessarily allocated a great deal of attention by those who cleaned the house. Conversely, Man’s perfect objects allow us to speculate about the trajectories and use of his objects: were they carefully packed away in storage, meant for the eyes of experts only? In a different way, compared to the generous donations of Man and Temple, the singularity of Tuson’s lone waistbelt, donated with just one necklace (to the Horniman Museum rather than RPMBH), betrays the constraint of her collecting patterns. The limited range of her collection, both at the Horniman and at RPMBH, hints at the comparatively subtle interest she seems to have had in engaging with material culture and museums. Indeed, as these objects suggest, Man, Temple and Tuson had complex and various relationships with both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and colonial collecting and display. Those who came into contact with the islands during their working lives were a heterogeneous group; a closer investigation of these three collectors and the trajectories of their objects will reveal much about the diversity of British experience of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, of imperialism and of colonial culture.

Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Postcolonial studies has long been concerned with the deconstruction of imperial power relations: increasingly, established histories of imperial dominance have been contextualized and tempered with a sustained analysis of the choices and discourses affected by colonized subjects. More recently, however, questions over the natural and immutable category of the ‘colonizer’ have also been raised. Douglas Lorimer, for example, has warned of a risk of ‘colonizing the Victorians’ themselves, cautioning against the development of a postcolonial discourse in which the Victorians are specifically drawn as our ‘others’, each positioned as advocates of a stereotypical, homogeneous approach to the wider world and its peoples.2 The unity and coherence of the colonial state has been challenged, with a singular colonizing identity now recognized as ‘divided by the strategic interests and differing visions of the civilizing mission’.3 Similarly, in object and collecting theory, there has been a gradual reassessment of the seemingly reductive and generalizing literature which has sought to define the ‘collector’ as a neatly classifiable or common type of person. Whereas theorists such as Susan Pearce have described a ‘classic modernist’ collecting paradigm, rooted in measurement, distinction and classification,4 more recently, calls have been made to examine the complex, personal motivations underlying

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individual collectors’ actions, and to problematize the relationships between a collection, the collector’s other creative endeavours, and their worldview.5 Collecting individuals can be ‘typical’ of their time, or even nationality, but ‘there is no “average collector”’;6 it may be argued that the processes of ownership and possession are too personal to be categorized or reduced to specific models or practices. For instance, particular social and economic relationships between individual makers and collectors impact on collecting practices in specific ways: regular customers or knowledgeable consumers may have different levels of access to objects compared to impulse buyers or tourists, for example. As Chris Gosden and Frances Larson have suggested, certain types of objects attract certain collectors in individual and personalized ways.7 The cultural milieu and intellectual agendas of broad collecting communities may often be the same,8 but even these broad frameworks are subject to individual interpretation. Any act of object selection and retention requires personal, specific and extended consideration at an individual level;9 in as much as the particular choices, juxtapositions and interpretations imbued in all collections reflect the individual personalities, preferences and opportunities of their makers, collecting can be seen to be a highly personalized activity. Indeed, it is possible to complicate earlier, neatly defined categories of collecting by introducing and analysing the collecting practices of three important, disparate individuals who selected, amalgamated and retained material collections during their careers in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the late nineteenth century. Man, Temple and Tuson all collected at approximately the same time and in the same place, but worked to very different agendas and schemata: the biographies of their collections directly challenge the notions of a monolithic colonial regime and a unitary collecting project. Following the Government of India’s second attempt at the colonization of the Andaman Islands in 1858, a sizable British presence grew up on South Andaman around Port Blair, and, between 1869 and 1888, a small, subsidiary penal settlement was located at Nancowry Harbour on Kamorta Island in the Nicobars. As Chapter 1 has identified, this new British presence on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands facilitated unprecedented levels of engagement between the indigenous groups of the region and outsiders. Throughout this period, substantial resources were employed in establishing contact and managing Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples, and although large portions of the indigenous populations existed outside a British sphere of influence during this time, regular expeditions around both island groups, the developing institution of the Andaman ‘homes’, and trade relations between the British and the Nicobarese brought representatives of the different cultural factions into regular communication. These new, direct connections also brought the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples to the attention of the European anthropological community and provided an unparalleled opportunity for information and insight about their lives to be gathered. For social evolutionists in the metropole, it was possible for

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all historical and contemporary human cultures to be positioned on a universal hierarchy of social ‘progress’, beginning in ‘savagery’, passing through ‘barbarism’ and culminating in an industrialized, secular ‘civilisation’ (typically reflecting Anglo-American middle-class values and traditions).10 Given this developmental process, analysis of the ‘modern savage’ was considered particularly useful in understanding the ‘early condition’ or the roots of ‘higher’ European societies.11 In this context, and because they were judged by some as ‘perhaps the most primitive, or lowest in the scale of civilization of the human race’,12 reports and examples of the physiognomy, language and social systems of the Andamanese, in particular, became highly sought after. Their perceived position at the very extreme of the imagined evolutionary scale of human development, combined with their assumed isolation from external influence for ‘hundreds, perhaps thousands of years’,13 made anthropological study of the Andamanese integral to the development and verification of such theories: here, apparently, was firm evidence of the early condition of mankind and living proof that Europeans were further advanced along a hierarchical scale of evolution.14 Similarly, the Nicobarese peoples, whilst marked out as culturally and ethnohistorically separate from the Andamanese within both the colonial archive and anthropological literature, were also seen to provide useful information regarding evolutionary developments, although at a ‘higher’ level. Within this framework, material culture was widely presented and particularly sought after as ‘the key’ for demonstrating evolutionary progress and gradualism.15 Key figures such as A.H. Lane Fox Pitt Rivers and Edward Burnett Tylor argued that objects could be physically arranged according to the perceived ‘simplicity’ or ‘complexity’ of their formal or functional qualities; the position of an object in the resulting sequence would indicate the intellectual, economic and cultural development of its producer. Apparently impervious to physical decay and comparable across centuries, objects were particularly useful in facilitating the comparison and even association of previously unlinked and geographically diverse societies.16 By plotting material culture in this way, it would be possible to ascertain both ‘the sequence of ideas by which mankind has advanced from the condition of the lower animals’ and the geographical trajectory through which humanity had journeyed.17 Objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were thus extremely well received by prominent members of the European anthropological community. There was also a severe sense of urgency within this project: after several years of formal contact with a European presence, the dramatic reduction in the population of the Andamanese and the alleged ‘acculturation’ of both the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples and their material cultures ensured that any anthropological interest in the region was also firmly rooted within the wider ‘salvage ethnography’ paradigm of collecting.18 Many who acquired material from the islands saw the peoples that had produced these objects as ‘dying out’; collecting anthropologies and ‘samples’ of ‘traditional’ material culture free from ‘deleterious’ outsider influence (and the cultural dynamism of the Andamanese

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and Nicobarese peoples) was believed to be crucial if science was to ‘save’ the remnants of these societies for the European historical record.19 Despite the considerable amounts of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture held in repositories across Europe, North America and India, very little scholarship has critically assessed colonial collecting practices in the region. Conspicuously, in the assessments that have explored this theme, analysis of a collecting rationale on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has focused heavily upon the restricted context of this evolutionary framework and the ‘salvage’ paradigm.20 Amongst some curators of Andamanese and Nicobarese material, a perceived homogeneity of collecting still persists today.21 While the search for material with which to cement wider social evolutionary theories and the desire to document ‘traditional’ ways of life on the verge of extinction were important elements of the nineteenth-century attraction to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, we must extend current knowledge of collecting on the islands by exploring the wider diversity of European interest in the islands’ material cultures. There was no monolithic collecting agenda throughout the British Empire, or even in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands: as Chapter 1 has established, the inclinations of Andamanese and Nicobarese makers and traders, and the relationships they forged with individual collectors, problematized ‘European’ collections, ‘salvage’ or otherwise, from the outset. Here, collecting processes in the region will be further critiqued through an exploration of the impact of gender, class, profession and personality on the collecting preferences and opportunities of European actors. There are many under-researched cases in which members of the British colonial community actively engaged with indigenous material culture, both during the time they spent on the islands and in their retirement, but, led by the collections at RPMBH, and because they provide an excellent cross-section of the islands’ European population, Man, Temple and Tuson will be our focus.

Edward Horace Man: Scientific Collecting Revised Edward Horace Man was born in Singapore in 1846 to a middle-class colonial family with a mercantile and military background. He spent his entire career in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, taking on a range of duties including Officer in Charge of the Andamanese between 1875 and 1879, and Officer in Charge of the Nicobars, sporadically in 1871, 1872, 1874 and 1875, and for longer periods between 1879 and 1880, and 1883 and 1888. He eventually retired in 1901 having attained the role of Deputy Chief Commissioner. As a character, Man was apparently deeply religious and reserved.22 On his return to the UK he settled with his sister, Amy Frances Man (1853–1936), in Preston, Brighton. Man’s long career on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and particular professional duties while there, ensured that his contact with the indigenous populations was closer than many others. He was viewed by a number of his

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contemporaries as a sometime ‘expert’ on both the Andamanese and Nicobar populations and their material cultures,23 spending much of his time on the islands conducting research and publishing the fruits of his endeavours in a variety of the most respected anthropological forums of the day.24 Man collected and donated material culture prolifically throughout his life, furnishing museums in Leiden, Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden, Florence, Oxford, Cambridge, London (the British Museum, Kew Gardens), Halifax (now at Manchester), Edinburgh and Calcutta (Kolkata) with large, diverse collections from either the Andaman or Nicobar Islands. Nearly all his collecting activity seems to have centred on actual or perceived institutional requirements, with most museums receiving correspondence and donations directly from ‘the field’ and being in receipt of his objects almost as soon as they had been acquired. The collections at RPMBH form an anomaly to this pattern, for he donated eighty-two items of material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands to Brighton Museum in three instalments in 1916, 1920 and 1923, long after his retirement. Unusually, these gifts include items collected by someone other than Man himself (the 1920 donation included a set of objects taken in a raid on an Ang encampment in 1918, presumably forwarded from the Andaman Islands by an ex-colleague), and they also seem to comprise a variety of ‘left-overs’ from his career, the miscellaneous donations to Brighton Museum bearing none of the structure and breadth with which others have characterized his earlier donations elsewhere.25 Man was also a keen photographer, with some scientific pretensions, and many of his endeavours in this field were also donated to museums throughout Europe, including, eventually, Brighton Museum, which acquired three sets of photographs, again much later than his other beneficiaries, in 1921, 1923 and 1924. As later chapters will explore, it was civic ties and a life-long commitment to museum practice rather than the desire to fulfil specific institutional wish lists that motivated this final donation: having settled in Brighton he had grown close to the curatorial staff at the museum, and his local institution would have seemed like the natural repository for the final remnants of his life’s work. Of the three individuals considered here, Man is the most thoroughly documented to date: his photographic activities in particular have been well analysed in the work of Elizabeth Edwards, David Tomas and Vishvajit Pandya, while his collecting practices and approach to material culture have been briefly examined by Edwards and documented in detail by Zita van der Beek and Marcel Vellinga.26 In this literature, Man’s photographic and material donations have been presented as the ‘epitome’ of the social evolutionary and salvage ethnography paradigms detailed above.27 Much has been made of his systematic, ‘comprehensive’ collecting methodology and enthusiastic reliance on the common advisory handbook, Notes and Queries in Anthropology.28 Produced in the hope of gathering a range of data which would assist anthropologists in the UK ‘in tracing the connexions between the culture of different races and localities’,29 Notes and Queries was aimed at encouraging interested amateurs in the colonies to conduct ‘scientific’, systematic ethnographical research for

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dissemination in the metropole. While Man’s personal copy of the 1874 edition of this text had no entry on collecting objects (later editions did), his praise of Notes and Queries and his claims to have ‘worked almost entirely upon the lines therein laid down’,30 have led to speculation that the handbook is likely to have guided Man ‘into several areas that were productive not only of data but also of artifacts’.31 But while these basic assumptions about Man’s scientific and systematic aspirations must be acknowledged, a broader variety of more complex motivations can also be taken into account.

Edward Horace Man and Evolutionary Anthropology Influenced by his correspondence with particular theorists in Europe, such as General A.H. Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, and, it would seem, by the Notes and Queries volume, Man’s approach to collecting Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture was certainly inspired by social evolutionism.32 Man’s researches were used to progress such theories,33 but his personal adherence to the comparative evolutionary paradigm is also hinted at in the marginalia of his research notes; for example, where he made his own suggestions for relational interpretations, commenting on the similarities between a miàn-lōe (a three-pronged spear) from the Nicobar Islands and a spear in use in Malaysia.34 In a modest contribution to the charting of the ‘lowest’ levels of humanity, he pointedly attached an extract from a paper on the ‘Habits of the Native Tribes of Tasmania’35 as an appendix to his own ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands’ ‘for the purpose of illustrating the many points of striking similarity, both in physical constitution and in culture, between the extinct Tasmanians and the Andamanese’.36 His ‘salvage’ approach to the region’s material culture, exemplified in his aim to compile a ‘comprehensive’ picture of ‘traditional’ Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture, is also clearly visible throughout his collecting practices.37 Man’s desire to render his knowledge of the Andamanese and Nicobarese ‘as exhaustive as possible’38 is clear, and his institutional donations were described by his contemporaries as, as ‘complete as a European museum is likely to get’.39 He enthusiastically accepted the requests of his museum contacts to ‘complete the collection’40 and render the region’s collections ‘well represented’.41 Man’s commitment to the development of ‘comprehensive’ and ‘scientific’ museum collections is particularly illustrated in the form and content of the two detailed catalogues he produced to accompany his material collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands respectively. Clear in their aim to include a sample of every single type of Andamanese and Nicobarese object (but only those items deemed to be of ‘traditional’ use and suitably free from foreign influence),42 these long, incredibly detailed documents pay homage to his systematic approach to material culture, and his passion for descriptive practices and research. For his Andamanese collections, a catalogue entitled ‘List of Objects Made and Used by the Andamanese’ was published in 1883 as an appendix to

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his ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands’ in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute.43 Here, eighty-three objects were recorded, each being allocated a number, an ‘indigenous name’ and a description of form and use.44 Most entries also referred the reader to a visual representation of the object as produced elsewhere in the journal feature, and flagged up particular sections of the wider document when more details had been included. For the Nicobarese collections, a similar catalogue consisted of a fifty-two-page, hand-written volume, listing 147 objects ‘made & used at the Nicobar islands’ (see Figure 2.2 below).45 Each type of object was individually numbered, with different variations of an item described in subdivisions (e.g., 1a, 1b, 1c). Some entries were illustrated by the author’s own photographs, and descriptions were arranged over three columns, the first giving the ‘indigenous’ name of the object ‘in the central group dialect’,46 the second detailing a description of the item, and a third reserved for ‘Remarks’. A master copy was written and subsequently duplicated by hand for the purpose of accompanying various museum-bound collections. The document was eventually published in 1895 as ‘Descriptive Catalogue of Objects Made and Used by the Natives of the Nicobar Islands’ over the February, March, April and June editions of the Indian Antiquary journal. Providing a vast amount of data for the Victorian anthropologist or curator, the documents functioned in the manner of a modern-day mail-order catalogue, allowing Man’s museum contacts in Europe to select and pre-order items in relation to their existing collections. Man had asked Henry Balfour of the Pitt Rivers Museum, for example, ‘to note any objects mentioned in [his] Nicobar catalogue, which are not represented in this Museum’ and Balfour gratefully listed thirteen ‘desirable’ items,47 while O.M. Dalton at the British Museum responded to a similar request, using the catalogue to expand Man’s original Nicobar collection there.48 In this way, the catalogues not only embodied Man’s structured approach, but also facilitated his apparent aim to provide as complete a repository of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture in European museums as possible.

An Exact Science? Man, Indigenous Agency and Competitive Collecting Man’s dedication to the fashionable scientific approaches of his time, then, is undisputed. Although specific comparisons have not been made, Man’s reputation thus far seems to embody closely Susan Pearce’s definition of the ‘systematic collector’, whose methods are accorded an ‘intellectual primacy’ rooted in scientific reason and whose central aim is to ‘complete a set’.49 However, as suggested, his collecting practices were more complex than the secondary literature implies: we have already seen how the practicalities of Man’s deployment on the Nicobar Islands and indigenous agency worked to temper his success in creating ‘complete’, ‘comprehensive’ collections, but another challenge to this neatly defined, objective and ‘systematic’ method must also

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be acknowledged, found both buried in the archive and visible in the content of Man’s various collections. While Man has been portrayed as a selfless salvage ethnographer, motivated by guilt over his part in the ‘cultural extinction’ of his subjects,50 there is additional evidence to suggest that his collecting was also an attempt to court the praise of a cadre of senior figures at the centre of the UK’s scientific and anthropological communities, a pragmatic response to the pressures of competitive collecting in the region and, furthermore, an effort to develop his own institutionalized memorial. Throughout his career Man was the recipient of some high praise from a number of the most prominent scientific men of his day. His colleague, Maurice Vidal Portman, termed Man ‘the [Anthropological] Institute’s pet’,51 and indeed the society’s meetings and journal pages were littered with his commentary and researches, as well as evidence of their positive reception. In 1878, General Pitt Rivers complimented his collections, ‘so carefully described’, heralding their arrival as ‘the first opportunity that we have had of comparing the productions of these primitive people with those of other races’.52 A.J. Ellis, in his presidential address to the Philological Society in 1882, proceeded to detail Man’s achievements to that date, summarizing his linguistic work as ‘thorough, practical and trustworthy’.53 It is in the context of positive peer review that Man seems to have flourished and in relation to such encouragement that his collecting developed. Richard Carnac Temple, in the obituary he wrote for his colleague, highlighted the extent to which Man was ‘greatly encouraged by this appreciation’, citing Ellis’ words as the catalyst for his later devotion to the study of ‘the Andamanese and their ways’.54 Certainly, it was at this point that Man entered the most productive phase of his collecting career,55 sending a continuous stream of speculative offers to collect for museums across Europe, presenting his services to the Pitt Rivers Museum (1885), the Museum für Völkerkunde in Vienna (1888), the British Museum (1887) and the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden (1891), amongst others. Man’s biographers have often prefaced their analyses with Henry Moseley’s barbed description of Man as the ultimate collector, ‘the sort of man who might send four or five entire Nicobar villages with all the inhabitants inside’.56 But in truth, Man had to work hard to progress and maintain his image as defined by Moseley. Over time, other members of the Nicobar Islands’ colonial community began to show an interest in the anthropology of the region’s indigenous peoples, critiquing the accuracy of his researches and challenging his status as the principal collector and source of information about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Despite claims of their close friendship,57 following his arrival on the islands in 1879, Portman set about systematically reviewing Man’s published work, privately criticizing it in correspondence to museum professionals in the UK, and more openly in his own publications.58 There was also an episode in 1892 when the two men became embroiled in a debate over who was to be posted as Officer in Charge of the Andamanese (and thus maintain the monopoly over the anthropological research that the role enabled),59 and it was Portman himself

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who described the fraught competition for academic recognition amongst other administrators, including Man and Temple: ‘Man was in such a fright, when he heard Temple calmly appropriating all my work, that by today’s mail he has sent off all his manuscripts, Dictionary, &c, to his sister in England. He wants his own name and no one else’s to appear on his work’.60 In this context, Man’s relentless donation practices and constant soliciting of commissions to collect may be considered as his bid to retain his specialist status in relation to these challenges. Theorists have acknowledged competition as a common motivation for collecting,61 and, for a time at least, Man’s collecting and his objects were not just gallant contributions to scientific development but also acted as ‘symbolic capital’62 in a charged atmosphere of competitive collecting with other officers on the islands. It may also be argued that Man moved beyond the confines of salvage ethnography, pragmatically acting to cement his own name in history as well as that of his Andamanese and Nicobarese subjects. Despite their new homes in British museums, Man persisted in referring to the objects as ‘my collection[s]’, adding to series at his leisure, and including suggested labels for his objects, symbolically retaining practical and academic control over his ‘donations’ all the while.63 Moseley seems to have empathized with Man, acknowledging, for example, the Oxford collection’s ongoing personal significance and its referential qualities: ‘I don’t know whether Mr. Man is prepared for the distribution of his present things … he would probably insist on the others being left together’.64 Betraying his wish for permanent acknowledgement, Man seems to have considered his researches and his collections, as other collectors have done,65 as lasting memorials to his own existence, sending a photographic portrait of himself to Balfour at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Here, the curator indulged Man’s apparent need for lasting recognition and placed the image on the Museum’s ‘wall of fame’ along with other chief benefactors.66 Accordingly, Man’s story paints a picture of a collector more multifaceted and difficult to define than some have suggested.

Edward Horace Man and Object Biography Man’s collecting, then, was predicated on his desire to contribute to the development of scientific advancements in Europe and allied to the development of his own reputation amongst his peers in the scientific community, but how did these wider projects impact on the biographies of the material culture he collected? Generally, despite their limited physical configurations and individual efficacy,67 once engulfed in the totality of the collection, collected objects tend to suffer a certain disassociation from their previous meanings.68 Made newly meaningful in relation to other components of the collection, such objects enter a spatial, temporal and ideological arena which inevitably alters their ‘natural’ careers.69 In entering Man’s ‘regime of value’,70 his objects were typically reinvented by the

Figure 2.2 Catalogue entry for chū-kai, from E.H. Man. 1887. ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands Presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, 21, handwritten manuscript held at the Centre for Anthropology, British Museum. © Trustees of the British Museum.

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interpretations bestowed upon them and their cultural significances were altered within the context of his selection and appropriation. In arranging his collections to match a framework that was acceptable and appropriate to both himself and the requirements of the European scientific community, Man brought his own conceptual and physical inscriptions to bear on his objects, redefining the ideological boundaries of their ‘Andamanese’ or ‘Nicobarese’ identities in the process. Man’s catalogues, it can be argued, became the key tools in his re-inscription of his objects. Amongst their Andamanese and Nicobarese owners, many of these objects had a value rooted in the cultural, economic and political circumstances of their makers and consumers; they were the product of individual and community creativity and harboured individual use-value and practical identities (see Chapter 1). In their arrangement within the design of his catalogues, however, where each ‘specimen’ was bound by the number, type, name and meaning it was allocated, the objects lost their individual, physical characteristics. A wide-ranging, diverse amalgamation of material culture was instead forced into the specific set and layout that Man had constructed. In Figure 2.2, this phenomenon is demonstrated in the case of a pair of chū-kai (cane baskets). In the table, the central column notes the inclusion of two baskets in the donation, specifically detailing one ‘smaller’ example and one of a ‘larger and better’ variety. Marginal comments for the entry, however, reveal that this standard description actually ‘applies to a former collection, supplied to either the Oxford Museum, or Imperial Museum at Vienna’.71 Instead, contrary to the main description, the two baskets bound for the British Museum were evidently similar in size. In this specific case, then, Man was unwilling to adapt the main text of his catalogue, even for small alterations in the physicality of his collection. This kind of occurrence became increasingly frequent with the publication of the Nicobar catalogue in the Indian Antiquary journal in 1895. Once published, the standardized, type-written document was distributed in a strict ‘one-size-fits-all’ format, devoid even of the occasional notes previously provided in the ‘Remarks’ column. More and more generalizations and oversimplifications occurred as the static statements in the now mass-produced catalogue effaced the particularities of individual objects. Conceptually, the objects were relieved of their use-value and idiosyncratic construction, becoming instead mere numbers, or anonymous replacements for items in a previous collection. Moreover, just as Man’s catalogues had become a tool for subjecting individual objects to his classificatory systems, they were also able to influence an overarching European and North American understanding of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture. Once produced, these documents were constantly referred to as the central source of information for all objects exported from the region: Man’s own donations were invariably accompanied by one or both of his catalogues, but Temple, Portman and other donors also directed the various recipients of their own gifts to Man’s documents for further information.72 Accordingly, the catalogues came to inform the structure and content of much of the secondary

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interpretation produced about Andamanese and Nicobarese collections away from the islands, despite a diversity of donors and a wide range of institutional repositories.73 A combination of this extensive distribution and the absence of any other detailed survey of Andamanese or Nicobarese material culture meant that where Man had chosen not to include an item in the volume, it could not exist in the eyes of the European curatorial community. Man was also able to reframe his objects linguistically, distancing them from their previous ‘lives’ and containing them within his own frame of reference. In attaching an ‘indigenous’ name to each object, both in the catalogues and on paper labels affixed to the items themselves, the roman script recording his own interpretation of a set of languages isolated the objects from their makers and users’ understandings. It also served to fix the objects within his authority as an anthropologist, providing an impenetrable layer of conviction against potential challenges from European curators: who could contest the knowledge of this ‘expert’, especially when they were unable to use his terms of reference? The conceptual trajectories of these collections were bound by Man’s attempts to slot them into a framework suitable for his museum contacts, but their significance was also influenced by a more fundamental, personal issue. Irrespective of the agendas involved in anthropological interpretation, as a European male in the late nineteenth century, Man was bound to apply his own cultural and gendered system of reference to the objects in order to make sense of them at all. The fibre ornament worn around the waist by Ongee women shown in Figure 2.3, for example, was given a meaning more familiar in relation to Man’s cultural perspective when he termed it a ‘lady’s dress’.74 He described the display of pig, turtle and dugong skulls on the roofs of Andamanese homes as exciting ‘envy and admiration among their neighbours and acquaintances much in the same way as drawing-room walls, covered with plates of quaint and diverse patterns, delight the eyes of our modern English aesthetes’,75 and termed a small Andamanese net bag a ‘reticule’, which ‘serves precisely the same purpose as the elegant equivalent so commonly used by ladies in lieu of a pocket’.76 Collecting and naming practices have often been described as ways ‘of constructing a relationship with the world’77 and, by ridding the objects of their original context, or ‘de-othering’ them,78 Man successfully instilled his items with a meaning more appropriate and tailored to his needs. This ethnocentricity continued to impact upon the biographies of Man’s objects, when, in a section of his monograph on the Andamanese addressing ‘Ornamentation’, he critiqued Andamanese objects from the perspective of the Western art-historical canon, where innovation and imagination are prized: ‘While the Andamanese habitually ornament their various utensils, weapons, &c., they never attempt to show their talent or originality by representing natural objects, or by devising a new pattern, but slavishly adhere to those which custom has prescribed for each article.’79 He criticized designs in use on the Andaman Islands for falling ‘far short of the neatness and mathematical precision’ demonstrated in the illustrations he included in his own book (see Figure 2.4),

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Figure 2.3 ‘Lady’s Dress’. Waistbelt, Little Andaman, c. 1890, plant fibre, orchid bark, 520 mm × 140 mm × 65 mm, donated to Brighton Museum by E.H. Man, 1920. RPMBH, WA509648[R2129/3]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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Figure 2.4 Man’s reinterpretation of Andamanese design, from E.H. Man. 1883. ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 12, 371.

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positioning his own representations as the ideal, compared to the efforts of the Andamanese which showed merely ‘the particular pattern attempted’.80 Ultimately, under Man’s care, these objects were extracted from their original sphere of influence and divorced from any potential use value they may have once had. The blades of Man’s Andamanese adzes would no longer shape wood; his broom from the Nicobar Islands would no longer sweep the floor and his body adornments, such as those discussed in the opening of Chapter 1, would never again be worn, nor facilitate communication between the human and spirit worlds. Indeed, from the moment of their European requisition, these objects would instead be largely subject to the colonial and modernist projects which privileged visual inspection and experience as primary modes of understanding.81 For both Man and the curators with whom he dealt, the purpose of the objects was now to inform future (European) generations about Andamanese or Nicobarese history. In their intent to preserve their ‘specimens’ for as long as possible, Man and his contacts suppressed the use value but also the history of embodiment and sensory complexity once implied by these objects. In the case of the Andamanese body adornments described above, in the clinical environment of Man’s shipping cases, or in the museum vitrine or store, the strings of shells and single pendants suspended from the belts would be secured to avoid damage, robbed of their prior ability to clink together and provide the beat to songs during dances. For some items, the possibility of human adornment was literally removed when the aged, brittle fibre of the waistbelt stiffened to form a flattened, elongated shape which forced the potential body out (see Figure 2.5). In other cases, the vibrating sound of taut bow strings when plucked, central to the initiation of the young Andamanese male,82 was made impossible, as Man’s bows were loosened for transport to Europe and then, for conservation reasons, never restrung. In the Nicobar Islands, the pleasant sound made by the lozenge shape protruding from the end of a wooden oar when used in the water83 was no longer acknowledged and no longer possible. Recent postcolonial scholarship has come to critique the European valuation of seeing as the primary sense for the production of rational knowledge, calling for an acknowledgement of the alternative sensory ratios and registers used by disparate cultures and an awareness of this ‘lost body problem’ in contemporary museum display.84 Ruth Phillips has termed the ‘reduction to visual and textual forms’ integral to processes of collecting and archiving ‘a form of colonial violence that compressed and muted the expressive systems in which indigenous material objects participate’.85 Indeed, Man’s treatment of these objects does seem to have put rather an abrupt end to the development of wide-ranging earlier meanings. Perhaps the clearest manifestation of ‘colonial violence’ over indigenous usevalue can be seen in Man’s extreme management of some of his largest and most unwieldy objects. In a letter to Lindor Serrurier, Director of the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, Man detailed how ‘for convenience of packing I was obliged to cut the [Nicobarese] loaf spears etc into 2 or, in some cases, 3 pieces, but this was done diagonally in such a way as to allow of the parts

Figure 2.5 Two waistbelts, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, pandanus leaf, cockle shells, a: 529 mm × 28 mm; b: 348 mm × 26 mm, flattened. RPMBH, WA509419[R2129/10]. Courtesy and Copyright, RPMBH.

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Figure 2.6 Unknown photographer. Photograph of A.F. Man and E.H. Man, c. 1914. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

being glued together without difficulty when unpacked [sic]’.86 This was clearly a practical act practised by others also sending material back from the colonies, but, as with the removal of his objects’ sensory complexity, in routinely altering the physical construction of his objects, such a deed can also be seen as a symbol of the wider possession and control that Man exercised over his collections and their biographies.87

Amy Frances Man To date, Man’s practices have been placed at the centre of wider discussions about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a space for colonial collecting, both of photography and material culture. This focus on one (male) colonial administrator and a comparable focus in wider colonial histories of the islands on political

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events and processes88 have led to an unspoken but skewed understanding of the gendered demographic makeup of the islands’ British colonial community.89 Within this, collecting on the islands has been imagined as a typically masculine endeavour. This perception will be nuanced by bringing the practices of Temple and Tuson into the debate in due course, but first, a word about Amy Frances Man, Edward Horace Man’s unsung research partner. Amy and her brother lived together in Brighton between June 1903 and his death in 1929. The pair were extremely close (see Figure 2.6); she was his ‘favourite sister’.90 After his death, she successfully petitioned to rename Brighton’s Wellington Road Day Nursery, of which she was the founder, secretary and chief benefactor, the ‘Horace Man Day Nursery’.91 Besides her role as a devoted sister, Amy’s work as her brother’s editor, publicist, secretary and collaborator must also be acknowledged. Amy was instrumental in the development of Man’s posthumous monograph on the Nicobar Islands, revising, arranging and editing his private notes and earlier work published in the Indian Antiquary and the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for publication.92 She wrote the opening note to the reissued edition of his On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands in 1932, also coordinating an earlier, failed attempt to republish the volume in 1893.93 During her brother’s time on the islands, she was his secretary and publicist in Europe, contacting the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden and collectors in Berlin on his behalf, offering his collecting services and informing them of his achievements to date.94 She was careful to make sure the British Museum was aware of Man’s success at the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883, where he won a silver medal, and advertised his previous experiences as a donor to the curator at Leiden.95 Importantly, Man’s archive at the Royal Anthropological Institute contains a booklet of eighty-four sheets (printed on both sides) of meticulous observations on his ‘Andaman Vocabulary’, authored entirely by Amy: commenting extensively on her brother’s work, she made detailed suggestions for the arrangement, delivery and development of the research. In as much as Amy expected that her brother’s ‘replies should be inserted on the blank perforated part’ of the booklet for her inspection, and in the sense that Man’s marginalia point to his consistent observation of her advice (comments such as ‘Noted’ and ‘Yes’ are regularly printed throughout), the project can be seen as collaborative, and her contribution to his South Andaman language dictionaries should be acknowledged.96 It is not clear as to where Amy developed the skills or knowledge to assist her brother in these various capacities, although she may have spent some time on the Andaman Islands in her youth, accompanying her parents during her father’s posting there;97 later in life, her secretarial skills were certainly honed in her charity work. Nevertheless, where Man’s researches have been characterized as being the product of his ‘quiet study and reflection’,98 it is clear that Amy took a leading role in both the administration and academic content of his researches and collecting, and that the two had a lively, fruitful intellectual partnership.

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Richard Carnac Temple: Collecting for Professional and Social Status Richard Carnac Temple was born in 1850 into an elite, landed aristocracy, the first son of Sir Richard Temple and great-grandson of Sir James Rivett Carnac, both of whom held office as Governors of the Presidency of Bombay, in 1877–80 and 1838–41 respectively.99 Following a successful military and administrative career including high-ranking roles in the Punjab, Mandalay and Rangoon, he was appointed Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in 1894. He married Agnes Fanny Searle in 1880 and, in 1904, they retired to the Temple ancestral home, ‘The Nash’, near Kempsey in Worcestershire. Throughout his retirement Temple maintained his busy lifestyle, spending a great deal of time in London and remaining active as Chairman of the Territorial Army and the St John Ambulance Association. Following financial difficulties resulting from the burden of his son’s apparently lavish lifestyle, as well as land and property taxation during World War One, his estate was sold in 1926; he and his wife retired to Switzerland, living in hotels until his death in 1931.100 Temple spent his entire career cultivating a developed interest in and a specialist knowledge of the history, folklore, linguistics and anthropology of the South Asian cultures he encountered. His impact on the emerging discipline of anthropology in the UK was considerable. Throughout his working life, and particularly in his retirement, Temple’s name was attached to a constant stream of diverse publications: his early research focused on the Punjab, but other specialist subjects included Burmese spirit worship and Indian folktales, and between 1892 and 1931 he was the sole editor and proprietor of the ethnographic miscellanea, the Indian Antiquary.101 He presided over the Anthropology Section of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1913 and made what has been referred to as ‘the first inaugural lecture on anthropology at Cambridge’ in his formal welcome of the Board of Anthropological Studies there in 1904.102 In addition to his academic output, Temple donated large collections of objects from the regions in which he worked to various museums in the UK: the British Museum, the Pitt Rivers Museum (sometimes via the British Museum), Liverpool Museum (via the British Museum), Manchester Museum (via Salford Museum & Art Gallery, originally via the British Museum), Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and Harrow School were all in receipt of the substantial donations he made during his lifetime. These collections, while dominated by objects from Burma, India, and/or the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, also tended to include small selections of miscellaneous items from other countries including Japan, China and West Africa.103 Like Man, most of Temple’s collections were donated at the height of his career and amassed with a particular institution in mind; his donation to Brighton Museum, by contrast, was instead part of his treasured private collection, gifted only as a result of the dispersal of his estate between 1922 and 1926. His donation

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to Brighton numbered 348 items, of which 307 were from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Great friends and collaborators throughout their respective careers and retirements, Man and Temple harboured a similar dedication to social evolutionary scientific thought and held the same commitment to museum collections. The two men were both part of the government administration on the Andaman Islands in the late nineteenth century, and developed a profound anthropological interest in their Andamanese and Nicobarese charges whilst there. However, Temple’s scientific mind, academic inclinations, and the geographic diversity of his colonial career, provide his publications with a more theoretical, generalist characteristic than those of Man: Temple engaged in the emerging discipline of comparative anthropology to a greater extent than his colleague, subjecting the entire Indian subcontinent to grand schemes of material development. He considered India an exceptional region for research, since ‘[i]n it can be observed still dwelling side by side human beings possessed of the oldest and youngest civilizations’; in India, for Temple, the ‘modern eye’ could trace ‘the whole evolution of most arts and many ideas’.104 In his address to the Cambridge Antiquarian Society in 1904, he outlined the development of the water pipe or hooka as a case in point: starting from the plain cocoanut with a hole to suck the smoke through[,] You can then pass on to the nut embellished with a brass binding at the top, and next at the top and bottom, until it is found covered over with brass and furnished with a sucking pipe. Then you can find the nut withdrawn and only the brass cover remaining, but this requires a separate stand, like a miniature amphora. Then it is turned over on to its wider end and the stand is attached to it, and finally the stand is widened and enlarged and the vessel narrowed or attenuated to give it stability, until the true hooka of the Oriental pictures with its elegant and flexible sucking pipe is reached, which differs from a cocoanut in appearance as much as one article can be made to differ from another.105

Given this belief in the academic study of material culture, his donation patterns tended to favour the Pitt Rivers Museum over the anthropology museum of his alma mater, Cambridge University. The emphasis on typological display in Oxford would have appealed to his own school of thought,106 and he is likely to have been aware of the close relationship between the work of the Pitt Rivers Museum and the teaching of anthropology in Oxford (this compared to Cambridge, where the antiquarian interests of the museum’s curator, Anatole von Hügel, jarred with the more ‘scientific’ approach forged by anthropologists such as A.C. Haddon, based in the anatomy department).107 Clear that ‘the best instrument for approaching ancient and medieval history is abstract study of the ways and thoughts of the modern savage and semi-civilised man’,108 Temple’s approach to collecting and the objects he amassed in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands must be assessed in relation to the academic framework he extolled and progressed.

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Temple’s role as Chief Commissioner on the islands and his social status also marked him out as a different character to Man, and put his collecting and approach to the islands in a noticeably different context. Indeed, these professional and social positions provided him with alternative opportunities to collect and inspired different preferences for particular objects; under Temple’s ownership the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects were utilized in ways specifically related to his individual personality and official responsibilities. To date, given Man’s remarkable output in terms of images, objects and publications on the anthropology of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, it is the junior officer that has dominated scholarly research and provided a benchmark for our understanding of collecting in the region. By exploring Temple’s particular relationship with his collections it is possible to nuance current appreciation of collecting in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and argue that, despite their similarities, Man and Temple produced two very different sets of effects on their objects’ biographies.

Temple, Collecting and Professional Responsibility Temple’s high level of responsibility as Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands had a great effect on the scope and approach of his collecting: while ‘pure science’ clearly inspired him, much of his interest in the islands’ indigenous peoples and their material cultures was linked to the effective development and maintenance of the region as a valuable British possession. Encumbered with a greater accountability than Man, Temple was particularly outspoken in his belief in the use of anthropological methods for political means, claiming that ‘he who profits first and best is he who knows the most of mankind and its ways’.109 Later, he encouraged young colonial officers to become familiar with anthropological methods before they were posted overseas as this, he argued, would greatly develop the sympathy and tact necessary for their administrative responsibilities.110 In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in accordance with his wider conviction that anthropology improved general productivity in the pacification and containment of indigenous populations, he firmly encouraged his own staff in their research activities.111 Under his directorship, and presumably as a result of his encouragement, the study of the Andamanese particularly gained a noticeably more prominent profile and official role within the colony’s written proceedings: shortly after his arrival on the islands an ‘Andamanese Department’ was established, and the contents of the newly named ‘Report on the Andamanese Department’ became suddenly full with an unprecedented level of anthropological detail.112 His staff, including Man, had been using material culture to facilitate their initial understandings of remote communities for years: given the impracticality of directly observing newly ‘discovered’ but still hostile groups, stray objects were often employed as factual data in the identification and classification of disparate

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communities who used similar items.113 Similarly, as Chief Commissioner, and in line with his belief in the wider capacity of anthropology to form a ‘mighty lever for gaining a hold on the people’,114 Temple used the indigenous material culture of the region to provide useful insight into the kinds of lives that his subjects led: in the making of their articles from the leaves and spathes of palms, the Nicobarese peoples showed themselves to be ‘very expert’ and ‘neat’,115 while the slow construction of huts in the Nicobar Islands was ostensibly linked to the fact that ‘Nicobarese are really a lazy people’.116 He saw objects and their modes of production as a form of character reference and gleaned from them practical information with which to run a colony: he knew, for example, that the Nicobarese could be productive (they had cleverly ‘learnt to supply themselves with their real wants… – e.g. canoes, houses, arms, and so on’),117 and he must have found such information useful in managing the settlement at Nancowry and the lucrative British/Nicobarese coconut trade he oversaw. In the Andaman Islands too, Temple engaged with and obtained indigenous material culture in ways which specifically related to his role as Chief Commissioner and overseer of an administration whose policy was aimed at instilling some form of European ‘civility’ into an otherwise uncontrollable population. As seen in Chapter 1, the Andaman ‘homes’ and the organized labour they promoted were considered a central mechanism through which the Andamanese could be both ‘pacified’ and ‘improved’. Portman describes a colonial regime where ‘good behaviour’ was associated with ‘sitting down … working and making baskets’, and where the development of ‘a livelihood gained by handicraft, farming, cultivation or domestic service’ was the ideal.118 Accordingly, although the previous chapter has argued that the government homes on the Andaman Islands provided a forum for indigenous resistance, and that the objects produced there acted as emblems of a creative and positive response to subjugation, for Temple and his colleagues, any movement towards organized labour, including the production of indigenous material culture for sale, would have been a visible marker of success in their civilizing mission. As noted, of the ninety objects of Great Andamanese manufacture included in his eventual donation to Brighton Museum in 1923, the majority were obtained from the Andaman homes and accordingly made meaningful, for Temple at least, within the wider project of control, pacification and civility he led. In a very practical sense, Temple’s professional responsibilities also dictated the nature of many of his collecting opportunities and methods. By his own admission, his day-to-day duties left little time for anthropological endeavours and private collecting sprees: in letters to colleagues in the UK, he noted how ‘I wish I had time to spare for ethnology here, but it is all taken up in the building of jails and so on’.119 Accordingly, he repeatedly delegated his collecting activities to his friends and staff: his collection from the Andaman Islands at Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology was actually amassed by Man,120 while there is evidence to suggest that he was also assisted by C. Anderson and M.V. Portman (both collectors in their own right, but here working under

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Temple in administrative roles) in his donations to the Pitt Rivers Museum and Harrow School respectively.121 Indeed, it was, in part, in his capacity as Chief Commissioner that his access to certain objects was granted: following an official ‘reconnaissance mission’ into Ang territory in 1902, the junior officers who had led the party were obliged to present their Superintendent with the set of objects they had stolen from the Ang encampments and it was in this way that Temple was able to send these coveted items to Cambridge and the British Museum.122 In certain respects then, Temple’s engagement with material culture and the practical aspects of his collecting were related to the particular roles his job conferred, and to the opportunities his career presented.

Temple and Self-promotion In addition to these issues of professional responsibility and opportunity, Temple had a variety of other complex motivations for developing his collections of South Asian material culture. Personally, as well as professionally, he was passionate about the study of anthropology, extolling its many ‘phases’ of interest and ability to ‘occupy the leisure hours from youth to full manhood, and to be a solace in some aspect or other in advanced life and old age’.123 His collecting was a personal passion rooted in scientific pursuit: he advised his audience to ‘Go and buy such things in the bazaars, if you have the chance, and find out for yourselves how great the interest is’.124 He was also highly supportive of the role of museums in education, taking on the role of cultural broker in facilitating others’ gifting processes to specific institutions,125 and declaring museums to be ‘as important factors in the advancement of knowledge as teaching itself’.126 During the distressing sale of his estate and personal collections in 1922, marginalia in the sales catalogue revealed Temple’s hope that certain objects, at least, would go ‘[t]o a museum if possible’.127 Ultimately, however, as with Man, Temple’s commitment to education and passion for scholarship were not his sole inspiration for his engagements with the material world. Again, like Man, one of the most enduring themes in Temple’s collecting centred on the development of his own reputation; he used his collections and donation opportunities to project his persona and promote his professional and social standing to his advantage. Despite his scientific interests, he seemed keen to donate ‘star’ items to prestigious institutions and to ensure that his efforts were well recognized and rewarded. Actively associating himself with the museums at the ‘apex’ of what Anthony Shelton has termed the ‘pyramidal structure’ of the nation’s ethnography collections,128 Temple’s collections found their way into a variety of provincial museums around the turn of the century, but it was the British Museum’s curators who were most regularly allocated first choice and given the opportunity to circulate those objects which were surplus to requirement. In a letter accompanying a consignment from the Nicobar Islands to the British Museum in 1901 Temple advised, ‘[w]hatever

Figure 2.7 Unknown photographer. Photograph of the drawing room, Government House, Ross Island, Andaman Islands, c. 1900. © The British Library Board(APAC, Photo 125/2(87)).

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Figure 2.8 Philipe Adolphe Klier. Photograph of the ball room and dining room with Temple’s Burmese Nats, c. 1895, Government House, Ross Island, Andaman Islands. © The British Library Board (APAC, Photo 125/2(13)).

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you don’t want let Oxford or Cambridge have as you think best’;129 similarly, an Andamanese collection received by Cambridge in 1905 was gifted through the British Museum, who made their own selections first.130 Moreover, his donations tended to focus on rare and exceptional objects: his Andamanese consignment to the British Museum included a small but important collection from the Ang people, whose elusiveness and hostility ensured that their material culture was barely represented in European museums and was highly sought after. His collections from the Nicobar Islands contained a notable proportion of unique and specially commissioned models of canoes and huts and a remarkable collection of nineteen full-sized kareau and hentakoi. Keen that his particular choices and efforts gain proper recognition, he revelled in the institutional competition for these coveted items, joking that ‘Cambridge is getting a bit restive through its anthrop. men at my sending [the British Museum] and Oxford things! As I am a Cantab.!’, and taking care to emphasize the novelty of the Nicobarese wooden figures in his covering letter.131 He was eager to mention when things had been carried out ‘under my own eye’ or ‘procured under my own supervision’,132 and despite his total absence from the region while Man amassed, documented and shipped two large collections to Cambridge from the Andaman and the Nicobar Islands, he firmly emphasized his role in the exchange, representing himself as the indispensable broker throughout.133 The relationship between Temple’s collecting and his self-promotion is particularly noticeable in the ways in which he displayed his personal collections in his private residences, both on the Andaman Islands and at his ancestral home in Worcestershire, ‘The Nash’.134 Daniel Miller has made clear the connection between personal possessions and social self-creation,135 and the domestic sphere and its material contents has long been considered an influential space for the development of character and identity.136 Kim Dovey has discussed the ways in which individuals program and design the spaces they inhabit in the ‘pursuit of amenity, profit, status and political power’;137 certainly, as a colonial official at the height of his career, Temple dressed his home on Ross Island in accordance with such pursuits. The drawing room (Figure 2.7) and dining room (Figure 2.8) of ‘Government House’ were full of material testimony to his glowing career across South Asia, showcasing a wide range of Burmese bronze work and carved teak frames, a fine example of a lacquered standing figure of Buddha carved in Mandalay (raised centre of Figure 2.7),138 and his prized collection of Burmese Nats (spirits), carved for him in Rangoon.139 Framed above the doorway and tucked behind the punkah (a fabric fan suspended from the ceiling), the living room décor included photographs taken by Portman, one being of two Andamanese men shaking hands (compare Figure 2.9), and, on the wall of the building’s central hallway, Temple installed a selection of Andamanese bows and arrows, Nicobarese spears and paddles, and ‘Indian arms’, displaying them in the ‘trophy’ arrangement popular in elite domestic spaces across the empire (see Figure 2.10 and rear of Figure 2.8).140

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Figure 2.9 M.V. Portman. Photograph of two Andamanese men posed to demonstrate their departure, c. 1890. RPMBH, WA900488. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

Irrespective of the realities of British control of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, in Government House, an arena which was already a key symbol of British occupation, Temple’s domestication of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture, and his double containment of the Andamanese men (first in the photographic frame, and then for ‘entertainment’ or aesthetic pleasure in his living room), can be read as loaded acts. Annie Coombes and Nicholas Thomas have both described the slotting of non-European material culture into the ‘trophy’ paradigm as a political operation, symbolic of a similar ordering of the colonial subject.141 In the Government House hallway, the symmetrical, layered and carefully placed arrangement of the objects aestheticized the utilitarian tools, subjecting them to the traditions of the Western art-historical canon.142 Such a display paradigm, in emphasizing their aesthetic and formal similarities, denied

Figure 2.10 Philipe Adolphe Klier. Photograph of the hallway with Andamanese and Nicobarese ‘trophies’, ‘Indian arms’ and ‘pistols of the Burma War of 1824–7’, c. 1985, Government House, Ross Island, Andaman Islands. © The British Library Board (APAC, Photo 125/2(8)).

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the objects their differences in function and provenance, blurring, furthermore, the very different cultures from which they came. Not only were the different production techniques and hunting styles of the varying groups from both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands merged, but tools from mainland India and the first Anglo-Burmese war were also included. In many respects, the hunting theme and the collector were the only two links between all the objects, and the display accordingly functioned as a literal ‘trophy’ of their owner’s imperial conquests. In his choice of hunting and fighting tools, and his removal of their use-value in this way, the display of these typically ‘masculine’ objects can also be seen as Temple’s symbolic emasculation of the objects’ sometime users. In the context of the inter-cultural warfare in which Temple was embroiled, the exhibition of the ‘tamed’ Andamanese in Portman’s photographs and the display of this material culture can be read as his bid to annex the power of the indigenous peoples represented (or a celebration of the power apparently attained). On his return to the UK, a similar installation in ‘The Nash’ acted to commemorate his supposed successes in containing his Andamanese and Nicobarese subjects: newly complemented by the horns and hides of the slaughtered animals from his son’s latest hunting trip,143 and decorating the walls of his billiard room (the ‘nucleus of the male preserve’),144 the tools were imbued with notions of male competition and sport and accordingly cemented more than thirty years of a sparkling career in the colonies. Indeed, these underlying messages were not only for Temple’s private satisfaction, but were widely disseminated and acknowledged: by the nineteenth century the domestic interior was deemed a prime space to develop and communicate a positive public image,145 and Temple seems to have been patently aware of the potential his private displays had in promoting good public relations. The placement of the trophy display in Government House, for example, at the heart of the building and in the controlled environment of the hallway, is striking.146 Government House was Temple’s home, but it was also an official arena, used for hosting visiting superiors and briefing junior officers, each of whom would have been struck by the centrality of the display and perhaps impressed with the connotations it embodied. Certainly, in the case of The Nash, Temple invited the Museums Association and The World newspaper into his home, with representatives of both dutifully commenting on the ‘evidence’ that his displays presented: his anthropology collections were deemed ‘without rival’ and his ‘trophies and curiosities’ clear evidence of a long-standing ‘connection with our Asiatic dependencies’.147 Sending photographic images of The Nash and its decorated interiors to ‘Mrs Roberts’, a lifelong friend in New Zealand, Temple was careful to explain how he had ‘risen beyond the usual ranks’ professionally, and how ‘in the study of mankind … I am supposed to be a shining light!’148 Temple’s domestic display of his material collections was also heavily bound to the status his class conferred. Once displayed in The Nash, his own collections became the latest addition to an established body of heirlooms representative of the Temple line. Not only had Temple’s father and grandfather collected

Figure 2.11 Richard Durrand Temple [?]. Photograph of the hallway, The Nash, c. 1904. Courtesy and copyright, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, 1999.19.9.

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prolifically during their own successful careers on the Indian subcontinent, but the family’s long-standing wealth had enabled the amalgamation of important furniture, fine art and manuscript collections. In The Nash, Temple’s assortment of Andamanese body ornaments were nailed to the wall of the anteroom (where they acquired the dust and nail holes which acted as physical evidence of this stage of their careers). Here, they were slotted behind his father’s Indian collections which already adorned the hallway (Figure 2.11). This positioning of individual collections, each belonging to a different generation and presented in consecutive rooms advancing away from the threshold of the ancestral home, can be read as the symbolic accumulation of layers of significance in Temple family heritage. When The Times noted that the Temple family line was ‘as old as English History’,149 such positioning of their objects provided more accurate, tangible evidence of this. As with his colonial career, Temple was immensely proud of this family history, and again, in correspondence to ‘Mrs Roberts’, he bragged that he was the proprietor ‘of one of the oldest houses in England … that has associations of centuries connected with my name!’150 It was, he described, ‘a beautiful place with a number of rare and good things in it … an old English house of the highest class’,151 and his Andamanese and Nicobarese collections were carefully integrated into this self-awareness and self-promotion. Jean Baudrillard has termed the object ‘the perfect pet’: ‘[i]t represents the one “being” whose qualities extend my person rather than confine it’.152 Like Man, Temple collected to promote himself to the wider world, but clearly, in this case, the messages were very different: intimately related to the individual, specific characteristics of their owner, in both the Andaman Islands and The Nash, Temple’s objects acted to embody both his particular career achievements and his specific social status.

Personal Attachment and Possession Perhaps one of the most fundamental differences between Temple and Man’s collecting practices is to be found in the discrepancies between their behaviour towards their objects as personal possessions. Nearly all Man’s collecting activities were conducted on behalf of his museum contacts; the items were barely ‘his’ before he passed them on to cultural institutions in the UK and across Europe. Even the modest donations he made to Brighton Museum throughout his retirement betray little physical evidence of any emotional attachment to the objects, private display, or any personal system of organization. Despite his longstanding connection to the Nicobar Islands, he had only nine miscellaneous objects to give to Brighton Museum, which he donated in no particular formation or order in 1916 and 1923. Twenty-five per cent of his 1920 Andamanese donation came directly from a raid on an Ang camp in 1918, forwarded by prior contacts still in the Andamans, while the other objects in this particular gift were a sundry assortment, seemingly unaffected by the selectivity and rationale

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required of a true collector.153 For Man, institutional collecting seemed to be his central motivation, even into his final years. For Temple, however, his Andamanese and Nicobarese material collections formed an integral part of a larger set of prized personal possessions, directly aligned with his social and professional achievements and family heritage. He engaged closely with his objects, arranging and displaying them for both private pleasure and public dissemination. In addition to the displays already discussed, Temple also built his own free-standing museum for some of his collections in the grounds of The Nash, a shrine to his most prized items and a space where he could privately admire and engage with his cherished collections.154 Temple envisioned his wider collections as part of his legacy to future generations of his family, speaking of them as ‘heirlooms’ and acknowledging them as integral to the status of future generations of his family.155 When the property taxes of the First World War forced him to sell his entire estate and its contents, his personal attachment to his collections and their representations of his career and family heritage became particularly clear. The dispersal of his collections ‘buried the hopes and labour of more than 40 years as far as I am concerned’;156 ‘21 consecutive days … from 9am to 7pm … sorting, moving, cataloguing, selecting and valuing the contents’ of his house was not only ‘hard on elderly people’, but ultimately ‘heartbreaking work’.157 Many of Temple’s collecting, donating and display practices, and his wider engagements with material culture, were, then, related to his particular career choices, intellectual passions and social standing. In entering Temple’s ‘regime of value’, his objects were made newly meaningful in relation to his personality and the particular public platforms his eminence afforded. They were re-imagined as useful tools with which to carry out his professional responsibilities and as handy apparatus for bolstering his public persona. They acquired new physical characteristics, including nail holes and coats of dust, which continue to provide evidence of their public display outside the sterile confines of a museum. Where some of his objects may have been treasured by their makers or users in the Andaman or Nicobar Islands, under Temple’s ownership they became conceptually reconfigured in relation to a new set of criteria; there they were still cherished, but newly bound to the emerging discipline of anthropology, as well as culturally distinct notions of British social heritage and class.

Katharine Sara Tuson: Women Collectors in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Katharine Sara Tuson (1864–1953, née Barnett) and her husband, Francis Edward Tuson, were also part of the colonial community on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the late nineteenth century. Francis, born to Reverend Henry Tuson in 1851, arrived on the Andaman Islands in 1868, working as Man’s close colleague and in similar roles and capacities, including Officer in Charge of the

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Andamanese in 1874 and 1875. Following their marriage in 1889, Katharine joined her husband in the Andamans, making a life for herself at the heart of the British community on Ross Island, and probably accompanying Francis on his occasional tours of duty to the Nicobar Islands.158 Katharine and Francis had four children in the Andamans and finally retired in 1905, settling in Eastbourne and naming their house ‘Camorta’, after the island in the Nicobars.159 Following Francis’ death in 1923, Katharine moved from their shared home, living for a time on Enys Road in Eastbourne. Here, from 1931, she cared for her three grandchildren during the school holidays while her son, Alan, and his wife were employed in the consular service in China. She is remembered today as having deeply religious, Conservative, and pro-temperance sensibilities, and is referred to fondly by her family as ‘the iron lady’.160 Tuson had a limited collecting and donating pattern compared to her peers: in 1923, directly after Francis’ death, she gifted a small collection of sixteen Nicobarese wooden carved figures and five other miscellaneous objects (including a carving by an inmate of the penal settlement at Port Blair) to Brighton Museum. In 1953, she offered a large teak Indian screen to the Horniman Museum, and, although this piece was rejected, two items of Andamanese body adornment also presented (a necklace and a leg band) were accepted.161 In 1980, her son Kenneth donated a further set of wood samples and seashells from the Andamans.162 This later donation to the Horniman also included four family photograph albums containing a disparate set of newspaper cuttings, postcards, personal and professional photographs, and the script for a play entitled Kismet: An Idyll of the Andamans, written by C.W.B. Anderson in 1903 and apparently performed by Port Blair’s Amateur Dramatic Society. The photographs themselves, some of which are annotated, include a sample of images of the islands and their indigenous peoples taken by Man (the Tusons’ close friend), professional images of the British settlement, and amateur photographs of the Tusons’ home on Ross Island and the wider colonial community participating in sporting events, picnics and weddings. The albums also include photographs which depict the Tuson family on their return to the UK and some images of the Tusons and other friends from the Andamans taken at Amy and Edward Horace Man’s house in Brighton. Given the regularity with which the duty of compiling the family album fell to the women of the house,163 and the notable similarity between the annotations in the albums and Katharine Tuson’s handwriting,164 we may tentatively assume that it was she who assembled the albums. Although it is more difficult to speculate about the ownership and agency attached to the Tuson objects currently at RPMBH, Katharine was their donor and, as this chapter will suggest, the contents of the collection could be considered more in keeping with female collecting tastes of the Victorian era. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel have commented on the ways in which many postcolonial scholars have accepted, consciously or unconsciously, the ‘masculine’ attributes of colonialism, and how the Western woman has been excluded or marginalized from the focus of such studies.165 The articles in their

Figure 2.12 Unknown photographer. Formal group portrait of a ship’s crew, including a number of British women, Andamanese men and some Nicobarese kareau and hentakoi carved figures. Presumably taken around the Andaman or Nicobar Islands, c. 1900. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

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book, and other significant interventions,166 have begun to counter this situation across the history of the British Empire, but this research seeks to gender the colonial space of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and examine the colonizer in this region as a gendered subject.

Gendered Collecting in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands As noted, the precise details surrounding the assembly of the Nicobarese wooden figures that Katharine Tuson eventually donated to Brighton Museum are vague. As a collection, they could have been amassed by Francis, her husband. However, in the particular object selections made, the Tuson donation has distinctly ‘feminine’ characteristics, bearing little resemblance to the ‘typically masculine’ collections owned by Man and Temple. Where Man’s objects were imagined as testimonies to scientific development, and Temple’s collections, filled with weaponry and tools, represented his professional successes in the colonies, Tuson’s material possessions from the Nicobar Islands seem particularly aligned with the pervasive gendered stereotypes often linked to female materialism and collecting. She collected, in the main, Nicobarese wooden carvings – some toys and models for decoration and some ‘genuine’ hentakoi and kareau (see Chapter 1). When appropriated by the British non-specialist, such objects tended to become meaningful as ‘mascots’ (see Figure 2.12, for example) or as aestheticized sculpture (see Figure 2.13, for

Figure 2.13 Unknown photographer. Photograph of a display of hentakoi and kareau, c. 1900. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

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example); as such, her choices could be associated with the object genres of ‘toys’ and ‘ornaments’, two categories that Pearce, in her study of gendered possession, has highlighted as particularly feminine preferences.167 But it is in its unscientific scope that Tuson’s collection is formally marked out as a Victorian feminine entity: where Man hoped to acquire anthropological specimens to reveal the religious practices of the Nicobarese peoples, and Temple delighted in donating unique items of the highest quality, Tuson seems to have been less academic or professional in her tastes, including in her collection a number of ‘cast-offs’ produced by apprentices who were still only in training to become fully qualified artisans (see for example Figure 1.7).168 Similarly, where the political burden placed on the male colonial official seems to have affected the access that Man and Temple had to the kareau figures, this was not the case with Tuson. Anthropomorphic wooden figures were highly prized amongst Nicobarese communities; Brian Durrans has suggested that where colonial officers were aware of the indigenous significance of these objects, through close contact with their makers and anthropological study, they were unwilling to extract such objects unnecessarily lest they should be blamed for any ensuing ill fortune and for fear of the risk that this would pose to Anglo/ Nicobarese trade relations.169 While Temple did make a significant donation of kareau to the British Museum (some of which were sent to the Pitt Rivers Museum), this was indeed an unusual, unique gift, and Man, having spent much time with the Nicobarese, both for research purposes and in his professional capacity as Officer in Charge of the region, tended to keep his donations of these objects to a minimum. He gifted only one or two such items to the British Museum and to the Oxford University Museum, for example, and included no kareau in his later donations to Cambridge and the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art (now National Museums of Scotland). Neither Man nor Temple retained any of the figures for personal use, feeling, perhaps, that away from the realms of museum-based science, the potential damage to productive colonial affairs was not worth the risk. But, as a woman in the late nineteenth century, Tuson would have been protected from intimate, regular contact with the ‘savage’ Nicobarese, and removed from problems related to the practical tasks of running a colony.170 Consequently, in contrast, she had no such qualms and was happy to include kareau in her collection. The Tuson objects also became distinctly ‘feminized’ in their transfer into the public sphere. Unlike Man, and particularly Temple, whose collections arrived at a variety of institutions with great fanfare announcing the generosity of their respective benefactors, Tuson seems to have donated the objects to Brighton Museum by way of Man’s suggestion,171 and, in her donation to the Horniman Museum, her brief, modest letter offering an Indian screen specifically noted ‘No acknowledgement required’.172 Whether or not, then, Francis Tuson was instrumental in the amalgamation of the objects eventually sent to Brighton Museum in 1923, Katharine Tuson’s donation is a distinct departure from the collections assembled by her friend

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Man and her acquaintance Temple. Tentatively, at least, these variations in object choice and donation style can be attributed to the expectations which would have been placed upon her as a Victorian middle-class female. Tuson was a strong, independent woman – she had the strength to care for her three grandsons on her own, long after she had reached the age of retirement, and she had clear, outspoken religious and temperance beliefs, beliefs which she forcefully impressed on her friends and family.173 But her collection bears the mark of her femininity and as such is a valid if somewhat stereotypical intervention into the notion of the colonial collection in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a systematic, male-dominated entity.

British Women and Indigenous Populations The existence of Tuson’s collection is clear evidence that colonial encounters with the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples were not limited to the official matters of trade, healthcare or employment, in which representatives from the various cultural groups of the islands dealt purely with (male) British government

Figure 2.14 Unknown photographer. Photograph of Katharine Tuson with unknown Andamanese women, c. 1900. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

Figure 2.15 Unknown photographer. Photograph of an unidentified group of Indian servants, European men and women, Nicobarese women, men and children and an Andamanese man on the Nicobar Islands, c. 1900. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

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officials. Photographs from the Tuson family albums at the Horniman Museum show a strong British female presence on the islands and hint at the extent to which British women engaged with Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples and their material cultures. Figure 2.14 and Figure 2.15 seem, somehow, to have been taken in order to commemorate a special or remarkable meeting between Europeans and indigenous Andamanese or Nicobarese people, but the party of Andamanese assistants in Figure 2.12 and the lone Andamanese man in Figure 2.15, who presumably accompanied the European party to the Nicobar Islands, suggest that even in the daily activity of the British settlement, chaperoned contact between European women and the Andamanese, particularly, was not entirely unusual. Certainly, the wives of officers or missionaries stationed on the Andaman Islands regularly accompanied their husbands on official trips to the Nicobars, or went on organized trips to the Andaman home at Haddo.174 Elsewhere, European women assisted in the running of an Andamanese orphanage on Ross Island in the 1870s,175 and exceptional women explorers such as Violet Talbot Clifton and Lady Vera Broughton had opportunities to trade with and photograph Andamanese and Nicobarese individuals.176 In certain cases Andamanese individuals entered the homes of British visitors to the islands, either as domestic servants or guests: in 1906, ‘Topsy’, an Andamanese woman, was appointed as an ayah to the children of the deputy superintendent; elsewhere, W.H. Burt, the wife of a junior officer, described an occasion where her friend invited ‘the Andamanese ladies to tea’.177 As Mary Deane notes in her highly romanticized memoir, as a child growing up on the Andaman Islands she apparently thought of the Andamanese as playmates: [If] the independent, indigenous little Andamanese pygmies … showed the least sign of welcome, we all climbed with dignity from our craft, and made the greatest friends with the tiny, shining creatures … . The friendship, for us children, was finally cemented when they mounted us both on enormous turtles, which we ponderously raced up and down the beach. Then, if we were thirsty, a small boy would dart up a palm tree, to cut and throw down a coconut.178

Within this wider sphere of contact, as the collecting successes of Tuson and Clifton demonstrate, and as some of the images reveal, British women certainly came across indigenous material culture as part of their lives on the islands: Figure 2.14 shows Tuson posing with three Andamanese women in full regalia and Figure 2.12 and Figure 2.15 include women photographed with Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture as if it were ‘part of the scenery’. As noted, in the Nicobar Islands there were limited opportunities for Western women to observe the production and use of indigenous material culture, but in the Andaman Islands women could visit the government homes where indigenous objects were made. Indeed, Port Blair’s Amateur Dramatic Society, of which many women were members (see, for example, Figure 2.16), even used Andamanese material culture as props for their plays. A set of Andamanese bows and arrows

Figure 2.16 Unknown photographer. Photograph of Port Blair’s Amateur Dramatic Society, including Katharine Sara Tuson (second row, fourth from right, marked ‘KST’) dressed as a nurse, c. 1900. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

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Figure 2.17 Unknown photographer. Photograph of an interior, presumed to be Katharine and F.E. Tuson’s home on Ross Island, c. 1900. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

(potentially genuine, but possibly ‘homemade’) cropped up in Kismet: An Idyll of the Andamans, where they were central to the dramatic tension created when a British group (including the characters ‘Biddy’ and ‘Pat’) found their way onto the Andaman Islands in error: Biddy: A Niggerman is very proper, When you know his way; You should see him skip and hopper, When he is at play. Pat:

Yes of course ’tis truth you’re telling, But it’s me that knows, What he is with anger yelling, Flourishing his bows…(Mrs. Snarley flies to husband and falls on him. Cause: Procession of painted Andamanese with bows and arrows entering.)179

Tuson also included an image of a set of kareau and hentakoi in her photograph album (see Figure 2.13). Although these are not the objects which she donated to Brighton Museum, and there is no way of ascertaining whether these figures

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belonged to her, her choice to insert the photograph into the family album – that Victorian ‘repository of identity’,180 as Thad Logan has termed it – suggests that Tuson was engaging with and thinking about indigenous material culture, albeit in a different way to people like Man and Temple.

Katharine Tuson and Object Biography British women who lived in the colonial community on the Andaman Islands in the late nineteenth century, then, had the opportunity and some inclination to engage with indigenous Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture, but for Tuson at least, such objects remained on the outskirts of her material world. Unlike Temple, who littered his homes with the trophies and souvenirs of his travels, Tuson chose not to decorate her home with Andamanese or Nicobarese objects. As Figure 2.17 shows, in the Andamans, the Tusons’ décor included some examples of furniture of Indian manufacture possibly produced by convict craftsmen working in the penal settlement, such as the central teak table and the carved frame at the rear, but there are no traces of material indigenous to the Andaman Islands. For the most part, the Tusons seem to have established a classic Anglo-Indian domestic interior, where the ‘inclusion of comforting connections to the homeland’, such as key items of furniture imported from the UK, was ‘an important aspect of the colonists’ attempt to feel ‘at home’ in the empire’.181 On her return to the UK and after Francis’ death, with the exception of the cherished Indian screen mentioned in her correspondence to the Horniman Museum, Tuson’s house betrayed little evidence of a life in the colonies.182 It would seem that Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture was not considered suitable for domestic display in her Anglo-Indian or Eastbourne home, and even in her photograph of the hentakoi and kareau (Figure 2.13), she separated Nicobarese culture from her own life, blocking out any connection to her personal background by way of a white cloth backdrop. Conceptually removed from their lives as Nicobarese ritual objects, in Tuson’s possession these wooden figures seem to have been re-imagined as interesting mementos of a life in the Andamans, but ultimately marginalized and kept markedly separate from their collector and her distinctly ‘British’ home life. Interestingly, however, although there is little evidence of her having displayed these items, there is scope to suggest that she may have had some emotional attachment to her collection. It is perhaps no coincidence that she was persuaded to give away her Nicobarese objects shortly after her husband died. She may have disposed of them for practical reasons (she was, after all, moving to a smaller house), but Tuson and her husband raised their children in the Andaman Islands, they had many close mutual friends whose acquaintances were made in the region, and a substantial part of their married life took place there. They clearly had fond memories of their time in the colonies, naming their Eastbourne home ‘Camorta’, after the island in the Nicobars, and continued to keep in close touch

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with their former colleagues (see Chapter 4). When Francis died, regardless of their previous associations, the objects would have become newly relevant as souvenirs of her married life in the Andamans and poignant reminders of a loved one. Indeed, at this moment, the objects and their symbolic references to the location which formed these shared experiences seem to have been too great an emotional burden to carry. Recent research has explored the relationship between grief and personal property, noting how, after the death of a partner, shared possessions or those belonging to the deceased can be experienced ‘as painfully “excessive”, an outof-time/place reminder of a … relationship which can no longer be lived out’.183 Certainly, in expunging the physical memories of their life together by donating the collection to Brighton Museum, her actions may be related to a common desire to classify or accommodate such ‘excessive’ objects by giving them a new but still constructive identity.184 Having disposed of the items and moved away from ‘Camorta’, following Francis’ death, Tuson chose not to share details of her life in the Andamans with her extended family, who continue to know very little about her experiences there.185 As ‘samples of events which can be remembered, but not relived’,186 in Tuson’s possession, these objects became souvenirs of her life and her relationship, their biographies affected by emotions and mortality, and eventually discarded as a result.

Conclusions As individuals and as collectors, Man, Temple and Tuson had many connections and similarities. Spending significant periods of time in each other’s company while at the heart of the British colonial community on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, they all became interested in the material culture they saw around them. They collected objects indigenous to the region contemporaneously and, as Chapter 4 will explore, remained friends into their respective retirements, donating their material collections to Brighton Museum together. Their deeper idiosyncrasies and the ways in which they impacted upon the material with which they came into contact, however, diverged considerably. Nicholas Thomas suggests that the potential uses of artefacts cannot be ‘reduced to a unitary model or process’, and warns against the development of a ‘constrictive typology of object-meanings’.187 Certainly, the radically different ways in which Man, Temple and Tuson appropriated their objects adds weight to this argument. Ultimately, where Susan Pearce has described a ‘classic modernist’ collecting paradigm rooted in measurement, distinction and classification, the various approaches and achievements of Man, Temple and Tuson suggest that collecting, even in the ‘modern era’, is a difficult activity to characterize. While aspects of Temple’s and particularly Man’s collecting parallel the ‘intellectual primacy’ of the ‘systematic collector’ as defined by Pearce, their complex attitudes to material culture and limited success in their ‘scientific’ aims suggest that even the most

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methodical approaches to collecting are complicated by the practical implications of source community involvement and the more spontaneous and personal motivations which necessarily affect the result of any collector’s endeavours. In the hands and minds of three members of the colonial community these objects acquired new layers of meaning which were different not only from those bestowed upon them by their previous makers and users, but also emphatically dependent on the individual collecting methodologies and particular styles of consumption enacted by their new owners. The biographies of RPMBH’s Andamanese and Nicobarese objects were affected by a multitude of variable factors related to the individual collector: degrees of professional responsibility, levels of access to and insight into indigenous owners and producers, forms of commitment to scientific communities in the metropole, personal status and circumstance, and individual tastes – all these factors came to influence how these objects were physically reconstituted and made meaningful at this point in their ‘careers’. But the trajectories of these objects did not stop there. As we shall see, their institutionalization and public reception in the museum would complicate their biographies yet further.

Notes 1. See WA509357[R2468/43]; WA509336[R2468/44]; WA509337[R2468/45]; WA509343[R2468/47], donated by Temple, compared to WA509334[R2129/12]; WA509335[R2129/13,14,15]; WA509419[R2129/10]; WA509649[R2129/11]; and WA509342[R2129/17], donated by Man. 2. D. Lorimer. 1996. ‘Race, Science and Culture: Historical Continuities and Discontinuities, 1850–1914’, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and Race, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 12–13. 3. Stoler and Cooper, ‘Between Metropole and Colony’, 20. See also Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, 2. 4. S. Pearce. 1995. ‘Classic Modernist Collecting’, in On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition, London: Routledge, 122–139. 5. A. Shelton. 2001. ‘Introduction: “Doubts Affirmations”’, in A. Shelton (ed.), Collectors: Individuals and Institutions, London: Horniman Museum and Gardens, 19. 6. W. Muensterberger. 1994. Collecting: An Unruly Passion: Psychological Perspectives, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 4. 7. Gosden and Larson, with Petch, Knowing Things, 65. 8. S. MacDonald. 2006. ‘Collecting Practices’, in S. MacDonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 90. 9. M. Akin. 1996. ‘Passionate Possession: The Formation of Private Collections’, in W.D. Kingery (ed.), Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 121; J. Clifford. 1985. ‘Objects and Selves – An Afterword’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 239; Pearce, On Collecting, 25. 10. Gosden and Larson, with Petch, Knowing Things, 96.

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11. D. van Keuren. 1989. ‘Cabinets and Culture: Victorian Anthropology and the Museum Context’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 25, 29. 12. R. Owen. 1863. ‘On the Osteology and Dentition of the Aborigines of the Andaman Islands, and the Relations thereby indicated to other Races of Mankind’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 2, 42. 13. W.H. Flower. 1898. ‘The Pygmy Races of Men, Lecture at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 13th April 1888’, in Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History, London: Macmillan, 295. 14. Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’, 75–79. 15. Van Keuren, ‘Cabinets and Culture’, 31. 16. Ibid. 17. A.H. Lane Fox Pitt Rivers cited in W.R. Chapman. 1985. ‘Arranging Ethnology: A.H.L.F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 33. 18. On the ‘salvage ethnography’ paradigm, see J. Gruber. 1970. ‘Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 72(6), 1289–1299 and J. Clifford. 1986. ‘On Ethnographic Allegory’, in J. Clifford and G.E. Marcus (eds), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 98–121. 19. See, for example, the telling publication of a letter from E.H. Man to his father, Henry Man, dated 26 June 1877, detailing the impact of a measles epidemic on the indigenous population of South Andaman, alongside an inventory of his collection sent to Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers) in A. Lane Fox. 1878. ‘Observations on Mr. Man’s Collection of Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects Presented to Major-General Pitt Rivers’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 7, 434–470. In his monograph on the Andaman Islands, Man noted the ‘lamentable consequences’ of indigenous contact with both the British and the ‘alien convict population’ but assured his readers that his observations were ‘restricted to those communities who have been found living in their primitive state, and who may therefore be fairly considered as representatives of the race, being unaffected by the virtues or vices of so-called civilisation’ (Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, xxiv). Similarly, Radcliffe-Brown judged that ‘[w]hat is really of interest to the ethnologist is the social organisation of these tribes as it existed before the European occupation of the Islands’, and was pleased to note that it was still ‘fairly easy, however, to discover from the natives themselves what was the constitution of society in former times’ (Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 22). 20. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 140; Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’, 88; S. Dudley. 1996. ‘Sir Richard Carnac Temple’, in A. Petch (ed.), Collectors: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 47. 21. Discussions at a study day on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at RPMBH organized by the Museum Ethnographers Group in June 2007 revealed these assumptions. 22. R.C. Temple. 1930. ‘Edward Horace Man’, Man, 30(January), 11–12. 23. See comments in Temple, ‘Andaman and Nicobar Islands’, 2; D. Prain. 1932. ‘Memoir’, in E.H. Man, The Nicobar Islands and their People, A.F. Man (ed.), Guildford: Royal Anthropological Institute, 16; A.J. Ellis. 1882–84. ‘Report on Researches into the South Andaman Language: Arranged from the Papers of E.H. Man, Esq., and Lieut. R.C. Temple, in Eleventh Annual Address of the President to the Philological Society, delivered at the Anniversary Meeting, Friday, 19th May, 1882’, Transactions of the Philological Society (Part 1), 44.

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24. See, for example, E.H. Man. 1878. ‘List of Andamanese and Nicobarese Implements, Ornaments, etc., Presented to Major-General Lane Fox by E.H. Man, Esq., and thus Described by Mr. Man, 18th September, 1877’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 7, 457–467; E.H. Man and R.C. Temple. 1880. ‘Notes on Two Maps of the Andaman Islands’, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 50, 255–259; E.H. Man. 1897. ‘Notes on the Nicobarese’, Indian Antiquary, August and October, 217–222 and 265–277. 25. E. Edwards. 1996. ‘E.H. Man’, in A. Petch (ed.), Collectors: Collecting for the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford: Pitt Rivers Museum, 36; Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 135. 26. E. Edwards. 1989. ‘Images of the Andamans: The Photography of E.H. Man’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 1, 71–78; Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’; V. Pandya. 1991. ‘From Photography to Ethnography: Andamanese Documents and Documentation’, Visual Anthropology, 4, 379–413; Edwards, ‘E.H. Man’; Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’. 27. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 136. 28. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 135, 140; Edwards, ‘Science Visualized’, 109–110; Edwards, ‘Images of the Andamans’, 74; Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’, 87–91; Pandya, ‘From Photography to Ethnography’, 394–395. 29. Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers reporting to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Annual Report, London: BAAS, 1874, cited in Petch, ‘Notes and Queries’, 22. 30. E.H. Man. 1883. ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part I)’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 12, 69. 31. Petch, ‘Notes and Queries’, 26. And see Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 136. 32. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 139. 33. Lane Fox, ‘Observations on Mr. Man’s Collection of Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects’, 434. 34. Man, ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands Presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, 5. Man cited ‘V. Low’s “Dissertation” fig. 37’ (untraced) as the source of his knowledge of the Malay spear. 35. J.E. Calder. 1874. ‘Account of the Wars of Extirpation, and Habits of the Native Tribes of Tasmania’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 3, 7–29. 36. E.H. Man. 1883. ‘Appendix D’, in ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 12, 412. N.B. In the event of the article’s publication, journal readers were instructed as to Man’s intentions but the actual extract was omitted and interested parties were advised to refer to the back volume for Calder’s original paper. 37. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 139. See also Chapter 2, note 19. 38. Correspondence from E.H. Man to Henry Man, July 1876, cited in Prain, ‘Memoir’, 14. 39. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to A. von Hügel, 1 December 1891, ACUMAA. 40. Correspondence from L. Serrurier to E.H. Man, 5 May 1890, Rijksmuseum voor Volkekunde, Leiden, ARA-201-93. 41. Correspondence from A.W. Franks to E.H. Man, 25 March 1887, ACHL. 42. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 147. Although notably, he did acquire some objects that betrayed a Western influence: see, for example, pairs of Andamanese

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43.

44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61.

62. 63.

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bracelets donated to Cambridge (on behalf of Temple, 1892.126.38) and the Pitt Rivers Museum (1884.73.38, 1884.73.39 and 1884.73.42) made from lengths of imported red cloth and, at Brighton Museum, a different style of bracelet, this time incorporating a blue glass bead (WA509416[R2129/5]). This catalogue was drawn from the documentation which accompanied his donation to A.H. Lane Fox (later Pitt Rivers) in 1878 (Man, ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, 327). This was inevitably an interpretation, in roman script, of a language he was only just beginning to know. Man, ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands Presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, 1. Ibid. The ‘central group’ comprises the islands of Kamorta, Trinket, Nancowry and Katchal, but, as above, the ‘dialect’ to which Man refers is, of course, his own interpretation. Correspondence from H. Balfour to E.H. Man, 21 March 1897, ACHL. Correspondence from O.M. Dalton to E.H. Man, 16 February 1897, ACHL. S. Pearce. 1992. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 84 and 87. Edwards, ‘E.H. Man’, 36. Correspondence from M.V. Portman to C.H. Read, 9 June 1894, APEBM. Lane Fox, ‘Observations on Mr. Man’s Collection of Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects’, 434. Ellis, ‘Report on Researches’, 73. Temple, ‘Edward Horace Man’, 12. As defined by Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 140. Correspondence from H. Moseley, Professor of Human Anatomy at the University of Oxford, to E.B. Tylor, Reader in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, January 1885, Tylor Papers: Man 3, Pitt Rivers Museum. See Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 35, and Edwards, ‘Science Visualized’, 113. Tomas also used the phrase in his description of Man (‘Tools of the Trade’, 85). Correspondence from M.V. Portman to A.W. Franks, 10 September 1886, APEBM. Correspondence from M.V. Portman to A.W. Franks, 10 September 1886, APEBM; Correspondence from M.V. Portman to C.H. Read, 9 June 1894, APEBM. In this last Portman maintains that Man ‘was never able to go about among the savages, relied on hearsay, and convict reports, for his statements with disastrous results’. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 622–635. Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas’ Archive (Eth Doc 677), British Museum. Correspondence from M.V. Portman to C.H. Read, 3 August 1894, APEBM. M. Bal. 1994. ‘Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting’, in J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 103; Akin, ‘Passionate Possession’, 113. P. Bourdieu. 1993. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, R. Johnson (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 41. Correspondence from E.H. Man to A.W. Franks, 12 April 1888, APEBM, my italics; correspondence from E.H. Man to C. Robertson, 6 June 1881, Tylor Papers: Man 1, Pitt Rivers Museum.

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64. Correspondence from H. Moseley, Professor of Human Anatomy at the University of Oxford, to E.B. Tylor, Reader in Anthropology at the University of Oxford, January 1885, Tylor Papers: Man 3, Pitt Rivers Museum. 65. Pearce, On Collecting, 232. 66. Correspondence from H. Balfour to E.H. Man, 11 February 1897, ACHL. 67. Gell, Art and Agency. 68. Akin, ‘Passionate Possession’, 121, and Clifford, ‘Objects and Selves’, 239. 69. S. Stewart. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University Press, 151–165. 70. Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, 4. 71. Man, ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands Presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, 21. 72. Temple referred the curator at Brighton Museum to specific entries in Man’s catalogue for contextual and interpretative information (see ARBM, No. 2468.4, 2468.7, 2468.9 and 2468.26, April 1923, 12–13); Portman sent Man’s descriptive catalogue to the British Museum as an accompaniment to his Andamanese donation (correspondence from M.V. Portman to A.W. Franks, 10 September 1886, APEBM), and C. Anderson included a typescript of Man’s appendix, ‘List of Objects Made and Used by the Andamanese’ with his donation to the American Museum of Natural History in 1908. 73. See Chapter 4. Elsewhere, curator Anatole von Hügel used a combination of information selected from Man’s ‘List of Objects Made and Used by the Andamanese’, the published version of the ‘Descriptive Catalogue of Objects Made and Used by Natives of the Nicobar Islands’, and his ‘On the Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects Presented to Major-General Pitt Rivers’ from the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland to produce Cambridge University Museum’s hand lists for the Man and Temple donations in 1892 (Correspondence from A. von Hügel to E.H. Man, 13 February 1902 and 19 February 1902, ACUMAA). 74. ARBM, ‘Lady’s Dress’, No. 2129.3, 1920, 118. 75. Man, ‘On the Andamanese and Nicobarese Objects’, 284. 76. Ibid., 280. 77. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 68. 78. Bal, ‘Telling Objects’, 105. 79. Man, ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, 370. Notably, Radcliffe-Brown refutes this, highlighting the competition amongst women to produce novelty and innovation in their work (Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, 122). 80. Man, ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, 370. Man’s italics. 81. See E. Edwards, C. Gosden and R.B. Phillips. 2006. ‘Introduction’, in E. Edwards, C. Gosden and R.B. Phillips (eds), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, Oxford: Berg, 2. 82. Pandya, Above the Forest, 214. 83. Simron Jit Singh describes this noise (interview with the author, 8 September 2008). 84. See essays and bibliography in E. Edwards, C. Gosden and R.B. Phillips (eds), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, Oxford: Berg, especially J. Feldman. 2006. ‘Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem’, in E. Edwards, C. Gosden and R.B. Phillips (eds), Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, Oxford: Berg, 245–267.

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85. R.B. Phillips. 2004. ‘Making Sense out/of the Visual: Aboriginal Presentations and Representations in Nineteenth-century Canada’, Art History, 27(4), 613. 86. Correspondence from E.H. Man to L. Serrurier, 23 October 1890, Rijksmuseum voor Volkekunde, Leiden, ARA-1(5)-M. 87. For the Pitt Rivers Museum he sawed a Nicobarese hentakoi board into three or four pieces in order to pack it (Correspondence from E.H. Man to C. Robertson, 6 June 1881, Tylor Papers: Man 1, Pitt Rivers Museum), and see also a hook and a harpoon handle at RPMBH which Man donated already split into various pieces (WA509685[R2129/41] and WA509684[R2129/40]). 88. See, for example, Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings; Venkateswar, Development and Ethnocide; Mukerjee, The Land of Naked People. 89. The focus on the mechanics of the penal settlement has, however, produced some very interesting work on the female component of the convict population (see, for example, Anderson, Legible Bodies; C. Anderson. 2001. ‘Fashioning Identities: Convict Dress in Colonial South and Southeast Asia’, History Workshop Journal, 52, 153–174, and S. Sen. 1999. ‘Rationing Sex: Female Convicts in the Andamans’, South Asia, 30(1), 29–59), but in discussions of the official policy towards the indigenous communities of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the European woman remains almost entirely silent. 90. Prain, ‘Memoir’, 24. 91. Herald. 1936. ‘“Horace Man Day Nursery”: A Year of Valuable Work’, 18 July, 13; Herald. 1936. ‘Death of Miss A.F. Man: Her Work for the Horace Man Day Nursery’, 25 January, 13. 92. L.H. Yates. 1932. ‘Introductory Note’, in E.H. Man, The Nicobar Islands and their People, A.F. Man (ed.), Guildford: Royal Anthropological Institute, v. 93. Correspondence from G.W. Bloxam, Anthropological Institute, to A.F. Man, 16 January 1893, ACHL. 94. See correspondence to A.F. Man from F. Jagor (Berlin) and W.H. Flower (British Museum, Natural History), ACHL; and from A.F. Man to E.B. Tylor, 30 December 1885, Tylor Papers: Man 1, Pitt Rivers Museum. 95. Correspondence from A.F. Man to the British Museum, 22 March 1887, APEBM; Correspondence from A.F. Man to L. Serrurier, 13 January 1890, Rijksmuseum voor Volkekunde, Leiden, ARA-1(5)-M. 96. A.F. Man, with marginalia by E.H. Man, ‘Andaman Vocabulary Notes’, typescript, 1885–1886, E.H. Man Papers, Royal Anthropological Institute, MSS 115; E.H. Man [with A.F. Man]. 1923. A Dictionary of the South Andaman (Âkà-Bêa) Language, Bombay: British India Press, reproduced from the Indian Antiquary, 1919–1922. 97. Van der Beek and Vellinga, ‘Man the Collector’, 152 (n. 61). 98. Yates, ‘Introductory Note’, vi. 99. See R.E. Enthoven. 1931. Sir Richard Carnac Temple, 1850–1931, from the Proceedings of the British Academy, London: Humphrey Milford Amen House, 3–10 for the following biographical information, unless otherwise stated. 100. Selected correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts (1910–1930), APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. 101. See, for example, R.C. Temple. 1883. A Dissertation on the Proper Names of Panjabis, London: Trubner; F.A. Steel with R.C. Temple. 1884. Wide Awake Stories, Bombay: Education Society’s Press; R.C. Temple. 1906. The Thirty-seven Nats: A Phase of Spiritworship Prevailing in Burma, London: W. Griggs.

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102. M. Fortes. 1953. Social Anthropology at Cambridge since 1900 (An Inaugural Lecture), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, cited in C. Morrison. 1984. ‘Three Styles of Imperial Ethnography: British Officials as Anthropologists in India’, Knowledge and Society, 5, 152–153. 103. Dudley, ‘Sir Richard Carnac Temple’, 47. 104. Temple, ‘On the Practical Value of Anthropology’, 236. 105. Ibid.; see also his ‘pagoda development series’ referred to in correspondence from R.C. Temple to A.W. Franks, 22 October 1892, APEBM. 106. Dudley, ‘Sir Richard Carnac Temple’, 47. 107. Gosden and Larson, with Petch, Knowing Things, 11–12. 108. Temple, ‘On the Practical Value of Anthropology’, 235. 109. Ibid., 226. See also Temple, Anthropology as a Practical Science. 110. H. Kuklick. 1991. The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885– 1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 197. 111. Temple praised both Man and Portman’s anthropological endeavours in both his private correspondence and his publications (see, for example, Temple, ‘Edward Horace Man’, 12). 112. See ‘Report on the Andamanese Department for October, 1894’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1894, P/4530, 110, for the inauguration of the new department and this significant shift in approach. 113. Portman, for example, had divided the Andamanese into three groups based, in part, on the distinguishing marks of their different bows (Correspondence from M.V. Portman to C.H. Read, 18 June 1893, APEBM), and Man saw evidence of the connections between the various communities he observed through the peculiarities of their varying bows and pails (‘Andaman Home Report for April 1876’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1876, P/853, 42). 114. Temple, ‘On the Practical Value of Anthropology’, 228. 115. R.C. Temple. 1908. Local Gazetteer: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 96. 116. R.C. Temple. 1899. ‘Round about the Andamans and Nicobars’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 48(2457), 120. 117. R.C. Temple. 1924. ‘Foreword’, in G. Whitehead, In the Nicobar Islands: The Record of a Lengthy Sojourn in Islands of Sunshine & Palms amongst a People Primitive in their Habit & Beliefs & Simple in their Manner of Living, with a Description of their Customs & Religious Ceremonies & an Account of their Superstitions, Traditions & Folk-lore, London: Seeley, Service and Co., 9. 118. Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. I, 375; Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 857 (emphasis mine). 119. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to C.H. Read, 13 February 1897, APEBM. 120. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to A. von Hügel, 1 December 1891, ACUMAA. 121. C. Anderson donated photographs and 257 objects to the American Museum of Natural History in New York in 1906, and Portman joins Man and Temple as a particularly prolific collector in this region. His major collection from the Andaman Islands is held by the British Museum. However, they also collected on behalf of Temple: Anderson, for example, wrote the note accompanying Temple’s collection of Nicobarese coconut scrapers (1904.30.1) at the Pitt Rivers Museum, describing the item as sent ‘at the request of Sir Richard Temple’ (Pitt Rivers Museum online catalogue). The Museum Committee minute books at Harrow School (1894–1904) also note that Temple’s collection from the Andaman Islands, accepted on 10 June 1895, was accompanied by a

Colonial Perspectives on Material Culture

122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137. 138. 139.

140.

141. 142.

143.

144.

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manuscript list compiled and signed by Portman as Officer in Charge of the Andamanese on 20 April 1895 (I thank Jeremy Coote, Head of Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum, for this archival detail). For details see Temple, Remarks on the Andaman Islanders, 92–121. Temple, ‘On the Practical Value of Anthropology’, 236. Ibid. C. Wintle. 2010. ‘Consultancy, Networking and Brokerage: The Legacy of the Donor in Museum Practice’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 23(April), 72–83. Temple, ‘On the Practical Value of Anthropology’, 235. Knight, Frank & Rutley’s Auction Rooms. 1922. Auctioneers Book: The Nash Kempsey Worcester, December 12th to 15th, London: Knight, Frank & Rutley, 14. See also comments in Observer. 1922. ‘Sir R. Temple’s Burmese Museum for Sale’, 10 December, 9. A. Shelton. 2000. ‘Museum Ethnography: An Imperial Science’, in L. Hallam and B. Street (eds), Cultural Encounters: Representing Otherness, London: Routledge, 159. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to C.H. Read, 27 April 1901, APEBM. Correspondence from A. von Hügel to R.C. Temple, 5 April 1905, ACUMAA. See a similar situation with the donations of the collections to National Museums Liverpool and Salford Museum & Art Gallery. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to C.H. Read, 27 April 1901, APEBM; correspondence from R.C. Temple to C.H. Read, 31 July 1897, APEBM. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to C.H. Read, 31 July 1897, APEBM. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to A. von Hügel, 1 December 1891, ACUMAA. See Wintle, ‘Career Development’, for further development of these ideas. D. Miller. 1987. Material Culture and Mass Consumption, Oxford: Blackwell, 215. K. Grier. 1997. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-class Identity, 1850– 1930, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press; I. Bryden and J. Floyd. 1999. ‘Introduction’ in I. Bryden and J. Floyd (eds), Domestic Space: Reading the Nineteenthcentury Interior, Manchester: Manchester University Press. K. Dovey. 1999. Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form, London: Routledge, 1. Currently in the collection of the British Museum (1923,0109.1). P. Herbert. 1991. ‘Sir Richard Carnac Temple and the Thirty-seven Nats’, in R.C. Temple, The Thirty-seven Nats: A Phase of Spirit-worship Prevailing in Burma [1906], London: Kiscadale, v. The nat images are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. See, for example, Lady Gordon’s arrangement in the dining room of Government House in Levuka, Fiji, in 1876, reproduced in Thomas, Entangled Objects, 173, and Charles Kettlewell’s dining room at St Margaret’s Mansions, Victoria Street, London, in 1888, reproduced in D. Cohen. 2006. Household Gods: The British and their Possessions, New Haven: Yale University Press, 35. Thomas, Entangled Objects, 174; Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 74. Weapons and fishing equipment were also commonly used in evolutionary display sequences, like those at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but the domestic context and highly aestheticized arrangements of these displays set them apart from the ‘scientific’ paradigms Temple admired elsewhere. The World. 1904.‘Celebrities at Home: Colonel Sir Richard Carnac Temple, Bart, CIE, at The Nash, Kempsey’, 20 September, 442–443; correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 31 December 1908, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. M. Girouard. 1971. The Victorian Country House, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 24.

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145. J. Tosh. 1999. A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-class Home in Victorian England, New Haven: Yale University Press. The indicative phenomenon of exploring the homes of notable personalities in the media also began at this point, beginning with the World’s ‘Celebrities at Home’ series in 1876 (see Cohen, Household Gods, 122–125). 146. See Dovey, Framing Places, 22, on the hallway as a significant space. 147. Museums Journal. 1905. ‘Worcester Conference, 1905’, 5(2), 35; The World, ‘Celebrities at Home’, 442. 148. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 7 June 1902, 19 August 1904, 6 January 1914, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. It is clear from the contents of the correspondence that Temple and ‘Mrs Roberts’ had a relationship in their youth. Following their split, she married another man in 1874 and moved to New Zealand, but, from 1902, the pair became reacquainted and maintained a lively correspondence until Temple’s death in 1931. His portion of the letters was donated to the British Library in 1991 (her letters are absent), by a Mr H.D. Raine, via the National Library, New Zealand, but aside from Temple’s address (‘Mrs Roberts’), her wider identity, including her given name, remains unknown. 149. The Times. 1902. ‘Death of Sir Richard Temple’, 18 March, 4. 150. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 7 June 1902, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. 151. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 5 February 1904, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. 152. J. Baudrillard. 1997. ‘The System of Collecting’, in J. Elsner and R. Cardinal (eds), The Cultures of Collecting, London: Reaktion Books, 11. 153. As defined by Pearce, in On Collecting, 27. 154. There are two photographs of Temple’s private museum reproduced in the catalogue of the sale of his estate: Knight, Frank & Rutley’s Auction Rooms, Auctioneers Book. The ‘museum’ was reserved for his Burmese collections; no Andaman or Nicobar objects seem to have been included. 155. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 16 May 1905, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. 156. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 12 January 1918, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. 157. Correspondence from R.C. Temple to Mrs Roberts, 29 October 1922, APAC, MSS EUR F98/67. 158. The Times. 1889. ‘Marriages’, 14 September, 1; The Times. 1923. ‘Obituaries’, 9 February, 12; Proceedings Port Blair, 1874-5, P/528. 159. Sussex County Herald, 1923. ‘Death of Mr. F.E. Tuson’, 10 February, 1. Today, ‘Camorta’ is usually spelt ‘Kamorta’. 160. L.E. Tuson (grandson of F.E. and K.S. Tuson), in an interview with the author, 13 September 2006. 161. Correspondence from K.S. Tuson to Horniman Museum, 24 June 1953, Anthropology Department archive, HML. 162. Correspondence from K. Teague to K.H. Tuson, 17 July 1980, Anthropology Department archive, HML. 163. P. Di Bello. 2007. Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1–2. 164. See correspondence from K.S. Tuson to Horniman Museum, 24 June 1953, Anthropology Department archive, HML.

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165. N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel. 1992. ‘Introduction’, in N. Chaudhuri and M. Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 3. 166. See, for example, C. Midgley (ed.). 1998. Gender and Imperialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press; A. Burton (ed.). 1999. Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities, London: Routledge and P. Levine (ed.). 2004. Gender and Empire, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 167. S. Pearce. 1998. ‘Objects in the Contemporary Construction of Personal Culture: Perspectives Relating to Gender and Socio-economic Class’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 17(3), 228–229. 168. Hitui village focus group in communication with Simron Jit Singh, 29 March 2007. 169. Brian Durrans, former Curator for Asian Ethnography at the British Museum, ‘The Nicobar Islands’, public gallery talk at the British Museum, Autumn 2005. 170. Women did visit the Nicobar Islands, and, on occasion, came into close contact with indigenous peoples (albeit usually in the company of European men): Rosamund Park, stationed on the Andamans for a year and a half in 1914 and 1915 with her husband, the chaplain of Port Blair and Superintendent of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Mission in the Nicobars, regularly visited the Nicobar Islands as part of her husband’s duties. Unusually, on one of these trips she observed a ‘Heathen Festival’ on Car Nicobar. In her memoirs, she describes the purpose of the festival, as she understood it, showing a particular interest in her encounter with ‘one very old woman’ and the clothing worn by the participants (Park, Recollections and Red Letter Days, 61). Generally, however, Mrs W.H. Burt, whose husband was stationed as a junior army officer in the Andaman Islands in 1914, complained that ‘[o]ne of the greatest objections to this place is never being able to go out alone. You either had to have an orderly, a police guard or a very trustworthy manservant, if your husband was not with you’ (W.H. Burt. Undated [c. 1914]. Untitled typescript detailing life on the Andaman Islands, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas’ Archive (Eth Doc 1714), British Museum). 171. Sub-Committee, 4 April 1923, 337. 172. Correspondence from K.S. Tuson to Horniman Museum, 24 June 1953, Anthropology Department archive, HML. 173. See, for example, instructions for the upbringing of her unborn child, should she die in childbirth (K. Tuson. 1890. Letter, ‘If I should not live after the birth of my child…’, 3 August, private collection), and strict conditions regarding the dissemination of her property in her last will. 174. Park, Recollections and Red Letter Days, 59–63; Burt, ‘Life on the Andaman Islands’. 175. A Mrs Hilton was in charge of the orphanage between 1872 and 1873 (Portman, A History of our Relations, Vol. II, 852), and Man’s mother, during her sojourn on the Andaman Islands, apparently also took an interest (Prain, ‘Memoir’, 9). 176. See Chapter 1 for Talbot Clifton’s trading practices. Broughton was a photographer who travelled with Walter Edward Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, to the Pacific and the Indian Ocean in 1934 and 1935. Her photographs of Car Nicobar, Chaura and Little Andaman are held by the Royal Anthropological Institute and many of them were published in W. Moyne and V. Broughton. 1936. Walkabout: A Journey in Lands between the Pacific and the Indian Oceans, London: William Heinemann Ltd. They show Broughton’s fleeting but physically intimate encounters with Nicobarese and Ongee individuals.

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177. Burt, ‘Life on the Andaman Islands’. On ‘Topsy’, see Anderson, ‘Writing Indigenous Women’s Lives in the Bay of Bengal’. 178. M.H.W. Deane. 1969. ‘The Andaman Islands: A Family Connection’, typescript dated 26 January 1969, APAC, MSS EUR D1032. Deane was the daughter of Mr and Mrs Reginald Lowis who were contemporaries of the Tusons and their close friends: the Tuson albums at the Horniman include images of the couple with a baby (perhaps Mary). 179. C.W.B. Anderson. 1903. Kismet: An Idyll of the Andamans. A Play in Two Acts, Port Blair, produced for private circulation by the Amateur Dramatic Society, 19. See copy in the Tuson photograph albums, CCS 308(541.9) TUS, HML. 180. T. Logan. 2001. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 126. 181. R. Jones. 2007. Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c. 1800–1947, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1. 182. L.E. Tuson, interview, 13 September 2006. 183. J. Hockey, B. Penhale and D. Sibley. 2005. ‘Environments of Memory: Home Space, Later Life and Grief’, in J.D. Davidson, L. Bondi and M. Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies, Aldershot: Ashgate, 143. 184. Ibid., 142. See, for example, the comparable action of sending the deceased’s clothes to a hospital. 185. L.E. Tuson, interview, 13 September 2006. 186. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 72. 187. Thomas, Entangled Objects, 26.

Chapter 3

Wider Spheres of Influence The Andaman and Nicobar Islands in Victorian and Edwardian Britain The individual objects which make up RPMBH’s collection from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands will return to feature ‘centre stage’ in the narrative of their social lives in Chapter 4. There, we will discover how developments in Brighton came to impact upon the material culture which once belonged to Man, Temple and Tuson as they entered the more institutionalized phases of their ‘careers’. Questions as to how museum display (or storage) affected the understanding of these objects will be posed: how did, for example, the personal taste of museum curators, the agenda of the museum’s trustees and the legacy of the collector affect the meaning and interpretation of these objects? How did Brighton’s professional, political and leisure-based societies engage with them while they were housed in this specific public arena? However, before questions of public reaction to these collections can be approached, we first must acknowledge the inevitable, important impact that prior knowledge and wider understanding had on this receptive audience. Michael Baxandall has advocated a model for the reception of exhibitions in which the influence of makers and curators is fundamentally integrated with the agency of the viewers of these exhibited objects.1 Crucially, the exhibition visitor ‘is a being of his [or her] culture’,2 bringing to an understanding of a specific object or display ‘all the historical and psychological accidents of who they are’.3 Visitors to Brighton Museum and other individuals who encountered the objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands would not have engaged with them from a ‘pure’, fresh perspective. Rather, specific political, social and economic insights and sensitivities, formed throughout their lives, would have influenced their understandings. In the decades before the Andaman and Nicobar collections arrived in their museum, Brighton’s residents would have been developing and storing their own comparative frameworks with which to access these objects. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a constant stream of events and a variety of different media projected the non-European ‘other’ into

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British homes and public arenas. Ronald Inden, Annie Coombes and Richard White, considering India, Africa and Australia respectively, have led the wideranging scholarship which acknowledges the extent to which all corners of the British Empire pervaded British awareness.4 Certainly, the wider discourses of ‘race’ permeating social consciousness, combined with a diffusion of imperial ideologies into popular culture and the wider ‘Easternization’ of Britain at this time,5 contributed to public understandings of ethnographic objects such as those at Brighton Museum. An introduction to the (mis)conceptions that circulated about the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is thus central to a book which seeks to map out the biographies of a set of objects from this region; the frameworks that influenced local and national potential museum audiences can help us glean an understanding of how they were made meaningful in the institutional stages of their careers. The multiple prior understandings of visitors and other observers are difficult to trace on an individual level, but we can examine how representations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, their peoples and, by extension, their material cultures, infiltrated a wider ‘popular society’ on a national scale in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. To be sure, as tiny, remote outposts of the British Empire, neither the Andaman nor the Nicobar Islands had the same prevalence as other, larger colonies, affected by particularly seminal events. Nevertheless, both island groups did pierce British national consciousness on a multitude of occasions, and in a wide variety of media. Photographs of the Andaman Islands have been particularly well analysed in the postcolonial literature to date, but the images taken by Man, Portman and others were mainly presented for the attention of a specialist, scientific community.6 For wider, more populist audiences, both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were highlighted in encyclopaedia entries, in travel writings, in illustrated weekly newspapers and magazines, in international exhibitions and in examples of popular fiction. Three particularly pertinent and widely disseminated examples appeared in the pages of the Illustrated London News (ILN), at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 and in Arthur Conan Doyle’s popular Sherlock Holmes novella The Sign of Four.7 Through a close examination of the relatively contained body of public material pertaining to one of Britain’s smallest colonial sites (though, of course, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were part of the Indian Empire, with all its associated connotations), we can establish a pattern of representation that offers wider implications for the relationship that British citizens had with their nation’s empire. Kelly Boyd, a historian of children’s popular fiction, has asserted that by the late nineteenth century the discourses of race and difference central to popular understandings of empire were formed of ‘not so much a scientific attitude as a cultural one overlain with a bit of science’.8 Investigating this notion, this chapter seeks to demonstrate that the ‘science’ beneath this cultural overlay was actually subject to varying levels of diffusion depending upon the form of visual or literary apparatus employed. Just as with mainland India,9 no single perception of the Andaman or Nicobar Islands existed; rather, an array of attitudes formed

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a number of imagined islands, the constructs of which were often invented at the heart of the empire. These imaginings were heavily influenced by the mediaspecific techniques employed during the production of illustrated periodicals, international exhibitions and popular literature, and, as we shall see, certain aspects of this ‘science’ were stressed or dispensed with, depending upon the medium.

Illustrated Periodicals and Visual Representations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Despite the notoriously difficult process of assessing the figures of periodical and newspaper readership in the UK during the Victorian and Edwardian eras, it is clear that circulation was expansive, with official statistics recognized as having been greatly inflated by the impact of ‘“hidden” readers’ who read and viewed these publications in public libraries, in the servants’ quarters of subscribing middle-class homes, and in other arenas.10 Instigated by nineteenth-century advances in the technologies of paper-making and printing, a proliferation in the production of weekly magazines and newspapers occurred, with the appeal and accessible nature of illustration particularly influencing audience demand and reception.11 Certainly, the textual and visual material publicised by these periodicals reached a wide stratum of British society and, it has been argued, provided one of the key sources from which Victorians derived their ‘sense of the outside world’.12 The ILN, influenced by the assumptions and idiosyncrasies of its particular editors, proprietors, journalists, artists and engravers, and its revolutionary policy of subordinating text to pictures,13 offers a particularly interesting perspective on the images of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that were disseminated for popular consumption.

Targeted Coverage and Catalytic Events Upon its launch, the ILN proclaimed its aim to ‘keep continually before the eye of the world a living and moving panorama of all its actions and influences’.14 Notably, given the political climate of this ‘world’, news of Britain, its colonies and the relationship between the two proved to be a popular focus of this ‘living and moving panorama’. As Chandrika Kaul notes, such publications ‘played a major role in creating, mediating and sustaining the evolution of the British imperial experience’.15 However, within this framework, specific colonies were by no means an ‘all-pervasive constant’:16 for the Andaman Islands, it was significant political events related to the British imperial project (albeit with a clear link to the region) that often provided the catalyst for the sporadic exposure that occurred. It was judged, for example, that the occasion of the British occupation of the Andaman Islands in 1858 would ‘render welcome the accompanying Engravings … illustrative of the Andamans and of their inhabitants’ and the

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information on the geography and anthropology of the area which was also supplied, courtesy of ‘Stocqueler’s “Oriental Interpreter”’ (see Figure 3.1).17 Similarly, it was significant political and scientific events, again related to British activity, which propelled the Nicobar Islands into the media spotlight. Occupation of the Nicobar Islands in 1869 prompted the ILN to issue a twopage illustrated spread in early 1870 (Figure 3.2 and Figure 3.3),18 and, when the European scientific community chose the Nicobars as a location from which to observe the 1875 total eclipse of the sun (due to their position close to the line of greatest totality),19 approximately thirteen hundred words and a fullpage illustration which combined six individual cartouches (Figure 3.4) were dedicated to the islands.20 In terms of press coverage, however, it was as the scenic backdrop to the unsettling murder of the Earl of Mayo, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, that the Andaman Islands attained its real public presence. Following Mayo’s fatal stabbing by Shere Ali, an Afghan convict, in 1872, the ILN ran the usual obituaries and dedications to the prominent statesman and administrator, presenting four half-page landscape illustrations of various vantage points around the islands (Figure 3.5, Figure 3.6, Figure 3.7 and Figure 3.8), a smaller image of the barracks at Port Blair, and an eight-hundred-word article on the history of the Andaman Islands and their inhabitants, to give some context.21 Indeed, the impact of this event was momentous: after 1872, the Mayo murder was highlighted in most references to the Andaman Islands and played a significant role in British understandings of the area.22 In a letter to the editor of The Times, the president of the commission which had originally recommended the Andaman Islands as a suitable location for a penal colony in 1857 asserted that they would be ‘now forever associated with the greatest crime and calamity of our time’,23 and, as predicted, almost one hundred years after the fatality, when writing the memoirs of her life as part of the colonial community in the Andamans, Mary Deane noted that the memory of ‘the murdered Viceroy’ and the associated ‘lurking rumours of violence were familiar to us all’.24

Remote Representation: Landscape and the Bay of Bengal Editors and contributors to publications such as the ILN clearly recognized the communicative potential that visual representation had in the dissemination of ‘objective’ information and historical ‘facts’.25 Pictorial depictions of places like the Andaman and Nicobar Islands were envisioned as ‘interpretative gateways’26 through which readers and viewers of the ILN could become fully accustomed to the empire’s outposts. Contributors employed different genres to introduce different facets of these colonies: in the 1858 feature, for example, while examining the Andaman Islands in their capacity as the most recent addition to the British Empire, the ILN used four methods of depiction to illustrate four alternative aspects of the islands (see Figure 3.1). First, a portrait of an ‘Andaman savage’

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Figure 3.1 ILN. 1858. ‘Expedition to the Andaman Islands’, 27 March, 316. Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Sussex.

Figure 3.2 ILN. 1870. ‘The Nicobar Islands’, 15 January, 68. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

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Figure 3.3 ILN. 1870. ‘The Nicobar Islands’, 15 January, 69. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

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Figure 3.4 ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

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Figure 3.5 ILN. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands: Hope Town, with Mount Harriet, showing the pier, where Lord Mayo was stabbed’, 24 February, 181. Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Sussex.

Figure 3.6 ILN. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands: North End of Ross Island, Head-Quarters of the Penal Settlement’, 24 February, 188. Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Sussex.

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Figure 3.7 ILN. 1872. ‘Back of Ross Island, Port Blair’, 24 February, 188. Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Sussex.

Figure 3.8 ILN. 1872. ‘Viper Island, Andaman Islands’, 16 March, 27. Courtesy of the Special Collections, University of Sussex.

Figure 3.9 ILN. 1889. ‘A Village in the Nicobar Islands’, 5 October, 443. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

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dressed in a sailor suit was used to illustrate the ‘character and expression’ of the inhabitants of the islands;27 then, a detail of a ‘Hut of the Andaman Islanders’ was given as an instance of the endeavours of the Andamanese on ‘Cheetham Island’, whose architecture was deemed to be ‘of the rudest description’.28 The third illustration was a separate study of the formal qualities of eight neatly arranged tools from South Reef Island, divorced from their hypothetical owner and any use-value they might represent, and provided in order to illustrate the material culture ‘used [or otherwise] by the natives of the Andamans’.29 However, indicative of a theme which ran through the ILN’s representations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the final and largest image of the feature spread was a scenic, elevated view; in this case, a seascape. Indeed, in a survey of Figures 3.1 to 3.8, landscapes and seascapes emerge with a particular regularity.30 Not limited to pictorial representations, the majority of printed contemporary information on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands outside the ILN also began with an introduction to their ‘picturesque’, ‘varied landscape’. Jules Verne, in his description of Phileas Fogg’s encounter with the Andaman Islands during his trip Around the World in Eighty Days, was no exception: ‘[t]he panorama … was superb. Vast forests of palms, arecs, bamboo, teakwood, of the gigantic mimosa, and tree-like ferns covered the foreground, while behind, the graceful outlines of the mountains were traced against the sky’.31 The ILN may have used the picturesque to capture its readers’ attention, but as a newspaper, it additionally employed landscapes as factual diagrams, to improve audiences’ understanding of serious, newsworthy issues related to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands: the illustration shown in Figure 3.5, for example, was described as ‘showing the pier, where Lord Mayo was stabbed’.32 Clearly, however, these images of beauty and ‘reality’ were in fact a ‘kaleidoscopic construct’ influenced by the ideological choices made by artists and engravers.33 Just as W.J.T. Mitchell has defined landscape as a ‘“discourse” in which various political positions may be articulated’ and as a medium rather than as a genre,34 the landscapes of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the ILN reveal a variety of recognizable tropes which highlight their hegemonic significance. In most of the ILN’s Nicobar landscapes, for example, a series of ‘naked savages’ progress the classic clothed/ naked dichotomy so common to imperial imagery.35 For instance, in Figure 3.9, two Nicobarese actors are pictured in the water itself, close to and working in harmony with the natural world.36 The perceived ‘natural’ state of the Nicobarese is emphasized by the materiality of the ILN itself: British readers would have consumed the paper whilst in their own, industrialized habitat; the contextual frame of the image (namely the printed page) would have been glaringly present as a symbol of the industrial printing revolution which dominated the period. Figure 3.4, which depicts the activity surrounding the recording of the solar eclipse of 1875 in the Nicobar Islands, is also indicative of the complex division between progress and savagery that structured the ways in which metropolis and colony were understood in Victorian Britain.37 According to J.N. Lockyer and Arthur Schuster in their report on the total solar eclipse, preparations

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for the event were consumed with questions as to whether, given the rarity of the phenomenon, reliable ‘old methods’ of eclipse observation should be employed, or whether the opportunity to explore ‘new methods’ and ‘fresh fields of research’ should be seized.38 In support of the scientists’ final decision to pursue progress and development, those who contributed to the visual depiction of the event chose to emphasize these European scientific advancements in their art (see Figure 3.4, and details in Figure 3.10 and Figure 3.11).39 ‘Progress’ was particularly highlighted through a direct comparison between the scientists and the indigenous peoples in the locale. In praise of civilization, at the top of the page (Figure 3.10), a series of three cartouches depicted the action involved in the arrangement, preparation and checking of innovative, experimental scientific equipment: an equatorial camera, a reflector, a spectroscopic camera and the observatory of the Italian astronomer Pietro Tacchini were all illustrated. Accompanied by a body of jargon-filled text,40 the images were a clear attempt to demonstrate the latest developments in astronomy and photography to a popular British audience. A vertical row of numbers pegged to a beam depicted in the central cartouche, presumably meaningless to the largely uninformed reader, remind the postcolonial critic, at least, of the nineteenth-century imperial obsession with data gathering and the illusion of ‘a controllable indigenous reality’, to which unlimited amounts of state-generated numbers, measurements and quantifications are seen to have contributed.41 In direct contrast to this densely peopled scene of progress, the reader was then introduced to the content of the cartouche at the bottom-right of the page (Figure 3.11). Notably, the images are bridged by a central panoramic scene which functions to distance the viewer from the European encampment above and transport them into the unknown hinterland of the Nicobar Islands depicted below (see Figure 3.4). According to the article which accompanied the illustrations, before leaving the Nicobar Islands the members of the expedition ‘spent a day in visiting some of the villages on the other side of the harbour’.42 It was this tour which inspired such photographs, and later illustrations, as ‘Village of Malakka’ (Figure 3.11).43 Taken in the context of the accompanying ‘anthropological’ information provided, which asserts that the ‘natives of the islands are not very numerous, and live as did the primeval lake-dwellers of Switzerland’,44 the two lone, anonymous Nicobarese men, static in their canoe in the foreground of the image, are seen as the antithesis of the numerous, dynamic, named European figures above, engaged in the highest levels of scientific research.45 The conical houses in the background of the lower image may visually echo Signor Tacchini’s observatory, but the various members of staff depicted as being in his attendance contrast directly with the deserted Nicobarese homes, while the descriptive titles of the cartouches, specifically ‘observatory’ (read scientific) and ‘village’ (read preindustrial), highlight the civilized/primitive dichotomy hinted at throughout the written and illustrated components of the article. The technical equipment illustrated in this depiction of the Nicobar Islands also highlights one of the most palpable tropes identifiable in the ILN’s various

Figure 3.10 ‘The Equatorial Camera’, ‘Browning’s Reflector & Spectroscopic Camera’, and ‘Sig[nor] Tacchini’s Observatory’, from ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

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Figure 3.11 ‘Village of Malakka’, from ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

illustrations of the Andaman Islands: that of surveillance. Bernard Cohn has highlighted the fact that, in the nineteenth century, the British appear ‘to have felt most comfortable surveying India from above and at a distance’.46 Certainly, in representations of the Andaman Islands in the late-nineteenth-century periodicals, this seems to have been the case. In 1872, four landscapes were printed in order to inform the newspaper’s audience as to the details of Lord Mayo’s murder (see Figures 3.5 to 3.8); the images were accompanied by a text which also reported on the ‘mingled sensation of profound grief and momentary apprehension’ which the event generated.47 Given this sense of ‘apprehension’, or fear, over the sudden fracture of the established imperial order, the ILN’s use of the landscape genre, so often employed as a ‘very visible marker of ownership and authority’,48 can be seen as an attempt to redress this sudden imbalance, as well as wider European fears over diseased, decaying and dangerous tropical environments.49 While the insurgence had taken place under the cover of night, as ‘Darkness overtook them’,50 the bright,

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exposed landscapes actively combated this murky uncertainty, visually revealing and resecuring the region though the optic of the colonial endeavour.51 Notably, despite the common use of the landscape medium in the denial of ‘progress’ in its many guises, and the tendencies of other observers to actively eliminate the changes which were taking place under colonial rule on the Andaman Islands, the ILN’s landscape images of the region effectively highlighted these imperial alterations.52 The cluster of tree stumps depicted in the foreground of Figure 3.5 provide notification of the deforestation programme which was realized during the colonial period, and the pier in the same image is symbolic of the regular transport and political links that the various islands by then had to each other and to mainland India. The huts, along with the houses and barracks in Figures 3.6 to 3.8, are a stark contrast to the woven palm leaves used to make shelters by the Great Andamanese communities, and an unambiguous illustration of the permanence of the islands’ new international residents. The church in the centre foreground of Figure 3.6, the ‘guiding light’ of the new lighthouse established in 1867 (Figure 3.12) and the colonial ‘verandah’ shown in its various guises in Figures 3.6 to 3.8 are all clear indexical signs of the British imperial project, firmly emphasizing the Andaman Islands as British territory. One more effect of British occupation of the Andaman Islands was, however, more subtly represented. Mitchell has read the attempt to depict beauty and harmony through the medium of landscape as ‘a compensation for and screening off of the actual violence perpetrated’ upon the land,53 and, indeed, some of the ILN images neatly skirt the grave problems of the colonial encounter in the Andamans: despite the underlying bloodshed that is known to have underpinned the arrival of the British in 1858, in the central landscape in Figure 3.1, the men and women of Interview Island (where the expedition first landed) are depicted as welcoming the outsiders with enthusiastic waves, rather than rejecting their advances. Conversely, in other images, the Andamanese are largely absent – prophetic, perhaps, of the devastating destruction that colonizers would come to have on the demography of the Andaman Islands’ indigenous communities.54

Figure 3.12 ILN. 1867. ‘New Iron Lighthouse, Table Islands, Cocos Group, Andaman Islands’, 18 May, 489. Courtesy of St Peter’s House Library, University of Brighton.

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Based on the illustrations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the ILN during the second half of the nineteenth century, a wider British audience would have gained access to a detailed but specifically constructed view of this colonial outpost. Individual readers with different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds would have read the messages inherent in this view in different ways, but these personal perceptions were immeasurably influenced by the choices of subject matter and the stylistic interpretation of the ILN’s editors, field correspondents, illustrators and engravers: through these agents, events such as the murder of Lord Mayo and the general colonial presence there came to dominate how popular Britain would have understood the islands. Ultimately, it was not the Andamanese or Nicobarese peoples that dominated ILN coverage, but news of Great Britain, ‘development’ and ‘progress’ that informed readers’ perceptions.

Representations of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at International Exhibitions: The Case of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886 Undoubtedly, with the nineteenth-century development of the ‘international exhibition’ as a medium for the display and dissemination of cultural material, Europe gained a ‘powerful stock of images’ with which to view itself and its non-Western ‘other’.55 Peter Hoffenberg summarizes the wider body of recent scholarship in his assertion that such events were ‘spectacles of tangible fantasy, in which participants forged nations and the Empire, both imaginary and material’.56 Despite their modest size, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, or more specifically their peoples and materials, featured in these cultural and economic programmes with surprising frequency and were represented by way of a variety of exhibits. Representations of the islands ranged from a single photograph of an ‘Andamanese group with Mr Homfray, their keeper, photographed at Calcutta’, displayed at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle, and a small contingency of ‘rude spears of the Nicobar Islanders’ again shown in Paris, in 1878, to the samples of the popular hardwood, Andaman Padauk (or Padouk), prominently displayed in the majority of exhibitions throughout the entire era.57 The most vivid and extensive representation of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, however, was in 1886, at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington. Perhaps due to the popularity of the event as a whole, or conceivably due to the individual exhibit’s imaginative and provocative display, it was here that the Andaman Islands in particular truly became part of this ‘powerful stock of images’ and the imagined British empire.58 The Andaman and Nicobar Islands were represented at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition by five near-life-sized clay or plaster-of-Paris figures of three Andaman Islanders and two Nicobarese men (see Figure 3.13 and Figure 3.14). Located together at the east entrance to the Indian Imperial Court, and part of the wider ‘Indian Empire’ section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, for the many visitors entering the event at its principal entrance on Exhibition Road,

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Figure 3.13 J. Dinsdale. 1886. Sketches at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London: Jordison & Co. Courtesy of RPMBH.

this small exhibit would have been one of the first they saw.59 This display (and its subsequent incarnations in newspapers and in other commentaries which covered the event) substantially contributed to British understanding of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, building upon and transforming the previous representations promoted in other media. While the focus of the ILN coverage explored above rested upon the landscape of the region and the British events

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Figure 3.14 Graphic. 1886. ‘Group of Andaman Islanders’, 15 May, 540. © The British Library Board.

which were hosted in the locale, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition brought the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and their material cultures to the fore. There may have been little opportunity to gauge readers’ reactions to the ILN’s articles, but given the availability of material which disclosed the rationale behind the exhibit in South Kensington and the abundance of published literary and visual responses to those efforts, there is evidence of the reception of this display and, by extension, how it contributed to a wider British understanding of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.60

Scale Models: Social Evolutionary Hierarchies Revisited As established in Chapter 2, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Andamanese peoples and their material cultures were commonly subject to anthropological paradigms which relegated them to ‘the lowest state of human

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society of which we have any certain knowledge’.61 Consistently judged in scientific circles to be of ‘the most degraded and barbarous races in existence’,62 the Andamanese were similarly categorized by the exhibition organizers in 1886: subject to the medium of exhibition design, which frequently ‘encoded racial, aesthetic, and economic oppositions and hierarchies’,63 here too they were assessed in relation to various physical and cultural scales, and, perhaps predictably, were resoundingly found to occupy their bottom rungs. The models were commissioned and arranged by the Royal Commission’s Special Officer for the Economic Section, George Watt, and modelled by Jadu Nàth Pal of the Krishnagar (Krishnanagar) modelling workshop.64 They were replicas of an earlier set of figures made for the Calcutta International Exhibition in 1883, and had originally been taken from six anonymous Andamanese (two women and four men) and three men from Car Nicobar who had been sent to Calcutta specifically for the purpose.65 They were part of a series of twelve groups of figures, each envisioned as representing the ‘leading provinces and native states of India’.66 Although Watt was at pains to emphasize that the models were presented ‘in order to show the leading groups of inhabitants of India, and not to work out any ethnological classification’,67 the attempt to fix the oriental ‘other’ in a wider taxonomic frame of reference is clear.68 Indeed, contemporary scientific assumptions regarding the existence of discernible differences in evolutionary status between human groups seem to have filtered through to the public reception of the Andamanese replica figures in imperfect but significant ways. These hierarchical comparisons, conceived of in both physical and cultural terms, and also in terms of skin colour,69 influenced much of the popular commentary on the exhibit. Certainly, the journalist reporting on the exhibition for the Graphic newspaper felt the whole Indian section conducive to such relational evaluation and expressed a desire ‘to compare province with province’ for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers.70 A writer for the Westminster Review was stirred to employ a similarly comparative approach, clearly selecting a number of social evolutionism’s preferred modes of ‘racial’ differentiation as his criteria for comment. His description of India, inspired by the display of the clay models, is worth quoting at length. This enormous population consists of numerous races and tribes, including every imaginable shade of colour – from the purest white to more than negro blackness – and every type of countenance, a fact which is hardly realized by the majority of Englishmen, but which is most clearly placed before us in this Exhibition, by a series of life-sized models in native costume, commencing with the diminutive unclad Andamanese, negroid in colour, and the Nicobarese, taller and lighter, but almost equally savage, and passing on through tribes decidedly Mongoloid in type, from the North-west Provinces, to the tribes of the Punjab, among whom we find a pale yellow type, and also the very tall, dark Sikh, with naked legs, and hat adorned with a perfect armoury of weapons of all kinds, commencing with those metal rings or quoits which Siva the destroyer is always represented as twirling upon one of his fingers. Then there

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are the Nagas from the hills, tattooed, and wearing large shell and cornelian bead necklaces of native manufacture, and other hill tribes.71

Due in some measure, perhaps, to the spatial hierarchy engendered by the positioning of the Andamanese figures as the first element of the exhibit, at the front of the court, and also encouraged, conceivably, by Watt’s desire to highlight ‘a few of the striking peculiarities of this extremely interesting people’,72 the writer conspicuously placed the Andamanese at the beginning (and at the bottom) of the scales of skin colour, body type and mode of material culture constructed in his or her prose. In a spectrum of ‘every imaginable shade of colour’, the ‘negroid’ Andamanese model was formed as a baseline with which to compare the ‘lighter’ Nicobarese and the ‘pale yellow’ ‘tribes of the Punjab’ residing further inside the court. Here, and elsewhere, the Andamanese models were consistently defined by their physical shortcomings: in a review of the exhibit published by the Graphic, they were noted as ‘diminutive’ and ‘comparatively puny’ compared to the ‘very tall’, ‘stalwart Sikh’, also included in the scheme.73 Moreover, where the complexity and breadth of a society’s material culture was seen as a marker of its producers’ progression along a hierarchical scale, the ‘unclad’ Andaman Islander could not compete with either the Naga models in the Assam exhibit which were festooned with ‘large shell and cornelian bead necklaces’, or the Sikh figure whose hat was ‘adorned with a perfect armoury of weapons of all kinds’.74 Indeed, the writer for the Westminster Review ignored the Andamanese adornments and tools completely, effectively placing the figures off the descriptive scale. These popular comparisons may not have replicated precisely the complex ‘scientific’ scales propounded by men such as Tylor or Pitt Rivers, but in these reviews the Andamanese consistently provided the benchmark against which other groups from India were physically measured. In their precise positioning of the Andamanese models in these rigid aesthetic scales of colour, physique and garb, the writers of both the Westminster Review and the Graphic echoed wider British attempts, made both at international exhibitions and in other imperial enterprises to impose a politically useful, meaningful order on the ‘apparent kaleidoscope’75 of Indian society. By way of their physical ‘peculiarities’, the Andaman models, along with the other figures in the Indian Imperial Court, were carefully categorized and controlled. The use in the exhibit of not real human bodies but representative models also allowed the exhibition organisers to symbolically control the people they depicted. Produced through the creative practices of mould-taking, casting, sculpting and painting, the models erased the literal and symbolic humanity and the uniqueness of the original sitter. In the reductive process of producing a scientific model, and in the parallel artistic act of creating a representational form, those (ideologically selected) physical elements of the human body perceived as denoting a person of a particular ‘race’ – a specific skin colour, a particular height or a precise body shape – were selectively extracted from Andamanese and Nicobarese individuals, creatively assembled, and physically manifested in a stylized ‘type’. Avoiding the

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complications of human specificity which had the potential to blur the process of comparison, the clay models were far superior to real human bodies in facilitating idealized social evolutionary comparison. Produced though the same ideological lens and artistic eye, and identical in format and media, the models could be displayed both simultaneously and in the same physical space. Through the mobility and immutability of their representations, the Andamanese and other Indian groups were made (to use Bruno Latour’s phrase) ‘presentable, readable and combinable’.76 Paul Greenhalgh, amongst others, has highlighted the regularity with which social evolutionary theories underpinned the ethnographic displays at international exhibitions in the late nineteenth century.77 With the 1886 inauguration of the Andaman Islands into such a public event, racial and cultural perceptions regarding the Andamanese which were already familiar to anthropologists made a seminal leap into the popular arena. Observations from a non-specialist audience had identified the Andamanese as the lowest, most ‘savage’ people in a perceived scheme of human cultural development; here, the Andamanese exhibit lent new outer limits to popular British views of India as an infinity of racial and social variety.

‘Instinct with Life and Expression’: The Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the Colonial Gaze As well as establishing the peoples of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands within a populist hierarchy, the tangible physicality of the figures, coupled with their inanimate state as models, also developed this level of public interest in new ways, controlled less by Watt and his team, and more by wider public attitudes towards the non-Western ‘other’ prevalent at the time. It was the ‘very life-like appearance’78 of the models, in particular, that lent new impetus to how the British public viewed their distant colony. A notable focus on the figures’ perceived verisimilitude is traceable both in the official literature describing them and in visual and written reactions to the exhibit. The three-dimensional, life-sized composition of the models, complemented by their precisely chosen skin tones,79 actual hair80 and ‘authentic’ accessories,81 seems to have evoked a ‘psychology of overvaluation’82 in exhibition visitors: properties normally associated with the real, living body were actively ascribed to the clay figures. One commentator on the Indian Imperial Court imagined the inanimate, abstract models as real people, with dynamic social lives and even social status: a female figure was conceived to be carrying the skull of ‘a near relation’ and standing next to ‘her husband’, who, in turn, ‘was no doubt a regular dandy among his people’.83 The figures were proclaimed as ‘instinct with life and expression’,84 while the author of a humorous ‘bird’s-eye’ view of the exhibition found the figures ‘quite startling in their exact resemblance to real human beings’.85 Standing on the Bamboo Trophy which overlooked the models

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(see Figure 3.15), the Prince of Wales himself is reported to have exclaimed, ‘Why, you have India itself here!’86 These are clearly the imaginative, poetic writings of individuals keen to promote the exhibition’s wonders, yet there does seem to be a marked tendency across a full range of commentators to delight in the possibility of the models’ humanity. Paradoxically, it was the artificial and inanimate qualities of the models which allowed Western audiences to perceive them as particularly ‘real’. Where scholars have begun to find traces of the agency of the individuals who peopled the ‘reallife’ ‘native villages’ commonly reconstructed at the great exhibitions, the models in their material solidity had no such ability to ‘speak’. When Liberty’s Department Store attempted to increase their sales through the production of a ‘living village of Indian artisans’ in 1885, all manner of problems resulted from employing real actors brought from India, with their ‘awkward’ demands for food, warmth and freedom from physical abuse.87 Similarly, ‘out of hours’ sightings of the so-called ‘living exhibits’, travelling on tramcars, smoking cigarettes and wearing European clothing, were known to have shocked visitors into recognizing the theatrical properties of the ‘native villages’.88 The models in the Indian Imperial Court were, by contrast, a reliable, permanent ‘other’, upon whose solid surfaces perceived ‘truths’ concerning the non-Western subject could safely be posited. The clay models could not complain, embarrass or reverse the European gaze, but were a secure, static option that could only accept the terms of their representation. Echoing recent analysis regarding the photographic frame and the stabilization of the subject,89 the immobility of the models rendered them unable to engage with or counter the Western fantasies imposed upon them; without such a restraint, these ‘truths’ were cemented and proliferated in a variety of ways. Confronted with the models, underlying British fears of the violent depravity of the non-Western savage were given full expression: one particularly imaginative visitor who reported on how the models ‘looked so much alive it was quite startling’, commented particularly upon how some of the male figures ‘looked rather fierce, and rolled their eyes’.90 Tensions also seem to have been increased by the bamboo barriers which surrounded the Andaman and Nicobar models: in Figure 3.15, as though at a zoo, a Victorian lady is shown to be peeping tentatively at one of the arrangements through the window of a tall, wooden trellis. While almost certainly a practical measure to protect the fragile figures from probing hands, the cage-like formation of the bamboo structure combined with the artist’s depiction of the woman’s hesitant pose also emphasize that what lies behind the barriers may need to be contained and controlled. Such anxieties over the inherent ferocity and violence of the British Empire’s colonial subjects were also perpetuated by the choices made by contemporary artists in the form and content of their representations, particularly with regard to the Andamanese models. In a survey of the contemporary visual and textual descriptions of the exhibits, for example, the irregular placement of a skull ornament and a bow raise such issues. Skulls of the recently deceased were indeed worn throughout the Andaman Islands as a sign of protection during mourning

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Figure 3.15 Graphic. 1886. The Bamboo Trophy at the top end of the Imperial Court, from ‘The Indian Section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, 15 May, 536. © The British Library Board.

(by women) and to heal sickness (by both men and women), and in the more authoritative and critical reports of the display, it was the female figure who held the protective emblem.91 However, in more popular depictions, particular object configurations implied an alternative use. The artist John Dinsdale (see Figure 3.13), for example, consciously united the skull with a more threatening male figure and the bow, used for hunting and fighting. In this arrangement, and by depicting a male figure whose stance and facial expression showed notable aggression and hostility, Dinsdale actively constructed the skull as a trophy rather than as a memorial, reacting to and augmenting the rumours of cannibalism with which the Andamanese were wrongly associated.92 Comparable fears were also expressed through a similar marriage of an ornamental skull and an aggressive pose in ‘Andaman Islander’, published in the ILN (Figure 3.16). Paradoxically, Victorian illusions concerning the overt sexuality and corporeal availability of the colonized subject were also inspired by the lifelike qualities of the models, reinforced by their inability to contradict such chimera. Tom Flynn

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Figure 3.16 ILN. 1886. ‘Andaman Islander’, 24 July, 92. © The British Library Board.

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has emphasized the ‘inescapable fact’ of the sculpted object, highlighting the unique psychological engagement which arises when an object occupies the same physical space as the viewing subject, while Anne Maxwell has contended that interpreting the non-Western ‘other’ through visual sources affected European audiences ‘with greater force and emotional impact’ than written accounts.93 Specifically, models as a genre have been seen to invite ‘distinctive bodily reactions’ in their audiences,94 while the human model as mannequin is considered as a functional stand-in, upon which ‘every imaginable malpractice can be exercised’ without the threat of consequence.95 Accordingly, where the aim of the exhibition was to ‘establish a closer relationship between Her Majesty’s subjects’,96 the visually arresting use of the inanimate human form in the Andaman and Nicobar exhibit certainly brought this relationship about, with emotive results. In his tongue-in-cheek sketch of the ‘Model Natives’ (see Figure 3.13), Dinsdale highlights the cumulative effect of the static, the three-dimensional and the exotic upon some exhibition visitors: encouraged, perhaps, by the knowledge that the model could not respond, and by the according assumption that his erotic interests would remain private, the bowler-hatted man to the left of the image is seen to indulge in a surreptitious, voyeuristic examination of the Andamanese female model’s breasts, with the illustrative blurring of his groin area leaving little to the imagination. Notably, however, in a decade characterized by the social purity movement, Dinsdale also pays homage to the development of a new moralism which denounced the display of the nude at the time.97 Perhaps referring to the still recent controversy over Alma Tadema’s A Sculptor’s Model,98 Dinsdale equates sexual desire for the exotic with lower-class tastes: the upperclass couple in the background, identified by their attire, disrupt the working man’s privacy, displaying their distaste and concern at his base, erotic thoughts. But the fantasies imposed upon the models were, ultimately, just that: in addition to these compositions of socially constructed colonial fear and sexual desire, visitors such as John Dinsdale and the illustrator for the Graphic also displayed a tendency to process the material objects in the exhibit subject entirely to arbitrary personal inclination. This was the first time that Andamanese material culture had been displayed at an international exhibition in the UK, and while some individuals and museums had begun to exhibit Andamanese objects by 1886, the display was produced on the cusp of what would eventually become a major influx of objects from this region into many important British museums and personal collections (see Chapter 2). Their relatively low profile at this time, however, may have contributed to their slightly disordered depiction by observers of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. In Figure 3.13 for example, Andamanese and Nicobarese attributes became confused, when an Andamanese waistbelt was coupled with a Nicobarese kamilee (hat) with unusually extended prongs; even the more ‘realistic’ illustration of the model placed at the left of Figure 3.14 depicted an unusual hairstyle and full waistbelt unrepresentative of Andamanese garb. Contributing significantly to the ‘powerful stock of images’ of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands then, the groups of clay figures at the Colonial and Indian

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Exhibition far extended British understanding of the islands, particularly in comparison to the more general press coverage of the ILN. Using tangible, visually arresting source material, George Watt and the Jadu Nàth Pal succeeded in bringing the indigenous inhabitants of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and their material cultures (in some form) to the fore of British consciousness regarding the region.

Something ‘Spicy’ and ‘Dramatic’: Representations of the Andaman Islands in Popular Literature ‘Well, and there is the end of our little drama,’ … [Watson] remarked.99

First published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890, but extensively reproduced thereafter, the widely read and enduringly popular The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle contains perhaps the most vivid and pervasive depiction of the Andaman Islands, their peoples and their material cultures in the British popular sphere. Placed firmly within the ‘whodunnit’ subgenre of detective fiction, the novella’s account of a wronged woman, a glorious, twice-stolen treasure and the deadly revenge of four conspirators was eventually received as a perfect cocktail of mystery, romance and ‘drama’ by multiple generations of the British reading public.100 Set in London, in 1888, the story unfolds as the beautiful, young Mary Morstan contacts Sherlock Holmes, concerned over the continued disappearance of her father and confused by her receipt of six priceless pearls, donated one by one over the last six years by an anonymous benefactor. More recently, she has received a mysterious summoning to an appointment with a stranger. Holmes, Mary Morstan and Dr Watson go together to meet this stranger, a Thaddeus Sholto, but rather than helping to solve these mysteries, the meeting serves to thicken the plot further. Meanwhile, during the Indian Mutiny-Rebellion of 1857, an English man, Jonathan Small, and his three Indian comrades murder a stranger, steal his fabulous treasure, and bury it for safe keeping while the uprising takes its course. Before they can recover their loot, however, they are apprehended for the murder, and sentenced to an indefinite amount of hard labour in the penal colony in the Andaman Islands. There, Small is forced to bargain with his overseers, a Major John Sholto and one Captain Morstan, promising them a portion of the treasure in exchange for his freedom. To Small’s horror, he is double-crossed by Sholto who keeps the treasure for himself, absconds to England and leaves Small to rot in the malarial, fever-ridden Andamans. Not happy with his lot, Small teams up with an Andamanese man, ‘Tonga’, and together they escape the islands, eventually travelling to England to wreak revenge. With John Sholto frightened to death by the arrival of Small and Tonga, and Captain Morstan already deceased, the treasure is now guarded by Sholto’s sons, Bartholomew

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and Thaddeus, the men who have been secretly supporting Mary Morstan with anonymous pearl donations in honour of their fathers’ friendship. The brothers’ plan is to share the treasure with Mary, but before arrangements can be made, Small and Tonga arrive, killing Bartholomew with an Andamanese poisoned arrow in order to retrieve the treasure for themselves. The plot reaches its climax as Holmes, Watson and the police pursue Small and Tonga down the Thames in a boat chase. In the end, the treasure is dumped in the river by a bitter Small, aware of his impending capture, and Tonga is killed in the pursuit. In a more relaxed postscript, Watson is engaged to be married to Mary Morstan and Holmes returns to his cocaine habit alone. Courtesy of Arthur Conan Doyle, the Andaman Islands provide the location in which many of the mysteries of the novella are eventually explained. Both Tonga, who is ultimately revealed as the mysterious, murdering assassin, and his personal effects are given much attention throughout the tale, providing rich material for analysis of representations of the Andaman Islands in British popular culture. For late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century readers, the bountiful images generated within colonial fictional literature undoubtedly spawned a plethora of imaginary ‘truths’ with which to comprehend the non-Western ‘other’.101 Fiction, it has been argued, became ‘fact’ in the popular comprehension of the outer world.102 In comparison to the ‘facts’ delivered by other forms of popular culture during this period, however, there was a crucial difference: while the ILN, as would be expected for a news publication, promised to deliver the world’s affairs with ‘fidelity’,103 and international exhibitions were conceived (amongst many other things) as instructive tools with which to educate the British public,104 fiction, as the very name implies, is understood and presented as constructed fantasy in which science and truth are purposely reshaped for ideological or artistic purposes.105 It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that in The Sign of Four, for the purposes of dramatic tension and literary flare, the Andaman Islands, its peoples and their material cultures were subject to particularly wild and hyperbolic description. This extremely popular text, devoured in journals, in multiple anthologies and single book publications, and continuously filmed and televised from 1923 onwards, provided a pervasive but warped wider framework within which audiences could view Brighton’s material collections. Undoubtedly a product of its time, the novella depicted Tonga as an essentialized racial ‘type’, in line with the classificatory practices of the British imperial project in India.106 However, irrespective of his wider inspirations, Doyle’s premier consideration was clearly his reader’s enjoyment: in correspondence with J.M. Stoddard, an agent for Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, it was established that a ‘spicy title’ that would be both ‘popular’ and ‘dramatic’ was required.107 In this context, the Andaman Islands, Tonga the Andaman Islander and his ‘earthly possessions’108 were purposely constructed as literary devices with which to excite readers of The Sign of Four.

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‘The conventional dragon or wicked earl’: Tonga the Sensational Cannibal John McBratney has identified the ‘bare-faced fabrication’ which Doyle employs in his depiction of Tonga and wider descriptions of the Andamanese:109 portrayed as cannibals with a range of physical deformities, Doyle’s untruths or exaggerations littered the pages of his novella, producing a particularly crude stereotype of the Andamanese for popular consumption. Fully aware of these inaccuracies, and likely to have consulted the Imperial Gazetteer of India during his writing of the tale,110 Doyle nevertheless instilled Tonga with these attributes, and presented him as a caricature whose characteristics are shaped in order to add to the melodrama of Doyle’s tale. The point is made explicitly by one of the novella’s peripheral characters: having taken into account the ‘injured lady, half a million in treasure, a black cannibal, and a wooden-legged ruffian’, Mrs Forrester, Mary Morstan’s landlady, proclaims the saga to be ‘a romance’, in which Tonga (and Small) ‘take the place of the conventional dragon or wicked earl’.111 Such a phrase well highlights how Doyle envisioned Tonga as a mythical monster and/or a pantomime villain for his dramatic ‘romance’. Given the profitable commodity status of fear,112 for Tonga to be a successful, appealing villain, his macabre characteristics needed to be extreme. Thus, just as Tonga’s brutish barbarism was marketed for entertainment purposes before the story began, when he was exhibited at fairs as ‘the black cannibal’, ‘so we always had a hatful of pennies after a day’s work’,113 the main narrative utilizes this uncontrollable savagery to heighten the dramatic tension of the novella: having survived a close encounter with the ‘little, bloodthirsty imp’,114 Watson concludes ‘Chapter 10: The End of the Islander’, with the impassioned, chilling admission, ‘I confess it turned me sick to think of the horrible death which had passed so close to us that night’.115 Indeed, as the text’s ‘most visible symbol of colonial alterity’,116 the Andaman Islander is particularly striking in his physical appearance: part of a wider ‘frightening array of eccentric bodies’,117 he is an ‘unhallowed dwarf’ with a ‘shock of tangled, dishevelled hair’ and a ‘hideous face’, described as the sort ‘to give a man a sleepless night’.118 His ‘misshapen head’ and ‘distorted’ figure are emphasized when compared to ‘the two graceful, clinging figures’ of Mary Morstan, the narrator’s love interest, and her landlady.119 For Watson, whose descriptions echo those of the Andamanese exhibit at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886, Tonga’s visage is at the predictable end of an expansive scale: compared to the normality of Jonathan Small who is described as ‘good-sized’, Tonga is ‘a little black man – the smallest I have ever seen’.120 Similarly, his countenance can be placed in a comparable scale: ‘Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty.’121 Such grotesque imagery may add to the romance and excitement of the tale, but Tonga’s physical peculiarities are also crucial to the narrative plot given that Holmes, as Doyle suggests, solves crimes by finding ‘traces of … individuality’.122 Accordingly, ‘the remarkable character’123 of the footprint that the Andaman

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Islander leaves at the scene of the crime, ‘perfectly formed, but scarce half the size of those of an ordinary man’,124 quickly provides the sleuth with the information he needs to begin to recognize the trespasser’s physical ‘type’.125 Such information, combined with additional ‘clues’ regarding Tonga’s distinctive persona, soon allows Holmes to identify the national identity of the mysterious murderer and begin the chase in earnest as a result.

‘Hellish Things’: Material Culture and The Sign of Four Just as Tonga is made meaningful and indispensable through his sensational and exaggerated alterity, his material possessions are presented to a British reading public in a comparable light. Throughout, the Andamanese objects described by Doyle are indeed ‘strange weapons’,126 bearing little resemblance to contemporary material culture used on the Andaman Islands. The Andamanese poisoned arrow features heavily in the novella’s narrative, but is dismissed as fiction by nineteenth-century ethnographers such as Man.127 Indeed, the lengthy arrows and large bows used by the Andamanese for hunting have little practical relation to the novella’s iconic blowpipe. Similarly, Tonga’s ‘stone-headed wooden mace’,128 or ‘club’,129 as it is varyingly referred to, is entirely fictional, adding weight to Lawrence Frank’s suggestion that Tonga is presented to Doyle’s readers as a stone-age ‘emissary from the pre-historic past’.130 Throughout The Sign of Four, the specificities of the ‘Andamanese’ objects, whether realistically depicted or fantastic creations, are introduced to the reading public as crucial devices for narrative success. It is Tonga’s canoe, his ‘long bamboo spear, and some Andaman coconut-matting, with which I made a sort of a sail’,131 that allow Small to escape his island captivity, and move closer to exacting his revenge. Similarly, it is Tonga’s arrows which kill Bartholomew Sholto and also add fuel to Watson’s budding romance with Mary Morstan, evoking a passionate reaction central to their evolving relationship. She listened with parted lips and shining eyes to my recital of our adventures. When I spoke of the [Andamanese] dart which had so narrowly missed us, she turned so white that I feared that she was about to faint. ‘It is nothing,’ she said, as I hastened to pour her out some water. ‘I am all right again. It was a shock to me to hear that I had placed my friends in such horrible peril.’132

Such objects also reveal information about the individuals who use them:133 just as Tonga’s physical individuality assists Holmes in his solving of the mysterious crime, the specificity of the mythical poisoned darts reveals both the assailant’s ‘ungovernable anger’,134 and his geographical origins: ‘“Is that an English thorn?” [Holmes] … asked. “No, it certainly is not.”’135 The objects’ material alterity supplies Holmes with the facts he requires: upon finding the arrow pouch and its contents, the case quickly becomes clear: ‘It confirms my diagnosis, as you doctors express it.’136

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Selective Audience Reception of The Sign of Four Kelly Boyd has emphasized the extent to which attitudes to ‘race’ and the colonized ‘other’ ‘suffused the literature of the era’, most commonly drawing on negative images and reinforcing British prejudice with regards to the British Empire’s wider population.137 But for Doyle, in The Sign of Four, the Andaman Islands, their peoples and their material cultures were not the substance of a stereotype formed through ignorance: that Tonga is a physically deformed, bloodthirsty ‘hell-hound’138 with poisoned weapons is the matter of specifically constructed literary fantasy, as imagined by a master of his craft. In Tonga, Doyle was not writing a scientifically precise, ethnographical exposé of Andamanese human anthropology; rather, he was creating a mythical monster, a ‘conventional dragon’, which would neatly substantiate his narrative. The Sign of Four is, however, well worth examining in light of the reactions of Doyle’s public to his myths. To be sure, readers would have appreciated ‘Doyle’s imagination’ and the ‘spine-creeping melodrama’ which infiltrated his writing,139 but unlike Doyle, whose own research would have rectified any misconceptions, many of his readers could not have known where reality merged with fiction. Most of his audience would have known the Andamans only by the popular author’s descriptions, remaining unaware of the contrasting anthropological realities. One reader, as he explained in a letter to The Times, had to visit the Andaman Islands himself before his false impressions about cannibals and poisoned arrows could be corrected: during his trip, upon hearing of the use of bows and arrows by the Andamanese and inspired by his literary activities, he ‘naturally asked [his informant] … whether they did not also use blow-pipes’.140 Unsurprisingly, his guide was able to correct the false knowledge that the text imparted: his answer was, ‘No, they did not, and [he] added with a charming smile, “You see, Conan Doyle was wrong, wasn’t he?”’141 Drawing upon Doyle’s ‘spicy drama’, the illustrator, Frederick Henry Townsend, also imagined Doyle’s words more literally than perhaps they were intended. Townsend was a popular illustrator, working for the ILN, the Daily Chronicle and the Graphic during his career, rising to Art Editor of Punch in 1905. His visualization of Tonga’s murder of the unfortunate Bartholomew Sholto (Figure 3.17), however, betrays none of the satire and colonial critique for which Punch, in particular, was famed. In the slippage between literary fiction and visual imagining, Tonga seems to have been transformed from a near-absurd, pantomime villain into a threat more closely aligned to very real fears that Britain invested in her colonized subjects. For instance, in Doyle’s story, the audience is spared the detail of Tonga’s evil attack on Bartholomew Sholto, but in Townsend’s illustration Sholto’s murder is brutally depicted. In the text, the deed is never directly described; it is Jonathan Small who informs Holmes, and Doyle’s audience, of Sholto’s death, despite not being in the room when Tonga purportedly administers the fatal dart.142 Conversely, in his visualization of the scene, Townsend draws on Doyle’s

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Figure 3.17 Frederick Henry Townsend, from A.C. Doyle. 1903. The Sign of Four, souvenir edn, London: G. Newnes Ltd.

words, but extends them further, using his own toolbox of imperial stereotypes to conjure up the moment of death. He highlights the Andaman Islander’s evil act by selecting it as one of a limited number of illustrations, and removes Small from the picture altogether. While Doyle uses Tonga’s physical deformity to ‘difference’ the Andamanese character, Townsend uses Tonga’s darkness to set him apart: it is his black skin, clear against the white brightness of Sholto’s hand and the striking glint of his own smile, that marks his alterity. Indeed, Tonga’s skin colour is marked as so dark that he begins to fade into the black shadows of the room’s right hand corner. Just as Tim Barringer has highlighted

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the particular potential that skin colouring holds in the visual production and ocular dramatization of ‘powerful distinctions between self and other’,143 it could also be suggested that this creative slippage from deformity to darkness related the character more closely to wider, popular fears and doubts over the black face, the ‘dark continent’ and the ‘gloomy’ Orient. Moreover, while the Tonga of Doyle’s fictional description is a misshapen, distorted, unimaginable mirage – the stuff of fairy tales – in Townsend’s tangible visualization, Doyle’s mythical creature becomes a more realistic, comprehensible and fully formed subject. As a ‘real’ person, rather than a fantastic monster, he becomes arguably more threatening and relatable to other Indian subjects involved in anti-imperial uprisings and rebellions depicted in the press, for example.144 Though seemingly tangential to the narrative, it is highly relevant that Bartholomew Sholto, the murdered man, is the son of John Sholto, a senior officer in the regiment who presided over the Andaman Islands and took possession of Tonga’s homeland. Newly human, black and shrouded in darkened shadow, Tonga is unstoppable in his symbolic revenge upon the helpless Sholto and the colonization he represents. Indeed, it was in this humanized format that Tonga was reintroduced to an extended reading, and viewing, public: Townsend’s illustration went on to complement the novella in James Askew’s undated publication of Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes and Pan Books’ 1974 publication of The Sign of Four, to name but two examples.

Conclusions As is the case with India,145 it is not possible to identify a singular, nineteenthcentury, British, popular opinion regarding the Andaman or Nicobar Islands. Just as Barringer has discussed the occurrence of ‘complex and inconsistent visual rhetorics through which Victorian notions of otherness were imaged’,146 a survey of literary and visual images of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands has revealed irregularities and variations throughout. Many of the specificities of each representation have been shown to have evolved in relation to the specific media employed in each case: while subjective ‘knowledge’ is necessarily at the heart of each example discussed, where the ILN professed to the dissemination of fact, Doyle’s primary aim was the entertainment of his readership. The exhibition medium, again with its own rationale revolving around display and grandeur, isolated new and varying aspects of the islands upon which to focus. Furthermore, the impact of the individual in the dissemination of information was crucial: Arthur Conan Doyle, Frederick Henry Townsend, George Watt, Jadu Nàth Pal and the staff at the ILN, for example, each had varying demands and requirements which they used the Andaman or Nicobar Islands and their inhabitants to satisfy. Consequently, the specific comparative framework that the ILN, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and The Sign of Four perpetuated with regard to the

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Andaman and Nicobar Islands is diverse. The visual news reports of the ILN highlighted the Andaman Islands as an unpeopled tabula rasa, meaningful only in relation to British political events, and portrayed the Nicobar Islands and their populations as a foil for the development of industrial Britain. Exposés of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at international exhibitions and in popular fiction brought the Andamanese, and to a lesser extent the Nicobarese, peoples to the attention of British audiences, but in differing, complex guises. The realism, ‘truth’ and ‘fact’ pursued in the models in the Indian Imperial Court at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition encouraged audiences to process an anthropological understanding of the Andamanese and Nicobarese: Watt hoped that the models would ‘be interesting from an ethnological point of view’147 and went to great lengths to acquire ‘authentic’ examples of indigenous material culture for the attention of his audience. Doyle, in direct comparison, invited readers to comprehend the Andaman Islands as a convenient Neverland from which a mythical monster and his ‘strange weapons’ hailed. There are, however, a number of recognizable themes within the various images of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands propounded by the ILN, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and The Sign of Four. In the case of Watt and Doyle, the Andamanese peoples were placed within a visual scale which highlighted their difference, particularly in terms of their physique and social behaviour. Both also used representatives of the islands as creative devices with which to ornament their respective projects: staff at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition employed the visually commanding models as decorative sculpture with which to enhance the appearance of the Indian Imperial Court,148 just as Doyle created Tonga as an aesthetically striking tool that would enhance the dramatic tension of his tale. The material culture of the Andaman Islands was also regularly presented: in the brief attention paid to the indigenous population in the ILN, a number of tools and weapons were visualized, and skull ornaments and weaponry were particularly highlighted in the exhibition of 1886 and in The Sign of Four. In the public reception of these varying images, though often differing from the ideas and rationales which established them, thematic links can also be found. Sexual desire seems to have been contained within the public reactions to the three-dimensional models in 1886, but colonial fear is shown as a pervasive emotion inspired across the variety of media: the surveillance landscapes of the ILN were used, and presumably accepted, as illuminations with which to combat fears of indigenous uprising, predominantly with regard to Lord Mayo’s murder; and at the exhibition, Dinsdale’s view of the ‘Model Natives’, in particular, demonstrated a fear of both interracial sexual contact and violent rebellion against the colonizer. Similarly, Frederick Henry Townsend’s illustration for The Sign of Four highlights the ways in which Doyle’s written words promoted colonial fears of the violent, uncontrollable ‘other’. In addition, in the reception of the exhibition models and of Doyle’s novella, the skin colour of the Andamanese formed a particularly important part of audience comprehension.

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These then, were the wider frameworks within which visitors to Brighton Museum could comprehend Man, Temple and Tuson’s Andaman and Nicobar collections. Distinctly ‘unscientific’, to return to Kelly Boyd’s perception of approaches to the wider world, factual information regarding the Andaman and Nicobar Islands was subject to a two-fold ‘cultural overlay’ of appropriation: first, newspaper articles, exhibition displays and popular literature emphasized or obliterated the particular aspects of the islands which seemed appropriate to their media-specific needs, and second, the receptive public then placed their own cultural concerns upon these imaginings. Notably, as the twentieth century dawned, and as Man, Temple and Tuson came closer to making their donations to Brighton Museum, the profile of the Andaman Islands shifted from that of an unpeopled tabula rasa in the ILN to a particularly fruitful site of human interest courtesy of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and The Sign of Four. It might be argued that it was only after becoming familiar with the geography of the region that a popular audience could come to terms with the peoples that lived there. Chronologically, in any case, it was Doyle’s depiction that would have had the greatest relevance to Brighton’s early twentieth-century museum visitors, and indeed, the novella’s popularity only grew during this period. It is perhaps telling that just as Doyle’s construction of a humanized, fanciful and hyperbolic point of reference came to dominate national understandings of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, very similar approaches to the ‘other’ were, in fact, colouring how regional audiences in Brighton received the Andamanese, Nicobarese and other nonEuropean objects in their local museum. Brighton Museum’s audiences had very idiosyncratic reactions to the museum’s displays, further influenced by curatorial decisions and practical considerations, but as we will now see, national trends of reception were by no means absent from the object biographies of the collections of Man, Temple and Tuson as they moved into a public, provincial arena.

Notes 1. M. Baxandall. 1991. ‘Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects’, in I. Karp and S.D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. 2. Ibid., 37. 3. C. Duncan. 1995. Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, London: Routledge, 13. 4. R. Inden. 1990. Imagining India, Oxford: Blackwell; Coombes, Reinventing Africa; R. White. 1981. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity, 1688–1980, Boston: George Allen and Unwin. 5. On the ‘Easternization’ of Britain see J.P. Waghorne. 1994. The Raja’s Magic Clothes: Re-visioning Kingship and Divinity in England’s India, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 11. See also S. West (ed.). 1996. The Victorians and Race, Aldershot: Scolar Press; J. MacKenzie. 1984. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

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of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Manchester: Manchester University Press; and MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture. See, for example, the twenty-four volumes of photographs donated to the Anthropological Survey of India, Kolkata, by Portman (some of which were also donated to the British Museum), various collections of photographs held by the Royal Anthropological Institute, and photographs published in various iterations of Man, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands. First published as ‘The Sign of the Four’, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, February, 1890, and then in book form in 1890 as The Sign of Four (London: Spencer Blackett), and in many non-illustrated and illustrated editions since (see particularly The Sign of Four, souvenir edn (London: G. Newnes Ltd.), published in 1903). See D. Redmond. 1990. Sherlock Holmes among the Pirates: Copyright and Conan Doyle in America 1890–1930, New York: Greenwood, for exhaustive detail about the novella’s moniker history and for information on the various editions produced. K. Boyd. 2000. ‘“Half-Caste Bob” or Race and Caste in the Late-Victorian Boys’ Story Paper’, in D. Finkelstein and D.M. Peers (eds), Negotiating India in the Nineteenthcentury Media, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 71. H. Park. 2000. ‘“The Story of our Lives”: The Moonstone and the Indian Mutiny in All the Year Round’, in D. Finkelstein and D.M. Peers (eds), Negotiating India in the Nineteenthcentury Media, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 86; G. Bearce. 1961. British Attitudes towards India, 1784–1858, London: Oxford University Press, 3. R. Ballaster, M. Beerham, E. Frazer, S. Hebron. 1991. Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine, London: Macmillan, 45. Richard Altick includes examples of official circulation figures in an appendix to his book, R. Altick. 1958. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, Chicago: University of Chicago Press: in 1843 (the paper’s second year of publication), the ILN sold 41,000 copies, with these figures rising to 67,000 in 1850, and 123,000 in 1854–55 respectively (394). However, Patricia Anderson asserts that the ratio of 1:5 is widely accepted as a conservative estimate of the relationship between circulation and actual readership (P. Anderson. 1991. The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture, 1970–1860, Oxford: Clarendon, 3). Anderson, The Printed Image, 3. J. Shattock and M. Wolff. 1982. ‘Introduction’, in J. Shattock and M. Wolff (eds), The Victorian Periodical Press: Samplings and Soundings, Leicester: Leicester University Press, xv. Altick, The English Common Reader, 344. ILN. 1842. ‘Our Address’, 14 May, 1. Kaul, Reporting the Raj, 3. D. Finkelstein and D. Peers. 2000. ‘“A Great System of Circulation”: Introducing India into the Nineteenth-century Media’, in D. Finkelstein and D.M. Peers (eds), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-century Media, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 6. ILN. 1858. ‘The Andaman Islands’, 27 March, 315. See J.H. Stocqueler. 1848. The Oriental Interpreter, and Treasury of East India Knowledge, London: C. Cox. ILN. 1870. ‘The Nicobar Islands’, 15 January, 68–69. R. Meldola. 1886. ‘Exhibition of Photographs of Nicobarese’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 15, 428. ILN. 1875. ‘The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station’, 26 June, 608–609, and ILN. 1875. ‘The Solar Eclipse Observatory, in the Nicobar Islands’, 26 June, 601.

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21. ILN. 1872.‘The Late Earl of Mayo’, 24 February, 183 and 185; ILN. 1872. ‘Assassination of Lord Mayo’, 17 February, 150; ILN. 1872.‘The Murder of Lord Mayo’, 16 March, 271 and 273; ILN. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands: Barracks, Port Blair’, 24 February, 192; ILN. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands’, 24 February, 189. 22. See ‘Andaman Islands’, in J.A. Hammerton (ed.). c. 1922. Harmsworth’s Universal Encyclopedia, Vol. I, London: Educational Book Co. Ltd., 395, and The Times. 1899. ‘Indian Affairs. An Island Penal Settlement’, 4 April, 8, for two examples. 23. F. Mouat. 1872. ‘The Andaman Islands’, The Times, 8 May, 5. 24. Deane. ‘The Andaman Islands’. 25. D. Rycroft. 2006. Representing Rebellion: Visual Aspects of Counter-insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 6. 26. This is Rycroft’s phrase from Representing Rebellion, 115. 27. This ‘savage’ had actually been captured during a skirmish at South Reef Island between a group of Great Andamanese and the commission charged with assessing the suitability of the Andaman Islands for British settlement (led by Frederic J. Mouat). Three Andamanese were reported killed, but an individual of about twenty-one years was captured and taken back to Calcutta. He was named John or ‘Jack’ Andaman and dressed in one of the committee (a sailor)’s clothes to cater to British sensitivities to nudity. See Chapter 3 of Tomas, Transcultural Space and Transcultural Beings for more information on this event, and a detailed analysis of this image in its third incarnation as the title page of F. Mouat. 1863. Adventures and Researches among the Andaman Islanders, London: Hurst & Blackett. See also Anderson, ‘Oscar Mallitte’s Andaman Photographs’, for a more recent analysis of the imaging of ‘Jack’ through photography and portraiture. 28. ILN. 1858. ‘The Andaman Islands’, 27 March, 316. 29. Ibid. See Coombes, Reinventing Africa, 74, and Chapter 2 of this volume, for an analysis of such arrangements of non-Western material culture as imperial trophies. 30. Recent scholarship on the relationship between landscape and empire has highlighted the sheer volume of colonial imagery which uses landscape as a means of introducing viewers in the metropole to their empire: W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.). 2002. Landscape and Power, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press; G. Hooper (ed.). 2005. Landscape and Empire, 1720–2000, Aldershot: Ashgate. 31. J. Verne. [1872] 2000. Around the World in Eighty Days, trans. by G. Towle, New York: Dover Publications, 67. See Ball, Jungle Life in India, 181, for another of the many examples where this trend applies to the Andaman Islands. See Satadru Sen on how such visual pleasure degenerated into incongruous dread once the viewer was in the jungle itself (Sen, Savagery and Colonialism in the Indian Ocean, 139). 32. One notable exception is the full-page landscape which accompanied a short paragraph on ‘The Nicobar Islands’ in 1889. The image is seemingly unlinked or uninspired by a political event which took place in the locale (see Figure 3.9). 33. Kaul, Reporting the Raj, 9. 34. W.J.T. Mitchell. 2002. ‘Introduction’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 3. See also David Arnold on the tropical landscape as a ‘cultural text’ imbued with the colonizing ethos of the era (D. Arnold. 2006. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 4); W.J.T. Mitchell. 2002. ‘Imperial Landscape’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), Landscape and Power, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 13.

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35. See, for example, T. Barringer. 1996. ‘Images of Otherness and the Visual Production of Difference: Race and Labour in Illustrated Texts, 1850–1865’, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and Race, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 40, for a discussion of this dichotomy. 36. The artist’s signature, ‘W.H.O’, may well refer to William H. Overend, a little known but prolific illustrator and engraver for the ILN. The signature in Figure 3.9 is, however, unusual: ‘W.H. Overend’ is the moniker more commonly employed. 37. J. Marriott. 2003. The Other Empire: Metropolis, India and Progress in the Colonial Imagination, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 6. 38. J.N. Lockyer and A. Schuster. 1878. ‘Report on the Total Solar Eclipse of April 6, 1875’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 169. 39. It is possible that the photographic inspiration for these wood engravings (‘We have received … some photographs of the observing station and of the Nicobar native villages in its neighbourhood’, ILN. 1875. ‘The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station’, 26 June, 608) were sent to the ILN by Professor Raphael Meldola, chemist and representative of the Royal Society during this expedition, as Meldola exhibited a number of seemingly similar images at the Anthropological Institute some years later (Meldola, ‘Exhibition of Photographs of Nicobarese’, 427–428). 40. ILN. 1875. ‘The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station’, 26 June, 608–609. 41. A. Appadurai. 1993. ‘Number in the Colonial Imagination’, in C. Breckenridge and P. van der Veer (eds), Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 316–317. 42. ILN. 1875. ‘The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station’, 26 June, 609. 43. A copy of the original photograph, presumably taken by Raphael Meldola, is in a miscellaneous collection of photographs held by the Centre of Anthropology at the British Museum (ASIA 3115 LGE). The engraver for the ILN was surprisingly accurate in his transposition of the image. The other original images have not been traced. 44. ILN. 1875. ‘The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station’, 26 June, 609 (emphasis mine). 45. See ‘Sig. Tacchini’, pinpointed in the far-right cartouche, and others personally referred to in the accompanying text (ILN. 1875.‘The Nicobar Islands Eclipse Station’, 26 June, 608–609). See wider Victorian perceptions of the tropics’ easy subsistence and natural abundance as breeding indolence and providing no stimulus to technological innovation in D. Arnold. 2000. ‘“Illusory Riches”: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840– 1950’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 21(1), 8. 46. Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge, 10. Cohn includes the surveillance modality in his seminal list of the ‘investigative modalities’ devised by the British imperial project with which to collect ‘facts’ regarding their colonies (3–11). 47. ILN. 1872. ‘Assassination of Lord Mayo’, 17 February, 150. 48. G. Hooper. 2005. ‘Introduction’, in G. Hooper (ed.), Landscape and Empire, 1720– 2000, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2. 49. See David Arnold and Nancy Leys Stepan on European anxieties about the tropics as pestilential space of physical and mental decline and fatal excess (Arnold, ‘“Illusory Riches”’, 7–8; N.L. Stepan. 2001. Picturing Tropical Nature, London: Reaktion. 50. ILN. 1872.‘Assassination of Lord Mayo’, 17 February, 150. 51. Glenn Hooper highlights ‘the optic of the colonial endeavour’ as a perspective that ‘saw land to be cultivated, improved, planted and, above all, secured’ (Hooper, ‘Introduction’, 5, emphasis mine). 52. On the denial of progress in landscape imagery see E. Hirsch. 1995. ‘Landscape: Between Place and Space’, in E. Hirsch and M. O’Hanlon (eds), The Anthropology of

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53. 54.

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

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Landscape: Perspectives on Place and Space, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1. The published photography of Edward Horace Man was particularly effective at eliminating the impact of colonialism; see Tomas, ‘Tools of the Trade’, 91. Mitchell, ‘Imperial Landscape’, 7. Comparative colonial experiences in Australia and North America had raised awareness of the impact of imported narcotics, alcohol and disease on indigenous populations during British occupation by this time. S. Mathur. 2000. ‘Living Ethnological Exhibits: The Case of 1886’, Cultural Anthropology, 15(4), 492. P. Hoffenberg. 2001. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War, Berkeley: University of California Press, xv. The photograph was taken in the studio of Saché and Westfield in September 1865. It was part of a selection of primarily archaeological photographs compiled by the Archaeological Survey of India for the India Office (John Falconer, personal communication, 5 February 2007). Eighty-three samples from this series were shown at the Paris Universal Exhibition, but only one made the indigenous Andamanese peoples its subject. The Nicobar spears were described in G. Birdwood. 1879. Paris Universal Exhibition of 1878. Handbook to the British Indian Section. Presentation Edition, London: Offices of the Royal Commission, 58. For examples of Padauk displays see the Timber Trophy in the Economic Court of the Indian displays in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886 (H.T. Wood. 1887. Reports on the Colonial Sections of the Exhibition, London: William Clowes & Sons, 463), the Indian section of the Empire Timber Exhibition (1920) and the material for the sample bank premises at the British Empire Exhibition in 1924. Attendance figures were recorded at 5.5 million, cited in P. Greenhalgh. 2001. ‘The Art and Industry of Mammon: International Exhibitions, 1851–1901’, in J.M. MacKenzie (ed.), The Victorian Vision: Inventing New Britain, London: V&A Publications, 273. See the sketch of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands display by Edward Radford in his sketch book of the ‘Colinderies’ (1886), held by the National Art Library (Msl/1980/52). See C. Wintle. 2009. ‘Model Subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886’, History Workshop Journal, 67(1), 194–207 for a more detailed analysis of the display. E.B. Tylor. 1863. ‘Wild Men and Beast-children’, Anthropological Review, May, 21. E.H. Man. 1889. ‘The Nicobar Islanders (Part 1)’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 18, 365 (emphasis mine). Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display, 30. ‘Museums and Exhibitions Branch’, Proceedings Revenue, June 1887, P/2981, 70. ‘Report on the Andaman Home for July, 1883’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1883, P/1994, 52; ‘Museums and Exhibitions Branch’, Proceedings Revenue, August 1885, P/2528, 9. G. Watt. 1886. ‘A Guide to the Ethnological Models and Exhibits Shown in the Imperial Court’, in Government of India and Private Exhibitors, Empire of India: Special Catalogue of Exhibits, London: William Clowes & Sons, 160. G. Watt. 1886. ‘A Guide to the Economic and Commercial Court’, in Government of India and Private Exhibitors, Empire of India: Special Catalogue of Exhibits, London: William Clowes & Sons, 50. N. Levell. 2000. Oriental Visions: Exhibitions, Travel, and Collecting in the Victorian Age, London: Horniman Museum and Gardens and Museu Antroplógico da Universidade de Coimbra, 80.

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69. G.W. Stocking. 2001. Delimiting Anthropology: Occasional Inquiries and Reflections, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 172–173. 70. Graphic. 1886. ‘India: The Courtyard, Indian Palace’, 15 May, 534. 71. Westminster Review. 1886. ‘The Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, July, 31. 72. Watt, ‘A Guide to the Ethnological Models’, 161. 73. Graphic. 1886. ‘The Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, 8 May, 495. 74. Westminster Review. 1886. ‘The Colonial and Indian Exhibition’, July, 31. 75. C. Pinney. 1990. ‘Colonial Anthropology in the “Laboratory of Mankind”’, in C.A. Bayly (ed.), The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947, London: National Portrait Gallery, 258. 76. B. Latour. 1986. ‘Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands’, Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, 6, 7 (emphasis in original). 77. P. Greenhalgh. 1988. Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 96. See also, for example, Levell, Oriental Visions, and B. Benedict. 1994. ‘Rituals of Representation: Ethnic Stereotypes and Colonized People at World’s Fairs’, in R. Rydell and N. Gwinn (eds), Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, Amsterdam: VU University Press. 78. T.N. Mukharji. 1888. Art-manufactures of India, Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, 59. 79. W.C. MacPherson, the Under-Secretary of the Government of Bengal, in a letter to the Secretary of the Government of India, specifically requested that the modellers ‘be furnished with any photographs … and with any instructions which may have been recorded as to the natural colours’ of the life models, for such purposes (‘Museums and Exhibitions Branch’, Proceedings Revenue, June 1887, P/2981, 73). 80. Mukharji, Art-manufactures of India, 59. 81. Responding to requests from Calcutta in 1885 for ‘samples of cloths, ornaments, weapons, &c., used by the aborigines of the Andaman and the Nicobar Islands’, Maurice Vidal Portman, in his capacity as Officer in Charge of the Andaman Homes during this period, coordinated the collecting and shipping of as many as eight cases of exhibits for the display (‘Museums and Exhibitions Branch’, Proceedings Revenue, September 1885, P/2528, 12; ‘Report of the Andaman Home for August, 1885’, Proceedings Port Blair, 1885, P/2446, 75; and ‘Museums and Exhibitions Branch’, Proceedings Revenue, October and December 1885, P/2528, 4 and 9). 82. T. Flynn. 1998. The Body in Three Dimensions, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 17. 83. T.N. Mukharji. 1889. A Visit to Europe, London: Edward Stanford, 71. 84. Mukharji, Art-manufactures of India, 59. 85. ‘E.V.B.’ 1887. A London Sparrow at the Colinderies, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 9. 86. Cited in ILN. 1886. ‘Colonial and Indian Exhibition: Indian Empire’, 17 July, 82. 87. Mathur, ‘Living Ethnological Exhibits’, especially 501–504. 88. R. Corbey. 1993. ‘Ethnographic Showcases, 1870–1930’, Cultural Anthropology, 8(3), 344. 89. A. Maxwell. 1999. Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities, London: Leicester University Press, 162. 90. ‘E.V.B.’, A London Sparrow, 10. 91. See, for example, Mukharji, A Visit to Europe, 71.

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92. Marco Polo, for example, proclaimed the Andamanese to be ‘a most cruel generation, and eat everybody that they can catch’ (M. Polo. 1993. The Travels of Marco Polo: The Complete Yule-Cordier Edition, New York, Dover Publications, 309). 93. Flynn, The Body in Three Dimensions, 8; Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions, ix. 94. L. Jordanova. 2004. ‘Material Models as Visual Culture’, in S. de Chadarevian and N. Hopwood (ed.), Models: the Third Dimension of Science, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 449 (emphasis mine). 95. D. Autie. [1981] 1982. ‘Artificial Bodies or the Naturalist’s Chamber’, in N. Parrot (ed.), Mannequins, London: Academy Editions, 24. 96. Graphic. 1886. ‘India: The Courtyard, Indian Palace’, 15 May, 534. 97. See A. Smith. 1996. The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 216–220. 98. See ibid., 202–204. 99. A.C. Doyle. [1890] 1974. The Sign of Four, London: Pan Books, 139. 100. However, it was not until the widely disseminated serialization of Doyle’s short stories in the Strand Magazine from July 1891 that audiences particularly warmed to this and his first novella, A Study in Scarlet (first published in 1887 in Beeton’s Christmas Annual) (R.L. Green and J.M. Gibson. 1983. A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 41–42). 101. S. West. 1996. ‘Introduction’, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and Race, Aldershot: Scolar Press, 6. 102. See A. Greenberger. 1969. The British Image of India: A Study in the Literature of Imperialism, 1880–1960, New York: Oxford University Press, for example, on the impact of fiction upon British perceptions of India. 103. ILN. 1842. ‘Our Address’, 14 May, 1. 104. Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 3. 105. Park, ‘“The Story of our Lives”’, 85. 106. J. McBratney. 2005. ‘Racial and Criminal Types: Indian Ethnography and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 33(1), 151–156. 107. Arthur Conan Doyle, cited in Green and Gibson, A Bibliography of A. Conan Doyle, 41. 108. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 136. 109. McBratney, ‘Racial and Criminal Types’, 154. 110. Ibid. (see W.W. Hunter. 1885. ‘Andaman Islands’, The Imperial Gazetteer of India, Vol. 1, 2nd edn, London: Trübner, 281–287). The Gazetteer does tend to revel in the recounting of some of the most dramatic descriptions of Andamanese cannibalism and savagery, but, in the main, is influenced by the most recent censuses and government reports available. These, although steeped in the discourses of race and superiority to be expected of Victorian descriptions of the Andaman Islands, firmly refute charges of cannibalism and deformed physical characteristics. 111. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 86. 112. J. Bourke. 2005. Fear: A Cultural History, London: Virago. 113. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 137. 114. Ibid., 138. 115. Ibid., 105. 116. C. Keep and D. Randall. 1999. ‘Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 32(2), 216 (emphasis mine). 117. Ibid., 215. 118. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 103.

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119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127.

128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

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Ibid., 103 and 62. Ibid., 103 (emphasis mine). Ibid., 103–104 (emphasis mine). Ibid., 53. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 54. See R. Jann. 1990. ‘Sherlock Holmes Codes the Social Body’, ELH: English Literary History, 57(3), 685–708, for a wider discussion of Doyle’s construction of coded social body types. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 82. Ibid. See Man, ‘On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands (Part III)’, 402–403, for a discussion regarding the events which may have spawned pre-nineteenth century reports of poisoned arrows as used on the Andaman Islands. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 83 and 107. L. Frank. 1996. ‘Dreaming the Medusa: Imperialism, Primitivism, and Sexuality in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four’, Signs, 22(1), 59. Doyle, Sign, 135–136. Notably, the Andamanese did not use coconut husks for matmaking purposes. Ibid., 110. Jann, ‘Sherlock Holmes’, 691. K. Farrell. 1984. ‘Heroism, Culture, and Dread in “The Sign of Four”’, Studies in the Novel, 16(1), 35. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 56. Ibid., 66. Boyd, ‘“Half-Caste Bob”’, 80. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 106. G. Greene. 1974. ‘Introduction’, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four, London: Pan Books, 9. The Times. 1961. ‘Selkirk’, ‘The Sign of Four’, 1 May, 13. Ibid. Doyle, The Sign of Four, 107. Barringer, ‘Images of Otherness’, 34 and 40. See Keep and Randall, ‘Addiction, Empire, and Narrative’, 214, for a discussion of Tonga’s physical characteristics as related to the Indian Mutiny. Bearce, British Attitudes towards India, 269. Barringer, ‘Images of Otherness’, 51. George Watt, cited in M. Jackson. 1883. ‘Calcutta International Exhibition’, The Statesman and Friend of India, 30 July, 4. In addition to their scientific role, the figures were also commissioned to make the area ‘more attractive to the public’. Royal Commission. 1887. Report of the Royal Commission for the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London 1886, London: William Clowes & Sons, 104. See Wintle, ‘Model Subjects’, 198–199 for further discussion of this element of the figures’ role.

Chapter 4

Public Property The Andaman and Nicobar Islands at Brighton Museum, 1900–1949 In September 1904, a donation of ‘Four Megapode eggs’ was formally acquired by the Public Museum and Art Gallery of Brighton.1 This early gift, offered by a newly retired Edward Horace Man to his local municipal museum, comprised the first of his Andaman and Nicobar objects to be accessioned into the collections of Brighton Museum. Over the next twenty years, Man’s larger collections, alongside those once owned and interpreted by Richard Carnac Temple and Katharine Sara Tuson, would, in small instalments, enter into this public sphere; here, in their new home, they would become subject to all the processes of re-presentation inherent in what Svetlana Alpers has termed the ‘museum effect’.2 A wide body of scholarship has gradually led to a rejection of the museum ‘as a clear and transparent medium through which our objects transmit messages’.3 Instead, the museum has increasingly been viewed as a process, or as a transformative device, where classification, exhibition and storage impact upon an object to the extent that its meaning is entirely reconstructed and reconstituted.4 Gaynor Kavanagh identifies the tendency of the interpretative practices of the museum to subsume or erase the ‘individual memories behind an object’.5 This chapter will explore this institutionalized and potentially revolutionary phase in the ‘object biographies’ of these Andamanese and Nicobarese collections, as they existed until 1949, and interrogate and assess the extent of the ideological ‘rupture’ that may be assumed to have occurred. Certainly, in their entrance into the accession registers of Brighton Museum, the objects once belonging to Man, Temple and Tuson took on alternative meanings and became significant in new ways. We have seen that collecting practices in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands regularly took place in the context of both implicit and precisely specified institutional demands;6 however, in the objects’ formal accession into the collections of a civic museum, these projected institutional and public connections became increasingly official. Here, for example, an object’s environment and audiences were transformed from the

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exclusive and the domestic to the public and the municipal. In the transaction between donor and institution, the custody of the objects became increasingly formalized: the new ownership of the objects was officially recorded (both in the sub-committee minutes of the museum and within the pages of local newspapers such as the Brighton Herald and Hove Chronicle)7 and the future physical relocation of the objects became increasingly unlikely due to museum policies surrounding deaccession. On a larger scale, under the auspices of their new caretakers, the ease with which these objects had previously transcended international boundaries – moving between indigenous and foreign communities on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and with their owners from India to England, for example – was also significantly reduced: once accessioned within the collections of the Brighton Museum they were firmly transported from a fluid, multinational frame of reference to a more permanent, local sphere of influence. Crucially, within their new physical surroundings, these objects also became subject to the expectations, interpretations and whims of a new set of interpreters. Behind the scenes of the museum, for example, a team of professionals worked to install a new phase in the ‘social lives’ of these collections. Our first area of enquiry will be how various ‘official’ interpreters from the museum acted to instil academic, aesthetic and often pragmatic significances into their new assets. The discursive mechanisms behind this dramatic shift call for investigation: how did the ethos of the museum and existing collection and display policies reflect on the incoming collections? How did the objects become ‘systematized’8 under the archival processes of the museum? How did the physicality of the objects change under this new ownership? What was the epistemic system by which these ‘objects’ became ‘acquisitions’? However, while the radical new conditions imposed upon these items of material culture demand attention, the magnitude of some of these ‘changes’ also require nuanced examination. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill has argued that ‘the concrete material presence of an object’ lends it a particular characteristic in that its physicality – its ‘erosions, surface patina, or evidence of damage’ – make it possible for earlier significations to continue to be ‘dug up, evoked, made visible’.9 For Hooper-Greenhill, despite the fact that ‘objects are made meaningful according to how they are placed within relations of significance’, ‘[e]arlier meanings are not entirely effaced as long as the material matter is still in existence’.10 Indeed, in the particular context of the provincial museum, prior interpretations also continue to have authority: processes of ‘dislocation and re-contextualization’ may often be central to museum practice,11 but, as we will see, the potential for previously projected ideologies to remain essential to an object’s significance, despite such movement, can also be great. Critiques of ‘official’ interpretations as imposed upon objects by public institutions are essential to understanding the contemporary significances of such objects, and necessary for their sensitive and accurate treatment in future display and interpretation. They tell us much of the histories of thought and of the

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academic disciplines implicated in such presentations. Much of the scholarship which has interrogated the mechanics of the display paradigm in relation to knowledge production has, due to the paucity of recorded popular reaction to such representation, necessarily focused upon intended interpretation or official constructions of meaning. Increasingly, however, the importance of ‘unofficial’ interpretations and the common discrepancies between intended meaning and popular understanding of museum displays has also been recognized.12 The dominance of the Foucauldian scholarship emphasizing the hegemony of the museum as a technology of power and an architect of singular knowledge is slowly being countered.13 New calls have been made for the inconsistencies and failures in the authority of such ‘disciplinary regimes’ to be revealed,14 and scholars have highlighted the need to credit a broader variety of human agents in the study of meaning-making in museums.15 Employing a survey of media commentary on Brighton Museum and its contents around the period of donation (1900–1949), the second half of this chapter will emphasize the museum as an increasingly democratic sphere of influence. Building on earlier discussions of popular perspectives of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this section will localize the debate and forge a picture of a regional public understanding specific to the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects. Newspapers inevitably offer a selective version of reality governed by media conventions,16 but reports and letters as published in the press can give some indication as to a range of regional perceptions and experiences of visiting museums.17 We will see that local audiences regularly engaged with non-European objects on display in Brighton Museum, but used wider experiences of empire and nonEuropean material culture, and preconceived notions of their museum as a visitor attraction, to contextualize their encounters. Brightonians undoubtedly forged an important relationship with the cultural institution at the heart of their town, but the extent to which curatorial intent was able to influence these audiences is open to question: often, despite the didactic intentions of the museum’s staff, the general image of the museum as a repository of fantasy and mystery prevailed. The practicalities of the archive and the specifics of history naturally shape the parameters of any investigation into past practices. There is, for example, a close relationship between the administration of the museum’s fastidious director, Henry David Roberts (in office 1906–1935), whose publication and documentation of the museum’s activities was exemplary, and the quality of the archive which sheds light on the internal workings of the institution. Similarly, even Roberts’ keen sense of order could not compete with the advent of World War One, or the corresponding staff and funding cuts that occurred at the time: from this period on, a picture of the curatorial processes which influenced the objects becomes more difficult to discern. The serendipitous and practical decisions which were made during this period – the decisions to document, keep or discard observations – thus necessarily provide a ‘filter’ affecting the writing of this collection’s biography.

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All Change? Official Interpretation of World Cultures at Brighton Museum In April 1923, the Andamanese and Nicobarese collections which had once belonged to Temple and Tuson entered Brighton Museum. Man’s more fragmented collections arrived between 1904 and 1925, with his two largest and most relevant donations of objects made in March 1920 and July 1923. In their accession, these objects entered the realm of a well established provincial museum which had already developed particular approaches to the care of its collections and fostered specific relationships with its audiences. The museum collection had evolved from ‘objects of scientific and historical interest’ gifted by the Brighton Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (1841–1869),18 and was nurtured initially in the upper rooms of the Royal Pavilion under the moniker of the ‘Brighton and Sussex Museum’ until 1872. Eventually, in 1873, Brighton’s Public Museum, along with a large library, was inaugurated on Church Street, on the site of the old stabling and coach houses of the Pavilion estate. The museum housed collections of ethnography, local archaeology and natural science (including geology and zoology); by 1902, highlights included the ‘insect room’ and the ‘bone room’.19 There were separate areas for sculpture, mezzotints and ‘coins, medals and early printed books’, and a large, central, top-lit gallery which displayed the town’s collection of paintings. Operating under the Pavilion Purchase Act of 1850, which provided financial support for the upkeep of the larger Pavilion estate, the institution was administered by a Library, Museum and Fine Arts Committee appointed by the town’s council. The three branches were directly managed by sub-committees specific to the Library, the Museum and the Fine Arts respectively.20 Non-European objects had been present in the town’s holdings since at least 1864, when the original, Pavilion-based museum was documented to have contained a broad, if unsystematic selection of such items, including ‘a miscellaneous collection of Indian curiosities’, a ‘tomahawk of a North American Indian’ and ‘native models of vessels used by the Cingalese’.21 Early donations included the collections of local dignitaries, such as James Ashbury, MP for Brighton between 1875 and 1880, whose yacht trips around the world resulted in the accumulation of important Pacific collections, including Maori flax aprons and cloaks. Later donors, such as the solicitor F.W. Lucas and local politician A.F. Griffith, seemed to develop their passion for material culture as they supported their local museum, participating in the administration of the museum while amassing and eventually donating their private collections to the museum in the 1920s. Elsewhere, the museum occasionally bought specialist field collections, such as that developed by the British Government official T.J. Alldridge, who worked with the Mende in Sierra Leone between 1890 and 1914. Despite these important donations, while housed in the upper rooms of the Pavilion and even after their move to Church Street in 1873, the displays

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lacked system or classification; the ethnographic collections were generally subject to a mode of arrangement which saw them scattered throughout the building and interspersed with a wild array of objects and materials.22 In fact, by 1900, when the museum’s first Popular Guide was published, Benjamin Lomax, an early curator of the museum (1879–1900), had combined much of the museum’s ethnographical collection with its archaeological and prehistoric European material, conforming to basic comparative-historical display trends of the period (see Figure 4.1).23 Such an approach may have been taken in order encourage visitors to make the supposed inherent connections between the objects’ respective manufacturers, and to hint at the form and path by which human culture was considered to have evolved. However, the text of the Popular Guide did not make these established links explicit, simply taking the reader on a descriptive journey of the objects and their processes of manufacture and use. If these archaeology and ethnography rooms provided an eclectic ensemble of rhinoceros remains, stone hatchets and shrunken heads,24 other areas of the museum were still more reminiscent of the Wunderkammern of the previous centuries. One room was home to some of Alldridge’s Mende collections and a loan of material from Botswana, but the space also contained a collection of siliceous sponges, two cases of Cloisonné enamel, a display of the ‘Electrotype reproductions of ancient coins and plaster casts of engraved gems’, and a section on British ‘Archaisms’, concerning ‘some remnants of the old order of things’.25

Figure 4.1 Ground floor, Brighton Museum, with three archaeology and ethnography rooms in enfilade, from County Borough of Brighton. 1900. Popular Guide to Brighton Public Museum, Brighton, frontispiece. Courtesy of RPMBH.

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By 1904, however, at the point of Man’s first donation, some major changes had been effected at the museum. In 1902, the pressing problem of a lack of space was temporarily resolved with the extension of the museum, a general redisplay, and the creation of a specific ethnography gallery on the ground floor. The career of Herbert Samuel Toms, who came to Brighton as museum assistant in 1896, and whose influence over the ethnography collections would span four decades, was now well established. The appointment of the equally influential Henry David Roberts as museum director (1906–1936) would follow in two years. Under these two men, the museum became a space where discipline and organization reigned: a particularly bureaucratic system of object accession and documentation, for example, ensued. For the ethnography collections at the museum, and the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects that they contained, Toms’ prior employment under Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers would prove to be particularly influential. Between January 1893 and April 1896, Toms was employed on Pitt Rivers’ staff as a supervisory field assistant on the Cranbourne Chase excavations in Dorset. Here, he was trained in surveying, draughtsmanship, recoding finds, reconstructing pottery and making models, and the keen interest with which he would go on to pursue the study of archaeology was forged.26 Simultaneously, Toms’ contact with Pitt Rivers, and the location of his sleeping quarters in his employer’s museum at Farnham where a collection of ethnographic material was stored,27 provided an excellent context in which to study non-European material culture. Toms’ grandson Richard has remarked that his grandfather ‘cannot have been anything other than influenced by Pitt Rivers’.28 Indeed, Pitt Rivers’ well known approach to the particular juxtaposition of archaeological and ethnographical objects in museum display would be observed at Brighton during Toms’ employment, but an exacting ‘military bearing’ inherited from the General would also influence his approach to engaging with material culture.29 Toms spent his entire career paying particularly close attention to the processes of accessioning and cataloguing involved in museum work. His junior colleague, Ralph Merrifield, identified Toms’ ‘meticulous system of accessioning’ as the ‘principal legacy’ he introduced to Brighton, noting the regularity with which Toms employed the phrase, borrowed from Pitt Rivers, ‘[i]f it has lost its register number, throw it into the first ditch you come to’.30 Under Toms, the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects were subject to a new system of reference which was manifested in both physical and conceptual forms.

‘Behind the Scenes’: Object Conservation, Registration and Systematization Michael Ames has explored the transformative impact of the museum as process: referring to the power relationships inherent in object transfer, he highlights the ideological ‘reconstruction’ that an object undergoes during accession.31 One of the most basic and revealing aspects of this ‘reconstruction’, however,

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is the physical change that an object undergoes during its transfer into a museum. Claude Lévi-Strauss emphasized the importance of the physical in the relationship between museum staff and their objects, citing ‘all the small tasks’ of ‘unpacking’, ‘cleaning’ and ‘maintenance’ as crucial to the place of an object within a museum collection.32 Upon their accession, as a result of these common processes, each of the objects that had once belonged to Man, Temple and Tuson underwent a material transformation: in June 1923, for example, the museum’s staff was consumed with the highly affective processes of ‘identification, cleaning, restoration, cataloguing, and arrang[ing]’ the new Temple and Tuson donations.33 The wooden Nicobarese figures gifted by Tuson, noted as being ‘broken or in a bad state of preservation’, were particularly subject to this ‘reconstruction’ when their natural degradation was impeded at the hands of the museum’s in-house carpenter who ‘mended and restored’ them.34 A carved figure with one leg missing, for example, had a badly matched dowel attached where the original would have been, the hentakoi in Figure I.1 had its arm reattached, and a wooden statue of a bird whose leg was damaged had glue inserted along the split. As a result, these figures would no longer keel over to one side, and could be placed on a shelf without a support; these alterations stabilized the material lives of the objects, making them ‘museumified’ and suitable for display. The objects also had a new numerical identity assigned to them. Many were painted with an accession number in red ink, acting as a permanent stamp to signify the objects’ affiliation with their new institution (see, for example, the boar’s skull trophy in Figure 4.2). Notably, however, a significant proportion of the objects were able to resist this new identity: the delicate, organic composition of those items made entirely of pandanus leaf, such as an Andamanese leg adornment donated by Man in 1920 (Figure 4.3), was difficult to mark. Accordingly, Toms was forced to affix a less permanent, and correspondingly less symbolic, marker in the form of a small green tag (see Figure 4.3). Similarly, despite the museum’s aim to safeguard their collections for future generations, European processes of preservation and conservation could not prevent the degradation of some of their collections. Indeed, in the case of a set of pots obtained by Temple from Chaura in the Nicobar Islands (see Figure 1.1), the museum’s clinical approach to object care meant that pots remained unused and accordingly unseasoned by the smoke of the household fire. Without this method of hardening, three of the pots originally donated to the museum became brittle and damaged and have since been destroyed. To varying degrees, then, in entering the museum, the objects were permanently altered in line with Toms’ expectations of what a ‘museum artefact’ physically constituted. Other institutional processes also acted to transform these objects into museum artefacts. In Brighton, in the accession of the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects into the museum’s collections a process of ‘conceptual and symbolic management’35 also occurred. For the group of objects previously owned by Man, his earlier labels were removed under the care of the museum,

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Figure 4.2 Boar’s skull, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, bone, cane, 275 mm × 140 mm × 110 mm, with prominent accession number in ink. RPMBH, WA509646[R2468/37]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

Figure 4.3 Leg adornment, Andaman Islands, c. 1900, pandanus leaf, twine, 350 mm (full length); 100 mm × 30 mm (band), with small identifying label attached. RPMBH, WA509342[R2129/17]. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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symbolically severing his personal method of classification and replacing it with an institutionalized, modified system.36 Where the physical inscription of the accession mark altered their material state, a new number also reframed the objects’ conceptual identities. The museum’s documentation system involved the registration of two pieces of data which tied each object into the institution’s long-standing reference system: for the boar’s skull donated by Temple, for example (Figure 4.2), an accession number of R2468.37 indicated the position of the entire Temple donation in the number of presentations made to the museum throughout its history (2468), and the place of the individual object in the list of accessioned entries documented for that particular donation (37, of 98). As David Jenkins has recognized elsewhere, through the repetition of this data (on the object itself, in the accessions register and then on the object label), this documentation acted to authenticate and stabilize the museum’s interpretation of its accessions.37 Although this institution-specific system of reference ensured that the object became permanently connected with the museum, the particular configuration of the number also meant that previous associations, rather than being erased, were given a prominent profile. In the case of Temple’s donation, a group of seemingly random objects, from places as diverse as the Andaman Islands, Brazil, South Africa and Australia, once used for non-comparable purposes, at varying points in time, in the various indigenous contexts from which they came, were now irreversibly connected by the code associated with their donor. Furthermore, such objects were also bound to the format in which their previous owner had chosen to present them: the choices that Man had made, for example, in splitting or organizing his various collections for donation purposes were honoured in the objects’ new numeric identities. A disparate set of ‘Fifty-five birds from the Straits Settlements, etc., [three] human teeth and bark cloth from the Nicobar Islands’,38 gifted in 1916, were grouped by the number of their donation (‘1707’), and another arbitrary amalgamation of objects from the Nicobar Islands and a statue of Buddha from Rangoon, gifted in 1923, were permanently linked with the donation number ‘2483’. In the objects’ movements into an institutionalized sphere, Toms’ actions ensured that new aspects of the objects’ identities were permanent and visible, but although their meanings had indeed been altered, remnants of their previous ‘lives’ also remained pertinent and clear.

Enduring Status: The Legacy of the Donor Explored Anthony Shelton has discussed the tendency for museums to ‘efface the individual biographies of objects’, contrasting the museum collection’s ‘scientific rationalism’ with the private collection’s roots in ‘individual predilection’ and ‘expression of [the collector’s] world’.39 In the transfer of objects between individual and institution, elements of previous interpretations are undoubtedly ‘expunged’, to use Michael O’Hanlon’s term,40 but in the formation of other aspects of an

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object’s conceptual identity during accession into a public collection, it may also be argued that previous owners of donated collections continue to impact upon the understandings attributed to their objects.41 Indeed, at Brighton, as at other provincial museums, donors and their interpretations were often prized in object display, documentation and categorization.42 As part of Toms’ efficient programme of documentation, most objects in the Brighton collection were allocated a prominent card label which invariably included the year of the object’s presentation, the accession number, and the donor’s name and title (see, for example, Figure 1.7 and Figure 2.3). The means by which the donor had acquired the object was often also included, ensuring that in a text label of less than thirty words, the collector and donor retained visibility and significance. The Official Guide to the museum mentioned the institution’s ‘deep debt of gratitude to those many travellers whose gifts and loans are shewn in the various rooms’.43 In the Official Guide, objects continued to be grouped and identified according to their donor and the identity and life experiences of the donor were also employed by museum staff as an additional interpretative layer with which to appeal to their audiences. An early but memorable example of this conduct was documented in the 1900 Popular Guide, when a group of ‘savage weapons’ from Uganda were described with the supplementary information that, shortly after their presentation, their donor, Anglican missionary Bishop James Hannington, returned to Africa, where ‘he was murdered, probably by weapons of a similar descrition’.44 Furthermore, despite Sarah Byrne’s assertion that curators were ‘pivotal agents’ in museum practice,45 Brighton was similar to other institutions of the period in that donors often continued to influence the ideological trajectories of their objects for practical reasons regarding the circulation of specialist knowledge. Toms’ formal training in anthropology was strictly limited; although he had encountered non-European material under the patronage of Pitt Rivers, his own original research was in the field archaeology of Sussex and Dorset.46 Accordingly, his interpretation and understanding of the ethnography collections in his care depended on the assistance of colleagues at other institutions, access to published ethnographies and, crucially, the support of the objects’ donors. Particularly in the case of the Andaman and Nicobar collections, given the level of Man’s experience in the region, this deferral to and reliance upon previously formed interpretations was especially pronounced.47 An appendix included in Man’s monograph on the Andaman Islands was clearly employed during the writing of the accession registers and object labels for his various donations to Brighton, with indigenous terms (or Man’s interpretation of them) and specialist scientific information passed on and entered in the museum’s documentation.48 Notably, however, mistakes in the transfer of this information were made: in his ‘List of Objects Made and Used by the Andamanese’, Man documented the term ‘to-ug’ as the indigenous name for a leaf torch made with resin,49 but the description in the museum’s accession register was incorrectly transcribed as ‘tong’.50 Similarly, red oxide of

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iron was referred to as ‘koriob’ in the register,51 rather than the term ‘kòi ob’, as documented in Man’s ‘List’.52 Despite these occasional inconsistencies, Man’s opinion was clearly deemed important: his 1920 donation of Andamanese items was only ‘provisionally labelled’ until a tour by Man of the collection in situ could be arranged, and he could duly declare ‘himself well pleased with the arrangement and labelling of the objects’.53 Man also continued to regulate the meanings that were attached to his colleague’s objects once they had made the transition into a public arena. In 1923, the contents of Temple’s donation were ‘cleaned, sorted, and provisionally identified’ under Toms’ initiative, but ultimately Man’s expertise was required to confirm any factual or contextual information, and he was asked ‘to check this identification before the cataloguing of the specimens is commenced’.54 The accession entries for Temple’s collection advised the reader to ‘see Mr. Man’s catalogue’ for further details,55 and the conservation of the Nicobarese models donated by Tuson in 1923 was undertaken only ‘with Mr. Man’s approval’.56 The endurance of donor interpretation and influence was further strengthened by the high potential for overlap that occurred between members of the museum’s advisory committee and those who made substantial presentations to the institution. Kate Hill, in her study of provincial museums between 1850 and 1914, has documented this phenomenon, suggesting that donors saw these official appointments as an opportunity to safeguard and expand their collections while widening their audiences and adding to the prestige of their collections.57 The motivations of committee members at Brighton Museum are likely to have been personal and diverse, but undoubtedly, even after 1914, a number of committee members approved the acceptance of their own donations during their periods of office, with others actively supervising their own collections even after a formal transfer had been made.58 Having been appointed to the museum sub-committee in February 1912, Frederick W. Lucas, for example, set about inspecting and selecting osteological specimens from the museum’s reserve collection for a public exhibition in the galleries. He donated fifteen skulls from his own collection for the display and, having ‘very kindly supervised the re-arrangement’, presented each skull alongside ‘a black polished wooden block … labelled in white paint with popular name, scientific name, and locality of specimen, and also name of donor’.59 Existing donors also influenced the formation of the museum’s collections by raising awareness of the institution as a potential repository for similar objects which belonged to their friends and colleagues. This was particularly the case with Man, when, after a period of almost twenty years of living in Brighton and donating to its museum, he began to facilitate the parallel transfer of those collections amassed by his colleagues during their own careers in India. In 1923, when Temple made his gift to the museum, Man was described as the broker of the donation process, with thanks duly expressed in the sub-committee minutes to ‘Mr E.H. Mann [sic], C.I.E., through whom Sir Richard Temple’s offer was made’.60 It seems likely that he was also instrumental in the donation by Katharine

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Tuson, whose collection was presented at the same time as the Temple transfer. Similarly, a later donation of ‘Six mounted heads from India and Kashmir’, made in June 1927 by his friend and colleague in the Andamans, H. Graham Tayler, may also have been brokered by Man as an enthusiastic supporter of the museum.61 The Tusons, the Taylers and Man all settled in Sussex upon their return from the Andaman Islands and remained friends: Figure 4.4 shows them

Figure 4.4 Unknown photographer. Group portrait, 19 June 1914. Back row, from left to right: F.E. Tuson, Thomas Cadell,62 E.H. Man, H.G. Tayler. Front row, from left to right: Mrs Tayler, K.S. Tuson, possibly taken in the garden of Man’s home, 251 Preston Road, Brighton. Tuson photograph album, HML, CCS 308(541.9) TUS [original out of focus]. Courtesy and copyright of the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

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in 1914, posing for a group portrait. Given their long friendships, there must have been ample opportunity for experiences of donating to the museum to be shared, and encouraging remarks supporting the donation of similar gifts to be made. As this scenario suggests, regional patterns in the settlement of people of particular professions, and the wider social histories of the region in which a museum was situated, also made an impact on the flow of material into municipal collections.63 The reputations of national museums, public collections associated with particularly celebrated patrons and the academic appeal of university museums may have helped to attract a wide range of donations from individuals of diverse backgrounds with little geographic or personal connection to their chosen museum, but regional museums tended to rely on material available from local auctions and retailers, and collections and objects offered by local residents. For Brighton, as the town became one of the UK’s most prominent centres for the returned colonial elite,64 the impact of these sources on the composition of its museum’s collections was revealed. As members of the colonial service returned and settled in Brighton, the museum became particularly renowned for material from Britain’s colonies.65 Brighton’s exotic, ex-colonial residents were apparently drawn by the region’s climate, the town’s existing popularity as an enclave for repatriates, and, speculatively, by sites in the urban landscape, such as the Royal Pavilion, which, according to Georgina Gowans, appealed to notions of familiarity, helping repatriates to ‘evoke a sense of belonging’.66 As Brighton developed, after 1890, from ‘a resort for visitors’ to a more permanent ‘residential resort town and regional centre’ for individuals such as those returning from the colonies,67 there is likely to have been an increase in potential for these newly permanent residents to develop a sense of proprietorship towards their town’s municipal services, and a corresponding growth in the chance that they would make donations to benefit those facilities. Man and his colleagues are prime examples of a wide range of individuals who returned from their international careers to settle in Brighton and donate their material souvenirs to their town’s museum. Certainly, donor influence was tempered by the staff at Brighton: Toms, Roberts and members of the committee, for example, had an understanding of what made a collection suitable for accession. Broadly, collections perceived as ‘rare’, ‘comprehensive’ and ‘authentic’ were particularly sought after.68 However, unlike other institutions, such as Liverpool Museum, where a book of collecting instructions was issued to its potential donors, and Newcastle Natural History Society, which distributed collecting equipment to some of its key benefactors,69 Brighton did not choose or have the opportunity to influence their donors so directly. While the museum exercised a power of veto, regularly refusing offers of donation, there was ultimately no specific accession policy for the museum. During the process of Temple’s donation to Brighton, Roberts had been to Worcester to inspect his collection, and ‘to see whether it would be advisable for me to recommend its acceptance’,70 but ultimately the institution had

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little control over when the gift was made, or its content: in this case, donor circumstances, such as the trajectory of Temple’s financial stability, and Man’s choice to settle in Brighton upon his return from the Andamans, formed the contents of the collections at the museum. Hill describes the general decline in the personal influence of the individual donor after 1900 in her findings,71 but at Brighton Museum, donors continued to influence the interpretation, display and content of the museum’s collections well into the twentieth century. The expunging of museum objects’ previous, idiosyncratic histories in provincial museums, especially, was not as dramatic as has been assumed.

Provincial Museum Ethnography: Science vs Pragmatism Despite these consistencies in the trajectories of the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects, the surviving signs of donor influence were, of course, blended with those structures of significance that Toms tried to implement in his capacity as curator at the museum. Broadly, the museum displayed and interpreted its ethnographical (and archaeological) collections within a typical framework of contemporary social evolutionary thought. Such an approach, although roundly rejected in university anthropology by the 1930s, remained accepted and influential in museum displays throughout the first half of the twentieth century72 and, like many institutions, Brighton sought to illustrate, through its objects, some of the key principles inherent in these intellectual discussions. Particularly influenced by certain individuals and practicalities at a local level, objects at Brighton Museum developed unique and institution-specific trajectories influenced by their new locations.

Pitt Rivers and the Implementation of Evolutionary Thought at Brighton Museum In the period between the redevelopment of the entire museum in 1902 and the ethnography gallery’s redisplay in 1949, ethnographic material had a strong presence in a variety of Brighton Museum’s exhibition spaces. First, the museum’s series of three ‘Archaeological Rooms’ (see Figure 4.5) were central to the delivery of a comparative paradigm which saw the material culture of non-European cultures judged against and aligned with the material remains of early man in Europe. In these galleries, the aim was to prove the existence of an ‘early condition’ belonging to all humankind, from which a ‘higher culture’ was considered to have gradually developed.73 In Room 1, particularly (see Figure 4.6 and Figure 4.7), visitors were able to examine a case of contemporary Maori and Tasmanian domestic items before engaging with the prehistoric Neolithic and Palaeolithic stone tools and ‘pigmy’ implements obtained locally. Case 12 specifically presented ‘modern savage stone

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Figure 4.5 Ground floor plan, Brighton Museum, from County Borough of Brighton. 1913. Official Guide to the Public Library, Museum and Fine Art Galleries, 5th edn, Brighton, 4. Courtesy of RPMBH.

Figure 4.6 Postcard, Room I, Archaeological Room, Brighton Museum, c. 1912, showing a series of comparative displays, with ‘Modern Savage Stone Tools’ in the table case at the far end. RPMBH, HA902294. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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Figure 4.7 Postcard, Room I, Archaeological Room, Brighton Museum, c. 1912, showing a series of comparative displays. The label ‘Modern Savage Stone Tools’ is partially visible behind the Wild Flower Table. Private collection.

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tools … as an introduction to the stone implements of prehistoric times’.74 The premise was that an exploration of the similarities between contemporary Pacific manufactures and historic European material culture could provide the visitor with evidence of a basic general likeness in all human nature; given the time lag of over a thousand years in the objects’ respective periods of production and the ‘advances’ made in Europe since that production, these cases were presented as proof that Europeans were further advanced long the scale of evolution. A series of ‘full descriptive labels’ inserted into the cases, written by Toms and highlighted in the Official Guide, instructed visitors as to the purpose of this arrangement.75 While these documents no longer survive, the theoretical rationale of the display and the evolutionary perspective he was known to have ‘staunchly supported all his life’76 were recorded in a number of the public lectures given by Toms during this period. Many of the presentations he made both to general audiences and to specialist groups emphasized how ‘Ethnography … as a study of the present … has in numerous instances proved an invaluable key to problems connected with the past’.77 Discussing subjects such as ‘The Marvels of Savage Art’ (May 1909), ‘Flint Chips by Neolithic Man’ (April 1907) and ‘Prehistoric Man’ (January 1908), he consistently aimed to demonstrate that ‘the study of the modern savage is imperative if we desire to obtain an idea as to those primitive conditions of life which gave birth to the arts, sciences, and religions we now enjoy’.78 Recommendations from professional and academic bodies such as the Anthropological Institute and the Museums Association are certain to have influenced Toms’ perspectives on the collections he cared for.79 Toms, Roberts and members of the museum sub-committee were regular attendees at the annual Museums Association conferences, and such occasions would have given them ample opportunity to engage with evolutionary methods commonly used by other similarly sized institutions holding comparable collections. Significantly, however, in addition to these more general contacts, and the development of this broadly comparative approach, Toms also pursued other, more specific, evolutionary display methods, inspired, conceivably, by his earlier relationship with Pitt Rivers. In line with the contemporary anthropological thought propounded by prominent individuals such as Pitt Rivers, Toms used the ‘Modern Savage Stone Tools’ case to distinguish between the Maori objects, which he considered to be marked by a specific ‘beauty and delicacy’, and those exhibits he termed ‘the less obvious flakes and scrapers of the extinct Tasmanians’.80 Pitt Rivers’ assertions that objects could be ‘arranged in sequence’ in order to demonstrate ‘the successive ideas by which the minds of men in a primitive condition of culture have progressed’81 were echoed in displays in which Toms arranged comparable objects ‘in descending order from the most highly developed forms to the lowest’.82 Similarly, just as Pitt Rivers had used models, or ‘facsimiles’, as he had termed them, of original pieces he had seen in other collections in order to fill the occasional missing stage in a certain material sequence of evolutionary development,83 Toms also made and employed ‘[f]acsimile models and drawings … to fill important gaps’ in his own series of non-European stone tools.84

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Presenting an albeit narrow section of what Edward Burnett Tylor, Pitt Rivers and others had envisioned as a wider, unbroken ‘line of continuity between the lowest savagery and the highest civilization’,85 the stone tools’ display demonstrates Toms’ ability and desire to implement the theoretical perspectives promoted by his peers and colleagues. In the case of these particular objects, the stories associated with their donors were removed, and they were reinvented as scientific proof of a perceived scheme of human cultural development. Notably, however, despite Toms’ obvious awareness of and concern with this typological paradigm, he took an alternative approach to the wider ethnographic collection displayed elsewhere in the museum. In other, larger exhibits, respect continued to be paid to academic paradigms, but the practicalities of municipal museum work prevented the development of such precise messages.

Practical Measures and Changing Paradigms In contrast to the comparative typological approach in the ‘Archaeological Rooms’, in the main ethnography gallery (Room IV, see Figure 4.5), Toms made attempts to display the museum’s objects along geographical lines. The comparative geographical classificatory system was another common evolutionary display paradigm in which ethnographic collections were arranged according to regional divisions rather than typological categories, so as to demonstrate the area’s ‘position in the scale of art or manufactures’ of the world.86 Warrington Museum, Aberdeen University’s Marischal Anthropological Museum and Liverpool Museum were among such institutions which classified their material regionally, displaying each geographical area separately.87 In these museums, by arranging these culture-specific exhibits in a particular spatial configuration (a cyclical ‘progression’ arranged around the circumference of a gallery, for example), objects were alternatively ordered, but, as in the typological paradigm, used to highlight their manufacturer’s perceived status in a wider developmental order. Supported by the donations of the region’s ex-colonial community, Brighton’s ethnographic collection was certainly varied and full enough to sustain the development of a comparative geographical display in its main gallery. Indeed, Roberts noted that ‘as far as possible’ the room’s contents had been ‘grouped into countries or districts’.88 Plans of the gallery during this period and descriptions of the space documented in the official guides and in Toms’ own accounts, however, demonstrate the lack of definition and uncertainty which dogged such academic intentions. No written reference was made to evolutionary sequences or the supposed developmental status of such regions, and, instead, a sense of miscellany and donor glorification continued to reign. Interpretative analysis of the gallery, as published in the official guides between 1908 and 1913, did include select anthropological facts about how some of the displayed objects were manufactured and employed; seemingly at random, material culture from the Pacific was discussed in detail, with the production

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of barkcloth and the method of preparing the Pacific ‘grog’, kava, acting as key examples.89 Generally, however, there was little stylistic or thematic consistency in the dense text: the identification of series of objects was eschewed in favour of highlighting certain items for their aesthetic qualities, while a large proportion of exhibits appear to have been ignored completely. The most common trope in both the displays and the accompanying literature was, again, the ubiquitous donor. Most cases were named after and identified by a previous owner: Cases 3 to 6 were described as ‘Malay and Dyak Arms; Butterworth Collection’, Case 13 as ‘Indian and European Arms; Waldo-Sibthorp Collection’90 and in Case 14, for example, diverse material was amalgamated from Uganda and Burma in order to display the property of Mr H.R. Row as a single entity.91 Ultimately, however, any intellectual debates or educational messages that the museum’s staff wished to engage with, and even opportunities for donor reification, were tempered by practical problems which had shaped the institution from its inception. Contemporary scholarship has identified the ‘stabilization of meaning’ that occurs when an object moves into the sphere of the museum: David Jenkins has discussed how objects become ‘institutionally secure’ and epistemologically static through their care, documentation and display.92 The formation of a singular knowledge or the development of a continuous theme which ‘fixed’ the meaning of these objects, however, is difficult to identify in the context of this particular provincial museum: the rapid transformation of the ethnographic collection over this period and constant constraints of space, combined with the effects of two world wars, allowed Toms and Roberts very little freedom to construct didactic messages for their audiences. A close reading of the museum’s sub-committee minutes and annual reports between 1900 and 1940 highlights an extreme instability in the display of the collection during this period. Substantial levels of acquisitions were approved by the sub-committee on a monthly basis, while loans of individual objects and significant collections moved into and out of the museum with surprising speed.93 Toms consistently sought to display much of this incoming material with immediate effect. As a result, each monthly curator’s report described how particular objects and displays had been ‘reclassified’, ‘overhauled’, ‘rearranged’, ‘temporarily stored’, ‘modified’ or ‘removed’ in order to accommodate the fluid contents of the museum’s holdings. Despite attempts to create some semblance of a geographic scheme in the ethnography gallery between 1902 and 1949, as early as 1909 it was admitted that ‘questions of space have sometimes made this impracticable’.94 For the first time, off-gallery storage and maintenance of the reserve collections became a concern for staff. In 1932, a new focus on the careful labelling of items for ‘ready-reference’ in store, and a systematic ‘overhaul of the ethnographic material stored in the basement’ occurred.95 Such pressures ensured that it was found ‘impossible to arrange the specimens in educational series’,96 and miscellaneous ethnographic objects were physically ‘crowded out of Room IV’ and onto the walls of the first and second archaeology galleries (see Figures 4.6 and 4.7).97

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With the advent of World War One, and as museums all over the country entered the difficult years which followed in its wake, this confused and inconsistent presentation of Brighton’s holdings began to intensify. Gaynor Kavanagh has described how, in the inter-war period, as local governments became increasingly responsible for education services and their budgets became ever more stretched, museums became ‘the least valued of the municipal services’ in their care.98 Brighton seems to have felt the immobilizing results of this difficult situation keenly: long-standing, ageing members of the museum’s subcommittee and staff, including Roberts and Toms, marked time, working slowly towards the end of their careers at the same institution in cramped, understaffed and underfunded conditions. There seems to have been little opportunity for strategic change and progress at management level and this wider stagnation of the museum was typified by Roberts’ re-publication of A Brief Synopsis of the Contents of the Brighton Public Library, Museums and Fine Art Galleries of 1908–9 almost word for word, twenty years later, for the conference of the Library Association in 1929. Under such circumstances, the ethnography gallery was described as ‘a mess’: a former museum assistant recalls the cases as ‘absolutely cluttered with stuff’, reminiscing how objects would ‘hang from the roofs of the cases’, and how ‘you could spend a whole day just looking at one case!’99 For a museum plagued by a high acquisition rate early in the century, increasingly cramped conditions and a ‘moribund’ inter-war existence (to use Kavanagh’s phrase),100 the successful presentation of cogent social evolutionary perspectives, whether typological or geographical, seemed unlikely.

Multiple Choice: The Andaman and Nicobar Collections at Brighton Museum It was into this wider situation of jumbled interpretation and overcrowding that the Andaman and Nicobar objects arrived. Given the contemporary anthropological understanding of the region’s peoples, material culture from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands would have provided excellent ‘evidence’ of the ‘bottom rungs’ of any evolutionary sequence the museum may have wished to create. Displays at the British Museum, for example, used the ‘very primitive’ status of the Andamanese to ‘enable us to understand by what methods man, in his earlier efforts of development towards civilization … gradually advances towards the cultivation of the industrial and ornamental arts’.101 Instead, however, the amalgamated collections once belonging to Man, Temple and Tuson at Brighton were subject to the same confused trajectories of interpretation as the museum’s wider ethnographic holdings detailed above. Prior to Man’s first major donation of Andamanese material culture in 1920, the Andaman Islands had already secured a physical presence in the museum: in 1881, a Lieutenant R.N. Colville had donated three Andamanese bows to the town, which eventually became part of an arrangement of assorted weaponry adorning the

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walls of the main ethnography gallery.102 The museum’s collection also contained a ‘[b]unch of shell money. Andamans’, purchased as part of a miscellaneous selection of ethnographic items from N.R. Penzer in 1912,103 and an illustrated chapter on ‘The Andaman Islands’ was incorporated into the textual interpretation of the ethnography gallery from 1915, when Toms displayed H.N. Hutchinson’s sizeable volume on The Living Races of Mankind (1900) to ‘serve as a description’ of the wider collections displayed there.104 These earlier, brief inclusions of Andamanese material and information about the islands, as incorporated into diverse displays, eclectic donations or dense texts, were actually prophetic of the ways in which the museum would come to engage with the Man, Temple and Tuson objects upon their arrival. Elements of donor identity would remain central to the objects’ display, but simultaneously, over time, they would also become entangled in the processes of rearrangement and redistribution which affected so many other parts of Brighton Museum’s holdings.

Bad Geography: Donor Status, Overcrowding and New Regional Priorities at the Museum The first archival reference to the display of the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects at Brighton was in 1920, when Man’s first major donation from the Andaman Islands replaced the Pacific material that had been previously housed in Case 19 of the ethnography gallery.105 Displayed in geographical isolation, in what became referred to as ‘the Andamanese case’,106 and added to by Man’s donation of photographs in October 1921, the early treatment of the Andaman Islands seems to have represented one of the more successful aspects of Toms and Roberts’ attempts to create a general geographical paradigm. New donations, increasing space constraints and the institutional convention of retaining donor identity, however, soon blurred this theme. When the Temple and Tuson objects arrived in 1923, there was no opportunity to accommodate the collections in the ethnography gallery. Rather, the new arrivals spilled out into the north corridor on the ground floor of the museum (see Figure 4.5 for reference), and an additional ‘Nicobar and Andamans case’ was developed there.107 Although this new display adhered to categories of geographical proximity and British-enforced political boundaries (although, notably, the collections were not displayed with ‘India’),108 these objects were exhibited separately from Man’s offerings and so the institution also continued to group the objects in accordance with their donors’ identities. Ideological messages were further disordered and multiplied in relation to concerns of space and pragmatism elsewhere. The breadth of Temple’s comparatively large donation, and the physical size of some of his objects, meant that his Nicobarese paddles and spears required the display dimensions available only on the walls of the first of the archaeological rooms.109 Here, they were apparently envisioned as part of the comparative typological paradigm discussed above, in as much as they were referred to as ‘modern savage weapons’ in a room of

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otherwise ancient objects.110 But without labels or publicly accessible information making this clear, it is more likely that they would have been subsumed into the gallery’s historical contents, and immersed in the homogenizing characteristics of what Susan Vogel has termed the ‘anthropological wallpaper effect’.111 Placed in a space dominated by the museum’s collection of prehistoric tools, despite having the capacity to represent the dynamic, thriving set of communities from which they came, the objects could easily have become cloaked in the same historical veil attributed to the other objects in the gallery, blurring real time and accordingly antiquating the Nicobarese. The instability that characterized the wider ethnography collections’ display also affected the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects at the museum. Over time, the acquisition of new, prestigious collections superseded the significance invested in donations from Man, Temple and Tuson: in 1927, ‘duplicates’ from the Temple collection were removed from display in Room I in order to accommodate incoming material.112 Later, in 1936, the case in the north corridor once devoted to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands was cleared of its contents, and the objects placed in store, again to make space for new acquisitions.113 In time, as noted in an undated annotation in the museum’s register of Temple’s donation penned by Toms, ‘[m]ost of Reg. 2468 [was] placed in store’.114 Eventually, practical requirements and the serendipity of historical process came to have a more permanent effect on the trajectories of these objects. On 24 August 1939, a message was sent from Brighton’s Air Raid Precaution Committee that the basement storage area of the library, museum and art gallery were required for air raid shelters with immediate effect. The area was to be evacuated of its accessioned contents and crucially, Temple’s stored collections became one of the most prominent victims of the ‘panicked’115 removal process. Press reports highlight the speed with which the collections were taken away: Up and down the stairs we staggered carrying books by the armful; we must have moved thousands of them … . This went on from half past five [pm] until eleven [pm], a non-stop procession[,] … and [then] the manual staff took over, working until six this morning … . We kept ourselves going with toffee and chocolate, and someone made tea two or three times … . That helped us to get through what seems something like a nightmare now.116

However, while the above-mentioned books seem to have been successfully salvaged, certain parts of the institution’s material collections were less fortunate. Clifford Musgrave, as the new director of the three services, supervised the operation. He wrote how ‘the storage basement of the Museum and Art Gallery presented a bizarre spectacle as dozens of glass cases containing ancient stuffed birds and animals were demolished by the staff and swiftly carried away to the waiting rubbish vans’.117 Much seems to have been immediately destroyed, but interviews with other sometime members of staff have made clear that during the dispersal of the basement’s diverse contents, the ethnographic material was stowed in Brighton’s aquarium and in holdings in Dukes’ Mound (a cliff facing

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directly onto the seafront).118 Swiftly ‘taken and dumped down’119 at these damp locations, by the time the objects were revisited in the 1960s by museum assistants Victor Sheppard and Winifred Patchin, the condition of the surviving objects was noted as being ‘pretty grim’.120 Tragically, as Sheppard and Patchin sifted though and catalogued the evacuated material, many of the ethnographical holdings were deemed ‘hopeless … beyond doing anything with’.121 Handwritten marginalia in the institution’s accession registers reference large quantities of objects as ‘Destroyed Aug 1939’. The damaged material was diverse in type and disciplinary boundary, but long, thin objects, such as spears, sticks, assegais and bayonets seem to have been particularly vulnerable, possibly because they were difficult to display in the galleries and therefore more likely to be in the store at the time of the ordered removal. Similarly, the spoils of foreign hunting trips, such as horns and skulls, seemed to have been regular casualties. As noted, prior to the exodus, much of the Temple donation had been stored in the basement, and subsequently accession register entries for his collections in particular are regularly marked with phrases such as ‘3 [of six bows] destroyed Aug 1939’, or ‘10 [of eleven fish spears] destroyed Aug 1939’.122 According to these annotations, of the 347 objects donated by Temple in April 1923, 133 were permanently lost during this incident. Aside from these notes, however, this process of evacuation, disposal and re-storage is barely mentioned in other areas of the museum’s official archive: the entire situation was clearly a disastrous, embarrassing episode for the institution and its staff. This specific schism in the Andamanese and Nicobarese collections at Brighton can be seen as another, albeit extreme example where pragmatism and expediency overruled the efforts and hopes of museum staff. The objects’ trajectories were yet again subject to events beyond the museum staff’s control, coerced here by orders from local government. Meanwhile, for those objects which did survive, interpretation was also blurred, this time by the tangible processes of preventative conservation and reorganization practised by Toms: donor prominence, for example, eventually began to wane when, after Man’s death in 1929, his collections were ‘thoroughly overhauled’ and re-identified, and the labels he had overseen re-researched and rewritten.123 In 1932, his collection was physically and ideologically divided as the examples of Andamanese personal adornments of shell and bone were removed from ‘his’ case, and displayed, instead, in Case 24 of the ethnography gallery along with similar decorative material from various Pacific Islands.124 Here, a new paradigm which prioritized the themes of ornament and decoration was revealed.

Artistic Leanings: A New Perspective on the Collections Indeed, this acknowledgement of aestheticism, exemplified by the reorganization of the Andamanese objects, had become increasingly influential in the development of the museum’s educational programmes, in its display paradigms,

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and in the types of merchandise produced for sale at the institution. Encouraged, perhaps, by the rising use of ethnographic material as the inspiration for modernist art forms throughout Europe, and the Surrealist and Cubist appropriation of exotic cultures in the subversion of bourgeois society, the late 1920s in Brighton saw a growing emphasis on the formal, aesthetic qualities of the museum’s ethnographic collections. The wider ‘taxonomic shift’ in the art world, whereby ‘artefact’ became ‘art’,125 seems to have trickled down to Brighton in some form: school groups, attending the museum as part of their formal education, continued to benefit from lessons on ‘Native Dresses of Cotton, Bark Cloth and Skins’, ‘Bows, Arrows and Boomerangs’ and ‘Primitive Weapons’,126 but, in addition, the ethnography collections also came to feature as subjects for drawing classes attended by students from institutions such as the Brighton Art School.127 Increasingly, the Tusons’ wooden Nicobarese figures became a priority: newly acknowledged as objects of exceptional aesthetic interest, and as items which would benefit from individual contemplation, three hentakoi were selected to be the subject of one of a series of postcards for sale in the museum (Figure 4.8). Manufactured in 1928 by Raphael Tuck & Sons, Ltd., in both postcard size (88 mm × 138 mm) and in a format for snapshot albums (62 mm × 88 mm),128 the plain, stark white background of the image and the symmetrical arrangement of the Nicobarese objects emphasized their striking physical form, proportion and carved detail. Indeed, this choice pre-empted developments in exhibition style, when, in 1936, the majority of the wide-ranging Temple and Tuson collections were removed from the single, cluttered case in the museum’s north corridor, and the twelve Nicobarese carvings were selected to remain. With their vibrant colouring,

Figure 4.8 Postcard, ‘Wooden Figures For Scaring Devils (Nicobarese)’, 1928. RPMBH, HA907232. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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and their expressive curves and faceting, the hentakoi and kareau were chosen for display over other items such as utilitarian tools and body adornments. In their new arrangement, the carved figures would have been released from the previous homogenizing effect produced by overcrowding and lack of classification, and, newly displayed alongside a large, visually striking, carved winged fish from New Ireland,129 reappraised for their form and visual appeal. Notably, fifteen years later, in 1949, this approach would be consolidated in the entire reorganization of the ethnography gallery as a new display which prioritized sculpture and textiles chosen on their artist merit (see Figure 4.9).130 This new gallery would be developed under the direction of Clifford Musgrave, whose own interests lay in fine art and the restoration of the Royal Pavilion,131 and employed a display paradigm where white backdrops and basic text labels emphasized the figurative and formal elements of the collection. Ralph Merrifield, Toms’ replacement and the gallery’s curator, noted how, under the influence of this new director, ‘it was inevitable that the ethnographical display should become an art exhibition’.132 In terms of the modernist aesthetic ideal (if not the geographic boundaries that the museum seems to have retained), the Nicobarese hentakoi and kareau would have compared well with the masks and southern Nigerian and Sierra Leonean figures prized by primitivist artists and included in the far case of the new gallery at Brighton Museum; earlier in the century, during a trip to the British Museum, the Fauvist painter and sculptor André Derain had selected a hentakoi of a pig from the Nicobar Islands for attention and included a sketch in his artist’s book.133 However, in the end, neither the Andaman Islands nor the Nicobars were included in this later gallery redevelopment. Despite the interest of Derain, and promising signs in Brighton’s earlier aesthetic displays, Indian ‘tribal art’ as a whole had a complex position in both modernist aesthetics and mid-twentieth century museum practice in Europe and North America.134 Even in the series of major mid-century US exhibitions that famously offered a grudging respect to the craftsmanship of adivasi artisans in India, there was little place for Nicobarese material culture, let alone Andamanese offerings: Stella Kramrisch’s watershed exhibition of 1968, ‘Unknown India: Ritual Art in Tribe and Village’ (Philadelphia, San Francisco and St Louis), excluded both island groups, and Stuart Cary Welch’s blockbuster, ‘India! Art and Culture 1300–1900’ (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985), included only one, lone Nicobarese kareau.135 Indeed, following Brighton Museum’s major redisplay in 1949, the collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands would retire from display for a while: as the next chapter will explore, the charisma of the Nicobarese collections resulted in their reappearance in a new gallery from 1974, but the Andamanese material would only emerge again in the twenty-first century, this time for a temporary exhibition developed in conjunction with the research undertaken for this publication.136

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Figure 4.9 Unknown photographer. Photograph of the new ethnography gallery, 1949. RPMBH. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

The Development of New Thematic Approaches By the 1930s, the prior emphasis on geographical systems of reference had clearly become obscured by new epistemological structures, but rather than moving in one clear direction, the aesthetic approach was also combined with various other thematic concepts. Simultaneously, the table cases in the ethnography gallery were rearranged to host a series of cross-cultural exhibits which highlighted a

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specific subject or a particular strength of the collection. These were temporary displays, usually accompanied by an explanatory label, focusing on precise themes such as ‘Head-hunting’ or ‘Snuff-taking’.137 The specific objects that were employed are not detailed in the archive, but Nicobarese items such as a palm leaf basket donated by Tuson, which would have been used for collecting betel nuts, and the three teeth marked with betel nut and lime encrustations, gifted by Man in 1916, could well have featured in the display of ‘appliances used in connection with the eastern practice of chewing areca-nut and betel-leaf with lime’ shown in November 1938.138 Themes were apparently chosen at random, but a number of the displays bore a striking resemblance to earlier lectures given, and exhibitions developed, at the Pitt Rivers Museum. The lecture series given by the curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Henry Balfour, on ‘Deformation WorldWide’ (1890), and his publication (1899) and display (c. 1900) on the subject of the ‘Geographical Distribution and Development of the Musical Bow’, appear to have been closely observed by Toms almost forty years later, and echoed in special exhibits on ‘Fashion in Deformity’ in 1938 and ‘the probable evolution of the harp from the primitive bow’ (1939).139 This lag in time between the implementation of Balfour’s research in Oxford and the displays produced by Toms in Brighton is not surprising: in the 1920s, on a national scale, academic anthropology had moved firmly from the museum into the sphere of the university, leaving museum ethnography with a deficit of critical scholarship and funding. For the rest of the century, museum ethnography’s failure to keep pace with academic paradigms seems to have defined the exhibition of world cultures.140 Moreover, by this point, Toms was coming towards the end of his career. His 1909 lecture ‘On the Marvels of Savage Art’ was reproduced, almost exactly, for a presentation to the local grammar school in 1917, and again for another public lecture in 1925.141 Due to retire in 1939, his trademark evolutionary standpoint and admiration for the work of Pitt Rivers was not easily replaced at this stage in his life. Despite enduring, albeit intermittent affiliations with the evolutionary paradigm, the ethnography collections at Brighton Museum, particularly from the 1920s onwards, seem to have been represented through a particularly diverse set of perspectives which alternated with surprising rapidity. Meanings were attached to objects on the basis of comparative geographical and typological evolutionary theories, but attempts to classify and display objects according to geographical divisions, aesthetic/modernist philosophies and the elevated status of the donor within the institution were also made. The group of objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands at Brighton Museum were implicated in divisive, diverse and changing trends: accordingly, the ‘stabilizing’ of meaning identified by Jenkins and others did not exist.142 Here, as in other institutions at the turn of the twentieth century (and, of course, today), new intellectual developments ruptured any conceptual stasis; the whirlwind of accession and display meant that certain objects faced sudden relegation to the obscurity of the museum stores, and even for those items that remained on display for longer periods,

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new juxtapositions forged by the arrival of incoming accessions and fresh labels created serendipitous meanings and novel interpretations for individual pieces. Even in the supposedly ‘secure’ arena of the museum, national emergencies led to dramatic, and in some situations, fatal object trajectories. Conversely, in the unusual case of the Chaura pots, the desire to ‘preserve’ museum objects specifically led to their total disintegration. The tales of the collections from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands make clear that the notion of museum accession as the ‘terminal phase’143 of an object’s career must be challenged.

Democracy in the Museum: Patterns of ‘Unofficial’ Interpretation While it is clear that the Andaman and Nicobar collections had rich, lively careers ‘behind the scenes’ of the museum, the interpretations of museum visitors also added to their trajectories. How, we may ask, did Brighton Museum’s audiences respond to the intellectual frameworks that Toms and Roberts attempted to forge for these objects? Undoubtedly, there was concerted effort from museum staff to instigate clear messages in their galleries, but, given the processes of rapid rearrangement and ideological reemphasis affecting the collections, was it really possible that these messages were transmitted successfully to the museum’s intended audiences? Given this complex institutional history, questions as to how the residents of Brighton engaged with their collections as displayed and interpreted in this space must also be raised. In 1928, Henry Miers wrote a national report assessing the condition of museums in the UK; he described the congestion and ‘over-crowding of duplicates and redundant objects’ of many institutions, and stressed the ‘deadening and confusing effect’ this had upon visitors.144 However, despite his pessimistic claims, the perceptions of visitors to Brighton Museum were not entirely ‘deadened’. In fact, notwithstanding the limitations of the museum, an investigation into the experiences of potential and actual museum visitors in the first decades of the twentieth century reveals that audiences were actually more creative that Miers suggests. The final section of this chapter will analyse Brightonians’ reactions to non-European material cultures and reflect upon the impact that the fluid and confused displays had on their learning, but first it is useful to examine some of the other local events that prioritized and celebrated non-European cultures in the region. As we will see, visitors formed their own methods for engaging with museum collections away from the museum, drawing on their personal experiences and a wider context of public cultural production and consumption. The notion that the British public had a lack of ideological commitment to imperialism and a complete ignorance of the territories of their empire has long been disputed.145 In Brighton between 1900 and 1949, in the period surrounding the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects’ movement into the region, ideas of empire permeated various aspects of everyday life. On the most basic

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level, the names of certain social and residential societies, such as the ladies-only Imperial Club on First Avenue in Hove, were inspired by Britain’s presence abroad. Other societies such as the Royal Colonial Institute, the Primrose League and the Overseas League, all of which had branches in Brighton, were more tangibly engaged with international policy, popularizing empire through lectures entitled ‘The Evolution of Empire’ and ‘Women and the Empire’.146 Memories of professional and personal experiences of empire infused the region through those local residents who had retired to the south coast after their colonial careers: the memberships of organizations such as the Hove Club on Fourth Avenue tended to have a ‘distinctly military character’, boasting significant numbers of ex-colonial officials amongst their associates.147 Returned members of the colonial community also participated in other social endeavours, sharing their life experiences with new generations of local residents. Coincidently, it is known that Man, for example, continued to develop the photographic skills he acquired in the Andaman Islands, further developing his expertise in the types of material culture he encountered while there: his snapshots were used to illustrate an article in the Brighton Season society magazine on the archery club of which he was a member (see Figure 4.10 and Figure 4.11).148 Notably, while the journalist described the ‘strange’ situation in which the ‘smart society’ in ‘this most hyper-cultured twentieth century of ours’ practised the same activities as ‘naked savages’ elsewhere,149 Man’s photographs, both of his peers and of himself, bore a skewed resemblance to those he had taken of his charges thirty years earlier (see Figure 4.12 below).

Figure 4.10 E.H. Man. Photograph of members of the Brighton and Hove Archery Club, from Brighton Season. 1906–7. ‘Toxophilites of the Twentieth Century: The Brighton and Hove Archery Club’, 22. Courtesy of RPMBH.

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Figure 4.11 Unknown photographer. Photograph of E.H. Man, from Brighton Season. 1906–7. ‘Toxophilites of the Twentieth Century: The Brighton and Hove Archery Club’, 23. Courtesy of RPMBH.

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Figure 4.12 E.H. Man. Photograph of a group of Andamanese people at Port Blair, c. 1880. RPMBH, WA900315. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

A more fundamental, tangible example of the impact that returned members of the colonial community made on life in Brighton can be seen within the wider provincial phenomenon of the staging of local fundraising bazaars. Organized by predominantly female groups of wealthy members of society, these events were given a particular theme, often encompassing the premise of ‘Empire’, or ‘the East’. Such themes influenced the décor of the venue, the types of refreshments available and the kind of commodities for sale. In these contexts, ex-colonial officials, and particularly the women who had accompanied them abroad, shared their knowledge and experiences of colonial life by offering their personal possessions and souvenirs, amassed during their lives in the colonies, for sale. The organizer of one ‘Indian Bazaar’ held in 1903 ‘had recently come from India’, and supplied the ‘gorgeous fabrics’ and brass and silverware on sale at the Hove Town Hall herself; Lady Collon, whose husband was a member of the Indian Council, took pains to assure her audience ‘that all are the genuine things and the best of their kind’.150 Similarly, at a ‘Chinese Fair’, held in the Brighton Dome in aid of the Royal Sussex Country Hospital in November 1920, ‘well-known Hove people who have had the closest of relationships with China’ provided their audience of 13,107 people with ‘the finest collections of genuine Chinese costumes that can have been seen together in Brighton or Hove’.151 Away from the museum, perceptions of the British Empire’s subjects were thus moderated by the people who had actually visited these far-flung locales.

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As well as facilitating the diffusion of individual residents’ direct experiences, the bazaar provided a crucial platform for the projection of non-European cultures as imagined by local people who had never left their own shores. These interpretations were often manifested through the delivery of musical and theatrical performances, and, again, objects formed an important part of these cross-cultural negotiations. At the ‘Lure of the Orient’ Bazaar, which raised funds for Hove Hospital in October 1924, a painting of the Taj Mahal formed the backdrop for a performance in which ‘a typical Eastern melody was played at the organ … followed by a long retinue of ladies and gentlemen in Oriental dresses’.152 The ‘Eastern Bazaar’, held in November 1909, included a similar pageant featuring ‘[s]tately Egyptian water-carriers of alluring charm, turbaned Hindoos of grave demeanour, dapper little Japs, sprightly Turks with the complexion of coffee, and winsome geisha borrowed from the Japanese teahouse’, each played by local residents.153 The stars of such shows may or may not have visited the countries represented in their productions, but one suspects that Master E.W. Dixon’s ‘Canadian Indian’, and Master Leonard Harrison’s ‘fearful and wonderful Zulu, black as night’, who ‘kept guard’ at the Imperial Market at St Saviour’s Church in 1909,154 were actually the products of a home-grown imagination and fantasy, linked instead to popular stereotypes proliferated by the media about the ‘Wild West’ and the Boer Wars. Moreover, at such events, ‘genuine’ objects gifted by returned travellers were also supplemented by the creative efforts of charitable local women.155 At the ‘Chinese Fair’ discussed above, a journalist for the Herald documented a process whereby, at the hands of the organizing committee, ‘humbler things’ were transformed into ‘articles of the greatest beauty and interest’ available for sale: a cigar box was fashioned into ‘some rare casket inlaid with mother-o’pearl and costly woods’, and ‘what was once a jam pot is now resplendent as a piece of Venetian ware’.156 Not only did the language used in the article evoke a scenario where British junk became authentic ‘oriental’ treasure, but also the makers of these commodities were seen as replicating typically ‘Eastern’ qualities in their acts of construction: the craftswomen, it was proclaimed, ‘have shown an ingenuity and an infinity of patience that are thoroughly Chinese’.157 The trend was to replicate and imitate the ‘other’, with locally produced, common items forming the foundations for exotic treasures. Whether products had been imported from the countries they pertained to represent, or whether mock venue decorations and saleable goods had been produced locally, the emphasis was on, and indeed the journalists’ descriptions focused upon, close reproduction and authenticity. The term ‘genuine’ was noticeably and frequently employed. However, the imitation of and engagement with other cultures in such contexts had a broader importance than this focus on simulation; such events inevitably had a financial objective, but the staging of bazaars and fairs was also an important social opportunity for personal interaction and the fostering of local community spirit.158 In Brighton, such occasions were seen as ‘the big events of the year’,159 promoting ‘sociability among the members’ of a particular

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organization or group, as Mayor Councillor E. Geere pointed out at an ‘Imperial Market’ in November 1909.160 A visitor to an ‘Eastern Bazaar’ in Hove, again in 1909, similarly mentioned how these fairs evoked a ‘common enthusiasm’, ‘bind[ing] together the whole body of church workers’ (in this case).161 An emphasis was put on human interaction and social engagement: whether the attraction was an English person dressed up in imitation or someone from another culture (a Chinese guest, for example, who had been invited to open an event),162 or whether those speaking were ‘those who know because they have been to see’,163 these events provided Brighton residents with a chance to communicate and engage with peers, friends, amateurs and specialists. Crucially, discussion and engagement with other people was actively fostered.164 Indeed, other successful events which promoted learning about and engagement with other countries also tended to incorporate an element of the personal encounter into their programmes. Lectures, talks and lantern slide-shows on themes of empire and non-European cultures were frequently advertised and reported upon in the Herald: there was seemingly a regular audience, formed either of the general public or of members from specialist groups, for presentations on subjects such as ‘The Native Races of South Africa’, ‘India under King Asoka’ and ‘Life in New Zealand’.165 Praise for these occasions focused on the ability of a live speaker to deliver ‘intimate knowledge’, or ‘first-hand information’ to their audiences; in person, a lecturer was able to draw ‘a most alluring picture’, and present ‘a vivid idea’ of their subject matter.166 Similarly, the attraction of the live performance in relation to the dissemination of information about non-European cultures could also be found in local theatre productions: the themes of ‘Britannia and her Colonies’ and ‘The Masque of Empire’ were common subjects for the productions of local youth groups.167 Throughout the 1930s, the Brighton and Hove Harmonic Society brought Thomas Fairbarn’s London production of Hiawatha to Brighton (see Figure 4.13). Featuring both the

Figure 4.13 Miss Mavis Bennett as Minnehaha, Mr Joseph Farrington as Hiawatha and ‘Chief Os-ke-non-ton’ as the Medicine Man, from Herald. 1933. ‘“Hiawatha” as Spectacle, Impressive Scenes in the Dome, Music, Colour and Action’, 2 December, 14. Courtesy of RPMBH.

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famed Mohawk baritone, Chief Os-ke-non-ton, ‘curiously impressive, because he is the real thing’,168 and the pupils of a number of Brighton’s local dance schools, such events were the perfect combination of presumed authenticity, human interest and local participation. The production of knowledge and understanding of the ‘other’ in the context of this sociable, dynamic environment, ripe for individual involvement and group participation, can be seen as an important aspect of how Brightonians viewed the outside world. These experiences provided, then, a markedly different introduction to nonEuropean cultures to those facilitated by the local museum. As we will see, public perceptions of Brighton Museum were complex, but the experiences of active engagement and involvement as described above must have formed a harsh contrast to the displays curated by Toms. Certainly in Brighton, where the museum was blighted by high acquisition rates, cramped conditions, low budgets and understaffing, Toms’ scientific arguments became only one potential influence amongst many. Arguably, in their encounters with museum events and collections, visitors used the external, more sociable experiences of nonEuropean cultures as tools with which to make sense of the alienating, didactic and confused experiences offered in the museum.

The Visiting Experience at Brighton Museum General perceptions of the service provided by Brighton Museum during this period were ambivalent. Discussions surrounding the founding of a public museum in neighbouring Hove in 1927 give an indication of popular opinions in the region regarding such provisions. During the proceedings, questions were raised as to the necessity of museums in general: for some, such institutions were seen as ‘a collection of odds and ends’, ‘a rather expensive luxury’ and ‘out of date altogether’.169 Indeed, as with museums on a national scale, in a marker of Brighton Museum’s status, the adjoining lending library was often prioritized, with newspaper coverage tending to focus on the development and activities held there instead.170 Nevertheless, a municipal museum was ultimately considered vital for the development and maintenance of civic pride, particularly by the middle classes. As Kate Hill has observed on a larger scale, Brightonians used such cultural institutions to ‘build their collective identity though stylized leisure, the performance of cultural capital, and to show off their persons’ through the display of their material gifts.171 The rebuilding of the library, art gallery and museum in 1902 was one occasion where this attitude was revealed. A proposed reduction in the project budget, and in the sum available for the development of the exterior of the building in particular, caused great controversy in the popular press: an announcement of the need to compromise the quality of the façade’s decoration for monetary reasons was met with ‘feelings akin to dismay’.172

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Ultimately, the critics were successful, and the original plans prevailed with only slight modifications. Brighton’s residents were clearly aware of their museum: Toms had a significant public profile, particularly related to his archaeological activities, and the museum received regular coverage in the press for ‘newsworthy’ events. Lectures, new staff appointments, large donations and the opening of the annual wild flower exhibit were often reviewed or reported upon in the press, or in the minutes of the Town Council’s meetings (which were published in the Herald). In 1933 and 1934, the Herald also ran an illustrated series entitled ‘Object of the Week’, in which, inspired by a similar undertaking at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a particular accession was chosen and specially displayed by the museum, and then featured by the press. Objects with a local relevance, such as a mosaic of George IV and a portrait of Dr Richard Russell (the physician who popularized the medicinal use of Brighton seawater in the eighteenth century), or items of particular value, such as the museum’s prize Bronze Age amber cup, tended to be selected. Significantly, perhaps, no non-European items were included, but mention was made elsewhere in the Herald of ‘the Museum’s truly magnificent ethnographical collections’.173 This understanding of the need for a municipal museum in Brighton, and an awareness of its presence, however, did not translate into straightforward visiting experiences. In 1904, the contemporary commentator David Murray wrote that a museum was ‘the easiest means of self-instruction’; he claimed that such institutions presented ‘the results of science in an easily intelligible form’ and gave visitors ‘a fair index of what has been ascertained on any particular subject, and … a definite base from which to work’.174 In their contributions to museology over the last twenty-five years, scholars have acknowledged the mechanisms that actively construct the ‘easily intelligible forms’ and ‘indexes’ supposedly found in museums, interrogating the affective processes of display, documentation and conservation which undoubtedly influence how museum collections and objects are perceived. More recently, however, a new focus has centred on the personal response of the individual visitor, regardless of these curatorial and design mechanisms.175 Museums clearly have an impact upon society, but their ideological impact should be tempered by a more democratic view of the visiting experience. The varying learning styles, life experiences, and motivations of museum audiences can make the modern museum’s ‘master narrative’ as described by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill,176 or at least its successful reception, difficult to locate. Indeed, these multiple visiting possibilities were encouraged by the specific situation at Brighton Museum. High acquisition rates, cramped conditions, low budgets and understaffing did not necessarily spoil visitors’ enjoyment, but they did complicate the museum’s curatorial direction and ‘easily intelligible format’. More generally, Tony Bennett has demonstrated the practical difficulties of reading indexes of objects in displays such as those at Brighton; to decipher the messages ‘inherent’ in late nineteenth and early twentieth century evolutionary

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sequences, for example, he highlights how the acquisition of ‘new visual habits’ through specific tutoring was required.177 Indeed, those few instances of seemingly successful public engagement with intellectual interpretation, such as the extended article on Toms’ ‘Marvels of Savage Art’ lecture in the Herald, tended, in effect, to be direct transcripts of the speaker’s presentation rather than the product of commentary, critique or reaction.178 In fact, a general picture of public reaction to the museum’s collection, built up through references sourced in the Herald between 1900 and 1940, reveals how semblances of the creativity, imagination and participation demonstrated during the execution of the region’s local bazaars are easier to identify than the scientific, aesthetic or thematic interpretations instigated by Toms. Popular visions of the ‘other’ as dramatized in the local bazaar, or on the amateur’s stage, seem to have been projected onto the contents of the museum on a regular basis. In a report of a public tour of the galleries, it was those objects most closely representing the ‘bizarre barbaric devices’ employed as stage props for the Brighton and Hove Harmonic Society’s performance of Hiawatha, for example, that were chosen for detailed description: from the entire ethnography collection, it was ‘a real cannibal man-catcher, warranted to work, … a Red Indian tomahawk … [and] the poisoned darts used by the aborigines of the Malay Peninsula’ that were selected for comment.179 Indeed, the entertaining attraction of the ‘savage cannibal’ was a regularly sought-after trope: more akin to the contents of Arthur Conan Doyle’s dramatic tales than any anthropological series that Toms had hoped to present, an early summary of Brighton’s new ethnography gallery described the collection as an entity ‘which generally works out as a collection of the war-clubs, poisoned arrows, and more peaceful implements of savages’.180 Similarly, a short ‘Descriptive and Pictorial Guide of Brighton’ picked out ‘the actual head (much shrunken) of a Brazilian warrior, which was long carried about by his tribe as a fetish’ for attention.181 An article covering Toms’ lecture on the contribution of Maori artefacts to evolutionary theory was entitled ‘Marvels of Savage Art: Comedy in the Cannibal Islands’, emphasizing the popular attraction of cannibalism as a subject over Toms’ careful argument, as well as the wider appeal that anthropology had as a source of entertainment.182 A junior member of staff voiced similar fears, complaining that the ‘first appeal’ of ethnological objects ‘is to nothing higher than a taste for the exotic and sensational’.183 The elements of fantasy and performance central to local perceptions of other cultures were clearly superimposed onto the town’s museum and its collections. Published descriptions evoke (and may also have been influenced by) contemporary fictional accounts of the museum-going experience as rife with the ‘residue of supernatural potential’.184 Museum objects, particularly those with age, harboured clear appeal to this mystical mindset. Egyptian material culture seems to have been especially ‘awe-inspiring’,185 and it was observed that, for the participants of a public tour, an Egyptian ‘tablet whose origin goes back to 3,000 years B.C. undoubtedly appealed to their imaginations’.186 An inspired

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description of a public archaeology event at the museum in 1925 imagined how, at the end of the evening, ‘as the archaeologists passed the museum cases, the exhibits seemed to look sorrowfully at their gatherers who had temporarily deserted them’, and it was fancied that in their reaction to the proceedings, ‘the pictures on the wall of the Art Gallery must wonder what it’s all about’.187 As a public figure, Toms also formed a crucial element of this wider image of the museum as a magical storehouse for animate objects hailing from the ‘mystic shadows of the distant past’.188 In keeping with the genre of ‘Museum Gothic’, as described by Ruth Hoberman and as exemplified by stories such as Vernon Lee’s ‘A Wedding Chest’ (1904) and H. Rider Haggard’s Smith and the Pharaohs (1912–1913), the curator’s ‘intimate relationship with his object of study’ was often what sparked the public’s imagination when engaging with the museum at Brighton.189 The Herald described the ‘wondrous stories’ told by Toms, and his knowledge of the Stone Age, pausing to imagine him as ‘a reincarnation of one of its medicine men’.190 Another article, suitably entitled ‘In Darkest Sussex’, presented a curious, mystical picture of Toms ‘wearing a red fez … and surrounded by curios from Egypt, Africa, Polynesia, and [other] equally thrilling relics … [as he] chatted … about witchcraft’.191 Naturally, the tendency of newspapers to focus on significant events rather than the everyday, and the agenda of the popular press, with its interest in attracting readers through attention-grabbing and marketable stories, is a somewhat ‘imperfect indicator’ of public opinion.192 Newspapers inevitably offer a selective version of reality governed by media conventions.193 However, given the paucity of information about historical visitor responses, the press provides us with a valuable if partial lens onto patterns of interpretation formed by those who visited the museum and those who formed opinions from the outside. Indeed, successful journalism is also about more than ‘telling a good story’; ‘[i]t is about telling stories that contain significant civic unity’.194 The ‘agenda-setting ability’ of the press must also be acknowledged:195 if the Herald was reinforcing the museum as a comedy store and supernatural space, then this is likely to have formed the cue for many museum audiences. Accordingly, despite the degree of journalistic whimsy and assumption to be found in the popular media, there must also be a marked value in the use of this material as an insight into public opinion before and after media influence. To a great extent, then, visitors and other observers of Brighton’s museum seem not to have engaged with the official interpretation offered, but rather to have superimposed their own, pre-formed experiences of other cultures upon this repository. In their museum, Brightonians seem to have found the same qualities that transformed the ‘Salvation Army lassies, in their quiet gowns and demure bonnets’, into the dramatic, picturesque and entertaining ‘lively creatures with gorgeous glittering headdresses and gauzy robes of many colours’ at a fundraising Indian Bazaar in 1909.196 The fantasy, drama and threat of cannibalism central to the appeal of The Sign of Four and the exhibit at the Colonial and Indian

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Exhibition (see Chapter 3) were equally sought after in the displays at Brighton Museum. However, while many visitors and commentators were able to transfer their experiences onto the museum and glean something positive from their experience, others were less creative. Instead, for them, the museum was simply marked out as a space which failed to support the popular participatory and people-focused methods of engagement provided by the bazaar, the lecture hall and the theatre; indeed, the museum disappointed as a result. In a report of a missionary exhibition at Hove Town Hall in 1920, the scene was described as ‘laden like a museum with all manner of curiosities belonging intimately to the life and religion of the people’,197 but ultimately, these comparisons were short lived: ‘[The fair] was, however, much more than a museum, for each section was in charge of a missionary who could, and did, speak with personal experience of life and labour in the land: and the frequent round of talks and explanations gave the exhibition abundant vitality.’198 Professional concerns in the museum world were voiced about how ‘the very word “museum” excites the wrong impression in the minds of people’, and how this was ‘not surprising when one considers how dull many of them have become and how low the worst of them have sunk’.199 Some Brightonians saw the institution as a ‘Shelter in Wet Weather’, or as a repository of ‘old bones and stones’.200 Despite the presence of Toms as a public figure, it would appear that the museum’s audiences needed more participation and personal input into the learning experience. Envisioned by some as quiet, didactic, strictly monitored funeral parlours, museums such as that at Brighton had an alternative ‘reputation for being dusty places where dead objects rested’;201 the experts, live shows, performances and participation of the fairs and bazaars were sorely missed at the museum. Of course, the alienation and confusion caused by this lack of opportunity for personal involvement in the construction of information is currently at the heart of debates in contemporary visitor and learning studies. Increasingly, models for object and gallery-based experiences which accept ‘the possibility of socially mediated learning’ have influenced best practice in the heritage industry.202 In his ‘Constructivist Museum’, George Hein ‘makes provision for social interaction’, designing spaces, constructing exhibitions and organizing programmes with which to ‘deliberately capitalize on learning as a social activity’.203 Jeremy Roschelle asserts that ‘learning proceeds primarily from prior knowledge and only secondarily from the presented materials’, and highlights the distortion that can occur if the two entities are at odds with each other.204 The methods of engagement with Brighton Museum’s ethnography collections as discussed in this research highlight the desire for personal involvement and demonstration of individual prior knowledge during the learning experience, thus lending an eloquent historical case study to such discussions. As Sandra Dudley has recently surmised, we encounter other people and material culture through our bodies: away from the glass vitrines of the museum,

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‘our senses, spatial locations and movements determine how we experience and interpret the world of which we are a part’.205 Indeed, at the missionary fairs and community bazaars, Brightonians were able to physically engage with (touch, handle and even wear) costumes, fabrics, brass and silverware brought from India, China and other countries. These embodied experiences could well have facilitated interest in and understandings of the use value and human labour present in such objects beyond that facilitated by the ocular experience of the museum; Dudley has eloquently written of the emotive and sensory possibilities in handling objects, going on to review how museums and their focus on the textual interpretation of objects limit opportunities for human empathy and engagement.206 Case studies like this demonstrate how attention to the benefits of embodied and sensory engagement with objects in museum practice can stimulate audience interest and engagement with the wider world.207 However, both sets of experiences detailed here – in the museum and in the participatory world of the fair – should also be read as cautionary tales about the crude and sometimes base perceptions that can occur when objects are released from the object–text composite that Dudley critiques: there may have been enthusiasm, but there was little empathy in local responses to other cultures. Certainly, then, the museum was a major protagonist in the circulation of wider impressions of non-European culture and imperial narratives within Brighton. Toms, as a museum curator, lent an institutional authority that was distinct from the first-hand but subjective experiences of the missionaries and colonial officials who had spent time in the colonies, and separate from the whimsy of the town’s amateur dramatic clubs and bazaar organizers. Despite the issues raised, the museum and its ethnographic collections did provide an important opportunity to expand existing understandings of the ‘Oriental’ or ‘savage’ other, supplying an alternative framework within which to reaffirm these ideas and narratives and presenting a creative forum for projecting and exploring them further. The museum’s collections may well have directly inspired the creativity of local audiences, and, as objects made and perhaps used by non-Europeans in their indigenous contexts, they had the capacity to evoke the agency and creative choices of their source communities in ways that the props manufactured by Brightonians could not. The rich and multiple histories of many of the museum’s objects – visually clear through the erosions and alterations to their physical states, and highlighted in their associated interpretation and documentation – evoked different meanings from the pristine, unused items sold at the missionary exhibitions and charity bazaars. However, Toms’ success in informing and instructing the public as to the evolutionary status of man and the diversity of humanity throughout the British Empire was limited. Certainly, his address would have resonated with the select elements of his audience who were familiar with these issues. However, for his wider, more general audience, his ‘disciplinary technologies’ and experiments with objects as indicators of social evolutionary theory became blurred by the practical problems of the provincial museum. In practice, audiences combined

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their own expectations and learning requirements with messages put forward by the museum’s displays, forming a complex amalgam of impressions about the world that was by no means dominated by the museum. Both inside and away from the museum, individual perspectives were of course rife; different audiences had nuanced and particular attitudes to both the museum and the diverse peoples of the empire. The British Empire’s subjects were not collated to form a single ‘other’: the imagined ‘winsome geisha’ of the bazaar was not equated with the ‘primeval’ cast of Hiawatha,208 just as the museum’s Japanese pottery collection was conceptually distinct from the cannibal man-catchers highlighted during a tour of the museum. For many, however, in Brighton Museum, ‘science’ seems to have been largely shunned, and popular types forged in the outside world appear to have reigned supreme.

Conclusions In their new setting at the heart of the ethnography collection at Brighton Museum, the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects became newly bound in a complex set of meanings which tied them to both their pasts and their futures. Ultimately, the immediate and complete ideological rupture that was threatened by the movement of the objects from a private to a public frame of reference did not occur, at least at first. Traces of the ways in which Man and Temple, in particular, perceived their objects continued to remain visible: the collections were displayed in a system which paid homage to the evolutionary hierarchies which infused these men’s careers. Man’s own views on the Andamanese, who, he said, ‘in spite of their many excellent qualities, must be regarded as one of the most degraded and barbarous races in existence’,209 are highly likely to have been shared by Toms. However, much of this research has sought to confirm that museum collections are, indeed, ‘historically contingent and subject to local appropriation’,210 and at Brighton Museum, the objects necessarily underwent material and ideological transformations through processes of conservation and registration and, ultimately, new paradigms of display. Gradually, other ideological movements influenced display and reception: geographical groupings, movements towards a preference for aesthetically appealing objects, and a more thematic approach slowly became an official part of the objects’ social lives. Unofficially, the specific ideological careers of the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects are much harder to determine. The Herald published brief details of Temple’s ‘valuable gift of ethnographical objects from Nicobar and Andaman’ in 1923,211 but these were noted in the transcripts of the Town Council’s minutes as standard procedure, and not as a result of any specific local interest. A broader understanding of local perceptions regarding the museum as a space and impressions of its objects and staff members have, however, been established: it is likely that there would have been major discrepancies in the meanings created

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from within the institution and by those who visited it. Given the regularity with which the museum’s pedagogic methods failed to engage audiences, and the multifarious ways in which visitors projected their own previously formed and often inaccurate knowledge on what they saw across the ethnographic collections, it seems likely that it was popular images of the region, such as those projected in the Sign of Four and at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, for example, that provided the context for museum audiences engaging with the Andamanese and Nicobarese collections in Brighton. Museum objects clearly are, as George Stocking has remarked, ‘the outcome of large-scale historical processes’.212 The trajectories of the Andamanese and Nicobarese objects and the wider contents of the collection into which they were subsumed were influenced by the comprehensive settlement patterns of the returned colonial community which fostered their arrival in the region. Their public reception and interpretation was inspired by a thriving culture of engaging with the colonial exotic through international exhibitions, charity bazaars and amateur dramatics. Their presentation in the museum’s galleries was influenced by standard schools of thought regarding the presentation of the non-European subject and the role of the object in the formation of these messages. The fact that these messages often failed to reach their intended audiences was due to a broader lack of knowledge of how museum audiences process information, and the practical difficulties that further blurred the relationship between intended and received messages were the result of issues that dogged provincial museums around the country. This investigation is therefore integral to establishing the history of a contained group of objects from the Bay of Bengal, but it is also an indicative case study which illustrates wider trends in the display of museum objects in the early twentieth century, both at Brighton and further afield.

Notes 1. ARBM, No. 613, September 1904, 60. 2. S. Alpers. 1991. ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 26. 3. Stephen E. Weil cited in E.H. Gurian. 1991. ‘Noodling around with Exhibition Opportunities’, in I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 189. 4. See, for example, C. Saumarez Smith. 1989. ‘Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings’, in P. Vergo (ed.), The New Museology, London: Reaktion Books. 5. G. Kavanagh. 1996. ‘Making Histories, Making Memories’, in G. Kavanagh (ed.), Making Histories in Museums, London: Leicester University Press, 2. 6. See also C. Wintle. 2008. ‘A Cross-institutional Examination of the Collection and Donation of Andamanese and Nicobarese Material Culture in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery, University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, and the

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9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

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British Museum’, unpublished report produced for University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The Brighton Herald and Hove Chronicle changed its name to Brighton & Hove Herald in November 1922. The Herald will be used here throughout. D. Jenkins. 1994. ‘Object Lessons and Ethnographic Displays: Museum Exhibitions and the Making of American Anthropology’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 36(1), 253. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, 50. Ibid. H. Lidchi. 1997. ‘The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures’, in S. Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, London: Sage, 173; MacDonald, ‘Collecting Practices’, 82. See, for example, Baxandall, ‘Exhibiting Intention’; V. Carroll. 2004. ‘The Natural History of Visiting: Responses to Charles Waterson and Walton Hall’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35, 31–64; S. MacDonald. 1996. ‘Theorizing Museums: An Introduction’, in S. MacDonald and G. Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Oxford: Blackwell, 4. The important contributions of T. Bennett. 1995. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge and E. Hooper-Greenhill. 1992. Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, London: Routledge have been particularly influenced by Michel Foucault’s principles of disciplined surveillance and power/knowledge as applied in M. Foucault. 1977. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Allen Lane. Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 6; L. Kriegel. 2006. ‘After the Exhibitionary Complex: Museum Histories and the Future of the Victorian Past’, Victorian Studies, 48(4); H.G. Penny. 2002. Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 206–208. M. Elliott. 2003. ‘Behind the Scenes at the Magic House: An Ethnography of the Indian Museum, Calcutta’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 18; Penny, Objects of Culture, chapters 4 and 5; S. Alberti. 2009. Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum, Manchester: Manchester University Press, chapter 6. T. Patterson. 2008. ‘The News as a Reflection of Public Opinion’, in W. Donsbach and M.W. Traugott (eds), The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research, London: Sage, 34. See C. Wintle. 2012. ‘Visiting the Empire at the Provincial Museum, 1900–1950, in S. Longair and J. McAleer (eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 39–41, for further details of this methodology which advocates building a ‘contextual shadow’ of museum visiting, or placing museum visiting in a wider context of public cultural production and consumption to investigate historical museum audiences. C. Musgrave. 1970. Life in Brighton: From the Earliest Times to the Present, London: Faber and Faber, 347. County Borough of Brighton. 1909. Official Guide to the Public Library, Museum and Fine Art Galleries, 2nd edn, Brighton, contents page. H.D. Roberts. 1908. The Brighton Public Library, Museums, and Fine Art Galleries: A Retrospect, reprinted from the Library Association Record, Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press Limited, 1–2.

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21. S.D. Jeffs. 1864. Jeffs’ Guide to the Royal Pavilion and Museum, Brighton, 2nd edn, Brighton, 33–34. 22. Shelton, ‘Re-presenting Non-Western Art’, 2. 23. This formation is likely to have been influenced by Lomax’s junior colleague Toms, whose approach will be discussed in detail below. 24. County Borough of Brighton. 1900. Popular Guide to Brighton Public Museum, Brighton, 35, 36 and 46. 25. Ibid., 33 and 31. 26. G.A. Holleyman. 1987. Two Dorset Archaeologists in Sussex: Lieut. General Pitt Rivers in Sussex, 1867–1878 and Herbert Samuel Toms, Curator of the Brighton Museum 1896– 1939, privately printed, 12. 27. M.W. Thompson. 1977. General Pitt-Rivers: Evolution and Archaeology in the Nineteenth Century, Wiltshire: Moonraker Press, 94. For a discussion of the contents of the Farnham Museum see, A. Petch. 1998. ‘“Man as he was and Man as he is”: General Pitt Rivers’s Collections’, Journal of the History of Collections, 10(1), 82–84. 28. Richard Toms (H.S. Toms’ grandson), in an interview with the author, 10 August 2007. 29. R. Merrifield. 1987. ‘Some Personal Memories of H.S. Toms’, in G.A. Holleyman, Two Dorset Archaeologists in Sussex: Lieut. General Pitt Rivers in Sussex, 1867–1878 and Herbert Samuel Toms, Curator of the Brighton Museum 1896–1939, privately printed, 32. 30. Ibid., 36. 31. M. Ames. 1994. ‘Cannibal Tours, Glass Boxes and the Politics of Interpretation’, in S. Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections, London: Routledge, 102. 32. C. Lévi-Strauss. 1972. Structural Anthropology 1, trans. C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 375. 33. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 6 June, 1923, 339. 34. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 4 April, 1923, 336. In the Nicobar Islands, a hentakoi is commissioned in order to assist the well-being of a particular person (see the Introduction and Chapters 1 and 2). After the illness is cured, the hentakoi is reactivated monthly and kept in order to promote the continued good health of that person. During that time, the object is likely to deteriorate from the effects of smoke and termite damage but is still kept, and this wear and tear does not affect its use value. Metal nails are used to prevent total degeneration but once the person for whom the object was commissioned has died, the model is no longer usable and put aside or buried under a particular tree, to decay. Kareau are kept within the community, even after the death of the people for whom they were commissioned, and decorated during festivals. These objects are also allowed to deteriorate naturally, from smoke and termite damage (Singh, ‘Ethnographic Objects from the Nicobars’). 35. Jenkins, ‘Object Lessons’, 244. 36. Man attached hand-written labels to his donated collections which detailed an indigenous name for the object and a number pertaining to his own system of documentation (discussed in Chapter 2). At Cambridge University’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the British Museum, for example, these labels are still either attached to the objects or held as associated documentation within the institution’s archive. Similar labels can be assumed to have been attached to those objects that came to Brighton, although they no longer exist. 37. Jenkins, ‘Object Lessons’, 255. See also Alberti, Nature and Culture, 131–136, on the affective processes of museum cataloguing more generally, and on how documentation

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43. 44. 45.

46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

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‘wrenched the object from its fiscal and social contexts’, creating ‘a frozen work of art’ (133). ARBM, No. 1707, September 1916, 22. A. Shelton. 2001. ‘Introduction: The Return of the Subject’, in A. Shelton (ed.), Collectors: Expressions of Self and Other, London: Horniman Museum and Gardens, 14. O’Hanlon, ‘Introduction’, 4. Some of these ideas were originally discussed in Wintle, ‘Consultancy, Networking and Brokerage’. See, for example, at Liverpool Museum, although Hill asserts that by 1890 donors were less able to wield such influences there (Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 82–83). See Alberti, Nature and Culture, 36 and 99–104 for a related discussion on the ‘economy of donation’ in a university museum. H. Glenn Penny highlights a similar phenomenon in German ethnographic museums (Penny, Objects of Culture, 135–140). County Borough of Brighton. 1913. Official Guide to the Public Library, Museum and Fine Art Galleries, 5th edn, Brighton, 18. County Borough of Brighton, Popular Guide to Brighton Public Museum, 44. Byrne, S. 2011. ‘Trials and Traces: A.C. Haddon’s Agency as Museum Curator’, in S. Byrne, A. Clarke, R. Harrison and R. Torrence (eds), Unpacking the Collection: Networks of Material and Social Agency in the Museum, New York: Springer, 309; see also S. Longair and J. McAleer. 2012. ‘Introduction: Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience’, in S. Longair and J. McAleer (eds), Curating Empire: Museums and the British Imperial Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 9. See R. Bradley. 1989. ‘Herbert Toms: A Pioneer of Analytical Field Survey’, in M. Bowden, D. Mackay and P. Topping (eds), From Cornwall to Caithness: Some Aspects of British Field Archaeology, Oxford: BAR British Series, for details of this aspect of Toms’ life. Elsewhere, Helen Southwood documents how the curator of the Marischal Anthropological Museum at the University of Aberdeen asked one of the museum’s donors to label each article with ‘a statement’ including native name, ‘structure’ and use (letter from R.W. Reid to A. Gordon, 30 September 1915, cited in H. Southwood. 2003. ‘A Cultural History of Marischal Anthropological Museum in the Twentieth Century’, unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Aberdeen, 162). See also, on a broader scale, Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 145. For some examples, see Wintle, ‘Consultancy, Networking and Brokerage’. Man, ‘List of Objects Made and Used by the Andamanese’, 405. ARBM, No. 2129, March 1920, 119. Ibid. Man, ‘List of Objects Made and Used by the Andamanese’, 403. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 3 March 1920, 221 and 224. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 4 April 1923, 336. ARBM, No. 2468, April 1923, 12 and 13. Similarly, each of Temple’s objects at Cambridge is accompanied by a handwritten label attributed to Man, including Man’s interpretation of an ‘indigenous’ name and a number referencing his own cataloguing system. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 4 April 1923, 336. Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 65.

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58. See, for example, a donation of fifty-eight ‘ethnographical specimens’ in December 1919 (ARBM, No. 2101, December 1919, 110–112), gifted by Frederick Harrison during his committee membership, and Mr G.C. Morant, who, as a committee member between 1909 and 1916, donated a ‘pair of Chilean spears’ and a ‘Vampire Bat from Trinidad’ (ARBM, No. 1438, November 1913, 224), to add to the large Sakai collection from the Malay Peninsula he had presented in 1908. 59. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 7 June 1912, 383. Emphasis mine. 60. Sub-Committee, 4 April 1923, 337. 61. ARBM, No. 2909, June 1927, 109. The level of Man’s continued influence is also indicated by the fact that he was recommended for membership of the Museum SubCommittee in 1916 (Sub-Committee, 6 September 1916, 87), although the proposal was shelved when a resolution was passed later that year stating that the Museum and Library Sub-Committees should not exceed ten coopted members (Library, Museums and Fine Arts Committee Meeting Minutes, 16 November 1916, 56, in the Archive of RPMBH). 62. Cadell (1835–1919) was Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands between 1878 and 1892. 63. Loughney, ‘Colonialism and the Development of the English Provincial Museum’, 301, for example, discusses the importance of the port as feeder to museums at Whitby, Newcastle and Liverpool. 64. E. Buettner. 2004. Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 19. 65. See S.F. Markham’s comments on Brighton’s ‘ethnographical collections which are amazingly rich in objects that cannot now be acquired for love nor money’ in 1938 (S.F. Markham. 1938. The Museums and Galleries of the British Isles, Edinburgh: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 47). 66. G. Gowans. 2002. ‘A Passage from India: Geographies and Experiences of Repatriation, 1858–1939’, Social & Cultural Geography, 3(4), 411. An article on ‘English Health Resorts by Combined Travel and Hotel Tickets’, in Thomas Cook & Son. 1920. The Oriental Traveller’s Gazette: A Monthly Magazine of Travel, February, 7, sold Brighton as being ‘famous for its sunshine, glowing light, and bright clear air’. 67. S. Farrant, K. Fossey, and A. Peasgood. 1981. The Growth of Brighton and Hove, 1840– 1939, Brighton: University of Sussex, Centre for Continuing Education, 16. 68. H.G. Mumford’s donation from ‘the Baluba tribe, Katanga Region, Upper Congo’, for example, was described in this way, and accordingly secured using the Museum’s entire annual purchasing budget of £50 for 1908 (ARBM, No. 844, July 1908, 92; SubCommittee, 17 July 1908, 133). 69. Loughney, ‘Colonialism and the Development of the English Provincial Museum’, 304 and 224. 70. Sub-Committee, 28 February 1923, 333. 71. Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 65 and 82. 72. Shelton, ‘Museum Ethnography’, 168. 73. These ideas were specifically postulated by Edward Burnett Tylor, one of the key proponents of evolutionary anthropology. See E.B. Tylor. 1873. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Arts and Custom, 2 vols, London: John Murray, especially Chapter 2, ‘The Development of Culture’, Vol. 1, 26–69. For a detailed discussion of Tylor’s relationship to wider issues

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76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

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of Victorian and Edwardian museum anthropology, see van Keuren, ‘Cabinets and Culture’, 26–39. H.S. Toms. 1911. ‘Notes on Recent Developments at the Brighton Museum, Prepared for the Museums Association, Brighton Meeting, 1911’, Museums Journal, 11(4), 97. County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 13. Editions of the Official Guide to the Public Library, Museum and Fine Art Galleries were published in 1908, 1909, 1910, 1911 and 1913. Minor amendments were made throughout the series to reflect some of the display rearrangements that were made, but the majority of the text was unchanged. The social evolutionary display of the ‘modern savage stone tools’ remained throughout this period. For clarity, the text and the plan (Figure 4.5) of the last edition of the Official Guide (1913) will be used throughout, unless otherwise stated. Merrifield, ‘Some Personal Memories’, 35. Herbert S. Toms cited in Herald. 1909. ‘Marvels of Savage Art: Comedy in the Cannibal Islands’, 1 May, 6. Ibid. See potentially key articles such as W.H. Holmes. 1902. ‘Classification and Arrangement of the Exhibits of an Anthropological Museum’, Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 32, 353–372, and H. Ling Roth. 1911. ‘On the Use and Display of Anthropological Collections in Museums’, Museums Journal, 10(April), 286–290. Herbert S. Toms cited in Herald, ‘Marvels of Savage Art’, 6; Toms, ‘Notes on Recent Developments’, 97. A. Lane Fox. 1874. Catalogue of the Anthropological Collection Lent by Colonel Lane Fox for Exhibition in the Bethnal Green Branch of the South Kensington Museum, Parts I and II, London: Science and Art Department of the Committee of Council on Education, 71. H.S. Toms. 1906. ‘Stone Implements’, Brighton Library & Museum Record, 1(3), April, 2. Petch, ‘Notes and Queries’, 29. Toms, ‘Stone Implements’, 2. E.B. T[ylor]. 1910. ‘Anthropology’, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 1, 11th edn, 116. Ling Roth, ‘On the Use and Display of Anthropological Collections’, 287. On Liverpool Museum see Tythacott, The Lives of Chinese Objects, chapter 5. County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 20. County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 18 and 20. See the key to the ground floor plan of Brighton Museum in County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 5. County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 20. Italics in original. Jenkins, ‘Object Lessons’, 255. However, by 1900 a loans policy which dictated, amongst other things, that ‘no loan be accepted for a period of less than a year’ had been formulated in an attempt to stabilize the fluctuating condition of the wider collection (Extract from the Sub-Committee, 21 December 1900, cited in Library, Museums and Fine Arts Committee Meeting Minutes, 27 December 1900, 20, in the Archive of RPMBH). County Borough of Brighton. 1909. Official Guide to the Public Library, Museum and Fine Art Galleries, 2nd edn, Brighton, 19. Penny has described a similar phenomenon in German ethnographical museums at the turn of the century (Penny, Objects of Culture, 171–183). Louise Tythacott describes a comparable scenario at Liverpool Museum

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95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

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(Tythacott, The Lives of Chinese Objects, 142) and Sam Alberti also suggests that the ‘sheer materiality of galleries and objects constricted the enactment of theoretical arrangement’ at Manchester Museum at this time (Alberti, Nature and Culture, 33–34). Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 6 January 1932, 122; Curator’s Report, SubCommittee, 7 September 1932, 152. H.D. Roberts. 1929. A Brief Synopsis of the Contents of the Brighton Public Library, Museums and Fine Art Galleries, Specially Prepared for the Conference of the Library Association, September, 1929, Brighton, 3. County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 13 and 16. G. Kavanagh. 1994. Museums and the First World War: A Social History, Leicester: Leicester University Press, 162–163. Winifred Patchin (museum assistant, 1934–1976) in an interview with the author, 18 March 2008. Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, 162. British Museum. 1899. A Guide to the Exhibition Galleries of the British Museum (Bloomsbury), with Plans, London, 98–99. County Borough of Brighton, Official Guide, 19. ARBM, No. 1240, July 1912, 189. Sub-Committee, 3 September 1915, 44. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 31 March 1920, 224. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 5 October 1921, 282; Curator’s Report, SubCommittee, 6 April 1932, 134. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 5 February 1936, 341. See Chapter 1 for information regarding the arbitrary joining of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands as a unity under British rule, despite the inhabitants of the two island groups being culturally and ethnohistorically distinct. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 8 June 1927, 505. Roberts, A Brief Synopsis of the Contents of the Brighton Public Library (1929), 3. Emphasis mine. S. Vogel. 1989. ‘African Art: Western Eyes’, in S. Vogel (ed.), ART/Artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections, New York: Center for African Art, 198. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 8 June 1927, 505. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 5 February 1936, 341. ARBM, No. 2468, April 1923, 13. Albert Victor Sheppard, museum assistant between 1962 and 1972, oral testimony interview, 2006, RPMBH, OH287. Miss E. Young, deputy librarian, cited in Herald. 1939. ‘Crisis among the Books: Allnight Toil at the Public Library’, 26 August, 11. Musgrave, Life in Brighton, 397. Patchin, interview, 18 March 2008; Sheppard, oral testimony interview; Winifred Patchin, oral testimony interview, 2006, RPMBH, OH000312. Patchin, interview, 18 March 2008. Ibid. Ibid. ARBM, No. 2468, April 1923, 13. Man’s collections were reorganized first in 1930 (Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 26 November 1930, 69) then again in 1932 (Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 6 April 1932, 134). It is likely that the latter round of revision may also have been influenced

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126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132.

133.

134. 135.

136. 137. 138.

139. 140.

141. 142. 143. 144. 145.

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by the timely posthumous republication of Man’s monograph, On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands, in 1932. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 6 April 1932, 134. J. Clifford. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 196. See also L. Tythacott. 2003. Surrealism and the Exotic, London: Routledge. Sub-Committee, 5 January 1927, 488; Sub-Committee, 26 February 1930, 44; SubCommittee, 24 March 1936, 377. Sub-Committee, 27 November 1935, 331. Sub-Committee, 4 January 1928, 531. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 5 February 1936, 341. The Pacific carving (WA506718) had been donated in 1931 by Mrs Crocker on behalf of a Mr Sansom, a policeman serving in New Guinea (ARBM, No. 3319, February 1931, 9). Shelton, ‘Re-presenting Non-Western Art’, 2. The Times. 1982. ‘Mr Clifford Musgrave’, 17 September, 12. Letter from R. Merrifield to A. Shelton. 1994. 1 June, James Green Centre for World Art archive, RPMBH. In addition, George Bankes, a more recent curator at the museum (1971–1980), recalls the gallery being referred to as ‘the Native Art Room’ by senior staff members (personal communication, 24 August 2007). The sketch was made in 1906 and reproduced in R. Labrusse and J. Munck. 2005. Matisse-Derain: La Verité du Fauvisme, Paris: Hazan, 165. I thank Brian Durrans for sharing this find with me. K.F. Hacker. 2000. ‘Displaying a Tribal Imaginary: Known and Unknown India’, Museum Anthropology, 23(3), 5–25. S. Kramrisch. 1968. Unknown India: Ritual Art in Tribe and Village, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art; S.C. Welch. 1985. India: Art and Culture 1300–1900, New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 100. Temple, Man and Tuson: Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, exhibition mounted at RPMBH between March 2005 and September 2007. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 5 October 1938, 470; Curator’s Report, SubCommittee, 23 November 1938, 475. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 23 November 1938, 475. The basket’s accession number is WA509363[R2467/11]; these teeth were given the registration number R1707/56 upon accession but are no longer traceable in the Museum’s current collection. Curator’s Report, Sub-Committee, 23 November 1938, 475; Curator’s Report, SubCommittee, 1 February 1939, 484. A. Shelton. 2001. ‘Unsettling the Meaning: Critical Museology, Art and Anthropological Discourses’, in M. Bouquet (ed.), Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 150. See marginalia and amalgamated typescripts of ‘Some Marvels of Savage Arts’, James Green Centre for World Art archive, RPMBH. Jenkins, ‘Object Lessons’, 255; MacDonald, ‘Collecting Practices’, 82. MacDonald, ‘Collecting Practices’, 82. H. Miers. 1928. A Report on the Public Museums of the British Isles, Other than the National Museums, Edinburgh: Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, 25. See, particularly, MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire; MacKenzie, Imperialism and Popular Culture and Rappaport, ‘Imperial Possessions’, 291.

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146. Herald. 1920. ‘The Evolution of Empire’, 31 January, 11; Herald. 1925. ‘Women and the Empire’, 28 February, 9; and see a report on the programme conducted by the Overseas League in 1933 which included ‘a number of lectures on Empire topics’ (Herald. 1934. ‘The Overseas League: A Year of Useful Work’, 13 January, 15). 147. ‘The Hove Club’. c. 1990. Privately printed pamphlet, Hove Club Archive. 148. Brighton Season. 1907. ‘Toxophilites of the Twentieth Century: The Brighton and Hove Archery Club’, 22. 149. Ibid., 21. 150. Herald. 1903. ‘Indian Bazaar at the Hove Town Hall’, 14 February, 8. 151. Herald. 1920. ‘The Chinese Fair: Opening by Chinese Minister’, 27 November, 8; Herald. 1920. ‘Chinese Fair’s £3,700 for County Hospital’, 18 December, 7. 152. Herald. 1924. ‘“The Lure of the Orient”: The Great Hove Hospital Bazaar’, 25 October, 4. 153. Herald. 1909. ‘An Eastern Bazaar: Church Extension at Aldrington’, 20 November, 4. 154. Herald. 1909. ‘Imperial Market at St. Saviour’s’, 20 November, 4. 155. The charity bazaar has been widely contextualized as a space for the development of women’s creativity and philanthropy (see F. Prochaska. 1980. Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-century England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 57–58; F. Prochaska. 1988. The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain, London: Faber and Faber, 65–66; S. Morgan. 2007. A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century, London: Tauris Academic Studies, 116–125). 156. Herald. 1920. ‘When the Dome Becomes Chinese: Preparing for Great Bazaar’, 20 November, 8. 157. Ibid. 158. See Frank Prochaska on the social and entertainment aspects of the charity bazaar (Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 47–72). 159. Herald, ‘“The Lure of the Orient”’. 160. Herald, ‘Imperial Market at St. Saviour’s’. 161. Mrs Hoskyns, married to the Vicar of Brighton, cited in Herald, ‘An Eastern Bazaar’. 162. ‘Sao Ke’, ‘Alfred Sze’ and ‘Madame Sze’ were, for example, present at the Chinese Fair at the Dome in November 1920, Herald, ‘The Chinese Fair’. The transformation of the Royal Pavilion into a hospital for wounded Indian soldiers between 1914 and 1916 was, of course, another opportunity for such personal interaction with people from other countries (see J. Collins. 1997. Dr Brighton’s Indian Patients, December 1914–January 1916, Brighton: Brighton Books). 163. Herald. 1900. ‘From the Seven Seas: Great Missionary Exhibition in the Dome’, 24 November, 5. 164. Sarah Cheang has commented on the fair and the bazaar as unique occasions for ‘learning by doing’ and offering the opportunity to participate (S. Cheang. 2007. ‘“Our Missionary Wembley”: China, Local Community and The British Missionary Empire, 1901–1924’, East Asian History, 32/33, 191). 165. Herald. 1909. ‘The Native Races of South Africa’, 13 March, 6; Herald. 1919. ‘Entertainments and Meetings’, 25 October, 3; Herald. 1923. ‘A Journey through New Zealand’, 1 December, 8. 166. Herald, ‘A Journey through New Zealand’; Herald, ‘The Native Races of South Africa’; Herald. 1919. ‘Lure of the South Pacific’, 22 November, 11. 167. Herald. 1903. ‘York Place School Entertainment: Tableaux and Costume Cantata’, 21 February, 3; Herald. 1925. ‘Girl Guides’ “Masque of Empire”’, 23 May, 10.

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168. Herald. 1933. ‘“Hiawatha” as Spectacle: Impressive Scenes in the Dome: Music, Colour and Action’, 2 December, 5. Performing as the medicine man in the Royal Albert Hall production between 1924 and 1936, like many Kahnawake performers, Os-ke-non-ton seems to have adjusted his indigenous clothing to meet the expectations of audiences who equated Plains feather bonnets and hide clothing as the standard of ‘Indianness’. T. Nicks. 1999. ‘Indian Villages and Entertainments: Setting the Stage for Tourist Souvenir Sales’, in R.B. Phillips and C.B. Steiner (eds), Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Postcolonial Worlds, Berkeley: University of California Press, 305. 169. Herald. 1925. ‘Brooker Hall as Museum: Government Inquiry at Hove. Criticism of Estimates’, 1 August, 6; Herald. 1925. ‘Does Hove Need a Museum? A Shelter in Wet Weather! N.C.U. Opposition’, 24 January, 4. 170. On the relationship between the museum and the library in Brighton see particularly commentary published in the Herald in relation to the refurbishment of the Library, Art Gallery and Museum in 1902. Caroline Lang, John Reeve and Vicky Woollard have linked this relative hierarchy to the impact of the Museum Act of 1845, which enabled (rather than obliged) boroughs with a population over ten thousand to build and maintain museums (libraries were mandatory). This statutory status has, they argue, affected their funding opportunities and relative position to libraries in many local authority services, both historically and today (C. Lang, J. Reeve and V. Woollard. 2006. ‘The Impact of Government Policy’, in C. Lang, J. Reeve and V. Woollard (eds), The Responsive Museum: Working with Audiences in the Twenty-first Century, Aldershot: Ashgate, 20). For a contemporary view of the national context, see Markham, The Museums and Galleries of the British Isles, 37. 171. Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 32. 172. Herald. 1900. ‘The Spoiling of the Library: Plea for a Handsome Building’, 3 February, 5. 173. Herald, ‘Marvels of Savage Art’, 6. 174. D. Murray. [1904] 1996. Museums, their History and their Use, London: Routledge/ Thoemmes Press, 269–270. 175. Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums; Penny, Objects of Culture, 198–214; Alberti, Nature and Culture, 33–34; G. Fyfe and M. Ross. 1996. ‘Decoding the Visitor’s Gaze: Rethinking Museum Visiting’, in S. MacDonald and G. Fyfe (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Oxford: Blackwell. 176. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture, 24–25. 177. T. Bennett. 2004. Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism, London: Routledge, 174. 178. Compare, for example, Herald, ‘Marvels of Savage Art’, 6, with H.S. Toms, ‘Some Marvels of Savage Art [typescript]’, amalgamated notes from 1909, 1919 and 1925, James Green Centre for World Art archive, RPMBH. 179. Herald. 1909. ‘A Tour through the Brighton Museum’, 17 April, 6. 180. Herald. 1902. ‘Our New Home of Art: The Re-modelled Library, Museum, and Art Galleries’, 1 November, 2. 181. Anon. 1902. A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Brighton and Hove, with Excursions to Lewes, Newhaven, Seaford, Worthing, &c., and Routes for Cyclists, 4th edn, London: Ward, Lock and Co., 59. 182. Herald, ‘Marvels of Savage Art’, 6. On anthropology as entertainment see Kuklick, The Savage Within, 13.

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183. R. Merrifield. 1940. ‘Cultural Anthropology in the Museum’, Museums Journal, 40(October), 191. Alberti notes a similar attraction for visitors in Manchester (Alberti, Nature and Culture, 176). 184. See R. Hoberman. 2003. ‘In Quest of a Museal Aura: Turn of the Century Narratives about Museum-displayed Objects’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 31(2), 469. 185. Herald. 1900. ‘A Contemporary of Moses: Remarkable Statuette in Brighton Museum’, 29 September, 3. 186. Herald, ‘A Tour through the Brighton Museum’, 6. See A. Briefel. 2008. ‘Hands of Beauty, Hands of Horror: Fear and Egyptian Art at the Fin de Siècle’, Victorian Studies, 50(2), 263–271 for a discussion of the magical properties with which Egyptian material culture in the museum was popularly associated. 187. Herald. 1925. ‘Medieval Mummery: Archaeological Revels’, 24 January, 3. 188. Ibid. 189. As Hoberman explores, it is this relationship between the misguided, corrupt or overzealous curator and his objects which often triggers the supernatural events central to the ‘museum gothic’ (Hoberman, ‘In Quest of a Museal Aura’, 469). 190. Herald. 1910. ‘Archaeology and Holidays’, 5 November, 5. 191. West Sussex Gazette. 1929. ‘In Darkest Sussex’, 14 November, 11. 192. Patterson, ‘The News as a Reflection of Public Opinion’, 34. 193. Ibid. 194. M. McCombs. 2004. Setting the Agenda: The Mass Media and Public Opinion, Cambridge: Polity, xiv. 195. McCombs, Setting the Agenda. 196. Herald. 1909. ‘An Indian Jungle at the Congress Hall’, 23 October, 7. 197. Herald. 1920. ‘Foreign Scenes in Hove Town Hall: Interesting Missionary Exhibition’, 4 December, 11. 198. Ibid. 199. Miers, A Report on the Public Museums of the British Isles, 80. 200. Herald, ‘Does Hove Need a Museum?’; Herald. 1900. ‘Science Notes’, 28 April, 3; and see Roberts’ own concerns about how visiting occurred ‘because they either drift in or it is a wet day’ (Herald. 1909. ‘Treasures in our Art Gallery: Lecture by Mr. Henry D. Roberts’, 24 April, 5). 201. Kavanagh, Museums and the First World War, 174. 202. G.E. Hein. 1998. Learning in the Museum, London: Routledge, 174. 203. Ibid. 204. J. Roschelle. 1995. ‘Learning in Interactive Environments: Prior Knowledge and New Experience’, in J.H. Falk and L.D. Dierking (eds), Public Institutions for Personal Learning: Establishing a Research Agenda, Washington D.C.: American Association for Museums, 37. 205. S. Dudley. 2010. ‘Museum Materialities: Objects, Sense and Feeling’, in S. Dudley (ed.), Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations, Abingdon: Routledge, 10. 206. Ibid., 4 and 9. 207. See also essays in Dudley, Museum Materialities; H. Chatterjee (ed.). 2007. Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, Oxford: Berg; and E. Pye (ed.). 2007. The Power of Touch: Handling Objects in Museums and Heritage, Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. 208. Herald, ‘“Hiawatha” as Spectacle’, 5. 209. Man, ‘The Nicobar Islanders (Part 1)’, 365.

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210. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 10. 211. Herald. 1923. ‘Brighton Town Council’, 28 April, 8. 212. G.W. Stocking. 1985. ‘Essays on Museums and Material Culture’, in G.W. Stocking (ed.), Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 4.

Chapter 5

Objects and Encounters Today This book has drawn upon the three-dimensional object to provide a series of unique insights into the imperial histories of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. It has positioned RPMBH’s collections of Andamanese and Nicobarese objects as an exceptional, central resource with which to interrogate the processes of contact, collection and display in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as played out in the Bay of Bengal and, later, on British soil. The carved hentakoi with which we began our story lived through initial processes of manufacture and ownership in the Nicobar Islands, but then left behind a life dedicated to healthcare and eventual physical deterioration; it has since had a lively and complex career, reimagined and physically transformed into the souvenir of a Victorian woman’s life in the colonies, and later into an accessioned museum object. In Brighton, its trajectory continued further as it became material evidence of a provincial museum’s relationship with its donors and the geographical spread of the British Empire, a foil for northern European evolutionary development, and eventually an aesthetic masterpiece reproduced on postcards for sale to museum visitors. In tracing the ‘object biographies’ of our hentakoi and the other RPMBH collections, as they were produced and used by Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples, selected and classified by British imperialists, and displayed and viewed by museum curators and visitors, it has been possible to reveal the nuanced and constantly changing subject positions embodied in the imperial process in new and, it is hoped, stimulating ways. These discoveries and analyses have moved some way towards answering the central questions at the heart of Colonial Collecting and Display. Specific objects and their changing meanings do reveal many original insights into imperial histories and practices, and these observations can usefully complement and challenge established readings of the key processes of imperialism. Analysis of the colonial encounter in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands through objects, for example, has provided a timely reminder of how cross-cultural trade was necessarily a two-way process influenced by indigenous practices and not only by colonial might; using the written archive to investigate object trajectories has also revealed a multilayered history of indigenous resistance to imperialism that

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has often remained silent or limited to isolated events of overt confrontation. The analysis has dispelled the myth of a unified British approach to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, both in terms of collecting and in terms of visual and literary interpretation. Although the type of analysis fostered by this ‘object biography’ approach has confirmed the role of the museum as a ‘committed participant’ in British imperialism, it has also highlighted the practical problems which tempered this complicity, particularly in the case of provincial museums in the interwar period, and emphasized the role of sociable and participatory learning in British experiences of empire. Material culture is central to the political and cultural dynamics of the colonial encounter: in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, objects formed a mediating function between colonizer and colonized, facilitating cultural awareness in place of human engagement, and acting as the building blocks of political affiliations and economic relationships between culturally disparate social groups. Certain strands of material culture also grew from the very structures of imperialism: firmly built on deep-rooted and localized indigenous practices of production, new physical and conceptual forms nevertheless provided material reactions to the demands of cross-cultural contact in both the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. Moreover, the three-dimensional object formed an important part of British people’s understanding of their nation’s distant empire: human interest was important, but material culture regularly provided the framework upon which to build cultural, political and anthropological assumptions and knowledge. For Arthur Conan Doyle, Andamanese ‘poisoned’ arrows were central to his depiction of the Andaman Islands and the construction of his drama, while for a European scientific and curatorial community such objects provided ‘objective evidence’ of the academic, theoretical developments of the day. In Brighton, local women made sense of the empire though exhibiting, sharing and making their own ‘imperial commodities’ at the region’s charity bazaars; local amateur dramatics groups employed non-European clothes and tools (whether authentic or homemade) as stage props to create a more realistic impression of the cultures they were trying to imitate; for museum-goers, objects provided a metonymic device and a crucial form through which to ‘know’ the subject peoples of their nation’s empire. Popular literature, illustrated periodicals, photographs and word of mouth were integral to a rich, multilayered understanding of the world, but in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and in the UK, material culture assumed a constitutive role in empire formation and development. This book has also argued by example for the importance of localized explanations and historically specific accounts of colonialism and its cultures: in accordance with Nicholas Thomas’ call for a recognition of the varied articulations of colonizing and counter-colonizing representations and processes,1 the preceding chapters have uncovered a set of locale-specific practices particular to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and to Brighton. In the Indian Ocean, for example, historic trade systems indigenous to particular Andamanese and Nicobarese trading communities forged very specific, intracultural business

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transactions, particular to the region and to the people involved. Localized intercommunity histories and individual and community-specific political agendas affected the viability of alliances between colonizer and colonized. Political events, cross-cultural relationships and material collections were also affected by the specific plans that the Indian Government had for the colonization of the islands: the colonizers’ approach to their Andamanese and Nicobarese subjects was much more explicit than a general aim to ‘know’ its subjects and facilitate ‘indirect rule’; particular aims regarding the ‘civilization’, pacification and containment of the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples created a particular set of contact zones far removed from the situations formed and events enacted in other colonized regions. Chapter 2 demonstrated the need to take into account the unique characteristics of individual collectors and colonizers in the analysis of colonial cultures: collectors of the ‘modern era’ or a homogeneous colonial community are difficult to define. Similarly, a focus on cultural practices and the museum profession in Brighton has revealed some important regional nuances affecting processes of imperialism and collection formation. Brighton had long been the site of orientalist fantasies – the Royal Pavilion, built for the Prince Regent by 1823, with its Mughal exterior and spectacular chinoiserie interiors, is continued evidence of the town’s enthusiasm for cross-cultural design. However, in the early twentieth century, the particular popularity of the charity bazaar as a social phenomenon in Brighton2 and the position of the town and its surrounding areas as one of the UK’s most prominent centres for the returned colonial elite created a specific environment in which to learn about and experience the wider world. Regional settlement patterns facilitated the development of a unique ethnographic collection upon which to draw, and the particular approaches of the curators, Roberts and Toms, influenced by their own experiences, mentors and practical constraints, created distinctive and specific displays and visiting experiences. In these ways Colonial Collecting and Display has raised many issues relating to contact zones in South Asia and to regional experiences of empire and provincial museum practice in the UK. I hope that these discussions will provide challenging material with which to address geographically diverse situations across a similar time frame; clearly such local lessons are an indispensable requirement for a full, rich, multilayered, historical understanding of imperial processes. The scope of this book finishes in 1949, when Herbert Toms’ social evolutionary approach to object display in Brighton Museum’s ethnography galleries was replaced by a new exhibition paradigm, and when British occupation in the Andaman Islands finally came to an end. This is not to suggest, however, that the lives and material cultures of the Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples became suddenly free from political and cultural appropriation at this time: neocolonial political impositions continued to affect island existence,3 and pseudoscientific anthropological approaches continued to present only partial representations of Andamanese and Nicobarese cultures in the UK. Indeed, at Brighton Museum from 1974 to 1993, some of the Nicobarese objects gifted by

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Man, Temple and Tuson were exhibited as part of a new ethnography gallery redisplay and, despite the geopolitical and museological developments which had occurred since their last showing, little seemed to have changed in the museum’s approach to these objects. In the new gallery, the artefacts were made meaningful through a structural functionalist display which portrayed the Nicobarese (and the other cultures which were represented) as an insular, self-regulating society whose culture was the product of tradition rather than historical process.4 Dimly lit and adorned with a backdrop of dark cloth and animal-print wallpaper (Figure 5.1), the objects were subject to a new type of exhibition design, but remained indicative of their producers’ apparent savagery, bestiality and low evolutionary ranking, just as they had under Toms’ supervision in the early twentieth century. Today, however, while the socio-political situation in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands remains fraught, some more progressive, positive ways of engaging with the historical and contemporary material culture of the two island groups have been discussed and modestly implemented. One of the central motivations for the development of this research has been rooted in the premise that the detailed excavation of non-European collections assembled under the guise of colonialism is crucial to the sensitive display and interpretation of these objects today. As has been shown, over time, and as a result of processes of use, commissioning, sale, exchange, collection, documentation, domestic display, public display and public reception, objects’ meanings become pluralized,

Figure 5.1 John Barrow. Photograph of the Nicobar case, ethnography gallery, Brighton Museum, 1974. RPMBH. Courtesy and copyright, RPMBH.

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obscured, erased and rewritten. It is only by exposing the constructs of ‘science’, colonialism and ‘modernity’ that have framed and contained these objects since their European appropriation that it becomes possible to tease out the set of rich, complex indigenous meanings hidden beneath these layers. In this way, we can acknowledge such objects as tangible ‘contact zones’ in themselves and as the material evidence of improvisational and interactive cross-cultural meetings in history. Utilizing the fruits of this research, and drawing upon some current examples of museum practice and museum scholarship concerning Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture, this book will conclude with an examination of some contemporary approaches to the display and interpretation of objects from this region, both at Brighton Museum and further afield, and some tentative suggestions for further improvements.

Towards a Postcolonial Display of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands Since the 1970s, museum scholarship has advocated an integrated approach to the treatment of non-European material cultures in heritage institutions: scholars have argued for the development of a more holistic curatorial practice, which prioritizes source community approaches to the care, classification and display of their objects, and called for exhibition paradigms which make clear the subjectivity of museum display and the influence of individual (European) interpretation on the messages contained in displays of non-European material culture.5 As Moira Simpson has commented, museums are increasingly coming to shake off their role as authoritarian preservers of ‘dying’ cultures, instead realizing their relevance to all communities, and especially to the communities from which their objects originally came.6 These approaches are being pioneered in North America, New Zealand and Australia, having been given particular impetus by changing political relations and voluble indigenous critiques of settler museum curation and representation in these countries.7 In the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the particular consequences of colonial and neocolonial regimes and the more recent effects of regional natural disasters have ensured that tangible heritage has not yet featured in the political agendas of the islands’ communities in the same way as it has with First Nation, Maori and Aboriginal Australian groups. Requests for repatriation of significant cultural items or human remains, for example, have not been made, and the Nicobarese participants in a Hitui village focus group conducted in March 2007 discussed their sense of pride in seeing the display of their material culture in museums such as RPMBH. According to Simron Jit Singh, his informants view European displays of Nicobarese objects as a ‘preservation of their culture’ rather than political subjugation, as in some other countries.8 Nevertheless, this does not negate the opportunity for consultation and collaboration with Andamanese and Nicobarese source communities in order to progress the display and care of their historical heritage in European museums.

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Nor does it prevent the need for a more integrated type of contemporary display and interpretation which reflects indigenous knowledge systems, desires and diversity, or for a museum practice which makes clear the partiality of European modes of display. Indeed, provisional steps have been made towards achieving some of these aims: Vishvajit Pandya, for example, has discussed the current displays of Andamanese material at Port Blair’s Anthropological Museum with his Ongee informants and they have expressed their dissatisfaction on finding that their cast-offs, stolen during the Anthropological Survey of India’s raids in the 1950s, are the medium through which they are now represented to museum visitors.9 Indeed, inspired by their calls for more rounded representations which demonstrate the meanings that they themselves invest in their own practices of collection and display, Pandya has advocated the development of an exhibition which is both relevant to the source community (including, perhaps, information on their own collecting cultures and how they depict the outside world) and in which the Andamanese actively represent themselves.10 Conversely, Simron Jit Singh has stressed the ways in which colonial collections of Nicobarese material culture can be made relevant to contemporary source communities and how such collections should be employed in relation to the needs and requirements of individual Nicobarese communities.11 Indeed, these suggestions have already come to be realized in individual cases: following the destruction of much Nicobarese tangible heritage in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, a group of Nicobarese elders visited Vienna’s Museum für Völkerkunde and used the colonial collections there as a major resource for their post-disaster regeneration. Similar projects are to be recommended and ‘visual repatriation’ projects such those conducted in Vienna and with RPMBH’s collections could also be further developed and formalized in order to prioritize indigenous needs and voices at documentation as well as at display level.12 This research has made clear the legacies of colonial collecting and anthropological methods in museum practice. The object selections and descriptive practices carried out by Victorian and Edwardian practitioners have rarely been challenged and continue to obscure, at least in part, indigenous knowledge and hierarchies of value;13 even today the accession registers written by Toms and based on Man’s nineteenth-century impressions continue to form a central component of RPMBH’s documentation of its Andamanese and Nicobarese collections while indigenous value systems lie largely dormant. The time, however, has come to reinstate the indigenous definitions of ‘valuable’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘representative’ that European imperialism and its archive have concealed. This research, for example, has drawn attention to important historical strands of Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture forged within the contact zone that have remained largely unacknowledged, and highlighted the historical suppression of various objects’ indigenous sensory complexities. These themes would be important components of any integrated display of either island group’s material culture in future interpretative projects.

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Moreover, where nineteenth- and twentieth-century displays of ethnographic objects, in keeping with nineteenth-century ethnographies, have tended to suspend non-European communities in time, removing their dynamism and contemporaneity and ‘freezing’ them in a static, mystical past or as extinct beings,14 the inclusion of present-day photographs of Andamanese and Nicobarese peoples participating in festivals and using today’s versions of their material culture can be effective in helping to situate such historical objects and their producers in a realistic time frame. Recent displays at the British Museum and RPMBH have used Singh’s photographs of the Nicobar Islands for this very purpose.15 As James Clifford has suggested, present-day photographs and transcribed statements from members of objects’ source communities, particularly when they are conflicting and personal, are ‘powerful indices of a living people’ and ‘can communicate [the] sense of indigenous diversity’ which has so often been lost in previous displays of historical non-European material culture.16 Similarly, at the Anthropological Survey of India’s Anthropological Museum in Port Blair, Obed Heunj from West Bay Village on Katchal Island produced a full-scale Nicobarese hut for exhibition in the museum (Figure 5.2),17 a project which has the potential to make clear the creative vibrancy and skill which continues to abound amongst Nicobarese communities today.18 Pandya has also called for museums to highlight ongoing shifts in Andamanese technologies in order to avoid presenting Andamanese cultures as ‘frozen in time’.19 A further investment in such projects and a focus on

Figure 5.2 Nicobar hut built by Obed Heunj, commissioned by the Anthropological Survey of India’s Anthropological Museum, Port Blair. Author’s photograph, February 2008.

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contemporary source community life in the display of historical Andamanese and Nicobarese material culture will move some way towards countering the legacies of colonial modes of anthropology and display which act to deny the existence of dynamic, thriving, modern-day peoples. Finally, at its core, this research has sought to deconstruct the imperial processes of contact, collection and display that have resulted in the location of 413 objects from the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in a provincial collection in the south of England. One of the central aims of this book has been to engage with imperial socio-political systems in order to reveal their nuanced impact and to release RPMBH’s collections from their metaphorical chains. Perhaps the foundation for any display of historical Andamanese or Nicobarese objects is a mode of exhibition which draws attention to these processes, allowing all audiences to understand the multilayered interpretations that have impacted upon these objects throughout their ‘social lives’.20 All museum displays are inherently partial,21 but through this research and by exploring the curatorial processes outlined above, it may become possible to move firmly towards reinstating the multiple significances of such objects and towards developing reflexive, informative and truly ‘postcolonial’ displays of historic Andamanese and Nicobarese culture.

Notes 1. Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture, ix–x. 2. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 70. 3. See Mukerjee, The Land of Naked People; Venkateswar, Development and Ethnocide; V. Pandya. 2005. ‘“Do Not Resist, Show Me Your Body!”: Encounters between the Jarwas of the Andamans and Medicine (1858–2004)’, Anthropology & Medicine, 12(3), 211-23; and Singh, In the Sea of Influence for details of some of these practices. 4. A. Shelton. 1992. ‘The Recontextualization of Culture in UK Museums’, Anthropology Today, 8(5), 13–14. 5. See, for example, L. Peers and A. Brown. 2003. ‘Introduction’, in L. Peers and A. Brown (eds), Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader, London: Routledge; C.F. Kreps. 2003. Liberating Culture: Cross-cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation and Heritage Preservation, London: Routledge; J. Clifford. 1997. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Lidchi, ‘The Poetics and the Politics of Exhibiting Other Cultures’. 6. M. Simpson. 2001. Making Representations: Museums in the Post-colonial Era (revised edn), London: Routledge, 248. 7. Peers and Brown, ‘Introduction’, 3. 8. Singh, interview, 8 September 2008. 9. Pandya, In the Forest, 138. 10. Ibid.; Pandya, personal communication, 8 September 2006. 11. Singh, interview, 19 May 2007; Singh, ‘Helping the Helper’. 12. The fruits of these initial projects have been documented in Singh, ‘Ethnographic Objects’ and in documentation records at RPMBH.

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13. Peers and Brown, ‘Introduction’, 2. 14. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 202. 15. The photographs used in the Nicobar case of the Living and Dying exhibition in the Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum between 2003 and 2009 and the Temple, Man and Tuson: Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands exhibition at RPMBH were originally printed in Singh, The Nicobar Islands. 16. Clifford, Routes, 176 (emphasis in original). 17. Antice Justin (Head of the Port Blair Office, Anthropological Survey of India), in an interview with the author, 12 February 2008. 18. Notably this exciting project does not yet fulfil its potential since there was (in February 2008) no information available to the visitor on how the hut came to be in the museum’s garden. A similar project was undertaken in 1972 for the ‘Asian fair’ in New Delhi, where artisans from various Indian states including the Nicobar Islands travelled to the capital to construct examples of their architecture for exhibition audiences. The hut remains in situ today, in the outdoor ‘Village Complex’ of the Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi (see P. Greenough. 1995. ‘Nation, Economy, Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi’, in C. Breckenridge (ed.), Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, for analysis and context). 19. Pandya, In the Forest, 101. 20. A modest contribution to this project was made in the exhibition Temple, Man and Tuson: Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, mounted at RPMBH between March 2005 and September 2007. Emma Poulter, in her ‘New “Ways of Seeing”’, makes a similar point. 21. Saumarez Smith, ‘Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings’, 12.

Bibliography Manuscript Collections American Museum of Natural History, New York, Archive, Division of Anthropology Man, E.H. Typescript of ‘List of objects made and used by the Andamanese’ (Accession envelope 1908-6).

British Library, Africa, Pacific and Asia Collections Deane, M.H.W., with E.H.M. Lowis. Private Papers, MSS EUR D1032. Proceedings of the Home Department Proceedings for the Revenue and Agriculture Department Proceedings for the Superintendent of Port Blair and the Nicobars Temple, R.C. Private Papers, MSS EUR F98.

British Museum Accession Register Tracings, Centre for Anthropology. Burt, W.H. Undated [c. 1914]. Untitled typescript detailing life on the Andaman Islands, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas’ Archive (Eth Doc 1714). Historic object labels for collections donated by E.H. Man, Archive, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (Eth Doc 1813). Man, A.F., E.H. Man, M.V. Portman and R.C. Temple correspondence, Archive, Department of Prehistory and Europe. Man, E.H. 1887. ‘Catalogue of Objects from the Nicobar Islands presented to the British Museum, June 1887’, handwritten manuscript, Centre for Anthropology. Portman, M.V., N.M.J. Horsford and A.W. Franks correspondence, Archive, Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas (Eth Doc 677).

Cambridge University, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Archive Von Hügel, A./R.C. Temple correspondence. Von Hügel, A./E.H. Man correspondence. Man, E.H. 1895. ‘Descriptive Catalogue of Objects Made and Used by the Natives of the Nicobar Islands’, Indian Antiquary, Feb–June (annotated), BA5/2/2.

Harrow School Museum Committee Minute Books. 1894–1904.

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Horniman Museum, London, Anthropology Department, Archive Anderson, C.W.B. 1903. Kismet: An Idyll of the Andamans. A Play in Two Acts, Port Blair, produced for private circulation by the Amateur Dramatic Society. Tuson, K.S. and K.H. Tuson correspondence.

Hove Club, Archive ‘The Hove Club’. c. 1990. Privately printed pamphlet.

Hove Library Man, E.H. and A.F. Man correspondence, Autograph Collection, No. 48–94.

National Art Library Radford, E. 1886. Sketch book of the ‘Colinderies’, Msl/1980/52.

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Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove, James Green Centre for World Art, Archive Merrifield, R. 1994. Correspondence with Anthony Shelton, 1 June. Toms, H.S. 1909, 1919 and 1925. ‘Some Marvels of Savage Art [typescript]’, amalgamated notes. Tuson, K.S. 1890. ‘If I should not live after the birth of my child…’, 3 August, private collection. Tuson, K.S. 1849. Last Will and Testament.

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Object and Photographic Collections Collections of objects unless otherwise stated (identification of collection by donor is not intended to privilege this ‘phase’ of the objects’ lives, but included for ease of reference only). American Museum of Natural History, New York C. Anderson collection, Andaman Islands (objects and photographs) (donated 1906).

British Library, Africa, Pacific and Asia Collections Richard Carnac Temple, photograph collection: ‘Views and Scenes in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands’, Photo 125/2 (donated 1919).

British Museum W.E. Guinness, Baron Moyne collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1936). E.H. Man collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1887). R.C. Temple collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1897). M.V. Portman collection, Andaman Islands (donated 1886). A. Smith collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1876). Miscellaneous photographs of the Andaman Islands (Asia 3115 LGE).

Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology W.E. Guinness, Baron Moyne collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1936). E.H. Man collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1892). R.C. Temple collection, Andaman Islands (donated 1892).

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Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove World Art Collections E.H. Man, photographs of the Nicobar Islands (donated 1924). E.H. Man collections, Andaman Islands, Nicobar Islands, South Africa, India, and Myanmar (donated 1904–1927). R.C. Temple collections, Andaman and Nicobar Islands (donated 1923). K.S. Tuson collection, Andaman and Nicobar Islands (donated 1923). R.N. Colville, Andaman Islands (donated 1881). N.R. Penzer, Andaman Islands (donated 1912). H.S. Toms, Andaman Islands (donated 1932). Copy of a photograph taken by M.V. Portman, made by Brighton Museum from a negative lent by E.H. Man, c. 1920. Oral History Collections W. Patchin. 2006. OH000312. A.V. Sheppard. 2006. OH287.

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Local History Collections Photographs of Brighton Museum. c. 1912, c. 1949, 1972. Souvenir Postcards, Brighton Museum. 1928.

Pitt Rivers Museum E.H. Man Collection, Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands (donated 1877, 1879, 1881, 1885). R.C. Temple Collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1904). Photographs of Brighton Museum, c. 1912, Private Collection. Photographs of ‘The Nash’, Kempsey, Worcestershire (1900–1960), Album, Private Collection.

National Museums Liverpool, World Museum Liverpool R.C. Temple collection, Nicobar Islands (donated 1902).

Interviews Interviews with the Author Justin, A., Head of the Port Blair Office, Anthropological Survey of India, 12 February 2008. Pandya, V., Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information & Communication Technology, 8 September 2006, 20 September 2008, 26 September 2008 and 16 October 2008. Patchin, W., Museum Assistant between 1934 and 1976, 18 March 2008. Singh, S., Institute of Social Ecology, University of Klagenfurt, 19 May 2007 and 8 September 2008. Toms, R., Grandson of H.S. Toms, 10 August 2007. Tuson, L.E., Grandson of F.E. and K.S. Tuson, 13 September 2006. Hitui village focus group in communication with Simron Jit Singh, 29 March 2007.

Newspapers Brighton Herald and Hove Chronicle/Brighton & Hove Herald The Brighton Season The Graphic Harper’s Weekly Illustrated London News The Statesman and Friend of India Sussex County Herald The Times Westminster Review West Sussex Gazette The World

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Index A Aberdeen, Battle of, 53n104 accessioning, 8, 155–56, 160–67, 182–83, 208 addiction, 26, 33–34 adzes, 54n117, 73 aesthetics, 39, 70, 85, 93, 109n142, 133, 146, 174 modernist, 178–82, 191, 195, 208 agency, Andamanese, 22–36, 46 indigenous, 6–8, 135, 194 Nicobarese, 23, 36–46, 65 object, 7, 9, 60, 67 Aka-Bea, 10, 15n34, 31–32 Ali, Shere, 116 Alldridge, Thomas Joshua, 158–59 Alpers, Svetlana, 155 Amateur Dramatic Society, Port Blair, 91, 97–98 American Museum of Natural History, New York, 14n17, 106n72, 108n121 Ames, Michael, 160 ancestral remains, 18, 26, 35, 38, 46n1, 51n71, 134–37, 146, 163, 178, 212 Andaman Homes, 24–30, 32–34, 50n55, 52n83, 53n93, 60, 80, 97 Andaman Trunk Road, 11, 16n41 Andamanese, agency, 22–36, 46 as British assistants, 31, 51n71, 53n108, 97 cosmology, 7, 18–19, 28, 36, 73 forced labour, 25–28, 51n58 gender roles, 18, 28–29, 53n93, 57, 136 gift-giving, 32–35 hostility, 4, 16n41, 22, 30–33, 53n93, 53n104– 5, 79, 84, 135–36, 139–46 trade, 7, 18–19, 22, 24–29, 33–36, 49n31, 54n130, 62, 95, 97, 208–10 See also separate communities and objects Anderson, C. (collector), 80, 106n72, 108n121 Ang, 9–11, 15n34, 16n38, 16n41, 23, 30–33, 51n61, 53n103, 53n108, 54n117, 54n130, 54n136, 63, 81, 84, 89 Anthropological Institute (see Royal Anthropological Institute) Anthropological Museum, Port Blair, 213–14 anthropology, 5, 11, 29, 60–62, 70, 76, 77–78, 81, 90, 103nn18–19, 116, 125, 131–134, 146, 164, 168, 191, 200n73, 205n182, 210, 215

and collecting objects, 4, 22, 37, 39, 48n27, 61–67, 78–80, 90, 93–94, 101, 103n19, 108n113, 209, 213 and imperialism, 22–23, 79–80 and museums, 164, 168–77, 182, 191, 213 Appadurai, Arjun, 6–7 Anthropological Survey of India, 148n6, 213–14 archaeology, 151n57, 158–60, 164, 168, 170–72, 174, 176–77, 190, 192 Around the World in Eighty Days (Jules Verne), 124 arrows, 44, 179 Andamanese, 26–27, 32, 34, 52n83, 84, 97, 99 poisoned, 51n61, 140, 142–43, 154n127, 191, 209 Ashbury, James, 158 Asiatic Society, Calcutta, 53n100 audiences for international exhibitions, 114, 129, 132–39, 146–47 for literature, 114, 139, 143–47 See also museum visitors; reception Australia, 4, 114, 151n54, 163, 212 authenticity, 27–29, 167, 187, 189 B Balfour, Henry, 38, 65, 67, 182 Ball, Valentine, 28–29, 35, 38–39 Bankfield Museum, Halifax, 63 barkcloth, 163, 174, 179 Barringer, Tim, 144–45 baskets, Andamanese, 32, 34, 52n85, 80 Nicobarese, 38, 68–69, 182, 203n138 Baudrillard, Jean, 89 bazaars, 186–89, 191–96, 204n155, 204n158, 204n162, 204n164, 209–10 Bennett, Tony, 190, 197n13 body adornment, 133 Andamanese, 7, 18–19, 26, 28–30, 35, 51n71, 52n85, 57–59, 70–74, 89, 91, 133, 135– 38, 146, 152n81, 161–62, 178, 180 Nicobarese, 40–41, 47n11 bows, 179, 182, 184–85 Andamanese, 26–27, 30, 32, 34, 52n85, 54n117, 73, 84, 97, 99, 108n113, 135–38, 142–43, 175, 178, 186 Nicobarese, 44 Boyd, Kelly, 114, 143, 147 Brighton, bazaars and fairs, 186–89, 191–96, 204n162

Index civic pride, 63, 189 returned colonials, 4, 166–68, 184–87, 196, 210 Brighton and Hove Archery Club, 184–85 Brighton and Hove Harmonic Society, 188–89, 191 Brighton Aquarium, 177 Brighton Art School, 179 Brighton Herald and Hove Chronicle/Brighton & Hove Herald, 156, 187–92, 195, 197n7, 205n170 Brighton Museum (see also Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove), 11, 14n15 accession practices, 8, 106n72, 155–56, 160–67, 174–75, 182–83, 189, 195 and Andaman collections, 4–5, 7–9, 19, 28, 32, 52n85, 63, 77, 80, 89, 91, 105n42, 113, 155–57, 160–68, 175–80, 182–83, 195–96, 212 conservation, 1, 8, 73, 160–61, 165, 178, 183, 195 donation patterns, 5, 63, 73, 77, 94, 101, 155, 158, 165–67, 196 donor legacy, 8, 113, 163–68, 173–74, 176, 178, 182, 195, 213 ethnography displays, 158–60, 164–65, 168–83, 191, 194–96, 210–11 evolutionism, 159–60, 168–73, 175–77, 182, 190–91, 194–96, 201n75, 208, 210–11 loans policy, 174, 201n93 Museum Sub-committee, 158, 165, 172, 174, 200n61 and Nicobar collections, 1, 4–5, 39–40, 43–44, 46, 47n8, 63, 77, 89, 91, 93–94, 101, 113, 155–57, 160–68, 175–80, 182–83, 195–96, 210–12 public perceptions of, 113–14, 147, 157, 183, 189–96 in wartime, 47n8, 157, 174–75, 177–78 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 77 British Empire Exhibition, London (1924), 151n57 British Museum, 4, 5, 38–40, 44, 47n15, 48n17, 49n32, 56n177, 56n182, 63, 65–66, 68–69, 76–77, 81, 84, 94, 106n72, 107n94, 108n121, 109n138, 148n6, 175, 180, 198n36, 214, 216n15 Broughton, Lady Vera, 97, 111n176 buckets, 32 Burma, 22, 37, 77, 86, 174 Burt, W.H., 97, 111n170 Byrne, Sarah, 164 C Calcutta, 29, 129, 132, 149n27, 152n81 Calcutta International Exhibition (1883–1884), 53n100, 76, 132 Cambridge University, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 4–5, 39, 40, 47n15, 52n85, 63, 77–78, 80–81, 84, 94, 105n42, 106n73, 198n36, 199n55 cannibalism, 136, 141, 143, 153n110, 191–92, 195

239 canoes, Andamanese, 26, 34–35, 51n62, 142 models, 26, 41, 44, 51n62, 56n177, 84 Nicobarese, 19, 21, 37, 41, 44, 56n177, 80, 84, 125 Car Nicobar, 19–21, 38, 111n170, 111n176, 132 Carnac, Sir James Rivett, 77 catalogues and cataloguing, 81, 90, 106nn72–73, 110n154, 160–65, 177–78, 195, 198n37 and Edward Horace Man, 38, 64–65, 68–70, 105n43, 106nn72–73, 164–65, 199n55 Chaudhuri, Nupur, 91 Chaura, 19, 21, 46, 111n176, 161 pots, 7, 19–21, 46, 47nn12–13, 47n15, 48n17, 161, 183 ‘Chief Os-ke-non-ton’, 188–89, 205n168 China, 77, 91, 186–88, 194, 204n162 Clifford, James, 214 coconut-shell vessels, 19, 38, 47n8, 78 Cohn, Bernard, 22, 127, 150n46 collecting, and anthropology, 4–5, 22, 37, 39, 48n27, 60–67, 78–80, 90, 93–94, 101, 103n19, 108n113, 209, 213 and class, 5, 62, 79, 87–90, 95, 102 and competition, 66–67, 84, 87 Edward Horace Man and, 5, 7, 22, 25–26, 30, 35, 38–41, 44–45, 57, 59–60, 62–67, 69–70, 73, 75, 77, 79–80, 84, 89–90, 93–95, 100–1, 104n42, 105n56, 108n121 and gender, 5, 62, 70, 76, 87, 93–100 and imperialism, 3–6, 22–23, 30, 46, 49n32, 73, 75, 79–81, 85, 87, 93, 152n81, 167, 186, 211 indigenous agents, 37–38, 55n159 indigenous influence on, 6–8, 22–25, 30, 32–39, 45–46, 65, 102, 194 Katharine Sara Tuson, 7, 22, 30, 44–45, 57, 59–60, 62, 76, 91, 93–95, 97, 100–1, 208 networks of, 5, 81, 101 Richard Carnac Temple, 5, 22, 28, 30, 32, 35, 41, 44–45, 48n27, 57, 59–60, 62, 76, 78–81, 89–90, 93–95, 100–1, 108n121 as salvage, 7, 61–64, 66–67, 103nn18–19 and self-promotion, 66–67, 81, 84, 87, 89–90, 93, 213 theories of, 22, 59–60, 65, 67, 70, 89–90, 94, 101, 210 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, London (1886), 14n18, 48n31, 49n32, 114, 129–39, 141, 145–47, 151n57, 154n148, 192, 196 Colville, R.N., 175 commissioning objects, 25–30, 38, 40–45, 48n31, 64–65, 84, 132, 152n81, 154n148, 198n34, 211, 214 conservation practices, 1, 8, 73, 160–61, 165, 178, 183, 190, 195 contact zones, 2–4, 210, 212–13 Coombes, Annie, 40, 85, 114, 149n29 Corbyn, Henry, 35, 50n55

Index

240 D Dalton, Ormonde Maddock, 65 deaccession, 48n17, 54n117, 156, 161, 177–78 Deane, Mary, 97, 112n178, 116 Derain, André, 180 Dinsdale, John, 130, 136, 138, 146 domestic display, 1, 30, 44, 58–59, 70, 99, 109n142, 110n154, 211 and identity, 82–90, 100 donation and gender, 94 rationales, 63–64, 66–67, 77–78, 81, 84, 89–90, 94, 101, 189 regional patterns of, 167–68, 210 and social networks, 5, 84, 95, 165–67 Dovey, Kim, 84, 110n146 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 114, 139–47, 153n100, 154n125, 191, 209 Dudley, Sandra, 193–94 Durrans, Brian, 94 E Eastbourne, 91, 100 Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art, 4–5, 63, 94 Edwards, Elizabeth, 63 Ellis, Alexander John, 66 Empire Timber Exhibition, London (1920), 151n57 evolutionism, 4, 60–64, 78, 132–34, 168, 172–73, 175, 182, 200n73 and objects, 4, 29, 61–64, 78, 109n142, 131–33, 168, 172–73, 175, 182, 190–91, 194–95, 201n75, 208, 210–11 popular views of, 132–34, 190–91, 194–95 Exposition Universelle, Paris (1867), 129, 151n57 F Fairbarn, Thomas, 188 fairs (see bazaars) Flynn, Tom, 136 Foucault, Michel, 8, 157, 197n13 functionalism, 211 G Government House (Ross Island), 82–87, 109n142 Great Andamanese peoples, 9–11, 15n34, 16n40, 25–34, 51n71, 53n103, 53n105, 57, 80, 128, 149n27 Greenhalgh, Paul, 134 Griffith, Arthur Foster, 158 H Haddon, Alfred Court, 78 Hannington, Bishop James, 164 Harrow School, 77, 81, 108n121 headmen, 37–38, 55n149 Hein, George, 193 hentakoi, xx, 1, 3, 12, 19, 39, 43–44, 47n10, 84, 92–93, 99–100, 107n87, 161, 179–80, 198n34, 208 Heunj, Obed, 214

Hiawatha, 188, 191, 195, 205n168 Hill, Kate, 165, 168, 189, 199n42 Hitui, 12, 19, 40, 47n8, 212 Hoffenberg, Peter, 129 home furnishings (see domestic display) Homfray, Jeremiah Nelson, 25–26, 28, 50n55, 129 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean, 3, 156, 190 Horniman Museum, 14n21, 15n32, 59, 91, 94, 97, 100, 112n178 Hove (see also Brighton), 1, 184, 186–89, 193 Hove Club, 184 Hove Museum, 189 Huntarian Museum, 52n85 huts, Andamanese, 28, 70, 124, 128 model, 56n177, 84 Nicobarese, 1, 20, 56n177, 80, 84, 125, 214, 216n18 I Illustrated London News, 114–31, 136–37, 139–40, 143, 145–47, 148n10, 150n36, 150n39, 150n43, illustrated periodicals (see also Illustrated London News), 7, 115–29, 132–33, 136, 138, 143, 209 Imperial Club, Hove, 184 Inden, Ronald, 114 ‘India! Art and Culture 1300–1900’ exhibition, New York (1985), 180 Indian Antiquary, 65, 69, 76, 77 Indian Museum, Calcutta (Kolkata), 4, 29, 63 Indian Mutiny-Rebellion, 4, 139, 154n144 Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), 12, 38, 213 interior design (see domestic display) international exhibitions (see also individual exhibitions), 7, 22, 29, 48n31, 114–15, 129–40, 146, 196 iron (in manufacture and exchange), 26, 29, 33–34, 37–38, 43, 198n34 J ‘Jack’ Andaman, 116–17, 149n27 Japan, 77, 186, 195 Jarawa (see Ang) Jenkins, David, 163, 174, 182, 198n37 K kalipau (mythical creature), 1, 3, 12, 47n10, 161, 179–80, 208 kamilee (cloth hood), 19, 138 Kamorta Island, 12, 37, 38, 60, 91, 100–1, 105n46, 110n159 kareau, 19, 38–39, 44–45, 47n10, 84, 92–94, 99–100, 179–80, 198n34 Katchal Island, 1, 37, 105n46, 214 Kaul, Chandrika, 115 Kavanagh, Gaynor, 155, 175 Kismet: An Idyll of the Andamans (C.W.B. Anderson), 91, 99–100 Kloss, Cecil Boden, 37–38 Kopytoff, Igor, 6–7

Index Kramrisch, Stella, 180 Krishnanagar, 132 L labels and labelling, 67, 70, 161–65, 171–72, 174, 178, 180, 182–83, 198n36, 199n47, 199n55 labour, 26–28, 51n58, 80, 139, 194 landscape, 116–29 as discourse, 124 Latour, Bruno, 134 ‘Lepa’, of Little Andaman, 32–33 Liberty’s Department Store, 135 Little Andaman, 9, 47n3, 51n71, 53n103, 111n176 Liverpool Museum, 4–5, 77, 109n130, 167, 173, 199n42, 200n63, 201n87, 201n94 Lockyer, Joseph Norman, 124 Logan, Thad, 100 Lomax, Benjamin, 159, 198n23 Lucas, Frederick William, 158, 165 M making, 1, 18–21, 23, 25–30, 38–41, 43–46, 47n15, 51n58, 51n71, 52n78, 52n83, 57, 69, 80, 99, 106n79, 132–34, 142, 159–60, 172, 187, 194, 204n155, 208–9, 214, 216n18 as resistance, 23, 27–30, 80 Malacca village, 37–38, 42 Mallitte, Oscar, 52n85, 149n27 Man, Amy Frances, 62, 67, 75–76, 91 Man, Edward Horace, 5–6, 9, 24, 46, 47n3, 50n55, 51n58, 51n62, 52n85, 62, 75, 79, 90, 91, 100, 111n175, 113, 161, 175–78, 182, 195, 200n61, 202n123, 211, 213 and anthropology, 5, 11, 20–21, 24, 47n13, 48n27, 50n45, 62–70, 76–79, 93–94, 103n19, 104n36, 105n58, 108n111, 108n113, 142, 154n127, 164–65, 195 and cataloguing, 64–65, 68–70, 72, 105n43–44, 105n46, 106n72–73, 164–65, 198n36, 199n55 and collecting, 5, 7, 22, 25–26, 30, 35, 38–41, 44–45, 57, 59–60, 62–67, 69–70, 73, 75, 77, 79–80, 84, 89–90, 93–95, 100–1, 104n42, 105n56, 108n121 and donation, 29, 38–39, 48n17, 49n32, 56n177, 63–67, 73, 75, 77, 84, 89, 94, 102n1, 107n87, 147, 155, 158, 160, 163, 164–68 and indigenous agency, 35, 38–39, 45, 65, 94 and photography, 63, 65, 67, 75, 91, 114, 148n6, 151n52, 176, 184–86 and self-promotion, 66–67, 81, 89 Man, Henry, 26, 103n19 Manchester Museum, 4, 63, 77, 199n42, 202n94, 206n183 Marischal Anthropological Museum, Aberdeen University, 173, 199n47 material culture as art, 85, 178–80, 182, 203n132, 208 and authenticity, 26–29, 138, 142, 167, 187, 205n168, 209

241 and bazaars, 186–87, 194, 209 and bereavement, 18, 21, 29, 100–1, 135–36 and evolutionism, 4, 29, 61–64, 78, 109n142, 131–33, 168, 172–73, 175, 182, 190–91, 194–95, 201n75, 208, 210–11 and imperialism, 2–4, 9, 26–27, 46, 73, 75, 79–81, 84–85, 87, 152n81, 167, 186, 209 -led research, 1–4, 6–11, 50n43, 57, 60, 208–9 sensory complexity of, 3, 73, 75, 194, 213 See also specific objects Mauss, Marcel, 11, 34 Mayo, Richard Southwell Bourke, 6th Earl of, 116, 121, 124, 127, 129, 146 McBratney, John, 141 Meldola, Raphael, 150n39, 150n43 Middle Andaman, 9, 11, 32, 47n3 Miers, Henry, 183 Miller, Daniel, 84 miniaturization, 26, 41–42, 44–45, 51n62, 56n177 missionary exhibitions, 193–94, 204n164 Mitchell, W.J.T., 124, 128 models, of objects, 26, 41–45, 51n62, 56n177, 84, 93, 158, 160, 172 of people, 129–39, 146, 152n79, 154n148 Moseley, Henry, 66–67 Moyne, Baron Walter Edward Guinness, 47n15, 111n176 mourning, 18, 21, 29, 100–1, 135–36 Murray, David, 190 Museum für Völkerkunde, Berlin, 4, 14n17, 63 Museum für Völkerkunde, Leipzig, 4, 14n17, 63 Museum für Völkerkunde, Vienna, 4, 14n17, 49n32, 63, 66, 69, 213 museum visitors, 7–9, 29, 113–14, 147, 157, 159, 183, 189–196, 197n17, 208, 213 theories of, 113, 193–94 see also reception museums, and anthropology, 5, 63–65, 78, 81, 159–60, 164, 168–77, 182, 190–91, 194–96, 200n73, 201n75, 201n79, 208, 210–11, 213 and comedy, 191–92, 205–6nn182–83 and decontextualisation of objects, 1, 8, 73, 113, 155–56, 160–61, 163, 168, 176–80, 182–83, 195–96, 198n37, 212–13 donor legacy in, 8, 67, 106nn72–73, 113, 163– 68, 173–74, 176, 178, 182, 195, 199n42, 199n47, 200n61, 213 and imperialism, 3–4, 6, 29, 40, 49n32, 53n100, 94, 73, 167, 209, 215 networks of, 52n85, 77, 81–82, 84, 94, 164, 172 and postcolonialism, 15n32 73, 212–15, 216n20 as spaces of control, 6–9, 156–57, 183, 189, 192, 194–96, 197n13, 202n94 and the supernatural, 191–92, 206n186, 206n189 and war, 47n8, 157, 174–75, 177–78, 209 see also reception of museums and exhibitions; museum visitors; provincial museums and separate museums

242 Museums Association, 87, 172 Musgrave, Clifford, 177, 180 N Naga, 133 nakedness, 124, 133, 138, 149n27, 184 naming as affective process, 65, 69–71 Nancowry Harbour, 37, 40, 42, 60, 80 Nancowry Island, 12, 37–38, 105n46 ‘The Nash’, 77, 84, 87–90 National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C., 4, 14n17 National Museums Liverpool (see Liverpool Museum) National Museums Scotland (see Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art) Native American/First Nation peoples, 55n159, 151n54, 158, 188–89, 191, 205n168, 212 ‘native villages’, at international exhibitions and department stores, 135 New Ireland, 24, 180 New Zealand (Aotearoa), 87, 110n148, 158, 168, 172, 188, 191, 212 Newcastle Natural History Society, 167, 200n63 newspapers, 8, 87, 91, 114–33, 136–40, 143, 145–47, 148n10, 156–57, 187–88, 190–92, 195 as historic sources, 157, 192 Nicobarese peoples, 2, 4, 9, 12, 19, 60–62, 64, 67, 69, 73, 78, 80, 87, 95–97, 111n170, 111n176, 124–25, 129, 132–33, 146, 177, 208–14 agency, 23, 36–46, 65 cosmologies, 1, 19, 21, 39, 94, 198n34, 208 trade, 7, 19, 22, 24, 36–46, 47n16, 49n31, 55n148, 60, 62, 80, 94–95, 97, 208–10 See also individual communities and objects Nigeria, 180 North Andaman, 10, 16n41 Notes and Queries in Anthropology, 48n27, 63–64 O oars (see paddles) object biography, 6–9, 15n26, 19, 36, 39, 46, 48n17, 60, 67–75, 79, 100–2, 114, 147, 155, 157, 163, 208–9 object-centred research (see material culture-led research) O’Hanlon, Michael, 24, 49n38, 50n42, 163 Ongee peoples, 9–10, 27, 30–31, 34–36, 51n71, 53n103, 53n105, 54n130, 55n144, 70–71, 111n176, 213 Oxford University Museum (see Pitt Rivers Museum) Overseas League, 184, 204n146 P padauk, 129, 151n57 paddles, 21, 73, 84, 176 Pal, Jadu Nàth, 132, 139, 145 Pandya, Vishvajit, 11, 19, 27, 29, 35, 51n71, 54n130, 63, 213–14

Index Park, Rosamund, 51n61, 111n170 Patchin, Winifred, 178 Pearce, Susan, 59, 65, 94, 101 Penzer, N.R., 176 photography, 5, 10, 12, 14n18, 52n85, 57, 84–85, 87, 91, 93, 95–97, 99–100, 108n121, 111n176, 114, 125, 129, 135, 148n6, 149n27, 150n39, 150n43, 151n57, 152n79, 209, 214, 216n15 albums, 91, 97, 99–100 and Edward Horace Man, 63, 65, 67, 75, 114, 148n6, 151n52, 176, 184–86 Pitt Rivers, Augustus Henry Lane Fox, 51n62, 52n85, 61, 64, 66, 103n19, 105n43, 133, 160, 164, 168, 172–73, 182 Pitt Rivers Museum, 4, 38, 49n32, 51n62, 59, 63, 65–67, 69, 76–78, 81, 84, 94, 105n42, 107n87, 108n121, 109n142, 182 Polo, Marco, 153n92 popular literature (see also titles of individual works), 7, 114–15, 139–47, 153n100, 154n125, 191–92, 196, 209 Portman, Maurice Vidal, 5, 14n18, 29–33, 49n32, 50n55, 66, 69, 80, 84, 87, 105n58, 106n72, 108n111, 108n113, 108n121, 114, 148n6, 152n81 postcolonial theory, 2–3, 6, 13n13, 24–25, 59, 73, 91 in museums, 73, 212–15, 216n20 pots (see Chaura pots) Pratt, Mary Louise, 2 Primrose League, 184, provincial museums, 1, 8–9, 81, 147, 155–56, 158, 164–65, 167–68, 194, 196, 200n63, 208–10, 215 See also Brighton Museum and individual museums Punjab, 77, 132–33 R Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald, 5, 11, 24, 27, 29, 34, 50n45, 53n93, 103n19, 106n79 reception, of literature, 140, 143–47, 153n100 of museums and exhibitions, 6–9, 11, 102, 113, 131–39, 146–47, 157, 183, 189–96, 197n17, 208, 211 Riala, Chief of Góp-l’áka-báng, 32 Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, Leiden, 4, 14n17, 38, 63, 66, 73, 76 Roberts, Henry David, 11, 157, 160, 167, 172–76, 183, 206n200, 210 Roberts, Mrs, 87, 89, 110n148 Roschelle, Jeremy, 193 Ross Island, 25–26, 30, 82, 84, 86, 91, 97, 99, 121–22 Row, H.R., 174 Royal Anthropological Institute, 66, 76, 111n176, 148n6, 150n39, 172 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 4–5, 52n85, 63 Royal Colonial Institute, 184 Royal Pavilion, 158, 167, 180, 204n162, 210

Index Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove (see also Brighton Museum), 4, 6–7, 9–10, 12, 14n15, 16n43, 18–21, 23–24, 30, 35, 39, 41, 46, 47n10–11, 48n17, 54n117, 57, 59, 62–63, 91, 102, 103n21, 107n87, 113, 203n136, 208, 212–15, 215n12, 216n15, 216n20 Rutland Island, 32, 34 S Salford Museum & Art Gallery, 77, 109n130 salvage ethnography, 7, 61–64, 66–67, 103n18 Schuster, Arthur, 124 scrapers, 108n121, 172 Searle, Agnes Fanny, 77 seascapes (see landscapes) senses, and imperialism, 73, 75 and indigenous peoples, 18, 73, 213 and objects, 3, 73, 75, 194, 213 Sentinelese, 9–10, 105n53 Serrurier, Lindor, 38, 73 Shelton, Anthony, 81, 163 Sheppard, Victor, 178 Sherlock Holmes, 114, 139–45 Shompen, 9 shrunken heads, 159, 191 Sierra Leone, 158, 180 The Sign of Four (Arthur Conan Doyle), 114, 139– 47, 148n7, 153n100, 154n125, 191–92, 196, 209 Simpson, Moira, 212 Singh, Simron Jit, 11–12, 16n43, 21, 36–37, 40, 47n16, 106n83, 212–14 South Andaman, 10, 25, 27, 30–31, 33, 52n85, 53n108, 60, 76, 103n19 South Reef Island, 124, 149n27 souvenirs, 37, 100–1, 167, 186, 208 spears, 51n61, 64, 104n34, 142, 178, 200n58 Nicobarese, 20–21, 37–38, 64, 73, 84, 129, 151n57, 176, 178 Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, Dresden, 4, 14n17, 63 Stocking, George, 196 Stoddard, John Marshall, 140 Strobel, Margaret, 91 Survival International, 16n38 T Tacchini, Pietro, 125–26, 150n45 tafal (see Chaura pots) Talbot Clifton, Violet, 35, 54n122, 97, 111n176 Tanamara, of Malacca village, 37–38 Tanoiny festival, 41 Tasmania, 64, 168, 172 Tayler, H. Graham, 166 ‘Temple, Man and Tuson: Collecting the Andaman and Nicobar Islands’ exhibition, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove (2005–2007), 180, 216n15, 216n20 Temple, Sir Richard, 77

243 Temple, Sir Richard Carnac, 5, 7, 9, 24–25, 31–32, 46, 48n17, 52n85, 56n177, 66, 69, 77, 106n73, 110n148, 113, 147, 155, 161, 163, 165, 166, 175–79, 195, 211 and anthropology, 22, 49n33, 77–81, 90, 108n111, 109n142, 195 and collecting, 5, 22, 28, 30, 32, 35, 41, 44–45, 48n27, 57, 59–60, 62, 76, 78–81, 89–90, 93–95, 100–1, 108n121 and domestic display, 58–59, 82–90, 100, 109n142, 110n154 and donation, 5–6, 39, 77–78, 81, 84, 90, 94, 106n72, 108n121, 155, 158, 163, 165–68, 199n55 and self-promotion, 67, 81–90, 93 Thomas, Nicholas, 13n5, 25, 32, 40, 85, 101, 209 Tilley, Chris, 28 Tomas, David, 27, 63, 105n56, 149n27 Toms, Herbert Samuel, 11, 160–61, 163–65, 167–68, 172–78, 180, 182–83, 189–95, 198n23, 210–11, 213 ‘Tonga’ (character), 139–46, 154n144 tools, 87, 168, 170–73, 177, 201n75, 209 Andamanese, 29, 34, 85–87, 93, 124, 133, 146, 180 Nicobarese, 19, 44, 85–87, 93, 107n87, 108n121, 180 See also adzes and spears ‘Topsy’, 97, 112n177 torches, 164 total solar eclipse (1875), 120, 124–27 ‘tourist art’ (see trade, objects made for) Townsend, Frederick Henry, 143–46 toys, 94 Nicobarese, 44, 93 trade, in the Andaman Islands, 7, 18–19, 22, 24–29, 33–36, 49n31, 54n130, 62, 95, 97, 208– 10 in the Nicobar Islands, 7, 19, 22, 24, 36–46, 47n16, 49n31, 55n148, 60, 62, 80, 94–95, 97, 208–10 objects made for, 25–30, 40–46, 52n84 translation, 15n34, 70, 76, 105n44, 105n46, 164, 199n55 travel writings, 49n42, 114, 143 trophies, 100, 134, 136, 151n57 Andamanese, 70, 136, 161–62 displays as, 84–87, 149n29 Tuson, Francis Edward, 5, 90–91, 93–94, 99–101, 112n178, 166 Tuson, Katharine Sara, 5, 7, 9, 14n21, 24–25, 39, 44, 46, 47n10, 59, 90–91, 95, 97–98, 113, 147, 155, 161, 165, 166, 175, 176–77, 179, 182, 211 and collecting, 22, 30, 45, 57, 59–60, 62, 76, 91, 93–95, 97, 100–1 and domestic display, 99–100 and donation, 5, 59, 91, 94–95, 158 and photography, 91, 93, 100 Tylor, Edward Burnett, 61, 133, 173, 200n73

Index

244 U ‘Unknown India: Ritual Art in Tribe and Village’ exhibition, US (1968), 180 V Van der Beek, Zita, 63 Vellinga, Marcel, 63 verandahs, 128 Verne, Jules, 124 Victoria and Albert Museum, 190 visitors (see museum visitors; audiences; reception) Vogel, Susan, 177 Von Hügel, Anatole, 78, 106n73 W warfare, 4, 16n41, 23, 30–33, 53n104, 87, 128 between Andamanese groups, 30–32

Warrington Museum & Art Gallery, 173 Watt, George, 132–34, 139, 145–46 weapons, 83–86, 109n142, 132–33, 164, 174–76, 178–79 Andamanese, 70, 93, 142–43, 146, 152n81 Nicobarese, 44, 80, 93, 152n81 see also bows, arrows, spears Welch, Stuart Cary, 180 White, Richard, 114 Whitehead, George, 38, 44, 48n22 wood bundles, 41–42 work (see labour) The World, 87, 110n145 Y Yassan, of Katchal, 37