Hello everyone, I'm curator Emily Hannam and welcome to
Eastern Encounters: Four Centuries of Paintings and Manuscripts from the Indian Subcontinent
which is the Royal Collection's exciting new exhibition here at
The Queen's Gallery, at the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh.
As many of you know, the Indian subcontinent is home to some of
the richest cultural and artistic traditions in the world, and over hundreds
of years, members of the British Royal Family have acquired a magnificent and
really wide-ranging collection of South Asian art.
But how do you tell a story of such richness and diversity in one exhibition?
Well, the answer I came up with is through the encounters, from early encounters with
the Moghul Emperors, to divine encounters with Hindu gods to encounters with the Raj.
In this exhibition, we travel through time to explore the encounters, and often very
personal relationships between the British Royal Family, and the rulers of South Asia.
But as well as telling these previously untold stories of Indian history,
this exhibition tells a new, and dynamic story of Indian art, of artistic
connections going back and forth, and
cultural resonances that echo throughout the centuries.
And its very important that we are showing this exhibition here in the UK
because this is not a one-sided story.
This is a shared history of South Asia and Britain, and one that is
inextricably linked to the Britain of today.
The first part of the exhibition is called 'Early Encounters', and here you will
explore the art of the Great Moghuls.
These exquisite and jewel-like paintings and manuscripts all date to an era
when the Moghul Empire of India was richer and stronger than any European power.
The British Royal Ambassadors like Sir Thomas Roe, depicted here in green,
were overawed by the riches that they encountered there.
It was a place where Indian, Iranian, central Asian, Chinese and European
cultures all converged, and we can really see that in the type of artwork
that the Moghuls created, like this extraordinary reinterpretation of a
16th century Flemish print, depicting the Day of Judgement.
Also on display, we have some magnificent works of art commissioned by the fifth
Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan.
Shah Jahan's artists created miniatures on an enormous scale. Grand scenes like this,
which show the Moghul Emperor taking part in ceremonies and appearing to his
subjects from the balconies of the royal palaces.
Shah Jahan was a contemporary of King Charles I, and the two actually exchanged
several letters. One of these was a grovelling letter of apology that
Charles I was compelled to send to Shah Jahan after the Moghul Emperor's ships
were plundered by pirates who were said to have been flying the English flag.
In Political Encounters, we explore art and the East India Company,
in these works of art dating from the 18th and early-19th centuries.
On display are gifts of paintings and manuscripts that were sent by Indian
rulers to British monarchs as appeals for their favour and their protection.
We are also showing gifts that the East India Company officers presented to
both George III and George IV as symbols of their successes in India,
and of their control.
The presence of the East India Company had a huge impact on the politics of
the Indian subcontinent, but it left its impression on India's art as well
as Indian artists adopted not just European imagery, but also
European materials and techniques in their work.
This oil painting depicts Akbar Shah II, the penultimate Moghul Emperor, who is
seated with his sons. Its by a Mogul artist, who evidently adopted European
stylistic conventions for his work.
And he did this very deliberately, thinking about the painting's intended
viewer, because the Emperor sent this work as a gift to George IV with a letter
very anxiously appealing for his help improving his relationship with
the East India Company.
In 'Victorian Encounters', we explore gifts of books, paintings and manuscripts
all sent to Queen Victoria.
This part of the exhibition covers the
early years of British Crown rule in India after 1858 when the Moghul Emperor was
deposed, the East India Company collapsed, and control of all of its territories in
South Asia now transferred directly to the British Crown.
Queen Victoria later assumed the title Empress of India.
And among the books sent to Queen Victoria by Indian rulers were several translations
of her own best-selling book, about her holidays in Scotland.
This is the opening page of a Hindi translation of her book, made by
Ishwari Prasad Narayan Singh, the Maharajah of Benares.
Its a hand-coloured composite image that consists of both photographic and
painted elements, and it depicts an imaginary encounter in which the Maharajah
presents his book to the Queen.
The painting was probably made by Madho Prasad, a member of an old artist
family from Patna, and he had worked for the Maharajah's family in Benares
for generations, and took up photography in the 1860s.
Twenty years later, the next Maharajah of Benares, Prabhu Narayan Singh,
actually used this same composition and the same print of Queen Victoria
for this image, which commemorates his sending of an album of photographs
to the Queen for her Golden Jubilee.
In 'Divine Encounters' we explore the Royal Collection's incredible holdings of
Hindu paintings from Northern India, many of which were brought back by
Queen Victoria's son, Albert Edward, the future King Edward VII, from his tour of
India in 1875. When he was in Bombay, the Prince attended the wedding
celebrations of the son of a local wealthy businessman, who presented Albert Edward
with three large albums containing these beautiful Rajput paintings of Hindu deities
It was around the time of the Prince's tour that scholars in Europe started to
think about India as the cradle of world civilisation.
They realised that the name 'Abraham', the Jewish, Christian and Islamic patriarch,
had its roots in 'Brahma', the Hindu god of creation, and Abraham's wife, Sarah,
comes from Saraswati, Brahma's consort, the Hindu goddess of learning and the arts
And so, in these paintings, the British prince could learn about Hindu religious
and spiritual life, and about these wider cultural connections too.
The final part of the exhibition is called 'Encountering the Raj', and explores
ideas of tradition and modernity in early 20th century India.
Here we are excited to be able to display some previously unseen images
from the photograph collection that were taken during the period of
British Crown rule known as the British Raj, when members of the
British Royal Family made grand, public tours of the Indian subcontinent.
Throughout these tours, they adopted South Asian courtly rituals of durbars, of
processions and big game hunts, and they really projected themselves as heirs to
the Moghul Emperors of the past.
George V and Queen Mary were the first reigning British monarchs to ever set foot
on Indian soil, and this extraordinary panorama is a record of the huge imperial
ceremony that was the 1911 Delhi Coronation Durbar,
where they officially proclaimed themselves Emperor and Empress of India.
This photograph was taken the following day, at the Moghul Red Fort, when
George V and Queen Mary very consciously put on their robes and crowns and showed
themselves to thousands of people, stood on the balcony, exactly where the
Moghul Emperors formerly showed themselves
Its composition is not dissimilar to the paintings of the Moghul court scenes,
seen earlier in the exhibition, with the Emperor shown on the balcony at the centre
But the atmosphere and the fixation could not be more different.
The crowd's all out of shot, and in the place of rows of distinguished courtiers,
are just a few potted plants and some awkwardly placed chairs.
But just as the British Royal Family looked to the past, and revived earlier
South Asian traditions, so too did many South Asian painters
of the early 20th century.
The final work in the exhibition is this painting by Abanindranath Tagore, the
founder of the Bengal school, and widely considered the father of Indian modernism.
The painting was given as a gift to Queen Mary in Calcutta, just a few days after
the Delhi Durbar.
It depicts the ancient Buddhist Indian queen Tissarakshita, the wife of
Emperor Ashoka, and it has quite a Moghul character.
Its painted in watercolour, its miniature sized, she's depicted in profile,
but it also has that emotional intensity that you find in traditional Rajput
painting, so its a painting that both looks back to early Indian history and art
as well as looking forward, because at this very important moment in Indian
history, Tagore created new and modern art for a new and modern India.
I've shown you just some of the more than a hundred beautiful works of art
from the Indian subcontinent in this exhibition, many of them on display here
in Scotland for the very first time.
We really look forward to welcoming you to The Queen's Gallery and hope that you
enjoy exploring this fascinating and important part of the Royal Collection.