A Passage on India

The Natural History Museum has recently ‘launched’ it’s Centre for Arts and Humanities Research, a brilliant initiative to make scholars outside of the natural sciences aware of the breadth and wealth of the NHM collections, and in turn to get those collections used more creatively. One of their initiatives is a residency for a modern artist.

I worked for CAHR the year before last, at the beginning of their ‘Nathaniel Wallich and Indian Natural History’ project conducting a collections survey of the South-East Asian natural history drawings. I spent a very happy couple of months working on the collections at the NHM, Kew and the British Library, and then writing up my report. I was therefore equally happy to relive that experience on Tuesday at the conference of the same name held as part of the project, I particularly enjoyed hearing what Kapil Raj has achieved with his expert research founded on my basic survey.

I was particularly struck by one speaker’s comment that such natural history drawings, mostly commissioned and collected by East India Company employees, were based on a ‘capitalist aesthetic’ that required them to be both useful and beautiful. They needed to be both attractive objects and an accurate record of the flora and fauna being discovered. Not only this but their attraction was itself utilitarian, as it formed part of EIC ‘advertising’ in England of the beauties of the sub-continent, and allowed a whole range of specimens to enter our parks and gardens and form well-loved decorative motifs on our fabrics and china.

What occurred to me was that these drawings’ beauty is still proving utilitarian, as it is the stunning nature of such collections which undoubtedly helps CAHR to gain funding for its important projects. Lets hope that the ‘capitalist aesthetic’ continues to operate for years to come.