Crafting Connections: The India Society and the Formation of an Imperial Artistic Network in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

Victorian and Edwardian Britain has been persuasively remapped by recent scholarship1 as an imperial contact zone, shaped as much by what Edward Said has described as the ‘intertwined histories’ of the colonial encounter, as the colonized territories overseas.2 Empire was not simply something ‘out there’, operating in the far- flung regions of the British imperial world, but was also lived and experienced ‘at home’ in British cultural life. As a result, an increasing amount of attention has been given to the cultural networks through which Britain came into contact with imperial subjects, ideas, images, materials and things. Elleke Boehmer, also a contributor to this volume, has written evocatively about the global networks of the British imperial world circa 1900. Sustaining and ‘imaginatively reinforcing’ the grids of the British imperial world, she writes, were ‘nets or “webs of language”, intertextual webs of common metaphors and shared images, including the webs of interrelationship’ which ‘registered the operations of imperial networks’ through both fictional and non- fictional writings.3 These international, cross- colonial networks were ‘created through contacts between imperial and native colonial elites, which were themselves facilitated by the cross- hatched, cable- linked communication, military and administrative grids of the Empire.’4