India: A history in objects

Abstract

Presenting a history of India in objects is an ambitious concept by any stretch of the imagination, even if the material in question is drawn exclusively from the collections of the British Museum. Richard Blurton’s thirty years’ service there as curator for South and Southeast Asia places him in a position to make the most of it, and he does not disappoint. It would certainly be impossible in a conventional narrative to contemplate such an ambitious sweep – the text ranging from the Palaeolithic to the late twentieth century and from stone tools to present-day film and music-making. The format adopted by the author and his publishers, already tried and tested in companion volumes on China and on the Islamic World, successfully resolves this problem: the bulk of the book is arranged as double-page spreads, each introducing a new topic, period, dynasty or category of object. In this way the reader moves through this mass of multi-faceted material in a structured, coherent and accessible way. The many colour images, most of them from the museum’s own photographic studio, are well reproduced – mostly as cut-outs, adding considerably to the pleasing appearance of the volume – and all are captioned in a uniform configuration that presents information on the objects themselves, their provenance and their donor or source.