The Mobile Museum: Collecting and Circulating Indian Textiles in Victorian Britain

Abstract

textiles, together with details of the length, width, weight, and cost of the fabrics, as well as photographs indicating how they were actually worn. Twenty sets of the sample series were made for distribution to chambers of commerce and art schools in Britain and india. A second series, with smaller-sized and more elegantly mounted samples, was produced from 1873. The director of this laborious undertaking was John Forbes Watson, the reporter on the products of india at the india Office, who was responsible for a diverse collection of botanical, zoological, archaeological, antiquarian, ethnographic, and industrial objects at the museum inherited from the East india Company. These ever-expanding collections, reflecting the history and breadth of British involvement in ndia, were supplied in part by the indian courts of international exhibitions of the period. Forbes Watson patiently selected his specimens from museum stores in the London suburbs, eventually producing around 30,000 hand-cut and mounted samples. But his efforts to extract the essential characteristics of indian textile design and manufacturing have not been treated kindly by posterity. Considered something of an embarrassment by successive officials at the india Office and by later curators at the South Kensington Museum