Today, sculptures of Siva Nataraja are displayed at the centre of South Asian galleries in museums in Europe and North America. A significant number of these bronzes and some two hundred South Indian images entered major Western collections through a network of actors involving the French archaeologist Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil (1885-1945), the art dealer C.T. Loo (1880-1957), and the Musee Guimet in Paris. Jouveau-Dubreuil settled in the French colony of Pondicherry in 1909 and supplied artefacts to C.T. Loo from 1924 onwards, in close collaboration with the Musee Guimet. Combining archival research, fieldwork, and oral history, this paper explores the entangled histories of museums and art markets and highlights the role of Indian intermediaries in art collecting. Jouveau-Dubreuil relied on a small group of agents, who belonged to the French-speaking Indian elite and had previously been his pupils at the Coll & egrave;ge Colonial in Pondicherry. These agents engaged with a wide range of actors and acquired artefacts through transactions shaped by informational, political, and economic asymmetries. The commodification of South Indian images resulted from collaborations, tensions within source communities, divergent claims to custodianship, imperial rivalries, and the contingent actions of local supply networks, ultimately shaping the art-historical canon of 'Indian art'.
The first casts of the Sanchi Stupa gateway in India were made in the nineteenth century under colonial regime and collected by various museums in Europe, including Berlin. While these casts were subsequently discarded, the Berlin cast (1886) not only survived but also gained new material avatars - artificial stone cast (1970), acystal cast (2021), and milled sandstone (2022). With each transformation, it shed a little of its "cast" status and became closer to the "authentic" in situ at Sanchi. Tracing thebiographies of these replicas, our paper investigates the technological, sociopolitical, and cultural processes behind their reproduction and display in Berlin. It examines how these objects are embedded in networks of actants and narratives and mobilised as "curatorial things" through their aesthetic, semantic, and sociopolitical contexts. In their display habitats, the meaning emerges through spatial arrangements, interactions with surrounding objects, and their "original" context. Exploring these multilayered entanglements, the paper examines these replicas beyond the binaries of authentic/ inauthentic, or their closure as mere archives that produce a static, reproducible "truth" of the lingering colonial past. It suggests that the replicas have acquired a force of their own, secreting excess of meanings, more than which was consciously inscribed in them.
The Bengal Famine of 1943, or Panchasher Manwantar (Famine of fifty), created by the colonial British government, killing an estimated 3 million people, is an outstanding example to demonstrate that famines in modern times are rather political outcomes than natural disasters. Curiously, the Bengal Famine of 1943 is also an instructive case to underscore that what we see and remember as a famine is culturally determined. By analysing a set of selected 1940s Famine texts, this essay argues that the longue dur & eacute;e crises of hunger in Bengal and its surrounded regions came to be seen as a famine only after the city of Calcutta witnessed the spectacular arrival of rural starving masses migrating to the city in search of food. It traces how the famine, from a generic aakaal (bad times) or durbhikkho (scarcity of alms), culturally becomes a manwantar (an epoch's end)-a full-blown event of social transformation-through the urban onlooker's aesthetic experience of the hungry as an outlier to the city's social. The essay, thus, indicates that the discourse of the 1943 Bengal Famine/Panchasher Manwatar is culturally constructed through aesthetic challenges of representation, and not so much through harrowing historical facts of decades-long conditions of deprivation, starvation, and death.
This paper examines the history of curatorial and display practices of South Asian objects in the Museum F & uuml;nf Kontinente (Museum Five Continents, formerly known as V & ouml;lkerkunde Museum) in Munich, one of the oldest anthropological museums in Germany, from its early beginnings to the present. Drawing on archival records, photographs, and exhibition catalogues, it follows up on questions about choices, motivations, and strategies pursued by directors and curators, and reflects on the institution's role within a larger cultural and sociopolitical context. By addressing these concerns, the research contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex negotiations and dynamics underlying displays and exhibitions at anthropological museums in Germany. Through the South Asian collection at the Museum F & uuml;nf Kontinente, the paper reflects on the role and position of anthropological museums in the past and today. Thus, the paper gives not only new insights into the Museum's South Asian displays and exhibitions but also advances our understanding of the collecting as well as the shifting modes of acquisition, presentation and interpretation of South Asian objects in Germany.
