V&A in India

Collections & galleries

The V&A’s Indian collection has its origins in the India Museum, founded by the East India Company in 1798. When this collection was dispersed in 1879, much of the collection, especially the textiles and decorative arts, came to the South Kensington Museum, later named the V&A. The South Kensington Museum had already been collecting Indian art in its own right since its inception, and these two collections combined to make one of the world’s most important holdings of art and design from the subcontinent. Collecting has continued to this day to enhance this superb collection.

Highlights from the collection, which is particularly rich in Mughal court arts, paintings jewellery and textiles dating from 16th to 19th century, are displayed in the evocative architectural setting of the Nehru Gallery. Key pieces of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sculpture are shown in the adjacent gallery.

The new Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Gallery for Buddhist Sculpture in the V&A features early Indian and Sri Lankan sculptures narrating the life events of the Buddha, the last phase of Indian Buddhism and the transference of the doctrines to the Himalayan regions of Tibet and Nepal, and a look at Mahayana and Vajrayana teachings which were so important to Tibet and elsewhere in Asia. Other displays include works from South East Asia, primarily from Thailand, Burma and Java.

Cultural Agreement

In June 2010, the V&A, British Library and British Museum signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Museum of India, acting on behalf of the Ministry of Culture. The Memorandum outlines a commitment to continuing exchanges of staff and the provision of professional advice. The V&A’s work supports the 2010 state to state India-UK Cultural Agreement.

In support of our commitments under the Memorandum of Understanding, the Bonita Trust is funding a two year V&A programme of skills sharing activities with our partners in India, starting in 2011.

Exhibitions

Recent years have seen an exciting programme of V&A exhibitions touring to India. Indian Life and Landscape was an exhibition of 94 V&A watercolours by British artists depicting Indian sites and landscapes as well as scenes of everyday life in India. It travelled to six venues around India in 2008-2010, including CSMVS in Mumbai; Mehrangarh Fort Museum in Rajasthan; National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi; Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata; Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad and National Gallery of Modern Art, Bangalore. As the first international exhibition to tour India, it was seen by over 500,000 people.

This year the V&A has shown Contemporary Photography: Something That I’ll Never Really See at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai (November 2010 – January 2011), two sites of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore (January-February 2011) and Delhi (March-April 2011) and the Salar Jung Museum in Hyderabad; and A Century of Olympic Posters at the Bhau Daji Lad (January – March 2011).

Kalighat Paintings opened at the Victoria Memorial Hall, Kolkata on 16 October until 11 December 2011 before travelling on to CSMVS in Mumbai, Salar Jung Museum, Hyderabad, and NGMA in New Delhi. We hope to send further exhibitions on Western decorative arts to venues in India, and an exhibition on Chintz: Indian textiles for the West is also planned for an Indian tour in 2014/15.

Rabindranath Tagore: Poet and Painter will display 49 of Tagore’s paintings at the V&A from 12 December 2011 t0 4 March 2012. A range of Learning events will be produced in conjunction with the exhibition.

Maharaja: The Splendour of India’s Royal Courts, held at the V&A and at the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Munich in 2009/10, greatly benefited from an unprecedented number of loans from Indian private and public collections, facilitated by the Ministry of Culture and the National Museum. A re-cast version Maharaja, is touring North America from November 2010 to August 2012 at venues including: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Exhibitions based on the V&A South Asian poster and sculpture collections were shown in Australia and in Spain respectively during 2007 and to mark Shanghai Expo in 2010, the V&A lent objects to the British Museum led exhibition India: The Art of the Temple, at the Shanghai Museum.

Relationships

Our exhibition programme in India has enabled us to build relationships with existing contacts, develop new partners, and share skills and expertise. V&A staff are now actively engaged in projects across India with a number of institutions, with generous support from the Bonita Trust.

We recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. We have a Memorandum of Understanding with the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai, and a long-standing relationship with the CSMVS in Mumbai. We have been working closely with the Salar Jung Museum as well as other institutions such as the Calico Museum of Textiles, the Mehrangarh Museum Trust, Jodhpur, and the TAPI Collection of Textiles. V&A staff have visited these museums to advise on gallery development, conservation, cataloguing and have contributed to workshops and lecturing. Staff from our East Asia section have visited India to advise on Chinese and Japanese collections in Gwalior and Hyderabad.

In October 2011, the V&A held a series of Museum Development Master Classes in Kolkata, funded by the Bonita Trust and in collaboration with the British Council, which coincided with the opening of the Kalighat Paintings Exhibition at Victoria Memorial Hall. These sessions covered Project and Design, Learning and Interpretation and Collections Management and attendees included senior managers from museums across the whole of India.

The Bonita Trust has also assisted with funding for conservators and scholars to come to the UK and has also contributed towards the costs of the textile conservation workshops in Kolkata in November.

A current major collaboration is the digitisation of Company Paintings in UK and Indian collections. This project is coordinated via the World Collections Programme and is being undertaken by seven partners in the UK and India.

Find more information on Company Paintings

We have had strong links with the Sutra organisation since its inception in 2002, and co-organised a conference on Indian textile trade in Kolkata, 2003. More recently, the V&A led collaborative workshops with Sutra in Kolkata in February 2010 and a six day conservation workshop will also be held at the Tagore Centre in Kolkata in November 2011 led by three V&A conservators.

‘Travel with the V&A’

The Development Department has longstanding links with Indian contacts, and is arranging a forthcoming trip to Goa and the Deccan for a group of the Museum's high-level supporters. The V&A has several Indian donors as well as a large group of donors who support the Museum’s India collections.

As well as furthering the V&A's relationship with its supporters by providing some context to its collections, the ‘Travel with the V&A’ programme serves to introduce well-connected and influential people to international peers. The first 'Travel with the V&A' trips took place in February 2006 taking a group of supporters to Rajastan. The trip included a high profile dinner hosted by Pavan Varma, Director General of the India Council for Cultural Relations, to which artists, collectors, government officials and press were invited.

Learning

Under the terms of the V&A’s Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Culture, India and with the support of the Bonita Trust, the V&A is planning a course in museum education for staff from Indian museums. The course will be held at the V&A, over two weeks from June 25 to July 6 2012, using the facilities of the award winning Sackler Centre for arts education. The course is for 15 participants from Indian museums who are responsible for the planning and delivery of education and public programmes.

The V&A is currently offering a year-long course entitled Arts of Asia 1500–1900. The course offers participants the opportunity to study the rich diversity of artistic traditions found within this geographical area and discover how artists and craftspeople refined the arts of painting and calligraphy, architecture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles and carpets, carving and sculpture. The second term focuses on South Asia.

Working with India in the UK

Within Britain, the V&A collaborates with several South Asian cultural organisations based in the UK, including the Institute of Jainology, the Pandit Ram Sahai Sangit Vidyalaya (PRSSV) Foundation, the UK Punjab Historical Association, the Anglo-Sikh Heritage Trail as well as other smaller local community groups.

The V&A hosts Indian scholars via the Nehru Trust for the Indian Collections at the V&A every year. This trust, administered by the V&A, awards grants to Indian museum curators, conservators and scholars to come to UK for training and research for up to three months, and also provides travel grants for UK-based scholars to use during study trips to India.

For more information visit www.nticva.org.

Sharing expertise is a growing activity. V&A curators and conservators visited the Salar Jung Museum to study its collections and advise on conservation facilities, and staff have participated in textile workshops and lectures with Indian museums. Between 2005 and 2009, LCF/V&A Fellow Eiluned Edwards undertook extensive fieldwork on textiles, identity and dress in Kachchh and Gujarat, relating her finds to the V&A's collections.

The Museum of Childhood, in collaboration with Harley Gallery in Nottingham, organised and hosted an international artists’ exchange programme with artists from Ahmedabad and Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2010. The South Asian artists held residencies at the Harley Gallery and the Museum of Childhood in May and June 2010. The V&A also hosted a one month training programme in the UK for a graphic designer from CSMVS in 2009.

Publications

The V&A is Europe’s leading centre for publications on the art of India with an active and productive strand of scholarly, exhibition and general titles by V&A authors. The V&A also has a long tradition of publishing books on Indian subjects, and many books by V&A authors have had Indian co-publishers or Indian editions, including:

• Anna Jackson and Amin Jaffer, Maharaja (V&A, 2009)
• Rosemary Crill and Kapil Jariwala, The Indian Portrait: 1560-1860, NPG (2010)
• Susan Stronge, Made for Mughal Emperors, (Roli Books/Lustre Press: UK edition published by I.B. Tauris, 2010)
• Rosemary Crill, Marwar Painting: A History of the Jodhpur Style, (India Book House, 2001)
• Susan Stronge, Tipu’s Tigers, (V&A, 2009)
• Susan Strong, Painting for the Mughal Emperor, (V&A, 2002)
• Rosemary Crill, Susan Stronge and Andrew Topsfield, Arts of Mughal India, (2004)
• Rosemary Crill, Chintz: Indian Textiles for the West, (V&A, 2008)
• P. Rohatgi and G. Parlett, Indian Life and Landscape by Western Artists, (CSMVS, Mumbai, 2008)
• Rosemary Crill, Indian Embroidery, (V&A, 1999)
• N. Barnard, Indian Jewellery, (V&A, 2008)
• John Guy, Indian Temple Sculpture, (V&A, 2007)
• C. Breward, P. Crang & R. Crill, British Asian Style; Fashion and Textiles, Past and Present, (V&A, 2010)
• Eiluned Edwards, Textiles and Dress of Gujarat, (V&A, 2011)
• Suhashini Sinha, Kalighat Paintings, (V&A, 2012)
• Anna Dallapiccola, South Indian Temple Hangings, (V&A/Mapin, 2013)

Indian Website

To engage audiences in India, the V&A recently launched a dedicated Indian website containing information relating to the V&A’s work in and with the country.

www.vamuseum.in