ABSTRACT
The Indian craftsman at international exhibitions, a curiously 'non-industrialized' practitioner of an 'industrial art', is both material and symbolic: a maker of commodities and himself a commodity. A collection of art-objects from the Indian Court of the exhibition is now housed in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. Saloni Mathur notes that the artisans on display at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886 were with few exceptions recruited from the Agra Central Jail, while one had voyaged to London on his own account to seek redress from the Queen in a land dispute. The World Fairs and exhibitions of the nineteenth century were sites of display where colonial power offered itself for public admiration, and objects of material culture, denuded of social context and use-value, were accessible for consumption as spectacles. Discussing the Great Exhibition of 1851, Carol Breckenridge suggested that British imperial ambitions in India were already on display through 'robes, crowns, jewels, thrones, and weapons'.
