ABSTRACT
Queen Victoria made a point of visiting the Crystal Palace's Indian Court on a number of occasions and confided in her journal that she was 'quite dazzled by the most splendid shawls and tissues'. In the late nineteenth century, there was, however, a marked deterioration in the quality and design of the 'traditional' Indian crafts being produced for the overseas market. The notion that the visuality of exhibits could stimulate the spectators' imaginations and transport them, albeit temporarily, into a chimerical India was a recurrent topos promulgated by the nineteenth century media. Prior to the incorporation of live exhibits, peoples from the Indian subcontinent were objectified, commoditized, and displayed at the majority of the international exhibitions in the forms of models. The Great Exhibition not only marked the dawn of the exhibitionary age, it also initiated a new mode of mass consumption: excursion tourism.
