ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the construction of a national identity for colonial India through the staging of exhibitions in India and Britain from 1850 to 1947. It looks at the use of exhibitions as part of the process of constructing an Indian national identity under imperial rule. The rst part looks at the staging of colonial exhibitions and coronation durbars developed in the second half of the nineteenth century by the British colonialists to create popular support for colonial empires. The colonial exhibition provided a controlled space where objects and people were arranged to generate a narrative of empire that sought to justify the merit of empire through the presentation and arrangement of objects and people in a certain choice of settings. Saloni Mathur has analyzed the mechanisms of social control behind the spectacle of the colonial exhibitions held in Britain ( Mathur 2007 ). Around the same time colonial exhibitions started to be staged in India as well, and a set of exhibitions of Indian art accompanied each of the three Delhi coronation durbars in 1877, 1903, and 1911, where the grandest spectacles of the British Empire were staged. It was before the 1903 Delhi durbar that Indian nationalists retaliated by staging a competing exhibition of Indian art at the opening of the eighteenth Indian National Congress (INC) in Ahmedabad. E. B. Havell, an art educator and historian, noted at the time that the Congress exhibitions provoked the colonial administration’s fears that industrial development would be given a political purpose by the nationalists ( Havell 1907: 59 ).
