Historian and collector, Dr Jim Masselos tells Shivangi Ambani-Gandhi that rummaging through shoe boxes in junk shops is far more exciting than buying off eBay.
Scouring through junk shops in Australia and London, Dr Jim Masselos began his collection of the now large and wonderfully varied Portvale Collection. “I would go through shoe boxes full of photos and other material in shops full of all sorts of old objects . I accumulated by hunting and rummaging. Now you can buy some such materials over ebay—it is far less exciting!”
The Indian Empire: Multiple Realities exhibition currently on show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, presents a selection of objects from this collection built up over 40 years of travels across India, London and Australia. Dr Masselos is donating a large portion of the items in the exhibition to the Gallery.
Dr. Masselos, an honorary reader in history at the University of Sydney, has visited India over 50 times. His first visit, in 1961 was to Mumbai to do his doctorate at St Xaviers College under the Commonwealth Scholarship Scheme funded by the Government of India. His doctorate, about the rise of nationalism in Mumbai and Pune was completed over a 4-year period in Mumbai leading to his book, Towards Nationalism.
“When I came back to Sydney to teach, there were no visuals available, such as those now easily available on the internet,” he recollects. So he, along with a colleague, put together an exhibition of India-related objects at Sydney University in 1967. Included in this exhibition were objects from Sir James Plimsoll’s (a former Australian High Commissioner to India) and some Mohenjodaro objects that had been gifted to Nicholson Museum by the Indian Government. It was with this humble exhibition that Dr Masselos’ interest in using Indian material objects to build up a sense of history began.
One room of the current exhibition is dedicated to beautifully embroidered textiles from Kutch and Saurashtra in Gujarat. “Lotika Varadarajan, who was also doing her doctorate in St Xaviers at the time, got me interested in textiles,” says Dr. Masselos. “I decided to go to Kutch and look at the folk embroidery to create a sense of what preoccupied the women who wore this embroidery and how they saw the world and depicted it in their embroideries.”
“I could have used French post-colonial theory to analyse their embroidery designs, but instead I decided to ask the women what their designs meant,” says Dr. Masselos. He found that although designs could have several different meanings in different areas of the region, one common image was of women churning curd—but it had become so stylized that one couldn’t see the literal story in the image.
Another common symbol used by these women was that of a scorpion usually embroidered on the left shoulder of the choli. This scorpion directed towards the heart, Dr Masselos found, symbolized the sudden pain of love, the love of Bhakti. Also included in the exhibition are some cholis of the Maharani of Kutch who Masselos befriended over long conversations about her life. “Sometimes I think I got to know her better than I know anyone else!”
Looking through the Indian Empire exhibition though, it becomes apparent through the extensive display of photographs and albums, that Dr. Masselos has a particular interest in this medium. “At the time I was doing my research on Bombay, I had to start collecting maps and drawings to build up a picture of what India was like a century or so earlier,” says Dr. Masselos. “Now you just wouldn’t bother—you would just go on the internet and surf for pictures. The photographs were also visually very interesting, and my interest grew from seeing the photographs as just historical information to aesthetics as well—seeing them as images that are beautiful in their own right.”
One of the albums on display has a panorama of Delhi, containing
stunning images of the city in 1858. In a jointly authored book Dr Masselos has written an essay on Beato, the photographer of this album, while Delhi historian Narayani Gupta has written about the same places as they were then and as they are now in a book titled Beato’s Delhi. “We found that between the Old and New Delhis was another Delhi—the Delhi of the 1800s before the uprising of 1857, a Delhi that wasn’t Shahjahanabd nor the Delhi of Lutyens and the British raj but was based around the Ridge and the then civil lines,” says Dr Masselos talking about this project. His other books include Bombay then and Mumbai now, (with Naresh Fernandes) and The city in action: Bombay struggles for power.
“India has been very well portrayed in early photographs. The way India is represented through these photographs and their range, there is nothing like it for 19th Century Australia. There was great attention paid to the Indian landscape as well as to many different facets of Indian life and living under the British,” says Dr. Masselos. “There is thus the Imperial view of British power that they convey, but also the picturesque.” And it is these multiple visions of India under the British Raj that is brought forth by the new exhibition of his collection.
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