India Discovered (22 page)

Acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1910, the Sanchi torso owed its celebrity to its supposedly classical modelling. As an example of ‘lndo-Grecian art of the 1st century AD’ it was one of the few Indian sculptures to win aesthetic approval. Yet, it has now been shown to date from the tenth century AD, a period once dismissed as artistically decadent.

No event contributed more to the European acceptance of Indian art than the discovery of the caves of Ajanta. Containing the finest gallery of wall paintings to survive from any ancient civilization, they were quickly acknowledged as ‘the greatest artistic wonder of Asia’. Sadly, attempts to preserve them have done more harm than good, (drawing by Jas. Burgess of a scene depicting ‘The Temptation’ in Ajanta Cave XXVI.)

General Sir Alexander Cunningham spent much of his career and all of his long retirement tramping across India in search of its Buddhist past.

Colonel James Tod, historian and champion of the Rajputs, who also brought to notice the Jain temples of Mount Abu and amassed a collection of coins from which the history of western India was largely reconstructed. ‘In a Rajput I always recognize a friend.’ (Rajput miniature from Udaipur.)

Colonel Colin Mackenzie employed Indian scholars to search out historical materials. The Mackenzie collection of manuscripts, inscriptions and coins is still the best archive for reconstructing the history of peninsular India. (Portrait by Thomas Hickey.)

B. H. Hodgson, for fifty years the doyen of British Indian scholars, and ‘the highest living authority on the native races of India’, spent most of his life in the Himalayas living like an Indian sage.

Sir George Everest, most cantankerous of Surveyors-General, who completed the south-north triangulation of the subcontinent, also extended his measurements along the Himalayas enabling the first accurate triangulation of their peaks. The highest was named after him.

E. B. Havell, the principal of the Calcutta School of Art, rejected received ideas about the Indian artist and championed the notion that his art was based on conceptual rather than representational ideals. (Portrait by one of his pupils.)

Sir William Jones was ‘the father of Oriental studies’. His discoveries in philology, history and literature provided the first evidence that India boasted a classical civilization to rival those of Greece and Rome.

Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India 1898–1905, was the first to acknowledge that India’s architectural heritage constituted ‘the greatest galaxy of monuments in the world’, and that its maintenance and restoration should be an imperial responsibility.