As a Chevening British Library Fellow, I am currently working on the British Library’s Turkish and Turkic periodicals published from the 1920s to 1930s. Most of these magazines are written in the Arabic and Latin scripts. This is what unites these materials; what distinguishes them is their coverage of different themes. In particular, a magazine named Mīḥnat provides us with a view of labour unions in Soviet Turkic states. It is a periodical about work, workers, and labour unions in Uzbekistan in the early Soviet period. The magazine was a joint periodical of three organizations: the People’s Labour Commissariat, the Soviet Professional Union, and the Central Social Insurance of the Uzbek S. S. R. It was published in 1926 and 1927. Several volumes of this magazine are held at the British Library under the shelfmark 14499.tt.23. Mīḥnat was published in two languages: Old Uzbek (Chagatai) in Perso-Arabic script and Russian in Cyrillic script. In 1927, the magazine had 1500 subscribers and more than 30 permanent correspondents supplied it with materials. Today, this magazine Mīḥnat is important for us as a way to better understand Soviet labour unions and their activities.

Cover of the magazine Mīḥnat (in Chagatai). Mīḥnat, vol. 1927, issue 7-8 (50-51). Tashkent, 1927 (BL 14499.tt.23)

When the Bolsheviks came to the power, they attempted to create a group of workers that would support their aims. As a consequence, labour unions began as a way to gather craftsmen and workers in one place under one purpose. To this end, Soviet authority needed a link to connect workers with labour unions. In the Uzbek S. S. R., a magazine named Mīḥnat took on this role. Soviet authorities used this magazine to share their views with local workers and to involve every individual possible in labour unions. Every profession had its labour union and these unions obeyed the Central Council of Labour Unions.

The early pages of the first issue of Mīḥnat each year begin with the publication of speeches of officials delivered at the annual congresses of the labour unions. These speeches cover the reports and future plans of the union, including how to increase the membership, the financial state of the union, the range of salaries, unemployment issues, the organisation of cultural events, and the publication of books about the labour union’s activities in the local language to attract local workers, and so on.

Cover of the magazine Mīḥnat (in Russian). Mīḥnat, vol. 1927, issue 4 (47). Tashkent, 1927 (BL 14499.tt.23)

Early suggestions proposed by officials and employees on improving the activities of labour unions concerned administrative issues. In particular, Y. Gārbūnāv offers in his article to put pressure on members, workers and factories to induce them to follow the decisions of labour unions. Later on, a reorganisation of labour unions is proposed based on dividing them into zones to reduce expenses and improve control. Subsequent issues raised concerned the financial aspects of the union with the content mainly dominated by matters such as reducing expenses and increasing the revenue of labour unions. One author named Lāzāvskī writes that the main source of income came from membership fees and, for this reason, he suggested recruiting new members as fast as possible.

One task of the labour unions was to establish rest conditions for workers and to organize their summer holidays. Labour unions became engaged in “social insurance” which, in Soviet Uzbekistan in the 1920s, meant organizing excursions to famous places, establishing social clubs, as well as sending workers to sanatoriums and holiday-homes for recreation. An analysis of the articles in Mīḥnat, reveals the limitations and difficulties faced by the unions because of a lack of financial resources and unfinished administrative procedures. The magazine would offer solutions, for example, by suggesting that the regional branches could be responsible for the allocation of “social insurance” because they knew who most needed it.

Left: Caricature of Lenin’s presence in workers’ dormitories, “Līnīn būrchakīda mīhmānkhāna.” Mīḥnat, vol. 1927, issue 3 (46). Tashkent, 1927, p. 17 (BL 14499.tt.23)
Right: Woman running away from Soviet-style work, “Bāsh būkhgāltīrning marḥamatī bīlan.” Mīḥnat, vol. 1927, issue 3 (46). Tashkent, 1927, p. 19 (BL 14499.tt.23)

Special issues of the magazine dedicated to one specific topic of concern were also published. For example, volume 4 of 1927 was concerned with women members of the labour unions who in 1926 represented 15.7% of the total membership in the Uzbek S. S. R. This issue mentions that the union’s main task was to involve them in the activities of the Soviet labour unions. Soviet authorities believed that local women would only be liberated when economically independent and so, via the Mīḥnat, labour unions offered to fight for the “freedom of women” by creating special schools for them and involving them in manufacturing. Furthermore, planning cultural events for women was seen as one of the best ways to attract them to Soviet ideology. In addition, this magazine was one of the first periodicals in Soviet Uzbekistan to publish an article proposing allowances for women workers for pregnancy and child-birth.

The magazine Mīḥnat usually published letters from factory and plant workers in every volume in a section entitled Maḥallardan khātlār (“Letters from places”). These letters were not limited just to the achievements and problems of the working processes in factories, but also covered issues concerning the active or passive work of the labour unions in them. For example, while a sugar worker was boasting about social clubs and an in-factory bulletin posted on walls promoting socialism in his factory, his colleague in the food industry was complaining that the labour union was not organizing cultural events at his place of work. Some workers wrote letters asking for the opening of a canteen in a factory or the building of medical centres and schools around factories located in the countryside. There were also letters of complaint concerning workers’ economic and social conditions, describing bad working conditions in factories, low salaries, and a lack of housing for workers.

Left: Workers playing cards while on the job, “Maḥallardan khātlār.” Mīḥnat, vol. 1927, issue 2 (45). Tashkent, 1927, p. 17 (BL 14499.tt.23)
Right: Unsafe working practices, “Maḥallardan khātlār.” Mīḥnat, vol. 1927, issue 2 (45). Tashkent, 1927, p. 17 (BL 14499.tt.23)

This is just a short description of one of the Turkic periodicals I have been working on. The main goal of my Chevening British Library Fellowship project is to explore and enhance the British Library’s Turkic-language collections. As a part of this project, I am creating a spreadsheet that covers every article in the Turkic periodicals held in the Library and am adding romanized and original script titles of articles and publications, published years, issues and subjects. This has made it possible to document the magazine Mīḥnat based on the data included in the spreadsheet. More than this, my aim is to show how classifying each article in these periodicals helps us to distinguish their different features at the same time contextualising them as part of a whole.

Further reading
Deutscher, Isaac., Soviet Trade Unions: Their Place in Soviet Labour Policy. Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1950
Gordon, Manya (1938), "Organized Labor under the Soviets", Foreign Affairs, 16 (3): 537–541

 

Akmal Bazarbaev, Chevening Fellow, British Library Asian and African Collections

 

In January 2019 the British Library began a new research project with the Centre for Art and Archaeology (CA&A) at the American Institute of Indian Studies in New Delhi, focused on our Visual Arts collections. The project has been funded through a grant from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the project is part of  the Rutherford Fund – a major UK Government investment launched in 2017 to promote international research collaboration.

The Vijayanagara Research Project examines both the Visual Arts collection of material (prints, drawings and photographs) related to Hampi Vijayanagara, a UNESCO World Heritage site in south India, including a recently acquired collection of modern architectural and topographical plans of the site produced by Dr George Michell and Dr John Fritz over a 30 year period. Sagera Kazmi, the Rutherford Fellow hosted by the British Library is researching and editing the metadata for the collections that will be made available later this year through Explore Archives and Manuscripts catalogue.

Sagera Kazmi with John Fritz (left) and George Michell (right) reviewing the original drawings in February 2019.

On 25th March, we hosted a a day long workshop to bring together colleagues and researchers from relevant institutions who work on Hindu temple architecture and sacred spaces in South Asia. Participants included Dr Purnima Mehta (Director General, AIIS), Dr Vandhana Sinha (Director, CA&A), Rizvi Syed (Librarian, CA&A), George Michell, John Fritz, Richard Blurton (British Museum), Nick Barnard (V&A), Crispin Branfoot (SOAS), as well as colleagues from the British Library. The aim of the workshop was to introduce the project and provide a forum to discuss how the VRP can have an impact on future academic research, digital humanities and cultural heritage management.

Sagera Kazmi introducing her research at the British Library's workshop. Also pictured, Luisa Elena Mengoni (Head of Asian and African Collections, BL), Alan Sudlow (Head of Research, BL), Crispin Branfoot (SOAS), and Nick Barnard (V&A).

John Falconer (British Library), Vandana Sinha (CA&A) and Purnima Mehta (AIIS) looking at photographic collections.

As part of the day, Sagera Kazmi, the Rutherford Fund Research Fellow who is currently being hosted by the British Library from the AIIS CA&A, presented material from the VRP collections, including some of those produced by Michell and Fritz. Work undertaken by Michell, Fritz and their teams since 1986, has resulted in over  pencil and ink drawings of the architectural features of numerous buildings and temples found at Hampi Vijayanagara which have recently been donated to the British Library. These important archaeological records provide a chronological continuation of the Library’s established historical collections related to this site and will act as an important resource for researchers in a variety of fields.

Pencil drawing showing the north elevation of the Raja Mahal, Chandragiri, scale 1:100. 

Wider collection items were also displayed during the workshop, including a plan of the site produced between 1780 and 1820. This map, part of the MacKenzie collection, shows the topography and fortifications found at the site during Colin MacKenzie’s survey of the Ceded Districts in the early nineteenth century. Other collection items included watercolour paintings of some of the buildings at the site and also photographs from the Archaeological Survey of India photograph series.

Map of Vijayanagara from the Mackenzie Collection, c.1780-1820. British Library, WD 2646.

 

Cam Sharp Jones, Sagera Kazmi and Malini Roy 

Why are these Haggadah manuscripts different from all other Hebrew manuscripts?
On all other nights we avoid spilling wine in our books,
But on this particular night, it is unavoidable.

Reading the Haggadah and pouring wine. Brother Haggadah, Spain, 14th century (Or 1404, f. 9r)

This year the Jewish festival of Passover starts on 19th April. Two years ago we talked about cleaning the house before Passover as illustrated in some of the British Library’s Haggadot, and this year we want to talk about “making a mess” at the Seder table.

Traditionally, on the eve of Passover Jewish families gather together for one or two nights for a special ritual meal called the Seder meaning ‘order’. The Haggadah is a service book which gives 15 steps to celebrate the Israelites' deliverance from Egyptian enslavement as described in the Book of Exodus.

The Haggadah text was originally part of the Hebrew daily prayer book, becoming an independent unit around the 13th century. Its oldest extant version can be found in the prayer book of Saadiah Gaon from the tenth century, and its earliest copy as a separate book dates from the turn of the thirteenth century, the so-called Birds’ Head Haggadah (Jerusalem, Israel Museum Ms. 180/57), which is also the first extant Haggadah in a separate volume to be illustrated. By the fourteenth century, the custom of illuminating the manuscripts of the Haggadah became widespread both in Sephardi as well as Ashkenazi lands.

The Haggadah is one of the most frequently decorated texts in Jewish practice, and the British Library’s Hebrew manuscript collection includes a range of beautifully illuminated Haggadot from around the 14th century.

The exquisite illuminations can be admired online and on display in the Treasures Gallery, but have you ever wondered about the stains in these invaluable manuscripts? Some of these codices were very expensive to produce, but, as these stains prove, their patrons apparently were not as vigilant as we are now about keeping them clean. Even nowadays, many Jewish families have stained books used every year at Passover. Why?

The first six steps of the Passover Seder. The participants are drinking wine and eating matzah, with books on the table. Leipnik Haggadah, Germany, 1740 (Sloane MS 3173, f.2r)

‘The cup of salvation will I raise, and I will call upon the name of God.’ (Psalms 116:13).

During the evenings of the Passover Seder, it is traditional to drink four cups of wine, and eat or gaze at different foods symbolising certain aspects of the enslavement of the Jews in Egypt and their Exodus. We will take you on a tour through all of the hazardous moments of the Seder, showing how stains and food crumbs become not only inevitable, but when practising the same ritual throughout generations, part of the tradition itself.

Imagine that you are seated at a table with an open Haggadah in front of you. And you pour some wine just like the men shown below in the fourteenth-century Hispano-Moresque Haggadah from Spain ...

Participants around the laid Seder table reciting the Haggadah and raising cups of wine. Hispano-Moresque Haggadah, Spain, late 13th century (Or 2737, f. 91r)

Wine is often considered a symbol of salvation in Jewish culture (and beyond). The four cups of wine one traditionally has to drink during the Seder are to celebrate Israel’s redemption from Egypt:

‘I am the Lord, I will free you from the labours of the Egyptians and deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements. And I will take you to be My people and I will be your God.’ (Ex. 6:6-7).

The four cups match the four verbs that describe how God delivered Israel from Egypt and will deliver Israel from exile at the End of Days: to free, to deliver, to redeem and to take. Of course, there are many more interpretations of the four cups, and the number four returns over and over and again during Seder.

The first cup of wine is used to make Kiddush, the blessing over wine (note the wine hazard!).

A man is holding a golden chalice. Ashkenazi Haggadah, Germany, 15th century (Add MS 14762, ff. 2v-3r)

After the first cup of wine, you might wash your hands, and sit down to eat some parsley, or other vegetable (karpas) depending on your tradition, dipped in salty water. Isn’t it just natural to shake the parsley a bit after dipping (food hazard)? Then, the middle matzah (unleavened bread) of the three stacked on the table is broken in half, with one half hidden for later (crumb hazard). The Seder ritual then continues with the retelling of the story of the Exodus. Some communities also have a tradition of raising the Seder plate or matzah stack over their heads (food & crumb hazard).

Holding the basket over the head. Barcelona Haggadah, Spain, 14th century (Add MS 14761, f. 28v)

The Seder continues, going through the Haggadah with the retelling of the Exodus story. When listing the Ten Plagues of Egypt, each participant of the Seder removes a drop of wine from their glass with their finger (wine hazard). Then you raise your second cup of wine, and after the recitation of some Psalms (Psalms 113-114), it is customary to drink at least half of the glass each time, and the glass should be filled to the top (wine hazard). Two glasses of wine on an almost empty stomach! It is not surprising that the numbers of stains in the manuscripts increase as the Seder progresses. After this, the participants eat matzah (crumb hazard). Then maror (bitter herb). Then sticky haroset (fruit and nut paste - food hazard) on its own and in crumbly matzah sandwiches (crumb hazard). And you have to turn the pages with those sticky fingers…

Pouring the second cup. Golden Haggadah, Spain, 14th century (Add MS 27210, ff. 27v-28r)

Blessings recited over the matzah and the maror at the beginning of the Seder meal. Ashkenazi Haggadah, Germany, 15th century (Add MS 14762, ff. 26v-27r)

After a ritual washing of the hands, a festive meal is served, followed by the previously hidden afikoman matzah (from the Greek epikomion meaning ’dessert’). After the banquet you have to have two more glasses of wine! The third cup after birkat ha-mazon, the grace after meal and the fourth cup after reciting some more Psalms (wine hazard).

The fourth cup is poured before reciting Psalm 79:6 which begins with Shefokh ḥamatkha (Pour out your wrath). Left: the initial word is missing in a 14th-century Ashkenazi Siddur (Add MS 26954, f. 124r). Right: the Shefokh in the Brother Haggadah, (Or 1404 f. 19v)

Now you can see why it is dangerous to have food and drink around books, and why the British Library’s Reading Room policy is so strict.

Thanks to the Hebrew Manuscript Digitisation Project and BL Labs, you can download one of the illuminated Haggadot from data.bl, print them out and make your own wine stains!
Hag sameaḥ!

Brother Haggadah, Spain, 14th century (Or 1404, f. 33r)

Miriam Lewis and Zsofia Buda

When writing an essay recently on the artist Sita Ram for a forthcoming exhibition in the Wallace Collection in London of great artists of the ‘Company’ period, I started rethinking to what extent he influenced Kolkata artists and indeed artists of other Indian schools. There is of course his obvious influence on the beginnings of the ‘picturesque’ school in Delhi asociated with Ghulam ‘Ali Khan and his circle, but Sita Ram’s own picturesque style, the culmination of the Murshidabad style with its loose, expressive brushwork, seemed to have had no followers (for Sita Ram see Losty 2015); and Kolkata painting thereafter reverted to a harder style exemplified by Shaikh Muhammad Amir and his circle.  Yet there is one artist, little known, who perhaps did work with Sita Ram and followed in his footsteps in producing picturesque topographical drawings with occasional forays into portraiture and natural history painting. This was an as yet anonymous artist who worked for Lieutenant-Colonel Walter Raleigh Gilbert (1785-1853).

Bridge of boats across the Ganga at Kanpur and Major Gilbert’s house. By Sita Ram, 1814-15.  BL Add.Or.4747

As Mildred Archer remarked in 1972, Gilbert and his wife Isabella belonged to a circle which was intensely interested in drawing and painting. Gilbert began his distinguished career in India with the 15th Bengal Native Infantry in 1801. From June 1812 to May 1813 he was A.D.C. to Sir George Nugent, the Commander-in-Chief, whose wife was an avid collector of paintings by Indian artists (see Add.Or.2593, Add.Or.2600, and the great volume of Agra architectural drawings, Stowe Or. 17).  On 1 June 1814 he married Isabella Ross, whose sister Eliza in the following year married Charles D’Oyly, the skilled amateur artist and later patron of Indian artists in Patna.  The sisters were cousins of Flora Hastings, wife of Lord Hastings, the Governor-General 1813-23, who were soon to embark on their long journey up-country, for which they employed Sita Ram to make a visual record of what they saw.  In 1814 Gilbert was barrack-master at Kanpur when Hastings and his party arrived in October. Indeed Sita Ram included, so the inscription tell us, a view of the Gilberts’ house above the River Ganga when depicting the newly erected bridge of boats to enable easier communication with the encampment of the new Nawab of Awadh, Ghazi al-Din Haidar, who had just arrived on the north bank of the river, which was part of Awadhi territory.

Gilbert and his wife then would certainly have been aware of Sita Ram and his place in the household of his wife’s cousin, and possibly even then they started commissioning their own paintings. Gilbert returned to Kolkata as Commandant of the Calcutta Native Militia, while Charles D’Oyly was the Collector there 1812-21. Besides owning a number of standard sets by Kolkata artists (still in private hands when examined by Mildred Archer), the Gilbert couple’s most interesting collection documented the next stage of their life when Gilbert was Commandant of the Ramgarh Battalion based on Hazaribagh (Jarkhand) from 1822 to 1828.  From 1825 to 1827, he was also Political Agent for the South West Frontier with head-quarters at Sambalpur (Odisha).  The BL has fifteen large drawings from this period, twelve acquired in the early 1960s (Add.Or.2514-25, see Archer 1972, no. 56), while three more were acquired privately by the Archers and entered the collection later (Add.Or.3949-3951). Seven other drawings from the set were acquired by the Victoria and Albert Museum (I.S. 10-1963 to I.S. 16-1963, see Archer 1992, no. 74).

The artist the Gilberts employed was trained in the Murshidabad style as practised at Kolkata, favouring the yellow and blue tonality often found in that style as opposed to the pink and brown favoured by Sita Ram. He must have been part of Sita Ram’s artistic circle in Kolkata and received the same sort of training in watercolour techniques.

The Gilberts’ bungalow at Sambalpur on the bank of the Mahanadi. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1825-27. BL Add.Or.2517

He had already mastered the picturesque style when he makes his first appearance and he uses the same techniques as Sita Ram, of soft, impressionistic brushwork and the tricks of aerial perspective. Unusually he sometimes employs a very low viewpoint showing off his grasp of recession, as in his view towards the Gilberts’ house in Sambalpur on the bank of the Mahanadi, and he uses the same viewpoint in his view of the fort at Sambalpur.

The fort at Sambalpur on the banks of the Mahanadi River. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1825-27. BL Add.Or.2519

Here the artist is demonstrating his grasp of aerial perspective.  Little now seems to remain of the fort or the palace within it. The Rajas of Sambalpur, Chauhan Rajputs, had been dispossessed by the Marathas in 1797, but the captive Raja Jait Singh was restored by the British in 1817 (see O’Malley 1909 for details of this period in Sambalpur).  His young son Maharaj Sai succeeded in 1820.  The last Raja died without an heir in 1849 and the state lapsed to the government.

The old palace in the fort at Sambalpur. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1825-27. BL Add.Or.2521.

Again in his view of the palace in the fort he uses a typical picturesque device, making use of a tree on the left as a repoussoir to throw the foreground into shadow.  Our artist also follows in Sita Ram’s footsteps in occasionally including his patron in his paintings.  Thus in his view of the palace above, we see Gilbert on a caparisoned elephant approaching the palace for an audience with the young raja and his advisers.

Temple of Maa Samaleswari in the fort, Sambalpur. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1825-27. BL Add.Or.2520

Sambalpur owes its name to Maa Samala or Samaleswari, a mother goddess of great sanctity in western Odisha and Chhatisgarh.   The temple has a square sanctum wherein the goddess resides and a vaulted arcade surrounding it for worshippers to perform pradakshina,features which are carefully depicted by our artist. Here he also includes features of village life – a cattle shelter, a little shrine with a worshipper, men working a well, and a sepoy of the Ramgarh Battalion standing guard outside a hut where other sepoys must have been stationed judging by the rifles stacked neatly outside.

Gilbert and other British officers being entertained with a nautch by the Raja of Sambalpur. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1825-27. BL Add.Or.2522

 Later in the series is a lively painting of Gilbert and his staff attending a nautch organised by the young Raja, who sits between his guests and his advisers all in European chairs. Our artist’s elongated figures like those of Sita Ram are derived of course from earlier Murshidabad painting, but in his familiarity with internal light sources in his paintings and in his treatment of the dark sky our artist comes close to Sita Ram’s work in his night scenes. 

Landscape with huge banyan tree beside a river. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1822-28. BL Add.Or.2525

He follows Sita Ram again in his penchant for making great trees the subject of his pictures. A great banyan tree beside a river with villagers bathing, unfortunately uninscribed, dominates another of our paintings.  It recalls in its massive and dominating bulk with small figures scurrying around beneath it Charles D’Oyly’s contemporary painting of the Bodhi tree at Bodh Gaya (Losty 1995, fig. 16) and its associated drawings done in 1824/25.  D’Oyly and his wife passed through Hazaribagh, Gilbert’s permanent station at this time, early in 1823 on their way overland to Patna (sketches in the D’Oyly album BL WD2060, Archer 1969, pp. 163-68) and must have stayed with Lady D’Oyly’s cousin Isabella, since D’Oyly drew her bungalow there. The D’Oylys would have been back again at Christmas 1824 when several drawings of the Bodh Gaya temple and its great tree were added to the album.  All in all it is very likely that our artist saw D’Oyly’s work in this field and was influenced by it.  A second great banyan tree near Surguja (Chhatisgarh) is the subject of another of his pictures (BL Add.Or.2523, Archer 1972, pl. 31), but this is more in Sita Ram’s manner and is less overwhelming. Surguja was another of the small tributary states on the borders of Orissa, Jarkhand and Chhatisgarh – the view of the palace there is in the V&A (I.S. 15-1963).

Gilbert’s munshi and diwan working in Gilbert’s bungalow.  By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1822-28.  BL Add.Or.3949

Occasional portraiture too comes within our artist’s purview, albeit less successfully, as in a double portrait of two men who appear to be his diwan and munshi, the men who looked after Gilbert’s official accounts and Persian language correspondence.  Another of his group portraits is of the Gilberts’ ayah and their table servants in red livery (BL Add.Or.2524, Archer 1972, pl. 31).

Gilbert’s race-horse, ‘Beggar Girl’, standing on the race course at Hazaribagh. By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1822-28.  BL Add.Or.3950

The natural world too could engage our artist’s attention, as in his depiction of Gilbert’s racehorse standing on the course at Hazaribagh. Like Sita Ram he is concerned with a naturalistic approach reproducing the animal’s volume and skin covering rather than anatomical details.  Gilbert was famous as a patron of the turf and could organise races anywhere he found himself posted.  It would seem certain that the walls of the Gilberts’ bungalows would have been covered with prints of famous racehorses posed against landscapes, by artists such as Stubbs and his successors, whose compositions Gilbert would have directed his artist to follow.  This is one of the earliest of the genre in Kolkata painting, and perhaps experimental, in that the right foreleg is wrongly positioned (the legs are often wrongly positioned in traditional Indian horse portraits too), a type that was later brought to perfection by Shaykh Muhammad Amir. 

Also in the BL collections are two other drawings of his racehorses which were given to James William Macnabb, son of another Ross cousin Jean Macnabb, when Gilbert was Military Member of the Supreme Council in Kolkata in 1852-53 (BL Add.Or.4305-06). On leaving Hazaribagh in 1828, he took a long leave until 1844.  When he returned to duty he was stationed in the north-west at Agra and Ferozepur and took part in both Sikh wars.  Since both these portraits of horses were done by a Kolkata artist but set against a slightly hilly landscape, he must have taken this artist up-country with him after his return to India.  He does not seem to have been based in Kolkata again until 1852.

A pink lotus (Nelumbo nucifera/family Nelumbanaceae).  By the ‘Gilbert artist’, 1822-28.  BL Add.Or.3951

Our artist could also turn his hand to botanical drawings as in his pink lotus. He shows the full plant including stem and root, with close-ups of leaf, flower, fruit and seed of a particularly fine specimen, but like Sita Ram before him he was more interested in endowing the flower and leaf with shade than with the niceties of botanical requirements. His drawing of a maize plant somewhat similarly arranged, showing the full plant with details of leaf, flower and cob, is in the V&A (I.S. 16-1963).

As so often with Indian artists, whether working under Indian or British patronage, we have no documentation to help with the identification of Gilbert’s artist, and his name never appears on any of his works. It seems likely that he was a junior colleague of Sita Ram venturing down the same ‘picturesque’ path, but Sita Ram was a special case whose extraordinary talent accorded him special treatment and recognition; but we still do not know where he was trained before he appears with the Hastings in 1814 and what happened to him after they had both left India by 1823.  The ‘Gilbert artist’ is even more anonymous and we only know of his existence for a tantalisingly brief glimpse from 1822 to 1828.

 

J.P. Losty, Lead Curator, Visual Arts (Emeritus)

 

References

Archer, M., British Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1969

Archer, M., Company Drawings in the India Office Library, HMSO, London, 1972

Archer, M., Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1992

Losty, J.P., ‘A Career in Art: Sir Charles D’Oyly’, in Under the Indian Sun: British Landscape Artists, ed. P. Rohatgi and P. Godrej, Bombay, 1995, pp. 81-106

Losty, J.P., Sita Ram: Picturesque Views of India – Lord Hastings’s Journey from Kolkata to the Punjab, 1814-15, Roli Books, New Delhi, 2015

O’Malley, L.S.S., District Gazetteers of British India – Sambalpur, Calcutta, 1909

 

Today's post is by guest blogger Xue Zhang, PhD candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University. Xue Zhang is working on Qing China’s geographical knowledge of Xinjiang in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a special interest in cartography. Here she writes about an important discovery in the British Library India Office Records Map collection

In 1735, Jean-Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743) thrilled European readers with the news that the Jesuits had made impressive progress in China. His colleagues used a map of Peking to impress the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1772) with the accuracy of the European methods and successfully persuaded him to commission the Jesuits to complete a national map of which was to be of vast importance to the empire. In the eighteenth century, a considerable number of Jesuit cartographers worked for the Qing court, and their most important works included the three atlases they presented to the Kangxi, Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735), and Qianlong (r. 1735-1796) emperors.

Noosy Hada off the Coast of the Arctic Ocean (BL IOR/X/3265)

The Jesuit atlas (IOR/X/3265) initially catalogued by the British Library as “Chinese roll maps” is a revision of the Yongzheng Atlas (henceforth the BL edition). A Catalogue of Manuscript and Printed Reports, Field Books, Memoirs, Maps, etc. of the Indian Surveys Deposited in the Map Room of the India Office refers to it as “A Chinese map of the greater part of Asia and part of European Russia,” and includes a detailed entry. As with the Kangxi and Qianlong Atlases, the scope of the Yongzheng Atlas reaches beyond the territories under Qing rule. The northernmost toponym of the BL edition is Noosy Hada off the Russian coast of the Arctic Ocean, and the southmost toponym is the Great Tortoise Shell Shoal ( Da daimao zhou) at the tip of today’s Hainan Island. The atlas extends west to the Red Sea, and east to Gioi Ri li Omo in Russia. Therefore, it is more accurate to regard it as a map of Asia than of the Qing empire.

The Great Tortoise Shell Shoal in the Pacific Ocean (BL IOR/X/3265)

In 1708-1718, under the patronage of the Kangxi emperor, the Jesuits conducted comprehensive surveys of Qing territories, measuring the longitudes and latitudes of 641 sites. Synthesizing their own data and other sources, the Jesuits produced the Kangxi Atlas. In 1756, 1759, and 1772, the Qianlong emperor, Kangxi’s grandson, had the Jesuits map Xinjiang, the former territory of the Zunghars that the Qing had newly acquired. The earliest edition of the Yongzheng Atlas was completed no later than 1726, while the BL edition reflects the territorial changes up through 1760. For most Qing territories, the BL edition consults the results of the land surveys conducted in 1708-1718, 1756, and 1759. For a few borderlands, such as Tibet, and the areas beyond Qing control, the Jesuit cartographers referred to Qing envoys’ records and other materials.

The BL edition of the Yongzheng Atlas is prefaced by two Qianlong’s poems in Chinese and Manchu, which are dated 1756 and 1760. The same poems preface the Qianlong Atlas (BL IOR/X/3265)


The Yongzheng Atlas is characterized by its hybrid style, which distinguishes it from the Kangxi and Qianlong Atlases, which use latitude-longitude coordinates. The BL edition is composed of ten rows of various lengths, and each row is divided into squares of 2.5 inches, by equidistant horizontal and vertical lines. The vertical lines represent meridians with indicators, such as “east one” and “west one,” on the bottom. The prime meridian is based at the Shuntian prefecture, the capital area of the empire. The horizontal lines resemble latitudes but do not note any degree. The coordinates of the Yongzheng Atlas are a hybrid of the latitude-longitude system and the conventional Chinese method of indicating the distance by a network of square grids. The Kangxi and Qianlong Atlases adopt curves, and thus are known as “curved-grid maps” (xiege ditu) in the Qing documents, while the Yongzheng Atlas, featuring straight lines, is referred to as a “rectangular-grid map” (fangge ditu).

The meridian crosses the Shuntian prefecture (In red)

Imperial cartographers updated the Yongzheng Atlas throughout the eighteenth century to make sure that it reflected the latest territorial changes and cartographical practices, and thus left multiple versions. The currently known nine editions of the Yongzheng Atlas are preserved in five institutions. The xylographic edition in the Chinese Academy of Sciences was printed no later than 1728. The xylographic print and manuscript in the First Historical Archives can be dated to 1729. The two colored xylographic editions in the Palace Museum in Beijing were printed respectively around 1725 and 1729. One manuscript edition in the museum was drawn before 1727, while the other was after 1730. The editions in the National Library of China and the British Library were produced between 1759 and 1761.

In 1825, John Reeves (1774-1865), a British tea merchant in Canton, presented the BL edition of the Yongzheng Atlas to the library of the East India Company in London. During his stay in Canton from 1812 to 1831, Reeves acquired an extensive collection of the specimens and drawings of exotic flora and fauna and his collection ended up in the British Museum’s natural history department. William Huttmann’s report to the Council of the Royal Geographical Society in 1844 briefly described the BL edition. Nevertheless, he mistook the revision of the Yongzheng Atlas for the Qianlong Atlas, which also included depictions of Inner Asian territories gained by the Qing in the 1750. Huttmann claimed that he had translated all the Manchu toponyms and a considerable portion of the Chinese ones in this atlas on behalf of the East India Company.

The marginalia in the lower left corner of the third row.

In his magnum opus Science and Civilisation in China, Joseph Needham argued that the Chinese grid tradition was another form of quantitative cartography, which continued to prosper when the European tradition of quantitative mapmaking suffered a great degeneration in the medieval millennium. The Yongzheng Atlas integrates two traditions, pioneering a series of nineteenth-century maps, in which the Chinese rectangular grid system and the latitude-longitude coordinates coexisted.

Further Reading:

A Catalogue of Manuscript and Printed Reports, Field Books, Memoirs, Maps, etc. of the Indian Surveys Deposited in the Map Room of the India Office. London: W. H. Allen & Co, 1878.

Cams, Mario. Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c.1685-1735). Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Hostetler, Laura. Qing Colonial Enterprise: Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Millward, James. “Coming onto the Map: ‘Western Regions’ Geography and Cartographic Nomenclature in the Making of Chinese Empire in Xinjiang.” Late Imperial China 20 (1999): 61-98.

Needham, Joseph. Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth, vol. 3 of Science and Civilisation in China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Perdue, Peter, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement: Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian Empires in Early Modern Central Eurasia.” The International History Review 20 (1998): 263-86.

 

Xue Zhang, PhD candidate, Department of East Asian Studies, Princeton University

Over 30,000 digital images of Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakarta are now fully accessible online through the British Library's Digitised Manuscripts website. The project, generously supported by Mr S P Lohia, has digitised 75 Javanese manuscripts held in the British Library from the collections of John Crawfurd and Colin Mackenzie, who both served in Java under Thomas Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor from 1811 to 1816. The manuscripts had been identified by historians Peter Carey and Merle Ricklefs as having been taken from the Kraton (palace) of Yogyakarta following a British attack in June 1812, when Crawfurd was Resident of Yogyakarta and Mackenzie was Chief Engineer of the British army in Java.

Serat Jaya Lengkara Wulang, copied in Yogyakarta, 1803. British Library, MSS Jav 24, ff. 2v-3r

The completion of the digitisation project was celebrated with an impressive ceremony at the Kraton of Yogyakarta on 7 March, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the accession to the throne of Sultan Hamengku Buwono X. The British Ambassador to Indonesia, Moazzam Malik, presented complete sets of digital images of the 75 manuscripts to Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono X, and also to the head of the National Library of Indonesia Mohd. Syarif Bando, and the head of the Libraries and Archives Service of Yogyakarta, Monika Nur Lastiyani. The digitised manuscripts will eventually also be accessible through the Kraton Jogja website.

Ambassador Moazzam Malik presenting to Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwomo X the set of digital images of 75 Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakarta in the British Library, 7 March 2019

The celebrations also included a two-day International Symposium on Javanese Studies and Manuscripts of Keraton Yogyakarta from 5-6 March 2019, organised by Gusti Kanjeng Ratu Hayu, the fourth daughter of Sri Sultan.  Princess Hayu is an IT specialist, and this was evident in the impressive digital presentation and styling of the Symposium, with the electronic submission of audience questions via an app. 

Princess Hayu and her youngest sister Princess Bendoro answer audience questions posted electronically, in the session on ‘The Millenial Palace: Reconstructing Tradition in the Modern Era’ (Kraton Milenial: rekonstruksi tradisi dalam era kekinian), at the International Symposium on Javanese Culture and Manuscripts, Yogyakarta, 6 March 2019.

In her opening speech to the Symposium, Princess Hayu noted that even after the calamity of June 1812 - remembered in Yogyakarta as Geger Sepehi, the attack of the Sepoys, after the Indian troops commanded by the British - the Kraton had never ceased to be a centre for the production and reproduction of knowledge. Nevertheless, with the loss of the royal library there had been a definite break in the chain of transmission of knowledge (ada mata rantai yang terputus).

Responding to Princess Hayu's call for the recovery of the 'missing links' of traditional learning from the manuscripts, four of the 16 papers presented at the Symposium were based on newly-digitised manuscripts from the British Library. Ghis Nggar Dwiatmojo of Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta delved into a royal Yogyakarta primbon (divination) manuscript (Add. 12311) on palintangan (astrology), palindhon (earthquakes) and pakedutan (portentous tingling of the nerve-ends), looking specifically at predictions linked to earthquakes and eclipses. This paper was paired with Ahmad Arif's presentation, collating similar fruits of local wisdom born of collective memories of natural disasters from throughout the Indonesian archipelago.  Rudy Wiratama (shown below) of Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM) found evidence in two manuscripts from the Mackenzie collection, MSS Jav 44 and MSS Jav 62, for the popularity of wayang gedhog - shadow-puppet plays based on the cycle of tales about Prince Panji - at the court of Yogyakarta before 1812. Stefanus K. Setiawan, also from UGM, had completely transliterated the beautiful copy of Jaya Lengkara Wulang pictured above (MSS Jav 24) for his undergraduate dissertatation, and was continuing his study of this manuscript for his masters degree; while Hazmirullah, from Universitas Padjajaran, Bandung, discussed a Malay version of judicial regulations issued by Raffles in Java (MSS Eur D742/1, ff. 155-166).

Rudy Wiratama of UGM showing the digitised wayang gedhog manuscript MSS Jav 44 used in his research on wayang performance at the court of Yogyakarta in the late 18th century.

The manuscripts were not only subjects of academic research, but also bore fruit in performance. The Symposium was opened with the Beksan Jebeng, a dance involving a shield-bow, while the ceremony at the Kraton on 7 March was heralded by an impressive performance of the Beksan Lawung Ageng, a martial dance accompanied by the venerable 18th-century gamelan Kiai Kanjeng Guntursari. As explained by Princess Hayu’s husband Prince Notonegoro to Ambassador Malik, both dances - creations of the first sultan of Yogyakarta, Hamengku Buwana I (r.1756-1804) - were being staged in their original form for the first time in two centuries, on the basis of information only now reaccessble through the digitised manuscripts.

Performance of Beksan Lawung Ageng at the palace of Yogyakarta, 7 March 2019

  
Left, Beksan jebeng text (Add. 12325, f. 26v); right, Beksan Lawung text (MSS Jav 4, f. 177r)

The evening also celebrated the opening of an exhibition at the Kraton of manuscripts from Yogyakarta collections, curated by Fajar Wijanarko of the Sonobudoyo Museum. Fajar noted that the earliest dated manuscript copied after 1812 now found in the Kraton library is the beautifully illuminated first volume of the Babad Ngayogyakarta, written in 1817.

Babad Ngoyogyakarta, vol. 1, covering the reigns of Hamengku Buwono I to Hamengku Buwono III, dated 1817, on display in the Kraton exhibition. Widyo Budoyo, W78/A27

 
(Left) royal librarian Romo Rinto showing a visitor to the Kraton exhibition a manuscript of Babad Ngoyogyakarta, covering the reigns of Hamengku Buwono III to Hamengku Buwono IV, dated 1854, with (right) a detail of the fine illumination. Widyo Budoyo, W84/A22

Back in London, alongside events marking Indonesia's role as Market Focus Country at the London Book Fair (12-14 March 2019), a small display of the Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakarta was launched in the Treasures exhibition gallery in the British Library. At a talk at the British Library on 12 March entitled Beauty and History: Javanese manuscripts from Yogyakarta, I was joined by maestro Ki Sujarwo Joko Prehatin, who brought the manuscripts to life in song (macapat). Javanese literature is traditionally written in verse, according to set metres, and was designed to be sung aloud to an audience.  To listen to mas Jarwo singing from the Babad bedhah ing Ngayogyakarta by Pangeran Arya Panular, describing the British attack on Yogyakarta (Add 12330, f. 43v), click here (with thanks to Mariska Adamson for this recording).

 
Ki Sujarwo Joko Prehatin, singing (menembang) the texts of Javanese manuscripts, at the British Library, 12 March 2019.

After the British attack on the Kraton of Yogyakarta in 1812, only three manuscripts were left in the royal library: a copy of the Qur'an copied in 1797, a manuscript of Serat Suryaraja written in 1774, and a copy of Arjunwiwaha dated 1778 (Carey 1980: 13 n. 11). During the course of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the palace scriptorium was kept busy with the creation of new literary works as well as the re-copying of classics, and a recent catalogue lists 700 manuscripts now held in the Widyo Budoyo and Krido Mardowo royal libraries (Lindsay, Soetanto & Feinstein 1994: xi-xii). Following the presentation of the digital copies of the Yogyakarta manuscripts from the British Library, Princess Bendoro informed me that Sri Sultan Hamengku Buwono X has decided that rather than printing out paper copies from the digital files, all 75 manuscripts will be recopied again by hand in the Kraton, in a continuation of the centuries-old tradition of inscribing knowledge in the courts of Java.

References

Carey, P. B. R. (ed.), The archive of Yogyakarta.  Volume I.  Documents relating to politics and internal court affairs.  Oxford: published for the British Academy by Oxford University Press, 1980.
Jennifer Lindsay, R. M. Soetanto and Alan Feinstein. Katalog induk naskah-naskah Nusantara.  Jilid 2.  Kraton Yogyakarta.  Jakarta: Yayasan Obor, 1994.
Fajar Wijanarko, Yogyakarta dalam sastra sejarah: catatan kuratorial. In: Pameran naskah Kraton Jogja: merangkai jejak peradaban nagari Ngayogykarta Hadiningrat, 7 Maret-7 April 2019 (Yogyakarta: Karaton Ngayogyakarta Hadiningrat, 2019); pp. 8-14.

Annabel Teh Gallop, Lead Curator, Southeast Asia

 

This guest post by Katherine Butler Schofield houses the illustrations for the podcast “A Bloody Difficult Woman: Mayalee Dancing Girl vs. The East India Company” produced by Chris Elcombe. It was part of a series of presentations at the British Library in 2018 for Katherine’s British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship programme “Histories of the Ephemeral: Writing on Music in Late Mughal India.” Special thanks to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, for permission to reproduce the detail below from MS 380 of the courtesans’ kite dance.

Loading salt on the new British leases at Sambhar Lake, Jaipur state, 1870s (BL Photo 355/1(60)

I was going through the East India Company’s Foreign Department Proceedings Index, Volume 1840–49 K–Z, in the National Archives of India, when I first found her: “Pension to Meyalee[1], dancing-girl, from Jeypore share of Sambhur lake funds.” It was my first foray into the official records of British colonial rule in India, and I was there to see if I could find any trace of the Indian singers and dancers that we know, from paintings and travel writings of the time, filled the long nights and dreams of many an East India Company man in the early decades of the nineteenth century. So far I’d had little luck. And yet here she was—Mayalee Dancing Girl. But not just Mayalee: a whole set of musicians, dancers and other performers named as “pensioners” of the salt revenues of Sambhar lake in eastern Rajasthan.

“Statement of pensions and endowments paid from Sambhur Treasury on account of the Jyepoor State from 1 January to 30 June 1839.” Section 2: cash payments monthly and on account of festivals (IOR Board of Control General Records, India Political Department, October 1838–1840)

For a brief period between 1835 and 1842, the East India Company sequestered the revenue and salt factories of the Sambhar salt lake that rightfully belonged to the independent Rajput states of Jaipur and Jodhpur. In 1818, faced with the Company’s overwhelming military might, the major Rajput states signed a treaty in which the British offered them political and military “protection” in exchange for heavy cash tribute. By the early 1830s, Jaipur and Jodhpur were swimming in debt and refusing to cooperate with the British. So, from 1835 until 1842, the Company seized the lake at Sambhar, which is still one of India’s largest commercial sources of salt.

  Timeline

Imperial Gazetteer of India , 1909 ed., vol. 26, Atlas: detail of “Rajputana”, p. 34

The Sambhar lake accounts here in the British Library include long lists of institutions and individuals who had historical rights in the salt revenues of Sambhar, in salt as well as cash. And among the individual recipients of both cash and salt was a courtesan, or “dancing girl”, who was clearly more important than all the other performers at Sambhar. Her name was Mayalee.

What does Mayalee’s appearance in the Company’s official records tell us about interactions between the British colonial state and the Indians whose lives they were increasingly encroaching upon during the 1830s and 40s? In this blogpost, which accompanies my podcast on the Sambhar lake affair, I will look more generally at where musicians and dancers appear in the official records of the East India Company held in the India Office collections of the British Library, and in the National Archives of India.

Indian musicians and dancers appear in official colonial records only rarely, and when they do, what they have to tell us tends not to be about music. Instead, performers’ appearances in the official records open up unusual windows onto much wider concerns.

C A Bayly once wrote that, by the mid nineteenth century (Empire and Information (CUP, 1997), p. 55):

The British were able…to penetrate and control the upper level of networks of runners and newsletter writers with relative ease…yet they excluded themselves from affective and patrimonial knowledges …British understanding, revealingly, was weakest in regard to music and dance [etc.]…though such concerns are near the heart of any civilization.

Bayly’s statement is not necessarily true of individuals such as Sophia Plowden and her fellow-travellers. But it does seem to have been true of the official colonial state. In the 1830s and 40s, the cultural heartlands of North India’s elite musical traditions remained the Mughal court in Delhi and the autonomous princely states of Lucknow, Rajasthan, Gwalior, etc.—though we mustn’t forget there was thriving demand for these arts in the colonial port cities of Calcutta and Bombay, too. An overview of the indexes to the records of the Company’s dealings with the autonomous states c.1830–58 is telling[2]. It indicates that the colonial state was largely uninterested in performing artists; except when they were:

• perpetrators or victims of crime or disorder, or otherwise involved in court cases;
• scandalously mixed up in state politics;
• included as a budget or expenditure line in the household accounts of deposed rulers who were now Company pensioners; or
• beneficiaries of wills, pensions, land grants, or other forms of disbursements—such as salt in the case of Sambhar.

Criminal and civil cases in which performers faced Company judicial proceedings overwhelmingly seem to have concerned courtesans. This suggests just how wealthy and important courtesans like Mayalee were in the early nineteenth century, but also the general distrust with which they were viewed for their apparently mercenary motives, as well as their physical vulnerability. The British Library’s incomplete set of newsletters (akhbārāt) from Delhi c.1810–30 (Add. 24,038, Add. 23,148–9, Add. 22,624) tell us for example that, on 11 May 1830, the Resident of Delhi, Francis Hawkins (Pernau and Yunus Jaffrey, p.231):

went to the Shish Mahal [in the palace] and held the session of the appeal court. He heard the case of the Raja of Kishangarh and Rasiya, the tawai’f. [The Raja claimed Rs 18,000 from Rasiya and she refused to pay. He] said that he had given her Rs 1,000 and a shawl in advance and that she had no claim to further payment.

Two courtesans perform the “kite” dance. Plowden Album. Lucknow, 1787–8
© Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, MS 380. All Rights Reserved

Numerous reports of highway robbery and even murder indicate how vulnerable tawā’ifs were to attack on the bandit-infested roads of Upper India. As itinerant professionals who moved from patron to patron carrying plentiful jewels and cash, they were clearly at risk even when they travelled together in large troupes[3].

Certain groups and individual performers became targets of Company suppression for their supposedly malignant interference in the political affairs of autonomous states. The Company’s most famous intervention was in Lucknow in 1848, when the Resident, Colonel Richmond, forced the last Nawab of Awadh, Wajid ‘Ali Shah, to stop appointing “Singers and other improper persons” to government positions, and made him send his notorious favourite, the sitār-player Ghulam Raza, into exile because of his “evil” influence[4]. But of particular relevance to Jodhpur and Jaipur in the 1830s was the Company’s attempt to destroy the power of the Rajput rulers’ customary bards and praise singers, the Bhatts and Charans, whom the British saw as “rapacious” “extortionists” with far too much sway over Rajput politics (see BL MSS Eur D814. Ludlow papers, c.1855).

Bhatt. From James Skinner's Tashrīh al-Aqwām, Delhi, 1825 (BL Add. 27,255, f. 129v)

In this case, the British intended to take down these ritual specialists. Elsewhere, the loss of musicians’ livelihoods was probably unintended, though still devastating. What happened to the Nawab Nazim of Murshidabad’s department of entertainment in 1773 is salutary. Music departments existed as bureaucratic units of most princely states long before the British, e.g. the gunijān-khāna or “house of virtuosos” in Jaipur, and the arbāb-i nishāt or “department of entertainment” in Mughal Delhi, Murshidabad, and Hyderabad. They sometimes also appear in Company records as lines in the household accounts of recently deposed rulers, including those for the Nazim of Murshidabad (deposed 1765), which remained a major centre of Mughal musical culture until the 1770s.

Besya. The accompanying description of the classes of courtesan includes the bhagtans of the Rajput courts (BL Add. 27,255, f. 137v)

In 1773, the British decided to slash the Nazim’s household expenditure. The young official placed in charge of this process sent a straitened budget back to Calcutta. All department budgets were slightly reduced—except one, which had a swingeing cut from 1393 rupees per annum to just 16: the budget of the “Arbab Neshat Musicians”[5]. With one pen stroke, a culturally illiterate accountant who considered music to be an unnecessary frippery for a deposed Nazim may have destroyed Murshidabad as a musical centre.

Musicians’ livelihoods were thus directly, and often harshly, affected by the Company’s interference, both intentional and unintentional, in older Indian modes of compensation for cultural labour. So what then of charitable grants and pensions: in cash, land, or things the British saw as valuable commodities, like salt? Company officials were clearly not at all averse to meddling in the customary and economic practices of autonomous states when they felt it was warranted, especially where their revenue maximisation was at stake. And as Roy Moxham has observed (The Great Hedge of India. Constable, 2001), where salt revenues were concerned, the Company was insatiably greedy.  But the appearance of Mayalee dancing girl and her colleagues within the salt-revenue records of the Sambhar lake affair—the subject of my next book—also reveals that the Company never had it all their own way.

Mayalee the dancing girl refused point blank to obey the British instruction to accept cash in lieu of the salt stipend that was her traditional due. And Jaipur and Jodhpur defied the Company in order to pay her in salt. To find out why—and what all this meant for Sambhar, Jaipur, Jodhpur, and the Company—you will have to listen to the podcast!

The images in this blogpost accompany the podcast and will help guide your imagination as I explore what the Company records inadvertently reveal about the lives and customs of all those who worked and ate the salt of Jaipur and Jodhpur, through the jarring misunderstandings and unintended consequences of East India Company interference in the operations of Sambhar salt lake.

Portrait of Jagat Singh II. Jaipur, 1810–15 (BL Add. Or. 5132)

Photograph of Ram Singh II. Jaipur, 1870s (BL Photo 127/(8))

Rag Hindol; Krishna surrounded by female musicians. Jaipur, c.1850 (BL Add. Or. 2856)

Engraving of Lieut. Col. John Ludlow, 6^th Bengal Native Infantry (BL P1538)

Collecting salt at Sambhar Lake, Jaipur state, 1870s (BL Photo 355/1(58))

With full credits and thanks on the podcast website

Katherine Butler Schofield, King's College London

---

[1] Her name is variously spelled Meyalee, Myalee and Mayalee in the accounts.
[2] The records of the East India Company’s dealings with the autonomous states are found in the Foreign Consultations and Proceedings in the National Archives of India, and the General Correspondence [E] and Board of Control General Records [F] files of the India Office records at the British Library.
[3] Tr. Margrit Pernau and Yunus Jaffrey, Information and the Public Sphere (OUP, 2009), pp. 69, 165, 231, 253–4.
[4] National Archives of India, Foreign Political Consultations (NAI FCP) 8 Jul 1848.
[5] NAI FCP 25 Jan 1773.

In 2015 Roly Keating, Chief Executive of the British Library, launched Living Knowledge,  a vision for the future of the British Library, aiming to make our intellectual heritage accessible to everyone for research, inspiration and enjoyment. Living Knowledge also sets out to make the British Library the most open, creative and innovative institution of its kind in the world. In order to achieve these targets, the Library announced a series of new values to guide its staff in this direction, one of the most important being ‘putting users at the heart of everything we do’.

Curators for different collection areas, along with all other members of staff, have taken this new mission seriously. We are aware that the extensive and rich source materials in our collections are of no use unless our users can access them, or at least become aware of their existence. In the Asian and African Collections, curators have been encouraged to clear backlogs and to make source material in their collections searchable online.

Drawer of Vietnamese catalogue cards, filed by name of author, in the Asian and African Studies Reading Room in the British Library at St Pancras in London

The Online Computer Library Centre (OCLC), the first online library catalogue, was launched at Ohio University in August 1971. Although this seminal event occurred almost half a century ago, it was a long time before online cataloguing was adopted by institutions worldwide. Even into the 1980s and 1990s, some collections were still being catalogued manually, often due to issues relating to the transliteration of non-Roman scripts and the use of diacritics. The cataloguing of the Vietnamese collection at the British Library fits into this category perfectly, due to problems with inputting the double diacritics needed for Vietnamese. When I took up my post as curator for Vietnamese at the British Library in 2005, most of the printed materials in our collection were still catalogued using old-fashioned catalogue cards, and hardly anything was searchable online. One of my major tasks has been to retroconvert the Vietnamese card catalogue onto the British Library’s online catalogue, and that task is now virtually complete.

Vietnamese book, previously only catalogued on cards (top right), which has now been recatalogued online (bottom right).

This mammoth project was conducted in two phases. Phase one started in around 2007, two years after I took up my post. I called up almost every single Vietnamese printed book to physically check that it was the correct one before I created an online record. This process was slow but was more likely to lead to fewer mistakes, such as mismatches between shelfmarks and items, or duplications of records. It took me a long while, until in October 2014, I was able report with some satisfaction that the retroconversion of the Vietnamese printed collection had been completed. However, the satisfaction of this achievement turned out to be rather short-lived as, not long afterwards, in June 2016, during office relocation moves one of my colleagues found four cardboard boxes brim-full of Vietnamese catalogue card in her area. When I randomly checked some cards to see whether they had been retro-converted in the first phase, none of them came up on an search on the British Library’s online catalogue Explore, meaning that all these cards also had to be recatalogued online.

One of the boxes of Vietnamese catalogue cards discovered in 2016

Hence my second phase of retroconversion began in August 2016. Judging from the amount of cards in those four boxes, which seemed to number well over 10,000, I couldn’t afford to use the same very thorough method for cataloguing as I had done in the previous phase. I therefore decided to rely on the bibliographic record appearing on each card as the major source for recataloguing, and only if there were serious doubts or queries would I call up the physical item in question to check. This method helped to speed up the cataloguing process. Fortunately, a large proportion of cards turned out to be duplicates and could be discarded; in the end, only just over 2,400 catalogue cards had to be retroconverted.  During this second phase of retroconversion, I found that issues certainly arose from not having physically seen all the items before creating new online records. There were sometimes mismatches between shelfmarks and items, or different items shared the same shelfmarks. These problems had to be resolved, for otherwise they would have caused confusion and frustration for users when calling up items for consultation.

An example of a cataloguing problem: the online catalogue gives a different title with the same shelfmark

Finally, I can now at last report that all our old Vietnamese catalogue cards, except for just a few problematic ones, have been retroconverted and are searchable online through Explore. Together with new acquisitions, there are now more than 10,900 titles in the Vietnamese collection ready for our readers.  I very much hope that the completion of this project will enable our readers to access more readily source material in Vietnamese in the British Library, either for research or enjoyment, as set in our Living Knowledge mission statement.

Dr Sud Chonchirdsin at work cataloguing Vietnamese printed books

Further reading:

Vietnam - British Library collection guide

Sud Chonchirdsin
Curator for Vietnamese