Revisiting The Delhi Durbar Exhibition of 1903 at Qudsia Bagh

The Great Exhibition, London, 1851

The regional emphasis of earlier exhibitions, such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London—housed within the grand glass pavilion at Hyde Park—was expressed through a series of ‘courts,’ each styled to represent a different region and competing in splendour and display. With performers cast as village artisans, the exhibition sought to construct an image of India that was at once authentic and fantastical. Celebrated by the public as a ‘tastemaking’ enterprise, it countered the relentless march of industrial modernity by staging a revivalist vision centred on rural craft traditions.

These objects, somewhat haphazardly gathered from different corners of the subcontinent became the foundational collections of the South Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and the East India Company’s India Museum in Leadenhall Street. In India, many art schools were established in the years following this exhibition, with the professed desire of elevating the minds and skills of craftspeople in the region. These schools feature more prominently in the 1903 Durbar exhibition, where they are front and centre of the Imperial craft revival project.

Universal Exhibition, Paris,1889

In the meantime, the art schools struggled to establish themselves, and grand Imperial plans to save the Indian art traditions were waylaid by financial and political imperatives. In Paris, a world fair was organised in 1889 to mark the hundredth anniversary of the French Revolution. The British Indian Section received no funding from the British Government who had boycotted the event in solidarity with the monarchy. In response, a private committee stepped up to sponsor the pavilion, which ended up primarily showcasing the interests of traders and manufacturers from both Britain and India. Each group maintained separate areas within the pavilion, making commercial gain the principal focus rather than cultural diplomacy or artistic exchange. Notably, Mohandas Gandhi, a young barrister-in-training in London at the time, visited the Paris world fair, encountering first-hand the contestations between industrial manufacturing and traditional crafts, and the charged debates between the colonial centre and the colonies.

Indian Art Exhibition, Delhi,1903

The exhibition was led by the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, and organised by George Watt, a botanist who had previously managed exhibitions in Calcutta (1883) and London (1886). He was supported by Percy Brown, Principal of the Mayo School of Art in Lahore, who helped coordinate a wide network of colonial officials. Museum curators, art school principals, District Officers, and Tahsildars were given the task of collecting traditional artefacts and overseeing the production of new ones. These new items had to avoid what officials saw as the ‘degrading’ effects of modernisation. The rulers of the Princely States also played a key role in supporting the exhibition. Some of the objects were made by artists trained in art schools, often from elite backgrounds, while others were created by traditional craftspersons from hereditary communities. The official catalogue focused on showcasing these craftspersons at work, using illustrations by Percy Brown. This interest in the ‘authentic’ rural artisan was a common theme in exhibitions from the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 to the Delhi Durbar of 1903. .

The Order of Things

The exhibition’s pavilion was designed in the Indo-Saracenic style—an architectural mode rooted in Mughal traditions and later reimagined by British architects such as Robert Chisholm, who fused diverse regional and religious elements. This hybrid style had already been employed in earlier India pavilions at international exhibitions. The façade of the structure featured tiles crafted by potters from Lahore, Multan, and Jaipur, complemented by frescoes executed by students of the Lahore Art School. Within the pavilion, Watt and Brown developed an elaborate classificatory scheme, organising the interior into carefully delineated sections to correspond with their system of categorisation.

The organisers hoped that these categories would become the dominant system for understanding Indian art, updating and expanding the work done by George Birdwood in his widely referenced publication ‘Industrial Arts of India’ (1880), which had so far established the collecting and organising logic for museums and collectors.

Objects were organised by medium: metal, stone, glass, wood, ivory, lac, textiles, embroidery, carpets; a total of ten categories, with the final category being Fine Arts. The accompanying catalogue detailed each medium, providing fascinating insight into the material culture of the time, while also betraying the forced artifice of many of the objects displayed, which were designed and supervised by the organisers to meet their standards of authenticity and quality. Within each category, hierarchies were imposed, and the objects judged to be of the highest quality were strategically positioned near the Fine Arts section, reinforcing a sense of progression and artistic refinement.

New Indian Art – Abanindranath Tagore

In the painting section the medal for second place went to the young Abanindranath Tagore, for his painting The last days of Shah Jehan which was classified under the ‘Muhammedan Painting’ section of the Fine Arts Category. He had eschewed his academic, art school training in painting, to turn to the Mughal miniature traditions, Ajanta paintings and Japanese inspired wash style of water colours. This award legitimised this new style, and Tagore went on to train his students at the Calcutta art college in this manner of painting, leading to the emergence of the widely prolific Bengal School of Art. For all the changes that the exhibition heralded, it is worth noting that no award for the first prize was given in the painting category. This was a pointed message from the organising committee on the perceived shortcomings of Fine Arts in India.

Art of Ornament – The Sidi Saiyyed Jaali

Another highlight of the exhibition, awarded a first prize, was the intricately reproduced semi-circular screen from the Sidi Saiyyed Mosque in Ahmedabad. The motif of the tree, and the ornamental jaali or lattice surrounding it had been copied and carved in wood by the students of Principal Cecil Burns of the Sir J. J. School of art in Bombay and was placed in one of the many special nooks that were dispersed across the exhibition pavilion. These nooks, named after the regions they represented exemplified the ‘adaptability of the various better-known styles of Indian Art, to modern household furnishing and architectural decoration’. And while many of these richly produced objects ended up in museums, the Sidi Saiyyed jaali became a recognisable feature of Indian architecture. While placed adjacent to the Fine Arts sections, these arts would retain their somewhat diminutive ‘decorative’ association, and artists would be allowed only limited and controlled access to the status of the higher arts.

The Order of Business

While the exhibition contributed in many ways to the development of the arts the exhibitions were fundamentally a commercial enterprise, with the Main Sale Gallery—with objects ranging from metal ware to Fine Art—as the central proposition. As Saloni Mathur writes in ‘India by Design’, 1903, the year of this exhibition, was also the year when ‘the nationalist historian R. C. Dutt would challenge such spectacles, and the conditions of economic dependence they concealed… His account in turn influenced the swadeshi (homemade) campaign in Bengal to boycott British goods and promote indigenous products, which reached its apex in 1905.’