Visitors move from one thrilling juxtaposition to the next. A patchwork quilt made by inmates at Wandsworth Prison, in southwest London, features an embroidered fingerprint flanked by strands of coiled DNA and the words “I didn’t do it Guv!! Honest!” A sampler embroidered around 1830 by Elizabeth Parker, a seventeen-year-old servant, takes the convention’s form—to demonstrate the fineness of a practitioner’s needlework—and turns it into a gripping narrative of abuse by her employer. In neat red stitches, Parker explains that “for trying to avoid the wicked design of my master I was thrown down stairs.” Nearby is a talismanic shirt inscribed with the entire text of the Quran. The shirt, likely made in India around five hundred years ago, was intended to protect its wearer in battle—or in childbirth. I didn’t expect a museum of craft and design to move me so, but I found myself on the brink of tears, struck by the palpable humanity of those who had made, and worn, such works. The armpits of the Quran shirt are stained with centuries-old sweat.
The V. & A., founded in 1852, has tears aplenty in its history. Much of its collection is a product of imperial extraction. In the eighteen-eighties, it absorbed twenty thousand objects from the former India Museum, which was founded by the East India Company. This notorious commercial entity, a precursor of the global corporations of today and big enough to command its own army, ruthlessly exploited foreign resources, human and material. One of the most celebrated objects from the India Museum is a mechanical wooden sculpture of a ferocious tiger gnawing at a British soldier’s throat. It was stolen from the palace of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, after he was killed in an assault by British forces in 1799.
Reckoning with the bloody history of global conquest has become a task for all museums whose collections are legacies of colonial control. But Tristram Hunt, the V. & A.’s director, has noted that it is “impossible and ahistorical to seek to ‘decolonise’ a museum like the V. & A., given its foundational connection to the history of British imperialism.” Instead, Hunt has argued, the V. & A. museums explicitly seek to represent a version of British culture that incorporates the historical fact of empire—rather than simply repudiating it, as some on the left might wish, or celebrating it, as some on the right might do. One years-long project is attempting to recover where, and by whom, the India Museum’s objects were made, thus conjuring “the world they inhabited before they were obscured by empire,” as Hunt has written.
