Introduction

On the unkempt greens in the foreground of the Hove Museum of Creativity in the seaside town of Brighton and Hove, decontextualized in space and time, stands awkwardly: the Jaipur Gate. As a heavily ornamented and detailed teak structure that breaks the continuity of the landscape, it cannot be ignored (see Fig.1). It does not fulfil its function as a gate and resembles more a pavilion.[1] In fact, it is relegated to the periphery with no dedicated pathway guiding one to it, inhibiting visitor interaction. There is no interpretation panel to tell us about its origin, construction, or anything about its past life. It stands as a mere spectacle, another fragmentary display of the Empire’s past.

Crucially, the Jaipur Gate, a Grade II listed structure,[2] is one of the few surviving fragments of the India section of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held in South Kensington in 1886 from 4th May to 10th November. As a woman hailing from the north Indian city of Jaipur, I was perplexed to see this fragment of my home-town on display as a protected yet un-interactive oddity within the grounds of this contemporary museum. This standalone artefact felt like a re-assemblage of something archaic, plucked out from Jaipur’s historic core. This encounter ignited a lot of questions for me. But, most importantly, I was drawn to the question of how the Jaipur Gate ended up in here, 60 miles away from the original Exhibition grounds, what it was doing here, and if there were other similar artefacts caught in a liminal realm between the historic moment of the exhibition and the modern day museum, not fully grasping either of those two contexts?

Dis-/Re-/Assembly

The operative processes of assembly, disassembly, and reassembly are a continuous cycle perpetuated by the ephemerality of colonial world fairs – not just in terms of the construction and dismantling of the large arenas where these displays were organised but also how the ‘spectacles’ were selectively represented, reducing entire nations’ cultural landscapes into fragmented objects. These three processes underlie those of dislocation and dispersion, engendering fragmentation of whole architectures over time entirely subject to imperial purposes and intentions.

Colonial architect-engineer Samuel Swinton Jacob (also the architect of the Jaipur Gate and the city of Jaipur), as an agent of the colonial administration, was tasked with ‘constructing an India that could be better packaged, subsumed, and ruled.’[3] Thus, his personal pedagogical practices were entangled in public imperial political agendas. The artefacts that he then carefully curated, and the artisans he tutored, and the knowledge that he collected and disseminated then become vehicles in the larger narrative at play. These were simply recontextualized to serve as symbols of power and influence.[4] Even after several years of the exhibition’s conclusion, the ex-metropolitan cosmopolitan museum circuit still regulates the life and death of these artefacts, making it extremely difficult for ex-colonies to present their own histories. If we uncover the narratives underlying the repetitive reconstructions of such material fragments, we find some palpable effects:

I.Decay

The physical assembly of the Jaipur Gate was preceded by the metonymic assembly of Jacob’s Jeypore Portfolio. There were already several parts that held the gate together, including approximately 1500 screws inside of the teak panels. The gate was put together and taken apart at all stages and levels of spatial dislocation. Finally, in the Hove museum after the gate gained Grade II listing, a survey carried out in 2003 revealed the structure to be unsafe and scaffolding was erected to hold it up in place. The Jeypore gateway(as it was known at the time of the exhibition) was once again disassembled, this time necessitated by its inevitable deterioration due to curatorial neglect — the wooden gateway was never conceived to be displayed outdoors where the rains could affect it.

II.Demise

Along with the Jeypore Gateway, the Hove Museum received another fragment of the exhibition – the Baroda Pigeon House. It was displayed alongside the Jaipur Gate in the grounds of the museum. However, in 1950s, it was found to be in a deteriorating state. Within the wider modernist movements at the time and the propensity to reconsider the value of these relics after the end of the empire, there was a reluctance to find necessary funds to cover the costs of the treatment of the structure.[5] In 1959, it was quietly disposed of, placing the often-arbitrary power of selectively choosing which fragments from the colony were worthy of care in the hands of the West, even after the formal end of imperial rule.

III.Denial

The Gwalior Gateway, another architectural encasing of the 1886 exhibition, was first displayed at the Calcutta Exhibition in India in 1883.[6] It was then disassembled, packed and shipped to the South Kensington Museum. It reached London in July 1884 and Deborah Swallow perceives the unrecorded thoughts of those at the museum who unpacked the 200 parcels, gradually coming to terms with the massive size of the seventy-ton stone gateway.[7] The uncomfortable encounter with the scale of the gateway led to a series of denials inhibiting its display. A specific shed was constructed to store the gate until a permanent solution was sought. Major J.B Keith, who designed the gate and wanted it to revel in full glory was particularly disappointed by these steps of the administration and he wrote extensively to express his concerns.[8] After being displayed in the 1886 exhibition, and with still no permanent solution, the gate ‘became an embarrassment too valuable to destroy, but too expensive to dismantle.’[9] It was partially housed in the Oriental Gallery until the 1950s, with its wide spreading eaves and structure above it still in bomb-proof stores. The final recommendation of concealing it behind the Raphael Cartoons today at the Victoria and Albert Museum foregrounds the relationship between the artefact and the process of archiving into invisibility being structural to colonial power relationships and museum practices, something Swati Chattopadhyay proposes the ‘unarchiving’ of.[10] These decisions of denial reflect the larger cultural, political and societal forces at play. Unarchiving for Chattopadhyay ‘is a technique of negotiating the archive by noticing the structures of containment.’[11] Navigating these storage boxes, the meaning of the collections are continuously reinterpreted and the power to define it is continuously questioned.

Changing contexts; Changing meanings

In An Empire on Display, Peter Hoffenberg notes the ‘long-term legacies at the personal and collective levels’ left behind by large-scale exhibitions.[12] I contend that the remnants of these events, geographically dispersed across non-metropolitan areas of Britain in their aftermath, embodied different meanings for different people along different stages of the fragments’ afterlives. Thus, such meaning-making is often influenced by the background, experiences and knowledge of the individual interacting with the colonial material-fragment and the context of this interaction, in-turn shaping identities of both people and places that the fragment encounters.

Over the years, Brighton and Hove’s residents have absorbed the legacy of the Jaipur Gate as their own, just like any other commissioned piece of work in the city. The gate features as a pit-stop in landmark trails today, catering widely to tourists and locals who enjoy revisiting Brighton and Hove’s diverse past. Regular visitors of the Hove Museum of Creativity are not affected by its presence, uninterested in actively interacting with its provenance, but at the same time recognise its place in the city. In a way, its colonial provenance gets assimilated within the larger practices of the Hove Museum of Creativity’s mission to create unique commissions for the museum.

Disentangling these histories forces one to acknowledge the need to read these multiple, complex, and often contradictory threads simultaneously, to glean a more nuanced understanding of fragments of colonial past in the present, one that recognizes the diverse perspectives and stories that these fragments continue to embody at different moments in their lives.