A museum that once existed in London, but is no more
DURING A VISIT to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recently opened Store at London’s Olympic Park, I spotted an interesting vitrine containing artefacts from India. The small collection was accompanied by an informative label, which tells the viewer that these objects were once housed in a museum that no longer exists – London’s India Museum. This establishment existed from 1801 until 1879.
The India Museum was founded by the British East India Company (‘EIC’). Designed to acquaint visitors with India’s resources and industries, it was housed in the company’s headquarters in Leadenhall Street. After the so-called Indian Mutiny (1857-1858: First War of Independence), the EIC lost its role as the British administrator of India. It was replaced by the government-controlled India Office.
In 1851, the India Museum was a major contributor to the Indian section of Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Later, the museum continued to participate in international exhibitions that followed. In 1861, the museum moved to Fife House in Whitehall, then to the attics of the newly built India Office in 1869, and from 1875 then to the ‘Eastern Galleries’ on the exhibition site to the west of the present Exhibition Road in South Kensington.
The India Museum was closed in 1879. Then as related in the Victoria and Albert’s website:
“… the collections were dispersed. In broad terms, the natural history specimens were divided between the Royal Botanic Gardens and the nascent British Museum (Natural History) – today the Natural History Museum – according to their nature. Antiquities and some parts of the ethnographic collections went to the British Museum. The bulk of the manufactured objects, however, were transferred to the South Kensington Museum, forerunner of today’s V&A.”
It is a few of those 19,000 objects transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum that we saw in the vitrine at the V&A’s amazing open access warehouse at the V&A Store at Olympic Park. While we were at the Store, we saw many other objects that must have been brought from India. No doubt, some of those had once been on display in the museum that exists no more.
