The British in India: A Legacy Worth Remembering
Look at a Vizagapatam ivory box, a carved Bombay blackwood chair or an Osler crystal chandelier and you are looking at one of the great meetings of cultures in history. British rule in India is often told only as a story of grievance, yet it brought reforms, scholarship and engineering whose benefits are still felt today, and a style of furniture prized by collectors the world over.
Centuries of trade
The West traded with India long before the British arrived. Roman merchants sailed to the Malabar coast for pepper. In 1498 Vasco da Gama reached Calicut, and from 1510 the Portuguese ruled Goa, bringing European furniture forms that Indian craftsmen made their own: the cabinet on stand, or contador, worked in ebony and teak and inlaid with ivory. The Dutch East India Company followed on the Coromandel coast, then the French and the Danes, each leaving behind ideas, techniques and tastes. When the East India Company rose to power, it built on that long tradition of exchange.
The birth of Anglo-Indian furniture
British officials and merchants wanted the furniture of home, and Indian craftsmen supplied it in superb local timbers: padouk, rosewood, ebony, teak and satinwood. In the 18th century Vizagapatam became famous for pieces veneered in ivory and engraved with fine penwork. In the 19th century Bombay workshops produced richly carved blackwood furniture that married Victorian forms with Indian ornament, while campaign furniture, made to fold, pack and travel with an officer, became another speciality. The result is a style neither purely British nor purely Indian, and that is exactly why it is so admired.
Osler and the glass palaces
F. & C. Osler, the Birmingham glassmakers, opened a showroom in Calcutta in 1840 to serve the Indian market. Osler made the great crystal fountain at the 1851 Great Exhibition, and its chandeliers, candelabra and even cut-glass furniture filled the palaces of India's princes. The Maharana of Udaipur's crystal collection, ordered from Osler in 1877, is still on show at the Fateh Prakash Palace, a striking example of British manufacture meeting Indian patronage at the highest level.
Ending cruel practices
In 1829 Lord William Bentinck abolished sati, the burning of widows on their husbands' funeral pyres, alongside Indian reformers such as Ram Mohan Roy. In the 1830s William Sleeman's campaign broke up the Thuggee gangs who robbed and strangled travellers on India's roads. The Female Infanticide Prevention Act of 1870 set out to protect baby girls, and in 1843 slavery lost its legal standing across British India.
Rediscovering India's past
James Prinsep, assay master at the Calcutta Mint, deciphered the ancient Brahmi script in 1837. His work let the edicts of the emperor Ashoka be read again for the first time in well over a thousand years, giving India back much of its own early history.
Health and infrastructure
Smallpox vaccination reached India in 1802 and saved countless lives. From 1853 the railways joined distant cities and markets, cutting journeys of weeks to days, and Indian Railways remains one of the largest networks in the world.
Living history
Every Anglo-Indian piece carries this story of trade, craftsmanship and exchange across the centuries. That is what makes these objects so rewarding to collect and to live with.
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