A letter from Prince Ghulam Mohammed
In June 1854, from his room in the Oriental Hotel in Vere Street, London, Ghulam Mohammed wrote to Abercromby Dick to inform him of the safe delivery of his letter to their mutual friend, Elliot Macnaghten, Chairman of the East India Company; also, to thank Dick for the protection given to his family — “the Mysore family’”— from “the oppression of the unjust magistrate” in Calcutta, where Dick was a judge in the Sudder Dewanny Adawlut, the East India Company’s supreme civil court in India.
Ghulam Mohammed went on to write, “We have been very Kindly received in England by all parties and particularly by her Majesty and Prince Albert. Also by Sir Chas. Wood and other members of Gov. And the principal Nobility of England”. He described his sea sickness on the voyage and his typical response to the initial thrill of “rail road travelling … quite astonishing us to think that we travelled from Southampton to London, a distance of near 90 miles in about 2 hours”.
Prince Ghulam Mohammed was the youngest son of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore defeated and killed by the British in 1799 in Srirangapatna. His family had been removed forcibly to Calcutta and many of its members — who had once ruled one of the richest states in India — were destitute. The prince was on a mission to obtain a pension for his family from the British Government.
You may remember that the pride of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s collection is Tipu’s tiger, a life-size automaton made for Tipu Sultan in the shape of a tiger mauling a European soldier, with a musical organ inside sounding out his cries of agony.
We found the letter last September, in an old tin box beneath my mother-in-law’s bureau, bundled up in a collection of unpublished manuscripts by Eliza Dick, Abercromby’s daughter, a poet who was better-known in her own time and a good friend of Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
This sent me on a mission of my own to find out more about Ghulam Mohammed. At the British Library, in an old and vast double-elephant-sized East India Company ledger, I found that six months after the letter had been written he was granted £3000 to ‘return to India in a manner suitable to his rank and position in society’, which is some £300,000 in today’s money and, however calculated, would buy the most extravagant passage to India. Nonetheless the bid for a pension was not immediately granted: six years later Sir Charles Wood (then Secretary of State for India) instructed that Ghulam Mohammed and his extended family be given their pension as a one-off payment of £500,000 — roughly equivalent to £50m today.
During this search at the British Library I came across a huge trove of related letters and documents that constitutes the McNabb archive: the McNabbs had close family and professional ties with the Dicks and there was much correspondence between them.
Many are probably full of ordinary family news; I say ‘probably’, because they’re often in dense cursive handwriting, overwritten on two axes to save on postage costs and barely decipherable. But the few I’ve read are extraordinary: a report of a successful use of vaccine in Bengal in 1815; letters from Rome and Florence describing the grand tour; a thrilling first hand account by Abercromby Dick’s brother Robert of beating off the French cavalry at the battle of Quatre Bras, two days before Waterloo; his father Dr William Dick on the tendency of obesity to delay recovery from wounds; reminiscences of William Makepeace Thackary as a child; a meeting with Bonaparte on St Helena; the death of Robert at the battle of Sabroan in the first Sikh War; the outbreak of the great rebellion in 1857; salacious gossip concerning Lady Hastings… The archive is a mine of interdisciplinary gems — about the realities of British rule in India, family relationships in the East India Company, medicine, military history, life on the Grand Tour and Victorian Literature and letters.
The documents are indexed — which is of course how I found them — but in partial detail and they felt lonely, unrecognised and unread: indexed but not digitised or machine-readable and profoundly beyond the gaze of Google. Except at St Pancras Road, they are inaccessible.
The experience of actually handling and reading the archive in the library is however extraordinarily rich and serendipitous — so an interesting question is, How that might be recreated online?
The British Library’s fault in all this is simply that it hasn’t yet got around to digitising this particular set of files and folders. The British Library is a world leader in digital preservation, but not quite so much in accessibility, and like every national institution faces huge problems of scale but also the difficult question of how to make connections between the people, places and histories involved in each artefact or archive.
And of course, my searches in the British Library cannot — as things stand — help me find material in other institutions. The Dick and McNabb family correspondence is not solely in the British Library, it’s split across three or four different archives including the Browning Correspondence, the Perth and Kinross Council archive, in private collections indexed in the National Archives website and probably a good chunk in old tins like the one beneath my mother-in-law’s bureau. The big institutions don’t have a monopoly on any particular kind of treasure: lots of us have slivers of cultural history in our heads or in tin boxes. So — how can the audience contribute too?
Reconnecting lost artefacts with their past and our present
This is, then, not simply a technical question, or one of numbers. How many objects we can digitise and at what quality is of course a very real problem; there is a more interesting challenge in overcoming the loneliness of the individual artefact hidden away in storage or treated as an isolated aesthetic object or digital record on a museum website catalogue, absent any sense of context.
Museums were established as separate institutions with their own collections and now with separate websites: each has its own purpose and principles. Museums cannot avoid having a proprietorial attitude to their collections and some curators take this so far as to worry about ‘the needs of the collection’ (I’ve heard one say just that) rather than the needs — or capabilities — of their audience.
The big and interesting questions that still remain unanswered are, what might be involved in shifting our mindset from acquired objects to shared narratives? In particular, thinking about how we connect objects in the archive with narratives that might cut across disciplines and across institutions and connect together the people who share an interest in them. In this way, curation can become a more collective pursuit.
This is the text of an introduction to Museum Without Walls, a panel discussion at Made by Many with participation by Kati Price and Omniya Abdel Barr of the Victoria & Albert Museum, Jane Bramwell from Tate and Elea Himmelsbach of Science Ltd.
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