How the Crooke collection at Pitt Rivers Museum reflects the entangled history of colonial rule in India

Most renowned museums across the world maintain a fairly good amount of objects and materials collected by the British officers from various countries that they had once colonised. Museum experts say the practice of colonial collecting was common and saw its peak between the 1870s and 1930s.

The British Museum in London houses many Indian objects and materials, the ownership of many of which is in question. The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, England is known for housing a vast variety of object collections from around the world, particularly from India. Although ethnographic collection in colonial India was majorly undertaken by civil servants, missionaries and naturalists, a significant proportion was carried out by colonial officers only.

William Crooke (1848-1923), a British civil officer stationed in the north-western provinces and Oudh region of India between 1871 and 1896, was one among them. While working as an administrative officer of the province, Crooke also emerged as a prolific writer of Indian folklore and oral traditions. It was during his journey to document folklore that Crooke started collecting jewellery, weapons, religious symbols, and everyday implements from the area, a collection which eventually found its way to the Pitt Rivers Museum.

A total of 1,144 of these objects reached the museum, 238 of which are currently displayed there. It was while studying the vast collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum that Vanshika Poddar came across the William Crooke collection, which consists of objects acquired primarily from the Indian subcontinent.

There was an earthenware pot found in Mirzapur with a caption, which read, “These are placed inverted on the graves of women who have died on their husbands’ funeral pyres, to bring good fortune and to avert calamity.” And then there were glass bangles and ear-plugs made of palm-leaf offered to the demon of the waterfall on the Chandraprabha River, Mirzapur (UP). Three wooden models of Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra (the deities worshipped in Puri, Odisha), collected by Crooke in 1872 and 1894, a tattooing instrument, a snake stone, a fire-making drill, rosaries, beads, musical instruments, clay for making caste-marks etc and the list goes on.

Vanshika said she was drawn to this collection because it reflects the entangled histories of colonial administration and ethnographic studies in 20th-century India. Vanshika was able to look deeper into the conditions of their collection and their journey to Oxford. “The idea was to understand the coloniality of museums and study how museums in the contemporary world interact with audiences and researchers,” said Vanshika, a native of Raipur (Chhattisgarh), who did her dissertation titled ‘The Collector and the Collected: A Study of the William Crooke Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum’ as part of her Master's in Archaeology from the University of Oxford.

“I have always been interested in studying the archaeology and history of India. I did my undergraduate study at Delhi University, where I got involved with an organisation called Speaking Archaeologically and pursued my passion for archaeology. I then went on to do a Master's in Archaeology from the University of Oxford, where I specialised in contemporary archaeology and the archaeology of colonialism,” she said.

Vanshika’s study is an object-focused approach to understanding and interpreting the William Crooke collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum. It aims to study the present context of the objects and then locate their histories through available record and secondary sources. William Crooke was a civil officer of the British Raj in India, and was also an avid folklorist. The process of ethnographic collection was therefore enmeshed in contemporary ethnographic discourse as well as colonial politics of power. The study explores these histories to make better sense of the collection now present at the museum.

“Crooke followed an evolutionist understanding in his writings of the Indian people, which are useful tools to gauge and understand his motivations to collect the objects. As he never kept a formal diary or catalogue to record the objects, scholars may have to rely heavily on his writings to understand his attitude towards the objects he collected,” said Vanshika, according to whom the Crooke collection, despite being one of the largest one in the museum, has not been previously studied as a collection. “It is a large assemblage of objects with very little information available regarding their provenance or context of collection. Many of them have been ascribed to ‘tribal’ groups like the Kol or Kharwar, but there is very little information on the identities of the objects before they entered the museum record.”

The Crooke collection is a varied and extensive collection of materials from the Indian subcontinent, assumed to have been collected by Crooke and donated to the museum in batches across decades. If you go by the museum’s online database, the number of objects in this collection total to 1,144, which were added to the museum collection between 1890 and 2022. These objects include not only materials that were donated by Crooke himself, but also objects that he gifted to other collectors that eventually found their way to the museum. “The first donation, according to museum records, was received in 1890, a tattooing instrument obtained from Mirzapur. There were four groups of objects donated in 1891, totalling to 90 objects. This included a model of a fire-making drill, followed by 19 pieces of jewellery, a group of 53 objects consisting of rosaries and beads, and 17 ‘arab rosaries.’ The biggest donation was received in 1892, totalling to 418 objects and divided into two groups and one snake stone,” writes Vanshika in her dissertation.

In 1893, the museum received another 158 objects, an eclectic group of musical instruments, body art, beads, and spoons. The next entry is dated to 1894, when the museum received three models of Lord Jagannath, Balabhadra, and Subhadra, deities worshipped in Puri, Odisha. The year 1896 records the accession of 10 items, including clay for making caste-marks and a fish-spear head. There was a single object donated in 1897, a serpentine stick which was, according to the description on the object, used by snake charmers. Founded in 1884, the Pitt Rivers Museum houses within an atmospheric building more than 500,000 objects, photographs and manuscripts from all over the world, and from all periods of human existence.

William Crooke died in 1923 and there are no records of further donations by any of his family to the museum. However, Vanshika found many items were still added to the museum record whose collection is accredited to Crooke. “There were a few objects that belong to a larger group of objects donated either by collectors like Henry Balfour (1863-1939) or E B Tylor (1832-1917) that may have been collected by Crooke. These include a conical mud pipe from Rajasthan donated by Balfour, and a group of 17 objects donated by E B Tylor in 1916, consisting of ornaments made of rosary beads,” she added.

"Museums like the Pitt Rivers showcase objects from around the world, but interpreted from the viewpoint of the white curator, contextualised for the white visitor,” writes Vanshika. The labels and categories are created in a way it would make sense to the white audience, original terms like challa and kalsi replaced with ‘metal rings’ and ‘earthen pots’. “Applying ideas of ‘museum death’ in modern debates about restitution and repatriation, like in the recent case of returning a bronze religious idol from the Ashmolean to where it was stolen from in India, might be useful in highlighting the plight of the object itself in a museum context. Modern debates have also questioned the need for an ethnographic institution at all, while others have pointed out that they can be spaces for important debates on repatriation, decolonisation, and cultural injustices,” she added.

In her study, Vanshika brings in various viewpoints of independent researchers and scholars to substantiate her point. In 2023, Sumaya Kassim, author and independent researcher, in a bold analysis of the museum as an institution had argued that ‘Museums are Temples of Whiteness’. “Kassim’s account reflects on what colonial museums and their collections mean for people of colour in the modern world. ‘Museums are not only where objects are put in their place,’ she writes, ‘it is where we are put in our respective places’.

Through well categorised objects in cabinets and galleries from all over the world, a White person, according to Kassim, has the power of God, able to survey all of humanity which is controlled by them. Crooke was also a ‘God’ among the people of the North Western Provinces, untouchable with immense power, assuming the responsibility of surveying the population,” writes Vanshika, quoting Sumaya Kassim. “Shahid Amin (author and former professor of history at University of Delhi) has even pointed out anecdotes where Crooke referred to native women as ‘cattle’, further strengthening the idea that the collector saw the people as the ‘other’, in this case, not even as humans,” she added.

How do displays define the people and culture? The museologists and curators across the world are yet to give a clear answer to the question. In her book Culture On Display: The Production of Contemporary Visitability, Bella Dicks examines how culture becomes transformed when it is put on display. She said ethnographic museums essentially showcase an image of an ‘other’ people, separated from the intended viewer and holding a picture of a people forever frozen in time.

Once, these objects were not just a representation of Indian cultures, ‘they were also the first point of contact for the Victorian public with the colony of India.’ Today, they are remnants of the racism and violence that was inflicted on them. Vanshika’s study has shown how the process of collecting was unjust, coercive, and without consent. “For a deeply colonial space like the Pitt Rivers Museum, it is necessary to consistently question itself and open up space for as many ‘outsiders’ as possible. The process of dismantling centuries of injustice and colonial violence will require as much scrutiny and introspection as can be carried out,” she said.