Imaging India

Complementing the thousands of artefacts that presented the sub-continent in terms of its material culture and natural resources were representations in a variety of media of the peoples themselves and the territory they occupied. This lent both a human face and a sense of place to the collection which, as we have seen, was assembled primarily with an economic or mercantile imperative but which gained an increasingly ethnographical dimension. There can be little doubt that this aspect went a long way to recommending the museum to the wider public and, it may be suggested, to rendering it a singularly advanced