Valuing Buddhist Things:

Religious objects and knowledge transfer in British India’s hill stations

Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies invites you to a public guest lecture by Emma Martin, University of Manchester

All are welcome. Registration is required.

During the winter months of 1912-13, the British Political Officer Charles Bell (1870-1945) invited a Buddhist lama to the Gangtok Residency in Sikkim to, “to explain the meaning of those Tibetan curios which were concerned with religion”. He asked the lama to appraise and describe a range of objects, from Buddhist statues to meditational paintings known as thangka. This presentation will not only identify the methods used by the lama, but it will reconstruct how he transferred Tibetan ideas of connoisseurial and aesthetic value to someone who did not already have the cultural capital to appreciate such things.

This object-led encounter in a colonial hill station offers insights into the local histories of empire. It highlights the importance of objects and their abilities to speak of previously unmapped networks and relationships. Such meetings not only offer a counterpoint to colonial intellectual and cultural power, but they reveal how the impact of imperial rule brought these two men, from very different worlds, together.

Finally, this paper will reunite the lama Barmiok Jedrung Karma Palden Chogyal (1871-1942) with this process of knowledge transfer. For fifty years this influential Sikkim man was an unidentified ‘other’ in the museum archives that hold Charles Bell’s List of Curios; the unpublished object inventory Bell produced following his discussions with men like the lama from Barmiok. By reconnecting these men and the religious objects that brought them together it becomes clear that Buddhist things, circulating in colonial worlds, were above all else highly political offerings.  

Biography

Emma Martin is Lecturer in Museology at University of Manchester and Senior Curator Ethnology at National Museums Liverpool. Her research focuses on object-led histories of empire and specifically the British-Tibetan encounter. She has published on colonial gift exchange and object-based knowledge production and is now leading a new international research network called, Object Lesson from Tibet & the Himalaya, which will bring together academics, museums and Tibetan communities in order to develop methods for understanding the role of objects in processes of knowledge production, loss and recovery.

The lecture is part of the BBB-lecture series and sponsored by the Danish Council for Independent Research | Humanities.