Empire of Enchantment by Zubrzycki John;

Author:Zubrzycki, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: OCC028000, HIS017000, OCC012000, OCC023000, OCC029000, SOC005000, REL032000
Publisher: Scribe Publications
Published: 2018-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

10

MOTILAL’S MAGICAL MENAGERIE

BOMBAY’S Elphinstone College, whose alumni include Coonvarji Sorabji Nazir, B.R. Ambedkar, the author of India’s Constitution, and Bollywood’s bad boy, Sanjay Dutt, is also the repository of the Maharashtra State Archives. Built in 1871 by the English architect James Trubshawe and financed by the Parsi philanthropist Sir Cowasjee Jehangeer, it is one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival east of Suez. Leading off the ornately carved galleries that face into the College’s courtyard are dimly-lit rooms stacked with heavy leather-bound volumes containing files on everything from the East India Company’s plans to combat piracy in the Gulf of Cambay, to the merger of India’s princely states.

Buried in this bluestone labyrinth is a file entitled ‘Ruling of the Govt of India regarding the departure from Bombay of a party of Indian jugglers and dancers for service in connection with the Exhibit in Paris’. Between the crumbling khaki-coloured covers tied together in rough hemp string, is a letter dated 1 April 1900 from Motilal Nehru, to J. Walsh, the Protector of Emigrants in Bombay. ‘I have just learnt that in order to send a party of Indians consisting of performers, musicians, acrobats and artizans to the ensuing Paris Exhibition it is necessary to obtain a permit from the Protector of Emigrants. As I am about to send such a party, I beg to state the necessary particulars for your information.’1 The patriarch of South Asia’s most powerful political dynasty, had taken time out from his successful legal career to follow in the footsteps of the world’s greatest showbiz entrepreneur, Phineas Taylor Barnum.

Marking ‘a new stage in the forward march of contemporary civilization’, the Exposition Universelle was the most ambitious world fair ever staged. More than 50 million visitors passed through the 108-acre site that spanned both banks of the Seine, a record that would not be broken until the Montreal Expo in 1967. The Exposition aimed to present ‘a picture of the world at the close of the nineteenth century with a minuteness and vividness never approached before’.2 Visitors were transported to the site on the newly opened Metro and then transferred to a four-kilometre long ‘moving sidewalk’ that tracked around the grounds. At the Tour du Monde, panoramas and dioramas featured living displays of people from countries as diverse as India, Turkey and China, ‘enacting the customs and habits of their daily life’. The official poster of the Indian court shows a procession of caparisoned elephants being led by turbaned warriors riding black stallions watched by men in dhotis and women in saris. Behind the procession is a building with white marble minarets and onion-shaped domes that look like a cross between the Taj Mahal and a Rajput palace. ‘All the world will go to Paris,’ one journalist predicted ahead of the exhibition’s opening on 14 April 1900, ‘the exhibitors to show and sell their wares and win prizes, the general public to be amused’.3

Satisfying this insatiable thirst for amusements of the exotic variety was clearly the motivation for Nehru to assemble his menagerie of magicians, dancers and artists.

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