A round trip Kolkata Brussels: some observations on the interaction between Tagore and Mahillon

In 1883, the Kolkata International Exhibition was an opportunity for the rajah Sourindro Mohun Tagore to present about 40 Indian musical instruments at the first major commercial event organized in the British Raj. Unsurprisingly, these instruments were presented with the same Sanskrit terminology and classification scheme as in the collections sent over the previous decade to various sovereigns in the world – a feature of Tagore’s collections that has been long identified with the Bengal Renaissance. However, whereas the “international” collections were systematically conceived as a standardized set of archetypal and unhistoricized items, this “local” exhibition stands out for its many redundancies and references to former owners and makers. Typically, the tritantri (a putative Sanskrit forerunner of the Persian setar) was represented by two specimens: one belonged to the famous Bengali patron Ashutosh Dev, the other was made in Brussels under the supervision of Victor-Charles Mahillon who, five years before, had catalogized Tagore’s donation to Leopold II on the base of the traditional Indian fourfold classification. Building on this unexcepted back-and-forth exchange between Kolkata and Brussels, this paper will investigate the contrasted nature of Tagore’s instrumental “local” and “international” collections. After discussing their respective use of instrumental denominations and definitions, it will reassess Tagore’s ideological agenda on the base of the recently discovered classification chart that accompanied the instruments sent to Brussels in 1876. Finally, a study of the dissemination of the Indian fourfold classification in European literature from the 18th century onwards will shed lights on its reception and interpretation by Mahillon