The splendour that was India

When it comes to high-value coffee-table books, buyers almost always ignore the dictum that a book should never be judged by its cover. Because such books are part-decorative and part-functional, appearance and title count for a great deal.

In that sense, the banal title, "A Vision of Splendour", is an inadequate descriptor for this magnificent display of photographs and drawings from the collections of a former senior official of the Archeological Survey of India (ASI) and now in the Kern Institute, Leiden in the Netherlands, one of the richest repositories of photographs of south and south-east Asian art.

Vogel, a Sanskrit scholar and epigraphist (one who specialises in the study of inscriptions), was an Austrian who worked for the ASI at its most reformist phase under Curzon's vice-regentship at the turn of the century. He served as an apprentice and surveyor to its inspirational director John Marshall eventually becoming Deputy Director General between 1910 and 1921.

Marshall and Vogel, with a team that included such Indian stalwarts as Ghulam Nabi, Daya Ram and Rakhal Das Banerji (who later discovered the remains of Mohenjo Daro), played a key role in preserving, restoring, researching and increasing the visibility of archeology in museums.

Vogel worked for many years as superintendent of what was known as the Northern Circle, which covered most of pre-partition north-west India. Over the years, the definition of Vogel's circle widened to include Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh. This allowed him to explore a wide sweep of Indian art and archeology - Buddhist, Islamic, Hindu and animist.

This collection covers 150 views, from a total of over 10,000, taken between 1870 and 1920 that, as the author Gerda Theuns-de Boer explains, "visually underpin the introductory retrospective on nineteenth century Indian archaeology".

The plus point to well-presented and -captioned sepia photos is an absorbing complementary text "" a rarity in books of this nature. The six chapters provide a compact but thoughtfully analysed account of the abrasive Curzon's often controversial vision for the ASI and the huge problems of documenting and recording India's vast and diverse art heritage and the nascent emergence of museology.

The underlying approach is scholarly but Theuns-de Boer leavens the account with interesting asides on the internal politics of the ASI, the skirmishes over preservation methods, Vogel's engagingly offbeat personality and even the embedded racism that stunted the potential of some of the ASI's most talented native experts.

One complaint is that the footnotes, often as content-rich as the main text, have been relegated to the end of each chapter, making them difficult to access readily. This is perhaps a weakness of the coffee-table format since footnotes on each page detract from the layout.

Heritage documentation in the early nineteenth century presented huge technology challenges. Emerging photographic techniques were still rudimentary. The albumen print, which used albumen (commonly found in egg white) to bind photographic chemicals on a paper base from a glass negative, required bulky equipment that was cumbersome to transport. Photographic expertise was also limited "" the ASI had just 13 photographers in the early days.

Interestingly, the ASI suffered bureaucratic bottlenecks then as it does now. In Vogel's time it was common for the conservation of a particular note to be entrusted to the Public Works Department (PWD) based on a detailed note drawn up by an ASI surveyor.

The results were not always happy because the PWD did not readily understand the difference between restoration and repair. Vogel's diary records his horror when he saw that the Shakti Devi temple in Chamba had been "covered with a thick white plaster, the spotless whiteness of which contrasted strangely with the subdued colour of the high roof which (probably owing to lack of funds) had been left in a dilapidated condition".

Readers who have seen restoration efforts on Delhi's monuments will sympathise with Vogel.

One of the most interesting chapters is "The Art of Fieldwork", an account of excavations in and debates over Charsada (ancient Pushkalavati, the ancient capital of Gandhar), Kasia (ancient Kusinagara where Buddha is said to have died) and Maheth (an extraordinary multi-religious city). All of them presented challenges that tested Vogel's skill as an epigraphist to the full.

That India owes much to Curzon for preserving her heritage is well known. It owes as much to people like Marshall and Vogel with their dirt-under-the fingernails expertise and dedication. The pity is that independent India hasn't really built on those early foundations.

A VISION OF SPLENDOUR
INDIAN HERITAGE IN THE PHOTOGRAPHS OF JEAN PHILIPPE VOGEL, 1901-1913

Gerda Theuns-de Boer
Mapin
192 pages