3 Military Collecting

3 MILITARY COLLECTING 3.1 Introduction In 1905 Colonel Francis Younghusband, political leader of the 1904 Expedition to Tibet, wrote an account of his geographical findings for The Geographical Journal. The 1904 Expedition had 'opened up' Tibet to a Western audience and had brought the Tibet that had been cultivated in the western imagination, over the course of the nineteenth century, into direct conflict with a 'real' Tibet found in a fixed geographical location by British military forces. The tension between the two was summed up in the closing section of Younghusband's report: 'We sought, but did not find, the Mahatmas, who would lead us to more lofty peaks of light and wisdom that ever we had trod before. While I would not deny that Buddhism has done much to tame and civilise a barbarous race of demon-worshippers in Tibet, I would warn those who would look to Lhasa for any kind of higher intellectual or spiritual guidance to seek nearer home for what they need,.1 Tibet was a complex entity even when imagined, with imperial ideologies influencing a series of different responses to Tibet and Tibetan culture. The way in which British agents ultimately chose to represent Tibet both drew from and affected peoples' actual experiences. As such, 'real' experiences came into tension with ideas formed by Orientalist scholars, 1 Younghusband, "The Geographical Results of the Tibet Mission", 492. 196 informal studies of the 'East' such as Theosophy, and the more 'accurate' geographical knowledge of Tibet constructed by the India Survey and the RGS.2 The tension around different ideas of what Tibet was, or should be, presented itself in tandem with another tension - between old and new military practices, particularly in relation to 'loot' and the role of collecting within the military hierarchy. Such ideological frictions remained through the 1904 Expedition and its aftermath, which saw Tibet reshaped once more within British understandings ofthe 'East'. Post-1904, British constructions of Tibet moved even further from the fluid rationalisation of Thomas Wise and earlier Enlightenment pioneers, than they had done even in late nineteenth century missionary representations. Whilst the missionaries examined in the previous chapter collected Tibetan material culture over a period of several decades, 1904 was a clearly defined 'moment' in the history of engagement between Tibet and the West. Crucially, the invasion of Tibetan territory by British forces was a violent one, and the processes by which objects came into the possession of British officers were largely different from the processes of negotiation, trade and reciprocity outlined in the previous chapter. 2 The imaginative landscape of Tibet was also fuelled by popular literature, including one of the most influential books of the era - Kim. Kipling's narrative clearly defined how knowledge about the 'East' was gathered and its purpose within western strategies of control, used to consolidate British hegemony in India and Tibet. Kim has been widely lauded as a key piece of literary evidence in the unravelling of British attitudes towards the 'East', and its place as part of a fantasy of imperial domination. Spiers has called Kipling the 'most influential writer of the nineteenth century' and McKay suggests that he was a particularly powerful influence on those serving in the Government of India. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army 1868-1902, 199; McKay, Tibet and the British Raj, 77. Also see Richards, "Archive and Utopia", 104-135. Kim's importance also extends to our understanding of the collection of Indian and Tibetan material culture, for example see Black, On Exhibit, Victorians and their Museums, 154-156 and Abe, "Inside the Wonder House: Buddhist Art and the West", 63-106. 197 It is the way in which objects formed part of this short and violent military and political encounter that will form the basis of this chapter. I will begin by contextualising the role of collecting within the British military, and examine the place of the 1904 Expedition within that history. The chapter will then explore military reactions to Tibetan Buddhism and the position of male and female agencies within military collecting, which was by definition an entirely male endeavour. Whilst contextualising these issues, I will examine the network of military collectors, and their relationships to each other, their objects and to museums. Using specific examples from Scottish museum collections, I will then highlight issues such as the impact of gender on collecting practices and collecting as trophy versus collecting for academic insight. A more in-depth case study of the collection of Lieutenant Frederick 'Eric' Bailey will examine the collection from the perspective of its caretaker, his mother Florence Bailey. In contrast, I will also examine an alternative mode of collecting - the diplomatic gift. The role of 'gifts' within a military campaign so closely associated with the violence of looting is often overlooked, but the act of gift giving in this situation adds another important dimension to our understanding of the role of objects within this conflict. Finally, as in the previous chapter, I will draw together some conclusions about military collecting and its role in support of imperial ideologies, to offer some insight into how military collecting, and the expectations and intentions which military personnel invested in objects, fitted into the broader trends of constructing an idea of Tibet through objects in Britain. 198 3.2 Contextualising British military collecting: war and loot in India and Tibet As Anne Buddie notes, 'war-booty and India share a long history. The word 'loot' comes from the Sanskrit lotra; to rob or plunder'.' Collecting, in its many guises had, by 1904, a long history of entanglement with military practices but it was in India, a land of plenty, that these methods of collecting reached new heights. Historically, the process of collecting 'loot' had acted as a method of payment for soldiers and as an incentive during punitive expeditions, wars and the process of colonial expansion and indigenous suppression." In India particularly, in the earlier years of Company rule, military service promised rich prizes, as compensation for the risks to personal welfare, and often acted as actual payment retrospectively financing wars and expeditions.' Therefore, while the looting of monastic sites in 1904 was shocking to the moralities of the Edwardian government and parts of wider British society, those actions were part of an extensive history of military practices when faced with a hostile force of great wealth. The looting of Srirangapatam following the Fourth Mysore War in 1798- 1799 was one of the major moments in this history of violent artefact collection. 3 Buddie, "What Sharks they are: Sunset at Srirangapatam 1799", 119. 4 Punitive expeditions can be characterized as short and targeted military-led reprisals for disputes, usually between bordering states, where one state considers that the other undertook an immediately punishable action. In this circumstance, loot was an important part of that punishment. The 1897 Expedition to Benin was one of the British Empire's best-known punitive expeditions of the colonial era. S During the time of Company rule in India, prize money was a routine form of both payment and as a means of replenishing the coffers of the Company. However, following the 1857 Rebellion the army was radically reformed, coming under the control of the British government in India, who instituted formal systems of pay, reversing these practices. Stuart Allan, Curator of Military Collections, NMS, email to the author, 13/04/2011. 199 The Third Mysore War in 1792 had realised prize money of over £93,500 (the equivalent of £5,238,805 today)." Anticipation of the riches available in the palace of Tipu Sultan during the Fourth Mysore War was high before the battle even began, much like the anticipation of the riches held in monasteries and the Tibetan capital of Lhasa before the 1904 Expedition commenced. The objects taken from Srirangapatam were to form the basis of the museum opened at East India House, London, in 1799, including one of the most famous of all looted items - Tipu's Tlger.' The fanfare that surrounded the entry of the tiger and other objects from the palace of Tipu Sultan into the British public consciousness could be seen as setting a benchmark for the way new cultures and art forms entered the British imagination through military interactions and the processes of collecting 'prizes'. As Davis notes, a distinction was made between prize, which was the legitimate right of the army, and plunder, which related to individuals who committed acts against the accepted code of practice. If plundering involved individual, disorderly and predatory activity, subverting the terms of disciplined military arrangements, prize involved collective, orderly, hierarchical distribution, rearticulating the established social order of the military itself." These distinctions, though seemingly paradoxical to modern sensibilities, were viewed as clear-cut, though largely unwritten, rules in the late eighteenth century. However, they had become far more ill defined 6 Buddie, "What Sharks they are: Sunset at Srirangapatam 1799", 120. Currency converted using The National Archives Currency Converter, accessed 19/05/2013, http://www .nationa larchives.gov .uk/currency /. 7 As previously noted, Tipu's Tiger is a carved wooden automaton, roughly life size, depicting a tiger

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