India and Britain Deepen Their Artistic Links

Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya Museum, Mumbai

Interns at the Courtauld Institute working on the "Sword of Damocles." The London art school is active in restoration efforts across India.

MUMBAI - It has taken well over sixty years, but after a traumatic divorce that unraveled an empire, India and Britain now seem to be having some kind of cultural honeymoon.

"Akbar ordering the slaughter to cease in 1578" (c.1595), one of the works showing in the British Library's coming exhibition "Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire."

"Squirrels in a Plane Tree," another work in the exhibition. Cultural ties between Britain and India have become stronger in recent years.

The landmark exhibition “Mummy: The Inside Story,” which opens on Nov. 21 at the biggest museum in Mumbai, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, or CSMVS, is the result of a new collaboration between the British Museum, whose collection forms the display, and the CSMVS. In January, the British Council is holding an exhibition in India of 30 contemporary British artists, including David Hockney and Peter Blake. And in London, India's Minister of Culture, Chandresh Kumari Katoch, is set to inaugurate on Nov. 9 the opening of “Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire,” at the British Library. While that exhibition did not involve any explicit collaboration with Indian museums or curators, it is part of a wider cultural momentum that has increased in recent years and notably since both countries signed a memorandum of understanding in July 2010 to deepen artistic ties.

“For the British public, India has always been a starting point for Asia,” Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, said by telephone. He added that the concept of London museums working more closely with India makes sense, “as a very large part of India lives here.”

From the formation of the East India Company in 1600 to the rise of the British Raj and its fall when India declared independence in 1947, British-Indian relations have weathered ups and downs. But with India's growing economic importance, wariness of the shadow of colonization is waning and a recognition is growing that the country's art heritage should be reinvigorated. Since the cultural agreement was signed in 2010, there has been an increasing number of exchange projects, including traveling exhibitions, research, training, digitizing of archives and collections and fund-raising.

“British institutions have always seen India as a huge art resource, but now it's being seen as a place for serious high-level exchange,” said Adam Pushkin, the head of arts at the British Council in India.

Major British institutions are increasingly turning to India to expand their resources, including modern and contemporary galleries. “We are actively developing reciprocal projects and possible exhibition plans,” Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, said in an e-mail.

Lekha Poddar, an Indian art collector who heads the Tate's newly formed South Asia Acquisitions Committee and who founded the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi, pointed out that many British institutions wanted to “be part of the new economic power shift that's happening from West to East.”

Developments on the arts front between India and Britain have been numerous in recent years. Earlier this year, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London displayed paintings by Rabindranath Tagore, with many obtained from the Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan in West Bengal and shown outside India for the first time. A traveling exhibit of Kalighat paintings this spring, organized by the V&A and the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata, was seen by 400,000 visitors in Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad and New Delhi.

Other initiatives include a show of works by the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor in Mumbai and Delhi, organized last year by the British Council, the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi and the Lisson Gallery in London. The British Council also reopened the Queens Gallery, an exhibition space in its New Delhi premises, last year.

Smaller galleries and provincial museums are also getting in on the cultural exchange. Spaces like Gasworks in London have residencies specifically for Indian artists financed by organizations like Creative India. Last year, the British artist Liz Ballard spent two months in Mumbai as part of a residency exchange between the CSMVS and the Norwich Castle museum, while the artist Simon Liddiment conducted printmaking workshops at the Sir J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai.

Exhibitions aside, Britain and India are also working together to share expertise. The British Museum held a leadership training program supported by India's Ministry of Culture for 20 people including museum directors, administrators and curators from across India earlier this year, while the V&A conducted a training program in London for 15 museum professionals from India. The V&A and the British Library are helping to digitize Indian archives and paintings from collections in India and Britain. Graduates from the Courtauld Institute of Art have worked at the conservation center at the CSMVS, and the Institute is active in restoration efforts across India.

In India, where many museums had, until recently, been left to languish, the fruits of collaboration might take time to be widely felt. “India is being courted by Western money and Western curators, but so far this simply hasn't affected the traditional museum sector, where the speed of change is glacial,” said the British historian William Dalrymple, who co-curated an exhibition on Mughal India at the Asia Society in New York this year. Mr. Dalrymple said that for that exhibition, no paintings or works were obtained from within India because the process was too cumbersome. But things are starting to change, led by institutions like the CSMVS and the Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum.

“Before, very few Indians traveled abroad,” said Sabyasachi Mukherjee, director of the CSMVS. “Now thousands go and the first thing they do is visit museums. The government realized it's important to develop relationships with foreign institutions.”

The learning and sharing is not just one-sided. “We would like to see scholar participation from India and new scholarship on Mughal art and culture,” said Malini Roy, a curator at the British Library, who put together the Mughal India exhibition.

Mr. MacGregor of the British Museum agrees. “The CSMVS is way ahead in how it presents material to children,” he said. “We've sent colleagues to study the coins display and we're thinking of using the CSMVS model of stamping and making your own coins.”

A version of this special report appeared in print on November 1, 2012, in The International Herald Tribune.