A South Kensington Gateway from Gwalior to Nowhere

The 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition featured colonial simulacra, displaced native environments and subject peoples serving to naturalize empire. While settler colony exhibitions emphasized cities, the Indian displays reified the village and its crafts as the essence of India. This ahistorical “traditonalization” of India was sustained by an Arts and Crafts movement that also produced a critique of empire. These contradictions are embodied in the Exhibition’s Gwalior Gateway, a seventy-ton hybrid of Hindu and Islamic carving built into the Victoria and Albert Museum, but now hidden from view—a parable of empire.