Model Subjects: Representations of the Andaman Islands at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, 1886

With the establishment of a British penal colony on the Andaman Islands in 1858, Andamanese and British identities and histories became newly entwined. In the ensuing half-century, multiple versions of an Andamanese 'identity' were imaginatively reinvented from a British perspective. The few Britons posted on the Islands in the late nineteenth century encountered the Andamanese directly; for others, like the members of anthropological societies in the UK, the Andamanese were encountered in text and material objects, conceived as scientific 'evidence', central to socio-cultural and evolutionary debates of the period.¹ For a wider British audience, however, with no direct geographical or academic connection, how was an impression of this isolated region and its inhabitants formed? This essay seeks to examine popular conceptions of the Andaman Islands in Britain by exploring one historical moment when the Andaman Islands were appropriated as part of the 'tangible fantasy'² of the imagined Empire: the Indian and Colonial Exhibition of 1886.

It is now well known that the imperial encounters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought the non-Western 'other' into Western consciousness. Ronald Inden, Annie Coombes and Richard White, considering India, Africa and Australia respectively, have led the wide-ranging scholarship which acknowledges the extent to which all corners of the British Empire pervaded British awareness.³ As remote outposts of the British Empire, the Andaman Islands did not have the same resonance as larger colonies, but they did reach British national consciousness on a multitude of occasions: featured in encyclopaedia entries, travel writings, memoirs, illustrated weekly newspapers and magazines, popular fiction, and at international exhibitions.

Amongst all these media, the international exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century provided Europe with a particularly 'powerful stock of images' with which to view itself and the peoples of its Empires.⁴ Despite their modest size, the Andaman Islands and their Nicobarese neighbours figured in these cultural and economic programmes with surprising frequency. Representations of the Andaman Islands ranged from a single photograph of an 'Andamanese group with Mr Homfray, their keeper, photographed at Calcutta', displayed at the 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle,⁵ and a small contingent of 'rude spears of the Nicobar Islanders' again shown in Paris, in 1878,⁶ to the samples of the popular hardwood, Andaman Padauk (or Padouk), prominently displayed in several exhibitions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁷ The most vivid and extensive representation of the Andaman Islands, however, was in 1886, at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in South Kensington. Here the Islands were represented by three clay or plaster-of-Paris figures,⁸ almost life size, positioned together at the east entrance to the Indian Imperial Court in a 'sub-court' enclosed by a bamboo barrier (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1.

'Group of Andaman Islanders', The Graphic, 15 May 1886, p. 540.

In the Exhibition of 1886 racial and cultural perceptions regarding the Andamanese, already fostered by the anthropological community, emerged in the British popular arena. Using as yet unexamined visual evidence, this essay looks at how the Andaman Islands, which epitomized the 'colonial exotic', were employed as dynamic visual entertainment for a metropolitan audience. In using clay models rather than human bodies, the exhibit which featured the Andaman Islands can be seen to have had a marked impact on the perceptions of exhibition visitors. An astonishing five and a half million visitors attended the 1886 Exhibition,⁹ and readership of the periodicals which covered the event was extensive.¹⁰ Perhaps due to the popularity of the event as a whole, or conceivably due to the individual exhibit's inventive and provocative display, this was a crucial moment in the development of Britain's vision of her distant colony.

Scale Models: Sociocultural-Evolutionary Hierarchies Revisited

Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, the Andamanese and their material cultures were commonly viewed through the perspective of anthropological paradigms which relegated them to 'the lowest state of human society of which we have any certain knowledge'.¹¹ Consistently judged in scientific...