The Earliest South Asian Collectors of South Asian Antiquities: War, Business, and Antiquarian Research in Nineteenth-Century Northwest India

In the nineteenth century, European antiquarians travelled to India as the territorial rivalry between Britain and Russia for influence over Central Asia, known as the Great Game, raged on. In northwest India, they hunted for antiquities and deposited them in museums in Britain and France. In their antiquarian endeavours, they were supported by local South Asian men, whom they failed to credit for their contribution, resulting in their historical erasure from the canons of the discovery of antiquities. While modern day scholarship has discussed these antiquarians, it has elided over the role of their Indian helpers. This paper corrects these historical erasures by highlighting the role of local Indian and Afghan men in building antiquities collection of European antiquarians in northwest India. It also recounts the story of the earliest Indian collectors of South Asian antiquities, Sayyid Karamat Ali and Mohan Lal Kashmiri, detailing their efforts in collecting objects and surveying historical sites. I show how through close reading and paying attention to the literal margins of texts, we can trace the development of knowledge on South Asian antiquities. These discoveries were not made by the lone European male scholar but crucially relied on Indian and Afghan actors.