The Indian Struggle for Independence
Here it is a bracelet, the final personal possession of the last Mughal emperor, exiled in Burma in 1857 by the British armed forces, which highlights the violent collapse of this dynasty (1526-1857). Nearly a hundred years of brutal occupation of the Indian sub-continent followed until the struggles for independence and the country’s liberation (1947); certain major figures of the latter are represented on the two canvases which once belonged to the independence fighter Shyamji Krishna Varma (1857-1930).
The journey of these objects also exemplifies Geneva’s place in the global history of Asia. The bracelet was given to the Ethnography Museum in 1990 by the wife of a high-ranking Indian civil servant at the UN who had received it from the descendants of the officer who accompanied the emperor into exile. As for the canvases, they arrived in Geneva in 1914 after the expulsion of Krishna Varma from London. He had set up a boarding house there for Indian students where the canvases used to hang. It was there that he continued his combat.
Damien Kunik
