“Progress” in the Tropics

Abstract

Visitors could approach the Indian Pavilion by boat from Wembley’s artificial lake or along walkways connecting to neighboring pavilions and the Exhibition Station (see Figure 3.1). By passing underneath the seventy-foot Entrance Gateway, modeled on the Buland Darwaza or “Victory Gateway” built by the Mughal Emperor Akbar the Great for his capital at Fatehpur Sikri, visitors were encouraged to associate British rule with the Mughals and reminded that the Mughal dynasty had left a record of astonishing architectural accomplishments. The rest of the Indian building consisted of seventeenth-century Mughal architectural examples, towers resembling the Golden Mosque at Lahore, and a dome similar to the Taj Mahal at Agra.¹ Benita Parry has noted how British observers saw Indian nationalism as the reawakening of an elemental India, one that might be countered through a discourse of progress.² Visitors to the Indian Pavilion were invited to consume India as tourist spectacle, to learn facts about the empire from a three-dimensional taxonomy of India’s marketable resources, and to identify with monuments suggesting an onward march of British-led progress. The Indian Pavilion presented images of economic and cultural complementarity, suggestively illustrating how tradition and modern changes and the needs of Britain and those of Indians might be balanced and reconciled. However, though few British visitors seemed to notice, elisions, disjunctures, competing visions, and discursive backflows undermined the pavilion’s professed unities.