D Tapati Guha-Thakurta FROM LONDON TO NEW DELHI: THE SHOWING OF INDIA'S 'MASTERPIECES' The exhibition was a follow-up of a prior show organized by the Royal Academy of Arts, London and held at Burlington House (the home of the Academy) from 29 November 1947 to 29 February 1948, to mark the occasion of the Transfer of Power in 91 British India. It was the success of earlier exhibitions of Persian and Chinese art in its premises in the 1930s that led the Royal Academy to work on the plan of assembling a show of "typical masterpieces of Indian art' for the British public, with the aim of creating a better understanding of the art and culture of the country.6 In 1931, a large exhibition of Indian art, too, had been organized by the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, which had brought across a number of art-objects from governmental and private collections in India, to add to the works from British collections. This exhibition, then, was seen as a crucial eye-opener to Indian art: 'an art rich in masterpieces of a marked individuality of character7 7 But, in a situation where the prestige of Indian art continued to suffer in the western world 'from a want of knowledge of its finest achievements', there remained a need for an exhibition of much greater standard and scale: a need that was seen to have been eventually fulfilled by the event of 1947. The timing of this show gave a special edge to this renewed gesture of cultural empathy and appreciation, even as the display offered a complete, unfragmented sense of what would henceforth be territorially divided as the art of India and Pakistan. In the history of the 'arrival' of Indian art in the west, this exhibition of 1947 is singled out as a major turning point—if it marked the independence of India from British rule, it also 'signalled the beginning of the freedom of Indian art from its history of past prejudices'.8 What made the vital difference in this show was the transportation of a large number of important pieces of sculpture from India, which 'enabled the public to see many masterpieces which, in all probability, they will never see again, and the scholar to study at firsthand, what had hitherto only been available in photographs'.9 As emphasized by all contemporary and later scholars, the novelty of the event lay in this first-hand encounter with the 'original' objects, in all their splendour. The presence of these large monumental sculptures (loaned almost entirely from museums in India and Pakistan, and brought across to England through much effort and expense) turned out to be the exhibition's most distinctive feat and feature. It is what set it apart from the 1931 display, where the exhibits had consisted mainly of paintings (primarily Mughal, Rajput and Pahari miniatures, including a few early Jain manuscript illustrations and some later Kalighat paintings), and where the sculptures had been confined largely to a smaller range (like seals and statues from Mohenjodaro and Harappa, Gandhara heads, or metal sculptures from south India and Bengal). This also now reinforced a particular definition of the 'masterpiece' in Indian art, equating it primarily with the achievements in early Indian sculpture. Here, a main framing vision was that of Kenneth de Burgh Codrington, then, one of the key authorities on Indian art in England, and the chief initiator of both the 1931 and the 1947 exhibitions: a scholar who used the central Numbers 30-31