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At her home on the Isle of Wight, Queen Victoria (1819–1901) fashioned a miniaturized and domesticated India over which she reigned as Empress. She commissioned a Durbar Room—an elaborate banquet hall—with a corridor filled with nearly one hundred paintings of Indian heads, and further outfitted her home with at least twelve turbaned men who breathed life into her most outrageous imperial fantasies. While it was the invisibility of servants that was praised in Victorian society, the Queen wanted her Indians to be as visible and legible as possible.Join Dr. Siddhartha V. Shah, John Wieland 1958 Director, Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, as he examines the picturesque servitude performed by the Queen’s foreign attendants through a study of her photo albums housed in the Royal Collection. These images expose a centuries-old convention of using imported laborers to fulfill contrasting social and chromatic effects—Indians as decorative props, arranged in a symbolic power play of light and dark, domination and subordination.
About the Speaker:
Siddhartha V. Shah joined Amherst College in 2022 as the John Wieland 1958 Director of the Mead Art Museum, which delivers a dynamic global exhibition program that addresses some of today’s most urgent topics. Under his leadership, the Mead was awarded accreditation through the American Alliance of Museums and became the first certified sensory-inclusive art museum in the region.
Before joining Amherst College, Shah was Curator of South Asian Art as well as Director of Education and Civic Engagement at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts, where he installed the museum’s renowned South Asian Art Galleries and curated several important exhibitions, developed programs to support the social and emotional wellbeing of the museum’s audiences, championed increased accessibility for visitors with invisible disabilities, and launched a bilingual initiative to attend to the needs of Spanish-speaking visitors and English language learners. Prior to his work in art museums, Shah had a sixteen-year career as an art consultant in a commercial gallery system, gallery director, and independent specialist in contemporary Hindu and Buddhist art of the Kathmandu Valley.
His academic and curatorial projects have been featured in publications ranging from The Times of India and India Today, to The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and Psychology Today. Learn more about Dr. Shah in his Amherst College faculty biography.
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