Curating a Lahore Darbar Gallery on a Zero Budget
The district museum in Patiala is planning a gallery called 'The Lahore Darbar of Maharaja Ranjit Singh' and has six weeks before opening. Four objects have been offered. Object A is a silver nanakshahi rupee whose mint name is Amritsar and whose date converts to 1828 CE. Object B is an oil portrait of the Maharaja, signed and dated 1844. Object C is a framed photograph of the Maharaja seated in durbar, donated by a family that says it was taken in the 1830s. Object D is a Persian farman bearing a seal, said to be from the Darbar, with no date visible. The curator has no conservator and no budget for scientific testing. She must decide which objects go into the main case as contemporary to the Maharaja, which need a caution label, and which should be left out. The gallery text must not mislead school groups.
1. Rank the four objects by how securely they can be displayed as contemporary with Ranjit Singh (d. 1839), and explain the ranking.
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A first. A coin is a dated, mass-produced official object; the mint name Amritsar and the date 1828 CE fit the Darbar period, and coin dies and weights are relatively well studied. The caveat is that copies exist, so the label should say 'struck at Amritsar, dated 1828 CE', not 'owned by the Maharaja'.
D second, conditional. A sealed farman is exactly the kind of document the Darbar produced, but with no visible date and no way to check the seal against a published corpus in six weeks, it is unverified; display only as 'attributed'. B third: dated 1844, five years after Ranjit Singh's death, it cannot be a life portrait. It may copy an earlier likeness, which makes it useful for the history of his image, not as a contemporary likeness. C last, for the reason given in the next answer.
2. Explain the problem with Object C in terms a Class 9 visitor could follow.
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Photography was made public in 1839, the same year Ranjit Singh died, and no photograph of him is known. Even if a camera had reached Lahore in time, the Maharaja was already ill and died in June. A '1830s photograph' of him in durbar is therefore almost certainly not what it claims: it could be a later photograph of a painting, a painted photograph, or a print with a family story attached.
The label should say what the object physically is first, for example 'photograph of a painting, late nineteenth or early twentieth century', and report the donor's tradition separately as a tradition. The teaching point is that an object's physical date and the date in its label can diverge, and the label itself is part of the evidence.
3. Draft the caution label for Object B (portrait, 1844).
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'Portrait of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, oil on canvas, dated 1844. Painted five years after the Maharaja's death, this is a posthumous image, probably based on an earlier sketch or miniature made at the Lahore Darbar. It shows how later artists and patrons imagined the Darbar rather than what the Maharaja looked like in 1844, when he was no longer alive. Compare the coin (A), which carries a date from his lifetime.'
Keep it short, lead with what the visitor sees, then say what it means. Avoid the word 'fake': a posthumous portrait is a normal historical object, not a forgery. The label should state who is depicted, when the object was made, and how that date relates to the Maharaja's lifetime.