Who were the audiences of colonial architecture? Who were the audiences of public institutions such as museums in the colonial context? How were such institutions received by their audiences? In this chapter, these questions motivate an examination of the Napier Museum in Trivandrum, designed from 1872 by Robert Fellowes Chisholm – consulting architect to the Government of Madras – for the nominally independent princely state of Travancore (Figure 7.1).

It is not easy to answer these questions about audience. First, there is little useful archival evidence. There are some bald statistics: numbers of visitors to museums, categorized by sex and by whether or not they could sign their name.1 The figures suggest that the majority of the visitors to museums in India in the nineteenth century were illiterate. But even those who did read and write probably left no diaries, no letters, no memoirs, as they did not participate in European rituals of literacy. Secondly, contemporary postcolonial theory may give us little help in understanding the condition of colonial architecture in places such as India. Mark Crinson, in his introduction to his 1996 book Building Empire, concurs with Edward Said that imperialism is central to the formation of modernity, and that culture and the cultivation of sensibility are themselves part of imperialism. But Crinson suggests that Said has little to offer in helping us understand encounters with the geographically displaced architectural objects European powers left scattered through Asia and the Middle East, for these took place in the colonial context itself, rather than in the centers of metropolitan Europe where orientalist paintings, books, music and decorative arts found their addressees.2 Chisholm, a successful and competent British architect who spent most of his productive career in India, designed buildings that were largely occupied, visited and beheld by Indians. We should, however, not assume that the lives of these Indian addressees were autonomously “other,” for they were being remade by the exigencies of Empire.3

• 1. Visitor numbers for the museums discussed here can be found in the following annual publications: for the Madras Government Central Museum, in Report on the Administration of the Madras Presidency; for the Napier Museum, in Report on the Administration of Travancore and Report on the Administration of the Madras Presidency; for the Baroda Museum, in Report on the Administration of the Baroda State.
• 2. Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture, London: Routledge, 1996, pp. 7–8.
• 3. Chisholm was born probably in 1840, and went to India to work at the Public Works Department of the Bengal Government in Calcutta. He won a competition staged by the Government of the Madras Presidency in 1864 for the designs of Presidency College and the Senate House of Madras University. See Manual of the Administration, Madras Presidency, Madras: Government Press, 1886, vol. 1, p. 375; and Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain’s Raj, London: Faber, 1989, p. 58. He became Consulting Architect in 1869 and stayed in that position until 1886: Report on the Administration of the Madras Presidency, during the year 1885–86, Madras: Government Press, 1886, p. 118, Oriental and India Office Collection, British Library (hereafter, OIOC) V/10/216. In 1888, he won a competition held for a new municipal office building in Bombay, but his design was not built. See “First Premiated Design for Municipal Offices, Bombay,” The Builder, vol. 55, no. 2387, 3 November 1888, 322. Chisholm was appointed to the state service of Baroda in 1889, having already designed the Baroda College buildings there in the early 1880s: see Report on the Administration of the Baroda State for the Official Year ending 31st July 1890, printed at Bombay, 1893, p. 73, OIOC V/10/793; and R. Fellowes Chisholm, “New College for the Gaekwar of Baroda, with Notes on Style and Domical Construction in India,” Transactions of the RIBA, 1882/3, 141–6. He worked on several major public buildings there, particularly the Baroda Museum. Chisholm appears to have spent long stretches of time back in England during the 1890s. He retired fully from India probably in 1900, the year he went on the RIBA retired list. He resumed practice in 1902, retired again in 1912, and died in 1915. For obituaries, see Journal of the RIBA, vol. 22, 1915, 427; and The Builder, vol. 108, 1915, 528.