Prehistoric India at Manchester Museum II: Frederick Swynnerton

Continuing the series of blog posts about Manchester Museum’s prehistoric lithics from the Indian subcontinent in preparation for the new South Asia Gallery due to open in 2020.

Stone artefact (?) from Bombay (Mumbai) collected by Frederick Swynnerton

By far the largest proportion of Manchester Museum’s collection – about half – of the just over 300 prehistoric stone tools from the Indian subcontinent were collected in or around Bombay or Mumbai in 1893 and were presented by someone with the initials ‘F.S.’ (see label shown in photograph above). At first I had no idea who F.S. was until I noticed that on one of the labels the name was written in full ‘Frederick Swynnerton’. Who was Frederick Swynnerton? A quick search on the internet produced a candidate:

Frederick Swynnerton self portrait c.1910 (courtesy of Iain Swinnerton)

The following summary is extracted from Inigo Thomas’s blogpost At Tate Modern about his great grandfather: Frederick Swynnerton was born in Douglas, in the Isle of Man, in 1858. He was one of four sons.  Frederick had written about Manx prehistory, and on Indian themes for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, but painting was his vocation. He learnt his art in Rome, where he lived with his older brother Joe and his wife, Annie Swynnerton, the painter, suffragette and the first woman to to be elected to the Royal Academy. He studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and then went to India, intending to make a career for himself as a portrait painter. One of Frederick’s brothers, Charles, was a churchman and moved to India and became a chaplain in Delhi. Frederick married the daughter of an Anglo-Italian military family, and lived with them in Simla. Simla was the summer capital of British India and the Punjab Province before 1947.

India was an opportunity for talented painters like Frederick because portraiture had been introduced by Warren Hastings in order to reduce corruption within the East India Company. Instead of accepting ornate gifts from Indian potentates, officials were to be given pictures of those they wished to influence or rule over. However, there was a problem: in India the sitters didn’t always pay since they got nothing in return. The artists might receive nothing for their labours and Frederick’s life in India wasn’t easy. Frederick also painted what we would now call celebrities , for instance, Jemadar Jangia Thapa, of the 5th Gurkha Regiment in 1890 (National Army Museum 1955-04-20-1). Thapa was awarded the Second Class of the Order of British India in April 1897 and was selected as one of the representatives for India at the inauguration of the Australian Commonwealth in January 1901.

What strengthens the case for for Frederick Swynnerton being the donor of Manchester Museum’s Mumbai stone objects is the fact that we know Frederick exhibited prehistoric stone artefacts that he had collected. In The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain  (vol.29 for 1899, p.141) under miscellaneous business of the meeting of June 27th 1899 is a notice of an exhibition of ‘rude stone implements from the state of Gwalior in central India. By Frederick Swynnerton, Esq. Simla’. The objects are described as roughly chipped fragments of jasper, chert, lydite and other siliceous stones, some collected by Frederick from the alluvial plain on which Gwalior stands. Some of the objects came from the gravels of the Sourrka River and the alluvium on the banks to a height of at least 20 feet and also from the surface far from the river. He also showed large quartzite implements of palaeolithic type found at Raipur, 12 miles from Gwalior by C.Maries, Esq. of Gwalior.

Frederick’s interest in archaeology stretched back to his youth on the Isle of Man and in his travels in search of commissions for the portraits he painted he clearly met people who collected stone tools and he himself collected them. Frederick died suddenly in Bombay in 1918 and was buried at the Sewri cemetery and how the objects from Mumbai came to Manchester isn’t known except  that many of them have  ‘P’ numbers on them in blue paint. The numbers refer to the ‘P Register’, kept by William Boyd Dawkins (1837-1929) and Wilfrid Jackson (1880-1978) and used to record geological, palaeontological and archaeological acquisitions at the Museum.

Natural stone from Mumbai

Unfortunately, whilst the objects, if that is the correct term for them, have been identified as cores, flakes, borers and knives, with a few exceptions, most of the objects appear to be natural.

Natural stone from Mumbai

Whilst this is disappointing the association with Frederick Swynnerton and the British government of India at Simla, Frederick’s  marital home, is significant. This cursory study of the prehistoric lithics collection from the Indian subcontinent has revealed a number of connections with the British imperial and colonial presence in India: a member of the Archaeological Survey of India, a Colonel in the Royal Engineers and now a portrait painter of the well-to-do based in Simla.

I am very grateful to Iain Swinnerton for sending me the image of the self-portrait by Frederick.

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Prehistoric India at Manchester Museum I: Archibald Campbell Carlyle

Cover design of British Museum occasional paper about the Carlyle collection (1994)

Manchester Museum is working on an HLF Courtyard extension project that opens in 2020, and collections curators are looking through their collections for anything that comes from the Indian subcontinent in preparation for the new South Asia Gallery. The new gallery will comprise eight ‘chapters’ ranging chronologically from prehistoric times to Partition, the diaspora  and the founding of South Asian communities in the UK, especially Manchester. All of the disciplines represented in the Museum collections are contributing to this exciting project and doubtless other curators will report in due course about what they have in their collections. In the archaeology collection it’s been an exciting journey of discovery and revelation as I began to realise how significant some of the collectors and donors represented in Manchester Museum’s collection were in the history of Indian archaeology.

Palaeolithic stone tool from the Vindhya Hills, India with a A.C.Carlyle label (Manchester Museum)

Detail of a Carlyle label (Manchester Museum)

Perhaps the most important of the collectors who gave us material from the Indian sub continent was Archibald Campbell Carlyle (1831-1897). Carlyle (or Carlleyle) was First Assistant to the Archaeological Survey of India from 1871 until his retirement in 1885.  Carlyle went to India to seek his fortune, initially as a tutor. At this time employment in the colonies offered security and career prospects. Carlyle worked in the Indian Museum in Calcutta, the Riddell Museum in Agra  and then joined the Archaeological Survey of India.  He was appointed by Alexander Cunningham (1814-1893), Director General of the Survey. The Archaeological Survey was part of the British imperial and colonial project in India, to survey, record, and catalogue the antiquities of the country in order to understand, administer and control them more effectively.  As Dilip Chakrabarti puts it: Cunningham ‘…was trying to justify the systematic archaeological exploration of India on the grounds that politically  it would help the British to rule India.’ (see Prof.Chakrabarti’s ‘The development of archaeology in the Indian subcontinent’, in World Archaeology 13.3, Feb.1982).

Upinder Sigh’s book The Discovery of Ancient India Early Archaeologists and the Beginnings of Archaeology (Permanent Black, 2004) and a British Museum occasional paper on The Carlyle Collection of Stone Age Artefacts from Central India by Jill Cook and Hazel Martingell (1994) provide a lot of information about Carlyle from which the following summary is extracted.

Occasional paper about the Carlyle collection at the British Museum

At a time when Cunningham and the other assistants were understandably preoccupied by ancient Indian sculpture, temples and coins, Carlyle was one of the few people making an effort to recover and record prehistoric stone tools. Jill Cook and Hazel Martingell’s occasional paper paints a vivid picture of Carlyle as a field archaeologist sleeping rough in ruined temples and upsetting the polite conventions of Raj society, on one occasion threatening an enquirer sent by the Raja of Nagod with a gun. Carlyle seems to have been rather prickly about his status, which may explain the alternative spelling of his name as Carlleyle,  to suggest he was from an aristocratic family. His ‘psyche-evaluation’ described him as ‘not ordinarily insane, but liable to outbursts of eccentric action and evil temper’ (Cook and Martingell:13).

The work took Carlyle into the landscape for long periods at a time, travelling on horseback, accompanied by servants on foot and camels to carry the baggage and surveying equipment. He was in eastern Rajastan in 1871-3, the Vindhya Hills and then northwards into the plains with seasons in Gorkhpur, Saran and Ghazipur during the 1870s. He excavated a site at Joharganj in 1879. In the early 1880s he worked in the Vindhya Hills again when complaints were made about him. As Cook and Martingell put it: ‘In 1882, a European with one servant, living rough, without bed and bedding and without a change of clothes or proper food for six weeks had to be mad.’ There is more than a hint of the Indiana Jones about him.

Charles Seidler’s letter in Manchester Museum

When Cunningham proposed that the Archaeological Survey be disbanded, Carlyle lost his job and came back to Britain in 1885. He was 54. Living in straitened circumstances in London,  Carlyle disposed of his archaeological collection by sale or by donation to a number of  museums and individuals. A dealer in antiquities, Charles Seidler, wrote letters to collectors including Sir John Evans, and Canon Greenwell,  antiquarian societies, and the Manchester Museum. David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Palaeontology, found some archive correspondence from Seidler relating to the sale of prehistoric stone artefacts from Carlyle ‘s collection (see image above). The slips of paper that accompany the letter give details of the objects and where they found. Presumably, the various objects were wrapped in these slips of paper. This information was used to compile the entries in the Manchester Museum accession register (the ‘O’ register) and from these we learn that some of the flints came from a very important site called Morhana Pahar in Mirzapur District, Uttar Pradesh. Bridget Allchin identified this as one of a group of sites in the Vindhya Hills escarpment overlooking the Ganga Valley about five miles north of Hanmana village near Bhainsaur. Carlyle excavated the site but didn’t publish it in full (B.Allchin and R.Allchin -1982 –The Rise of Civilisation in India and Pakistan, p.82). He may have kept the information to himself, thinking he would go back some day to investigate it in detail but his ‘retirement’ prevented further work.

The cave or rock shelter site at Morhana Pahar yielded thousands of worked flints and there were cave paintings or mural art. Some of the images must have been painted later in prehistory because they show men driving chariots being ambushed by men on foot using bows. Carlyle’s notes  described them as showing ‘in a very stiff and archaic manner scenes in the life of the ancient stone chippers, others represent animals or hunts of animals by men with bows and arrows, spears and hatchets…’ They seem to depict people living a hunter-gather lifestyle confronting chariot-drivers of the Indian Iron Age, so there must have been considerable overlap of what might be considered chronologically distinct material cultures. Chenchu hunter-gatherers in India were photographed during the 1930s, showing how resilient this way of life is (see Allchin and Allchin p.85). Carlyle seems to have been the first to propose that the cave art was undertaken by people in prehistory. When he was working it was commonly supposed that cave paintings couldn’t have survived for such a long time, and it was only the discovery of Altamira later in the 19th century that opened people’s eyes to the existence of prehistoric cave art. It is a shame that so far we  have not been able to find a photograph of Archibald Campbell Carlyle. Over to you gentle reader….

Carlyle Collection microliths from Morhana Pahar in the Vindhya Hills, in northern central India

The flints from Morhana Pahar are known as microliths and include lunates or crescent shaped artefacts, rhomboids, trapezes, trapezoids triangles, bladelets, drill points and so on. Some of them were mounted in wooden shafts to create barbed weapons. Some were found still ‘glued’ in position in their wooden armatures using bitumen at the prehistoric site of Mehrgarh in Pakistan. The tools are very small and some archaeologists assumed that the people who made them must have been themselves of small stature or pygmies, hence the name for the tools: pygmy flints. They are very similar to the stone tools found on the Pennines around Manchester and during the early 2oth century an associate of William Boyd Dawkins at Manchester Museum, Revd Gatty, argued that northern Britain had been settled by so-called pygmy people from northern India! The flints date from the Mesolithic period, c.9,000-4,000 BC.

Other material includes more microliths from Gharwa Pahari,  Baghe Khor and Likhneya Pahar, Palaeolithic implements and Neolithic axeheads from Marfa in Bundelkhand, and other stone artefacts, including a Madras type hatchet from the Gaur River.

As a footnote to this discussion I might also add that the list of museums holding Carlyle material in Cook and Martingell’s occasional paper in 1994 does not include Manchester Museum. So far 82 artefacts that Carlyle collected have been catalogued, one of the largest of the collections after the British Museum and National Museums of Scotland (Edinburgh).

I leave the last words to Carlyle:

‘The question now, therefore, is not -‘where are stone implements to be found?’ but rather – where are they not to be found?’ For so far as my own experience goes, they appear findable almost everywhere in India.’

Dilip Chakrabarti (1999) India an Archaeological History Palaeolithic Beginnings Early Historic Foundations (O.U.P.), p.95

Next time: Frederick Swynnerton.

 

See also The Mystery of Colonel Mayne