Luxury Goods from India: The Art of the Indian Cabinet-maker

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Many of these masterpieces were made to satisfy the demand of the colonial powers: the Portuguese, Dutch and British settlers who arrived on Indian shores from the late 15th century. They discovered, to their surprise, rare articles of courtly furniture richly worked and inlaid with precious stones and gold. However there was no local furniture that suited the settlers' manner of living, so they commissioned extravagant pieces along European lines from native craftsmen, allowing them free rein with local materials. The resulting fusion of Western forms with Indian materials and decorative techniques gave rise to a wide range of luxury goods - cabinets, game-tables, painted boxes, ceremonial arms - that were breathtaking in their craftsmanship and widely prized in Europe, where they found their way into royal collections, ecclesiastical treasuries and stately houses. The fifty pieces in this volume, dating from the 15th to the late 19th century, demonstrate the diversity and skill of Indian craftsmanship and tell a fascinating story about the changing role of domestic objects and their use in the subcontinent. They illustrate the subtle interaction between European and Indian tastes and sensibilities, and chart the course of colonial patronage. Manypieces illustrated here have never been published before, and Amin Jaffer's scholarly yet accessible text throws new light on a rich and largely unexplored tradition.

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Dr Amin Jaffer is a curator in the Department of Asian Art at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He is an expert on the decorative arts of colonial India and is a regular lecturer and contributor to periodicals on this subject. He is also the author of Furniture from British India and Ceylon: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Peabody Essex Museum (V&A Publications, 2001).