Tibetan gift-giving, British indifference, and the erasure of provenance in colonial india

Abstract In 1913, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet dispatched a lavish diplomatic gift to the viceroy of India. However, upon its arrival the colonial administration received it with marked disregard and its subsequent fate remains unknown. The lama’s gift and the British reaction to it brings into view the British Toshakhana in colonial India, an office within the foreign department in Calcutta responsible for managing, appraising, and discreetly selling off diplomatic gifts without the giver knowing. This article examines how an eighteenth-century decision to bureaucratize gift exchange continued to disrupt long-standing South Asian protocols of reciprocity and regard well into the twentieth century. In doing so it challenges readings of diplomatic gift-giving as an opportunity to reflect on moments of (albeit unequal) transcultural encounter and material exchange and instead argues that the colonial administration fostered a gifting culture of indifference. The study of the Toshakhana’s methods of dispersal not only sheds light on the complex networks that enabled diplomatic gifts to disappear without a trace, but also provides new insights into the widespread absence of provenance information for South Asian and Tibetan artefacts held in European and South Asian museum collections today.