A New Testament Content

A NEW TESTAMENT Scandinavian missionaries and Santal chiefs from Company and British Crown Rule to Independence

Tone Bleie

solum bokvennen 2023

© Solum Bokvennen AS 2023 Imprint: Vidarforlaget Printed in Latvia Livonia Print, Riga 2023 Book i set with 11/14 p. Adobe Garamond Pro Paper: Munken Print Cream 80 g Cover foto: Anupam Abishai Baskey Cover design: monoceros ISBN: 978-82-560-2873-3 ISBN: 978-82-560-2874-0 (e-book) E-mail: post@solumbokvennen.no Internet: www.solumbokvennen.no

The author has received core funding from UIT The Arctic University of Norway and The Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association (NFFO) Published with support from Arts and Culture Norway, Digni and Strømme Foundation

Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 About the contents of the book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Section 1: Contexts of a Scandinavian-South Asian legacy Chapter 1: Legacy context, issues, and landscapes . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Chapter 2: Archives and public blind spots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Chapter 3: Missions, missionaries, and merchants: global and the regional contexts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Chapter 4: Missionaries and chiefs as actors – intellectual meetings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Section 2: Mission Station Christianity’s universalization Chapter 5: Faith entrepreneurship and its foundation . . . . . . . . 125 Chapter 6: Christianity, mother tongues, and ethno-nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Chapter 7: Rights, moral, and social reforms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199 Section 3: Globalization localized: settlers, heirs, icons Chapter 8: Ebenezer Mission in the jungle as settler history . . . 225 Chapter 9: The Trust Deed and a succession drama . . . . . . . . . . 271 Chapter 10: Cast selves, submission, and silences – a person gallery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295

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Section 4: Museums, churches, and mission in the 20th Century Chapter 11: A history of a Norwegian ethnographic museum and its Bodding collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 Chapter 12: The Society and its Church – constitutionalism as a prism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 Chapter 13: The Post-Raj period of churches – neocolonialism as a prism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 Annex 1: Timelines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453 Annex 2: Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459 Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 461 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 515 About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 523

The words of the ancestors are ended.

I learned from Buku guru of the village Pabea in Panḍra coun­ try, and I have made you two, Kerap Saheb [L.O. Skrefsrud] and old Jugia my disciples in the country, in order that the words may not be lost, may they remain genera­ tion after generation.

1 Benagaria [Mission], 05.08.1887 L.O. Skrefsrud and Jugiạ Haṛam

My story is about to be unravelled.

I learned from the written sayings of the ancestors in the col­ lections and archives in foreign countries, and the living tales of gurus, pastors, missionaries, and villagers in Benagaria, Mohulpahari, Dumka, Ranchi, Bishnubati, Kolkata, Copen­ hagen, Oslo, Hurdal, Minneapolis, and Dinajpur, in order that the words and deeds may not be lost, may they remain genera­ tion after generation.

Tromsø [University], 02.11.2022 T. Bleie

1 Sage Guru Kolean’s conclusive words that ended his recitation of the ancestors’ epics (binti), as rendered in Traditions and institutions of the Santals: Ho̱ ṛkore̱n mare hepṛamko reak’ katha (1887/1994).

Preface The Scandinavian–Santal legacy entwines two histories, one ‘little’,, the other ‘grand’. A new testament interrogates this entanglement over centuries of the colonial history of major European powers and missions, unraveling an ignored settler story. It began in the jungle in the late1860s in the newly designated district of Santal Parganas in Eastern British India. Readers are invited to journey through an extraordinary history of Mission Station Christianity among Santals initially, then expanding to Boro and Bengalis of Lower Assam and tracts of West Bengal and East Pakistan, later Bangladesh.

As awakened messengers of the Gospel, missionaries traversed an enormous Atlantic World. They propagated universalist ideas about the saving grace of becoming born again and achieving earthly social justice before the coming of the Kingdom of God. In Eastern India, Santal missionaries toured the countryside in winding elephant caravans, on stools and on foot. Prayers, biblical readings, hymns, and mission photography of evangelical ‘progress’ lifted “Santalistan” into an imaginary utopian mindscape. This notion of ‘progress’ lent legitimacy from clergymen and philosophers’ justification of Christianity’s ‘civilizing’ mission worldwide.

Another underpinning for expansion was the global spread of ideas of private property, bounded territory or enclosure. Such cataclysmic ideas originated in the lush British countryside, before being brutally tested on the Irish peasantry in the 17th Century. They eventually reached prosperous Bengal after the Battle of Plassey in 1757. The victor, the British [9]

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East India Company, superimposed a largely alien legal notion and an intermediary revenue class, a tenurial regime that undermined ancient land arrangements. Usury landlords assumed ownership over enormous territories, previously held by a mosaic of neighborly ancient chiefly and royal formations. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Scandinavian faith entrepreneurs maneuvered on a knife’s edge in a societal cauldron. Seething anger boiled over during the Santal rebellion of 1855–1856. We portray a chiefly organized society, bitterly divided over how to deal with white godmen and settlers. And we show how the latter – as religious gurus, patrons, landlords, medics, peacemakers, and advocates – painstakingly earned a measure of goodwill among colonial officers, chiefs, and locals.

The Scandinavian–Santal Mission ‘in the jungle’ arguably contributed to reshaping cultural landscapes in British East India. An earthly vehicle, the early Santal church was mainly modeled on apostolic ideas and traditional ‘tribal’ democratic consensus-oriented assemblies. But this would change. The Mission expanded, building supporter constituencies on both sides of the Atlantic. Modern printing presses, cameras, telegraphs, rails, and oceanic post and passenger ships formed a transformative technoscape. Remote mission estates and the ‘global village’ became connected. Scholar missionaries, chiefs, and sages set written standards for Santali, this ancient Northern Muṇḍa language of the Austroasiatic family. They embarked on a generational treasure hunt (1890s–1930s), collecting ethnographic and prehistoric artifacts. The Protestant notion of holy scriptures in the vernacular melded with Western education. The impact on the Santals, steeped in an ancestral millennia-old oral legacy, was enormous. Universalization processes transmuted the oral legacy onto handwritten manuscripts, publications, artifacts, and grammar standards.

A new testament is not a straightforward history of a European core and a colonized periphery. We may speak of two, unequal, peripheries. From remote capitalist-penetrated borderlands, Santals and Norwegians upheld compatible egalitarian values. Painstakingly they built trust despite racial bars. The book covers mainly three mission epochs. An awkward combination of modern ideas of rural improvement from below and colonial schemes of indirect rule and pacification (1867–1910) from above characterizes the first. The 1911–1947 period represents a shift from Indian home mission to a transatlantic society. Foreign, expert-composed staff [ 10 ]

PREFACE

pioneered humanitarian, health, and educational service delivery. The third, development aid epoch, began after the independence of India and Pakistan (1947) and Denmark and Norway (1945). Liberations from British imperialists and Hitler Germany caused cascades of consequences for the relations between independent states, Christian missions, and their successor churches. The Lutheran successor churches and parachurch organizations remained constrained by a neocolonial paternalistic mindset hampering the delivery of public goods and self-rule.

Above all, this book seeks to fill unconscionable gaps and silences in current public memory, co-produced transnationally under unequal political, economic, and cultural conditions such as pernicious language and racial barriers for non-Scandinavian speakers. Eminent academic works highlight specific mission periods and iconic themes like the Santal Rebellion. This volume’s extended timeline takes in early DanoNorwegian and British Company Rule, Crown Rule, and the early postIndependence period. This helps to fill certain critical knowledge gaps of the longue durée. Secular scholars have mainly grappled with the Scandinavian Santal Mission as cultural, and hence religious, history. This volume acts as a counterpoise with greater attention to economic, legal, and political history – thrust onto local, regional, and global canvases.

Two citations adorn A new testament’s first inner page. One is taken from the famous Ancestors’ Tales by the Guru Kolean (Ho̱ ṛkore̱n mare hepṛamko reak’ katha). The other conveys my unbounded gratitude to the authors and harbingers of the oral and textual sources of a 170-yearold Scandinavian–Santal literary tradition. The Norwegian pioneer missionary and cultural nationalist, L.O. Skrefsrud, and his accomplice, Chief Jugiạ Haṛam, recorded in 1871–1872 the sacred epics. The time that has passed since Skrefsrud’s subsequent publishing of the Ancestors’ Tales in 1887, represent a mere blink of the eye compared to the millennia of the Santal oral tradition.

A new testament consults historical archives on three continents and revisits ethnography crafted over my own participant observation and interviews (1982–2005) with living custodians of orality: gurus, healers, oracles, and ordinary villagers. Santals or Ho̠ ṛ Ho̠po̠n, Oraons, Muṇḍas and other Adivāsis across states and districts in East India, Northern Bangladesh, and Eastern Nepal, sustain annual ritual cycles. Joyful and [ 11 ]

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graceful enactments unfold in a parallel memorial universe most outsiders are ignorant of or prejudiced about. Their indigenous lifeworld was already facing tremendous pressure at the time when the Scandinavian settlers claimed a tract of jungle and sat at the feet of Guru Kolean.

Skrefsrud’s doomsday prophecies about the demise of the oral heritage have been proven wrong. Guru Kolean’s portrayal of inner and outer strains on his society as dense forests was razed, and the land laid bare to cultivation and plunder was closer to reality. These desecrations have not merely come to pass but have become more pervasive and destructive.

About the contents of the book Section 1: Contexts of a Scandinavian-South Asian legacy Chapter 1: Legacy contexts, topics, and landscapes The chapter’s opening portrays the imperial context in which Protestant evangelicals began propagating the Gospel among the forest tribes of Bihar and Bengal. The topics of A new testament are presented before portraying the cultural landscapes that sustain current public memory of the populace, heritage custodians, the Transatlantic successor missions, and their Lutheran Churches in East India, Northern Bangladesh, and Eastern Nepal. The narrative focus shifts to unraveling the odyssey of research and the craft of academic storytelling. The Scandinavian–Santal–Boro– Bengali legacy is likened to a magnificent tapestry. Scrutinizing in depth Scandinavian–Santal transnational history, the chapter introduces a kaleidoscopic story examining the legacy’s designs, peculiarly solid base, and generations of weavers, many forgotten, others scandalized or canonized.

Troubling blind spots in public and academic debates justifies telling a compelling history of this remarkable religious, cultural, and economic legacy since Danish Company Rule in the 18th Century until the early post-Independence period. [ 13 ]

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Chapter 2: Archives and public blind zones How much patience, imagination, and devotion to rigorous craft does it take to research a secretive and disorganized archive and produce the narrative building blocks of a historical tapestry that engages both academics and non-academics? This chapter lifts the lid on the work of a historical anthropologist who consulted public and private archives on three continents and revisited her anthropological records going back to the early-1980s. Paradoxes in contemporary public debates on the homeland, multiculturalism, and the post-secular turn, particularly in Norway, are explored. Contemporary debates stir up moral anxiety about invasive aliens showing an unapologetic indifference to mounting evidence of transformative rather intrusive presences of the double-monarchy Denmark–Norway and later evangelical missions in South Asia.

Chapter 3: Missions, missionaries, and merchants – global and regional contexts Indigenous-inhabited Raj Mahal’s location on the fringes of an enormous forest-shrouded world and the mighty Ganges attracted hunting parties, nawabs, and sailing European merchants in the18th Century Missionaries were yet to arrive. Taking the global history of Christianity and of Christianity in South Asia as contexts, light is shone on how different phases of colonialism impacted the recruitment, routes, and moving frontiers of generations of emissaries of the Gospel. A reexamination of the epochs of Denmark–Norway’s fortified mission enclaves (1706s–1790s) in Bengal and South India and dispersed interior mission estates (1860s–2000s) in Bihar and Bengal exposes how intimately the spatial layouts of missions in the two epochs reflected the stages of colonialism – from mercantile trade to fuller territorial control, resource extraction, and pacification of rebellions tribes. The narration switches once again from the global and regional to the local in the form of a revelatory story of the Scottish Grant family’s proprietorship in Dumka, Santal Parganas. The background for the Grants’ generous bequeathals of two estates evinces the pro-mission stance of the Grants’ ‘illustrious’ ancestor Charles Grant (1746–1823), an Anglican reformist politician and chairman of the British East India Company. [ 14 ]

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Chapter 4: Missionaries and Santal chiefs as actors – intellectual meetings Acknowledging the Transatlantic area as a fertile recruitment ground for 19th-Century evangelists, this chapter examines what lay behind an unlikely intellectual convergence and budding alliance between Scandinavian–Santal missionaries and Santal chiefs (1870s–1900s). The counterintuitive narrative explains how early local opposition turned into a meeting of utopian ideas, egalitarian values, and joint advocacy for chiefly self-rule and land protection. Santal chiefs drew on their mobile prehistory. They nurtured an undying hope of a restorative social order despite the bloodshed and dire repercussions of the Santal Rebellion (1855–1856). The North European mission founders drew on contrasting class, religious and social backgrounds, ranging from a politically and religiously changing East Norwegian countryside, to a rowdy workingclass milieu in Copenhagen, cosmopolitan evangelical Berlin, and Calcutta’s high society. The chapter concludes by discussing the missionary pioneers’ intellectual sources and posturing as rising international evangelical stars and the consequences for their mission’s Lutheran turn in the early 20th Century.

Section 2: Mission Station Christianity’s universalization Chapter 5: Faith entrepreneurship and its foundation Faith entrepreneurship theory departs from the recognition that Scandinavian missionaries and Santal chiefs were actors directed by, respectively, a supreme Lord and a Godhead. This and supporting evidence explain how missionaries and chiefs operated as proactive faith entrepreneurs rather than mere colonial pawns (1870s–1900s). A visionary legal trust-based ownership made the tapestry unassailable solid. Using middleman strategies as godmen, legal advisers and arbiters, humanitarians, and peace mediators, reformist missionaries, chiefs, and friendly British administrators made progress during these volatile decades. Santal chiefs deployed strategically their white Sahibs and their own dreaded reputation for deadly mass action. Semi-traditional chiefly powers, amid advo[ 15 ]

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cacy for self-rule and land reform, humanitarian food-for-work, education, benevolent landlordism and colony and tea schemes in Assam, demonstrated a seemingly divinely blessed endeavor. A nearly omnipotent missionary presence raised Santal hopes for a return to a social order of greater justice and dignity, preparing the ground for a period of rapid progress of Evangelical Christianity.

Chapter 6: Christianity, mother tongues, and ethno-nationalism This and the next chapter develop a theoretical perspective on the underrated designs of universalization propagated by the Santal Mission and its later iterations. The enduring impact on the fabric of the host society remains understated by scholars and policymakers alike. A theoretical perspective is developed by initially revisiting the influential thesis of religious universalization in Bengal’s enormous forest frontiers in the medieval period. Against this backdrop, our narrative unravels 19th- and 20th-Century universalization by scholar-missionaries, gurus, sages, pastors, and evangelists. They were variably influenced of low-church evangelism, post-Rebellion resistance forms, and a literary turn inspired by Scandinavian cultural nationalism. In a reassessment of a contemporary academic argument that views the scholar-missionaries, gurus, and sages as purely ideology-driven kingmakers of vernacular Santali, neglected evidence of their lives and innovative research methods is revealed. Vernacular Santali is conclusively reviewed as a politics of recognition and identify formation between the two world wars (1918–1939) and following Independence (1947).

Chapter 7: Rights, moral, and social reforms Constitution-making and related legislative reforms form the points of departure for this chapter’s inquiry into entitlement-based designs of universalization. Taking the original Indian Constitution as a starting point, the designs of entitlement-based politics of ethnic minorities, tribes, Adivāsis and Indigenous in South Asia are reexamined, drawing on comparative human rights law and political anthropology. A comparison of constitutionalism, lawmaking, and popular politics in the British-ruled Golden Mission Era (1860s–1947) and the post-Independence epoch brings to light why Nepal’s, India’s, and Bangladesh’s Constitutions and [ 16 ]

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international commitments to ethnic minority rights differ. A second analyzed design of universalization draws on this author’s earlier theoretical works on gender and modernity, opening a new vista on the impact of the Santal Mission as social and moral reformer.

Section 3: Globalization localized: settlers, heirs, icons Chapter 8: Ebenezer Mission in the jungle as settler history In 1867, the faith entrepreneurs Lars Skrefsrud, Edward Johnson, and Hans Peter Børresen ‘discovered’ and claimed a ‘pristine’ tract adjacent to three Santal hamlets in Santal Parganas. Over the following decades (1867–1892), the ‘dark’ jungle gave way to a palatial ‘white’ mission headquarters designed and supervised by white settlers, built by them and local craftsmen and laborers. Following early legal and reputational difficulties, the Santal Mission got to work in saving souls, expanding its imposing headquarter and acquiring several new mission estates.

Revisiting the colonial settler myth of site possession by divine grace, this chapter pieces together a colonial cultural and economic geography.

The Santal missionaries maneuvered within this geography as godmen, gurus, estate lords, architects, constructors, and fundraisers among local and foreign foes, allies, and mission friends. In reexamining official mission history, the chapter offers a new and grander narrative of the Santal Mission as an expansionist landlord and universalist reformer constantly extending Christianity’s ‘civilizational’ frontiers.

Chapter 9: The Trust Deed and a succession drama The partly self-made myth as pioneer missionaries living heroic detached lives on their jungle estate was debunked in an earlier chapter that revealed their transnational style of living. This chapter further dispels this myth by showing how the Santal Missionaries operated their propertied faith enterprise under the aegis of evangelical patrons and Anglo-Indian trust law. The early sections disclose how these faith entrepreneurs mobilized social capital connecting them to the inner circles of the British Raj, to be at the forefront of new colonial legislation, shedding light on the favorable timing of the Trust Deed in 1880. Skrefsrud, on behalf of his [ 17 ]

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mission, also positioned himself as a central intermediary in the drawn out Santal Parganas Land Settlement (1872–1910), a role that proved advantageous for the Mission’s trust property accumulation. Access to a trove of original correspondence involving heirs, wills, a legal counsel in Calcutta, and leaders in Scandinavia exposes a succession drama. In eye of the storm was a dying Lars Skrefsrud, his co-founder and confidante Caroline Børresen and his earlier protégé and supposed successor Paul Olaf Bodding.

Chapter 10: Cast selves, submission, silences – a person gallery uncovered In the pioneer era, the Santal Mission propagated a civilizing enterprise on two fronts. Externally, it spanned transatlantic member missions and the evangelical circles in the British Raj. In Norway, Denmark, and America, an early women’s civil and political rights movement necessitated internal balancing acts. Religious societies sought to maintain men’s exclusive right to pastoral duties as priests and pastors but began recruiting single women as missionaries and native evangelists. In the British Raj, the Mission was an architect of moral reform that sought to curb libertarian tribal mores. Moral reform put strict demands on missionaries as gurus and star evangelists to behave as icons – displaying an impeccably puritan moral self-discipline. Drawing on the author’s earlier works on body politics and modernity and archival material, an intriguing person gallery of prominent foreign missionaries and a Santal evangelist is unveiled.

This gallery testifies to the personal sacrifices and tragedies caused by an unbridgeable distance between lofty pietistic ideals and personal lives torn between duty on remote estates and alluring metropolises with their star-struck adoration and emancipatory promises.

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ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF THE BOOK

Section 4: Museums, churches, and mission in the 20th Century Chapter 11: A history of a Norwegian ethnographic museum and its Bodding collection This history is composed from narratives on the rise of the Victorian public museum, Norway’s first ethnographic university museum and a particular non-European “tribal” collection amassed and donated (currently questioned by way of oral history) between 1901 and 1934. Having characterized how the early museum’s collections were acquired under shifting collection and exhibition policies and practices, we trace how the parliamentary and national breakthroughs motivated the collector and scholar-missionary P.O. Bodding and his mentor L.O . Skrefsrud to embark on a generational dual-purpose collection effort. Our exposition interrogates Bodding’s notions of custodianship, in/tangible artifacts, and his trained collectors’ protocols of recording the oral legacy and amassing allegedly archeological artifacts, some considered sacred locally.

The following sections chronicle the hidden ‘life’ of conserved artifacts and manuscripts in Oslo (mainly) over a 120-year period (1901–2022), until a first virtual repatriation to India in the late-1980s and the current digitized repatriation. Informed by an ethnography of museums, and minorities and indigenous rights to cultural heritage, the chapter concludes by examining the painful dilemmas inherent in coming to grips with what can justifiably be called a postcolonial custodian policy.

Chapter 12: The Society and its Church – constitutionalism as a prism Chapter 13: The Post-Raj period of churches – neocoloniality as a prism The final chapters narrate how a revamped Transatlantic mission society handled a constitutional reform agenda amidst unprecedented changes in global, regional, and national politics and religious affairs. Chapter thirteen explains how a secular international order rose from the ruins of World War 2. The order’s secular ideas of solidarity challenged Christian [ 19 ]

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compassion and prompted state-society accommodation under the new state-funded aid regimes. Employing an interdisciplinary social science viewpoint, both chapters tease out new insights into how this faith entrepreneurial enterprise responded to and exploited new opportunities.

The case holds wider relevance as other Asian Lutheran missions were similarly compelled to navigate the Asian theatre of Cold War politics.

Chapter twelve may profitably be read as an international precursory history of aid (1911–1950) and chapter thirteen as a history of aid (1950– 2000). Together, they address religious globalization, social technology transfers, and liberal foreign funding under asymmetrical conditions of internal bargaining power. Both chapters delve into a centenary history of traffic in Lutheran theology, constitutional principles of the Mission Society and its Lutheran church, missionary expertise, and, not to forget, a financial policy wrought with dilemmas. This transnational traffic unfolded amidst attempts of church nationalization and self-financing.

Complementing chapter eleven on a technology-facilitated traffic in museum artifacts and people, the final two chapters build a 20th-Century framing to A new testament’s narratives of the previous two centuries.

Chapter 11 A history of a Norwegian ethnographic museum and its Bodding Collection I think and feel that today is the happiest day for all Santali loving people, because the dream of P.O. Bodding has become a reality by handing over to us the tools and instruments prepared by him for development of Santal literature. It was his strong desire that as far as possible this collection should be made available to future generations of Santal people.

Ezicheal Hembrom, President, the Com­mit­tee of Santal Cultural and Literary Organizations, St. Xavier’s College, 2 Novem­ber 1988, Calcutta.

Introduction

684

Early chapters of this book examined faded designs showing hidden influences dating back to Company Rule, the Reformation, the Medieval Period, and a waning ‘golden’ Santal past. On a remarkably solid base, intricately interwoven indigenous and European designs symbol684 This chapter partly builds a paper presented at the Missionaries, Materials and the Making of the Modern World conference held on 15–17.09.2014 at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge and a later version delivered at The International Bodding Symposium, 3–5.11.2015, co-organized by the Museum of Cultural History of the University of Oslo, and SSINherit at the University of Tromsø.

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ized land, justice, and spiritual belonging. The bold designs on this 20thCentury fabric, however, show distinctively stronger European cultural, economic, and political influences. The meaningful patterns, color symbolism, and weavers that emerge betray a formidable transnational flow of ideas, artifacts, peoples, technologies, and transactions.

Why did a Norwegian missionary and his Santal collaborators amass the Indian subcontinent’s most comprehensive ‘tribal’ collection and dispatch several shipments across “the seven seas” to Norway and the capital’s university museum? Once there, we must trace the “lives” of the three sub-collections over more than a century, encompassing Paul Bodding’s passing, Nazi occupation, and a drastic dip in scientific and political valorization of colonial collections.

Between 1901 and 1934, numerous consignments of finely scripted manuscripts and various types of artifacts reached Kristiania. Shipments were dispatched from Santalistan via Calcutta’s bustling waterfront and the Suez Canal and from there into the North Atlantic Sea route, ending up in Kristiania’s harbor. This appears as another intricate story of intersections between the transnational, the national, and the local (see chapters 3 and 4). Britain in her New Imperialist Period pioneered the Victorian public museum. Norway, a budding nation-state on Europe’s periphery, would in the 19th Century adopt this colonial museum model 685 and invest massively in cultural and historical museums and collections.

Parliamentary and cultural breakthroughs in the 1880s and 1890s would inspire a Norwegian scholar-missionary to become a pastoral enlighten686 ment ideologue, author, and collector overseer. Concluding, I question the prospects for renewing custodian politics and museum practices, and progressively accommodating the source communities’ customary 685 New Imperialism refers to a late period of colonial expansion by North European powers, America, and Japan during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

New imperialism distinguishes somewhat modern imperialism from earlier waves of European colonization; see, e.g., Gallaher (2009), Eriksen (2022).

686 The use of Western social contract theory is not unproblematic in this transnational context. However, I would argue that social contract theory is fruitful in understanding the religious, moral, and social forms of trust that existed between Northern Santals and this Santal Mission, painstakingly forged by the missionaries and Santal chiefs. Together, they operated successfully as intermediary entrepreneurs (see chapters 5–7).

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CHAPTER 11 – A HISTORY OF A NORWEGIAN ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEUM AND ITS BODDING COLLECTION

687

and international cultural rights to this particular heritage. This chapter views a museum as a specially crafted space dedicated to conserve, store, and represent diverse or specialized holdings by way of architecture, physical and virtual exhibitions, dance, auditory materials, and texts within physical and virtual spaces. A museum must actively ensure access and co-management by source communities. Museum practices underpinned by brutal uses of asymmetrical power, even violence (theft included), may have radically removed objects from their original custodians. Practices should enable revival, reconnect objects and ancestral environs, and open records to living custodians. Expectations of feasible physical or virtual repatriation should not be rejected out of hand by holding museums. This definition informs my historical lens on this Norwegian museum’s legacy and one of its “colonial Indian” collections.

I also discuss recent and contemporary efforts by museum custodians 688 and the Santals as ultimate custodians and source community.

Custodianship as a concept entails multifaceted management beyond the divisive issue of ownership. Custodial arrangements may entail 689 deposits or repatriation virtually. The portrayed custodianship here of 687 The International Council of Museums’ (ICOM) recently adopted definition says a museum should be “a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage.” It must be “open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability” and “operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities, offering varied experiences for education, enjoyment, reflection, and knowledge sharing”; https://icom.museum/en/resources/standardsguidelines/museum-definition/. This chapter’s working definition is in line with this approach. On former advocacy on the wider relevance of cultural rights and the Santal Bodding collection, see, e.g., Bleie (2015).

688 The original ethnographic museum was founded by the Kongelige Frederics Universitet (Universitas Regia Fredericiana) in 1857: The University of Oslo; https:// www.uio.no/english/about/facts/history/. The Museum of Cultural History is part of Oslo University and comprises two museum buildings: the Museum of Cultural History (formerly Historisk Museum) in downtown Oslo and the Museum of the Viking Age in Bygdøy. A new museum is to open at Bygdøy in 2026; https://www.khm.uio.no/english/ about/, accessed 03.01.2023.

689 Issues of ownership of specific artifacts, and parts of or entire collections, may be extremely demanding in legal, technical, customary, and financial terms. Yet, it is compellingly necessary to debate with source communities and mandated institu-

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a recently re-designated “Bodding collection” is instructively complex, defying blank description as colonial. What is revealed is a custodianship in Norway (mainly) that served a dual ethno-nationalist purpose on two continents. This transnational political and social context informed protocols of a strikingly collaborative amassing and recording effort. Unequal bargaining power, tantamount to structural violence, should not be fully precluded in the case of sacred earth objects, the so-called “firestones” (cetin dhiri). A trust-based social contract fostered a custodianship over nearly four decades of periodic collecting (1890s–early 1930s).

Never scripted and not without its paternalistic undertones, it remained anchored in constituencies in East India and Bangladesh. Concluding this chapter, I examine those claims of customary oral contract, which differ distinctly from the justifications made by mandated national and state-level institutions on Tribal and Adivāsi culture.

A “collection” implies an often-deceptive idea of underlying coher690 ence. No synonymous term exists in the Santali language. The rather unique collection in question, for more than a century called the Bodding Collection (Boddingsamlingen), consists of three distinct sub-collections of ethnographica, stone artifacts, and manuscripts. Collection names may be intimately connected with a “colonial past” or current “postcolonial” museum practice, an expression that is often used for modest changes in museum regime and custodianship. Changes, minor or major, result from policy, scientific, technological, and legal paradigm shifts, and funding. They affect museum and collection organizations, partnerships, exhibition policies, magazine plans, marketing strategies, tions. In certain instances, return may be feasible and necessary or, given the potential requesters, not at all. Noted examples of the first instance are the Benin Bronzes and the Parthenon Sculptures at the British Museum; https://www.britishmuseum. org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/benin-bronzes; https:// www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/ parthenon-sculptures 690 Terms for “collection” in Bengali and Hindi are not widely known among Santal speakers. A Santali translation of the term “collection” is Rakhi Jogao. According to Boro Baski, the head of The Museum of Santal Culture at Bishnubati, it is used officially, as in Santal Ari Chali Rakhi Jogao Bakhol. See also current Norwegian institutions; https://www.khm.uio.no/english/collections/santal/collection/index.html; https://www. nb.no/search?q=Bodding

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and owners’ and source communities’ senses of “ownership.” Impacts on collection co-management, and custodianship practice are complex.

Categorizing a collection as “colonial” since it was recorded and amassed (reduced to artifacts and texts) in a conquered land or territory is not enough. That is also the case with the (former) Bodding Collection. Evidence of extraction and collection protocols, registrations, cataloguing, and naming practices below offers an intricate picture. This amounts to an intriguing history of interfaces between Bodding as chief collector, his accomplished Santal collaborators, scientific milieus, visitors, museum directors, source communities, and other national custodians.

A nation in-waiting and its public museums Europe’s earliest museum opened in the Vatican City in the late 15th Century. In 1677, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford became Britain’s 691 first public museum and the world’s first university museum. Colonial administrators, trade agents, explorers, art dealers, and scientists began to amass collections of ethnographical and archeological objects on a grand scale. Florence, St. Petersburg, Lisbon, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, and Paris, as well as other university cities of declining and rising colonial powers, constructed palatial museums. Displays and stores of treasures were monumental temples of royal and papal colonial sovereignty. Eurocentric history production excelled. The establishment of the Royal Danish Kunstkammer c. 1650 by King Frederik III shows that Den692 mark–Norway followed suit. Such collections formed the basis for the public museums in Europe in the 18th and 19th Centuries. The French Revolution in 1789 and the emergence of the nation-state in Western 691 https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-ashmolean-opens 692 The early exhibition concept in Europe was that of private collections of works of art, curiosities, and scientific paraphernalia kept in curiosity and art cabinets (wunderkammeren or kunstkammeren). Exhibitions displayed royal, papal, and aristocratic power; https://en.natmus.dk/historical-knowledge/historical-knowledge-theworld/asia/india/tranquebar/collections. The public’s access was restricted. Aristocrats and royal houses on the Indian continent and the Fertile Crescent possessed similar private collections. The world’s oldest known museum, the Ennigaldi-Nanna’s Museum in Mesopotamia, dates back to c. 530 BCE; see Impey and MacGregor (2017); http:// museums.eu/highlight/details/105317/the-worlds-oldest-museums.

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Europe made aristocratic collections available to the public. The grand public opening in August 1793 of the previously royally owned Palace of Louvre as a museum became a symbol of the New Republic’s principles of liberté, égalité, and fraternité. As a model, the public museum became a powerful vehicle for educating the masses into ‘citizens’. As such, the public museum was a ‘civic engine.’

On the northern-most fringes of Continental Europe, Norway’s collective quest of expressing a national identity, sovereignty, and educating 693 the public began in earnest in the 19th Century. Cultural nationalism and enlightenment ideals actualized the importance of having museums.

A glance at the longer political history of the Norwegian nation-state inwaiting helps to situate the rise of museums. Norway’s 434 years under Danish overrule ended when the Danish king ceded the country under 694 the Treaty of Kiel in 1814. After a brief spell as an independent country with its own constitution in 1814, Norway went reluctantly into union with Sweden. At that time, Norway lacked either a museum or any major collection. Years earlier, in 1807, an unpopular royal decree had required all archeological relics found in Norway to be sent to Copen695 hagen. It was staunchly opposed. The Royal Norwegian Society for Development (Selskapet for Norges Vel) urged patriots to donate whatever 696 they possessed to a future national university museum of antiques.

Aware of Norwegian sentiments, the Swedes refrained from reinstating 693 Norway lost its privileged role as a North-Atlantic trading power after the Kalmar Union of 1380 CE. The country and its former island possessions became united with Sweden and expansionist Denmark. From 1536 to 1537 CE, Denmark and Norway formed a personal union that developed in 1660 CE into Denmark–Norway or the “Twin Kingdoms”; https://www.britannica.com/place/Kalmar-Union.

694 Denmark–Norway allied with Napoleonic France, lost against a coalition of six European powers, including Sweden. A hastily convened Constituent Assembly at Eidsvoll in May 1814 drew up a constitution and approved the heir apparent to the Danish throne as the King of Norway, as a step toward full independence. The Swedes took military action. Tough negotiations produced a union with Sweden, under which Norway retained its parliament and constitution.

695 The decree followed the establishment of a Royal Commission for Ancient Remains (Den Kongelige Kommisjon til Oldsakers Oppbevaring).

696 Many objects were a testamentary gift by the city councilor, industrialist, and collector Carl Deichman (1700–1780); Gjesing and Krekling (1957),1 2.

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The mission museum in Stavanger in 1883 – exhibits of missionary bravery in the wild. Credit VID Archives

this controversial rule of relics. Composed of precious silver and gold coins, prehistoric tools, and rare minerals, the collections (Oldsakssamlingen and Myntkabinettet) moved to the new Royal Frederick University in 1811. Later in 1852, they moved to the new permanent palatial buildings at the head of Karl Johans Gate, a stone’s throw from the royal palace. Semi-independent Norway had an expanding stately center with a royal palace, a university with antiques and coin collections and a State Art Museum (Nasjonalgalleriet) from 1837. Bergen, Norway’s Atlantic 697 Hansa city, already boasted a public museum with exotic collections.

In another Atlantic city, Stavanger, the Norwegian Missionary Society (NMS) opened its in-house museum in 1864. This was shortly after Skrefsrud left the city for Berlin. Earlier, in 1850, the Academic Collegium founded an “ethnographic” museum. It got a flying start by an 697 See https://snl.no/museum. Bergen Museum, founded in 1826, possessed from the beginning natural science and historical collections. Its first major African collection was a Madagascar collection donated by Norwegian missionaries from 1868 onward, https://snl.no/Universitetsmuseet_i_Bergen; https://www.vid.no/historiskarkiv/misjonsmuseet, accessed 10.01.2023.

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The First World Exhibition in the Crystal Palace London 1851.

Credit: Public Domain 698

exchange agreement with the famous Crystal Palace in London. The agreement was the result of a collegial friendship between scholar-politician Ludvig Daa (1809–1877) – from 1861 head of the Ethnographic Museum – and the renowned ethnologist Robert G. Latham (1812– 1887). The multi-gifted Latham became famous as the curator of the ethnographic exhibition “the Court of Natural History” at the rebuilt Crystal Palace in 1852. Initially a vast, imposing dome in iron and glass, it housed the first Great Exhibition (commonly known as the first world exhibition) in 1851. The whole edifice was dismantled and moved from its original Hyde Park exhibition site to Sydenham in South-East Lon699 don. Latham wanted a barter agreement of “Lappish” (Sámi) artifacts in exchange for “exotic” objects from Borneo and British Guyana.

698 The reopening of Crystal Palace in Sydenham was as a commercial enterprise that displayed Victorian notions of culture, education, and entertainment. For insightful studies, see, e.g., Qureshi (2011a, 2011b). In Norway, a specially appointed commission that included Daa negotiated the barter agreement. At their disposal was a government grant in the order of 200 speciedaler for the purchase of “Lappish” objects.

699 Qureshi (2011a).

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Plaster casts of Mathias J. Hætta, Niels P. Karasjok and Peder O. Riik. Credit: Digitalt Museum

The objects included plaster portrait casts of the heads the three convicted “Lapps” (Sámi): Mathias J. Hætta, Niels Karasjok, and Peder O. Riik. Although from the High North, they served their sentences hundreds of kilometers away at Christiania Tukthus in Kristiania. The barter in their portrait casts holds significance for our story on three counts; the sentences, why they were transported across enormous distances, and finally, a peculiar convergence during the 1850s for certain imprisonments in three nearby prisons, Christiania Tukthus being one of them. The imprisonment of Hætta, Karasjok, and Riik at Christiania Tukthus in early 1852 was punishment for either open or covert resistance, i.e., ‘obstruction’ of public worship, ‘theft’ and ‘illegal’ slaughter.

Hætta’s early anti-church protest helped foment the Kautokeino upris700 ing on 08.11.1852. Armed with only knives and logs, Sámi reindeer herders attacked the settlement’s priest, local merchant, and police commander – all usurers and an extended arm of an encroaching state. As ‘instigator’, Mathias Hætta, would nevertheless only serve part of his term. The “Notorious Lapps” who took part in the Kautokeino uprising were executed, including his own brother Aslak Hætta, or served lifetime sentences at the nearby state prison at Akershus fort. During this time, our protagonist, Lars Skrefsrud, sat incarcerated in Botsfengslet, a

700 See cited prison protocol, https://samisksamling.w.uib.no/gipsavstopninger/, accessed 15.02.2023.

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Santal Rebellion 1855–1856. Credit: Public Domain 701

newly opened high-security prison in Christiania. When Lars Skrefsrud began his four years of penal servitude for minor theft (1858–1861), Hætta, Karasjok and Riik – unlike the lifetime sentenced Sámi rebels at Akershus – were already free men. Prior to their release, two Italian plaster sculptors, the Guidotti brothers, had modeled their heads, be that as 702 a display Lapps’ physical features or as showcasing of convicts.

The reason for particularly Hætta’s sentence in Christiania before being pardoned speaks to one of this volume’s designs, translations of the Bible in the vernacular. Jens A. Friis (1821–1896), an authority on Northern Sámi and Finnish, had written to the authorities and pleaded with them to transfer the convicts down south. Friis wanted to regu701 See https://lokalhistoriewiki.no/wiki/Christiania_tukthus; https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet; okalhistoriewiki.no/wiki/Akershus_landsfengsel, accessed 05.05.22.

702 Latham apparently requested the works commissioned from the Guidotti brothers. One motive was the importance of exhibiting anthropomorphic installations of peoples of the Old and New World at the Court of Natural History. When appointed curator at Crystal Palace at Sydenham, Latham was both a trained medical doctor and philologist. In 1853–1854, the Commission had several sets of busts made, intended for barter and their own collection; Opdahl Mathisen (2020), 12. The internationally acclaimed Ethnographic Museum in Copenhagen backed these founding plans in Christiania.

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Film scene on the Kautokeino uprising 1852. Credit: Public Domain

larly consult native speakers. The authorities acceded to his professorial 703 plea. Hætta turned out to be an excellent teacher and informant. Friis and Hætta would cooperate after his release and together contribute to the translation of the Bible into Northern Sámi, published in 1895.

When Skrefsrud was serving his sentence under cruelly isolated conditions (1858–1861), the political prisoners from the Kautokeino uprising (Guovdageaidnu) were serving theirs under agonizing conditions at nearby Akershus Fort. The Santal Rebellion (1855–1856) took place less than three years after the Kautokeino rebellion (1852). The indigenous people of the interiors of Sámi and Ho̠ r territories both felt in those years 704 that intrusive presences were reaching intolerable levels.

The agreement allowed the Ethnographic Museum to retain copies of “Lappish” objects, exchanged for Dayak armor from Borneo and face 703 See https://snl.no/Jens_Andreas_Friis, accessed 10.01.23.

704 Skrefsrud did not mention in his later writings the convicts on nearby institutions such as the (in)famous imprisoned Kautokeino rebels at Akershus. That does not prove he did not know about the uprising and the rebels’ harsh sentences; Zorgdrager (1997, 2008). A celebrated Ash Lad turned autobiographic writer and international evangelist star, Skrefsrud used his prison experience to build his public image. Elevating other contemporary inmates was not therefore his priority.

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masks from Guyana. This bartered collection formed a large part of the 705 display at the opening in 1857. The Museum was from its modest beginnings influenced by ideas of cultures embodied by Crystal Palace’s famous historical court tableaus and Latham’s ethnographic exhibits. In addition to the mentioned barter, the Museum in the following decades would exchange objects with institutions like the Trocadéro in Paris and 706 the Smithsonian in Washington.

Daa’s period of leadership (1862–1877) ended before the Santal Mission started, over a decade later, amassing objects and tales for the 707 museum Daa helped to found. Daa was unstoppable as a collector.

He believed every ethnos should find its place in the museum and was critical of the prevailing evolutionary and anthropological paradigm of advanced and primitive cultures despite this stance damaging his reputation. Daa launched searches for artifacts of Norwegian, Lappish (Sámi), and non-European cultures. Weary of hierarchies within and between regional cultures, Daa organized exhibitions influenced by German 708 regional geography. His museum nevertheless retained a certain char709 acter as a chamber of curiosities. Daa’s collection and exhibition policy laid a firm basis for that of his successor. A believer in the ethnographic study of high and primitive cultures, Yngvar Nielsen (1877–1916) would nevertheless make his imprint on exhibition and collection poli710 cy. True to his stance, Nielsen called for the establishment of a separate 705 Bouquet, Forsgren, and Lømo (1996), 112.

706 Ibid., 112.

707 https://nbl.snl.no/Ludvig_Kristensen_Daa 708 Regional geography and the related specialty of Landerkunde became mature sciences during the 1880s. For an instructive review, see Wardenga (2006).

709 The Museum collection increased from 266 to 4,300 objects during Daa’s tenure. On a trip to Holland in 1864, Daa bought a Russian Devil’s Machine (Helvedesmaskine), originally used at sea during the Crimean War. This curiosity installation lingered for a long time in the Museum’s vaults.

710 Nielsen’s treatise from 1891, on the Lapps’ southward expansion in Trondheim County and Hedemarken, concluded that Central-Norway’s Sámi were recent migrants from the High-North. Despite being awarded a professorate in ethnography, no further ethnographical work came from Nielsen’s hand. His conclusion suited an expansionist Norwegian state and its Supreme Court, which used his historical narrative until it was rejected by historians in the late 20th Century; the cultural historian Dikka Storm at

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Norwegian folk museum. When it opened in 1894, Nielsen deposited 711 much of the folk culture collection there. He would keep an expanding “Lappish” sub-collection in the Ethnographic Museum.

A political breakthrough ushers in museum and collection plans In 1884, a landmark decision of the Norwegian parliament gave voting rights to men regardless of profession, but able to pay a minimum tax .

The democratic breakthrough invigorated a polity of cultural radicals, trade union leaders, liberal politicians, women’s rights defenders, lowand high-church conservatives. Across this political spectrum, cultural nationalism was one unifying factor, prompting debates on the impor712 tance of a historical museum with proper exhibits. Excavations of the Tune Ship in 1867 and Gokstad Ship in 1880 (see photo on the next page) heightened public pride in Norway’s former glory as a maritime Viking empire. Scholars sought to trace a diffusionist path from Stone Age toolmaking through Northern-Atlantic Viking expansionism to contemporary folk cultures. The sensational boat finds gave parliamentarians added reasons for regarding a museum of history as a priority. The Ethnographic Museum struggled to attain the prestige of antiques and the maritime wonders of the Viking past. Nevertheless, Daa’s acquisition of artifacts from Norwegian and related folk cultures appealed to a public 713 preoccupied with things “Norwegian.”

In the early 1880s, the India missionary Lars Skrefsrud undertook highly publicized preaching journeys throughout Northern Europe, including his native Norway and Denmark. Newspapers covered daily Skrefsrud’s mass gatherings around Norway and regularly ran museum University of Tromsø offered this insight.

711 Gjessing and Krekling (1957).

712 The political terms under which Norway accepted a union with Sweden granted internal self-rule by the parliament under the newly adopted 1814 Constitution.

713 The policy of collecting equitable folk cultures from Norway, Lapland, and abroad was strongly influenced German Romantic ideas and went hand in hand with often unequal and power-laden encounters. Acquisitions were at times negotiated between cash-wielding museum staff and disempowered local and Indigenous custodians. See this chapter on a power-freighted nature of Bodding and the Gurus’ collection process.

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The Gokstad ship’s temporary placement at Tullinløkka. License_CC_BY-SA_4.0

debates. Responding to the momentum of political and cultural change, parliament decided to allocate funds for a Museum of History within 714 Kristiania’s expanding quadrant of national public buildings. Tullinløkka was proposed, a popular green space adjacent to the National Gallery and the University. An 1887 parliamentary proposal to allocate funds to start construction work did not pass due to opposition to the cost 715 involved and the loss of recreation space. While the debate raged in parliament, ministries, and newspapers, the committee in charge of the work selected, in 1892, architect Karl August Henriksen’s (1868–1892) drawings. However, he died unexpectedly that same year. The committee chose to hire Henrik Bull (1864–1953), another young star architect, to 716 amend the prize-winning drawings.

714 The quadrant included the Royal Palace, the Parliament Building, the University, and the Museum of Art, but Tullinløkka was chosen as the site for a Museum of History.

715 Perminow, Eek, and Bergstøl (2004), 12–13. More than a century later, one observes a similarly intense debate on the future of Tullinløkka and new public buildings; https://cm.vartoslo.no/domus-juridica-entra-kristian-augusts-gate/dette-er-oslosentrums-nye-bydel/294570 716 Henriksen was a graduate of Königlich Technische Hochschule, Berlin and

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The touch bearers on the front wall.

Credit: Museum of Cultural History

During the early 1890s, the plans for a new public building at Tullinløkka got underway. The recently dispatched Santal missionary and linguist Paul Olaf Bodding responded enthusiastically to Yngvar Nielsen’s call to his compatriots abroad to augment the collections. Bodding was not alone in collecting artifacts in the 1890s. So, for example, did Inge Heiberg, missionary in Congo, Sea Officers Theodor Ring and O. Smith in, respectively, Siam and Japan, and not forgetting General Councillor 717 Carl Bock, a judicious Asian collector. Arctic explorer and folk hero, Roald Amundsen, having found the Northwest Passage and located the Magnetic Pole, brought home artifacts of the Canadian Inuit. They had 718 generously hosted his expedition and taught its members survival skills.

A graduate of Christiania University, Bodding was certain about his choice of a main recipient institution, and his own Skrefsrud was too. so was Bull; https://snl.no/Karl_August_Henriksen; https://nbl.snl.no/Henrik_Bull__1864%E2%80%931953.

717 Heiberg worked as a doctor in Congo. In common with Bodding, he was an avid collector over decades.

718 Gjesing and Krekling (1957), 35.

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Funds released in 1897 covered the cost of a preliminary construction phase. Works accelerated. A magnificent four-story Art Nouveauinspired building (Vienna Jugendstil) was ready in 1902, although work on the interiors and exhibitions was incomplete. The official opening to the public in 1904 was a year before the dissolution of Norway’s union with Sweden. Similar exterior and interior styles incorporated emerging trends in European architecture with “Norwegian elements” of semiabstract animal and floral designs inspired by Norse (Viking) and later medieval architecture and saga literature. Designs of collection cabinets matched the exterior façade, halls, and stairs with stylish lightening 719 fixtures. The museum’s three upper floors allowed for collection of displays in wall-mounted carved cabinets and showcases. The ground floor housed the archives and storage rooms. An airy India Hall was to be opened on the third floor with exhibits from the Santal tribe. The museum promised to become a national science and cultural research hub for an eager public. They awaited the opening and exhibitions displaying national history and exploits in foreign lands. The museum was indeed a “civic machine” as Norway’s independence approached. On the main façade of the third floor, two beautifully carved infant torchbearers expressed graphically this public enlightenment idea.

Bodding as chief collector and museum collaborator On home leave in 1902–1903, Bodding visited the imposing museum building when it was still under completion. His shipment landed in 720 May 1903. In his letters, Bodding does not comment on Nielsen’s exhibition policy and the prospect of Santal artifacts being displayed as tribal specimens rather than as folk culture, but he expresses another expectation. The exhibits would hopefully educate and motivate “blue721 eyed” mission recruits. Bodding’s rationalist theology, missionary zeal, and ambitions as a collector come to light here. The collections in Christiania (renamed Oslo in 1927) represented a custodianship on behalf of 719 See https://www.historiskmuseum.no/english/about/buildings/index.html 720 Letter from Bodding written in 1901 to Yngvar Nielsen, cited in Hodne (2006), 135.

721 Ibid., 136.

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Y. Nielsen, O.M. Solberg (left), and A. Brøgger at the newly opened Museum.

Credit National Library / Narve Skarpmoen.

a Santal brethren nation in the making under Christian influence. The Scandinavian missionaries had a God-entrusted mandate. They were to assist Santals in disciplining, educating, and elevating themselves. Bodding nurtured a double nationalist vision, contributing at home and in Santal Parganas. He shared his superior Skrefsrud’s ideas of Norwegian and the Santal nationhood, but not his utopian expectations of Christianity’s complete victory in Santalistan. Keeping their material heritage in Christiania was a worthwhile investment.

As a museographer, Bodding maneuvered between egalitarian ideas of Santal and Norwegian folk cultures, orientalist language of the “crude”, and the “primitive,” theological claims of the Santals’ monotheistic past, his rationalist theology, and more undogmatic observations than his 722 dear Skrefsrud. Beginning with Bodding’s operations as chief collec722 Museology is a science that analyzes related systems of functions. Museography’s record is longer and refers to concrete activities of the museum and its collections. On a Nordic history of museography, and the distinction between museology and museography, see Ekman (2018), Grewcock (2014), Stylianou-Lambert, Bounia, and Heraclidou (2022), Bäckström (2018).

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tor following his home stay in 1902–1903, we chronicle the history of conserved artifacts and manuscripts over the ensuring 120 years (1901– 2022).

723 In 1903–1904, exhibitions were prepared. The East Asia Hall with its fine Borneo collection was the first. The halls for Indian, Pacific, and Australian collections followed suit. Shortly before the “Santalistan” consignment arrived in May 1903 from India on a Norwegian vessel, the Travancore-stationed British Judge Fredric Hunt and his Norwegianborn wife Signe donated religious artifacts for the India Hall. The dona724 tions inspired the curators to plan a major India exhibition.

An attached letter from Bodding does not only minutely describe the sub-collections and the importance of forthcoming consignments but gives a lengthy phonetic instruction to curators for use of current signs 725 (diacritics) in Santali. His meticulous attention to signs for pronunciation discloses his ontological view of collected “objects” (gjenstande) as organically interconnected with the living immaterial environment from which his collectors had removed them (see later). Such an ethnographic approach to how living things became artifacts was uncommon at the 723 The new Museum of History was a merger of the University of Oslo’s Prehistoric Collection (Oldsakssamlingen), the Ethnographic Museum, and Coins and Medals Museum (Myntkabinettet), see Perminow, Eek, and Bergstøl (2004).

724 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:The_Indian_Biographical_Dictionary. djvu/234 (scanned). The Hunts made further donations between 1902 and 1922; see Gjessing and Krekling, ibid. 104.

Before these substantial donations in 1902–1903, the India acquisitions were limited to folk art figurines purchased by Daa in Denmark, a few ornaments, and a collection of watercolors of East Indian landscapes and monuments by General Major Peter Anker painted during his period as Governor of the Danish–Norwegian enclave Tranquebar between 1788 and 1801 (see chapter 3). His heir, C. J. Anker, donated the paintings in 1878. Anker’s valuable collection of statues was sold by his heir to the Ethnographic Museum in Copenhagen; Gjesing and Krekling (1957), 103; https://nbl. snl.no/Peter_Anker_-_2 725 The early consignments (1901–1903) contained instruments and implements produced by Bhuiya (agricultural laborers), Pal (potters), Jadopatia (cire perdue technique), Kamoi (blacksmiths), Mahle (basket makers), and Teli (oil pressers). The 1903 consignment also contained allegedly prehistoric tools from ancient landscapes surrounding Bodding’s mission station in Mohulpahari.

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726

time, if not exceptional. New consignments of Santalistan objects, mostly ethnographica, are on record from the reporting years 1907 and 1911. Nielsen wrote enthusiastically in his 1907 Annual Report: Our museum has received a collection which probably no other European 727 Museum possesses … [consisting] “mainly of musical instruments, jewelry, weapons, hunting and fishing equipment, cutlery, ploughs, and vehicles.”

As the Santal Mission’s chief collector and a recognized scholar-missionary, Bodding carved out a space in the annals of the museum as one of its most important collectors and donors (indsamlere og givere).

The collection was named after its European chief collector rather than his employer mission. For more than a century, registrations and main catalogs routinely used the name “Bodding” and replicated to a large degree his recording routine in catalogs and inventories. A postcolonialinformed name alternation to “the Santal Collection” (Santalsamlingen) 728 is, as noted, very recent. Enjoying royal patronage, Nielsen ensured Bodding received royal honors in 1901 and 1910. Nielsen had no small say in the King Oscar II’s (1872–1905) decisions on the recipients of honors. He became himself quite bemedaled. King Oscar bestowed on Bodding a Gold Honor Medal in 1901 (see photos). Then, in 1910, Bodding was honored as a Knight of St. Olav’s Order by King Haakon VII (1872–1957).

The final consignments from, respectively, “Santalistan” and the 729 Assam-Bhutan border reached Norway in 1926 and 1934. Ole Martin 726 Certain British scholar-missionaries produced professional catalog entries.

The British art historian A. E. Coombes and the Norwegian cultural historian H. Nielssen observe how mission societies’ collection catalogs tended to list sacred objects as “idols,” followed by the donor’s name. See, e.g., Nielssen (2007), 199, 209; Lien and Nielssen (2019), 94–108; Coombes (1995), 161–186.

727 Nielsen (1907), 105.

728 The concluded digitalization project did introduce ‘donator’ as a search term for Bodding, somewhat imprecise as a historical fact as he acted on behalf of his employer.

729 Late consignments augmented the prehistoric stone blade sub-collection.

Nielsen had no small say in the King Oscar II’s (1872–1905) decisions on the recipients of honors. King Oscar bestowed on Bodding a Gold Honor Medal in 1901. In 1910, Bodding was honored as a Knight of St. Olav’s Order by King Haakon VII; see Hodne (2006), 152. Erroneously, Hodne writes that King Oscar awarded Bodding the King’s Medal of Merit, which in fact was instituted by his successor King Haakon in 1908; see

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The Ash lad, painting by Theodor Kittelsen.

The National Museum/Høstland Børre

Solberg, the then ethnographic museum’s director from 1917 to 1945, shared Nielsen’s earlier enthusiasm for the Bodding collection’s magnitude, quality, and diversity. The University of Oslo had become the keeper of more than one thousand ethnographic objects, around 2,770 prehistoric stone artifacts, apart from unidentified objects in stone and crystal, and a vast manuscript collection. This was the largest heritage collection of Santal or any other regional Ạdivạsi culture in East India, 730 Bangladesh or abroad.

The university museum gained a certain renown in archeology, oriental languages, and ethnology. Bodding would correspond with museum directors, and the prominent linguists Georg Morgenstierne (1892–1978) 731 and his mentor Sten Konow (1867–1948). Back in India, Bodding spoke enthusiastically to Santals at mass gatherings about their treasures “across the seven seas.” His vast international correspondence with linguists and ethnographers prompted later donations to Leiden University, Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, the Ethnographic Museum in ibid., 152; https://www.kongehuset.no/artikkel.html?tid=27598 730 https://www.khm.uio.no/english/collections/santal/about/ 731 https://nbl.snl.no/Georg_von_Munthe_af_Morgenstierne; Ringdal and Beyer (2008); https://nbl.snl.no/Sten_Konow

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732

Copenhagen, and Bergen Museum. This chapter’s final section returns to the legal and social contractual nature of Museum of History’s custodianship. Bodding’s illustrious decades as chief collector and museum collaborator ended in 1934, the year of his official retirement. Following his death in 1938, the enormous collection of handwritten and typed manuscripts was moved to the National Library at the University. The ethnographic and prehistoric sub-collections remained in the care of the Ethnographic Museum. Unlike other important Asian and Circumpolar collections, such as Carl Lumholtz’s from Borneo, H.U. Sverdrup’s Tsjuktsjer/Chukotka collection, and Roald Amundsen’s from the Netsilik Inuit, Solberg refrained from prioritizing the Bodding collection for a major temporary show. Strange as this may seem, and possibly disappointing to Bodding, visitor preferences and the Santal Mission’s own grip on the public imagination explain it.

The public craved for displays that conjured up hyperbolic cultural narratives. Before Bodding’s retirement in 1936 and move from Oslo to Odense, two temporary exhibitions displayed East Asian collections of exquisite porcelain, ceramics, furniture, and instruments. These were insignia of Asian “high cultures.” Tribal implements could not match the public’s taste for displays of distinction, the ghastly, the daring, and Norway’s past greatness. Importantly, the evangelical reading public devoured richly illustrated mission literature about the late Skrefsrud 733 and his hunting exploits and the poetry loving Santals. Moreover, Lillehammer was a short train journey from the capital. Few kilometers away, the Skrefsrud cottage (Skrefsrudstuen) opened to the public a few months after Skrefsrud’s passing in December 1910, attracting crowds who combined picnics with pilgrimages (see the illuminating photo732 Leiden received around 200 objects (stone celts) and Pitt Rivers 42. The National Museum in Copenhagen appears to have been gifted around 60 artifacts, brought by Danish Santal missionaries on furlough in 1913. Bergen Museum received a similar small donation; Hodne (2006), 138.

733 Excellent amateur photographers, Skrefsrud’s early and Bodding’s later black and white documentation of missionary living in “Santalistan” with their Santals, fascinated Norwegian, Danish, and Scandinavian–American publics. See the late anthropologist Marianne Gullestad’s “classic” on visual representations of a Norwegian mission in Cameroon, Western Africa; Gullestad (2007).

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graph in chapter 10). The modest cottage evoked a hagiological narrative of the ash lad who left his sheltered fireplace and land, becoming Norway’s famous apostle.

Mounted Santal craft artifacts and tools on the cottage’s interior walls were, technologically speaking, not strikingly inferior to Norwegian 734 farming tools on display at the Open-Air-Museum in Lillehammer.

The culture trail’s displays of Santal and Norwegian folk cultures differed from those of the Museum of History on tribes.

Three examples of custodianship, meanings, and materiality Bodding’s ethno-nationalist leanings made him obsessively concerned with establishing a collection covering the material and immaterial lifeworld of the Santals. A 1903 consignment letter sheds light on his ambition of a macroscopic documentation of Santals as aboriginals embedded 735 locally through exchanges with several artisan castes. This ethnographic ambition was rather contrary to his own mission narrative of the Santals as a primitive and isolated “jungle tribe.” Extremely significant, the ethnographic and manuscript sub-collections constituted a vast body of raw data that Bodding himself, his superior Skrefsrud, and their gurus and sages described as mere “tools” in Bodding’s strikingly practical jargon.

Any future critical reinvestigation into the evidence-base of the classics should access this treasure house.

Zooming in on the details of Bodding’s world as chief collector, one realizes how he chose to operate between his known Museum world and the lifeworld of his Santal gurus, sages, and villagers. His missionary world was never completely absent. Because of Skrefsrud’s sovereign role and support, he and the gurus’ collection sprees occurred on the mission’s payroll. His ideas of the (ontology) of things affected his protocols for amassing objects and recording speech. Informed by his rather modern anthropological understanding of meaning and materiality, he engaged 734 Skrefsrud spent his late childhood on this tenants’ farm (husmannsplass). The turf hut opened in 1911 to the public.

735 See footnote 725 on artisan castes, see Hodne (2006), 155, and Bodding in Man in India on his late years as collector; Bodding (1930).

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trusted and trained Sarom and Christian collaborators. They were agents who converted animated (also secret) utterings into texts (manuskrifter) and living oobjects into artifacts (gjenstande). Getting permission from storytellers to record oral utterings and acquire wares from accomplished artisans and owners was delicate, infused with power relations and labo736 rious. Persuasion, negotiation, and return visits (often futile) were 737/738 Although he never drew a red line between mission and routine. collection endeavors, his leading collectors, like the polyglots Sangram Murmu and Sidu Besra, moved far and wide, delving for years into every knowledge domain of the lifeworlds of the Santals and their service castes.

Every artifact, from a hunting trap to a piece of silver jewelry, embodied in/tangible attributes that were meticulously examined. The registering by category in Santali varied from brief to extensive with a com739 mentary sheet. Handwritten cards with delicately cut tags were tied to every artifact with spun jute. Bodding’s Western museological approach to conservation, preservation, and storage rested on ideas, words, and technologies utterly alien to collaborators and source communities. Wry 736 Registrations of acquisition methods and source names are sometimes inconsistent and too general, such as “Bengal” and the imaginary “Santalistan.”

737 Bodding noted in correspondence the virtues of patience and tact. Although archival evidence of coercive removals is absent, this does not prove anything (see the comment in the body text). Artifact collection and recordings unfolded often in community settings benefiting from the Mission’s evangelical, diaconal, and development outreach. Such power-laden contexts may not have necessitated coercive barter or alluringly expensive offers, except for the sacred “firestones” (Cetin Dhiri). Removing them from their abodes risked invoking divine fury and punitive acts, which may explain cases of high prices, as the Asiatic Society Chair for Anthropology, Ranjana Ray, commented on in a Copenhagen University, SSINherit-organized conference; Ray (2019).

738 My 1893 dating relies on Soren’s findings of letters from Sagram Murmu in the “Santalia” manuscript collection; Soren (1999), 5.

739 Of the total registrations in the accession catalog, forty entries have between four and eighteen lines of description; https://www.khm.uio.no/english/collections/santal/collection/documents/accession-catalogue-english-and-santali-latin-script.pdf.

The Indian-born anthropologist Mohan Gautam’s classification is entirely functional; Household life, Economic life (incl. hunting, fishing and gathering, agriculture, and craftmanship); Socio-religious life (kitchen and hearth, dresses and ornaments, lifecycle events, and Bonga rituals); Feasts and festivities (instruments, makeup, recreation, greetings, and relations); and finally Miscellaneous; Gautam (1972).

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Century-old leaf plate from “Santalistan.”

Source MCH website on the Santal Collection

and matter-of-fact, Bodding seldom dwelled on his communicative challenges in writing. Take two categories as illustrations: museums as store and display houses and amassing organic objects.

Bodding established a field museum on the lawn of his new Dumka headquarters. This was inventive pedagogy. A steady flow of visiting Northern Santals got exposed to an alien concept of storage and display.

Over the years, a basic imaginary idea of “museum” took hold. Bodding implies his own brethren were much harder to convince. Since they had a fundamental distinction between the spiritual and the material world, it followed that their mission’s primary purpose was collecting souls to be 740 saved for eternity, not preserving tools and idols.

The Santals view of the rapid decay of any organic matter posed another communication challenge. Banana leaves were household items as food plates and cups for libations of blessed beer for ancestors. Fresh 740 Bodding’s biographer remarks that neither young missionaries nor home leaders quite liked the field museum “stunt.” After the Boddings left India in 1934, collections at the field museum and a store at their former residence at Mohulpahari became a curiosity and gift trove rather than a site for preservation. Objects were gifted visiting British officials and other prominent guests; Hodne (2006), 136.

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emerald green leaves would be routinely assembled, finely cut, and plaited for the occasion, and then thrown away. Bodding commissioned a whole set of banana-leaf plates and cups for storage and display which 741 must have caused ridicule. He persevered though. Imagine the consternation he faced in explaining how the physical decay of cups could be arrested and “preserved” for decades in Norway. Well over a century later, visiting Dumka in 2018, this author shared as a conservation example from Oslo the leafy dinner sets in excellent shape in the cool storage. My polite listeners struggled to hide their disbelief.

Vital evidence about Bodding’s ideas of im/materiality stems, as noted, not only from letters. At hand is an accession catalog that builds on Bod742/743 Its existence is a boon. Entries by serial dings own notes and entries. numbers in the stone collection describe the item by generic name in Norwegian such as “stone blade” (stenblad) and in Santali, if known.

Entries describe probable use, color, shape, and degrees of completion, not source sites of excavation or abodes of worship. One may argue limited tool analyses and rock classification testifies to a patchy archeological and geological expertise, but the versatile Bodding was far from totally off-track. Paleo archeologists have continued for a century to refer to his early paper on stone implements from 1901 in the Journal of the Asiatic 744 Society of Bengal. Bodding neither denied nor insisted that the ancestors 741 Typically, archival correspondence and other texts offer scant evidence for analyzing different ontologies (claims of what exists) and epistemologies (explanations how we know about a thing's existence) of in/tangible objects and specific speech acts.

742 Early exhibition catalogs, curators’ records, exhibition and reviews may not exist. However, new archival evidence of official donation letters and additional accession letters (1901–1934) might come to light.

743 Study of the in/tangible nexus and relations between collection categories and objects tends to be hampered by missing or decaying original accession catalogs. This author found it satisfying to observe during her visit to the Ethnographic Collection in 2013 that the original catalog had largely copied Bodding’s notes. Many original tags were intact.

744 Bodding argued that there were two distinct industries, one of which traces were all over the continent and the other existing just in a belt from Burma and Assam to Chota Nagpur and Orissa; Bodding (1901). A 1962 paper on Stone Age culture in Santal Parganas by P.R. Allchin discusses Bodding’s argument and his collection of celts. The only Norwegian to write a major thesis based on the collection was Solberg’s student, Arne Bang Andersen.

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of modern Santals were the makers of the stone celts. He hoped for a new era of ethno-archaeological discoveries of Bengal’s and Bihar’s prehistory.

His hopes may not have fully come to fruition. But a currently submitted PhD thesis at Calcutta University compares stone celts in Oslo with finds in the original collection’s source area in Mohulpahari Santal Parganas, 745 and by doing so honors Bodding’s expectations.

Returning to the catalog’s ethnographic entries on skilled/ritual use, 746 in social contexts, the Kab Kubi instrument illustrates my argument.

The entry literally evokes the extraction context, unraveling the musician’s techniques and skilled enactments. Depth of ethnographic and skills descriptions may vary, but entries do systematically record the arti747 san community, and the existence of comparable artifacts elsewhere.

This fascinating catalog validates my earlier argument. Bodding entertained a modern ethnographic ambition. He documented artifacts and services the Northern Santals obtained from a range of neighborly artisan and service castes. The Santals’ embeddedness in exchange relations with a range of service and artisan castes is brought to light, calling into question any radical distinction between “tribe” and “caste” and a narrative of 748 an isolated tribe. But as it comes to his registration protocol, Bodding 745 SSINherit advocacy in 2017–2018 meeting with Prof. Ray of the Asiatic Society on the importance of new archaeological research comes to fruition in Soumyajit Das’es PhD project; Das (2021), Das, Mondal, and Ray (2022).

746 “Kab Kubi, made of Lagenaria vulgaries. Used during the so-called dasar darar (wanderings in September). One end of the instrument is placed under the left arm, and the fingers on the left hand strum the string; pitch is achieved by tightening and loosening the string. The sound that is produced is quite peculiar, almost attractively comical.

Buans are manufactured annually in Santalistan.”

747 Building on my Bodding Symposium paper, Bleie (2015), this author subsequently advised MCH to prioritize having the catalog translated into English and Santali in Latin with diacritics and in Ol chiki. This was subsequently undertaken by Prof.

Fuglerud, the late Timotheas Hembrom and Lalchand Murmu, an important accommodation to source communities and other stakeholders.

748 This argument does not imply artifact categories having timelessly survived the millennia back to prehistoric times. Rather the totality of all sub-collections constitutes a unique testimony of millennia of shifts in time, space, and places. The Ho̠ r cosmopolitan prehistory in terms of accommodation and boundary maintenance has never been the subject of any subaltern/postcolonial exhibition concept; Bleie (2023a), Risley (1891).

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Crown prince Harald and his class at “To the Ends of the World.”

Credit VID Digital Library

speaks with two tongues. By entering “Santalisthan” as source area, he submits to a utopian idea that he personally as a rationalist theologian and scholar did not buy into.

From exotic and praised to disposable Bodding passed away in Odense on 25.09.1938. The following day Adolf Hitler made a vitriolic speech at Berlin’s Sportpalast where he defied the world and implied war with Czechoslovakia could start at any time.

On 01.09.1939, Germany invaded Poland and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. The World War 2 had begun. Germany occupied Norway and Denmark the following spring. In 1942, German Reichskommissar Josef Terboven took over, at short notice, a whole floor of the Museum of History in Oslo. Collections were hurriedly evacuated and remained in storage until the occupation ended in April 1945. Afterward, the museum was painfully aware that reinstalling the old exotic displays in the halls for ethnographica was not desirable. The German school of ethnography and geography was debunked. American cultural [ 371 ]

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studies and British functional structuralism were critical of diffusionist and historical approaches. This new orthodoxy rendered the collections a colonial backwater. Apart from the Director, Guttorm Gjessing (1947–1973), an incoming Anglophile and anti-colonial generation of anthropologists were not primarily museum people.

New intellectual fashions did not quell the public’s appetite for the great missionary adventure. The Norwegian Mission Society’s (NMS) ethnographic exhibit “To the Ends of the World” toured the Kingdom between 1948 and 1960. Nearly one-fourth of the country’s population or about 1 million literally devoured exciting, guided tours. One may say it was a worthy closure to an era of public life within which missions 749 played a pivotal role.

In India and East Pakistan, Santals began in great numbers to use several of Bodding’s and Skrefsrud’s monumental dictionaries and books.

In sheer geographic terms, their original lifeworld and efflorescent Santal and official Indian cultural institutions were radially distant from the overseas collections in Oslo. “Their treasures,” re-classified as “tools,” were quite unreachable from the 1930s to the 1960s. Little did they know, however, how scientific shifts and anti-colonial movements were 750 affecting custodians in Oslo. There, dusty string instruments and masks from India and Borneo attained value as windows onto the cultural significance of lifeworlds.

“We could have sold this collection and financed our fieldtrips with the 751 proceeds.” This alleged remark by Fredrik Barth, the man in charge of ethnographic museum, in the mid-1970s, casts light on the limbo in which colonial collection resided. Recalling this remark, Barth’s colleague, Arne Martin Klausen emphasized that he himself was “a collection man,” but 749 Nielssen (2007).

750 The anthropological staff included Fredrik Barth (1928–2016) newly returned from foreign studies, Arne Martin Klausen (1927–2018), and Henning Siverts (1928–2001); https://snl.no/Fredrik_Barth, https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henning_ Siverts, https://nbl.snl.no/Arne_Martin_Klausen accessed 12.05.2022.

751 When I interviewed Prof. Emeritus Arne Martin Klausen, he reiterated him Barth’s sharp expression, calling it illustrative of the prevailing attitude among colleagues during his tenure; phone interview, 20.05.2015. On Barth’s tenure and his colleagues’ critical views on outdated exhibition concepts, see Lien and Nielssen (2019), 135–140.

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unfortunately not specialized on Tribal India (see chapter 13). Blissfully unaware of museum staffs’ views on coloniality, Santal missionaries and church officials visited the manuscript sub-collection, largely after half a century in Oslo.

Their enthusiasm did not generally extend to the prehistoric and ethnographic sub-collections, alleg752 edly packed with ‘pagan’ artifacts.

However, much “Sahebish rule” was resisted by certain church fractions, their heritage custodianship in Oslo Assam Colony-born Santosh K. Soren in 1962 in Denmark. Credit Danmission was not. A stay in 1969–1970 by Photo Archive Indian-born anthropologist Mohan K. Gautam from Leiden University excited curators of ethnographica. His stay and subsequent published articles made since a mark on institutional 753 memory.

Santosh K. Soren’s subsequent stay in the University Library in 1971– 1972 did not elicit equally institutional attention, although his commitment and library science skill, arguably, became in the end “a saving grace.” A former mission-employed agriculturalist in his native Assam, Soren became a Danish citizen and librarian. His old mission funded his six-month stay, examining enormous unorganized collection series, 754 producing a handwritten catalog. Librarians serving Soren apparently 755 did not realize his work’s importance. Back in Denmark, it took Soren 752 In field interviews in Northern Bangladesh in 1997–1998, the church leaders who had visited in the 1960s revealed that they feared “idols’” potency. Nothing suggests any of them considered ritually cleansing the objects of harmful efficacy by prayers.

Instead, they kept away from the ethnographic and stone artifact sub-collections.

753 Gautam (1972); https://www.khm.uio.no/english/collections/santal/collection/documents/mohan-k-gautam-the-santali-uprising-and-the-use-of-weapons.pdf 754 Right before his INAS publication in 1998, Soren cataloged the final files in the university library, plus Ms 54, kept at the library of the then Indo-Iranian Institute.

755 His limited interaction with conservators may possibly explain why the library did not offer to publish the catalog. See Soren’s account in his preface and acknowledg-

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twenty-five years after his initial Oslo stay to publish his invalu756 But quickly able inventory. understanding the manuscripts’ importance for his people, Soren convinced Prof. Amiya K. Kisku, then a union minister, to come to Denmark and Norway. Kisku visited first time in 1978. His visits, and the visit of the renowned Prof.

Surajit Chandra, then Vice-Chancellor at the Tagore-founded VisvaBharati University in West Bengal, A Santal at Bhojpur became turning points. Over a photo by Georg Morgenstierne. decade spokesmen of several Santal Credit: Public domain literature and cultural societies cofounded by Kisku, the Lutheran church (NELC), Olaf Hodne (1921– 2009) stationed in Calcutta, and Oslo’s National Library corresponded intermittently. Santal leaders recall in interviews non-committal and 757 delayed responses.

Debating physical repatriation, Santal literates conceded they did not have any mandated Indian tribal institution with technical resources to preserve and display the collection as the University of Oslo (UiO) did. Probably they were unaware of the alarm raised by the eminent linguist Prof. Georg Morgenstierne (1892–1978). A close ments; Soren (1999).

756 In an interview with this author, Soren acknowledged editorial and other support by his Danish colleague Prof. Peter B. Andersen; phone interview 18.01.2023; ibid., preface.

757 https://wiser.directory/organization/all-india-santal-welfare-and-culture-society-aiswacs/. Prof. Amiya Kumar Kisku aside, other leading homecoming advocates were Ezicheal Hembrom, Theodore Kisku Ropaz, Nathaniel Murmu (interviewed by the author), and the anthropologist Prof. Surajit Chandra; https://www.veethi.com/ india-people/surajit_chandra_sinha-profile-4900–18.htm. As a visiting scholar at INAS in Copenhagen, Chandra was invited in 1973 by Prof. Barth to visit the Ethnographic Museum. Chandra found the scope and importance of the collection breathtaking; see Coordination Committee (1988).

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colleague of Bodding, the professor publicly called for a saving opera758 tion for the precious Santalia manuscripts. An employed Santal literate, he maintained, could copy the endangered collection. The library’s management chose not to adopt Morgenstierne’s proposal. Microfilming was cheaper. During the subsequent analog reproduction process, conservators found, to their dismay, erased letters, words, and phrases.

Undoubtedly, much would have been retrievable had they recruited a copying expert. They found microfilm more attractive, since it reduced storage space by up to 95%, was a stable archival medium in a cool climate, and did not need software to decode data. A Norway-to-India returns of compact reels seemed feasible, agreeable, and fundable by 759 the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD).

Five recipient Indian institutions were chosen, without any funding for expanded reel access, technical aid, and research cooperation. UiO must have felt relieved that a long-requested return was finally under760 way. Since this was a homecoming of ancestral voices, the Santal source community looked forward to scrolling through their legendary 761 gurus and scribes.

One thousand jubilant guests graced the official handover ceremony at St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata on Bodding’s birthday on November 762 2nd. The heritage treasure ‘hid’ in nondescript looking objects. The assemblage of reels was not as impressive as caches of ancient documents 758 https://snl.no/Georg_Morgenstierne; Morgenstierne (1966).

759 In the 1980s, this technology was not at all new. The American Library of Congress and the British Library pioneered the technology for civilian library preservation of books and manuscripts before WW2. Initially, it was used for military purposes during the Franco-Prussian war (1870–1871), during the siege of Paris, pigeons were used to transport microfilm reels to Paris. There films were projected onto a screen by magic lanterns and clerks copied dispatches onto paper. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Microform.

760 On the preconditions for returns that qualify as “repatriation”; see Bleie (2018a, 2023a).

761 See overviews of notable Santal collaborators; Soren (1999, 2015).

762 Indian recipient institutions included Visva-Bharati University (Santiniketan, West Bengal), Ranchi University (Jharkhand), the Asiatic Society (Kolkata), and Anthro­ pological Survey of India, both national institutions with headquarters Kolkata, and finally the main source community’s own cultural organization AISWACS (see earlier).

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would have been. Expectations were high, nevertheless. Not only did the Kolkata-based academic institutions have distinguished records of collaborating with the late Bodding, but the universities also had departments of tribal and regional languages in tribal heartlands. The purported promise that Bodding’s collection would eventually return home, made at his farewell gathering in 1934, was reiterated in Ezicheal Hembrom’s poignant inaugural speech in 1988 (see the introductory citation).

External scroll users soon faced difficulties of access and marathon waiting times as some in-house scholar treated reels as if it was a book not a compressed library. Desktop readers with translucent screens were in short supply. So were special microfilm printers for photocopying. Users 763 resorted to exhausting study by way of magnifying glasses. Short of equipment, All India Santal Welfare and Cultural Society (AISWACS), the only Santal-led recipient organization, was using the facilities of the Asiatic Society. Responding to high demand, the Society loaned out their microfilm set to AISWACS, which to date is the publisher of three com764 plied volumes, a better output than the recipient academic institutions.

To users’ frustration, reels began decaying despite the silver halide preservation with a life expectancy of 500 years. The culprit was fungus that 765 destroys the silver halide-fixing gelatin in damp environments. When reels became unreadable, work stalled, prompting requests for supple766 mentary sets from Oslo. In their own Santal literary world, Ol Chiki literary activists came forward, requested access to the reels. Although critical of Bodding’s Latin with diacritics, they relied on his monumental 767 dictionary, Santali folktales and Santal Medicine series.

763 Interviews with AISWACS micro scroll users in Kolkata and Dumka; November 2010.

764 Ho̠ ṛ Hoponak Sadae Kathan. Kolkata: The Santal Academy, Volume 11, AllIndia Santal Literary and Cultural Society.

765 The dizao-based system, less vulnerable to fungus attack although less longlasting, would have been a better option.

766 From January 1999, the National Library took over the department of the University Library, which until then had several functions of a national library. This partial merger led to a new post earmarked for IT and Innovation, setting in motion an era of digitalization through the Norwegian Cultural Network Project (see earlier).

767 Bodding’s multivolume A Santali Dictionary, his grammars, and the series Studies in Santal Medicine and Connected Folklore, published by the Royal Asiatic Society

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In Oslo, the exhibition policy of ethnographica (1993–2010) from permanent collections remained reportedly steeped in a colonial-era 768/769 In other areas, change was underway. conventions and geography.

Preservation, storage conditions, and digitization were to be greatly improved. When objects were to be transferred to the new cool storage archive (svalarkivet), conservation status was examined. Permitted entry to this cool storage back in 2013, this author gazed at shelf after shelf of exquisite string instruments, bows and arrows, traps, and fishing nets, most of them in remarkably good condition. Shortly after this Oslo visit, I toured monsoon struck Santal Parganas and spoke in public about my visit. Mandatory use of sterile clothing, a protective hairnet, and surgical gloves, not to speak of a ban on touching, intrigued people. To them, the medicalization of visitors’ contacts with their treasures was an alien notion. Since Bodding’s model museum in Dumka was their main reference, the very idea of gazing at ancestral ornaments and tools through phones or computers was close to unbelievable. Amidst bewilderment, they stuck to their imagination of a physical house “over seven seas.”

Technological innovation perplexing as it was, did not dent people’s faith in the museum’s custodianship.

Claims of oral custodianship and ownership: which laws help?

The history of the Bodding Collection defies simplistic characteristics.

Steeped in egalitarian and cultural nationalist aspirations, the colonial context nevertheless impinged in specific ways. The collection was and remains ‘colonial’ in certain respects, anchored in an unequal trust-based and museum custodianship transatlantic “seven seas” traffic in artifacts of Bengal, were available in India and therefore extensively used by all script camps.

768 The Bodding Collection’s current magazine manager (magasinforvalter) is an anthropologist.

769 Anthropological staff express discomfort with the semi-colonial framing of exhibits from permanent collections. The Siberian and Amundsen collection, unlike the Bodding collection, had major exhibits in the period 1993–2008; see Lien and Nielssen (2016), 124–126. See also Perminow, Eek and Bergstøl (2004), Røkkum (2005). For statistics about the ethnographic collections in Bergen Museum in the same period, see Rio (1998). Primary information was obtained in discussions in 2013–2014 with the then Head of the Ethnographic Section and the Collection Manager.

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Our Indo-Scandinavian custodianship and heritage workshop fall 2018 at Danmission HQ Copenhagen

and manuscripts. As chief collector and intermediary, Bodding operated two vastly different worlds, in sovereign control of two contracts, one customary and another in-writing. Public oral memory of a specific pledge came to light when undertaking field investigations for this volume (2010–2018). Bodding Saheb, informants claim, made a public promise at his farewell ceremony at Benagaria Mission a warm spring day in 1934 before departing from his beloved Santal Parganas. His was a promise of transatlantic access and future repatriation of “their treasures” at some undisclosed time.

The Ethnographic Museum yearbooks and consulted letters lend evidence of specific consignments and pride in custodianship tantamount to 770 ownership. What caused the conflicting understandings? Could it be either imaginary fabrication or distorted recollection of Bodding’s actual pledge? Contradictory pledges in India and Christiania cannot be ruled out, although Bodding was in general not a man to play foul. Verifica770 One cannot rule out that unidentified archival evidence exists at the Museum of Cultural History or the National Library.

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Revitalizing cooperation – participants at the Heritage Workshop in Copenhagen autumn 2018. Credit Sudipko Mukhopadhay

tion of a pledge of oral access and eventual homecoming is demanding.

Clues can be gleaned from letters of literary figures in Calcutta, including Ezicheal Hembrom requesting access to manuscripts, and his mention of the pledge at the handover ceremony in 1987. Importantly, my informants were themselves leading figures of the Santali literary renaissance or their parents were. In view of their milieu’s code of honesty, these literary legends did not fabricate a pledge. Its vagueness about a future return is believable as Bodding that time could hardly predict the coming of library micro roll technology (see footnote 759).

Treasured collections became colonial possessions after WW2. Soren sat in the library for months doing long-awaited cataloguing work without anyone offering for it to be printed. Despite the difficulties of obtaining foolproof verifications of oral pledges and ownership, as the main source community Santals can assert rights to their overseas in/tangible cultural heritage under international law and museum and library ethics codes. Given our deciphered designs of collection and custodian[ 379 ]

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Revitalizing tradition – Banam makers at The Museum of Santal Culture West Bengal 2018. Credit Boro Baski

ship, restitution is evidently not an appropriate legal term. Except for highly priced earth-removed stone tools, artifacts and manuscripts were not illegally acquired in the source areas under the 1878 Indo-British law on “treasure troves.” Return is an appropriate legal term in this case, as objects were removed without authorization by the colonial author771 ity, with the caveat stated already. The initially celebrated NORADfunded micro roll project who ran into difficulties were a temporary vir772 tual return, not repatriation.

771 Unearthed “firestones” (cetin dhiri) of prehistoric antiquity fell under the Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878, in force in Santal Parganas granted the object fetched a price higher than 10 Indian rupees as the law’s minimum value; https://web.archive.org/ web/20160630050116/http://asi.nic.in/pdf_data/9.pdf, accessed 05.02.2023.

772 Multilateral treaties do not use repatriation as a distinctly legal term; it derives from the Latin “to return to the fatherland” with state-centric connotations. What we learned from the ill-fated analog reels project, combined what is known about current disparities, is that Santals’ access to the internet, across all Indian states, and Bangladesh

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The Museum of Cultural History (MCH) and the National Library of Norway (NL) as state-financed institutions must comply with international law. The earliest international legal instrument dealing with trafficking and restitution of cultural property was the 1970 UNECSO Convention on the Means of Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and 773 Transfer of Ownership to Cultural Property. Dismayed by the nearly exclusive attention to physical materiality in the 1970 Convention and the succeeding 1972 Convention on World Heritage Conservation, UNESCO opened a new Convention on immaterial cultural heritage to signatures in 2003. Articles of UN Convention on Indigenous People (UNDRIP was adopted in 2007) define objects and cultural practices as 774 intangible manifestations. MCH and NL are also bound by the International Codes of Ethics of Museums and Libraries that set standards for 775 engagement with original source communities. This author raised the question of full adherence to these codes and binding conventions at the 776 Bodding Symposium in late 2015. Since then, MCH has customized its digitized portal on the Collection under the redesignated name of the and Nepal, needs improvement. The same applies to technology servicing and competence gaps in archival sciences, museology, conservation, preservation, and curation. And this list is not exhaustive.

773 The early UNESCO Conventions 1970 and 1972 address illegal border crossings and material heritage; https://whc.unesco.org/en/convention/. Most relevant in our case is UNESCO Convention 2003 on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which recognizes inseparable relations between objects, and context. The earliest Indian laws governing antiquities and art treasures are The Antiquities and Art Treasures Act of 1972 and The Treasures Rules Act of 1973. The 1972 Act and the Rules are rooted in the Indian Treasure Trove Act of 1878 and the UNESCO Convention of 1970. The 1972 Act defines an “antiquity” as a coin, sculpture, painting, epigraph, work of art, or craftsmanship that has been in existence for 100 years or more, or manuscripts, records or other documents that have been in existence for over seventy-five years.

774 UNDRIP, however non-binding, affords opportunities for museums and source communities to co-manage collections and expedite return of heritage to original custodians; confer Article 11; Article 12.1; and Article 13.

775 See Kuprecht (2014), Degn-Sutton (2021). ‘Source community’ as a notion was introduced by Laura Peers and Alison Brown in an anthology; Brown and Peers (2003). See also Peer’s blog https://pittrivers-americas.blogspot.com/2014/01/sourcecommunities-back-in-july-at.html 776 Bleie (2015), 11–15.

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source community (Santal). NL has likewise digitized most of the Santalia manuscript collection.

An awaited Parliamentary White Paper from 2021 with the poignant title “Museums in society: trust, things and time” emphasizes mandatory 777 compliance with ratified and signatured international conventions.

MCH’s current Director Håkon Gløstad considered in a recent op-ed these redirections on museum policy, arguing loans rather than com778 plicated repatriations are the way forward. His views reflect to some degree MCH’s demanding Bååstede Repatriation Project (2007–2018) of about 1600 objects to Sámi museums and his sound views on Nordic cooperation around loans. Glørstad takes as departure point the high heat of repatriations to mainly non-European countries for arguing for a 779 flexible Nordic loan policy. Glørstad disappointingly does not address specifically non-European collections in terms of postcolonial museum practice as sought established for our countrymen the Sámi and minorities.

What specific conclusions should we draw from this chapter’s inquiry into this magnificent collection – from idea to creation – and its ‘life’ as museum artifacts over more than a century? The Santal Collection’s prehistoric stone artifacts lend themselves, in conservation terms, better to transnational traffic than most objects in the ethnographic subcollection. Separating the prehistoric sub-collection from the other two might appear unproblematic, granted this sub-collection has nothing to do with Santal prehistory. But this cannot be ruled out. Some recent ethno-archeological and linguistic evidence argue there are links between the Neolithic makes and users of tools, blades, and microliths in eastern part of Jharkhand’s Chota Nagpur Plateau and modern Northern Muṇḍa 777 The UNESCO-Conventions, ILO-Convention 169, and the UNs Sustainable Development Goals; see The Royal Ministry of Culture, Parliamentary Prop 23 (2020– 2021); “Museums: Trust, Things, Time” https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/ meld.-st.-23–20202021/id2840027/?ch=1 778 See a recent op-ed by the Director of the Museum of Cultural History “Who owns cultural heritage?”; https://klassekampen.no/utgave/2022–10–03/hvem-eier-­ kulturarven 779 The restored Viking ships got their own Museum at Bygdøy in 1926. Con­ struction of a new one begins in 2023. https://www.statsbygg.no/prosjekter-og-eiendommer/vikingtidsmuseet, accessed 12.01.2023.

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speakers. The mentioned new PhD thesis on this prehistoric tool industry affirms studies by some Indian scholars who draw on Bodding’s very early argument of cultural affinity to Mon-Khmer speakers in Southeast Asia. Any long-term deposit or repatriation should prioritize Jharkhand 780 and Santal Parganas are the original source areas. The fragility of the Santalia manuscripts’ renders physical return nearly irrevocably unrealistic, even with strides in conservation, storage, and loan facilities. Any transnational scenario would require museum upgrading and expansion or a new heritage complex, publicly funded or by any public–private cultural initiative. The latter could involve heritage development on currently vacant trust property. Any candid debate on scenarios and stakeholders inevitably brings up an uncomfortable truth; the tragic consequences of a centuries-old vast experiment unraveled over the chapters of this book. Deko incursions – European and domestic – accentuated by the selective constitutional recognition of Santals as scheduled tribe, and divisive electoral, religious, language, scripts, and census politics, all contribute to a despairingly fractured Santal polity. Our scenarios therefore cannot rely on any broad civil society alliance on heritage culture, education, and development as the prime mover of a custodian-driven 781 initiative.

780 See Das, Soumyajit. A Study of prehistoric cultures of Dumka District, Santal Parganas Division, Ph.d submitted to Calcutta University 2023. There is no unanimous agreement in recent research on the Chotanagpur’s Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods, e.g., Ghosh (2008, 2009), Das, Mondal, and Ray (2022), Imam (2002), Pratap (2000). See also Bodding (1904).

778 For my comparative discussions of India’s, Bangladesh’s and Nepal’s records as states parties to relevant binding and nonbinding treaties, see chapter 7; and Pratap (2000), 107.