On collecting, conserving, and care: Penn Libraries will be new home to South Asian collection
By Özlem Yıldız
Kenneth X. Robbins took a multiple-choice test at high school over sixty years ago, in which the correct answer to a question was “Muslims are Arabs.” He insisted that his teacher was wrong, that not all Muslims were Arabs, but he got in trouble with the school for pointing out this obvious fact. Perhaps his interest in finding and filling the gaps in people’s knowledge started with this strange incident. Today, he aims to have his large collection of South Asian art and ephemera help researchers and the public do the same.
Robbins and his wife Joyce Robbins designated the Penn Libraries as the recipient of their collection of over 100,000 items in their estate planning. This outstanding collection is a result of decades of collecting and includes objects Mr. Robbins says, “no one really knows about or wants to collect.” It is a curious remark, and one wonders if what is meant by “no one” here is “no one” among the people with the access and means to collect. During our chat, he mentions fascinating objects. A painting from Bijapur dated 1650-75 depicting a Sufi, described as “the founder of hatha yoga”, and popular posters depicting Muslim saints and their shrines from twentieth-century Pakistan. In addition to connections around the Indian Ocean and Africa, the collection also expands toward the west, with items of ephemera about the Persian Constitutional Revolution, the Greek-Turkish wars of the early twentieth century, and so much more. Pritha Mukherjee, a PhD researcher at Rutgers University specializing in South Asian collections, noted the potential of so-called “ephemeral” objects to speak to moments in history that are often excluded from art historical research. “Ephemera can often be significant components of the visual culture of a society, documenting people whose daily lives do not encompass art objects we usually study in art history,” she states.
Poster depicting the Indian Sufi master Tajuddin Muhammad Badruddin, also known as Tajuddin Baba, and his dervish lodge. Printed in Mumbai, probably mid-20th century. Courtesy of Penn Libraries. Courtesy of Kenneth Robbins.
Mr. Robbins is aware of his status as a white man from the United States, collecting and researching material regarding minorities in South Asia, and the questions such a collection raises: about who art belongs to, and what the act of displaying and explaining the heritage of other people highlights and obscures.
A medical doctor by profession, he started collecting Rajput, Deccani, and Mughal paintings during his psychiatric residency in New York after seeing some at a Madison Avenue dealer. He attended college and medical school in the city, but his “most important educational experiences were from wandering the streets of New York City, seeing how different ethnic groups lived, visiting as many houses of worship as possible and listening to jazz.” Over the decades, he authored numerous books and articles on the subjects relating to his collection. He was in Bangladesh to give a speech on unexplored historical ties between Afro-South Asian communities earlier this year. “But who am I to talk about this?” he asks. That self-reflection does raise a legitimate question or two. When do we have the right to talk about cultures that are not our own? At a time when the repatriation of museum objects is a burning issue, similar questions can be asked of the institutions. Why on earth should materials from around the Indian Ocean be housed in an institution in Philadelphia?
The shape of answers to these questions may emerge in the way the University of Pennsylvania deals with the Robbins collection. Penn has a strong faculty and program of South Asia studies. The addition of this collection to its libraries will surely draw scholars to conduct research there. Delineating the provenance of the objects is significant for repatriation and avoiding cultural appropriation and exoticization, according to Mukherjee. The recent repatriation of looted objects from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to Turkey supports her emphasis on the transparency of objects’ past lives. “It will be interesting to see how the Penn Libraries address these issues in their provenance documentation about the individual objects,” Mukherjee said, adding “This collection must be made easily accessible for scholars across the world through rapid digitization so that it does not privilege practitioners of Asian art history in the United States.”
Detail from a manuscript leaf with a short section taken from a teaching (sūtra) on Mahāyāna Buddhist wisdom and possibly the image of bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara. Palm leaf. Nepal, 1200. Courtesy of Penn Libraries. Courtesy of Kenneth Robbins.
But the collection is not just to be used by people with PhD’s, Mitch Fraas, Director of Special Collections and Research Services at the library, says. Philadelphia has a very active South Asian community, and the Penn Libraries want to make sure to create plenty of public programming around the collection. Currently, Fraas is working on a public event on African and Indian connections around the objects that Robbins has already been regularly donating to the library. The collection is used in teaching, too. A few minutes after our interview, Fraas shows a painted Nepalese palm leaf in an undergraduate class. Penn Libraries want to be an institutional home to the collection itself, as well as to events that will bring the public and the collection together.
The first steps to studying, writing, or talking about any part of the world are exquisite care, self-awareness, and transparency. Stating the facts starts filling the gaps in knowledge. So, it is crucial that Penn Libraries offer the collection to the local and international community with an openness about the lives of the objects they hope to preserve in the decades to come.
Özlem Yıldız is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University. Her research focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in Islamic illustrated manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.