Raymond and Bridget Allchin on their wedding day, March 1951. © Ancient India & Iran Trust
Digging through the Trust’s Allchin Archive proves rewarding for visiting fellow
At the beginning of March, the Trust welcomed NTICVA (Nehru Trust for the Indian Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum) Visiting Fellowhip recipient Professor Arjun Rao. Professor Rao is from the Department of History and Archaeology at Central University, Karnataka, and is currently working on several areas of prehistoric archaeological research, but wanted to visit AIIT during his fellowship in the UK to look at the research papers and notes related to Raymond Allchin’s PhD thesis on prehistoric sites in South India. The trust archive holds a copy of …
Feasting on the Shahnameh
Amongst the manuscripts we hold at the Trust is Abolqasem Ferdawsi’s tenth-century epic Persian poem, the Shahnameh, copied in Samarkand in 1604. When I first applied for the Administrator post, this felt like an added reason to work here, as my name derives from that of Manizheh, the daughter of King Afrasyab and the heroine of the love story ‘Bizhan and Manizheh’ told in the Shahnameh. That this story was housed here reinforced the personal affinity I have always felt with the Trust. However, while I was aware of my …
Among the archives: the seal of Ernst Stein
One of the more surprising items in Sir Harold Bailey’s collection at the AIIT is a small sealstone made of a dark bluish green bloodstone, streaked with red specks (as its name suggests!). This was given to Sir Harold by Jeanette Mirsky (1903-1987), author of the biography of the Central Asian explorer and archaeologist Sir Marc Aurel Stein (1862-1943). Perhaps Jeanette Mirsky visited Sir Harold while she was researching her book Sir Aurel Stein, archaeological explorer (Chicago & London, 1977), for in March 1982 he received a belated birthday present, …
Echoes of the past: pre-partition postcards from India
A delightful item which we have recently catalogued is a collection of 58 postcards dating from pre-partition India which was given to us by Cyrus Pherozeshah Mehta (1917-2011)[1]. The collection includes mostly black-and-white views from Baluchistan, Benares, Calcutta and the holiday resorts of Simla and Matheran in Maharashtra. The Sir Stuart Hogg Market, Calcutta. Designed by Richard Roskell Bayne, an architect of the East Indian Railway Company, this Victorian Gothic market complex was begun in 1873. It was officially named after one of its greatest advocates, Sir Stuart Hogg, the …