Digby Collection

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Mayank Austen Soofi

Posted: Fri, Mar 18 2011. 8:17 PM IST

The estate of the lasteccentricChristies will auction medieval India scholarSimon Digbys private artefact collection nextmonth

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Born in Jabalpur to a colonial-era judge and a vagabond painter, SimonEverard Digby spent months reading on art and history in the museums andlibraries of Mumbai and Kolkata. He was a voracious collector of books andartefacts.

A polyglot who spoke Hindi, Urdu and Persian, he wrote numerous articles onmedieval Indias Islamic past in books with titles such as Sufis and Soldiers inAwrangzebs Deccan and War-horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate.

In 2010, when he died of pancreatic cancer at his rented Delhi apartment at78, he was cremated in the city according to his wishes.

Next month, Christies is all set to auction several objects that the Britishscholar collected over a lifetime. The Digby Collection offers the opportunityfor buyers to acquire some very rare, best of type works of art, somethingthat the market is always hungry for, says Sara Plumbly, Islamic artspecialist, Christies, London. The collection is expected to realize 309,000-460,000 (around Rs 2-3 crore), which will go to the Simon Digby MemorialScholarship Fund.

Simon was fabulously eccentric, indeed almost a Dickensian one-off, saysBritish author William Dalrymple, who knew him. He was the sort ofindependent scholar who no longer exists.

Whenhewas



All that glitters:(clockwise from top, left) Digby (Courtesy RobertSkelton); a mother-of-pearl pen box from Gujarat; a Bidri ewer; a bird-shaped brass ewer; an engraved iron catch. All circa 16th-17thcentury, between 5,000-170,000 (Photographs courtesy Christies).

A carved Indian ivory powder horn.

terminally ill in December 2009, Digby asked his friend Richard Harriswhoretired as regional manager (South Asia) for the BBC World Service in Delhitocome to India to help him. But a visa delay, swine flu scares and ill-healthforced Harris to mourn his friends death in England.

In Delhi this month to sort out the loose ends of Digbys life and work, Harrishas a lot to accomplish. Simon left the responsibility of his legacy to the threeof us, says Harris, referring to Dominic Omissi, a schoolteacher who metDigby while he was doing his PhD on colonial literature, and Colin Perchard,who was the director of the British Council in Delhi. We decided that the mostfitting memorial would be a scholarship fund to encourage the study ofsubjects dear to Simons heart, says Harris, adding, He had collectedthousands of objects and we decided to sell them in order to put the moneyinto the fund.

Plumbly says the top lot in the collection, and one that has generatedexcitement in the market, is a fine Gujarati mother-of-pearl overlaidqalamdaan (pen case) dating to the late 16th or early 17th century.

Butthe

Christies catalogue only skims the surface of this informed historians uniquecollection. Take a particular water vessel that was one of Simons mosttreasured possessions, says Harris. Indistinguishable from similar vesselsproduced in brass foundries across India, Simon found a small inscription onthe base in Persian. From these words, he was able to tell that this vessel hadbeen made in the Deccan in the 18th century and had ended up in the handsof a Malay Muslim sailor who, from his name, must have converted fromChristianity. Then, Simon could continue about the Indian Ocean trade in the18th century for many hours.

Not everything Digby acquired was bought in India. In 1985, he inherited ahouse in Jersey, one of the Channel Islands, from relatives. Jersey was apopular retirement place for ex-colonials from India. Many of these familieshad artefacts that might have been in their families for many generations. Asthis generation faded away, several objects ended up in auction houses inJersey and other places in the UK.



Jersey and other places in the UK.

Simon was one of only few people who knew what these things were andwhat their significance might have been, says Harris. He bought objects atreasonable prices because the fashion for Indian decorative objects had passedaway. Now, with well-informed collectors, their value has once again beenrestored.

Digby never married and he only held one job in his lifetime: as keeper ofEastern Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford during the 1970s. He lived ona series of small legacies from a dwindling community of aunts and uncles,says Harris. He spent half the year in India and the other half in the UK, butattended academic events throughout the world. His intoxication came fromlistening to bhajans or qawwali or from the pleasure of sharing his life with hismany friends. He loved the area around the Sufi shrine at Nizamuddin, saysHarris. In another time, he would surely have been recognized as a Sufi or ayogi. In his own time, he was considered an eccentric.

The auction will be spread over a number of sales. While the top 50 lots fromthe collection will be sold on 7 April at Christies King Street location, a further37 will be offered the next day at South Kensington. The last group will be soldin early October. He was not concerned with the superficial beauty of thepieces, but of what they could tell us of the people who made them and usedthem, Harris adds. The answers to those questions can be found in Digbyswritings.

One of the tasks Harris has in Delhi is to discuss the reprinting of some ofDigbys books and the printing of those which have yet to be published. Thatlegacy will perhaps be cheaper to buy.

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