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Abstract
In 1881, the Ahmedabad Wood Carving Company (AWCC) began producing replicas of the tracery windows, or jalis, of the celebrated Sidi Saiyyed Mosque for New York–based artist, decorator, and importer Lockwood de Forest. They were some of the earliest commissions of the new workshop jointly established by de Forest and Gujarati merchant Muggunbhai Hutheesing to manufacture elaborately carved furnishings for export to the United States. Over several weeks, the craftsmen used mallet and chisel to translate the intricate stone patterns of the sixteenth-century mosque’s jalis into dense and oil-rich teakwood. Anticipating the windows’ overseas journey, the AWCC’s carpenters avoided cutting the wood too thin to prevent breakage in transit. On the other side of the world, de Forest’s elite clientele understood these luxury goods as distinctly “Oriental” objects produced for use in their “artistic” interiors.
Art historians studying Orientalist interiors have demonstrated how western designers and their clients appropriated the work of diverse cultures to create imperial visualizations of the East for western consumption. While this remains an important critique, the approach privileges the creative vision of U.S. artists and designers and sidelines the agency of craftsmen, dealers, and other agents in South Asia and the Middle East who knowingly translated local aesthetics and knowledge systems to new mediums and forms for export and western use. Drawing on methodologies from art history’s material and transnational turns, postcolonial theory, and commodity studies, this dissertation centers the company’s objects and examines their materials and means of production, their mobility and circulation, and the people and ideas that constructed their values. Across three chapters, I track the AWCC’s work from the forests of India and Burma to workshops in Ahmedabad, India to commercial showrooms in New York. My approach decenters de Forest as the primary author of the company’s work, while reconstructing the complex social and material networks that facilitated the global circulation of luxury goods, raw and refined materials, and capital through imperial and global capitalist economies at the turn of the twentieth century.