Charles Stuart (East India Company officer)
Archie Baron says, in his book An India Affair:[7] He quickly took to wearing Indian clothes, and this became his normal garb when off the parade ground.
His commander-in-chief "ticked him off" due to his partiality towards sepoys sporting "Rajput moustaches or brightly coloured caste marks on their foreheads".
Stuart published his letters extolling the virtues of "elegant, simple, sensible, and sensual" Indian saris vis-a-vis "the prodigious structural engineering Europeon (sic) women strapped themselves into, in order to hold their bellies in, project their breasts out and allow their dresses to balloon grandly up and over towards the floor" along with some replies by "outraged" white women in a "deliciously silly volume" entitled The Ladies Monitor, Being A Series of Letters First published in Bengal on the Subject of Female Apparel Tending to Favour a regulated adoption of Indian Costume And a rejection of Superfluous Vesture By the Ladies of this country With Incidental remarks on Hindoo Beauty, Whale-Bone Stays, Iron Busks, Indian Corsets, Man-Milliners, Idle Bachelors, Hair-Powder, Waiting Maids, And Footmen.
[3] In his book Vindication of the Hindoos (1808), Stuart criticised the work of European missionaries in India, claiming that: "Hinduism little needs the meliorating hand of Christianity to render its votaries a sufficiently correct and moral people for all the useful purposes of a civilised society."
Stuart defends Hinduism from assaults by missionaries explaining: "Wherever I look around me, in the vast ocean of Hindu mythology, I discover Piety...
[3] During his lifetime, Stuart amassed a large collection of Indian, South Asian, Indonesian, Australian and New Zealand objects, including statues, weaponry, armour, furniture, and books in his home on Wood Street in Chowringhee, Kolkata.
[3] Some of these objects may have been gotten by illicit means- in 1810, the Asiatic Society of Bengal received a donation of two inscriptions from Bhubaneswar from a "General Stewart" which were later found to have been cut from working temples.
Stuart died on 31 March 1828 and was buried with his deities at the South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta,[8] in a tomb which took the form of a Hindu temple.
[9][10] In 2018, Indian news site Rediff.com contacted the British Museum to ask about the return of one piece of the collection, a sandstone sculpture of the Hindu deity Harihara.
The strength of the museum's collection is its breadth and depth, which allows visitors to compare and contrast cultures and understand our interconnectivity.
