Transporting India: the Gentil Album and Mughal manuscript culture

This essay addresses artistic encounters between Mughal India and France in the early modern period. In 1778, the French East India Company officer Jean-Baptiste Gentil (1726-99) returned to France after twenty-five years in India, taking back with him a substancial collection of Indian manuscripts and albums. Included in this collection were new illustrated works that Gentil had produced in collaboration with Indian artists and translators. This essay focuses on a key example, known today as the "Gentil Album". This object is interpreted in relation to multiple systems of artistic and epistemological production, including the manuscript tradition of the early modern Indo-Persian world and the network of European artists, scholars, and patrons central to the construction of an early, eighteen-century Orientalism. The significant role this culturally layered art object played in mediating between India and France is emphasized, as well as its implications for current discussions of circulation and encounter.