About the Book: Fashioning a National Art: Barodas Royal Collection and Art
Institutions (18751924)
This book is about how the Baroda Palace Collection came into being under its
patron-collector Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III.
It throws light on Sayajiraos private collecting practice that shaped Barodas
modern art and craft institutions and industries. Taking rare archival records
from 1875 as its point of departure, the work demonstrates how the Maharajas
private collecting practice and its egalitarian ideas both shaped and
participated in the institutional, industrial, and commercial realms within
Baroda, India, and Euro-America. For the first time, a native prince emerged
simultaneously as an exemplar of international collecting, an arbiter of