Les statues dites « kafirs » du musée Guimet : politique des dons et compétitions impériales dans l’Afghanistan du début du XXe siècle

Abstract

For years, visitors to the Musée Guimet were bound to notice the two wooden statues enthroned in the institution's entrance hall. However, the information label explained their journey from Afghanistan to Paris in a rather elliptical manner. This article reopens the case of the gift of several sacred statues looted by the army of the Emir of Afghanistan ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Khān in the mid-1890s during the conquest of "Kāfiristān" (the "land of the heathens"). The so-called “Kafirs” were non-Muslim peoples whose supposed Aryan origins fed Rudyard Kipling’s inspiration as well as the imagination of the many of the explorers of this remote area of the Hindu Kush. These populations were forced to convert to Islam and were partially deported by the Emir. The region was renamed Nuristān ("the land of light") to mark the disappearance of religious practices considered contrary to Islam. A few pieces of local religious statuary were taken away by the troops and displayed in the Emir's residence in Kabul, while other pieces were destroyed on the spot. Some of these statues were then donated by Ḥabībullāh, then Emir of Afghanistan to France in the 1920s, much to the irritation of British authorities. After decades of well-maintained and consolidated diplomatic connections between British India and Afghanistan, the donation of the statues could be interpreted as one of the many symptoms of a degraded relationship. This article analyses the trajectory of heritage objects from Nuristān to their subsequent transformation into early Afghan heritage and their donation to France through the prism of the complex trans-imperial relations that shaped the area at the turn of the 20th century.

Keywords

• Afghanistan
• history of Afghanistan
• material culture
• diplomatic history
• history of heritage