Ralph Pinder-Wilson: Persian scholar, archaeologist and curator
Hyfler/Rosner
November 10, 2008
Ralph Pinder-Wilson: Persian scholar, archaeologist and
curator
Ralph Pinder-Wilson was a distinguished Persian scholar,
Islamic archaeologist and museum curator.
He was born in 1919 in Wimbledon. His family had historical
connections with the East India Company, and his father, a
naval officer, compiled several pilot's guides to the West
African and South American coasts. He was educated at
Westminster School and in 1937 he was elected Westminster
Scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, where he read history and
was granted a war emergency honours degree.
On the outbreak of war he was attached to the Indian Army
and posted to India, where he learnt Urdu. He was later
posted to Tripolitania (in what is now Libya) and Egypt, and
served in Palestine, Jordan, Italy and Greece, ending the
war as a captain. On demobilisation he returned to Oxford to
read Oriental languages, Arabic and Persian.
On graduating in 1949 he joined the Department of Oriental
Antiquities in the British Museum, first as assistant and
then as deputy keeper, and remained there till 1976. India,
Oxford and the British Museum were the three loves of his
life.
The department in his time, and the neighbouring Department
of Prints and Drawings, was full of larger-than-life
characters, with a fair degree of eccentricity, as well as
outstanding scholarship. Though modest and self-effacing by
disposition, Pinder-Wilson was admirably suited for the
post, having as sharp an eye for objects as he had for
people. Like his colleagues, the Indianist Douglas Barrett,
the sinologist William Watson and Basil Gray during his long
keepership, he was of a time when scholarship was defined
not by narrow specialisation but by a comprehensive
knowledge of art and artefacts from the whole of what, in
those innocent days, was known as "the Orient".
One of his outstanding exploits was, with Douglas Barrett,
the identification of a long-lost masterpiece of Islamic
art, the Vaso Vescovali, a silver-inlaid Persian bronze of
the early 13th century which had been published by the
Vatican librarian, Michelangelo Lanci, in 1845 but had then
disappeared. It is now one of the treasures of the British
Museum and was published by Pinder-Wilson in the British
Museum Quarterly in 1951.
His skill as an epigraphist made him a valued colleague on
excavations. He spent a season (1959) on Storm Rice's
excavations at Harran in southeastern Turkey, a site that in
Late Antiquity had been notorious as a stronghold of the
star-worshipping Sabaeans who nevertheless achieved
prominence in the Baghdad Caliphate in the ninth century. In
1966 he took part in the first season of the British
Institute of Persian Studies' excavations at Siraf on the
Persian Gulf, a port that had flourished in the early
centuries of Islam as a commercial centre rivalling medieval
Basra and controlling the rich trade between the caliphate
in Baghdad, the Indian sub-continent and the Far East. He
dug for several seasons at Fustat (Old Cairo) and later in
his career took a close interest in the British excavations
of the late 1970s of the citadel of Kandahar in Afghanistan.
It was not merely his wide expertise, however, that made him
so welcome as a colleague: he had an on-the-spot knowledge
of much of the Middle East, he had an enviable command of
the languages, he submitted to the hardships of excavation
life without complaint and by his example did much to
maintain morale in campaigns that frequently provoked
controversy and at times may have appeared to lack
direction.
In 1976 Pinder-Wilson was appointed Director of the British
Institute of Afghan Studies in Kabul. It was a return to the
Greater India that he had come to love during the war. He
cannot, however, have had many illusions. Afghanistan, which
was already showing signs of instability, has always struck
travellers as immensely odd and distinctly reminiscent of
the North-West Frontier under the Raj. Movement within the
country was still largely unrestricted, however, and he
exploited thoroughly the opportunities his position afforded
of travel to its remotest corners. Among the chief
achievements of his time as director were the restoration of
the Buddhist stupa at Guldara and surveys of Ghaznavid and
Ghurid monuments in Afghanistan, which were particularly
dear to his heart.
The situation changed radically with the Russian invasion of
1979 and the establishment of a puppet Government under
Babrak Karmal. In these conditions it is doubtful that the
institute could have continued to operate satisfactorily for
long, but he remained as one of the few Westerners in Kabul.
Matters were brought to a head by its closure early in 1982,
on the ground that it was a cover for espionage, and his
trial and a ten-year prison sentence on a trumped-up charge
of attempting to smuggle Afghans out of the country. He
shared his cell with a stool-pigeon, a taxi-driver from
Panjhir, with whom he would converse to improve his already
impressive command of the Afghan Persian dialect, Dari. His
captors, trained in the already outmoded techniques of
brain-washing, tried to make him incriminate himself by
writing confessions of guilt, which because his offences
were imaginary, and his imagination inevitably failed him,
all displeased them. He was not conspicuously ill-treated,
though once, he said, in the course of an interrogation that
was going nowhere, the interrogator threw a piece of chalk
at him. In later years he was quite ready to speak of his
experiences but he was never heard to utter any complaint
about his ordeal, proof of exemplary fortitude, in
ultimately ludicrous but frightening and depressing
conditions.
His family and friends campaigned energetically for his
release. The effectiveness of any riposte by the British
Government - which did not recognise the Karmal regime - was
hampered by the lack of information, which had mostly to be
gleaned from the Soviet news agency, Tass, and the Kabul
press, and by the refusal of consular access to him, while
protests through official channels were simply ignored.
Freedom came unexpectedly. The MP, George Galloway, who was
about to go to Kabul, was asked to raise the case with the
authorities. His intervention was successful, and
Pinder-Wilson was released on July 15, 1982.
For the first six months of 1968 he had been a visiting
Fellow of All Souls, working on a monograph on Islamic
glass. After his return to England from Afghanistan he also
spent a profitable year (1982-1983) as visiting Fellow of
Churchill College, Cambridge, and the year after a semester
as Regent Professor at UCLA Berkeley.
The following two decades were especially fruitful. He was
much in demand as an examiner and although he did not hold a
teaching position he put his great knowledge and experience
at the disposition of colleagues and countless graduate
students.
He continued to work on some of the more recondite aspects
of the Islamic arts - ivory, jade, rock-crystal and glass -
of which he had in the course of his career made a
speciality, though, sadly, his important work on monuments
and memorials in the Khalili Collection remains incomplete.
He was a valued consultant on Islamic art at Christie's, the
auction house, and to the collection of Shaykh Nasser
al-Sabah in Kuwait. But, rather than these activities and
his written works, his true memorial is his unfailing
kindness and generosity to so many friends and colleagues.
He was an enthusiastic chamber musician, playing both the
violin and the clavichord, in an ensemble directed by the
ebullient Teddy Croft-Murray, the former Keeper of Prints
and Drawings in the British Museum. He converted to
Catholicism at the age of 18 and remained a devout Catholic
for the rest of his life.
Ralph Pinder-Wilson, Persian scholar, Islamic archaeologist
and museum curator, was born on January 17, 1919. He died on
October 6, 2008, aged 89