Visual Arts

In 1912, Bihar and Orissa was carved out of the erstwhile Bengal Presidency as a separate Province. The next year saw the beginnings of one of the most lavishly financed archaeological excavations of colonial India in the new province—the Pataliputra excavations funded by Ratan Tata and supervised, on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of India, by D.B. Spooner. The excavations discovered Patna, the new Provincial capital, as the ancient city of Pataliputra. This essay traces the history of archaeological excavations at Patna between 1913 and 1918. However, it does not engage with Pataliputra as a pre-given, physically available site, which could be discovered through archaeological excavations. Against the backdrop of provincial reconfigurations across Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the paper explores the politics of place-making and provincial self-fashioning in early twentieth-century colonial Bihar. It maps how Pataliputra was brought into being through
the place-making labours of colonial archaeology. And in tracking the different and changing trajectories of making Patna Pataliputra, the essay unearths how nationalist identities were
deeply imbricated in the same disciplinary and institutional spaces opened up by colonial archaeological and museum practices.

Focusing on one particular moment of the centenary celebrations of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1961, this essay seeks to map the politics of configuring an academic discipline, Indian archaeology, in the public domain through three interlocked sites of visual simulations: documentary film screenings, an exhibition venue, and written non-specialist ‘histories’ of national heritage. Like other practices of official nationalism, particularly in postcolonial India, the publicity materials of the centenary celebrations of 1961 were singularly unimaginative and ponderously bureaucratic. However, these unimaginative documentary films, exhibition layouts and handbooks, bearing strong traces of the specialist language, performed as sites for the production of the postcolonial nation and the new subject-citizen. This article tries to explore the boundaries and limits of this official pedagogy through particular moments of public staging of the discipline of Indian archaeology during the 1950s and 60s.

This essay explores the problems of archaeological conservation of ancient temples in active worship in colonial India, specifically in the province of Orissa. Colonial archeology’s investment in conserving these temples asserted the proprietary rights of the colonial state over the history and heritage of the colony. However, subjecting old structural remains to new regimes of historicity remained a process fraught with tensions. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, Orissa emerged as a critical site of contestation between colonial archaeology’s regime of ‘secular’ historicist jurisdiction over ancient temples and the ‘traditional religious’ rights exercised at these very sites. In exploring these sites of contestation, the essay juxtaposes archaeology’s involvement at the practicing temples of Bhubaneswar and Puri with the archaeological conservation of the deserted Sun Temple at Konarak. The study does not posit the domain of ‘religious’ practice as a seamlessly continuous space of tradition ruptured by colonial archaeology’s modern regime of monument making. It argues instead that the new configurations of sacred spaces around old temples were predicated upon colonial archaeology’s historicist preoccupations with ancient monuments and its commitment to conserving pre-modern temples and shrines as ‘secular’ historical vestiges of a lost past.

Taking the destruction of the Babri Mosque in 1992 by activists of the Hindu Right wing political parties and consequent violent rupture in the public positioning of archaeology in contemporary South Asia as an entry point, this article reflects back on the claims of the discipline as a science around issues of its indigenization and translation in colonial India. The material focus of this study lies in a select body of Bengali texts published during early twentieth century. These writings in regional vernaculars sought to popularize the idea of heritage and the disciplinary field of archaeology and scientific history among non-specialist readers. Such translations involved remarkable transmutations of the parameters of methods and aims of archaeology as a discipline of Western/European ‘origins’. Exploring how a range of linguistic, religious and territorial identities came to be played around such texts, this study looks for history of ways and forms in which disciplinary practices of archaeology came to be overlaid with a range of extra-disciplinary concerns.

This chapter presents an overview of contemporary Indian Buddhism, broadly conceived, highlighting several historical developments, transregional influences, and Indo-centric adaptations within the colonial and postcolonial context. As the “homeland” of Buddhism and central to various contemporary revitalization movements, two themes are of particular analytical importance to this chapter: the recovery and reconfiguration of Buddhist material objects and the importance of reinvention among a range of Western and Asian Buddhist actors. After situating Indian Buddhism within the context of Indian historiography and discussions around the decline of Buddhism, this chapter examines various ways Indian Buddhist sites, artifacts, and structures are reimagined and reconfigured under colonization, nation-building, and changing socioeconomic interests. Also covered are Buddhist movements within India such as the Ambedkar-inspired New Buddhism, the role of Tibetan Buddhist refugees, and how t...

(Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20 Artefacts of history: archaeology, historiography, and Indian pasts, by Sudeshna Guha, Delhi, Sage India, 2015, 273 pp., Rs. 995 (hardback), ISBN 978-93-515-0164-0 Sraman Mukherjee To cite this article: Sraman Mukherjee (2017): Artefacts of history: archaeology, historiography, and Indian pasts, by Sudeshna Guha, Delhi, Sage India, 2015, 273 pp., Rs. 995 (hardback), ISBN 978-93-515-0164-0, South Asian History and Culture,

This paper explores the possibility of reading the shifts in locations of objects as processes of translation and change in art history. The study focuses on the journeys and material reconstitutions of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics as they travelled from an archaeological site in British India, Piprahwa Kot, to a new relic temple in Bangkok, the capital of the Kingdom of Siam (Thailand), during the late nineteenth century. Mapping the shifting locations of the Piprahwa relics across changing geographical, institutional, cultural, and political spaces, the paper traces the changing materiality and multiple identities that accrued around these objects. This study does not ascribe these new identities of Buddhist relics solely to the "inventive" capacity of the cultural politics of British colonialism. Rather, it seeks to bring out the complexities of antiquarian collecting and market , connoisseurship, display, and scholarship; rituals of state diplomacy; and religious reclamations across transnational Southern Buddhist worlds, as constitutive of the new and multiple identities of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics.

Focusing on one particular moment of the centenary celebrations of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1961, this essay seeks to map the politics of configuring an academic discipline, Indian archaeology, in the public domain through three interlocked sites of visual simulations: documentary film screenings, an exhibition venue, and written non-specialist ‘histories’ of national heritage. Like other practices of official

In 1912, Bihar and Orissa was carved out of the erstwhile Bengal Presidency as a separate Province. The next year saw the beginnings of one of the most lavishly financed archaeological excavations of colonial India in the new province—the Pataliputra excavations funded by Ratan Tata and supervised, on behalf of the Archaeological Survey of India, by D.B. Spooner. The excavations discovered Patna, the new Provincial capital, as the ancient city of Pataliputra. This essay traces the history of archaeological excavations at Patna between 1913 and 1918. However, it does not engage with Pataliputra as a pre-given, physically available site, which could be discovered through archaeological excavations. Against the backdrop of provincial reconfigurations across Bengal, Bihar and Orissa in the opening decades of the twentieth century, the paper explores the politics of place-making and provincial self-fashioning in early twentieth-century colonial Bihar. It maps how Pataliputra was brought ...

As a continent lying to the east of Europe, Asia has been malleable to different spatial and temporal imaginations and politics. Recent scholarship has highlighted how the seemingly self-contained regional configurations of West and Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and East Asia carved by the Area Studies paradigm reflect changing (geo)political and economic interests than historical or cultural roots. This volume advances the question as to what Asia is, and as to whether there existed one or many Asia(s). It seeks to explore Asian societies as interconnected formations through trajectories/networks of circulation of people, ideas, and objects in the longue durée. Moving beyond the divides of Area Studies scholarship and the arbitrary borders set by late colonial empires and the rise of post-colonial nation-states, this volume maps critically the configuration of contact zones in which mobile bodies, minds, and cultures interact to foster new images, identities, and imaginations of Asia. https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/2406#contents

This essay explores the problems of archaeological conservation of ancient temples in active worship in colonial India, specifically in the province of Orissa. Colonial archeology's investment in conserving these temples asserted the proprietary rights of the colonial state over the history and heritage of the colony. However, subjecting old structural remains to new regimes of historicity remained a process fraught with tensions. During the opening decades of the twentieth century, Orissa emerged as a critical site of contestation between colonial archaeology's regime of ‘secular’ historicist jurisdiction over ancient temples and the ‘traditional religious’ rights exercised at these very sites. In exploring these sites of contestation, the essay juxtaposes archaeology's involvement at the practicing temples of Bhubaneswar and Puri with the archaeological conservation of the deserted Sun Temple at Konarak. The study does not posit the domain of ‘religious’ practice as a seamlessly continuous space of tradition ruptured by colonial archaeology's modern regime of monument making. It argues instead that the new configurations of sacred spaces around old temples were predicated upon colonial archaeology's historicist preoccupations with ancient monuments and its commitment to conserving pre-modern temples and shrines as ‘secular’ historical vestiges of a lost past.