Monuments, Objects, Histories - Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India

Erscheinungsjahr 2004
ISBN: 978-0-231-12998-5
Verlag: Columbia University Press

Buch, Englisch, 432 Seiten, Format (B × H): 186 mm x 258 mm, Gewicht: 948 g

Reihe: Cultures of History

Monuments, Objects, Histories is a critical survey of the practices of archaeology, art history, and museums in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. The essays gathered here look at the processes of the production of lost pasts in modern India: pasts that come to be imagined around a growing corpus of monuments, archaeological relics, and art objects. They map the scholarly and institutional authority that emerged around such structures and artifacts, making of them not only the chosen objects of art and archaeology but also the prime signifiers of the nation's civilization and antiquity.

The close imbrication of the "colonial" and the "national" in the making of India's archaeological and art historical pasts and their combined legacy for the postcolonial present form one of the key themes of the book. Monuments, Objects, Histories offers both an insider's and an outsider's perspective on the growth of these scholarly fields and their institutional apparatus, analyzing the ways they have constituted and recast their objects of study. The book moves from a period that saw the consolidation of western expertise and custodianship of India's "antiquities," to the projection over the twentieth century of varying regional, nativist, and national claims around the country's architectural and artistic inheritance, into a current period that has pitched these objects and fields within a highly contentious politics of nationhood.

Monuments, Objects, Histories traces the framing of an official national canon of Indian art through these different periods, showing how the workings of disciplines and institutions have been tied to the pervasive authority of the nation. At the same time, it addresses the radical reconfiguration in recent times of the meaning and scope of the "national," leading to the kinds of exclusions and chauvinisms that lie at the root of the current endangerment of these disciplines and the monuments and art objects they encompass.

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile Asiatische Kunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionPart I. The Colonial Past1. The Empire and its Antiquities: Two Pioneers and Their Scholarly Fields2.The Museum in the Colony: Conserving, Collecting, ClassifyingPart II. Regional Frames3. Interlocuting Texts and Monuments: The Coming of Sge of the 'Native' Scholar4. Between the Nation and the Region: The Locations of a Bengali Archaeologist5. Wresting the Nation's Prerogative: Art History and Nationalism in BengalPart III. National Claims6. The Demands of Independence: From a National Exhibition to a National Museum7. 'For the Greater Glory of Indian Art': Travels and Travails of a YakshiPart IV. The Embattled Present8. Art History and the Nude: On art, Obscenity, and Sexuality in Contemporary India9. Archaeology and the Monument: On Two Contentious Sites of Faith and HistoryNotesBibliographyIndex

Über Autor(innen)

Tapati Guha-Thakurta is professor in history at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, The author of The Making of a New 'Indian' Art: Artists, Aesthetics, and Nationalism in Bengal, she is a specialist on the art and cultural history of modern and contemporary India.