Art, Archaeology, and the Museum in India

Abstract

Edward's Said's Orientalism, a significant amount of scholarship has documented how nineteenth-century colonialism created a dense web of knowledge of the non-West by developing new representational grids, which include archaeology, ethnology, real ism, and recovery of textual origins along with developments in the novel, photogra phy, and painting. While this has provided us with a much fuller picture of how representational practices in the nineteenth century framed the non-West, what has been less examined is how, in the twentieth century, various nationalist movements before and after decolonization appropriated and transformed these practices. An impor tant reason is that many twentieth-century materials were published and circulated within national and regional frameworks, frequendy produced in non-Western lan guages and archived in regional or national collections. Guha-Thakurta's essays?which move seamlessly from considering the colo nial construction of Indian past, providing extended readings of nationalist develop ments beginning well into the nineteenth century, and discussing current controver sies?offer an excellent example of how art historical scholarship of the non-West is enriched by historicization and attention to regional developments. book consists of nine chapters, divided into four parts: The Colonial Past, Regional Frames, National Claims, and The Embatded Present. first chapter in Part i discusses the simultaneous rise of the