‘Natural Heritage’ and Colonial Legacies: India in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

The article examines the ways in which the British imperial context, ideologies relating to national heritage—both cultural and natural—were not just extended but developed in a colonial context, and how they have been subsequently redefined and reconstituted in the post-colonial era. From a nineteenth-century romantic antiquarianism drawn to the ruins of a lost civilization, we can see the growth in status of scientific disciplines of archaeology and palaeontology and natural history in the colonies, and an equivalent diffusion of heritage legislation from the Indian subcontinent to East and Southern Africa and even to metropolitan Britain by men like Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, whose interest in monumental architecture led him to protect the Taj Mahal and later to take these interests to Britain where he was instrumental in helping to formulate the ancient monuments’ consolidation and amendment Act in 1913.