New province, old capital

Abstract

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.