Review: Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi, by Mrinalini Rajagopalan

Abstract

Mrinalini Rajagopalan Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016, 244 pp., 10 color and 51 b/w illus. $55 (cloth), ISBN 9780226283470; $55 (e-book), ISBN 9780226331898 It is often claimed that historic preservation as a state-sponsored activity in India began with the founding of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in 1861, when the subcontinent was under British colonial rule (1858–1947). It is also often said that state-sponsored preservation in independent India has maintained substantial continuities with colonial practice, both in terms of institutional forms and in the ways historic monuments have been identified, categorized, and managed by the state. In her important new book Building Histories , Mrinalini Rajagopalan refines both of these notions to some extent; for example, she pushes the history of institutionalized preservation back in time, providing several examples from precolonial contexts. She also presents a nuanced discussion of differences between colonial and postcolonial practices and goals. But none of this analysis is meant to ameliorate the indictment, which Rajagopalan herself makes, that institutionalized preservation in India today “continue[s] to reproduce colonial constructions of India's past” (11). Instead, Rajagopalan asks why the formal, official narratives the state deploys at historical monuments so often fail to account for the multiple counternarratives those same monuments evoke in their diverse, and often fractious, audiences. In seeking an answer to this question, she develops two main lines of argument. The first concerns the nature of the archive on which the state has relied in crafting its narratives. Building on Michel Foucault's argument that archives help bureaucracies establish a monopoly over historical truth, and on Jacques Derrida's focus on the role played by archons —or those who guard access to the archive—in constituting the authority of the archive, Rajagopalan presents a forensic analysis of the archive that authorizes state-sponsored preservation in India, particularly that used by the ASI. What she finds is that “colonial constructions of India's past” entail a melange of voices. Well-known British stalwarts like …