Art history as it is largely practiced in Asia as well as in the
West is a western invention. In India, works of art-sculptures,
monuments, paintings-were first viewed under colonial rule as
archaeological antiquities, later as architectural relics, and by
the mid-20th century as works of art within an elaborate
art-historical classification. Tied to these views were narratives
in which the works figured, respectively, as sources from which to
recover India's history, markers of a lost, antique civilization,
and symbols of a nation's unique aesthetic, reflecting the
progression from colonialism to nationalism. The nationalist canon
continues to dominate the image of Indian art in India and abroad,
and yet its uncritical acceptance of the discipline's western
orthodoxies remains unquestioned, the original motives and means of
creation unexplored. The book examines the role of art and art
history from both an insider and outsider point of view, always
revealing how the demands of nationalism have shaped the concept
and meaning of art in India. The author shows how western
custodianship of Indian "antiquities" structured a historical
interpretation of art; how indigenous Bengali scholarship in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries attempted to bring Indian art
into the nationalist sphere; how the importance of art as a
representation of national culture crystallized in the period after
Independence; and how cultural and religious clashes in modern
India have resulted in conflicting "histories" and interpretations
of Indian art. In particular, the author uses the depiction of
Hindu goddesses to elicit conflicting scenarios of condemnation and
celebration, both of which have at their core the threat and lure
of the female form, which has been constructed and narrativized in
art 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.
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