Monuments, objects, histories : institutions of art in colonial and postcolonial India / Tapati Guha-Thakurta.
Material type: TextLanguage: English Series: Cultures of historyPublication details: New York : Columbia University Press, 2004.Description: xxv, 404 pISBN:- 9788178241876
- 701.030954 GUH
Ch. 1. The empire and its antiquities : two pioneers and their scholarly fields -- Ch. 2. The museum in the colony : collecting, conserving, classifying -- Ch. 3. Interlocuting texts and monuments : the coming of age of the "native" scholar -- Ch. 4. Between the nation and the region : the locations of a Bengali archaeologist -- Ch. 5. Wresting the nation's prerogative : art history and nationalism in Bengal -- Ch. 6. The demands of independence : from a national exhibition to a national museum -- Ch. 7. "For the greater glory of Indian art" : travels and travails of a Yakshi -- Ch. 8. Art history and the nude : on art, obscenity, and sexuality in contemporary India -- Ch. 9. Archaeology and the monument : on two contentious sites of faith and 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."
"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."--BOOK JACKET.
There are no comments on this title.