Monuments, Objects, Histories
Subtitle: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (Cultures of History)
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: June 10, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 432
ISBN-13: 9780231129985
Subjects: History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900; History of art & design styles: from c 1900 -; Art; Art & Art Instruction; Politics/International Relations; Asian; Art / History / General; Asia - India & South Asia; General; 19th century; 20th century; Historiography; History; India; Nationalism and art
First sentence: THIS CHAPTER IS ABOUT beginnings and foundations.
Description: "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.