Essentialised Cultures Cunningham’s surveys and interpretation of the temple at Bodh Gaya, which he presented in The Mahabodhi, provides many examples of the ways in which he used photographs to physically fill in the ‘lost’ architectural details (Figure 12). Despite recognizing that local customs and rituals had made its marks within the body of this derelict Buddhist tem… >

Truth Values The use of archaeology to build up truth-values of notions derived from elsewhere is explicit in the ‘Aryan’ and ‘non-Aryan’ racial classifications that were imposed on the archaeological finds. The two categories into which the ‘races of India’ were variously placed, and which were touted as historical truths from the middle of the nineteenth century, allow… >

Replicating Truths The creation of ‘visual replica’ for ancient ruins and historical monuments has a long history outside photography and India. As scholars focused attention on first hand studies of phenomena, their reliance on illustrations, which could effectively transmit their own ‘true’ vision, grew in scale. In Britain, one of the earliest and most comprehensive samp… >

Archaeological Photography The role of archaeological photography for recording archaeological excavations remained common throughout the nineteenth- and twentieth- centuries, although, the scope of documentation changed with the onset of large-scale excavations. The objective from then on has been to transform photographs of sites into quantifiable documents, and establi… >

“The photographer will point his camera at each pinnacled niche or floriated doorway, he will take his sun painted sketch of each figured corbel or grotesque gargoyle; and in fact carry away in his portfolio every nice architectural detail long before time with his destructive hands shall have the opportunity to mar any more of the beauty of the original.” Introduction S… >

Early Efforts It is in these years that we find some of the earliest efforts of systematic photographing of excavations, one example being the photographs taken by Augustus le Plongeon and his wife, Alice, during their excavations in the Yucatan (Mexico) between 1873 and 1885. The excavators, who were also antiquarians and mystics, had hoped to attain fame and fortune by pu… >

Social Saliency The impulse to look beyond the ‘appearance’ of photographs has had very little hold within the archaeological imagination. Given that to ‘see is to believe’ still resonates on knowledge formation on the archaeological, it is equally striking to note how minimal any critical engagement with this relationship has been. Methods of pursuing archaeological phot… >

British Scholarship The British pursuit of knowledge on India followed the East India Company’s rise in status from a trading company to the revenue collector of Bengal in 1765. The translations into English of the indigenous Persian and Sanskrit texts, which were a direct response to the Company’s new administrative needs, facilitated the recovery of ‘Ancient’ India. This … >

Historical Scholarship Of the archaeological work that was undertaken during much of the nineteenth century, one was a survey of the ‘Hindu’ and ‘Mohammedan’ monuments, an activity pioneered as a scholarly pursuit by James Fergusson, who ventured out of his lucrative indigo plantation at a rather opportune moment (when indigo prices fell partly as a consequence of the depr… >