Archaeological Photography and the Creation of Histories in Colonial India

Archaeological Photography and the Creation of Histories in Colonial India

Archaeology Colonial

Nineteenth-century archaeological investigations grew from the antiquarian scholarship of the previous century, and in many ways endowed this with the trappings of a rational science. The urgency of exposing the past and, thereby, re-connecting with it, like salvage ethnography, resonated on the needs of the ‘modern’ industrial nations and their politics of imperialism. For many Western nation states, history had a powerful moral use as it could be evoked for critiquing what was perceived as ‘decline in values’ within an increasingly industrial age. With respect to their colonial domains, the histories that they created for the ‘native’ population allowed them to disseminate and entrench their rule, and their imperialist ideologies. To a considerable extent, down-grading the civilization worthiness of the colonized population was realized through a scholarship based on archaeological investigations. The command invested upon archaeology, such as in India, for aiding the scientific discovery of a colony’s ‘true’ past, was, as we know, rooted within the interplay of nineteenth-century empiricism, rationality and politics. This interplay has subsequently aided the marketing of archaeology as a truth-making enterprise in many parts of the former colonial world.