Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India.

Brown, Robert L.

Monuments, objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India. By Tapati Guha-Thakurta. New York: Columbia University PRESS, 2004. Pp. xxv + 404. $75.

When the British began to focus on Indian art and architecture in the first half of the nineteenth century, during their progress toward ruling the subcontinent, they brought two Western scholarly disciplines to bear, art history and archaeology. The story of how these disciplines took form, of who practiced them, and of what their underlying assumptions, judgments, and conclusions were has now been told fairly completely. It is a sad story in many ways, as retold by contemporary scholars, of missteps, misunderstandings, and grave consequences from which art historians suffer up until today. It has largely been the story of British and European actors.

Guha-Thakurta's book takes a somewhat different focus, and includes the story o( how Indian scholars participated in the art historical enterprise, bringing the tale up to the present, some fifty years after the independence of India in 1947. It is a story well told, in nine chapters, each of which can function quite independently of the others. This is in part because all but two of the chapters have appeared in previous publications. Still, the nine chapters work well in sequence, which is basically a chronological one, and, when read straight through, create a good overview of art historical change over a period of some two centuries.

I am not sure Guha-Thakurta would agree with me that the major contribution of her book is the discussion of the contribution of indigenous Indian scholars to the art historical discourse. She says in her introduction that

 the essays in this book ... set out to uncover some of the modes of
 enquiry and engagement that went into the forming of an official
 national canon of Indian art. The canon that was constructed over
 these years continues in many ways to dominate the field .... And it
 is the urgency of decoding this canon and its constructions that
 frames the main thrust of this book.

Guha-Thakurta does indeed deal with the art historical canon, telling us why certain works of art have become important, what their political connotations are, and how constant debate (including her own here) has kept the canon in contention. Nevertheless, the decoding of the canon is now done so frequently that it is a mainstay of even undergraduate university papers. For me the book's major excitement is in presenting significant strategies of "native" scholars in using art history.

The first two chapters focus on the beginnings of the archaeological and art historical enterprise, with the first chapter dealing with two of the most important British founders in the middle years of the nineteenth century, James Fergusson (actually a Scotsman) and Alexander Cunningham. In many ways these two pioneers could not have been more different in their interests. Fergusson attempted a survey of Indian architecture, putting for the first time India's vast architectural heritage into an order of time and a sequencing of worth. He ultimately wrote a history of world architecture, in which Indian architecture was placed. His tools were surveys, drawings, and a new technology, photography. Cunningham, on the other hand, was an archaeologist, whose tools were excavations, but also the collection of artifacts, including sculptures, coins, and inscriptions. He became entranced by the recently translated histories written by Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India, particularly that of Hsuan Tsang who traveled in India in the seventh century. Cunningham attempted to retrace Hsuan Tsang's footsteps by identifying Buddhist sites across India. Yet, however different the two, their respective ways of categorization and identification of art and architecture remain with us today. Both felt monuments and artifacts could tell the history of India, a history otherwise difficult to recover, due primarily to a lack of historical texts. Both were attempting to organize the art into a chronology, as well as to render judgments of aesthetic value.

The second chapter looks at the institution of the museum during the colonial period. It shows that including archeology (in the form of artifacts) in the museum put this domain in prolonged competition with natural history and the industrial arts, two categories of knowledge whose objects had pride of place within the museum. A second site of tension for the museum artifact was the question of which audience, that of the specialist or that of the public, was supposed to be addressed by its display. The move in the 1880s toward making the museum a fiduciary space to conserve the object increased the role of the museum as a display of art, although the transfer of an artifact from its origi nal site into a museum rarely had unanimous support and was frequently highly contentious. This chapter would work well as an independent reading for university classes in museum studies and art history.

The next three chapters deal with the native scholar, making up the section of the book the author calls "Regional Frames" These are the chapters I found of most interest. Chapter three presents two of the earliest native scholars. Ram Raz and Rajendralal Mitra. Ram Raz's book Essays on the Architecture of the Hindus was published posthumously in 1834, a startlingly early date. Writing over twenty years ago (in On; the Study of Indian Art [Harvard Univ. Press, 1983J), Pramod Chandra pointed out that Ram Raz's use of Sanskrit texts and living practitioners in understanding ancient Indian architecture was

 ... not taken up and followed ... for almost a hundred years .... had
 Ram Raz been emulated earlier our present knowledge of Indian
 architecture would be much broader and much deeper than it is.

A valuable path not pursued. Raja Rajendralal Mitra, who worked in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a different story, as he was very well published and greatly honored. His studies of Oris-san architecture, however, brought him into direct and vitriolic conflict with Fergusson, largely over one of the most persistent and unfortunate controversies in both popular and scholarly Indian thought, the identification (or not) of ethnic and linguistic groups as Aryan.

Chapter four introduces the very interesting archaeologist, scholar, and novelist, Rakhaldas Banerjee. Rakhaldas worked in the first half of the twentieth century, a time when the role of the native scholar had increased tremendously, as witnessed by the many Indian teachers and colleagues named along with Rakhaldas in this chapter. It was also a time when the museum and the Archeological Survey were becoming closely linked as institutions, and regional surveys, site museums, and local scholarly societies were proliferating, Rakhaldas published in both English and Bengali, thus reaching a wider and more diverse audience than the earlier English-only publications. Indeed, that Bengal was an autonomous region and culture was an argument he made through the art, in a move toward nationalist thinking that would end with India's independence. Rakhaldas produced careful scholarship, which Guha-Thakurta feels is sometimes overly focused on dates and classification ("a dry arche-ological approach"). He also, however, was a novelist, who presented in Bengali the art historical story of India in fictional form, a necessity due, apparently, to the constraints of his precise scholarship. In his 1914 novel Pashaner Katha {The Tale of Stone), the protagonist, in a twist worthy of Philip Roth, is the ancient stone stupa remains of Bharhut now in the Indian Museum, who is the voice of the tale!

Chapter five is primarily about Abanindranath Tagore, "the leading artist and ideologue of the nationalist art movement in Calcutta," who is contrasted with the earlier Bengali scholar Shyamacha-ran Srimani. The chapter argues that Abanindranath epitomized a radical shift in how Indian art was considered by Indian scholars (and the public), from archeological artifact (as in Shyamacharan's work) to aesthetic creation, in Abanindranath's, and it is as an aestheticized object that art will take up its role as a nationalized statement. I admit that I find this categorization, and the chapter, confusing. Abanindranath for me was indeed given a nationalist title, but it was not asked for, and was indeed fairly quickly taken away. His art, rather than displaying a national Indianized style, reflected the Internationa styles of the period, and thus jumped the confines of the nationalist debates. It was in fact this universal aesthetic that drew criticism from nationalist commentators, like Coomar-aswamy. In any event, Guha-Thakurta, who has written at length about Abanindranath elsewhere (The Making of a New "Indian" Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal 1850-1920 [Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992], presents her argument again here.

The next two chapters both concern how art during the twentieth century was made to represent the Indian nation state. Chapter six traces the creation of a national museum out of an art exhibition held in New Delhi in 1948 to celebrate India's independence. Only ancient art--sculpture and painting--was displayed, no modern or contemporary Indian art. It thus looked backward in its attempt to identify India and what defined the spirit of the people. The exhibition, and then the national museum, also attempted to distance themselves from the West by emphasizing the spiritual and religious nature of art. Guha-Thakurta again stresses the new aesthetic appraisal of the art (in contrast to the earlier archaeological appraisal) as the basis for the nationalist reading of the artifact, and here it seems she sometimes means simply viewing the object as art. Certainly, making Indian art worthy of equal consideration as fine art with Western art was a battle fought in the twentieth century, its new status epitomized by museum display, and one that was in tension with popular Indian understandings of artifacts as deities to be worshiped. This tension remains. Several years ago while I was in the site museum at Bodhgaya, a group of Indians came in and worshiped the images, including placing flowers on them.

Chapter seven tells the story of the Didarganj Yakshi, a life-size female stone sculpture dug up in 1917 in Patna. This chapter is of the life-of-the-image genre, in which an object or monument is traced from its founding up until today, with the argument that an object's initial creation, and its original meaning, are but one of its lives, and indeed one that it is not only difficult to retrieve but also not very interesting. The Didarganj, with its twentieth-century story well documented, works well as an example to track over time. Its nationalist life was due to its anointment as one of India's greatest masterpieces. During shipping to an exhibition of Indian masterpieces in the U.S. and France in the 1980s, it was slightly damaged. There was an outcry in the popular press in India and a demand that the sculpture not be allowed to travel again. The irony is that the masterpiece is today in a dusty glass case in the Patna Museum, a museum far from the path of either Indian or foreign tourists, and so is hardly ever seen.

The last two chapters move to the present and to topics of contemporary contention, when art and monuments have become the focus of debate, even violence. Now the story is completely Indian, in its protagonists, narrative, and issues--although the colonial voice is there as a past helping to define the present. Chapter eight discusses the attacks that M. F. Husain's paintings and drawings received, both verbal and physical, from the Hindu political right in the second half of the 1990s, due to their presenting certain Indian goddesses as "nudes." Chapter nine concerns two monuments whose control is being disputed between religious groups: Bodhgaya between Buddhist and Hindus, and Ayodhya between Hindus and Muslims. The criticism of Husain has a communal basis as well, as Husain is a Muslim. Thus, all three points of contention are fueled by religious intolerance. For Guha-Thakiirta, I think her urgency in this book to decode the art historical canon is driven by her belief that it will help inform contemporary groups, so that they can interact with intelligence and understanding, not bias and emotion.

ROBERT L. BROWN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES