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

• Author: Brown, Robert L.
• Position: Book review

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...