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HIST370: Art, Archaeology and Antiquities in Modern India

This course is designed to introduce to students the principal categories through which the material arts of South Asia have been constituted and studied over the last 200 years. Some of the objects we will study were generated thousands of years ago but we will focus on the means by which they have been understood, named and organised by the modern disciplines of archaeology and art history. By what means and to what effect were the material cultures of South Asia judged to be ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ in the nineteenth and twentieth century? Why were some craft practices undermined and other disciplined and re-generated by art schools? We will consider the different ways in which objects considered to be ‘art’ were documented through excavation, photography, geography and museology. How did the treatment of art reflect the interests of the colonial state? And how could art be mobilised to undermine and resist colonial authority in South Asia? In this course will consider the ideas and assumptions which lie behind art history as a discipline and in particular, examine its imperial career in South Asia.

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