ABSTRACT
The argument that values and belief systems are imprinted in various ways in material culture is now a commonplace. It is generally based on the premise of a single cultural origin, however, and so it presents some problems when we try to apply it, as this chapter will do, to understanding the adaptive reuse of buildings in a colonial context. It goes without saying that reuse of preexisting structures has been widespread in cultures throughout history, especially in the wake of conquest. However, the topic has remained almost entirely unstudied in the context of British India, and investigation shows it to provide both a useful framework and a focal point for examining changing cultural interrelationships from new perspectives. Colonial adaptations, it might be argued, are the hybrids of material culture, occupying a continuum of time and space that falls between societies. So how are we to interpret the relative values in reused buildings from a cultural landscape that would, by one definition, have been understood as that of the colonized “other”? We might pursue this problem by asking why some buildings, not others, were singled out to be put to new uses. What does their location in a changing landscape – one whose spatial logic is now often no longer easily discernible – have to tell us now about the layered ways in which interactions between colonizers and colonized were constructed and negotiated?1
