ABSTRACT
This chapter has as its broad canvas the workings of archaeology in colonial India, both as a new field of authoritative knowledge on India’s ‘antiquities’ (a category encompassing ruined monuments, architectural and sculptural fragments, inscriptions and coins), and as a new mode of historical imagination. It traces archaeology’s self-formulation as a discipline over the late nineteenth century, the emerging textual and institutional contours of the field, and the manner in which it constituted its objects of study. 2 At the same time, it explores the way the disciplinary field opened up a terrain for the scholarly and popular imagination. The ‘imagination’, here, while claiming the legitimacy of scholarship, can often be seen to push beyond the boundaries of what could always be empirically known and attested. This raises certain crucial questions: how did a discipline like archaeology work within a local and national context? How was a ‘Western’ field of expertise and practice strategically transformed into an area of ‘national’ knowledge? In what ways were the same archaeological sites and structures made available as relics of a national past?
