Cherry-Afterlives of Monuments.pdf

7/21/2019 Cherry-Afterlives of Monuments.pdf

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/cherry-afterlives-of-monumentspdf 1/17

PROOF COVER SHEET

Journal acronym: RSAS

Author(s): Deborah Cherry

Article title: The Afterlives of Monuments

Article no: 772800

Enclosures: 1) Query sheet

2) Article proofs

Dear Author,

1. Please check these proofs carefully. It is the responsibility of the corresponding author to check these and approve or

amend them. A second proof is not normally provided. Taylor & Francis cannot be held responsible for uncorrected errors,

even if introduced during the production process. Once your corrections have been added to the article, it will be considered

ready for publication.

Please limit changes at this stage to the correction of errors. You should not make insignificant changes, improve prose style,

add new material, or delete existing material at this stage. Making a large number of small, non-essential corrections can lead

to errors being introduced. We therefore reserve the right not to make such corrections.

For detailed guidance on how to check your proofs, please see

http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/production/checkingproofs.asp.

2. Please review the table of contributors below and confirm that the first and last names are structured correctly and

that the authors are listed in the correct order of contribution. This check is to ensure that your name will appear correctly

online and when the article is indexed.

Sequence Prefix Given name(s) Surname Suffix

1 Deborah Cherry



Queries are marked in the margins of the proofs.

AUTHOR QUERIES

General query: You have warranted that you have secured the necessary written permission from the appropriatecopyright owner for the reproduction of any text, illustration, or other material in your article. (Please see

http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/preparation/permission.asp.) Please check that any required acknowledgements

have been included to reflect this.

No Queries



The Afterlives of Monuments

Deborah Cherry*Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of the Arts London and University of Amsterdam

This introductory essay proposes thatmonuments have afterlives.The study of the afterlives of monuments encompasses5 how, where, when and why monuments have been re-modelled, re-used, re-sited, remade, cast aside, destroyed or

abandoned to accommodate changing political and social climates; how they survive through re-invention and transfor-mations. Afterlives accrue through material alteration and they accumulate in representation. The diverse ways in whichmonuments survive, it is argued, depends on definitions and listings of monuments, practices of monument-making pastand present and recent debates over history and memory. The concept is proposed to capture afterlives that co-exist as

10 well as those occur sequentially, and to suggest a model of greater complexity and plurality than a linear or quasi-biographical trajectory. Conflicts over monuments especially over their survival, it is suggested, are as much concernedwith projections of a future, as with reconstructions of the past or mnemonic recollection. Monuments — ancient,modern and contemporary — have taken centre stage as different and competing South-Asian communities claim a stake

in the making of national, religious, cultural and local histories and identities. In their varied afterlives, monuments15 emerge as extraordinarily mobile, marked by material change, putto newuses andinterpretations, andtravelling throughimage-banks, archives, collections and exhibitions. Their afterlives, like monuments themselves, are multi-media..

Keywords: afterlives; monument; monument-making; modernity; replication; diversion

20 Two massive sculptures, resplendent and statuesque,appear as if moving in a river. Their golden garlandsadorned with bank notes catch the light, glittering againstthe moist greys of the river and its distant bank. Birds flitoverhead and skim the waterline. Beyond, a train goes by,

25 construction traffic passes, dogs run along the water’sedge. Pylons, a bridge, and overhead electric railway

cables bestride the scene (Figure 1).This is Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (Prologue) (2008), an

eleven-minute single screen video by leadingartists Raqs30 Media Collective. According to the artists, it features ‘the

wandering figures of a Yaksha and a Yakshi, mythic maleand female guardians of treasure and keepers of riddlesin different Indic traditions’. They continue: ‘The Yaksha and the Yakshi provide a crepuscular subjectivity to a

35 landscape, their gaze passing, leaving open the questionwhether the guardians of wealth are leaving the city orentering it.1 The film is compelling in its ambiguity,posing unanswered questions, unsolved riddles. Who ismoving – the statues, animate figures roaming a contem-

40 porary industrial landscape, coming in and out of view?Are these deities being transported by boat? Recurringlandmarks in the scene prompt a growing realization thatit is the camera that is in motion, restlessly circlingaround the figures, positioning and repositioning the

45 video’s viewers. Though the statues are adorned withgold and money, embellished perhaps as an act of devo-tion, there are no visible devotees, whose ‘visual and

bodily performances’ as Chris Pinney puts it, ‘contributecrucially to the potential power – one might say comple-

50tion – of the image’.2 The figures on the riverbank or theman paddling a boat seem not to notice them. Were thestatues immersed in the river in an everyday practice of worship, purposefully placed there, or abandoned? Orlike many other ancient sculptures long separated from

55their precise locations, have they ‘wandered far fromtheir original sites’, like the Didarganj Yakshi salvagedfrom the river Ganga in 1917, to be retrieved from themuddy river bank.3 Framed in the diurnal metamorpho-sis from misty evening to the illuminated dark of night,

60the video interrogates time. The Yaksha and Yakshi are atonce gods in living worship and ancient statues that arepart of India ’s ‘living past found especially in its sacredplaces and spaces’.4 Images and icons have been vitallyimportant to the history of Indian civilisation and they

65remain central to much Indian life today.5 The video’stitle hints that the figures are asleep, possibly to waken,that they are part of a group traveling together.

Close-ups reveal that the sculptures are not polishedstone. They were modelled on the two statues guarding

70the portals of the New Delhi headquarters of the ReserveBankof India, commissioned from the artist Ram KinkarBaij in the heydayof Nehruvian nationalism, when publicand government buildings were decorated with sculptureand visual icons in the making of a new identity for

75this independent nation. Historic forms and ancient

South Asian Studies, 2013Vol. 29, No. 1, 1 – 14, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2013.772800

*Email: [email protected]

© 2013 The Society for South Asian Studies



sculptures, many of which were circulating in exhibi-tions, reproductions, and publications and on display inNew Delhi, were considered particularly appropriate.

Baij drew his inspiration from a massive Yaksha discov-80ered at Parkham now in Mathura Museum, and a colossal

Yakshi recovered in Besnagar in 1885 and presented to

1. Raqs Media Collective, Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (Prologue) , 2008. Single screen video. 11 minutes. Still. Courtesy of the artists and Frith Street Gallery London.

2 Deborah Cherry



the Indian Museum in Calcutta, adapting, revising, andre-imagining parts that had eroded or disappeared.

Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (Prologue) was shown at the85 Indian Highway exhibition at London’s Serpentine

Gallery, where Raqs Media Collective curated Steps

Away from Oblivion, a project that invited 8 Indian film-

makers to revisit key moments in their work, re-editing,re-making, or re-presenting particular sequences from90 their films.6 Displayed in a confined space to the side of

the main galleries, ladders and step-ladders surroundedthe small screens and projections. Under the broadumbrella of ‘different rhythms of repose and transforma-tion in today’s India ’, Sleepwalkers’ Caravan counterposes

95 these replicated ancient statues with the contemporaryurban development and industrialisation that, in power-ing India ’s wealth, are re-making its landscapes and cities.Like the Yaskha and Yakshi, the artwork has afterlives of its own. Showcased at the second Indian Art Summit

100 (New Delhi, 2009) it was presented on a vast 72 x 48

inch screen, and it is readily downloaded from the col-lective’s website to a laptop or handheld device.Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (Prologue) circulates in the globa-lized circuits of production, display, reception, and col-

105 lecting of contemporary art. And with it go the Yaksha and Yakshi, in their ever-proliferating replication andreproduction.

Sleepwalkers’ Caravan (Prologue) introduces this col-lection of essays assembled around a speculative propo-

110 sal, that monuments have afterlives. To explore theafterlives of monuments is to investigate how, where,when, and why monuments have been remodelled,reused, remade, re-sited, cast aside, adapted, destroyed,

defaced, forgotten, or abandoned. It is to investigate the115 diverse conditions in which objects and sites survive and

the varying demands and claims made upon them.Mutilation, destruction, and neglect, in whole or in part,leave traces, vestiges of a previous state, site, or condi-tion, fragments which come to have afterlives of their

120 own, supported by new narratives, uses, and modes of sensory and participatory engagement. Statues and siteshave been appropriated and put to adaptive reuse; theyhave been razed, defaced, disbanded, reconstructed, theirmaterials salvaged, destroyed, thrown away, re-cycled.

125 South Asia is famous for its monuments, and theliteratures on its ancient and modern sites, memorials,antiquities, and art objects is extensive, from popularguidebooks to specialized academic accounts. Focusinglargely on India from the colonial period to the present,7

130 this collection proposes that monuments in the sub-continent and further afield provoke, enjoy, resist, andattract multiple, heterogeneous, multi-lingual, and multi-disciplinary re-appraisals and re-makings, generated bydiverse groups or opposing communities. The collection

135 takes its inspiration from recent studies that have empha-sized the lives of images, objects and sites through

liturgical, performative, scholarly, museological, and cur-atorial interaction, notably Richard Davis’s account in Lives of Indian Images of ‘the different worlds of belief

140that Indian religious images have come to inhabit overtime’, and Tapati Guha-Thakurta ’s sustained attention tothe careers and biographies of ancient sites, objects, and

monuments.

8

That monuments accumulate afterlives alsotakes a lead from an ongoing re-assessment of ‘the cul-145tural biography and the social history of things’9 along-

side mappings of the mobility and circulation of objects.Influential too has been re-assessment of the writings of Aby Warburg and his concept of Nachleben, conciselysummarized by Georges Didi-Huberman:

150‘Survival’ is the central concept, the Hauptproblem, of Aby Warburg and the Warburgian school of art history. InWarburg’s work, the term Nachleben refers to the survival(the community of afterlife and metamorphosis) of images and motifs – as opposed to their renascence

155after extinction, or conversely, their replacement by inno-

vations in images and motif.10

The term afterlives is adopted here to suggest the restlessmultiplicity of co-existing versions, representations,imag(in)ings, and interactions taking place in widely

160distributed circuits of use, replication, and interpretation.Afterlives are constructed in the corporeal, mnemonic,and sensory engagements between people – individuals,groups, institutions – and sites, objects, texts, and images.The concept holds the promise of survival, of living-on,

165through change. Both Richard Davis and Tapati Guha-Thakurta compellingly narrate the fortunes of theDidarganj Yakshi, its passage through time, attentive to

the distinctive historical circumstances that shaped andre-directed its many careers. And as both demonstrate,

170afterlives often co-exist, complementing, competing,disrupting, jostling with one another. In this uneasy co-existence they may be said to supplement one another,according to the ‘logic of the supplement’, discerned byJacques Derrida as dangerous, disruptive, and divisive.

175The supplement, he contends, ‘breaks into the very thingthat would have liked to do without it, and which allowsitself to be simultaneously cut into, violated, filled, andreplaced, completed by the very trace through which thepresent augments itself in the act of disappearing into

180it.’11 In their supplementarity, simultaneous afterlivessummoned for a singular site or object may well annulor revoke each other, amass in diametric and at timesviolent and destructive opposition. Each is shaped byspecific conditions, agents, archives, location, by distinct

185movements through space and time. The concept of afterlives proposed here aims to highlight the pluralityof survivals that may disrupt a strictly linear trajectoryimplied in a quasi-biographical form modeled on a sequential passage of human life from birth or origin to

190death or extinction.12 And to indicate that while afterlives

South Asian Studies 3



accrue with the support of history and memory, in theirprojection of a future they exceed reconstructions of thepast and mnemonic recollection.

Are monuments especially disposed to generate and195 sustain prolific afterlives? This collection builds on stu-

dies of the commemoration and survivals of major events

in world history and their living-on in monuments andother mnemonic forms, notably the literature onHolocaust memorial and the growing attention to

200 Partition.13 Seemingly permanent and enduring, monu-ments are never finished. Living on from their manypasts into the present, they may sustain addition or demo-lition, temporary accretions, adaptive re-use, appropria-tion, and material and visible change, and summon new

205 visitors, uses, and appropriations. During the colonialperiod ancient structures and complexes were designatedmonuments and transformed into sites of archaeologicalinvestigation and preservation, while others were re-modeled for residential or other suse, or disregarded.

210

More recently, palaces and forts have become touristdestinations; historic temples and mosques are alsosites of contemporary worship. Statues have been toppledoff their plinths, and new sculptures installed. Largecomplexes of religious worship have been erased. New

215 structures have been erected, often citing and adaptingearlier precedent. Viewed and reviewed by generationsof spectators, interpreters, guides, commentators, andimage-makers, monuments undergo a restless prolifera-tion of meanings as signifying and custodial commu-

220 nities emerge, reconfigure, regroup, depart. Theafterlives of monuments encompasses the active prac-tices of monument-making from the colonial period to

the assembly of an appropriate national heritage afterindependence and participation in world heritage.

225 Listing as a protected monument is highly significant toa site or object’s future. As this collection suggests, afterl-ives take material form, enacted in physical alteration toa site or object, and they accumulate in representation, inimages, texts, and documents, the registers of materiality

230 and the archive not necessarily coinciding. In their afterl-ives monuments emerge as extraordinarily mobile,marked by material change, put to new uses and inter-pretations, and travelling through collections of texts,images, and objects.

235 According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word‘monument’ is capacious. It can signify a sepulchre, a written document or record, an indication, token, orevidence, a marker in the soil for a tract or boundary,‘anything that by its survival commemorates a person,

240 action, period, or event [. . .] a structure, edifice, or erec-tion intended to commemorate a notable person, action,or event [. . .] a structure of stone or other material overthe grave [. . .] in memory of the dead’. Andew Hui hastraced the interlaced etymologies of the English word

245 monument, from the Latin: meminisse, to remember,

memoria, memory, monere, to remind, and monimenta,which signifies both memorial and reminders. He alsoindicates that monere can also mean ‘to warn’, hinting atthe memorial’s function to caution, to admonish: ‘in as

250much as the monument is a reminder of the past, it alsoprojects a trajectory toward the future, in the sense that it

is meant to endure and remind future generations of itslegacy’.14 Raj Ghat in New Delhi, built at the site of hiscremation on 31 January 1948 on the banks of the

255Yamuna river, not only commemorates Gandhi’s life, butalso points forward, to the survival of his legacies andtheir potential afterlives in India ’s and the world’s future.Memorials thus come to signify far more than theirmaterial manifestation. They are activated within com-

260plex systems of participation and representation inwhich, to borrow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reflec-tions on Vertretung and Darstellung, come to signify both

portrait and proxy.15 The memorial stands in for the indi-vidual and much more: a hope for the future, a promise to

265

remember, a potential legacy to come. Afterlives accruethrough visits and viewings, images and material replica-tion, gifts and donations deposited at the monument orsite, prescribed and impromptu performative and parti-cipatory rituals. Gayatri Sinha has persuasively stated

270that ‘the memorial can only survive through reinven-tion’, and she writes here of the ‘part secular, part sacred’observances at Raj Ghat: weekly commemorativeprayers are held, and visitors must remove their shoes.

The monitory, in the sense of admonition, may well275outweigh the commemorative in the building of imperial

monuments. Dedicated to notable persons and events,numerous statues and memorials were imported and

erected during the British colonial period, often strategi-cally sited to articulate critical junctures in the urban

280planning of re-built cities. For Sunil Khilnani, Calcutta ‘became a stage where the regalia of British sovereigntywas displayed, where the India was ruled, where spacewas most explicitly governed [. . .] vast areas of old citieswere demolished’ in the display of this ‘new imperial

285power’.16 Tracy Anderson’s essay in these pages consid-ers how colonial monument-making was shaped by ten-sions between formations of sexual difference andimperialism, generating a population of statues of famous men, the Queen Empress and female allegories

290that contrasted to the tomb to commemorate CharlotteCanning, installed in the gubernatorial garden atBarrackpore, one of many nineteenth-century Christianmemorials where imperial identities and private losscoincided. The monument-making of colonial urban

295planning paralleled and extended the monument-makingof its archaeology: as these modern cities were pepperedwith statues of viceroys, monarchs, military leaders, pub-lic figures, so India ’s antiquities and ancient sites weredefined as monuments, productions of antiquity. A pre-

300dilection for ancient ruins may well have occluded the

4 Deborah Cherry



ruins created in the chaos and trauma of colonial inter-vention, in what Homi Bhabha has identified as the‘colonial violence of destruction and domination’.17 Thetwin axes of colonial monument-making were closely

305 connected, both produced in a splitting of modernityand antiquity, a subject considered at some length in

these pages by Partha Mitter.

18

Independence demanded the creation of nationalicons for the new Republic. Gayatri Sinha explores the

310 multiple ways in which Gandhi’s iconicity is encoded inthe design of currency notes and stamps, popular prints,official commissions, the many statues at roadsides, invillages and cities, in peace monuments, and in thenumerous buildings, institutions and streets named after

315 him, commemorative practices which take place in thedaily circulation of paper (the notes in embellishing thegarlands on the Yaksha and Yakshi in Sleepwalkers’

Caravan), as in the many occasions that his memorialsprovide for events, photography, and embellishment.

320

With Independence also came a refashioning of the ico-nography of memory – the erection in 1961 of the mem-orial to commemorate the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of 1919 offers one example – and the re-assembly of national heritage, undertaken in the listings redrawn by

325 the Archaeological Society of India soon after 1947.19

Raminder Kaur argues in this collection that nuclearstructures and arsenal are as much part of national icono-graphy as flags and other signs: ‘these nuclear monu-ments are conceived as vital signatures of the

330 progressive, forward-looking nation-state [. . .] highlyregulated through draconian legislation, censorship, andintensive security’. In projecting its modernity, India has

built and extended its nuclear capacity, often in rivalrywith Pakistan. The visibility and architectural presence

335 of nuclear sites, power-stations, accelerators, missiles,and bombs is highly controlled, access strictly regulated;unlike other public forms of national celebration andcommemoration, they remain largely hidden from view.

India ’sOfficial memorials have diversity has gener-340 ated contending and contentious views of nation and

identity. Official memorials have been challenged bythe emergence and afterlives of counter-monuments gen-erated in the sub-continent’s contested political, cultural,and religious histories. Assessing the making of its mod-

345 ern political iconography, Richard H. Davis writes: ‘Onecannot speak of a single iconography of India, but of multiple iconographies within a historically changingnation-state.’ He differentiates between icons of state,the ‘unofficial imagery’ of mass print, ‘alternative

350 grounds of nationhood’ forged in political movements,religious, and cultural organizations, and ‘other identities’negotiated though regional affiliation.20 The complex-ities of forging a consensual national identity surfacedin 1947 in the rituals of independence, including the flag-

355 raising ceremony at the Red Fort in Delhi. For Eric

Hobsbawm, traditions are invented, their creation flour-ishing in periods of rapid transformation.21 And as tradi-tions are invented, it is inevitable that they will bechallenged, along with the re-inventions of the past and

360appropriations of space that they entail. Jim Masselos hasanalyzed the mapping of a ‘new spatial order, a symbolic

taking over of space that had been controlled by theformer rulers’ and an appropriation of the imperial gran-deur of the Mughals in the staging of this event at the Red

365Fort.22 Others have drawn attention to dissenting per-spectives. Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya examinethe concerns expressed by Ashfaq Alam Khan of Meerutwho stated that: ‘This historic building of red stone andmarble stands on the sandy bank of the Jummna in sacred

370memoryof centuries of Muslin rule in India and is held inhigh esteem by Muslims all over the country.’ Khanexpressed anxieties about ‘playing with Muslim senti-ments, especially in the present atmosphere of mutualsuspicion and hatred’, summoning in support the Red

375

Fort’s status as a historic monument: ‘The Red Fort likeother historic buildings is an Archaeological monument

and should be placed under joint control.’23 Plural afterl-ives have multiplied around the seventeenth-centurycita-del of Shah Jehan: it is at once an archaeological

380monument, a popular venue for internal and internationaltourism, a site of British occupation, resistance, andindependence (Figure 2). And Khan’s conviction of thesignifying power of Mughal architecture has endured.Hilal Ahmed explores here how in the heightenedpolitics

385and conflicts of the 1980s Jama Masjid in Delhi, alsobuilt in the reign of Shah Jehan, was summoned to repre-sent a royal Muslim past and the ‘ Muslim contribution to

the making and remakingof the official postcolonial idea of “Indian heritage”’.

390In contemporary India, statues, ancient and modern,have become sites for the expression of dissent.‘Monumental Mayawati’ (this apt term is SuryanandiniSinha Narain’s) has met with controversy and hostility.24

2. Red Fort, Delhi, 2005. Photograph: Author.




When a statue of Mayawati was ‘beheaded’ in July 2012,395 those assuming responsibility stated that the destruction

was ‘their way to express anger against the scams whichtook place under the Mayawati regime’.25 According toone source, ‘Statues of political leaders are generally putup posthumously, but Ms Mayawati says that this belief is

400

outdated.’26

Mayawati’

s statuary rebuffs a no longer uni-versal rule of retrospective commemoration, which likethe protocols of posthumous admission to galleries of national portraits is being eroded. India is by no meansthe only country in which monuments have become the

405 focus for internal dissent. With the rise of neo-fascismextreme right-wing groups have despoiled statues, warmemorials, commemorations of the Holocaust, andJewish cemeteries with anti-semitic slogans. While theyare still regarded in terms of their principal purpose, to

410 honour the dead, to commemorate the Holocaust, thesemonuments have become targets for racial hatred.Hostility and opposition are pitted against the person,

event, or trauma – the portrait aspect –

as well as againstwider issues the monument may represent – its proxy415 aspects.

Regime change and the making of new nations inevi-tably bring monument change. The melodramatic stagingfor world media in 2003 of the fall of the statue of Saddam Hussein testifies to the potent symbolism of

420 statuary to signify overthrow and conquest. Disgraced

Monuments (UK, 1993, dir. Laura Mulvey and MarkLewis) traces the fortunes of revolutionary monumentsin Russia after the fall of communism, tracking themthroughdemolition, disappearance, storage, or collection

425 in a ‘Temporary Museum of Totalitarian Art’ in a

Moscow park. Clare Harris’s contribution here followsthe comprehensive re-articulation of a Tibetan nationalicon, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, under the Chinese rule.By contrast to the widespread dismissal of socialist poli-

430 tical icons in the Russia and the complete remaking of Tibetan heritage, it has been argued that colonial monu-ments in the sub-continent were by and large not vanda-lized. In the decades after 1947 colonial statues weredispersed and collected. While some remained in place,

435 others were abandoned or disappeared; many wereremoved, their vacated plinths offering sites for theinstallation of a new pantheon of national heroes.27 Themost obvious icons of imperial rule proved irresistible:statues of Queen Victoria were disfigured, and the most

440 visited British lieu de mémoire met with defacement andejection, its site appropriated by Indian nationalists.28

Maria Misra narrates:

In the dusty north Indian city of Kanpur, in a neglectedchurchyard looms a large stone angel, the angel had

445 originally presided over the Bibighar compound, andexclusively ‘white’ domain built as a shrine to Britishheroes of the ‘mutiny’ and forbidden to all Indians. On15 August 1947, Independence Day, a group of revellers

broke into the compound and assaulted the celestial450entity, leaving it noseless. The statue was swiftly relo-

cated to its present resting place and a statue of Tantia Topu, the great Indian hero of the rebellion, put in itsplace – symbolic recompense for events of ninety yearsearlier.29

455

Relics of the Raj were clustered together in gardens andgraveyards of old statuary, consigned to museums,depots, or collections of imperial memorabilia, such asthe Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, planned as anextensive, highly ornamental monument to Empress and

460Empire and still a landmark in the city.30 Contemporaryartistic engagements with colonial monuments, like artis-tic interventions into museum collections, offer critiqueand alternative structures of thinking. Vivan Sundaram’sextensive, multi-media, site-specific installation of 1998,

465 Journey Towards Freedom/ Structures of Memory: Modern

Bengal investigates Bengal’s history from the mid nine-teenth century to 1947.31 Sundaram reconfigured the

spaces, narratives, and collections of the Hall, withobjects and texts, jute bags, railway tracks, and archive

470boxes. If in one afterlife the building and its collectionsremain ‘a memorial to a dead Raj, whose memories likeits representations have long lost their edge’,32 inSundaram’s installation it was transformed into an inter-active space that was at once a library, warehouse, recy-

475cling depot, refugee terminus, memory-bank, mela.Sundaram’s installation is one of many contemporary

artworks that reinvent the monument. Jitish Kallat’sPublic Notice 2 (2007) summons the text of Gandhi’sspeech of 11 March 1930 on the eve of the historic

480Dandi March, his protest against the brutal salt taximposed by the British, setting out a manifesto for inde-pendence founded on non-violence and civil disobe-dience (see Figures 13 and 14 in Sinha ’s article in thisissue). A recurring theme in Kallat’s Public Notice series,

485momentous speeches by India ’s leaders return time andagain in recent film and video. Zarina Bhimji’s film,Yellow Patch (2012) evokes the evanescence of speech,its echoing sounds conjuring speech’s propensity forethereal disappearance, captured in historic recordings

490on the edge of audibility. Kallat gives speech monumen-tal form on a monumental scale: the installation’s exten-sive reach, the corporeal and visual demands on the

viewer, and the juxtaposition of the severe rhythm of the shelves with the cursive shapes of their contents are495central to the work’s identity. The stark, white, stripped

down appearance of the letters, fabricated to simulateskeletal bones picked clean of flesh, points to the poten-tially fatal human cost of salt depletion. The temporarystatus of contemporary art, living its afterlives in storage,

500exhibitions, and images, highlights the short-lived natureof many monuments. The sub-continent has a lively cul-ture of mobile monuments constructed in relativelyephemeral materials and making inventive interventions

6 Deborah Cherry



into local spaces.33 Monuments are, as this collection505 concedes, multifarious, multi-dimensional, and multi-

media, spanning architecture, sculpture, popular culturalforms, and contemporary artistic practice.

‘Monument’ also has another major meaning, accord-ing to the Oxford English Dictionary, to connote a notable

510 ‘

building, structure, or site that is of historical impor-tance or interest’.34 The two meanings supplement oneanother: Taj Mahal is both a memorial and a historicstructure of major consequence. In the colonial periodmonument-making was an act of colonial authority.

515 Sraman Mukherjee examines monument-making inOrissa at three major Hindu temple complexes, sitestoday under protection of Archaeological Society of India: the Lingaraja complex of temples atBhubaneswar, the great temple at Puri dedicated to Lord

520 Jagannath (then and now in active worship), and theworld-renowned Sun Temple at Konarak. As bothMukherjee and Guha-Thakurta demonstrate, consigning

an ancient site to the status of monument involved assid-uous knowledge production and assertions of ownership,525 demands that were effectively navigated and frequently

resisted. More recently, historic locations and artifactshave been called to take a place within the frames of conservation, art, national iconicity, and world heritagegiven by the Archaeological Societyof India (ASI) or the

530 United Nations Educational, Scientific and CulturalOrganisation (UNESCO). Monument-making is a retro-spective designation, usually assigned after several cen-turies or millennia. Inclusion and exclusion, afterlives inthemselves, have profound impact on the survival and

535 fortunes of any historic building, site, or artifact, often

caught in uneasy compromises, such as those betweentourism and conservation. Conservation, moroever, is a highlydisputed domain and set of practices, caught todaybetween several competing models, one which attempts

540 to arrest further change by maintaining the monument ata distinct stage of its development, and others whichaccept degrees of change and allowing a more processualmodel, generating in India as elsewhere intensedebates about conservation practices, materials, and

545 protocols.35As Sudeep Dasgupta writes in these pages,‘The contentious politics around the restoration of monu-ments is but one indication that the temporalities monu-ments embody and the meanings they accrue and lose arefar from fixed.’ Listings are neither stable nor enduring:

550 Sraman Mukherjee notes that the group of temples atLingaraja, Orissa, was struck off the Protected Listbetween 1903 and 1918. And listing offers no guaranteesof the protection of cultural property. When belatedlygranted World Heritage status in 1994 by UNESCO, the

555 Potala Palace in Lhasa was already largely stripped of itscontents. Historic structures have also encountered unan-ticipated afterlives. A seventeenth-century building inLahore, the tomb of a Muslim nobleman, possibly

Qasim Khan Mir Bahr, was, as Sheila Shorto discovered,560occupied by Sikh soldiers, transformed and extended by

British officials into a imposing Edwardian mansion,eventually becoming Government House. It is still inuse today by the Governor of the Punjab Province of Pakistan, having undergone numerous re-modelings

565

with its adaptive re-uses.

36

Any site, building, or object evolves and changesover time, becoming a palimpsest of plural historiesand uses. In palimpsest sites, one building is constructedupon another, some times re-using and adapting existing

570elements, at others rebuilding over demolition. Themodel of the palimpsest is drawn from analysis of manu-script practices in which writing on vellum has beenscratched out or over-written yet traces remain visible.Where visible and material traces of revision and/or

575erasure remain, afterlives multiply, with claims andcounter-claims over the site’s identity, history, andbelonging. Investigating the histories of Quwwat al-

Islam mosque and Qutb complex in Delhi has promptedFinbar Barry Flood to explore the palimpsest to capture580the practices of extensive recycling in post-conquest

mosques, exemplified in Qutb’s re-use of Hindu andJain temples, and the thirteenth-century extensions that‘entailed appropriation, juxtaposition, and superces-sion’.37 The conceptual frame of the palimpsest encom-

585passes the layerings of the past in re-making of builtenvironment and the layerings of history and memory.Mrinalini Rajagopalan has studied the more recent his-tories of the Qutb complex and the contestations thathave arisen today in its ‘triangulated identity [. . .] as

590mosque, as national monument, and temple’, exploring

the conflicting narratives, beliefs, and identities projected around the site and its histories.38 Decipheringthe complexity of Qutb in the past and in the presenthas provoked extensive debate over iconoclasm and

595appropriation, syncretism and spolia, looting, salvage,and demolition, all of which depend on and re-shapelarger narratives of Indian history, especially accountsof the Mughal conquest and Hindu-Muslim relations.39

Palimpsest sites, buildings, images, texts, and objects600elucidate the principals of survival elaborated in

Warburg’s concept of Nachleben: continuation throughtime and significantly across borders and cultures.Displaced to and putto work in Sthe sub-continent, livingon is necessarily translated to address survivals shaped

605its histories and cultures. The afterlives of monuments inSouth Asia have been built on claims of longevity, on bidsto secure continuity, as for example in campaigns for therestitution of relics, the restoration of a site to religioususe, therebuilding of a demolished structure, or the many

610new buildings based on and adapting ancient models.And afterlives have been projected in terms of rupture,instigating a break and re-direction; forcing a distinctionwhere one afterlife ends and another begins has sparked




conflict and at Ayodhya and within extensive violence,615 thes demolition of Babri Masjid. Memory plays a strate-

gic role in the afterlives for palimpsest sites and objects,as contending communities pitch battle over the past tore-invent it for the future. For Sunil Kumar Qutb ‘resur-rects memories of communal distinctions and strife’,

620

becoming for some ‘

an icon encapsulating the trauma of 1947 and acting as an historical exoneration for the actsof December 1992’.40 The subcontinent has seen its ownmemory wars.41 Partha Mitter elucidates here the power-ful forces entailed in the social production of memory.

625 Dissecting a concept elaborated for Europe by PierreNora, he illuminates how lieux de mémoire have becomesites of disputation and conflict.

The vexed and contested definitions of monuments,along with the contentious practices of monument-

630 making, lie at the heart of this collection. Some commonthemes – diversion, replication, archive, temporality –

are suggested in what follows, not to map a comprehen-

sive typology but to indicate some of the discussionsgathered together in these pages. Assigning the status of 635 monument to an historic site or ancient artefact constitu-

tes a diversion in the sense of the ‘paths and diversions’traced by Appadurai for things.42 In diversionary afterl-ives, sites objects and their resources are re-routed to newuses, audiences, archives, futures. In the colonial period

640 sites were physically transformed, and objects, dislodgedover time or purposefully removedas salvageor museumexhibits, relocated. As it was re-routed, each disparateelement accrued and continues to accumulate its ownafterlives: as a discrete object, as part of the collection

645 or collections, in its travels to exhibitions and in publica-

tions, in relation to a precise or potential location, inrelation to other objects of its kind, style, or period.Tapati Guha-Thakurta ’s opening essay tracks the multipleafterlives of the hillsite at Sanchi. Taking a long view

650 from the nineteenth century to the present, she traces itsmany archaeological transformations from the interven-tions, excavations, and restorations in the colonial period,especially the on-site activities during the ‘Marshall era ’,to more recent discoveries. Sanchi’s multifarious afterl-

655 ives have been projected in the competing claims andcounter-claims for control and custody: as an archaeolo-gical site, a national icon, and as a centre of worldBuddhism, each attended by its supporters, all variouslyrepresenting the site to project its future. By the mid-

660 nineteenth century Sanchi had been abandoned. Disuse atSanchi, as at Konarak, eased the route to archaeologicalmonument-making; and monument-making today is stillfacilitated by absence.

Diversion may allow parallel afterlives for the reli-665 gious complex that is concurrently a protected monu-

ment, or it may provoke a departure from which thereis no return. Sraman Mukherjee examines the tensionsthat arose around practising Hindu temples, contrasting

the ‘a deep aestheticization’ of Konarak as a ruin to the670struggles over the Jagannath Temple of Puri and the

Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneswar, then as now in usefor active religious worship. He examines the head-oncollisions between colonial officials and temple custo-dians who objected to on-site demolition and adroitly

675

negotiated admission; admission to these sites today isstrictly regulated by the temples’ administrative bodies.As in other colonial settings, conflicts over access stagedmuch larger debates about ownership, authority, and con-trol, not only over sites and objects but over territories

680and peoples. Demands for archaeological access tookplace within an imperial regulation of space that ruledcertain locations, as Tracy Anderson indicates, zones of exclusion to Indians.

The diversionary paths of archaeology and conserva-685tion physically transform ancient sites, demolishing parts

and building new structures from fences and temporarybuildings to on-site museums. Clare Harris examines the

complete transformation of the Potala Palace, winterresidence the Dalai Lama and centre of Tibetan690Buddhism, into ‘a hollow shell that can be emphatically

claimed as the property of the Chinese government’.With the extensive remodelling of the city of Lhasa andthe erection of a new monument dedicated to ‘thePeaceful Liberation of Tibet’ in the new Potala Plaza,

695the palace has become a monument, museum, touristdestination and theme park, diversions that effectivelydebar its return to the Dalai Lama. The contents thepalace have been transferred to a new museum, designedto placate international concerns over Tibetan cultural

700property and to present that cultural property as obsolete

religious relics. For Harris, as for Mukherjee and Guha-Thakurta, diversionary afterlives of objects and sites areshaped in and by swirling vortices of the secular, reli-gious, political, and national. The current listing of

705Protected Monuments by the Archaeological Survey of India seems commodious enough, but although it is oneof the largest mosques in South Asia, Jama Masjid inDelhi is not included. In 1980s, monument status wastemporarily claimed for this historic practising mosque.

710Hilal Ahmed narrates how in 1987 the Imam, SyedAbdullah Bukhari, closed the mosque to regular prayersand activities; the domes were draped with black clothand placards installed at the three main gates,distinctive architectural features of post-conquest

715mosques, demanding action following the massacres atHashimpura and the Meerut riots. Taking place in paral-lel with demands for access to historic sites for religiousworship, Ahmed links the closure of Jama Masjid as withthe pressure to open Babri Masjid, then still standing, for

720Muslim prayers. Ahmed interprets the closure of Jama Masjid as a refutation of the site for everyday worshipthat enabled this mosque to be temporarily annexedas a protected monument, a diversionary tactic that

8 Deborah Cherry



underlined the major cultural and religious contributions725 of Mughal Empire and Islam to India ’s past and present.

Monuments accumulate their manyafterlives throughreplication, through the production and circulation of their unlike doubles of the image and the copy.Monuments have been mediatized since at least the sec-

730

ond half of the eighteenth century, and today they areavailable in a vast range of still and moving, digital andanalogue images. Film, social media, photography, digi-tal sites, and popular prints miniaturise massive sculp-tures and vast three-dimensional complexes, reducing

735 them for delivery to the paper print, the small screen of a mobile phone or tablet. All the essays collected heredemonstrate the significance of developments in globalmedia production and distribution, as monuments areconstantly re-produced in drawings, photography, print,

740 film, tourist souvenirs, artworks, and new media.Extending her analysis of the ‘compulsions of visualrepresentation,’43 Tapati Guha-Thakurta examines

Sanchi’s remarkable replication in myriad visual andmaterial forms, its status as ‘documentary image, porta-

745 ble object, or reproducible architectural style [opening] itup to a range of scholarly, devotional, public, and exhibi-tionary uses’, each attended by ‘processes of imaging,replication, display, and documentation’. As Guha-Thakurta, Mukherjee, and Mitter explain, classification

750 of a building or complex as a ruin greatly assistedmonument-making. And in the nineteenth century photo-graphy became a key mediator, representing ancientcomplexes as ruins in a visual rhetoric of collapsedstructures, tumble-down antiquities and overgrown

755 vegetation that attained wide currency from India to

North Africa and further afield. Embodying loss andpalpable absence, images of the ruin stage the past asancient, distant, and remote, its artefacts as relics of lostor extinct civilizations, at the same time articulating the

760 need for intervention, protection, and restoration. Thepreservation of the ruin, as Nicholas Stanley-Price hasindicated, continues to have considerable resonance incontemporary practices and theories of conservation andrestoration.44 For Clare Harris, the Potala Palace’s recent

765 transformation and the spectacular views afforded byurban rebuilding offer numerous opportunities for photo-graphy readilydistributed in today’s global media that re-affirm its new identity. In assessing India ’s nuclear struc-tures and weaponry as monuments, Raminder Kaur

770 emphasises that nuclear accelerators, power-stations,bombs, and missiles appear primarily through visualrepresentation in India ’s mass print cultures, diversemedia, and wide range of public displays, festivals, andperformances. While nuclear buildings remain hidden or

775 distant to view, nuclear iconography has developed a repertory of recurrent readily-identifiable visual forms – semicircular domes, conical missiles, hour-glasstowers – to encode nuclear arsenal and energy as icons

of the modern nation state, to figure their presence in780festivals and print, and in protest, to articulate their

deathly and dangerous menace.Equally part of a monument’s bountiful afterlives is

its material replication. The memorials to the firstVicereine, Charlotte Canning, took many forms: a tem-

785

porary vault, a deteriorating tomb (designed by GeorgeGilbert Scott and shipped from the UK) that was movedto and around Calcutta, a copy that was installed in thegarden at Barrackpore, and the garden’s transformationfrom official retreat to a depository for unwanted statu-

790ary. At odds with the sculptural, sepulchral monuments isthe memorial created by her friend, Emily Bayley, a collection of mementoes, dried flowers, and photographsassembled in an album, a reminder of the diversity of mnemonic communities. Replication extends the survi-

795val of an object, building, or style, quotation and varia-tion adapting for re-use as well as re-authorizing thereferent. Raminder Kaur identifies what she calls‘ancient contemporaneity

’ to account for the range of intersections of past and present in the design of nuclear

800structures: tower forms are derived from historic forts, a mural inspired by an ancient frieze, and a mandala basedon a Tibetan form. In India newly built temples andbuildings adapt and modify ancient forms. Tapati Guha-Thakurta traces the numerous shiny-bright manifesta-

805tions of Sanchi in and outside the sub-continent.Essaying the biographies of Eminent Victorians in

1918, Lytton Stratchey, a writer from a family with exten-sive imperial connections, commented that ‘our fathersand our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated

810so vast a quantity of information’.45 While still a major

resource, the ‘great ocean of material’ of the imperialarchives has been discovered to be partial, and incom-plete: in searchof the Rani of Sirmur, Gayatri CharavortySpivak famously discovered that the Rani was not here to

815be found.46 Alternative collections, image-banks, assem-blies of knowledge in diverse languages consitute sig-nificant archives that create and sustain the afterlives of monuments. As opposing South-Asian communitiesdeclare a stake in the making of national, religious, cul-

820tural, political, and regional identities, debates about pasthistories have raged across the disciplines of archaeol-ogy, art history, and history: government submissions, thepopular press, publications of all kinds, and oral testi-mony have become key sites for these hard-fought and at

825times violent contestations. For Hilal Ahmed as forothers, oral testimony is increasingly recognized as a vital and critical resource in researching and revisinghistories.47 Partha Mitter lays emphasis on memory,reflecting on the ‘multiplicities of memory in India, a

830plural nation of multiple communities’. Reviewingnumerous accounts of memory that have come to con-stitute what Jay Winter has called ‘a memory boom’,Mitter interrogates the usefulness of western theories of




memory in accounting for ‘the competing aspirations of 835 different communities’ in the sub-continent.

Partha Mitter’s understanding of the dialectics of modernity and antiquity are central to the fashioning of temporality in the multi-layered, heterochronic afterlivesof monuments. Monument-making, whether in colonial

840

India or contemporary Tibet, assigns historic buildingsor artefacts to a remote past severed from, and other to,the modern present; monument-making is as much asabout constructing modernity, as it is about the makingand re-making of the past. Whereas the focus of the first

845 three contributions lies on the colonial period and itslegacies, later essays shift to the pressing concerns con-temporary India. Modernity and modernization – thenation’s nuclear capacity, urban life, rapid industrializa-tion, the politics of national identity – come under

850 scrutiny and pressure. For Sudeep Dasgupta the repre-sentation of the past in terms of permanence, giventhrough and by India ’s world heritage of monuments, is

secured by the enduring continuity of precarity. Againstthe permanence associated with monuments stands the855 impermanent and transient, yet enduring, settlements of

the ‘slum’ that are at once part of and apart from themodern global city. ‘The memorial as a monument topast histories’, he writes, ‘is crossed by an aesthetics of transiency.’ Through an analysis of Slumdog Millionaire

860 (UK, 2008, dir. Danny Boyle), Dasgupta unpicks theways in which the film ‘dramatizes increasing class andsocial divisions within the postcolonial nation as a con-sequence of the expanding and intensive dynamic of global capitalism’ while simultaneously turning the

865 slum into an ‘object of sensuous consumption’, an

image of the precarious poverty of the global south, forcirculation in the transnational media flows of entertainment.

Concluding his essay on monuments and memory,870 Partha Mitter remarks that ‘[m]emoralisation can be

selective, and in this sense forgetting is also an essentialpart of it’. Mitter notes the ‘few public acknowledge-ments of the 1947 genocide’. In India there is only onemonument to Partition, the Martyrs Monument in

875 Chandigarh. There is no sustained culture of memorialto the thousands who died, the women who wereabducted, the violent and traumatic events that continueto shape generations in the sub-continent and in diaspora.As Yasmin Khan points out, the absence of official mem-

880 orials does not mean that Partition has been forgotten.48

It haunts contemporary artistic practice. In NaliniMalini’s installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh

(1998, collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane andLekha and Anupam Poddar Collection, New Delhi)

885 viewers are invited into a space delineated by four largescreens, channelling video larger than life-size; on thefloor are 12 tin trunks, each containing an upturned videomonitor (Figure 3). The space is filled with intermingling

and colliding images, flooding the floor, reflected in the890lids of the trunks. Viewers become participants: walking

through the space, casting their shadows and illuminatedby the projection, they are caught into the installation,imprinted by it, inescapably immersed in it. According tothe artist:

895On thewalls projected images of two women, facing eachother (symbolically one each from India and Pakistan)who try and fail to fold a sari together. The sari balloonsup, becomes a mushroom cloud, and falls over the headsin remembrance of falling leaves, harnessing them sud-

900denly in the accoutrement of their religion – the veil.Slowly they turn into ‘mutants’ as their faces aredeformed and their bodies and gestures seem to comeunstuck.49

The artist’s account points to the overlaying, spiralling,905merging, metamorphosizing images as Malini spins a

globalweb of references; the women morph into mutants,

reminders of the devastating physical harm and psychicdamage caused by radiation. Malani’s work in these yearswas intensely preoccupied with sectarian violence, fun-

910damentalism, militarisation, environmental catastrophe,the reciprocal nuclear detonation launched by India andPakistan in May 1998.50 In Remembering Toba Tek Singh

the sampling and re-mixing of images of nuclear exploi-sion and devastation at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini

915Atoll underlines her concern with the destructive lega-cies and fatal afterlives of Partition. Chaitanya Sambranidescribes Malani, born in Karachi and migrating as a refugee to Bombay when young, as ‘a child of midnight,born in 1946 on the eve of independence and its blood-

920

soaked twin, the 1947 Partition’.51

Remembering TobaTek Singh offers a space for recollection, in which theartist re-members and re-assembles the legacies of thecolonial period and Partition. The work’s title makesreference the well-known short story, Toba Tek Singh

925(the name of a person as well as a place) by Sa ’adatHasan Manto, which, with a range of texts on India ’snuclear capacity, provides the script of the installation’svoice-over. Given the choice to live in either India orPakistan, Toba Tek Singh refuses to believe that the sub-

930continent will be divided and he deliberatelyendshis life.

There, behind barbed wire, on one side, lay India and

behind more barbed wire, on the other side, lay Pakistan.In between, on a bit of earth that had no name, lay Toba Tek Singh.52

935Sustained analysis of the sub-continent’s temporarymonuments is beyond the scope of this collection. Butone global form merits inclusion: at the end of December2012, carpets of flowers, lit candles, and mnemonictokens occupied the streets and spaces of Delhi in

940remembrance of an anonymized woman who was rapedand murdered.53 Adopting wide variety of local

10 Deborah Cherry



variations in their layout, gifts, and elements, temporarymemorials are to be found world-wide, at roadsides, onfootball pitches, outside public buildings, in metro-

945 stations. These impromptu assemblies mark the life anddeath of one or many, pinpoint the site of an atrocity, a massacre, a bombing; they call for action, inspire a hopefor change. Assembled with delicate and ephemeralmaterials, they soon disappear, to remain memorialised

950 in the image cultures of today. They are reminders too of the plurality and abundance of monuments in South Asia.As monuments multiply, from colossal sculptures instone to transient collections, and as they live on andsurvive, so their afterlives flourish, sustained and chal-

955 lenged through performative interaction, the productionof archives, and the reproduction of images.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The papers here were first presented at The Afterlives of

Monuments conference (London, April 2010), and I

960warmly thank all the speakers and participants for severaldays of inspiring papers and productive discussions witha special mention to the three young scholars: Anisha Saxena, Sneha Raghavan, and Suryanandini Sinha Narain. I am especially indebted to Tapati Guha-

965Thakurta for her critical thinking, to Gayatri Sinha forher intellectual generosity, and Partha Mitter for his col-legial encouragement; his AHRC-funded workshops on

Indian Modernityat the University of Sussex were one of the starting points. I extend my thanks to Sutapa Biswas970for her wise counsel and stimulating discussions when

we co-curated Monuments and Memorials (London,2008). My colleagues in Amsterdam at ASCA, in ArtHistory, and the research group New Strategies in the

Conservation of Contemporary Art have constructively975shaped my thinking over these years. Zippora Elders,

Taya Hanauer-Rehavia, and Nguyen Vu Thuc Linh whohelped to prepare the papers for publication. The projecthas been supported and funded by the British Academy,

3. Nalini Malani, Remembering Toba Tek Singh , 1998. Installation with 4 screens, 12 monitors in trunks surrounded with mirror reflecting material, sound,20 minutes. Photograph: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy: the artist, and World Wide Video Festival, Amsterdam.




the Nehru Centre London, the India High Commission,980 the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, and the

University of the Arts Research Centre onTransnational Art, Identity, and Nation (TrAIN). To allthose who acted as peer reviewers, to Adam Hardy whoinvited me to select and edit this collection, to Duncan

985

Hardy and Vikki Davies for steering the issue through topublication, my warmest thanks.

NOTES

1. <http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx#> [accessed January 2013]. Monica Narula,

990 Jeebash Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta founded Raqs Media Collective in 1992.

2. C. Pinney, ‘Piercing the Skin of the Idol’, in Beyond

Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of

Enchantment , ed. by C. Pinney and N. Thomas995 (Oxford: Berg, 2001), p.167.

3. T. Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial

India (New York: Columbia University Press,2004), p. 211. The fortunes of the Didarganj Yakshi

1000 are narrated at length in T. Guha-Thakurta, ‘TheEndangered Yakshi: Carers of an Ancient ArtObject in Modern India ’, in History and the Present ,ed. by P. Chatterjee and A. Ghosh (New Delhi:Permanent Black, 2002),pp. 71 – 107 andthe opening

1005 pages of R. H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; repr.1999).

4. A. Appadurai and C. Breckenridge, ‘Museums are

Good to Think: Heritage on View in India ’, in1010 Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed.

by D. Preziosi and C. Farago (London: LundHumpries, 2004), pp. 685 – 99 (p. 689).

5. D. Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India

(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);1015 K. Jain, Gods in the Bazaar: The Economies of

Indian Calendar Art (Objects/Histories) (Durham:Duke University Press, 2007); C. Pinney, Photos of

the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle

(London: Reaktion, 2004).1020 6. Indian Highway (Steps Away from Oblivion),

Serpentine Gallery, London, December 2008 – February 2009. The figures of the Yaksha andYakshi had appeared in Raqs’s The Reserve Army(2008), a sculptural installation that paid ‘tribute to

1025 the perspicacity of the modernist Indian sculptorRam Kinkar Baij and to the Reserve Bank of India ’s commission to Baij to adorn its portal witha Yaksha and a Yakshi in the first decade after theformation of the Indian Republic’. The Reserve

1030 Army is described by the artists as ‘Fibreglassrescension of Ram Kinkar Baij’s Yaksha and

Yakshi, with cash and barbed wire ornaments, anda printed vinyl screen’. First shown at The SanthalFamily, Muhka Museum, Antwerp, February 2008

103<http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx >[accessed December 2012].

7. Dutch and Portuguese monuments in the subconti-

nent are not considered here; on the former seeM. H. Peters, In steen geschreven. Leven en sterven104van VOC-dienaren op de Kust van Coromandel in

India, with photographs by F. André de la Porte(Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 2002),with thanks to Martin-Jan Bok for this reference.

8. Davis, Lives of Indian Images, p. 6.1049. A. Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the

Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things:

Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. byA. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1986), pp. 3 – 63 (p. 34).;

10510. G. Didi-Huberman, ‘Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs

Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time’,Common Knowledge, 9.2 (2003), 273 – 85 (p. 273).

See also G. Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the

World on One’s Back? (Madrid: Museo Nacional105Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, 2012).

11. J. Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Les Éditions deMinuit, 1972), p.126, my translation.

12. V. Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women:

Autobiography in Nineteenth Century England 106(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) demon-

strates that this organic model of biography wasdeveloped in nineteenth-century Britain for greatwhite men.

13. For example, J. E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-106 Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and

Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press,2000); J. E. Young, The Texture of Memory (NewHaven: Yale University Press,1993); The Partitions

of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, ed.107by S. Kaul (Bloomingdale: Indiana University

Press, 2001).14. A. Hui, ‘Texts, Monuments, and the Desire for

Immortality’, in Moment to Monument, the Making

and Unmaking of Cultural Significance, ed. by107L. B. Lambert and A. Ochsner, Cultural Studies 32

(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), pp. 19 – 34 (p. 20),with thanks here to Christoph Lindner.

15. G. C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews,

Strategies, Dialogues (London: Routledge, 1990),108p.108.

16. S. Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 1997), pp. 116,118.

17. H. K. Bhabha, ‘Postmodernism/Postcolonialism’,in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by

108R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of Chicago Pres, 1996), pp. 435 – 52 (p. 450).

12 Deborah Cherry



18. P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of

European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1977) remains a classic account

1090 of European perceptions of ancient monuments.19. M. Rajagopalan, ‘A Medieval Monument and its

Modern Myths of Iconoclasm: The Enduring

Contestations over the Qutb Complex in Delhi’

, in Reuse Value: Spolia and Appropriation in Art and 1095 Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed.

by R. Brilliant and D. Kinney (London: Ashgate,2011), pp. 199 – 221 (p. 215).

20. R. H. Davis, ‘Introduction’, in Picturing the Nation:

Iconographies of Modern India, ed. by R. H. Davis1100 (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp.1 – 31(p.5).

21. E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’,in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by E. J. Hobsbawmand T. O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1983; repr.1992), pp.1 – 14.

1105 22. J. Masselos, ‘The Magic Touch of Being Free’, in

India: Creating a Modern Nation, ed. byJ. Massselos (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,1990), pp. 37 – 53, quoted in Davis, Lives of Indian

Images, pp.10 – 11.1110 23. Quoted in T. Y. Tan and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath

of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge,2000; repr. 2005), p. 56.

24. S. Sinha Narain, ‘Monumental Mayawati:AnticipatingAfterlives’, unpublishedpaperpresented

1115 at the conference Afterlives of Monuments, 2010.25. A. Tripathi, ‘Mayawati’s Statue “Beheaded” in

Lucknow, Police Call It Sacrilege’, Times of India,26 July 2012 <http://articles.timesofindia.

indiatimes.com/2012-07-26/lucknow/ 1120 32868612_1_senior-bsp-leader-mayawati-sena-

leaders> [accessed December 2012].26. ‘Mayawati Statues: Race to Cover India Chief ’s

Monuments’, 10 January 2012 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16481185> [accessed

1125 December 2012].27. M. A. Steggles, Statues of the Raj (London: British

Association for Cemeteries in South Asia, 2000); British Sculpture in India, ed. by M.A. Steggles andR. Barnes (Norfolk: Frontier Publishing, 2011).

1130 28. S. J. Heathorn, ‘Angel of Empire: The CawnporeMemorial Well as a British Site of ImperialRemembrance’, Journal of Colonialism and

Colonial History, 8.3 (2007).29. M. Misra, Vishnu’s Crowded Temple: India Since the

1135 Great Rebellion (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. ? – ?.30. G. H. R. Tillotson, ‘A Visible Monument:

Architectural Policies and the Victoria MemorialHall’, Marg, 49.2 (1997), in a special issue onVictoria Memorial Hall; P. Vaughan, The Victoria

1140 Memorial Hall, Calcutta: Conception, Collections,

Conservation (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1997).

31. ‘Another Life: The Digitized Personal Archive of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram’, files uploadedto Asia Art Archive <http://www.aaa.org.hk/

114Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionFoldero/102> [accessed December 2012].

32. T. Guha-Thakurta, Traversing Past and Present in

the Victoria Memorial , Occasional Paper 153(Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,1151995).

33. See T. Guha-Thakurta, In the Name of the Goddess:

The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Calcutta

(forthcoming).34. For an interesting discussion of European practices,

115see F. Choay, The Invention of the Historic

Monument , trans. by L. M. O Connell (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2001).

35. Conservation: Principles, Dilemmas, andUncomfortable Truths, ed. by A. Bracker and

116A. Richmond (London: Routledge, 2012).

36. S. Shorto, ‘A Tomb of One’s Own: The Governor

’sHouse, Lahore’, in Colonial Modernities: Building,

Dwelling, and Architecture in British India and

Ceylon, ed. by P. Scrivener and V. Prakash116(London: Taylor and Francis, 2007), pp.151 – 68.

37. F. B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture

and Medieval ‘ Hindu-Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 2009), pp.137 – 247 (pp.150, 230).

11738. Rajagopalan, ‘A Medieval Monument’.39. For example S. Amin, ‘On Retelling the Muslim

Conquest of North India ’, in History and the

Present , pp.19 – 32.

40. S. Kumar, ‘Qutb and Modern Memory’, in The117Partitions of Memory, pp.140 – 82 (pp.141,176).

41. See James Young’s discussions of the contestationsover Holocaust memorials in Textures of Memory.

42. Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and thePolitics of Value’, p.16.

11843. T. Guha-Thakurta, ‘The Compulsions of VisualRepresentation in Colonial India ’, Traces of

India: Photography, Architecture, and the

Politics of Representation, 1850 – 1950 , ed. byM. A. Pelizzari (New Haven: Yale University

118Press, 2003), pp. 108 – 39.44. N. Stanley-Price, ‘The Reconstruction of Ruins:

Principles and Practice’, in Conservation:

Principles, Dilemmas, and Uncomfortable Truths,pp. 32 – 46.

11945. L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians ([n.p.]: [n. pub.],1918; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003), p. 5.

46. G. C. Spivak, ‘The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay inReading the Archives’, History and Theory, 24.3

119(1985), 247 – 72, revised in G. C. Spivak, A

Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History




of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1999).

47. On the relations of history, memory, and oral testi-1200 mony, see History and the Present .

48. Y. Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India

and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2007), p. 201.49. N. Malani, ‘Gamepieces’, in Nalini Malani, ed. by1205 S. Kissane and J. Pijnappel (Milan:Charta, 2007), p.

77 (published to accompany the exhibition at theIrish Museum of Art, Dublin).

50. See Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other, Retrospective

1992– 2009 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), espe-1210 cially W. Chadwick, ‘Record, Remember, Relate’,

pp.15 – 19 (published to accompany an exhibition atthe Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne).

51. C. Sambrani, ‘Shadows, Reflections, andNightmare: The Art of Nalini Malani’, in Nalini

121 Malani, ed. by Kissane and Pijnappel, pp. 23 – 36(p. 23).

52. S. A. Manto, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, translated byK. Hasan in Kingdom’s End and Other Stories,repr. in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947 –

12297 , ed. by S. Rushdie and E. West (London: Vintage,

1997), pp. 24 –

31 (p. 31).53. The protests were widely discussed in worldmedia; one reference to the memorial isS. Ghosh, ‘In Memory of “Amanat”, a

122Makeshift Memorial, Protests Continue’, ndtv,31 December 2012 <http://www.ndtv.com/ article/india/in-memory-of-amanat-a-makeshift-memorial-protests-continue-311719> [accessedJanuary 2013]. While other recent rapes and

123murders of women have attracted protest, pub-lic memorialisation in this form is highlyselective.

14 Deborah Cherry

Cherry-Afterlives of Monuments.pdf

Documents

Transcript of Cherry-Afterlives of Monuments.pdf