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South Asian Studies, 2013

Vol. 29, No. 1, 114, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02666030.2013.772800

The Afterlives of Monuments

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

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This introductory essay proposes that monuments have afterlives. The study of the afterlives of monuments encompasses
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 transformations. Afterlives accrue through material alteration and they accumulate in representation. The diverse ways in which
monuments survive, it is argued, depends on definitions and listings of monuments, practices of monument-making past
and present and recent debates over history and memory. The concept is proposed to capture afterlives that co-exist as
well as those occur sequentially, and to suggest a model of greater complexity and plurality than a linear or quasibiographical trajectory. Conflicts over monuments especially over their survival, it is suggested, are as much concerned
with 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, monuments
emerge as extraordinarily mobile, marked by material change, put to new uses and interpretations, and travelling through
image-banks, archives, collections and exhibitions. Their afterlives, like monuments themselves, are multi-media..
Keywords: afterlives; monument; monument-making; modernity; replication; diversion

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Two massive sculptures, resplendent and statuesque,

appear as if moving in a river. Their golden garlands
adorned with bank notes catch the light, glittering against
the moist greys of the river and its distant bank. Birds flit
overhead and skim the waterline. Beyond, a train goes by,
construction traffic passes, dogs run along the waters
edge. 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 leading artists Raqs
Media Collective. According to the artists, it features the
wandering figures of a Yaksha and a Yakshi, mythic male
and female guardians of treasure and keepers of riddles
in different Indic traditions. They continue: The Yaksha
and the Yakshi provide a crepuscular subjectivity to a
landscape, their gaze passing, leaving open the question
whether the guardians of wealth are leaving the city or
entering it.1 The film is compelling in its ambiguity,
posing unanswered questions, unsolved riddles. Who is
moving the statues, animate figures roaming a contemporary industrial landscape, coming in and out of view?
Are these deities being transported by boat? Recurring
landmarks in the scene prompt a growing realization that
it is the camera that is in motion, restlessly circling
around the figures, positioning and repositioning the
videos viewers. Though the statues are adorned with
gold and money, embellished perhaps as an act of devotion, there are no visible devotees, whose visual and
*Email: d.cherry@uva.nl
2013 The Society for South Asian Studies

bodily performances as Chris Pinney puts it, contribute

crucially to the potential power one might say completion of the image.2 The figures on the riverbank or the
man paddling a boat seem not to notice them. Were the
statues immersed in the river in an everyday practice of
worship, purposefully placed there, or abandoned? Or
like many other ancient sculptures long separated from
their precise locations, have they wandered far from
their original sites, like the Didarganj Yakshi salvaged
from the river Ganga in 1917, to be retrieved from the
muddy river bank. 3 Framed in the diurnal metamorphosis from misty evening to the illuminated dark of night,
the video interrogates time. The Yaksha and Yakshi are at
once gods in living worship and ancient statues that are
part of Indias living past found especially in its sacred
places and spaces.4 Images and icons have been vitally
important to the history of Indian civilisation and they
remain central to much Indian life today.5 The videos
title 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 polished
stone. They were modelled on the two statues guarding
the portals of the New Delhi headquarters of the Reserve
Bank of India, commissioned from the artist Ram Kinkar
Baij in the heyday of Nehruvian nationalism, when public
and government buildings were decorated with sculpture
and visual icons in the making of a new identity for
this independent nation. Historic forms and ancient

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

sculptures, many of which were circulating in exhibitions, reproductions, and publications and on display in
New Delhi, were considered particularly appropriate.

Baij drew his inspiration from a massive Yaksha discovered at Parkham now in Mathura Museum, and a colossal
Yakshi recovered in Besnagar in 1885 and presented to

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the Indian Museum in Calcutta, adapting, revising, and

re-imagining parts that had eroded or disappeared.
Sleepwalkers Caravan (Prologue) was shown at the
Indian Highway exhibition at Londons Serpentine
Gallery, where Raqs Media Collective curated Steps
Away from Oblivion, a project that invited 8 Indian filmmakers to revisit key moments in their work, re-editing,
re-making, or re-presenting particular sequences from
their films.6 Displayed in a confined space to the side of
the main galleries, ladders and step-ladders surrounded
the small screens and projections. Under the broad
umbrella of different rhythms of repose and transformation in todays India, Sleepwalkers Caravan counterposes
these replicated ancient statues with the contemporary
urban development and industrialisation that, in powering Indias 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
(New Delhi, 2009) it was presented on a vast 72 x 48
inch screen, and it is readily downloaded from the collectives website to a laptop or handheld device.
Sleepwalkers Caravan (Prologue) circulates in the globalized circuits of production, display, reception, and collecting of contemporary art. And with it go the Yaksha
and Yakshi, in their ever-proliferating replication and
reproduction.
Sleepwalkers Caravan (Prologue) introduces this collection of essays assembled around a speculative proposal, that monuments have afterlives. To explore the
afterlives 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 the
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 condition, fragments which come to have afterlives of their
own, supported by new narratives, uses, and modes of
sensory and participatory engagement. Statues and sites
have been appropriated and put to adaptive reuse; they
have been razed, defaced, disbanded, reconstructed, their
materials salvaged, destroyed, thrown away, re-cycled.
South Asia is famous for its monuments, and the
literatures on its ancient and modern sites, memorials,
antiquities, and art objects is extensive, from popular
guidebooks to specialized academic accounts. Focusing
largely on India from the colonial period to the present,7
this collection proposes that monuments in the subcontinent and further afield provoke, enjoy, resist, and
attract multiple, heterogeneous, multi-lingual, and multidisciplinary re-appraisals and re-makings, generated by
diverse groups or opposing communities. The collection
takes its inspiration from recent studies that have emphasized the lives of images, objects and sites through

liturgical, performative, scholarly, museological, and curatorial interaction, notably Richard Daviss account in
Lives of Indian Images of the different worlds of belief
that Indian religious images have come to inhabit over
time, and Tapati Guha-Thakurtas sustained attention to
the careers and biographies of ancient sites, objects, and
monuments.8 That monuments accumulate afterlives also
takes a lead from an ongoing re-assessment of the cultural biography and the social history of things9 alongside 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, concisely
summarized by Georges Didi-Huberman:
Survival is the central concept, the Hauptproblem, of
Aby Warburg and the Warburgian school of art history. In
Warburgs work, the term Nachleben refers to the survival
(the community of afterlife and metamorphosis) of
images and motifs as opposed to their renascence
after extinction, or conversely, their replacement by innovations in images and motif.10

The term afterlives is adopted here to suggest the restless

multiplicity of co-existing versions, representations,
imag(in)ings, and interactions taking place in widely
distributed 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,
through change. Both Richard Davis and Tapati GuhaThakurta compellingly narrate the fortunes of the
Didarganj Yakshi, its passage through time, attentive to
the distinctive historical circumstances that shaped and
re-directed its many careers. And as both demonstrate,
afterlives often co-exist, complementing, competing,
disrupting, jostling with one another. In this uneasy coexistence they may be said to supplement one another,
according to the logic of the supplement, discerned by
Jacques Derrida as dangerous, disruptive, and divisive.
The supplement, he contends, breaks into the very thing
that would have liked to do without it, and which allows
itself to be simultaneously cut into, violated, filled, and
replaced, completed by the very trace through which the
present augments itself in the act of disappearing into
it.11 In their supplementarity, simultaneous afterlives
summoned for a singular site or object may well annul
or revoke each other, amass in diametric and at times
violent and destructive opposition. Each is shaped by
specific conditions, agents, archives, location, by distinct
movements through space and time. The concept of
afterlives proposed here aims to highlight the plurality
of survivals that may disrupt a strictly linear trajectory
implied in a quasi-biographical form modeled on a
sequential passage of human life from birth or origin to
death or extinction.12 And to indicate that while afterlives

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accrue with the support of history and memory, in their

projection of a future they exceed reconstructions of the
past and mnemonic recollection.
Are monuments especially disposed to generate and
sustain prolific afterlives? This collection builds on studies of the commemoration and survivals of major events
in world history and their living-on in monuments and
other mnemonic forms, notably the literature on
Holocaust memorial and the growing attention to
Partition.13 Seemingly permanent and enduring, monuments are never finished. Living on from their many
pasts into the present, they may sustain addition or demolition, temporary accretions, adaptive re-use, appropriation, and material and visible change, and summon new
visitors, uses, and appropriations. During the colonial
period ancient structures and complexes were designated
monuments and transformed into sites of archaeological
investigation and preservation, while others were remodeled for residential or other suse, or disregarded.
More recently, palaces and forts have become tourist
destinations; historic temples and mosques are also
sites of contemporary worship. Statues have been toppled
off their plinths, and new sculptures installed. Large
complexes of religious worship have been erased. New
structures have been erected, often citing and adapting
earlier precedent. Viewed and reviewed by generations
of spectators, interpreters, guides, commentators, and
image-makers, monuments undergo a restless proliferation of meanings as signifying and custodial communities emerge, reconfigure, regroup, depart. The
afterlives of monuments encompasses the active practices of monument-making from the colonial period to
the assembly of an appropriate national heritage after
independence and participation in world heritage.
Listing as a protected monument is highly significant to
a site or objects future. As this collection suggests, afterlives take material form, enacted in physical alteration to
a site or object, and they accumulate in representation, in
images, texts, and documents, the registers of materiality
and the archive not necessarily coinciding. In their afterlives monuments emerge as extraordinarily mobile,
marked by material change, put to new uses and interpretations, and travelling through collections of texts,
images, and objects.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary the word
monument is capacious. It can signify a sepulchre, a
written document or record, an indication, token, or
evidence, a marker in the soil for a tract or boundary,
anything that by its survival commemorates a person,
action, period, or event [. . .] a structure, edifice, or erection intended to commemorate a notable person, action,
or event [. . .] a structure of stone or other material over
the grave [. . .] in memory of the dead. Andew Hui has
traced the interlaced etymologies of the English word
monument, from the Latin: meminisse, to remember,

memoria, memory, monere, to remind, and monimenta,

which signifies both memorial and reminders. He also
indicates that monere can also mean to warn, hinting at
the memorials function to caution, to admonish: in as
much as the monument is a reminder of the past, it also
projects a trajectory toward the future, in the sense that it
is meant to endure and remind future generations of its
legacy.14 Raj Ghat in New Delhi, built at the site of his
cremation on 31 January 1948 on the banks of the
Yamuna river, not only commemorates Gandhis life, but
also points forward, to the survival of his legacies and
their potential afterlives in Indias and the worlds future.
Memorials thus come to signify far more than their
material manifestation. They are activated within complex systems of participation and representation in
which, to borrow Gayatri Chakravorty Spivaks reflections on Vertretung and Darstellung, come to signify both
portrait and proxy.15 The memorial stands in for the individual and much more: a hope for the future, a promise to
remember, a potential legacy to come. Afterlives accrue
through visits and viewings, images and material replication, gifts and donations deposited at the monument or
site, prescribed and impromptu performative and participatory rituals. Gayatri Sinha has persuasively stated
that the memorial can only survive through reinvention, and she writes here of the part secular, part sacred
observances at Raj Ghat: weekly commemorative
prayers are held, and visitors must remove their shoes.
The monitory, in the sense of admonition, may well
outweigh 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 strategically sited to articulate critical junctures in the urban
planning of re-built cities. For Sunil Khilnani, Calcutta
became a stage where the regalia of British sovereignty
was displayed, where the India was ruled, where space
was most explicitly governed [. . .] vast areas of old cities
were demolished in the display of this new imperial
power.16 Tracy Andersons essay in these pages considers how colonial monument-making was shaped by tensions between formations of sexual difference and
imperialism, generating a population of statues of
famous men, the Queen Empress and female allegories
that contrasted to the tomb to commemorate Charlotte
Canning, installed in the gubernatorial garden at
Barrackpore, one of many nineteenth-century Christian
memorials where imperial identities and private loss
coincided. The monument-making of colonial urban
planning paralleled and extended the monument-making
of its archaeology: as these modern cities were peppered
with statues of viceroys, monarchs, military leaders, public figures, so Indias antiquities and ancient sites were
defined as monuments, productions of antiquity. A predilection for ancient ruins may well have occluded the

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ruins created in the chaos and trauma of colonial intervention, in what Homi Bhabha has identified as the
colonial violence of destruction and domination.17 The
twin axes of colonial monument-making were closely
connected, both produced in a splitting of modernity
and antiquity, a subject considered at some length in
these pages by Partha Mitter.18
Independence demanded the creation of national
icons for the new Republic. Gayatri Sinha explores the
multiple ways in which Gandhis iconicity is encoded in
the design of currency notes and stamps, popular prints,
official commissions, the many statues at roadsides, in
villages and cities, in peace monuments, and in the
numerous buildings, institutions and streets named after
him, commemorative practices which take place in the
daily circulation of paper (the notes in embellishing the
garlands on the Yaksha and Yakshi in Sleepwalkers
Caravan), as in the many occasions that his memorials
provide for events, photography, and embellishment.
With Independence also came a refashioning of the iconography of memory the erection in 1961 of the memorial to commemorate the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre of
1919 offers one example and the re-assembly of
national heritage, undertaken in the listings redrawn by
the Archaeological Society of India soon after 1947.19
Raminder Kaur argues in this collection that nuclear
structures and arsenal are as much part of national iconography as flags and other signs: these nuclear monuments are conceived as vital signatures of the
progressive, forward-looking nation-state [. . .] highly
regulated through draconian legislation, censorship, and
intensive security. In projecting its modernity, India has
built and extended its nuclear capacity, often in rivalry
with Pakistan. The visibility and architectural presence
of nuclear sites, power-stations, accelerators, missiles,
and bombs is highly controlled, access strictly regulated;
unlike other public forms of national celebration and
commemoration, they remain largely hidden from view.
IndiasOfficial memorials have diversity has generated contending and contentious views of nation and
identity. Official memorials have been challenged by
the emergence and afterlives of counter-monuments generated in the sub-continents contested political, cultural,
and religious histories. Assessing the making of its modern political iconography, Richard H. Davis writes: One
cannot speak of a single iconography of India, but of
multiple iconographies within a historically changing
nation-state. He differentiates between icons of state,
the unofficial imagery of mass print, alternative
grounds of nationhood forged in political movements,
religious, and cultural organizations, and other identities
negotiated though regional affiliation.20 The complexities of forging a consensual national identity surfaced
in 1947 in the rituals of independence, including the flagraising ceremony at the Red Fort in Delhi. For Eric

Hobsbawm, traditions are invented, their creation flourishing in periods of rapid transformation.21 And as traditions are invented, it is inevitable that they will be
challenged, along with the re-inventions of the past and
appropriations of space that they entail. Jim Masselos has
analyzed the mapping of a new spatial order, a symbolic
taking over of space that had been controlled by the
former rulers and an appropriation of the imperial grandeur of the Mughals in the staging of this event at the Red
Fort.22 Others have drawn attention to dissenting perspectives. Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya examine
the concerns expressed by Ashfaq Alam Khan of Meerut
who stated that: This historic building of red stone and
marble stands on the sandy bank of the Jummna in sacred
memory of centuries of Muslin rule in India and is held in
high esteem by Muslims all over the country. Khan
expressed anxieties about playing with Muslim sentiments, especially in the present atmosphere of mutual
suspicion and hatred, summoning in support the Red
Forts status as a historic monument: The Red Fort like
other historic buildings is an Archaeological monument
and should be placed under joint control.23 Plural afterlives have multiplied around the seventeenth-century citadel of Shah Jehan: it is at once an archaeological
monument, a popular venue for internal and international
tourism, a site of British occupation, resistance, and
independence (Figure 2). And Khans conviction of the
signifying power of Mughal architecture has endured.
Hilal Ahmed explores here how in the heightened politics
and conflicts of the 1980s Jama Masjid in Delhi, also
built in the reign of Shah Jehan, was summoned to represent a royal Muslim past and the Muslim contribution to
the making and remaking of the official postcolonial idea
of Indian heritage.
In contemporary India, statues, ancient and modern,
have become sites for the expression of dissent.
Monumental Mayawati (this apt term is Suryanandini
Sinha Narains) has met with controversy and hostility.24

2.

Red Fort, Delhi, 2005. Photograph: Author.

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When a statue of Mayawati was beheaded in July 2012,

those assuming responsibility stated that the destruction
was their way to express anger against the scams which
took place under the Mayawati regime.25 According to
one source, Statues of political leaders are generally put
up posthumously, but Ms Mayawati says that this belief is
outdated.26 Mayawatis statuary rebuffs a no longer universal rule of retrospective commemoration, which like
the protocols of posthumous admission to galleries of
national portraits is being eroded. India is by no means
the only country in which monuments have become the
focus for internal dissent. With the rise of neo-fascism
extreme right-wing groups have despoiled statues, war
memorials, commemorations of the Holocaust, and
Jewish cemeteries with anti-semitic slogans. While they
are still regarded in terms of their principal purpose, to
honour the dead, to commemorate the Holocaust, these
monuments have become targets for racial hatred.
Hostility and opposition are pitted against the person,
event, or trauma the portrait aspect as well as against
wider issues the monument may represent its proxy
aspects.
Regime change and the making of new nations inevitably bring monument change. The melodramatic staging
for world media in 2003 of the fall of the statue of
Saddam Hussein testifies to the potent symbolism of
statuary to signify overthrow and conquest. Disgraced
Monuments (UK, 1993, dir. Laura Mulvey and Mark
Lewis) traces the fortunes of revolutionary monuments
in Russia after the fall of communism, tracking them
through demolition, disappearance, storage, or collection
in a Temporary Museum of Totalitarian Art in a
Moscow park. Clare Harriss contribution here follows
the comprehensive re-articulation of a Tibetan national
icon, the Potala Palace in Lhasa, under the Chinese rule.
By contrast to the widespread dismissal of socialist political icons in the Russia and the complete remaking of
Tibetan heritage, it has been argued that colonial monuments in the sub-continent were by and large not vandalized. In the decades after 1947 colonial statues were
dispersed and collected. While some remained in place,
others were abandoned or disappeared; many were
removed, their vacated plinths offering sites for the
installation of a new pantheon of national heroes.27 The
most obvious icons of imperial rule proved irresistible:
statues of Queen Victoria were disfigured, and the most
visited British lieu de mmoire met with defacement and
ejection, its site appropriated by Indian nationalists.28
Maria Misra narrates:
In the dusty north Indian city of Kanpur, in a neglected
churchyard looms a large stone angel, the angel had
originally presided over the Bibighar compound, and
exclusively white domain built as a shrine to British
heroes of the mutiny and forbidden to all Indians. On
15 August 1947, Independence Day, a group of revellers

broke into the compound and assaulted the celestial

entity, leaving it noseless. The statue was swiftly relocated to its present resting place and a statue of Tantia
Topu, the great Indian hero of the rebellion, put in its
place symbolic recompense for events of ninety years
earlier.29

Relics of the Raj were clustered together in gardens and

graveyards of old statuary, consigned to museums,
depots, or collections of imperial memorabilia, such as
the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, planned as an
extensive, highly ornamental monument to Empress and
Empire and still a landmark in the city.30 Contemporary
artistic engagements with colonial monuments, like artistic interventions into museum collections, offer critique
and alternative structures of thinking. Vivan Sundarams
extensive, multi-media, site-specific installation of 1998,
Journey Towards Freedom/ Structures of Memory: Modern
Bengal investigates Bengals history from the mid nineteenth century to 1947. 31 Sundaram reconfigured the
spaces, narratives, and collections of the Hall, with
objects and texts, jute bags, railway tracks, and archive
boxes. If in one afterlife the building and its collections
remain a memorial to a dead Raj, whose memories like
its representations have long lost their edge,32 in
Sundarams installation it was transformed into an interactive space that was at once a library, warehouse, recycling depot, refugee terminus, memory-bank, mela.
Sundarams installation is one of many contemporary
artworks that reinvent the monument. Jitish Kallats
Public Notice 2 (2007) summons the text of Gandhis
speech of 11 March 1930 on the eve of the historic
Dandi March, his protest against the brutal salt tax
imposed by the British, setting out a manifesto for independence founded on non-violence and civil disobedience (see Figures 13 and 14 in Sinhas article in this
issue). A recurring theme in Kallats Public Notice series,
momentous speeches by Indias leaders return time and
again in recent film and video. Zarina Bhimjis film,
Yellow Patch (2012) evokes the evanescence of speech,
its echoing sounds conjuring speechs propensity for
ethereal disappearance, captured in historic recordings
on the edge of audibility. Kallat gives speech monumental form on a monumental scale: the installations extensive 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 are
central to the works identity. The stark, white, stripped
down appearance of the letters, fabricated to simulate
skeletal bones picked clean of flesh, points to the potentially fatal human cost of salt depletion. The temporary
status of contemporary art, living its afterlives in storage,
exhibitions, and images, highlights the short-lived nature
of many monuments. The sub-continent has a lively culture of mobile monuments constructed in relatively
ephemeral materials and making inventive interventions

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into local spaces. 33 Monuments are, as this collection

concedes, multifarious, multi-dimensional, and multimedia, spanning architecture, sculpture, popular cultural
forms, and contemporary artistic practice.
Monument also has another major meaning, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to connote a notable
building, structure, or site that is of historical importance or interest. 34 The two meanings supplement one
another: Taj Mahal is both a memorial and a historic
structure of major consequence. In the colonial period
monument-making was an act of colonial authority.
Sraman Mukherjee examines monument-making in
Orissa at three major Hindu temple complexes, sites
today under protection of Archaeological Society of
India: the Lingaraja complex of temples at
Bhubaneswar, the great temple at Puri dedicated to Lord
Jagannath (then and now in active worship), and the
world-renowned Sun Temple at Konarak. As both
Mukherjee and Guha-Thakurta demonstrate, consigning
an ancient site to the status of monument involved assiduous knowledge production and assertions of ownership,
demands that were effectively navigated and frequently
resisted. More recently, historic locations and artifacts
have been called to take a place within the frames of
conservation, art, national iconicity, and world heritage
given by the Archaeological Society of India (ASI) or the
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO). Monument-making is a retrospective designation, usually assigned after several centuries or millennia. Inclusion and exclusion, afterlives in
themselves, have profound impact on the survival and
fortunes of any historic building, site, or artifact, often
caught in uneasy compromises, such as those between
tourism and conservation. Conservation, moroever, is a
highly disputed domain and set of practices, caught today
between several competing models, one which attempts
to arrest further change by maintaining the monument at
a distinct stage of its development, and others which
accept degrees of change and allowing a more processual
model, generating in India as elsewhere intense
debates about conservation practices, materials, and
protocols.35As Sudeep Dasgupta writes in these pages,
The contentious politics around the restoration of monuments is but one indication that the temporalities monuments embody and the meanings they accrue and lose are
far from fixed. Listings are neither stable nor enduring:
Sraman Mukherjee notes that the group of temples at
Lingaraja, Orissa, was struck off the Protected List
between 1903 and 1918. And listing offers no guarantees
of the protection of cultural property. When belatedly
granted World Heritage status in 1994 by UNESCO, the
Potala Palace in Lhasa was already largely stripped of its
contents. Historic structures have also encountered unanticipated afterlives. A seventeenth-century building in
Lahore, the tomb of a Muslim nobleman, possibly

Qasim Khan Mir Bahr, was, as Sheila Shorto discovered,

occupied by Sikh soldiers, transformed and extended by
British officials into a imposing Edwardian mansion,
eventually becoming Government House. It is still in
use today by the Governor of the Punjab Province of
Pakistan, having undergone numerous re-modelings
with its adaptive re-uses.36
Any site, building, or object evolves and changes
over time, becoming a palimpsest of plural histories
and uses. In palimpsest sites, one building is constructed
upon another, some times re-using and adapting existing
elements, at others rebuilding over demolition. The
model of the palimpsest is drawn from analysis of manuscript practices in which writing on vellum has been
scratched out or over-written yet traces remain visible.
Where visible and material traces of revision and/or
erasure remain, afterlives multiply, with claims and
counter-claims over the sites identity, history, and
belonging. Investigating the histories of Quwwat alIslam mosque and Qutb complex in Delhi has prompted
Finbar Barry Flood to explore the palimpsest to capture
the practices of extensive recycling in post-conquest
mosques, exemplified in Qutbs re-use of Hindu and
Jain temples, and the thirteenth-century extensions that
entailed appropriation, juxtaposition, and supercession. 37 The conceptual frame of the palimpsest encompasses the layerings of the past in re-making of built
environment and the layerings of history and memory.
Mrinalini Rajagopalan has studied the more recent histories of the Qutb complex and the contestations that
have arisen today in its triangulated identity [. . .] as
mosque, as national monument, and temple, exploring
the conflicting narratives, beliefs, and identities projected around the site and its histories. 38 Deciphering
the complexity of Qutb in the past and in the present
has provoked extensive debate over iconoclasm and
appropriation, syncretism and spolia, looting, salvage,
and demolition, all of which depend on and re-shape
larger narratives of Indian history, especially accounts
of the Mughal conquest and Hindu-Muslim relations. 39
Palimpsest sites, buildings, images, texts, and objects
elucidate the principals of survival elaborated in
Warburgs concept of Nachleben: continuation through
time and significantly across borders and cultures.
Displaced to and put to work in Sthe sub-continent, living
on is necessarily translated to address survivals shaped
its histories and cultures. The afterlives of monuments in
South Asia have been built on claims of longevity, on bids
to secure continuity, as for example in campaigns for the
restitution of relics, the restoration of a site to religious
use, the rebuilding of a demolished structure, or the many
new buildings based on and adapting ancient models.
And afterlives have been projected in terms of rupture,
instigating a break and re-direction; forcing a distinction
where one afterlife ends and another begins has sparked

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conflict and at Ayodhya and within extensive violence,

thes demolition of Babri Masjid. Memory plays a strategic role in the afterlives for palimpsest sites and objects,
as contending communities pitch battle over the past to
re-invent it for the future. For Sunil Kumar Qutb resurrects memories of communal distinctions and strife,
becoming for some an icon encapsulating the trauma of
1947 and acting as an historical exoneration for the acts
of December 1992.40 The subcontinent has seen its own
memory wars.41 Partha Mitter elucidates here the powerful forces entailed in the social production of memory.
Dissecting a concept elaborated for Europe by Pierre
Nora, he illuminates how lieux de mmoire have become
sites of disputation and conflict.
The vexed and contested definitions of monuments,
along with the contentious practices of monumentmaking, lie at the heart of this collection. Some common
themes diversion, replication, archive, temporality
are suggested in what follows, not to map a comprehensive typology but to indicate some of the discussions
gathered together in these pages. Assigning the status of
monument to an historic site or ancient artefact constitutes a diversion in the sense of the paths and diversions
traced by Appadurai for things.42 In diversionary afterlives, sites objects and their resources are re-routed to new
uses, audiences, archives, futures. In the colonial period
sites were physically transformed, and objects, dislodged
over time or purposefully removed as salvage or museum
exhibits, relocated. As it was re-routed, each disparate
element accrued and continues to accumulate its own
afterlives: as a discrete object, as part of the collection
or collections, in its travels to exhibitions and in publications, in relation to a precise or potential location, in
relation to other objects of its kind, style, or period.
Tapati Guha-Thakurtas opening essay tracks the multiple
afterlives of the hillsite at Sanchi. Taking a long view
from the nineteenth century to the present, she traces its
many archaeological transformations from the interventions, excavations, and restorations in the colonial period,
especially the on-site activities during the Marshall era,
to more recent discoveries. Sanchis multifarious afterlives have been projected in the competing claims and
counter-claims for control and custody: as an archaeological site, a national icon, and as a centre of world
Buddhism, each attended by its supporters, all variously
representing the site to project its future. By the midnineteenth century Sanchi had been abandoned. Disuse at
Sanchi, as at Konarak, eased the route to archaeological
monument-making; and monument-making today is still
facilitated by absence.
Diversion may allow parallel afterlives for the religious complex that is concurrently a protected monument, or it may provoke a departure from which there
is no return. Sraman Mukherjee examines the tensions
that arose around practising Hindu temples, contrasting

the a deep aestheticization of Konarak as a ruin to the

struggles over the Jagannath Temple of Puri and the
Lingaraja Temple in Bhubaneswar, then as now in use
for active religious worship. He examines the head-on
collisions between colonial officials and temple custodians who objected to on-site demolition and adroitly
negotiated admission; admission to these sites today is
strictly regulated by the temples administrative bodies.
As in other colonial settings, conflicts over access staged
much larger debates about ownership, authority, and control, not only over sites and objects but over territories
and peoples. Demands for archaeological access took
place within an imperial regulation of space that ruled
certain locations, as Tracy Anderson indicates, zones of
exclusion to Indians.
The diversionary paths of archaeology and conservation physically transform ancient sites, demolishing parts
and building new structures from fences and temporary
buildings to on-site museums. Clare Harris examines the
complete transformation of the Potala Palace, winter
residence the Dalai Lama and centre of Tibetan
Buddhism, 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 and
the erection of a new monument dedicated to the
Peaceful Liberation of Tibet in the new Potala Plaza,
the palace has become a monument, museum, tourist
destination and theme park, diversions that effectively
debar its return to the Dalai Lama. The contents the
palace have been transferred to a new museum, designed
to placate international concerns over Tibetan cultural
property and to present that cultural property as obsolete
religious relics. For Harris, as for Mukherjee and GuhaThakurta, diversionary afterlives of objects and sites are
shaped in and by swirling vortices of the secular, religious, political, and national. The current listing of
Protected Monuments by the Archaeological Survey of
India seems commodious enough, but although it is one
of the largest mosques in South Asia, Jama Masjid in
Delhi is not included. In 1980s, monument status was
temporarily claimed for this historic practising mosque.
Hilal Ahmed narrates how in 1987 the Imam, Syed
Abdullah Bukhari, closed the mosque to regular prayers
and activities; the domes were draped with black cloth
and placards installed at the three main gates,
distinctive architectural features of post-conquest
mosques, demanding action following the massacres at
Hashimpura and the Meerut riots. Taking place in parallel with demands for access to historic sites for religious
worship, Ahmed links the closure of Jama Masjid as with
the pressure to open Babri Masjid, then still standing, for
Muslim prayers. Ahmed interprets the closure of Jama
Masjid as a refutation of the site for everyday worship
that enabled this mosque to be temporarily annexed
as a protected monument, a diversionary tactic that

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underlined the major cultural and religious contributions

of Mughal Empire and Islam to Indias past and present.
Monuments accumulate their many afterlives through
replication, through the production and circulation of
their unlike doubles of the image and the copy.
Monuments have been mediatized since at least the second half of the eighteenth century, and today they are
available in a vast range of still and moving, digital and
analogue images. Film, social media, photography, digital sites, and popular prints miniaturise massive sculptures and vast three-dimensional complexes, reducing
them for delivery to the paper print, the small screen of
a mobile phone or tablet. All the essays collected here
demonstrate the significance of developments in global
media production and distribution, as monuments are
constantly re-produced in drawings, photography, print,
film, tourist souvenirs, artworks, and new media.
Extending her analysis of the compulsions of visual
representation,43 Tapati Guha-Thakurta examines
Sanchis remarkable replication in myriad visual and
material forms, its status as documentary image, portable object, or reproducible architectural style [opening] it
up to a range of scholarly, devotional, public, and exhibitionary uses, each attended by processes of imaging,
replication, display, and documentation. As GuhaThakurta, Mukherjee, and Mitter explain, classification
of a building or complex as a ruin greatly assisted
monument-making. And in the nineteenth century photography became a key mediator, representing ancient
complexes as ruins in a visual rhetoric of collapsed
structures, tumble-down antiquities and overgrown
vegetation that attained wide currency from India to
North Africa and further afield. Embodying loss and
palpable absence, images of the ruin stage the past as
ancient, distant, and remote, its artefacts as relics of lost
or extinct civilizations, at the same time articulating the
need for intervention, protection, and restoration. The
preservation of the ruin, as Nicholas Stanley-Price has
indicated, continues to have considerable resonance in
contemporary practices and theories of conservation and
restoration.44 For Clare Harris, the Potala Palaces recent
transformation and the spectacular views afforded by
urban rebuilding offer numerous opportunities for photography readily distributed in todays global media that reaffirm its new identity. In assessing Indias nuclear structures and weaponry as monuments, Raminder Kaur
emphasises that nuclear accelerators, power-stations,
bombs, and missiles appear primarily through visual
representation in Indias mass print cultures, diverse
media, and wide range of public displays, festivals, and
performances. While nuclear buildings remain hidden or
distant to view, nuclear iconography has developed a
repertory of recurrent readily-identifiable visual forms
semicircular domes, conical missiles, hour-glass
towers to encode nuclear arsenal and energy as icons

of the modern nation state, to figure their presence in

festivals and print, and in protest, to articulate their
deathly and dangerous menace.
Equally part of a monuments bountiful afterlives is
its material replication. The memorials to the first
Vicereine, Charlotte Canning, took many forms: a temporary vault, a deteriorating tomb (designed by George
Gilbert Scott and shipped from the UK) that was moved
to and around Calcutta, a copy that was installed in the
garden at Barrackpore, and the gardens transformation
from official retreat to a depository for unwanted statuary. At odds with the sculptural, sepulchral monuments is
the memorial created by her friend, Emily Bayley, a
collection of mementoes, dried flowers, and photographs
assembled in an album, a reminder of the diversity of
mnemonic communities. Replication extends the survival of an object, building, or style, quotation and variation adapting for re-use as well as re-authorizing the
referent. Raminder Kaur identifies what she calls
ancient contemporaneity to account for the range of
intersections of past and present in the design of nuclear
structures: tower forms are derived from historic forts, a
mural inspired by an ancient frieze, and a mandala based
on a Tibetan form. In India newly built temples and
buildings adapt and modify ancient forms. Tapati GuhaThakurta traces the numerous shiny-bright manifestations of Sanchi in and outside the sub-continent.
Essaying the biographies of Eminent Victorians in
1918, Lytton Stratchey, a writer from a family with extensive imperial connections, commented that our fathers
and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated
so vast a quantity of information.45 While still a major
resource, the great ocean of material of the imperial
archives has been discovered to be partial, and incomplete: in search of the Rani of Sirmur, Gayatri Charavorty
Spivak famously discovered that the Rani was not here to
be found.46 Alternative collections, image-banks, assemblies of knowledge in diverse languages consitute significant archives that create and sustain the afterlives of
monuments. As opposing South-Asian communities
declare a stake in the making of national, religious, cultural, political, and regional identities, debates about past
histories have raged across the disciplines of archaeology, art history, and history: government submissions, the
popular press, publications of all kinds, and oral testimony have become key sites for these hard-fought and at
times violent contestations. For Hilal Ahmed as for
others, oral testimony is increasingly recognized as a
vital and critical resource in researching and revising
histories.47 Partha Mitter lays emphasis on memory,
reflecting on the multiplicities of memory in India, a
plural nation of multiple communities. Reviewing
numerous accounts of memory that have come to constitute what Jay Winter has called a memory boom,
Mitter interrogates the usefulness of western theories of

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memory in accounting for the competing aspirations of

different communities in the sub-continent.
Partha Mitters understanding of the dialectics of
modernity and antiquity are central to the fashioning of
temporality in the multi-layered, heterochronic afterlives
of monuments. Monument-making, whether in colonial
India or contemporary Tibet, assigns historic buildings
or artefacts to a remote past severed from, and other to,
the modern present; monument-making is as much as
about constructing modernity, as it is about the making
and re-making of the past. Whereas the focus of the first
three contributions lies on the colonial period and its
legacies, later essays shift to the pressing concerns contemporary India. Modernity and modernization the
nations nuclear capacity, urban life, rapid industrialization, the politics of national identity come under
scrutiny and pressure. For Sudeep Dasgupta the representation of the past in terms of permanence, given
through and by Indias world heritage of monuments, is
secured by the enduring continuity of precarity. Against
the permanence associated with monuments stands the
impermanent and transient, yet enduring, settlements of
the slum that are at once part of and apart from the
modern global city. The memorial as a monument to
past histories, he writes, is crossed by an aesthetics of
transiency. Through an analysis of Slumdog Millionaire
(UK, 2008, dir. Danny Boyle), Dasgupta unpicks the
ways in which the film dramatizes increasing class and
social divisions within the postcolonial nation as a consequence of the expanding and intensive dynamic of
global capitalism while simultaneously turning the
slum into an object of sensuous consumption, an
image of the precarious poverty of the global south, for
circulation in the transnational media flows of
entertainment.
Concluding his essay on monuments and memory,
Partha Mitter remarks that [m]emoralisation can be
selective, and in this sense forgetting is also an essential
part of it. Mitter notes the few public acknowledgements of the 1947 genocide. In India there is only one
monument to Partition, the Martyrs Monument in
Chandigarh. There is no sustained culture of memorial
to the thousands who died, the women who were
abducted, the violent and traumatic events that continue
to shape generations in the sub-continent and in diaspora.
As Yasmin Khan points out, the absence of official memorials does not mean that Partition has been forgotten.48
It haunts contemporary artistic practice. In Nalini
Malinis installation, Remembering Toba Tek Singh
(1998, collection: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane and
Lekha and Anupam Poddar Collection, New Delhi)
viewers are invited into a space delineated by four large
screens, channelling video larger than life-size; on the
floor are 12 tin trunks, each containing an upturned video
monitor (Figure 3). The space is filled with intermingling

and colliding images, flooding the floor, reflected in the

lids of the trunks. Viewers become participants: walking
through the space, casting their shadows and illuminated
by the projection, they are caught into the installation,
imprinted by it, inescapably immersed in it. According to
the artist:
On the walls projected images of two women, facing each
other (symbolically one each from India and Pakistan)
who try and fail to fold a sari together. The sari balloons
up, becomes a mushroom cloud, and falls over the heads
in remembrance of falling leaves, harnessing them suddenly in the accoutrement of their religion the veil.
Slowly they turn into mutants as their faces are
deformed and their bodies and gestures seem to come
unstuck.49

The artists account points to the overlaying, spiralling,

merging, metamorphosizing images as Malini spins a
global web of references; the women morph into mutants,
reminders of the devastating physical harm and psychic
damage caused by radiation. Malanis work in these years
was intensely preoccupied with sectarian violence, fundamentalism, militarisation, environmental catastrophe,
the reciprocal nuclear detonation launched by India and
Pakistan in May 1998.50 In Remembering Toba Tek Singh
the sampling and re-mixing of images of nuclear exploision and devastation at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini
Atoll underlines her concern with the destructive legacies and fatal afterlives of Partition. Chaitanya Sambrani
describes 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 bloodsoaked twin, the 1947 Partition.51 Remembering Toba
Tek Singh offers a space for recollection, in which the
artist re-members and re-assembles the legacies of the
colonial period and Partition. The works title makes
reference the well-known short story, Toba Tek Singh
(the name of a person as well as a place) by Saadat
Hasan Manto, which, with a range of texts on Indias
nuclear capacity, provides the script of the installations
voice-over. Given the choice to live in either India or
Pakistan, Toba Tek Singh refuses to believe that the subcontinent will be divided and he deliberately ends his life.

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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

Sustained analysis of the sub-continents temporary

monuments is beyond the scope of this collection. But
one global form merits inclusion: at the end of December
2012, carpets of flowers, lit candles, and mnemonic
tokens occupied the streets and spaces of Delhi in
remembrance of an anonymized woman who was raped
and murdered.53 Adopting wide variety of local

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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.

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variations in their layout, gifts, and elements, temporary

memorials are to be found world-wide, at roadsides, on
football pitches, outside public buildings, in metrostations. These impromptu assemblies mark the life and
death of one or many, pinpoint the site of an atrocity, a
massacre, a bombing; they call for action, inspire a hope
for change. Assembled with delicate and ephemeral
materials, they soon disappear, to remain memorialised
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 in
stone to transient collections, and as they live on and
survive, so their afterlives flourish, sustained and challenged through performative interaction, the production
of archives, and the reproduction of images.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The papers here were first presented at The Afterlives of
Monuments conference (London, April 2010), and I

warmly thank all the speakers and participants for several

days of inspiring papers and productive discussions with
a special mention to the three young scholars: Anisha
Saxena, Sneha Raghavan, and Suryanandini Sinha
Narain. I am especially indebted to Tapati GuhaThakurta for her critical thinking, to Gayatri Sinha for
her intellectual generosity, and Partha Mitter for his collegial encouragement; his AHRC-funded workshops on
Indian Modernity at the University of Sussex were one of
the starting points. I extend my thanks to Sutapa Biswas
for her wise counsel and stimulating discussions when
we co-curated Monuments and Memorials (London,
2008). My colleagues in Amsterdam at ASCA, in Art
History, and the research group New Strategies in the
Conservation of Contemporary Art have constructively
shaped my thinking over these years. Zippora Elders,
Taya Hanauer-Rehavia, and Nguyen Vu Thuc Linh who
helped to prepare the papers for publication. The project
has been supported and funded by the British Academy,

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the Nehru Centre London, the India High Commission,

the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, and the
University of the Arts Research Centre on
Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation (TrAIN). To all
those who acted as peer reviewers, to Adam Hardy who
invited me to select and edit this collection, to Duncan
Hardy and Vikki Davies for steering the issue through to
publication, my warmest thanks.

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NOTES
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<http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.
aspx#> [accessed January 2013]. Monica Narula,
Jeebash Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta
founded Raqs Media Collective in 1992.
C. Pinney, Piercing the Skin of the Idol, in Beyond
Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of
Enchantment, ed. by C. Pinney and N. Thomas
(Oxford: Berg, 2001), p. 167.
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
are narrated at length in T. Guha-Thakurta, The
Endangered Yakshi: Carers of an Ancient Art
Object in Modern India, in History and the Present,
ed. by P. Chatterjee and A. Ghosh (New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2002), pp. 71107 and the opening
pages of R. H. Davis, Lives of Indian Images
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997; repr.
1999).
A. Appadurai and C. Breckenridge, Museums are
Good to Think: Heritage on View in India, in
Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed.
by D. Preziosi and C. Farago (London: Lund
Humpries, 2004), pp. 68599 (p. 689).
D. Eck, Darshan: Seeing the Divine Image in India
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1998);
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).
Indian Highway (Steps Away from Oblivion),
Serpentine Gallery, London, December 2008
February 2009. The figures of the Yaksha and
Yakshi had appeared in Raqss The Reserve Army
(2008), a sculptural installation that paid tribute to
the perspicacity of the modernist Indian sculptor
Ram Kinkar Baij and to the Reserve Bank of
Indias commission to Baij to adorn its portal with
a Yaksha and a Yakshi in the first decade after the
formation of the Indian Republic. The Reserve
Army is described by the artists as Fibreglass
rescension of Ram Kinkar Baijs Yaksha and

8.
9.

10.

11.
12.

13.

14.

15.
16.
17.

Yakshi, with cash and barbed wire ornaments, and

a printed vinyl screen. First shown at The Santhal
Family, Muhka Museum, Antwerp, February 2008
<http://www.raqsmediacollective.net/works.aspx>
[accessed December 2012].
Dutch and Portuguese monuments in the subcontinent are not considered here; on the former see
M. H. Peters, In steen geschreven. Leven en sterven
van VOC-dienaren op de Kust van Coromandel in
India, with photographs by F. Andr de la Porte
(Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen, 2002),
with thanks to Martin-Jan Bok for this reference.
Davis, Lives of Indian Images, p. 6.
A. Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the
Politics of Value, in The Social Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. by
A. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), pp. 363 (p. 34).;
G. Didi-Huberman, Artistic Survival: Panofsky vs
Warburg and the Exorcism of Impure Time,
Common Knowledge, 9.2 (2003), 27385 (p. 273).
See also G. Didi-Huberman, Atlas: How to Carry the
World on Ones Back? (Madrid: Museo Nacional
Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, 2012).
J. Derrida, La dissmination (Paris: Les ditions de
Minuit, 1972), p. 126, my translation.
V. Sanders, The Private Lives of Victorian Women:
Autobiography in Nineteenth Century England
(London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989) demonstrates that this organic model of biography was
developed in nineteenth-century Britain for great
white men.
For example, J. E. Young, At Memorys Edge: AfterImages of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and
Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000); J. E. Young, The Texture of Memory (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); The Partitions
of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India, ed.
by S. Kaul (Bloomingdale: Indiana University
Press, 2001).
A. Hui, Texts, Monuments, and the Desire for
Immortality, in Moment to Monument, the Making
and Unmaking of Cultural Significance, ed. by
L. B. Lambert and A. Ochsner, Cultural Studies 32
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009), pp. 1934 (p. 20),
with thanks here to Christoph Lindner.
G. C. Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews,
Strategies, Dialogues (London: Routledge, 1990),
p. 108.
S. Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1997), pp. 116, 118.
H. K. Bhabha, Postmodernism/Postcolonialism,
in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. by
R. S. Nelson and R. Shiff (Chicago: University of
Chicago Pres, 1996), pp. 43552 (p. 450).

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18.

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19.

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20.
1100

21.

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23.
24.

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29.
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P. Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of

European Reactions to Indian Art (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1977) remains a classic account
of European perceptions of ancient monuments.
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
Architecture from Constantine to Sherrie Levine, ed.
by R. Brilliant and D. Kinney (London: Ashgate,
2011), pp. 199221 (p. 215).
R. H. Davis, Introduction, in Picturing the Nation:
Iconographies of Modern India, ed. by R. H. Davis
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 2007), pp.131 (p. 5).
E. J. Hobsbawm, Introduction: Inventing Traditions,
in The Invention of Tradition, ed. by E. J. Hobsbawm
and T. O. Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983; repr.1992), pp.114.
J. Masselos, The Magic Touch of Being Free, in
India: Creating a Modern Nation, ed. by
J. Massselos (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers,
1990), pp. 3753, quoted in Davis, Lives of Indian
Images, pp. 1011.
Quoted in T. Y. Tan and G. Kudaisya, The Aftermath
of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge,
2000; repr. 2005), p. 56.
S. Sinha Narain, Monumental Mayawati:
Anticipating Afterlives, unpublished paper presented
at the conference Afterlives of Monuments, 2010.
A. Tripathi, Mayawatis Statue Beheaded in
Lucknow, Police Call It Sacrilege, Times of India,
26
July
2012
<http://articles.timesofindia.
indiatimes.com/2012-07-26/lucknow/
32868612_1_senior-bsp-leader-mayawati-senaleaders> [accessed December 2012].
Mayawati Statues: Race to Cover India Chiefs
Monuments, 10 January 2012 <http://www.bbc.
co.uk/news/world-asia-india-16481185> [accessed
December 2012].
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 and
R. Barnes (Norfolk: Frontier Publishing, 2011).
S. J. Heathorn, Angel of Empire: The Cawnpore
Memorial Well as a British Site of Imperial
Remembrance, Journal of Colonialism and
Colonial History, 8.3 (2007).
M. Misra, Vishnus Crowded Temple: India Since the
Great Rebellion (London: Penguin, 2007), pp. ??.
G. H. R. Tillotson, A Visible Monument:
Architectural Policies and the Victoria Memorial
Hall, Marg, 49.2 (1997), in a special issue on
Victoria Memorial Hall; P. Vaughan, The Victoria
Memorial Hall, Calcutta: Conception, Collections,
Conservation (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1997).

31.

32.

33.
34.

35.
36.

37.

38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.

44.

45.
46.

13

Another Life: The Digitized Personal Archive of

Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram, files uploaded
to Asia Art Archive <http://www.aaa.org.hk/
Collection/CollectionOnline/SpecialCollectionFol
dero/102> [accessed December 2012].
T. Guha-Thakurta, Traversing Past and Present in
the Victoria Memorial, Occasional Paper 153
(Calcutta: Centre for Studies in Social Sciences,
1995).
See T. Guha-Thakurta, In the Name of the Goddess:
The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Calcutta
(forthcoming).
For an interesting discussion of European practices,
see F. Choay, The Invention of the Historic
Monument, trans. by L. M. O Connell (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Conservation:
Principles,
Dilemmas,
and
Uncomfortable Truths, ed. by A. Bracker and
A. Richmond (London: Routledge, 2012).
S. Shorto, A Tomb of Ones Own: The Governors
House, Lahore, in Colonial Modernities: Building,
Dwelling, and Architecture in British India and
Ceylon, ed. by P. Scrivener and V. Prakash
(London: Taylor and Francis, 2007), pp. 15168.
F. B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture
and MedievalHindu-Muslim Encounter (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009), pp.137247 (pp.
150, 230).
Rajagopalan, A Medieval Monument.
For example S. Amin, On Retelling the Muslim
Conquest of North India, in History and the
Present, pp. 1932.
S. Kumar, Qutb and Modern Memory, in The
Partitions of Memory, pp. 14082 (pp. 141, 176).
See James Youngs discussions of the contestations
over Holocaust memorials in Textures of Memory.
Appadurai, Introduction: Commodities and the
Politics of Value, p. 16.
T. Guha-Thakurta, The Compulsions of Visual
Representation in Colonial India, Traces of
India: Photography, Architecture, and the
Politics of Representation, 18501950, ed. by
M. A. Pelizzari (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003), pp. 10839.
N. Stanley-Price, The Reconstruction of Ruins:
Principles and Practice, in Conservation:
Principles, Dilemmas, and Uncomfortable Truths,
pp. 3246.
L. Strachey, Eminent Victorians ([n.p.]: [n. pub.],
1918; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003), p. 5.
G. C. Spivak, The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in
Reading the Archives, History and Theory, 24.3
(1985), 24772, revised in G. C. Spivak, A
Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History

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1150

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1160

1165

1170

1175

1180

1185

1190

1195

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47.
1200

48.
49.
1205

50.
1210

51.

Deborah Cherry
of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999).
On the relations of history, memory, and oral testimony, see History and the Present.
Y. Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India
and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007), p. 201.
N. Malani, Gamepieces, in Nalini Malani, ed. by
S. Kissane and J. Pijnappel (Milan: Charta, 2007), p.
77 (published to accompany the exhibition at the
Irish Museum of Art, Dublin).
See Nalini Malani: Splitting the Other, Retrospective
19922009 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2010), especially W. Chadwick, Record, Remember, Relate,
pp. 1519 (published to accompany an exhibition at
the Muse cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne).
C. Sambrani, Shadows, Reflections, and
Nightmare: The Art of Nalini Malani, in Nalini

Malani, ed. by Kissane and Pijnappel, pp. 2336

(p. 23).
52. S. A. Manto, Toba Tek Singh, translated by
K. Hasan in Kingdoms End and Other Stories,
repr. in The Vintage Book of Indian Writing, 1947
97, ed. by S. Rushdie and E. West (London: Vintage,
1997), pp. 2431 (p. 31).
53. The protests were widely discussed in world
media; one reference to the memorial is
S. Ghosh, In Memory of Amanat, a
Makeshift Memorial, Protests Continue, ndtv,
31 December 2012 <http://www.ndtv.com/
article/india/in-memory-of-amanat-a-makeshiftmemorial-protests-continue-311719> [accessed
January 2013]. While other recent rapes and
murders of women have attracted protest, public memorialisation in this form is highly
selective.

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