Authority in Stone: Conservation and the Fabric of Antiquity in British India

The focus of this paper is the custodial claim established over Hindu temples by the colonial government in twentieth-century India. In 1904, the British Indian Government passed the Ancient Monuments Protection Act and, in doing so, radically enlarged the bureaucratic claim of the state over structures defined, for the purposes of the Act, as monuments. The project of conserving the Hindu temple was beset by discomforts: the physical requirements of conservation were at odds with the rituals of Hindu devotion; it required an aesthetic preservation of an architecture and sculpture which was regarded as artistically deficient and, finally, preservation necessitated a bureaucratic intervention in a religious institution which, following the rebellion of 1857, the Government of India had committed itself to avoid perpetually. These ambivalences and discomforts make the temple an ideal location in which to trace the interaction of social, juridical and religious authority - in both temporal and divine forms - in colonial India. Ostensibly, there was a conflict between colonial authority and local Hindu devotees separated by different precepts of religiosity and alternate orders of aesthetics, time and history. However, it is clear that there were also confluences: legislative authority could masquerade as antiquarian custody and, in practice, the secular veneration of material antiquity blurred with Hindu divinity. This work combines an exploration of the principles of archaeological conservation, as they were formed in the European bourgeois imagination, and then traces their transfer, though Imperial administration, to case studies of specific temples. Of particular interest is the deployment of the Act by local administrations and the counter-challenges, appropriations and manipulations of the same legislation by local communities. How were the aesthetic codes of conservation, and the legislation which sought to order and enforce their introduction, compromised by religious claims and practices?