‘”Gaur as “Monument”: The Making of an Archive and Tropes of Memorializing’

• Main Author: Parjanya Sen
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2013-12-01
• Series: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subjects: brick architecture; Bengal; Gaur; Picturesque; the Daniells; monumentality; ASI; Abid Ali
• Online Access: http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/sen.pdf

This paper seeks to locate the fifteenth-century medieval city of ‘Gaur’ in Bengal, and the various historical and art historical claims which have emerged around it. Beginning with a historiography of early exploration and visual encounters with the site, this paper traces the aesthetic shifts and mediations which occurred during the Cunningham era in British India, which variously attempted to re-produce the colony’s ruins as knowable landscape. Within a larger set of historical/archaeological concerns which were intricately linked with the colonial project and desire to invest the colony with a history, what specificity did Gaur as site attain? The next section of this paper looks at a series of ‘native’ claims on the site and how the discipline of colonial archaeology itself created a variety of subject positions. The emergence of the ‘native’ scholar was both legitimized and co-opted by colonial pedagogy, as is witnessed in the case of Abid Ali. It also led to a series of counter claims which sought to incorporate Gaur as part of a nationalist and regional history.