BUDP Publications
By Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Associate Professor of History
Anticolonial Practice and the Image Archive offers a critical examination of the formation of “Indian art” via the nineteenth- and twentieth-century extraction of objects from ancient and war-torn landscapes of the Indo-Afghan borderlands to European collections. Instead of tracking migration itineraries of objects from ruins of war to museums, as much of the object-centered historiography has done so far, this study breaks new ground by staying at the scenes of destruction to give a detailed on-the-ground account of the different kinds of effects such colonial extraction had on the multi-religious landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Colonial and national narratives are disrupted and dismantled via an interactive archive and mapping system that juxtaposes material across geographies and temporalities, such as government records, ethnographic dictionaries, military manuals, war albums, museum catalogues, photographs, colonial films, and contemporary documentation from the author’s own fieldwork on the “frontier.”
