The proposed project seeks to explore the complex interplay between secularization of archaeological heritage, politics of religious revivalism and configurations of sacred spaces in colonial and postcolonial India. The research, in particular, will try to trace the competing agential role of archaeologists, tourists and pilgrims in the production of historical monuments and constitution of sacred spaces. Focussing on the making of archaeological/ historical monuments out of old and new Hindu and Buddhist temple sites in eastern and central India, I will explore some of the competing modes through which archaeologists, museum professionals and other scholars and interest groups produce and appropriate history and heritage, constitute historical monuments and configure the sacred space of ritual/ religious practice. Rather than treating the questions of sacrality and historicity of these sites as given and embedded within a linear historical narrative, the research seeks to map the politics of the essentially modern production of ancient pasts.

A central concern of my research lies in tracing the production of sacred space within the larger domain of the making of archaeological heritage in colonial and post colonial India. The project, to begin with, will investigate the ways in which practices of heritage conservation in the colony were influenced by European, particularly English, notions of heritage preservation. My research will specially focus on the comparative status of sacred spaces as a key element in the constitution of heritage discourses in Europe and in the colony. While conservation of church and parish properties in nineteenth and twentieth century England emerged as major site of contention between the advocates of the conservation of the Baroque style and proponents of the restoration of Gothic aesthetics, the sacred space, as a central component in the configuration of heritage practices in the colony, functioned on a different level than that of specialized architectural/ aesthetic debates.

In the colonial context, the distinction between the "secular" and the "sacred" acquired a sharper edge than was the case in contemporary debates in Europe on the subject, especially since colonial archaeology’s institutional and disciplinary hold over conserving the ancient monumental remains of the colony, remained a predominantly state enterprise, a state which formally professed an attitude of neutral non-intervention in matters of religion of its subject population from the mid nineteenth century onwards. However, the practice of restoring ancient religious structures and their subsequent metamorphosis into monuments under the guidance of colonial archaeology necessitated tortuous negotiations with the legal/ religious custodians of such structures.

Rather than locating the space of the “sacred” and the “secular” along the register of a bipolar opposition, this project will try to figure out the tensions of the deeply interpellated, and often overlapping domains of “secular” monument making and “sacred” religious practice. The project will not posit the domain of religious practice as a seamlessly continuous space of tradition ruptured only by colonial archaeology’s modern regime of historicist, secular monument making. Instead, I will try to analyze how the space of sacred religious practice was more often produced out of colonial archaeology’s historicist engagement with monuments, out of official archaeology’s policy of conservation and making of secular monuments out of practicing temples in eastern and central India.