Abstract:
The long scholarship on materialities demonstrates the academic value of engaging with museums, collections, and curation. As important areas of research and knowledge production, object histories, collecting, and collections management practices provide unique insights into larger issues of sociality and implicate the politics of decolonization and their shifts through time. Importantly, they enable us to reflect upon practices of sorting, describing, archiving, and documenting. By drawing into histories of visualization and museums, and heritage-making in post-colonial India, I shall highlight the historical value of thinking through the material for exploring representation, and linkages in methods of inquiry beyond the politics of guarding disciplinary domains.
Prof. Sudeshna Guha teaches at the Department of History and Archaeology, Shiv Nadar Institute of Eminence, Delhi-NCR. She is the author of A History of India Through 75 Objects (Hachette India, 2022). Her current research is on aspects of Museum Archaeology and Heritage Studies. Among her forthcoming publications is an exhibition volume: Histories in the Making: Photography and Monuments in Nineteenth-Century India (DAG, 2024).