Professor Tapati Guha Thakurta to Deliver Ritchie Lecture about the Sanchi Stupa

This year’s Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Tapati Guha Thakurta, who will speak about “The Production and Reproduction of a Monument: The Sanchi Stupa in Colonial and Postcolonial India”.

5:30pm, November 9 · Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), Robert L. McNeil Jr. Lecture Hall, 1111 Chapel Street

Professor Tapati Guha Thakurta  is a Professor in History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) who writes widely on the art and cultural history of modern India.  Her two main books are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004). She is also the author of several monographs of her curated exhibitions – Dharmanarayan Dasgupta: Representing the Bengali Modern (Galerie 88, Kolkata, 2000), In Her Own Right: Remembering the Artist, Karuna Shaha  (Seagull, Kolkata, 2001), Visual Worlds of Modern Bengal: An introduction to the documentation archive of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (Seagull, Kolkata, 2002) and The Aesthetics of the Popular Print: Lithographs and Oleographs from 19th and 20th Century India (Birla Academy of Art and Culture, Kolkata, 2006), The City in the Archive: Calcutta’s Visual Histories (Calcutta: CSSSC, 2011). She is presently completing on a book on the visual cultures of Durga Puja in contemporary Calcutta.

Professor Guha Thakurta will also speak about “The Aesthetics of a Public Festival: Durga Puja in Contemporary Calcutta” as part of the South Asia at Yale Brown Bag Series on Thursday, November 10 at 12pm in Room 203, Luce Hall.  Professor Guha Thakurta’s visit to Yale coincides with two important exhibitions about South Asia at the Yale Center for British Art: Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed (October 27, 2011-February 12, 2012) and Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770-1830 (October 11 – December 31, 2011)

The Ritchie Lecture Series is jointly sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery and was established to honor the memory of Andrew Cardnuff Ritchie, director of the Yale University Art Gallery from 1957 to 1971. The Ritchie Lectures are offered annually and bring to the University distinguished members of the international visual arts community. These lectures are free and open to the public, honoring Ritchie’s belief that the art museum serves as a gathering place for all members of the community.

Abstract for “The Production and Reproduction of a Monument”
The paper explores the ways in which a modern biography can be produced around one of India’s most prominent ancient Buddhist sites. Its main concern lies in unraveling the many semantic layers in the restitution of the ‘true’ pasts of Sanchi over the 19th and 20th centuries - and in looking at the new vortex of secular and sacred, archaeological and devotional consecrations that attended its transition from a colonial to a national monument. There are four main themes that run through the paper. Firstly, it examines the 19th century transition of the stupa site from ruin to monument, culminating in the radical archaeological remake of the site in the first decades of the 20th century, under the superintendence of Sir John Marshall, Director of the Archaeological Survey of India. Secondly, it looks at the way a site like Sanchi would feature centrally in the practices of imaging, plaster-cast replication and visual documentation that becomes so crucial to the colonial archaeological project. My idea of the many lives of this stupa complex revolves around these flourishing off-site careers of Sanchi as portable object and image in different museum and exhibition locations and publications, parallel to the growing monumentalization of the structures on site since the late 19th century.  Thirdly, the paper juxtaposes the archaeological triumphs of the ‘Marshall era’ with the contending custodial claims to the site of a Muslim ruling dynasty and a neo-Buddhist religious organization, introducing the Begum of Bhopal (in whose princely state the monument was located) and the Mahabodhi Society as other key players in the politics of the possession and resacralization of the site in the same decades. In the final section, the paper turns to some of Sanchi’s travels and afterlives, as secular architectural form and consecrated religious monument, within and outside the nation, in independent India. From colonial to postcolonial times, we see the sanctity of the in situ monument continuously refracted by its reproducibility as form, image and copy in different locations to serve different commemorative functions.