The duty of investigating, describing and protecting the ancient monuments of a
Country is recognised and acted on by every civilised nation in the world. India has
done less in this direction than almost any other nation, and considering the vast
materials for the illustration of history which lie unexplored in every part of Hindoo-
stan, I am strongly of the opinion that immediate steps should be taken for the
creation under the Government of India of a machinery for discharging a duty, at
once so obvious and so interesting.
(in Chakrabarti 1988: 71).Cunningham maintained that there were other ‘European governments which,
if they had held our [British] rule in India, would not have allowed’ antiquities
to remain unexamined to such an extent (Chakrabarti 1988: 58). What he was
thinking of is diYcult to know. As seen in this chapter, nothing similar to the ASI
was created either in Dutch Indonesia (although the Museum of Jakarta was
opened in 1868) or in French Indochina (which was being colonized at this
time). He may have referred to French North Africa (Chapter 9).
The hypotheses and practices delineated so far regarding Indian antiquities
create an image of hegemonic knowledge very much formed as a noisy sum
of overlapping voices and operations: a rhizomic network in the web of
empire. Resistance also seems to have followed this pattern, although the
lack of backing for administrative oYces supporting opposing views at this
time had an impact on dissenting speech. Hence, information about resistance
to the use of the past by the colonizers is scant. Indeed, there were some
examples in history (Chatterjee 1995) and philology (Ballantyne 2002: 174;
Bryan 2001: ch. 3; Trautmann 1997: 218–22),Welds closely connected with
archaeology inasmuch as the equation between language, race, and culture and
their links to religion were often used to trace the past of India. A note of
caution is needed here. There is a danger of simplifying the situation by
equating all native scholarship with resistance. Some native scholars contrib-
uted to the Western pursuit of knowledge by assisting with translations of
ancient texts. Some of their names can be retrieved (Singh 2004: 305–7) but
not their intentions and their feelings. At the start of the nineteenth century,
in a world still more hybrid in its tastes and customs of what would become
later on throughout the century (Dalrymple 2002: xl–xli), there were Indian
rulers and well-oVindividuals who established European-style cabinets of
curiosities. They used them as a sort of self-redeWnition, to sell their social
persona, perhaps mimicking what European collectors were doing at this time.
One could mention the young Maharajah Serfoji II of Tanjore, and the Italian-
style Marble Palace at Calcutta built to educate the public in Western art in
- Its construction was ordered by Rajendro Mullick, an Indian who had
had a British instructor during his childhood. However, as JasanoV(2005:
316–17) points out, Mullick combined his European tastes with his Hindu
228 Colonial Archaeology