sculpture, painting and architecture; and,Wnally, the cramming for examin-
ations, which prevented ‘that love of knowledge and research which makes the
true scholar’ (in Chakrabarti 1997: 115). Yet time would prove him wrong.
Increasingly in the last decades of the nineteenth century and especially
through theWrst half of the twentieth century, local intellectuals became
involved in the study of antiquities, showing the degree of acceptance of the
discourse of the past. Native engagement in the study of antiquities would
prove empowering. Just by being there, local archaeologists undermined
colonial authority. The European colonial mission of bringing civilization,
the mission civilisatrice, was no longer needed. The versatility of archaeo-
logical evidence made it possible for local archaeologists to generate alterna-
tive interpretations of history that challenged those produced by the
colonizers, as seen in the example of Mitra in the 1870s. Beyond India, the
Wrst native archaeologists to work in the oYcial heritage bodies in Southeast
Asia were appointed in the 1910s and 1920s (Cherry 2004b; Tanudirjo 1995:
67). By the 1930s about 90 per cent of the administrative personnel in most
Southeast Asian colonial states were native (Anderson 1991: 183). In 1945
decolonization started, and soon the whole area had attained political inde-
pendence. Importantly, throughout these periods the discourse of the past
maintained its prestige. The new nation-states created from the old colonies
still needed a past to legitimize them as political entities. This was commu-
nicated through education and museums. The past—and therefore the na-
tion—was made visible through objects in museums and by the physical
presence of ruins. The transferral from colonial to national archaeology,
therefore, was undertaken without major diYculties. This should come as
no surprise, given that, as is insisted so many times in this volume, nine-
teenth-century colonialism can only be understood as but one of the mani-
festations of nationalism. The colonies inherited, and made political use of,
the forms of thinking about the past developed in the European nations
during the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth centuries.
244 Colonial Archaeology