So thank you so. What I want to do today is.
Give you a glimpse of some of the things that I've been thinking about in the light of a long debate that is still going on and has not abated on.
You know, the debate between, you know,
what is a sacred structure which should be put up and what does it mean about India's sort of essential religious
identity and birthplace of gods and so on and so forth that that idea is still very much political alive today.
And I want to sort of use that as a way to think back and then go back and revisit one
of the one or two ideas that I worked with in my book on the Ganges or the Ganga,
which is the name of the book in the. In the Indian edition.
I will use the word Ganges for now for for the sake of convenience, but you know, I have no particular malicious intent there.
Am I the goddess, of course, is going up, but.
So in my book, The Ganges, the many pasts of an Indian River,
I look at the emergence of the the valley of the Gangetic Valley as a kind of an Indian version of a middle country.
A historic political and symbolic landscape and.
It has to do with the idea that, in fact, the so-called sort of Hindu pilgrimage,
a set of sights along that river basin actually have a much deeper history of books, especially the legacy of Buddhism and Jainism.
And then before that, in any number of.
Animism, animistic and an indigenous coast that were sort of absorbed into many of these traditions
and therefore arguing for a sort of true plurality and a sort of a mixed legacy of the space.
So this middle country, a historic, political and symbolic sacred landscape,
cannot be neatly folded into a sort of a unitary, monolithic Hinduism, which I think we all know.
In fact, I argue in the book that that sexuality actually comes from things like long centuries of Buddhism and Jainism and things like that.
But this river basins saw the rise and fall of kingdoms, empires, you know, the burgeoning and reigning of various forms of trade and pilgrimage,
both from within and connected to outside of the the boundaries of the subcontinent.
But they also talk in the book about how the space was fought over across centuries,
that fight said witnessed building destruction, sacking looting of cities, markets, walls, forts and places of worship.
And this long and embattled history of the passing of regimes and the transmission of objects, artefacts, structures.
The ideas of conquest and the assimilation of defeated are politically humble tribes,
kingdoms, empires, entire panorama and deep history of that legacy.
Begs a central question about the entanglement of three objects of intellectual history that I think you might be interested in.
I'm sure you are. One is, of course, the history of the political history of the sacred and the history of the temporal, and these are connected.
In what ways do boss institutions practises,
customs forms of religious beliefs persist or manifest their presence within the depths of all successive regimes,
including in the Church of Mongol regimes that displaced previous regimes?
And then, of course, the coming of British rule? How are stretches of time and folded within the temporal frames of the architectures of conquest?
How does the epochal reckoning of history conjure up the ghosts of regimes past?
And in what sense does, and this is where I borrow heavily from the historians of architectural spoiler.
And what Sense does a spoliation and including ruins and remnants of monuments evoke the sense of both loss and possession of the past itself?
So that is the opening gambit. Now, all historians are sporty and not just architectural historians.
Wrestled with several questions. And again, at the risk of repetition, I would say.
You know, they asked the question, how are figures, emblems, buildings, structures,
architectural spaces, assimilated, incorporated, reused, memorialised or repatriated?
When a new regime comes in. Especially after a war and conquest.
And then, of course, how do we reckon for those historical traces, what are the terms of such reuse?
Is it simply the reuse of materials from buildings destroyed or dismantled?
And by the way, by this I implicate especially the various kingdoms of southern India, in fact, where much of this started.
And in fact, in my book, I talk a lot about the assimilation of the iconography of the Gangetic Valley in the south and the the various fights between
the older ones and the challenges and the challenges and the children's is it the reuse then of materials of buildings,
temples destroyed or dismantled pillars, domes, lintels, murals or inscriptions?
Or it is such appropriation a deeper reflection of the desire to consume, subsume and rehabilitate the aesthetic invisible presence of those regimes.
Is it perhaps an oblique acknowledgement of the historical gravitas and character of the material past itself?
Or and sometimes this is what historians especially also point to or hint at?
Is it an Apple triptych gesture? The evil I do to ward off of male villains and curse of the vanquished and the slain?
Is it a prophylactic measure? Like the circulation of the Sphinx image in ancient Greece.
Do fall in pillars or defaced images involve a magical transubstantiation of their potency.
Our selective acts of destabilisation,
as in the stripping away of fragments of building the structure and attempt to put one's own mark on the past itself as a trophy.
And many of these ideas are there in either directly or indirectly in architectural history.
My task today here is to speculate from there to talk about history itself.
Not what history tells us about spoiling, but what is polio and spoliation, tell us about history itself.
Now, of course, one of the most common least commonly studied aspects of spoliation be study
in India in the Indian history is the desecration and destruction of temples,
the looting and recycling. First, you know, recycling them,
the destruction of images and the display of trophies in the temples and battlements of conquering
regimes sometimes and die cities became the objects of destabilisation such as Varanasi and canals,
most famously Varanasi. And this often happened along the valley of the Ganges and in my book.
I've tried to show how, in fact, Condones became the most invaded Indian city of all time.
So much so that the architecture,
the ruins of the place are sparse and a list of notable invaders of that city over centuries show a remarkable succession of marches and sieges.
And by implication, the number of times the city must have been deserted,
depopulated and rebuilt and rehabbed re inhabited at least 30 major times in
13 major invasions that took place between the 7th and the 13th centuries.
I think in my book, I even have a list with all the dates and details and classic textbook fashion.
So, you know, this included the Gujarat pretty hard as the rush recruiters,
the partners, the Chandlers, the first Navid's the god of valleys and the courts.
And of course, if you think about the Alabama treaty and the coming of British rule, then you can add that to this list.
Now, Ghannouchi came into prominence as the ancestral stronghold of the Mochrie rulers,
and Harshvardhan, if you recall from Schoolbook Histories, made it the centre of his sprawling empire.
All the Hirsch's dynasty came to an unexpected end after his death.
The image of the imperial city on the Ganges had left a lasting impression on subsequent political imagination.
Some of the earliest descriptions of the city, such as in the work of the Chinese pilgrim and monk shrines, sunk on.
The West Bank of the Ganges speaks of its imposing waterfront battlements, towers and most eye on a cliff overlooking the passage of boats,
pilgrims and traders, commanding, in fact, the fertile plains of the Upper Ganga Yamuna, though up.
Which was back then known as intervening. It enjoyed a strategic military advantage over the rest of the valley, and in fact, as you know,
the political focus has shifted from the eastern part of the Gangetic Valley,
which was my brother to that part later in that at the end of the Gupta period.
Noted for its abundance of temples, sacred bathing spots and building attractions cannot possibly as sacred as Varanasi of later times,
and its name was, you know, actually sort of invoked in the genealogy.
If you if you follow the coast history of India, a genealogy of Brahmins often claim allegiance to the connotes.
Which is, you know, mythical land and genealogical both.
And, of course, the other city that we find in this sort of kind of Banaras nexus is,
of course, a city which has now been renamed the city of Allahabad,
which actually had a damn long time ago, a perfectly fine name that the U.S. dominated the 12th century.
This raja the king of pilgrimages. But, of course, sometimes will be renamed places we don't necessarily want to.
Look up the history of that place. I'll leave it at that for now.
This was the place which appeared as a lava, things dropped, but on the moral map in volcanoes here,
along with Prague and Varanasi as emblematic of this middle Gangetic kingdom
because this is the one of the prime crucibles of the Indian historical imaginary.
And we are, as I said, before still spilling the blood over its monumental legacies.
Now I just want to make one point that you know this this idea of the Majima issue, which is a Buddhist constant concept.
Originally, the Middle Kingdom actually is in some ways a shift away from the old biomedical and Vedic conception of sacred land.
And you know, this is something that I explore in the book about, you know, which parts of of the northern Indian sort of.
Geographical, spatial, imaginary are sort of, you know, appropriate for certain kinds of worship and where they begin to encounter people.
You know, who are not part of the sacred domain, but I just want to say that that was redefined because of the of the the great resurgence,
especially of Mahayana Buddhism for over the last centuries. But we can maybe talk about that later.
That's not the main focus of this talk.
And one of the ways to appreciate the conception and fight over this sort of space that I have described as a fundamental core of
the Indian geographical and historical imaginary is to try and conceive of an erasure of the line between what we call political.
And what we called sacred. Just as Hindu regimes of the 19th century support each other over the historic legacy of such spaces.
And therefore, the various kingdoms dating even back to the time of Ashokan antiquity.
So must have the courage and the mom looks who had succeeded them.
And such a re-imagining. One could think of the reclamation of things like pillars and letters and images,
defaced images from the ruins of Buddhist, Hindu and Jain structures at places such as the Terminator,
not just as the appropriation of objects and symbols of defeated regimes and kings, but indeed the antiquity and the historical legacy of.
And this is a word that we have to use a little bit more carefully pre-Islamic rulers and regimes in a manner very similar to the it did Cordoba,
Spain or the Abbasid in the former realms of the Byzantine Empire or in sustaining lands.
Now, the historic history of spoliation and spoliation, architectural borrowings go back to,
of course, the entire, you know, the terminology comes from a Roman precedence.
So I must sort of give you a little cameo of what we, you know, what we have from Rome.
And especially because much of this language was was put in place again in the in the annals of British colonial architectural description of India.
And that Roman precedence is worth going back to in their own case,
the seizure of objects as talismans from defeated from the defeated symbolic appropriations of the strengths of one's enemy.
Which is why weapons have fallen combatants were surprised by Roman patricians and plebeians alike.
The sack of temples and capture of idols, particularly noteworthy in the Roman campaigns waged against the Greek islands of the Aegean,
intended to strip the enemy of its divine protection graven images of conquered regimes ended up in Imperial Treasury,
as well as in private collections as cumulative inventories of past campaigns and laurels.
At times such, Boulia also serve to reaffirm the supreme virtues.
The stars of the Roman gods in Roman ways are worshipped.
The display and public affirmation of trophies in the Temple of Jupiter,
the adornment of patrician villas which shields enemies standards broken off beaks of vessels destroyed in naval combat,
show a rich harvest of the militarised society of Rome, which coveted the relics of worthy foes,
especially those collected from distant and exotic frontiers of the empire.
The Roman case is instructive. And thinking about societies that were oriented towards routine warfare, by the way,
the Romans also worried about the legal precedent about this kind of seizure. Cicero talks a lot about it.
And then of course, you know, if you look at the history of the early Islamic empires,
you can see a tremendous amount of sort of riding on what is jai's and what is allowed, which is not in terms of actual spoliation.
But imagine the distribution of spoils. Who gets to keep it?
Who gets to distribute it? So there's a long legacy here.
We can invoke in the Roman case, the example of plunder during the siege of the Greek islands,
where arms and armour of enemy chieftains slain in distant battlefields were taken,
idols were taken from temples, ago, horrors and shrines and how they were reinstated in Roman shrines.
You can see the collection of paintings, sculptures and other objects of art that poured in from the Greek campaigns.
As Margaret Myers, the architectural historian,
points out the most sought after prises of war in the Roman case for objects from personal collections.
This is referred to as spoiler in see statues, paintings, vessels of precious metal textiles,
carved objects of wood and ivory dedicated to sanctuaries and buildings reading the Roman history.
Sort of gives us a certain kind of appreciation of a similar process, which you know, has been still not fully understood in the Indian context.
Now, in the case of Indian history, there's an exceptionalism,
and the exceptionalism is the so-called history of quote unquote Islamic conquest of India.
And this exceptionalism, I would argue, places an equally exceptional burden on the history of spoiling and spoliation.
And as you can imagine, not only did it animate a certain colonial conception of Indian history,
but of course that in turn animates today a certain nationalistic and maybe sometimes unfortunate in certain traditions,
a reckoning of this of this bust.
And in the political practise. Now, I will not go here into the question of whether such kind of a periodisation of Islamic conquest is warranted,
appropriate or not, or how such epochal divides might be motivated by colonial, nationalist or contemporary religious imaginaries.
But this is a a sign and a period in which the history of sport here takes centre stage in the history of Indian historical imagination.
This particular period?
The reckoning, often top autochthonous past has been at least since colonial times fraught or injected with a sense of loss dispossession,
especially over the history of the selective appropriation and reuse of buildings and materials
from the Hindu Jain Buddhist antiquity as an essential is an essential part of its history.
And this is why there could have been ash of shines as the gallery of this kind of a museum ology of this kind of history.
Just as the appropriation of Roman Roman antiquities are key to the making of Carolinian monuments in Europe.
This these are the the makings of a particular kind of Hindu rate, Indian antiquity, except that they do not evoke feelings.
Those in Carolinian here did not evoke feelings of national or popular antipathy between the French and the Italians today.
I'm this, I'm mistaken, and you should tell me if that is the case.
They bear witness to the role of architecture in absorbing bits and pieces of this material past,
which is another really famous historian Maria Hanson has pointed out,
is an essential element of all forms of architecture spoiler in this regard,
structures like the arc of Constantine in Rome and its layers of recycled fragments of previous reliefs.
And, you know, and artefacts pose a fundamental challenge to the very authenticity and historical and temporal placement of objects.
They remind us that fragments put together in different epochs have their own unique aura and significance.
And this is a second lesson that we can draw from the architecture of historians who study sport,
which is that it is really not about appropriation always. It is also about acknowledgement, even perhaps gratitude.
Architectural historians such as Richard Brilliant, therefore make a distinction between spoliation, say,
which have invoked already and spoiler in Ray Ray, meaning things room let in the taking of material.
Objects of the making of virtual entities slowly and read might include, for instance,
books, libraries, texts, formula charms, incantations, forms of knowledge.
Forms of decoding forms of translation. The Rosetta Stone.
Now, my emphasis in the rest of the stop is the second aspect the appropriation of texts and objects of histories,
along with monuments of the past and in fact, therefore time itself.
And therefore, the tongue in cheek, the test of time.
I want to emphasise the persistence, resilience resumption of this kind of a bust, not just in the sense of antiquity,
but certain forms of temporal reckoning that are, I believe, are at the heart of the lingering spectral and emotional quality of polio.
As the object of history, we cannot get rid of that. Now I'm going to place before you two examples of the ways in which.
The past appropriation of objects and artefacts might usefully perplex.
A simple narrative of spoliation that we are familiar with.
And I start, therefore with a Shokin's Ashokan pillars.
Think of the ocean pillars, which are a staple of undergraduate history textbooks that we have familiar with the pillars bearing
the edicts of the modern Emperor Ashoka made of sandstone quarried near the Camer Hills and Jeannot,
the Mirzapur district of U.P., a place that I visited many times, chiselled there and transported to various sites during the third century B.C.
Now, Sugar himself was a great appreciated if of past objects.
He, after all, dug up any number of structures and redistributed the relics across the Ashokan imperial landscape.
The the most famous of these pillars was the Allahabad pillar with the elaborate pillar inscription is not only bears a stroke,
his message to his subjects, but also the inscription of the fourth century Gupta imperial monarch, some of them.
And on top of that, the 17th century model, emperor Jahangir.
Reinstalled during Jong-Il's father, Akbar's reign from its original location to the great Ford on the Ganges overlooking the proud confluence.
Similarly, both the Delhi top rugby player that stands over the palace now in ruins, a philosopher according and the Daily Mirror below.
Both transported by rail cars and and then, of course, barges along the river during the 15th century by the very curious and perhaps.
Amateur scholar, historian of the time, the Delhi Sultan Feroz Shah,
who who has been lavishly praised by early British historians for his antiquarian impulses during the Tulip Dynasty.
Now this kind of palimpsest of successive regimes in terms of murals and inscriptions is very much for me within the purview of sodium.
But my question is that while we are so excited about the defacement of images and the and the appropriation of pillars,
why does not the success of the appropriation of these pillars invoke any kind of similar outrage?
And that is because, you know, we are in fact.
Sort of conditioned in some ways to think about different forms of appropriation as as different forms of national outrage.
And this goes back, in fact,
to the way in which some of the historians and scholars of architecture in British India also tried to figure and sort out good from bad polio.
To use a shorthand. I'm going to give you the example of Vincent Smith, who in the Atlantic society pages in a very,
very well known exposition on the Iron Pillar of Morality,
speculating on its origins and transportation to Delhi during the period of the Pollard dynasty.
And debating whether it was unthinkable the second or so on and so forth set the context for this architectural marvel.
By first describing the good of Minot as a kind of setting of the pillar and could ominous architectural sleight of hand.
Remember, he's describing the Iron Pillar, but then he is commenting also in the same breath on the on the courtyard of the winner.
He notes how the courtyard of the main structure was fashioned out of the pillars of Hindu enjoin temples, and I quote him.
These temples were with slight exception. Utterly overthrown.
So that one stone was not left upon another. This is quote unquote.
And then he says, goes on to say the ground on which the mosque stood was quote the original undisturbed platform of a Hindu temple.
And the court, again, Muhammad is left intact, the beautifully constructed double flooring resting on its massive rubble foundation.
And this is these these are very interesting words. What is fascinating about Smith's account is that the very same passages where he described
decries the crass appropriation of Hindu and Jain columns in the construction of the could not.
He also describes the installation of Ashokan pillars, as I said in Feroz Shah Kotla.
Again, branching off from the commentary of the island villa.
Varosha, as I said before, did not destroy a monument, but in in the routine act of Royal Prerogative simply repaired and reclaimed these pillars,
exhibiting a fine sense of antiquarian curiosity in this metaverse, I quote.
It's quite quite delightful. He acted, in fact.
In the same way as Kings of all ages.
And the immense pains he took to move the show because one of its from made up and Delhi,
some could go some way to Prague along the river in boats was and again here,
just like Napoleon and other princes who have taken similar troubles to quote,
obtain positions of Egyptian obelisk for the declarations of their capitals.
It's it's a small example from a particular historian, but I hope you can share my wonderment at this kind of.
Double notes of history. Now, famously, in the Jamie Masjid of connotes, again back to connote James Ferguson,
the domain of architectural historians of 19th century India insisted on certain rules of thumb
separating the elements of the Hindu from what he called the elements of the centre ascending style.
In the early mosques, he notes,
the Muslim rulers quote appropriated the remains of Jaina architecture to save themselves the trouble of erecting the whole
building from original materials vexed by the resulting jumble of what appeared as historically and artistically incompatible.
Ferguson's search for the exact seams,
the lines where the forms of Muslim and Hindu architecture had been joined had been clustered, had been sort of suture together.
Looking at the Jemmy Masjid in Karachi, the converted from a Hindu temple by Ibrahim Shahjahanpur in early 15th century.
Ferguson described it as quote Undoubtedly a giant temple rearranged on a plan similar to a mosque in Cairo.
The roof and dome are pure examples of giant architecture, so that quote, no trace of the Moorish style is seen internally.
He's not comparing this to the the guy who reads us, you know, Mamluk, the mass of the Sun.
He's comparing it directly to the Islamic architecture that's evident in and different mom looks at the looks of Cairo.
And the great could have been out near the roof and in less visible areas,
you know, noted the fragments of cross legged figures belonging to Jane Saints,
which she called a Hindu, remains an architecture here for for Ferguson, therefore presents.
The indisputable and visible reminder of Islamic conquest, Islamic triumph in Hindu adversity.
But equally importantly. The line drawn between India and Saudis sending not simply a technical demarcation of architectural style,
but in fact I would suggest the sign of incompatible histories.
Clearly marking one epoch from the other. So we move, in fact, in the same notes, in a different register to a certain kind of reckoning of time.
Then Bill Gazetteer published at the turn of the century because, you know,
this was one of the most widely read things in its chapter on Indian architecture distilling, Ferguson put it in this way.
Of course,
what is popularly known as set of Sydney architecture in this style was adopted by the Muhammed's when they became the ruling race in India.
So here, not the the word religion has been replaced by the word race.
This is exactly the kind of historical demarcation that was popularised by James
Dodd in his widely and widely popular annals of antiquities of Rajasthan,
much read, much admired,
where he wrote the definitive elegy of the death of the Great Britain of Jahan slain during the valiant fight against shop, including.
I've been working on a different project,
which is to say how big and Bengali historians and especially novelists before historians got absolutely smitten with Todd.
Todd, live lives as we know this already, I mean, Todd lives as well and alive in the in the passages and annals of Indian history even today.
Now we can see going back to Todd, and this takes us back to the beginning of the stock.
That Islamic conquerors had finally broken down the defence of India's Middle Kingdom and reached the supposed inner sanctum.
And the ultimate ignominy of this vanquishing was not just the fall of connotes.
But the desecration of the holy city of Varanasi or Benaras, which is very interesting in many ways.
After Varanasi fell to the Turks, there were quoting Tod scenes of devastation, plunder and massacre that lasted through the ages, laments Dodd.
One of the most celebrated passages, I'm sure you've read it before and called all that was sacred in religion and
celebrated in art was destroyed by these ruthless and barbarous invaders.
The what's sacred here has been replaced now with the idea of this, you know,
desecration and and history really as it as if as if this was a a land which had been shored up from the ravages of time and conquest,
but now open to spoliation, which is historically the opposite of what you know, at least Korus tells us.
In this and other instances, we see that in fact,
the history of Islamic conquest in Hindu defeat has already become a part of the historic antecedents of empire and colonial rule.
Integral to its own temporal succession, explanatory logic and historical muse.
Maybe you can even sometimes I'd like to think of it as a kind of historical picturesque.
With the ruins in place. I mean, think of the famous cartoon of James Daniel in the memo and the map of Hindustan,
where by the Brahmins are exchanging knowledge with Britannia.
This is the image that, well, you know this image, so I don't show it to you. There's always the temple is always there.
The very far distant.
And and that tells you something about the reminder of the of Hindu antiquity in a map of of of a newly emerged and ascendant company regime.
So the appropriation of Todd in the early nationalists historical imaginary about the enslaving invasion of India and the end of Hindu India.
The idea that the Turkish invaders denied Indians their rightful inheritance and most importantly,
the yearning for a far distant past where the Hindus were the sovereign subjects
of their history is plainly evident in the the writings of nationalists.
So I'm going to take you to one last vignette. And this is a very interesting character.
And you know who this is are said that distinguished Indian civil servant, congressman,
economic historian, one of the architects of the drain theory in that sense, a nationalist par excellence.
And maybe you know this, or maybe you have forgotten one of the earlier exponents of the historical novel in Bengali.
That was taken much with the history of the decline of the Rajput warriors of Western India and composed in early novel known as Rajput Jeevan Qanbar,
which translates as the twilight of Rajput life inspired by Colonel Todd.
By the way, this inspiration of Todd goes back to the young Bengal and the poets such as Michael Madhusudhan,
that the different people have written about how Todd was appropriated by the students of Henry Louis Vivian D'Orazio,
which is which makes interesting reading in itself, but maybe for another time.
This is inspired by Charles stirring passages, Rajput bravery against the bullets at the end of the novel.
If you ever look it up, that accepts a passage from Todd from the Annals of Antiquities of Rajasthan,
where he remarks on the valour and resistance of Rana Plaza of Moi,
who defied Akbar but and refused to surrender to the other forces and ran away on his favourite horse,
etc. as we knew I had to study in school book histories in India.
The, you know, the Indian fellas, as it were. In his novel and other novels celebrating the rise of Shivaji and the military
resurgence against Muslim rule in another novel and subsequent novel called.
And I'm not making this up, Maharashtra, given what the dawn of Maharashtrian life.
Dust describes the journey of Shivaji in this novel.
He is going to meet Aurangzeb Imperial Delhi, where he is thinking about joining Aurangzeb,
scored quite vexed by the fact that he has been invited by the Movile Rajputs.
Who have invited him to and his contemporaries, if one thing and people like that are part of this noble wrecking of the moguls, I as a Hindu join.
In a remarkable passage in which Shivaji is travelling.
In Old Delhi. Imagine this. And that speaks in everybody's voice as it were, and then describe Chavez's reckoning with Indian history.
And I want to just read that passage I've translated for you and I quote the entire way was full of the ruins of all Muslim palaces.
The first Muslims had established a capital near the old fort of B, who arrived with two large soon after having conquered Delhi.
And thus one can see the remnants of mosques, palaces and mausoleums have that spot.
And the world famous good of Minard was built here as well.
In course of time, newer emperors began to raise new palaces and residences for the north, and the city gradually began to spread north.
Shivaji could not count how many palaces, mosques and minarets, how many ruins of pillars and tombs he saw on the way.
As she traverses this landscape of ruins, readers of the novel are treated to a panoramic view of history,
and there are lakes and successions of the aspirants to the throne of Delhi of guns.
And though these laws, when Shivaji passes these tombs in cemeteries, is thoughts John predictably to the passage of historical time itself.
Well, coming from the Ford of Petteri to modern Delhi, not to what modern?
Shivaji felt as if the history of India had been inscribed on that very highway.
Each palace and each mansion where a page of a page of that history,
its symmetry and letter remorseless time was the historian or else why would history have been written in such a script?
Now, as the art historian Barry Flood has suggested.
Very, very provocatively, and interestingly, we need to reconsider iconoclasm, for instance, in a very different way.
The destruction of temples, not simply as a universal sign of conquest, destruction,
desecration, defacement or recycling or the redefinition of images and monuments.
But acts that must be understood within very specific historical and spatial contexts.
And this is a subject that we cannot enter into today because it my talk is really borrowing
from the work of historians of Somalia and occupations and historians of architecture.
I'm really musing on the possibilities of that kind of work and what what it
means for the way we think about historic historical time and temporal aspect.
The histories of conquest of war and spoliation are woven into the texture of Indian colonial and nationalist historiography in a very different way.
And the way they are woven into this historic currency, in fact, betray an underlying temporal.
Emotional affect and epochal consciousness.
Mere assertions of the complexity of historical agency in the various political minutiae of who defeated home and who took what from whom.
The defeats and conquest of regimes cannot therefore easily dislodge such a deeply ingrained imaginaries.
Because of the long antiquity and sort of history of the views of the past
that have animated the practise of Indian history over a long period of time.
Here today, I have indulged you and try to present a different way of thinking about polio.
Not just as desecration easy or patient, but as claims over the past itself.
Before we can change the terms of such reckoning of history, of antiquity, of age and epoch.
We need to understand the depth and complexity of the relationship between the IDF soldier and.
Time itself. And time by this, I don't mean necessarily historical time or chronology.
I mean, a certain kind of regime of temporality or regimes of temporality.
With that last part, I will open this two to two questions.
This is a very open ended. It's exploration I have.
Not moved on to visit, it could be easily be a corollary here to, you know, the the Elgin Marbles, you know,
the the reconstruction of the bottom stoop in the Imperial Museum, which today is the Indian Museum in Calcutta.
And I can see already chats people talking about that. Maybe, you know, that's that's something that we can discuss.
But the notes of the appropriation of the Archaeological Survey of India,
etc. are a little bit different from the way in which, you know, we have talked about.
The history of buildings in pre-colonial period.
But yeah, so that is all I have to say today, and I hope I have not offended anybody too much.