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Conference Reports
place as it revolved around the region-centred claims to the collections
of the Bihar Sharif museum in colonial eastern India vis-à-vis
the ‘greater’ claims of the Indian Museum, established by the colonial
state for pan-Indian collections.
The second panel, called ‘Fractured Canons: Heritage Con ser -
vation in Colonial Contexts’, which was chaired by Sudeshna Guha
(Cambridge), engaged with how European knowledge was called into
question in the colonies. Fenneke Sysling (VU, Amsterdam) focused
on the expeditions undertaken to Dutch New Guinea be tween 1903
and 1936 in order to aid research in physical anthropology seeking to
show how the Papuan past and present were rewritten through racial
science. At the same time, she showed how local practice intervened
in the production of notions of human heritage. Indra Sengupta (GHI,
London) dwelt on the manual for conservation of ancient buildings
written by the Director of Archaeology in India, John Marshall, and
published in 1923. She stressed that the manual needed to be read not
only as a colonial text, but also as a work that was produced in the
entangled history of metropole and colony, which sought both to
reflect and define the local at a time when notions of preservation of
heritage were increasingly acquiring a universal character.
The post-lunch session, ‘Managing “Alien” Pasts’, chaired by
Holger Hoock (Liverpool), consisted of a panel that engaged with the
role, functions, and self-perception of the bureaucracy as guardians
of what they self-consciously perceived as an ‘alien’ past. Michael S.
Dodson (Indiana/Bloomington) in his analysis of the historical
preservation of small-town North India (Jaunpur) referred to what he
described as the ‘spatial imagination’ of colonial governance and the
bureaucracy, which was caught in the tension between the aesthetics
of monumentality and urban preservation on the one hand and the
realities of North Indian city life on the other. In the realization of
their ideas on a day-to-day basis, colonial officials had to operate at a
highly localized level, dependent as they were on the consensus of a
wide range of local actors. E. Taylor Atkins (Northern Illinois) spoke
of the paradoxical effects of the curatorial practices of the Japanese
colonial bureaucracy in Korea: the very same notion of Korean heritage
that was created by Japanese colonialism for its own political
ends was used in independent Korea to define its national past. Lucia
Gunning (London) looked at the links between the activities of
Foreign Office officials in the Aegean and the growth of the British
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