In Search of the Sacred and Antique in Colonial India

Urban landscapes in nineteenth-century colonial India were constituted through transformations in perception as well as a shift in the ways identities were constructed. The emergence of colonial knowledge resulted in newer temporalities that accompanied the development of positivist historical perspectives. Intimately connected to an emerging national consciousness, such reorganization was neither devoid of parochial interests nor free from ambivalence. The term “colonial knowledge” refers to a set of ideas and practices derived through conditions of colonial modernity, and it has been applied to societies such as those in the Indian subcontinent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Cohn 1996). As a number of scholars have recently shown, such knowledge was jointly produced by the British and by Indians. Some Indians participated in this process as “native” informants and assistants (Trautmann 2009). Others were scholars who conceptualized new notions of the Indian nation, its constituencies and its pasts (Guha-Thakurta 2004; Chatterjee 1993).