Culture-keeping as State Action: Bureaucrats, Administrators, and Monuments in Colonial India

Late Victorian and Edwardian preservationist lobbies in early twentieth-century Britain, keen to put pressure on the government to become more actively involved in preserving Britain’s ancient monuments, were not unsatisfied with the way such matters were being dealt with in Britain’s premier colony, India. Christiana Herringham, the noted Edwardian art copyist and member of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), who visited India in 1906, reported, ‘(as) I saw a great deal of what has been done recently by the Archaeological Department there during a journey last winter…, I should like to express my pleasure at finding that the neglect of which the English have often been accused is becoming rapidly a thing of the past’. 1 On the newly enacted Ancient Monument Preservation Act (AMPA) of 1904, 2 the art historian Gerard Baldwin Brown remarked: ‘It is noteworthy that it is fully equipped with clauses, prohibitions, and penal sanctions, of which people in the mother country are so shy.’ 3 While much work still needed to be done, what preservationists found worthy of note in India was something that Britain seemed to lack: an energetic state, unequivocally committed to the preservation of the country’s ancient architectural heritage. Most importantly, it was a state driven by a sense of public duty, free of the need to protect private property, which so hindered the state’s effectiveness in preserving Britain’s historic architecture.