Presentation by Tapati Guha-Thakurta

October 23 at 4:00 pm

Eldersveld Room, 5670 Haven Hall (505 S. State Street, Ann Arbor)

With a focus on Calcutta’s landmark monument – the most grandiose of the memorials to the Queen of all the ones built across the British imperial territories – this lecture addresses the theme of the end of empire through the persistence and proliferation of the genre of civic public statuary, its shifting cast of characters, and its movements across time and space. It is on the grounds of the Victoria Memorial – in the lingering shadows of a bygone empire – that a brood of imperial statues have found a safe haven, quietly living out their post-imperial lives of oblivion in a time and place where the empire is long gone but its hauntings remain.  In the recent past, we have seen how such hauntings of the past can suddenly return to a body of long-standing statues of American Confederate leaders, slave owners and imperialists, bringing on them the wrath of anti-white supremacist protests that began to rage across Western cities and universities during 2020. What the Black Lives Matter movement did was to return attention in India to the long-forgotten specimens of colonial statuary, mostly hidden away in remote locations of our cities – raising the issue again, after over 75 years of Independence, of their rights to remain in the spaces where they still stand. The afterlives of these relics of empire is a central theme of this lecture, as it explores various moments in the travels, dislocations and relocations of Calcutta’s imperial statues, while charting a small parallel history of Indian statue-making over these transitional decades of the last years of British rule and the coming of Independence.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta was educated at Presidency College, Calcutta University, and the University of Oxford. She is currently an Honorary Professor of History at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) and was its former Director from 2012 to 2017. She has written widely on the art and cultural history of modern India, and has held several visiting fellowships abroad. Her three main books are The Making of a New ‘Indian’ Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 1992) and Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (Columbia University Press, and Permanent Black, 2004), and In the Name of the Goddess: The Durga Pujas of Contemporary Kolkata (Delhi: Primus Books, 2015). She has also had a parallel career as exhibition curator and archivist, and has helped build a large digital image archive on the visual cultures of modern and contemporary Bengal at the CSSSC. She has co-edited three anthologies of essays – Theorising the Present: Essays for Partha Chatterjee (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011); New Cultural Histories of India: Materiality and Practices (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); and How Secular is Art? On the Politics of Art, History and Religion in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Among her other professional work is the preparation of a dossier on the Durga Pujas of Kolkata for the Ministry of Culture, Government of India, which has brought to the festival the coveted UNESCO inscription under its List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2021.