How is heritage created? Both - conflicts and silences - have played their part in the making of India’s regional and national heritage following independence. Objects, including monuments, move in and out of many histories and often pose resistance to our efforts to make meaning of them. At our Online Talk #HeritageHistories, historian Sudeshna Guha highlights the importance of interrogating the practices and curation of heritage making through histories of museums, collections and the administration of archaeology. She reflects upon issues of ethics that implicate acts of heritagisation and recalls exhibitions that may be little-known, such as of Assyrian antiquities in 19th century Bombay.

About the speaker

Sudeshna Guha is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Shiv Nadar University (U.P.). She has recently written on ‘Decolonizing South Asia through Heritage- and Nation-building’ in Future Anterior (Winter 2019). Her latest monograph, provisionally titled ‘Object and Histories’, has been submitted for publication to Hachette India in April 2021.