Laurent GLATTLI

(Ph.D. fellow at Humboldt University)

National heritage for the new nation:

a post-independence history of the Archaeological Survey of India’s conservation policies

Discussant: Hilal Ahmed, (Associate Professor, CSDS). His last publication is Companion to Indian Democracy: Resilience, Fragility, Ambivalence (with P. R. deSouza and S. Alam, Routledge 2021)”

The session will be online via Zoom on 21 March 2022, 05:00 pm onwards:

https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84061344939?pwd=OVVRdXUwZGFia0ZUT3VpNWl5d2JQZz09

To get priority access in case of large affluence, kindly register to:
neeru.gohar@csh-delhi.com

Abstract:

Created under British rule to conduct archaeological excavations and protect historical monuments, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) became, after 1947, the caretaker of independent India’s ‘national’ heritage. But to what extent does ASI’s conservation policy reflect the epoch’s official vision of national history? Drawing from archival records from the 1960s, Laurent Glattli analyses the drivers of conservation policies and practices such as bureaucratic procedures, the selection criteria for ‘monuments,’ or ASI officers’ mental representations of what ‘heritage’ is, to show that the outputs reflect the difficulty to shed away the institution’s own colonial heritage.

Speaker:

Laurent Glattli is pursuing a Ph.D. at the Department of South Asian Studies, Humboldt University in Berlin since 2019, with support from the Berlin Senate and the German Academic Exchange Service. He is an alumnus of the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Toulouse, France, where he completed his B.A. in Political Sciences and his M.A. in International Relations in 2015. He then worked for think tanks in Mumbai and in Paris, before joining the French Embassy in India as a project manager for scientific and university cooperation. Laurent is now working on a history of heritage conservation policies in South Asia.

jt[dot]martelli[at]csh-delhi[dot]com

laurence[dot]gautier[at]csh-delhi[dot]com