A History of India through 75 Objects

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Through a selection of things from prehistoric to modern-day India, this book encourages the appreciation of the complexity of History. It illustrates the logic of expecting many histories of a particular phenomenon and conveys the merit of evaluating the historical linkages we construct. Histories through objects, as it demonstrates, bring us to see the vast terrain of unknowns.

They present the immense value of collections and collecting practices for nurturing historical scholarship. The histories in the book convey the inordinate power of object worlds to analyse schemes of classification, acts of historicizing and projects of history- and heritage-making. In presenting the shifting valuation of things over time, they guide readers to see that a history is always in the making.

SUDESHNA GUHA is currently a professor in the department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University, India. She holds a Ph.D. in archaeology and has a long curatorial and teaching career at the University of Cambridge. She has built upon the scholarship of visual anthropology and ethnographies of material studies for analysing histories of archaeology and is at present developing research on histories of museums, collections and curatorial practices within South Asia. She has published widely, also on histories of heritage, and is the editor and contributor of The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Mapin/Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2011), and author of Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (SAGE, 2015).