Relics in Transition: Material Mediations in Changing Worlds

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of reading the shifts in locations of objects as processes of translation and change in art history. The study focuses on the journeys and material reconstitutions of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics as they travelled from an archaeological site in British India, Piprahwa Kot, to a new relic temple in Bangkok, the capital of the Kingdom of Siam (Thailand), during the late nineteenth century. Mapping the shifting locations of the Piprahwa relics across changing geographical, institutional, cultural, and political spaces, the paper traces the changing materiality and multiple identities that accrued around these objects. This study does not ascribe these new identities of Buddhist relics solely to the "inventive" capacity of the cultural politics of British colonialism. Rather, it seeks to bring out the complexities of antiquarian collecting and market, connoisseurship, display, and scholarship; rituals of state diplomacy; and religious reclamations across transnational Southern Buddhist worlds, as constitutive of the new and multiple identities of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics.