Blending Travelogue, History, and Archaeology

From the emplacement of the Ashoka chakra to the Indian national flag to the installation of the Sengol in the newly constructed building of the Indian Parliament, we seem to have come full circle in the politics of memorialization. Notwithstanding our personal aesthetic preferences for the way such politics is played or even our deeper concerns about the underlying intentions behind symbolic projections, there is no doubt that memorialization and its political agenda is inevitably built into large state building and social projects. That this was the case even in the hoary past is the story that Nayanjot Lahiri’s Searching for Ashokatells.