Preface (The Rediscovery and Reception of Gandhāran Art)

Previous volumes of workshop proceedings for the Gandhāra Connections project have addressed themes of fundamental importance for understanding Gandhāran art in its ancient contexts: the chronology of the tradition, its regional geography, and the links between Gandhāra and the art of other parts of the ancient world. In this we chose to defer consideration of a topic that might be regarded as equally fundamental, indeed perhaps as ‘the elephant in the room’ in this field: the historiography and reception-history which has mediated our experience of Gandhāran art and determined its significance in the modern world. We are concerned here with two closely related aspects. By ‘rediscovery’ we mean primarily the history of Gandhāran archaeology (broadly defined). We are concerned partly with the early discovery and display of artefacts against the background of British rule in nineteenth-century India, at a time when the potential meaning of Gandhāran art was being constructed and debated. This is a story of pioneering expeditions, but also haphazard methods and often poor or non-existent documentation, ineffective efforts to stem the smuggling of antiquities, and the nascent development of Gandhāran art collecting. The ‘looting’ of Gandhāran artefacts, which has had such a ruinous effect on our understanding of Gandhāran art in context, has flourished almost since the outset, as the studies in this volume demonstrate, and the recent work of researchers in Pakistan aims to recover lost knowledge from recently confiscated antiquities as much as from the bureaucratic documents of a century ago.