To ‘tear the mask off the face of the past’: Archaeology and politics in Jammu and Kashmir Mridu Rai Yale University This article examines the historical and political course followed by a colonial discipline, namely the British-initiated archaeological project, as it was extended to the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir in the early twentieth century. It examines how and in what circumstances colonial archaeology was adopted both by the Dogra-Hindu rulers and their preponderantly Muslim subjects in this indirectly governed part of the British Indian Empire. This article argues that the adoption of this project emanated not so much from interest in the discipline of archaeology qua discipline, but in its ancillary political effects. It demonstrates that whereas the Hindu princely rulers modified colonial archaeology in ways that could enable them to use it buttress their sovereignty, their Kashmiri Muslim subjects appropriated it to strip the legitimacy off that very sovereignty. In the process, this article also highlights the capacity of various indigenous actors to recast aspects of colonial projects to serve their own several purposes. Introduction On 6 December 1992, when Hindu nationalists hammered down to rubble in full public view a sixteenth-century mosque in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, it might have seemed that the British colonial project of archaeological conservation had also been decisively dismantled. The justification offered for the destruction of this particular mosque, built in 1528 by Mir Baqi, a general of the first Mughal emperor Babur (ruled 1526–30), was the ‘righting’ of a historical wrong. 1 Hindu supremacists insist that Babur’s general had destroyed a temple marking the birthplace of the Hindu God Ram to yield room for the mosque. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46, 3 (2009): 401–426 SAGE Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC DOI: 10.1177/001946460904600306 1 Elst, Ayodhya and after, pp. 20–35. at PUNJAB UNIVERSITY on May 11, 2016 ier.sagepub.com Downloaded from