What is the most popular contribution of sanchi to the twentieth century of iconography?
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This essay considers the many lives of the ancient Buddhist stupa complex at Sanchi, tracing its transformations from a disused ruin and a site of ravage and pilferage to one of the best-preserved standing stupa complexes of antiquity. It engages with nineteenth-century histories of Sanchi's passage from discovered and excavated relic to portable object and image, exploring some of the processes of its imaging, replication, display, and documentation that preceded and paralleled the intense spurt of photography at the site, highlighting the tightening institutional grip of the colonial state and the intensification of the practices of archaeological repair, conservation, and care, culminating in the ‘Marshall era’. Contending claims for control and custody attended the politics of the possession and resacralization of the site, intensifying the vortex of secular and sacred, archaeological and devotional consecrations that accompanied Sanchi's transition from a colonial to a national monument. In conclusion, Sanchi's travels and afterlives are explored as a secular architectural form and consecrated religious monument, within and outside the nation, in postcolonial and contemporary times.