The Medieval Hindu temples of Puri, Rhubaneswar and Konark are promoted as Orissa's version of northern India's ‘Golden Triangle’ of Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Jaipur. One of the less affluent States in India, Orissa stands to benefit from tourism (FIGURE 1). The promotion seeks to appeal to all Indians and foreigners and also to prompt an image of Orissa as a distinct region. Such duality is typical among the diversity of community, ethnic, communal, federalist and national values at issue in India (Chatterjee 1993: 75).

Cultivation of the temples is nothing new. Whatever the original purposes of icons, significance is ascribed, not simply inherent. It depends on economic or political interest and context (Cohen 1985). Harrison (1999) has argued that images of ethnicity tend to be defended as if at risk of pollution or theft by outsiders. Under the influence of European ideology, the commonest symbol for ethnic or nationalist aspiration is language but religion and other markers of culture have been used too (Smith 1981). Other than religion, one of the criteria for invoking the temples is the discipline of archaeology. However, archaeology too is a Western conceptual idiom (Cohn 1983: 209). Although literacy — including in the ‘English medium’ — is spreading, archaeology is not appreciated by everyone in Orissa. Partly for that reason, there have been various views as to how the temples should be presented and to whom.

‘How is it that your countrymen steal our gods?’ asked a Brahmin of the Baptist missionary, John Chamberlain who noted the details of this conversation in his diary on 20 November 1817 (Davis 1997: 164):

After the destruction of Ayodhya's Babri mosque in 1992 by supporters of the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), the statement above seems laden with premonition of the events to come (Rao 1994). More importantly, Carnegy’s comments highlight that the mosque’s destruction was not simply the result of 20th-century politics. The events surrounding and following the outbreak of violence in 1992 have resulted in more ‘spilt ink’ than Carnegy could ever have imagined. This literature can be divided into two main categories; firstly, the initial documentation submitted to the government by a group of VHP aligned historians, which presented the ‘archaeological proof’ that the Babri mosque had occupied the site of a Hindu temple dating to the 10th and 11th century AD (VHP1990; New Delhi Historical Forum 1992). This was believed to have marked the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama (hence the name Rama Janmabhumi — literally ‘birthplace of Rama’), and been demolished at the orders of the Mughal emperor Babur during the 16th century. As a response, a second group of ‘progressive’ Indian historians began a counter-argument, based on the same ‘archaeological proof’ that no such temple had ever existed (Gopal et al. 1992; Mandal 1993). The second category is a growing body of literature which has filled many pages of international publications (Rao 1994; Navlakha 1994). Especially following the World Archaeology Congress (WAC) in Delhi (1994), and subsequently in Brač, Croatia (1998), this has been preoccupied with finding an acceptable route through the battlefield which arises as a result of the problematic, but recurrent, marriage between archaeology, folklore and politics (Kitchen 1998; Hassan 1995).

For a developing nation, Bangladesh has a surprisingly large number of active archaeological excavations and museums. Resources have been invested not only in the capital city of Dhaka, but also in regional centres where there are archaeological museums and sites open for public visitation. These venues, identified by politicians and philosophers as the repositories for symbols of heritage and national identity, provide another significant benefit in the form of open public space for recreation and leisure. The use of these spaces by growing numbers of urban-dwelling Bangladeshis illustrates the often under-appreciated phenomenon of domestic tourism as a component of archaeological heritage management in developing nations.

There are competing, yet interlinked, identities in Sri Lanka through which people ‘establish, maintain, and protect a sense of self-meaning, predictability, and purpose’ (Northrup 1989: 55). These have become established over hundreds of years, and communities are attributed labels including Sinhala, Tamil, Vadda, Buddhist and Hindu (Coningham & Lewer 1999: 857). Sri Lanka is now experiencing what Azar (1990) has called a ‘protracted social conflict’, wherein a section of the Tamil communities led by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) are engaged in a struggle to establish a Tamil honieland or Eelam. International links, especially with south India, have had important implications on the formation of identities in Sri Lanka. Here we will focus on a key influence which has deep archaeological and political implications, whose interpretation has informed and distorted the present understanding of the concept and evolution of identities. This theme, the Vijayan colonization of the island, illustrates the formulation of identities, especially as derived from a historical chronicle, the Mahavamsa, which was ‘rediscovered’ by colonial officials in AD 1826 and has played a major role in determining the dynamics of this conflict.