Artefact shares root with artifice. Both are tethered together by an origin; art. It is no coincidence that the creation and proliferation of ‘art’ in the common European vernacular coincides with imperial conquest and plunder of the mid-eighteenth century. Inevitably, a binary companionship of the ‘artefact’ is necessitated. Several more oppositional classifications emerge: centre/periphery, ethnographiable/historifiable, civilised/savage, subject/object and so forth. Bernard S. Cohn notes a particular ‘Museological Modality’ of the British rule of India, which reinscribed the landscape as a ‘vast museum’ whose selective classification, aggregation, and extraction was perceived as the exigent anthropological and moral responsibility of the imperial state, to codify a history ‘for’ the colonised culture. Thus all that is of value exists behind the sanctity of the transparent vitrine. All that is left behind is no more than a vestige — a shadow theatre of the real. After all, the authentic has no disputed origins. It is singular in its severed state. Yet it circulates. It is transposed from margin to centre. And in this pilgrimage of sanctification, its enunciation within the museum, holds claim to the preservation not only of a site but to the absolute knowledges of a culture and a people that it yearns to contain.