Combines historical, literary, art historical, and archaeological perspectives to explore the idea of the Hindu temple in the British colonial imagination.A History Today**'s 2024 Book of the Year**From 1800 onwards, the Hindu temple occupied a fragile and uneasy proximity to Imperial governance in India. The colonial state sought to regulate and extract the wealth of large temples. Imperial scholars classified the...

In 1498, when Vasco da Gama set foot in Kerala looking for Christians and spices, he unleashed a wave of political fury that would topple local powers like a house of cards. The cosmopolitan fabric of a vibrant trading society - with its Jewish and Arab merchants, Chinese pirate heroes and masterful Hindu Zamorins - was ripped apart, heralding an age of violence and bloodshed. One prince, however, emerged triumphant from this descent into chaos. Shrewdly marrying Western arms to Eastern st...

From Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen, a memoir about home, belonging, inequality, and identity, recounting a singular life devoted to bettering humanity.A towering figure in the field of economics, Amartya Sen is perhaps best known for his work on poverty and famine, as inspired by events in his boyhood home of West Bengal, India. But Sen has, in fact, called many places “home,” from Dhaka in modern Bangladesh to Trinity College, Cambridge. In Home in the World

This book is written as much for the general reader interested in India's antiquity and its pioneering archaeologists, as for students of the history of archaeology, colonialism, and constructions of the past. It breaks colonial archaeology down into its specific constituents and examines the ideas, impulses, tensions, and individual contributions that comprised early studies of India's ancient past. It focuses, at the outset, on the ideas and work of Alexander Cunningham, the first Director ...

I call myself a Nehruvian Indian [and] I like to think that the term "Nehruvian Indian" captures more than my own c.v.', says Ramachandra Guha in his Introduction to this sparkling collection of essays. His book is a meditation on how a large area of contemporary India's cultural and intellectual life has in fact been fashioned by exceptional individuals who have, in diverse ways, imbibed the spirit of liberalism, secularism, personal integrity and social commitment—values which Guha assoc...

How can the complexities of ancient India be comprehended? This book draws on a vast array of texts, inscriptions, archaeology, archival sources and art to delve into themes such as the history of regions and religions, archaeologists and the modern histories of ancient sites, the interface between political ideas and practice, violence and resistance, and the interactions between the Indian subcontinent and the wider world. It highlights recent approaches and ch...

The book focuses on Henry Irwin, a man who began his life in India as a PWD engineer and subsequently rose to the position of consulting architect to the government of Madras succeeding Robert Fellowes Chisholm, his predecessor in that office. Many of Irwins creations continue to dominate the Madras skyline and are held in high esteem by local denizens. However, the blatant hybridity of some of these monuments, coupled with the fact that they failed to reflect the attempt to legitimize col...

This work examines in detail the world of travelogues of a highly interesting culture-universe: the Bengali bhadralok. A travelogue is usually a crucial political/aesthetic text. Its very fabric is structured in space and power - it creates, relates, compares and contrasts spaces and powers. Bengalis travelling to Europe in the colonial period felt compelled to produce such texts. An analysis of these works from a historian's angle provides crucial windows to the colonised mind striving fo...

In the latter part of the nineteenth century,the royal status of Indian princes was under threat in what became a critical period of transition from traditional to imperial rule.Weakened by treaties concluded with the British earlier in the century,the rulers were subject to a concentrated campaign by British officials to turn palace life into a westernised construct of morality,rules and regulations.Young heirs to the throne were exposed to a western education to encourage their enthusias...

With a curation of objects from the prehistoric ages through twenty-first century India, Sudeshna Guha provides a panoramic view of the rich histories of the subcontinent. The incisive essays in this collection detail not just the objects but the histories of their reception: examining how changing times and attitudes cast their shadow on the ways in which the past is interpreted and narrated. In doing so, A History of India through 75 Objects inspires us to interrogate our own no...

C. P. Ramaswami Aiyar, famously known as C.P., was born in 1879 to a marriage that was a celebrated union of two leading Tamil Brahmin families. He became one of India’s greatest constitutional lawyers, a passionate general secretary of the Indian National Congress, a loyal dewan of the princely state of Travancore and vice-chancellor of two different universities simultaneously. In the midst of a lecturing tour at universities in London and Oxford in 1966, C.P. breathed his last. Inheriting ...

A leading scholar in early twentieth-century India, Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870–1958) was knighted in 1929 and became the first Indian historian to gain honorary membership in the American Historical Association. By the end of his lifetime, however, he had been marginalized by the Indian history establishment, as postcolonial historians embraced alternative approaches in the name of democracy and anti-colonialism. The Calling of History examines Sarkar's career—and poignant obsolesc...