New Cultural Histories of India - Materiality and Practices

Description

This book examines the new orientations in the writing of cultural histories of India from the pre-colonial and early modern period into the postcolonial and contemporary era. It analyses the 'materialist' turn through wide-ranging textual, visual, aural, ritual, and spatial resources like eighteenth-century scribal literature in western India, art deco architecture in twentieth century Calcutta, contemporary urban spaces, early illustrated Bengali almanacs, circulating heads in Naga hills, football in Calcutta's politics, performance and film-making studies in south India, and Mayawati's monuments in Lucknow. The essays examine how recent interdisciplinary studies have enriched our understanding of cultural pasts and presents. Providing an overview of the popular and public manifestations of cultures over time, this volume traces the distinct trajectory of cultural histories of India. It highlights the need for a more dynamic formulation of new cultural history of India in the present era of globalization. Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements INTRODUCTION Partha Chatterjee, Tapati Guha-Thakurta, and Bodhisattva Kar, “New Cultural Histories of In-dia: Materiality and Practices” I. THE TEXTUAL 1. Francesca Orsini, “For a Multilingual Literary History: North India in the Long Fifteenth Cen-tury” 2. Prachi Deshpande, “Scripting the Cultural History of Language: Modī in the Colonial Ar-chive” 3. Rosinka Chaudhuri, “Poet of the Present: The Material Object in the World of Iswar Gupta” II. THE VISUAL 4. Christopher Pinney, “The Look of History: The Power of the Aesthetic” 5. Kajri Jain, “The Handbag that Exploded: Mayawati’s Monuments and the Aesthetics of De-mocracy in Post-Reform India” 6. Tapati Guha-Thakurta, “Conceits of the Copy: Travelling Replicas of the Past and the Pre-sent” III. THE AURAL 7. Rajan Kurai Krishnan, “When Kathavarayan Spoke His Mind: The Intricate Dynamics of the Formations of the Political through Film Making Practices in Tamil Nadu” 8. Lakshmi Subramanian, “Music Revivals—Major and Minor: Studying the Politics of Perfor-mance in Modern South India” IV. THE RITUAL 9. Gautam Bhadra, “Pictures in Celestial and Worldly Time: Illustrations in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Almanacs” 10. Partha Chatterjee, “Football and Collective Identity in Colonial Calcutta” 11. Bodhisattva Kar, “Heads in the Naga Hills” V. THE SPATIAL 12. Swati Chattopadhyay, “‘Metro Pattern’: Art Deco Residences and Modern Visuality in Cal-cutta” 13. Sanjay Srivastava, “Urban spaces, Post-nationalism and the Making of the Consumer-Citizen in India” 14. Srirupa Roy, “When the Revolution is Televised: Reflections on Media, Civil Society and Power in Contemporary India” Notes on Contributors