India's Fabled City

India's Fabled City PDF Author: Stephen Markel
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This work presents imperial Lucknow's sophisticated synthesis of styles, histories and beliefs melded into its distinct artistry. It includes essays by scholars on several aspects of Lucknow's cultural heritage.

India's Fabled City

India's Fabled City PDF Author: Stephen Markel
Publisher: Prestel Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
This work presents imperial Lucknow's sophisticated synthesis of styles, histories and beliefs melded into its distinct artistry. It includes essays by scholars on several aspects of Lucknow's cultural heritage.

The Visual Turn

The Visual Turn PDF Author: Sandria Freitag
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317541138
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
The Visual Turn: South Asia Across the Disciplines explores new perspectives made possible by the evidence drawn from visual culture. This evidence is utilized by historians, literary analysts, anthropologists and, in a new way, art historians. Focusing on built environments within their urban contexts; the interactions of buildings, roads, and bodies; the meaning-making achieved through consumption of images (on their own or in concert with literary texts) all contribute to a much broader and deeper understanding of change in South Asia. Juxtaposed, these case studies not only approach their topics in a multi-disciplinary manner, but also make clear just what scholars from various disciplines can learn from each other to add nuance and depth to their own analyses. In the process, the authors demonstrate how the application of different methods and theorizing, when coupled with a fascinating range of types of evidence, contribute to a significant broadening of our abilities to interpret the past and the present. In particular, these essays bring new ways of thinking about cities as well as the multiple ways that visual culture contributes to individual and collective forms of identity-narratives that are negotiated at key moments of change in South Asia. Readers will see their own materials and historicized contexts with new eyes. This book was published as a special issue of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies.

Mumbai Fables

Mumbai Fables PDF Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069114284X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Starting from the catastrophic floods and terrorist attacks of recent years, Prakash reaches back to the sixteenth-century Portuguese conquest to reveal the stories behind Mumbai's historic journey. Examining Mumbai's role as a symbol of opportunity and reinvention, he looks at its nineteenth-century development under British rule and its twentieth-century emergence as a fabled city on the sea. Different layers of urban experience come to light as he recounts the narratives of the Nanavati murder trial and the rise and fall of the tabloid Blitz, and Mumbai's transformation from the red city of trade unions and communists into the saffron city of Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena. Starry-eyed planners and elite visionaries, cynical leaders and violent politicians of the street, land sharks and underworld dons jostle with ordinary citizens and poor immigrants as the city copes with the dashed dreams of postcolonial urban life and lurches into the seductions of globalization. --

The Mythic Indian

The Mythic Indian PDF Author: James Boucher
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040017339
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The Mythic Indian: The Native in French and Québécois Cultural Imaginaries charts a genealogy of French and Québécois visions of the Amerindian. Tracing an evolution of paradigms from the sixteenth century to present, it examines how the myths of the Noble, Ignoble, and Ecological Savage as well as the Vanishing Indian and Going Native inform a variety of discourses and ways of thinking about Québécois culture. By analyzing mythic depictions of the Native Figure that originate at first contacts, this book demonstrates that an inextricable link exists between discourses as disparate as literature and science. This book will be of interest to scholars in French Studies, Francophone Studies, Indigenous Studies, Hemispheric Studies, Social Sciences, and Literary Studies.

Last King in India

Last King in India PDF Author: Rosie Llewellyn-Jones
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1849045356
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
The Last King in India is the story of an extraordinary man whose memory still divides opinion sharply today. Was he, as the British described him, a debauched ruler who spent his time with "fiddlers, eunuchs and women' instead of running the kingdom? Or, as most Indians believe, a gifted poet whose works are still quoted today, and who was robbed of his throne by the East India Company? Somewhere in between the two extremes lies a complex character: a man who married over 350 women, directed theatrical events lasting a month, and built a fairytale palace in Lucknow. Wajid Ali Shah was written out of the history books after his kingdom was annexed in 1856. Some even thought he had been killed during the mutiny the following year. But he lived on in Calcutta where he spent the last thirty years of his life trying to recreate his lost paradise. He remained a constant problem for the government of India, with his extravagance, his menagerie and his wives-in that order. For the first time his story is told here using original documents from Indian and British archives and meetings with his descendants.

The Place of Many Moods

The Place of Many Moods PDF Author: Dipti Khera
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691201846
Category : ART
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
"India retains one of the richest painting traditions in the history of global visual culture, one that both parallels aspects of European traditions and also diverges from it. While European artists venerated the landscape and landscape paintings, it is rare in the Indian tradition to find depictions of landscapes for their sheer beauty and mood, without religious or courtly significance. There is one glorious exception: Painters from the city of Udaipur in Northwestern India specialized in depicting places, including the courtly worlds and cities of rajas, sacred landscapes of many gods, and bazaars bustling with merchants, pilgrims, and craftsmen. Their court paintings and painted invitation scrolls displayed rich geographic information, notions of territory, and the bhāva, or feel, emotion, and mood of a place. This is the first book to use artistic representations of place to trace the major aesthetic, intellectual, and political shifts in South Asia over the long eighteenth century. While James Tod, the first British colonial agent based in Udaipur, established the region's reputation as a principality in a state of political and cultural deterioration, author Dipti Khera uses these paintings to suggest a counter-narrative of a prosperous region with beautiful and bountiful cities, and plentiful rains and lakes. She explores the perspectives of courtly communities, merchants, pilgrims, monks, laypeople, and officers, and the British East India Company's officers, explorers, and artists. Throughout, she draws new conclusions about the region's intellectual and artistic practices, and its shifts in political authority, mobility, and urbanity"--

Cosmopolitan Dreams

Cosmopolitan Dreams PDF Author: Jennifer Dubrow
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824872703
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
In late nineteenth-century South Asia, the arrival of print fostered a dynamic and interactive literary culture. There, within the pages of Urdu-language periodicals and newspapers, readers found a public sphere that not only catered to their interests but encouraged their reactions to featured content. Cosmopolitan Dreams brings this culture to light, showing how literature became a site in which modern daily life could be portrayed and satirized, the protocols of modernity challenged, and new futures imagined. Drawing on never-before-translated Urdu fiction and prose and focusing on the novel and satire, Jennifer Dubrow shows that modern Urdu literature was defined by its practice of self-critique and parody. Urdu writers resisted the cultural models offered by colonialism, creating instead a global community of imagination in which literary models could freely circulate and be readapted, mixed, and drawn upon to develop alternative lines of thinking. Highlighting the participation of readers and writers from diverse social and religious backgrounds, the book reveals an Urdu cosmopolis where lively debates thrived in newspapers, literary journals, and letters to the editor, shedding fresh light on the role of readers in shaping vernacular literary culture. Arguing against current understandings of Urdu as an exclusively Muslim language, Dubrow demonstrates that in the late nineteenth century, Urdu was a cosmopolitan language spoken by a transregional, transnational community that eschewed identities of religion, caste, and class. The Urdu cosmopolis pictured here was soon fractured by the forces of nationalism and communalism. Even so, Dubrow is able to establish the persistence of Urdu cosmopolitanism into the present and shows that Urdu’s strong tradition as a language of secular, critical modernity did not end in the late nineteenth century but continues to flourish in film, television, and on line. In lucid prose, Dubrow makes the dynamic world of colonial Urdu print culture come to life in a way that will interest scholars of modern Asian literatures, South Asian literature and history, cosmopolitanism, and the history of print culture.

Wonder of the Age

Wonder of the Age PDF Author: John Guy
Publisher: Metropolitan Museum of Art
ISBN: 1588394301
Category : Painters
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Published in conjunction with an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Sept. 28, 2011-Jan. 8, 2012.

Banaras Reconstructed

Banaras Reconstructed PDF Author: Madhuri Desai
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295741619
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
Between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries, Banaras, the iconic Hindu center in northern India that is often described as the oldest living city in the world, was reconstructed materially as well as imaginatively, and embellished with temples, monasteries, mansions, and ghats (riverfront fortress-palaces). Banaras’s refurbished sacred landscape became the subject of pilgrimage maps and its spectacular riverfront was depicted in panoramas and described in travelogues. In Banaras Reconstructed, Madhuri Desai examines the confluences, as well as the tensions, that have shaped this complex and remarkable city. In so doing, she raises issues central to historical as well as contemporary Indian identity and delves into larger questions about religious urban environments in South Asia.

Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes along the Silk Road and beyond

Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes along the Silk Road and beyond PDF Author: Hans de Zeeuw
Publisher: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd
ISBN: 1789691702
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
This book is divided into two main parts: ‘The Tanbûr Tradition’ discusses the origin, history, construction and playing techniques of tanbûrs; ‘The Tanbûr Family’ focusses on long-necked lutes as a family of musical instruments. After a short introduction, the construction, playing technique, and musical traditions are discussed.