Art history as it is largely practiced in Asia as well as in the West is a western invention. In India, works of art-sculptures, monuments, paintings-were first viewed under colonial rule as archaeological antiquities, later as architectural relics, and by the mid-20th century as works of art within an elaborate art-historical classification. Tied to these views were narratives in which the works figured, respectively, as sources from which to recover India's history, markers of a lost, antique civilization, and symbols of a nation's unique aesthetic, reflecting the progression from...

This book offers an analysis of the transformations that occurred in the art and aesthetic values of Bengal during the colonial and nationalist periods.

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...