Indian Architecture In Postcards

Focusing on a private collection of 60 postcards of modern architecture in Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai and Agra, the contributors to this volume explore the many dimensions of modern architecture in India from the 1890s to the 1970s and share their own perspective on these objects. Experts on architectural history and visual studies, as well as postcard collectors provide new insights into a territory and its architectural heritage which is still largely unknown in Europe, and reflect on the postcard as a medium for historical research.

Combining ethnographic and archival research, this book examines the lives of colonial-period postcards and reveals how they become objects of contemporary historical imagination in India. Picture postcards were circulated around the world in their billions in the early twentieth century and remained, until the advent of social media, unmatched as the primary means of sharing images alongside personal messages. This book, based on original research in Bengaluru, shows that their lives stretch from their initial production and consumption in the early 1900s into the present where they act as visual and material mediators in postcolonial productions of history, locality, and heritage against a backdrop of intense urban change. The book will be of interest to photographic historians, visual anthropologists, and art historians.

“Eschewing simple formulation of power's dependence on display, Saloni Mathur offers a brilliantly original disentangling of the anxious and involuted attempts to manage India as an 'aesthetic' project. Her account is rich in archival research, theoretically elegant, and exceptionally engrossing. With remarkable clarity, it opens colonial rule's 'cultural techniques' to a new set of illuminating questions.”—Christopher Pinney, author of Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India “India by Design is an elegant and precise book, remarkable for its conciseness and clarity. Taking a transnational perspective and deftly engaging postcolonial theory, Mathur explores not only the representations but also the representational practices that shaped imperial, colonial, and postcolonial relations.”—Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, author of Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage “Saloni Mathur's book is a gathering of rare gifts and talents. With the subtle, searching eye of an expert curator, and the analytic skills of a fine scholar, Mathur explores the diverse scales and conflicting values of colonial design and discourse, arts and crafts. Monumental histories of museums are placed beside the petits recits of post-cards; the picturesque Victorian portraiture of Indian life makes a fine contrast with the celebration of 'modern' Indian art in the diasporic world of non-resident Indians. Always open to the lure and pleasure of Imperial display and spectacle, Mathur is equally astute about its underlying strategies of surveillance and subordination. This remarkable work is deeply engaged in the mechanics and mediations of Imperial authority and its visual signs.”—Homi Bhabha, Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University "Saloni Mathur manages to bring together remarkably diverse strands that make up the contemporary visual cultures of India and provide insights for art historians, anthropologists and cultural theorists alike. India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display illuminates issues that are long overdue but hardly ever addressed in the art historical circles. Mathur's command of theory is truly impressive, but even more noteworthy are her insights about Indian modernity and colonial and post-colonial institutions in and outside of the country."—Vishakha N. Desai, President, Asia Society

Take a journey through Indian architecture from the dawn of civilization to the present with this colorful, attractive survey. The architecture of India reflects both the cultural diversity of the subcontinent and its rich political and historical inheritance. In this guide, the various strands of this rich architectural history, from the dawn of civilization to modern times, are beautifully presented in word and picture. Readers are taken on a fascinating tour of Indus Valley civilization, early Vedic traditions, Hindu, Jain, Mughal, regional, colonial and post-independence architectural styles. Themes such as water architecture and the architecture of science also figure prominently, giving many westerners their first glimpse of these styles. The informative text, complemented by 400 photographs, watercolors, maps and plans, provide compelling evidence of India's influence on building design throughout history.

* The book provides a glimpse of the visual history of India at the beginning of the industrial travel era, a hundred years back* Explore the geographic diversity of 130+ cities through 550 picture postcards of pre-Partition India* The book contains a detailed catalogue of the printers, photographers and publishers of the first picture postcards of IndiaWith the dawn of the twentieth century, at the height of the British Empire, came significant changes in the landscape of India - formation of new capital cities in the plains and summer retreats in the hills, evolution of towns or nagores and pores, growth of cantonment towns with their military and civil lines, development of ports or pattanams and creation of cultural, educational and trading centers, all increasingly well connected by an extensive rail, road and, later on, air network. The 550 postcards featured in this book visually document this growth, while also capturing evidence of earlier times in India's fascinating polytemporal towns. The postcards are divided across six chapters representing six regions within India and Pakistan, as they were a hundred years ago. Through these picture postcards and the supporting text, the readers can vividly imagine what it would have been like to travel by road or rail across India during the period 1896-1947. An attractive and nostalgic record of the topography of the time, these picture postcards are an untapped resource for those interested in the evolution of cities, town planning, architecture, ethnography, sociology or, simply, travel.

Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities presents exciting new perspectives on modern colonial regimes to researchers and students in gender studies, history and cultural studies.

Postcards, individually and collectively, contain a great deal of information that can be of real value to students and researchers. Postcards in the Library gives compelling reasons why libraries should take a far more active and serious interest in establishing and maintaining postcard collections and in encouraging the use of these collections. It explains the nature and accessibility of existing postcard collections; techniques for acquiring, arranging, preserving, and handling collections; and ways to make researchers and patrons aware of these collections. Postcards in the Library asserts that, in most cases, existing postcard collections are a vastly underutilized scholarly resource. Editor Norman D. Stevens urges librarians to help change this since postcards, as items for mass consumption and often with no apparent conscious literary or social purpose, are a true reflection of the society in which they were produced. Stevens claims that messages written on postcards may also reveal a great deal about individual and/or societal attitudes and ideas. Chapters in Postcards in the Library are written by librarians who manage postcard collections, postcard collectors, and researchers. Some of the authors have undertaken major research projects that demonstrate the ways in which postcards can be used in research, and that have begun to establish a standard methodology for the analysis of postcards. They write about: major postcard collections, including the Institute of Deltiology and the Curt Teich Postcard Archives the use of postcards for scholarly research postcard conservation and preservation, arrangement and organization, and importance and value Postcards in the Library describes the postcard collections in a variety of libraries of different kinds and sizes and indicates very real ways in which the effective use of postcard collections can result in and contribute to substantive, scholarly publications. It also offers advice and suggestions on the myriad issues that libraries face in handling these ephemeral fragments of popular culture. Special collections librarians, postcard collectors, postcard dealers, and historical societies will find the information in Postcards in the Library refreshing and practical. Libraries with established postcard collections or those thinking about developing postcard collections will use it as a valuable planning tool and start-to-finish guide.