Desiring India Representations Through British And French Eyes 1584 1857

Desiring India

Desiring India: Representations through British and French Eyes 1584-1857

The reception and construction of the image of India by the Western, in particular French, German and English travellers, writers and thinkers is the theme of this volume, a collection of twelve essays by academics from sundry parts of the globe. Giving a new twist to Indological, philological or postcolonial understanding of travel narratives, the authors here attempt to give fresh impetus to the discovery of India story from perspectives of cultural history, historiography, ethnography, material culture, economic modes of production, fictional travel, epistolary discourse, theatrical representation of widowhood, women in the Mutiny, feminist reading of the Mughal court, colonial painting and classical music. Circumscribed by the dates of the arrival of Ralph Fitch, the first English traveller and the Mutiny, the first War of Indian Independence this anthology revives an interest in the early modern to the colonial appropriation of India in the Western imaginary.

Religion and the City in India

This book offers fresh theoretical, methodological and empirical analyses of the relation between religion and the city in the South Asian context. Uniting the historical with the contemporary by looking at the medieval and early modern links between religious faith and urban settlement, the book brings together a series of focused studies of the mixed and multiple practices and spatial negotiations of religion in the South Asian city. It looks at the various ways in which contemporary religious practice affects urban everyday life, commerce, craft, infrastructure, cultural forms, art, music and architecture. Chapters draw upon original empirical study and research to analyze the foundational, structural, material and cultural connections between religious practice and urban formations or flows. The book argues that Indian cities are not ‘postsecular’ in the sense that the term is currently used in the modern West, but that there has been, rather, a deep, even foundational link between religion and urbanism, producing different versions of urban modernity. Questions of caste, gender, community, intersectional entanglements, physical proximity, private or public ritual, processions and prayer, economic and political factors, material objects, and changes in the built environment, are all taken into consideration, and the book offers an interdisciplinary analysis of different historical periods, different cities, and different types of religious practice. Filling a gap in the literature by discussing a diversity of settings and faiths, the book will be of interest to scholars to South Asian history, sociology, literary analysis, urban studies and cultural studies.