A Place for Utopia: Urban Designs from South Asia (Global South Asia)

Exploring several utopian imaginaries and practices, A Place for Utopia ties different times together from the early 20th century to the present, the biographical and the anthropological, the cultural and the conjunctional, South Asia, Europe, and North America. It charts the valency of "utopia" for understanding designs for alternative, occluded, vernacular, or emergent urbanisms in the last hundred years. Central to the designs for utopia in this book are the themes of gardens, children, spiritual topographies, death, and hope. From the vitalist urban plans of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes in India to the Theosophical Society in Madras and the ways in which it provided a context for a novel South Indian garden design; from the visual, textual, and ritual designs of Californian Vedanta from the 1930s to the present; to the spatial transformations associated with post-1990s highways and rapid transit systems in Bangalore that are shaping an emerging "Indian New Age" of religious and somatic self-styling, Srinivas tells the story of contrapuntal histories, the contiguity of lives, and resonances between utopian worlds that are generative of designs for cultural alternatives and futures.

History

Srinivas, Smriti

Asia

University of Washington Press

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Established in the middle of the sixteenth century, Bangalore has today become a center for high-technology research and production, the new "Silicon Valley" of India, with a metropolitan population approaching six million. It is also the site of the very popular annual performance called the "Karaga" dedicated to Draupadi, the polyandrous wife of the heroes of the pan-Indian epic of the Mahabharata.Through her analysis of this performance and its significance for the sense of the civic in Bangalore, Smriti Srinivas shows how constructions of locality and globality emerge from existing cultural milieus and how articulations of the urban are modes of cultural self-invention tied to historical, spatial, somatic, and ritual practices. The book highlights cultural practices embedded in urbanization, and moves beyond economistic arguments about globalization or their reliance on the European polis or the American metropolis as models.Drawing from urban studies, sociology, anthropology, performance studies, religion, and history, Landscapes of Urban Memory greatly expands our understanding of how the civic is constructed.

Landscapes of Urban Memory: The Sacred in India's Silicon Valley

Univ. of Minnesota Press

This book offers an account of the Sai Baba movement as a pathway for charting the varied cartographies, sensory formations, and cultural memories implicated in urbanization and globalization.It is based on ethnographic research carried out in India, Kenya, and the US.

In the Presence of Sai Baba: Body, City, and Memory in a Global Religious Movement (Numen Book Series, 118)

World

Brill Academic Pub

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Books by Srinivas, Smriti