A Concise History Of Modern India

Thomas R. Metcalf

Barbara Daly Metcalf

Concise History of India

Barbara D. Metcalf

History

Cambridge University Press

"An Imperial Vision" explores the relationship between culture and power as revealed in the architectural forms the British used in their buildings in India between 1830 and 1930. It illustrates how, in the years after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the British gradually acquired a vision of themselves as something more than conquerors. In the author's view they saw themselves as legitimate rulers linked directly to the Mughals and so to India's past. This assumed connection was the origin of the distinctive "Indo-Saracenic" architectural form as well as other imperial styles. The author contends that from the great monuments of New Delhi to obscure structures in remote towns up country what the British built in stone reflected political decisions they had made as imperial rulers. For over 50 years such architecture helped sustain a new ideology of empire. But, by the 1920s the vision and the power that had upheld the Raj begun to slip away, in spite of the massive building projects Lutyens and Baker were bringing to fruition in the plains of Delhi.

An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj

Arts & Photography

Architecture

Faber&Faber

<p>Prof. Metcalf has updated this anthology to include new scholarship which became available since the 1971 first edition.  It still addresses the key questions: How Indians shaped for themselves a distinctive culture & how the British rule shaped that past afresh; the elements that formed the enduring structures of Indian society; the nature of the transformation set in motion by British colonial rule & the vision of the future, as expressed by Indians, as they sought to refashion a society free from the bonds of colonialism.</p>

Modern India

Americas

Stosius Inc/Advent Books Division

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Books by Thomas R. Metcalf