Sumathi Ramaswamy
Showing all 7 books
Why and how did debates about the form and disposition of our Earth shape our sense of selves and being in the world in colonial modernity? Sumathi Ramaswamy explores this question for British India with the aid of the terrestrial globe, which since the sixteenth century has circulated as a worldly symbol, a scientific instrument, and not least, as an educational tool for inculcating planetary consciousness.
In Terrestrial Lessons, Ramaswamy provides the first ...
Husain’s Raj forefronts the ludic quality in the work of Maqbool Fida Husain, postcolonial India’s most iconic modernist and also arguably its most playful.The book focuses on a series of paintings in which the artist offers a postcolonial visual commentary on the erstwhile colonial world in which he had been born and raised. These works are densely packed with objects and people (British and native, high and low, male and female) and some animals as ...
'This book brings to the reader the best of Tasveerghar, a trans-national digital network of South-Asian popular visual culture. A visual treat, the book is a collection of the 'popular' forms of art, which include posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisement and other forms of street and bazaar art. Presenting 'other' kinds of art, the kinds that exist outside art-galleries, Tasveerghar provides an insight into the ...
This book brings to the reader the best of Tasveerghar, a trans-national digital network of South-Asian popular visual culture. A visual treat, the book is a collection of the popular forms of art which include posters, calendar art pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings advertisement and other forms of street and bazaar art. Presenting other kinds of art, the kinds that exist outside art-galleries Tasveerghar provides an insight into the throbbing ...
A striking feature of modern-day society is the ubiquity of visuals and images in everyday life. According to metropolitan theorists, modernity is marked by the hegemony of vision, with everything being measured by its ability to show or be shown. But how does this linking of the visual to the modern stand up to scrutiny when placed within the contexts of the complicated picture-worlds, print-complexes and image-cultures of India? This is the principal question ...
This exceptionally innovative exploration of the historical imagination – in India and elsewhere – looks at ideas about vanished homelands, hidden civilizations, and forgotten peoples. During the nineteenth century, Lemuria was imagined as a land that once bridged India and Africa. Much like Atlantis, Lemuria is supposed to have been submerged by the oceans long ago. This elegantly written books is the first to explore Lemuria’s incarnations across ...
Why would love for their language lead several men in southern India to burn themselves alive in its name? Passions of the Tongue analyzes the discourses of love, labor, and life that transformed Tamil into an object of such passionate attachment, producing in the process one of modern India's most intense movements for linguistic revival and separatism. Sumathi Ramaswamy suggests that these discourses cannot be contained within a singular metanarrative of ...