Showing all 7 books
Each year, Kolkata's Durga Puja scales new heights as the most spectacular and extravagant event in the city's calendar. From the turn of the twenty-first century, the festival has taken on a particular artistic dispensation that is unique to the contemporary city, demanding a new order of attention and analysis. Based on field-research conducted between 2002 and 2012, this book unravels the anatomy of this newly-configured 'art' event, by tracking the new ...
The essays in this volume describe certain major fields of cultural practice—textual, visual, aural, ritual, and spatial—in which the twin tasks of dealing with the material and the representational, or of explanation and interpretation, have been tackled in the recent historiography of India. Thus, it explores the continuous morphing of the cultural into the worlds of the social and political—the central idea of the book—and brings into a ...
A political scientist, historian, cultural analyst, social anthropologist, and philosopher, Partha Chatterjee has consistently provided academia with novel conceptual tools for analyzing the present. This collection brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines to honor his life and work.Dealing with different ways of theorizing the present, the essays in Theorizing the Present focus on some critical themes underlining twentieth century India--work of ...
The Hitesranjan Sanyal Memorial Collection at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, is an archive of sources of the cultural history of modern Bengal. It consists of microfilmed printed texts as well as documentation of pictorial and photographic material. The archive is based on the premise that visual and textual representations are equally meaningful indices of social and cultural change. Just as the new technology of print assumed a life of its ...
Karuna Shaha (1921–1996) was one of the first women students to enrol in the Government College of Art and Crafts, Calcutta, and amongst the first women artists who persisted—indeed, insisted—on claiming professional space in her own right. She exhibited regularly, continuing with her drawing, sketching and painting right till the end of her life. She was a founder member of The Group, a collective of women artists. Shaha remains best known for her studies ...
Monuments, Objects, Histories surveys the practices of archaeology, art history, and museums in nineteenth-and twentieth-century India. It looks at processes by which 'lost pasts' came to be produced in India. This book reveals the scholarly and institutional authority that emerged around such structures and artifacts, making them not only the chosen objects of art and archaeology but also signifiers of a nation's civilization and antiquity. The close ...
This reader is being published by sahmat in conjunction with the symposium 'Iconography Now: Rewriting Art History?' The immediate provocation for both have been the most recent attacks on MF Husain, which started as an internet campaign in the US in October 2005. There is a sense of Deja vu here, as we have been down this road before. For most of us, who thought that the change in regime two years ago heralded the end of the carefully planned, communal assaults ...