Vivid colors, delicate stonework, and opulent décor are the trademarks of the palaces, forts, and mansions of India's maharajas. With their vast marble halls, jewel-box mirrored rooms, mosaics, and tapestries, these palaces present a veritable visual feast. In styles ranging from Art Deco to modern, from Indian folk style to English Colonial, the palaces of Rajasthan, dating from as early as AD 760 to as recently as the middle of the last century, are astonishingly innovative and modern. Many of the most luxurious of them have been converted to hotels. Lavishly illustrated with more than 250 photographs, this book offers twenty-one of the most sumptuous palace hotels, displaying their interior decoration in detail, as well as their pleasure pavilions, gardens and pools.--From publisher description.

The Most Brilliant Contribution To Postcolonial Criticism Since Edward Said S Orientalism & A Masterpiece Of Calm, Well-Thought-Out, Cogent And Inspiring Analysis Jane Marcus, Cuny Graduate Center And The City University Of New York Sara Suleri S The Rhetoric Of English India Is A Powerful Challenge To The Obsession With Otherness That Is A Trademark Of Colonial Studies. Where Other Scholars Tend To Observe A Strict Separation Between Works By Western And Non-Western Writers And Between Ruling And Subject Races, Suleri Reconstructs A Narrative In Which English And Indian Idioms Play With, And Against, Each Other. By Studying A Wide Range Of Materials, From The Writings Of Burke To The Travel Logs Of Nineteenth-Century Women Such As Fanny Parkes And Harriet Tytler To The Fiction Of Kipling, Forster, Naipaul And Rushdie, Suleri Deftly Reveals The Complicity That Always Operates In Colonial Literature. In Doing So, Suleri Succeeds Not Only In Challenging The Standard Chronology Of Imperial History, But Also In Fundamentally Recasting Contemporary Discourse On The Theories Of Cultural Empowerment.

Tracing a genealogy of colonial discourse, Suleri focuses on paradigmatic moments in the multiple stories generated by the British colonization of the Indian subcontinent. Both the literature of imperialism and its postcolonial aftermath emerge here as a series of guilty transactions between two cultures that are equally evasive and uncertain of their own authority. "A dense, witty, and richly allusive book . . . an extremely valuable contribution to postcolonial cultural studies as well as to the whole area of literary criticism."—Jean Sudrann, Choice

Taking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime reconstellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism and postcolonial critique, this book forges an innovative approach to the question of late romanticism and grounds categories such as the sublime within the dynamic of commodification. While G. S. Sahota takes canonical European critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the outskirts of empire, he reads Indian writers such as Muhammad Iqbal and Jayashankar Prasad in light of the expansion of instrumental rationality and the neotraditional critiques of the West it spurred at the onset of decolonization. By bringing together distinct literary canons—both metropolitan and colonial, hegemonic and subaltern, Western and Eastern, all of which took shape upon the common realities of imperial capitalism—Late Colonial Sublime takes an original dialectical approach. It experiments with fragments, parallaxes, and constellational form to explore the aporias of modernity as well as the possible futures they may signal in our midst. A bold intervention into contemporary debates that synthesizes a wealth of sources, this book will interest readers and scholars in world literature, critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and South Asian studies.

Indian Renaissance: British Romantic Art and the Prospect of India is the first comprehensive examination of British artists whose first-hand impressions and prospects of the Indian subcontinent became a stimulus for the Romantic Movement in England; it is also a survey of the transformation of the images brought home by these artists into the cultural imperatives of imperial, Victorian Britain. The book proposes a second - Indian - Renaissance for British (and European) art and culture and an undeniable connection between English Romanticism and British Imperialism. Artists treated in-depth include James Forbes, James Wales, Tilly Kettle, William Hodges, Johann Zoffany, Francesco Renaldi, Thomas and William Daniell, Robert Home, Thomas Hickey, Arthur William Devis, R. H. Colebrooke, Alexander Allan, Henry Salt, James Baillie Fraser, Charles Gold, James Moffat, Charles D'Oyly, William Blake, J. M. W. Turner and George Chinnery.

This book explores the formations and configurations of British colonial discourse on India through a reading of prose narratives of the 1600-1920 period. Arguing that colonial discourse often relied on aesthetic devices in order to describe and assert a degree of narrative control over Indian landscape, Pramod Nayar demonstrates how aesthetics furnished a vocabulary and representational modes for the British to construct particular images of India. Looking specifically at the aesthetic modes of the marvellous, the monstrous, the sublime, the picturesque and the luxuriant, Nayar marks the shift in the rhetoric – from the exploration narratives from the age of mercantile exploration to that of the ‘shikar’ memoirs of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century’s extreme exotic. English Writing and India provides an important new study of colonial aesthetics, even as it extends current scholarship on the modes of early British representations of new lands and cultures.

The Gig Economy in India explores the topic of gig work in India’s digital political economy, and the relationship between key factors such as start-ups, state governments, and platform providers. The book begins by placing the gig economy in context, defining the platform ecosystem and the Indian government’s perception of its problems and opportunities. Thomas then examines the critical dimensions of the gig economy in India, from its data infrastructure capabilities, the enabling role of venture capitals and FinTech, to government regulations. Attention is paid to the precarity of gig labour, the vagaries of algorithmic management, and the minimal legal support available for workers. The book also includes chapters on labour resistance and highlights some of the issues related to the ethics of artificial intelligence. Given the limited research on India as a case study, this volume fills a crucial gap in the literature. It will interest scholars in diverse fields such as business management, digital media, and communication studies.