This book investigates the different cultural roles played by photographs of Indian architecture from the latter half of the nineteenth century, an inquiry stretching from their pre-history to their migration into book illustrations, calendar art, and religious imagery. Beyond the apparent purposes of these images - as picturesque views, scientific records of an architectural past, political memorials, travel mementos, textbook vignettes - deeper considerations influenced the way their makers worked in selecting, framing, composing, and populating their representations. Shaping the viewer's thinking about what they represented, these images remain enduring records of a way of seeing, of minds as well as monuments, and exist today as artefacts of the visual culture of colonialism. Twelve essays from scholars working in several disciplines (history, anthropology, art history, and the history of photography) show how photographs of architecture reveal the inescapable ways in which the practice of image making is aligned with the purposes of power, the presumptions accompanying the encounter with strangeness, the internal order of the colonial and the scientific mind, and even our metaphysical dispositions toward the world.

Reason's Traces addresses some of the key questions in the study of Indian and Buddhist thought: the analysis of personal identity and of ultimate reality, the interpretation of Tantric texts and traditions, and Tibetan approaches to the interpretation of Indian sources. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, Reason's Traces reflects current work in philosophical analysis and hermeneutics, inviting readers to explore in a Buddhist context the relationship between philosophy and traditions of spiritual exercise.

This is the first book ever to be devoted to this subject.

Indian traces in Korean Culture examines the enduring cross-cultural discourse between India and Korea over the centuries, emphasizing the transformative power of cultural exchange beyond geographical and temporal constraints. The book analyses how symbols transcend sensory realms and embody spiritual content and suggests that Indian associations in Korean culture reflect a hybridized nature, seamlessly blending cultural elements. The author presents various facets of the cultural exchange between India and Korea, covering Princess Hŏ Hwang-ok's legendary Indian origins shaping Korean identity, Ilyŏn's strategic documentation of Buddhism's transmission, the influence of Indian figures such as Gandhi and Tagore, an exploration of literature from ancient Buddhist verse to modern poets like Kim Yang-shik and Shiva Ryu, and a study of cultural exchange in K-pop. Facilitating a possible alternative to Huntington’s theory of the clash of civilisations, this book provides evidence that the multifaceted encounters between cultures are a historical process that co-shapes civilisational change on a global scale. The first monograph solely dedicated to India-Korea cultural connection from antiquity to the present, this book offers a paradigm shift, inviting readers to explore fresh insights and reshape their understanding of cultural exchanges. It will be of interest to researchers in intercultural communication, Cultural Studies, Cultural History and Asian Studies, in particular Korea and India.

A wedding couple gazes resolutely at viewers from the wings of a butterfly; a portrait surrounded by rose petals commemorates a recently deceased boy. These quiet but moving images represent the changing role of photographic portraiture in India, a topic anthropologist Christopher Pinney explores in Camera Indica. Studying photographic practice in India, Pinney traces photography's various purposes and goals from colonial through postcolonial times. He identifies three key periods in Indian portraiture: the use of photography under British rule as a quantifiable instrument of measurement, the later role of portraiture in moral instruction, and the current visual popular culture and its effects on modes of picturing. Photographic culture thus becomes a mutable realm in which capturing likeness is only part of the project. Lavishly illustrated, Pinney's account of the change from depiction to invention uncovers fascinating links between these evocative images and the society and history from which they emerge.

Seventy years on, the Partition of India fades from memory. Can it be restored?