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.

In Where Histories Reside Priya Jaikumar examines eight decades of films shot on location in India to show how attending to filmed space reveals alternative timelines and histories of cinema. In this bold “spatial” film historiography, Jaikumar outlines factors that shape India's filmed space, from state bureaucracies and commercial infrastructures to aesthetic styles and neoliberal policies. Whether discussing how educational shorts from Britain and India transform natural landscapes into instructional lessons or how Jean Renoir’s The River (1951) presents a universal human condition through the particularities of place, Jaikumar demonstrates that the history of filming a location has always been a history of competing assumptions, experiences, practices, and representational regimes. In so doing, she reveals that addressing the persistent question of “what is cinema?” must account for an aesthetics and politics of space.

Dissenters and Mavericks reinvigorates the interdisciplinary study of literature, history, and politics through an approach to reading that allows the voices heard in writing a chance to talk back, to exert pressure on the presuppositions and preferences of a wide range of readers. Offering fresh and provocative interpretations of both well-known and unfamiliar texts--from colonial writers such as Horace Walpole and Edmund Burke to twentieth-century Indian writers such as Nirad Chaudhuri, V.S. Naipaul, and Pankaj Mishra--the book proposes a controversial challenge to prevailing academic methodology in the field of postcolonial studies.

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.

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