Books and Essays

Bureaucracy, Belonging, and the City in North India: 1870-1930

2020

This book is a re-evaluation of modern urbanism and architecture and a history of urbanism, architecture, and local identity in colonial north India at the turn of the twentieth century. Focusing on the workings of colonial bureaucracy, it argues that the mundane was a vital space for crafting urban belonging.

Books

Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia

2012 (co-edited w/ Brian Hatcher)

Presenting cutting-edge scholarship dedicated to exploring the emergence and articulation of modernity in colonial South Asia, this book builds upon and extends recent insights into the constitutive and multiple projects of colonial modernity.

Banaras: Urban Forms and Cultural Histories

2011

Supplementing traditional accounts, which have focused upon Banaras’s eligious imaginary, this volume brings together essays written by acknowledged experts in north Indian culture and history to examine the construction of diverse urban identities in Banaras during, and after, the British colonial period.

Orientalism, Empire, and National Culture: India, 1770-1880

2007

Orientalist research has most often been characterised as an integral element of the European will-to-power over the Asian world. This study seeks to nuance this view, and asserts that British Orientalism in India was also an inherently complex and unstable enterprise, predicated upon the cultural authority of the Sanskrit pandits.