Building Histories

“An eloquent study [that] narrates extraordinary stories. . .making a strong case for pulling archival histories out from the influence of popular emotions. . .the book echoes the need for more nuanced history of architectural objects.”

Mrinalini Rajagopalan successfully works through her arguments by setting the consideration of source and consequence of the master narrative alongside what are, by all intents, micro-narratives. . .she allows her architectural texts to articulate the very human stories that resonate with every wall, gate, courtyard—in all their glory and dilapidation. . .This book’s achievements suggest that, beyond Delhi, there is an even bigger story to tell about India, and I can think of no better teller to tell it. . . an ambitious and intimate study.

“Building Histories is methodologically innovative, interdisciplinary in spirit, conceptually ambitious, and highly synthetic in its approach. The result is a portrait of the monument that does not stand still. Instead, Rajagopalan’s monument spaces shape-shift relentlessly over time as vessels of meaning making and contested, at times violent, histories. This book, which narrates extraordinary stories about Delhi and its monuments—many of them previously unknown—will significantly impact the field and raise the bar for future work in this vein.”

“This insightful and eloquent book traces the complex narratives of five buildings in Delhi, balancing the uniqueness of each example with an eye for larger patterns. Examining a number of violent confrontations—reaching from the Red Fort at the time of early British conquest to recent Hindu-Muslim conflicts over the Qutb Mosque—Rajagopalan shows how each of these monuments unleashed an affective power, an outpouring of popular emotions about subjects like religion, partition, nationalism, and social change. Building Histories signifies an exciting shift in architectural history and colonial studies.”

"Between history and legend, between archive and affect, this is where the meaning of Delhi’s many historic structures – buildings classified as monuments – is generated. Mrinalini Rajagopalan’s provocative new thesis, presented as Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi, operates from within the tense, murky interstices of various contestations over the semiotic quality of heritage, monument, and history. It is a bold new book for our troubled times, venturing innovatively into a territory of urban studies shackled as much with a surfeit of project reports as with an acute lack of sound scholarship. As an aspirational, aggressive India seeks to remake its image, the work of scholars such as Rajagopalan acts as a timely reminder of the deep flux of association and meaning which comes to inevitably frame the affective contours of our cities’ many pasts. . . . Building Histories is very well produced, with its many maps, sketches, and photographs having the strength to become points of reference in their own right"