Building Histories
The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi
- Contents
- Review Quotes
- Awards

List of Abbreviations
Note on Transliteration
Introduction: The Modern Lives of Medieval Monuments between Archive and Affect
1 1857: Red Fort
Mutiny, Memory, Monument
2 1918: Rasul Numa Dargah
Interrupting the Archive: Indigenous Voices and Colonial Hegemony
3 1932: Jama Masjid
A Menacing Mosque Reveals the Limits of Colonial Power
4 1948: Purana Qila
The Many Origins of Partitioned Nations, Cities, and Monuments
5 2000: Qutb Complex
Secular Nations and Specters of Iconoclasm
Epilogue: Making New Monuments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“[An] eloquent book. . . .Building Histories unravels the histories of some of Delhi’s, and India’s, most important medieval monuments, and presents them in a completely new light. . .while Foucault saw documents as monuments, Rajagopalan suggests the reverse: that in India monuments were seen by colonial administrators and the postcolonial nation-state as stable documents from which they could gather data about the past and place it within a field of rigid meanings — producing, in turn, unquestionable histories. Rajagopalan skillfully deconstructs these unquestionable histories, and their agendas of preservation, through the trope of ‘affect.’”
Society of Architectural Historians: Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award
Won
Architecture: Middle Eastern, African, and Asian Architecture
Asian Studies: South Asia
History: Asian History
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