Preface / by Monica Juneja -- Introduction: The materiality of liquescence / Sugata Ray and Venugopal Maddipati -- The shape of Babur's Lake : architecture and water in the central Indian frontier / Tamara I. Sears -- Water is a limited commodity : ecological aesthetics in the Little Ice Age, Mathura, ca. 1614 / Sugata Ray -- Lakes within lake-palaces : a material history of pleasure in 18th-century India / Dipti Khera -- Photos of the ocean : pearl fisheries, British colonialism and the Gulf of Manaar / Natasha Eaton -- When times were strange : water, geology and drawing in the religious imagination at Girar, 1855 / Venugopal Maddipati -- From nallah to nadi, sewer to stream : urban waterscape research in India and the United States / James L. Wescoat Jr. -- Water : its meanings and powers in the Indian Sufi tradition / Catherine B. Asher -- Developmental aesthetics : modernism's ocular economies and laconic discontents in the era of Nehruvian technocracy / Atreyee Gupta -- A critical look into the existing practice of water governance in cities : the case of Chandernagore / Gopa Samanta and Malay Ganguli -- Making water media in 21st-century South Asia / Bishnupriya Ghosh -- The religious and affective actualities of the Yamuna : conversations with Pandit Premchand Sharma, Nigambodh Ghat, Delhi / Padma D. Maitland -- From Bundi to Delhi : water harnessing systems in semiarid regions / Asim Waqif -- You always step into the same river! / Atul Bhalla -- Cosmographia universalis : environmental crisis and the water aesthetics of global South Asia / Partha Mitter.
Summary:
"This book surveys the intersections between water systems and the phenomenology of visual cultures in early modern, colonial, and contemporary South Asia from the 16th century to the present. Bringing together contributions by art and architecture historians, artists, architects, geographers, maritime historians, and environmental activists from India, Europe, and the United States, the volume situates water in an expansive relational domain. It covers disciplines as diverse as literary studies, environmental humanities, sustainable design, urban planning, and media studies. The chapters explore the ways in which material cultures of water generate technological and aesthetic acts of envisioning geographies and make an intervention within political, developmental, and cultural discourses. A critical interjection in the sociologies of water in the subcontinent, the book brings art history into conversation with current debates on climate change, and examines the artistic, architectural, engineering, religious, scientific, and environmental facets"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.