This book contributes to a growing body of scholarship that examines material culture and its relationship between design and its construction of knowledge about multicultural identities in the colonial and postcolonial periods, with a focus on South Asia.

Priya Jha is Professor of English and Director of Media and Visual Culture Studies at the University of Redlands, USA. Her work is located in postcolonial, global, and transnational film and cultural studies. She has published widely on topics as diverse as nationalism, gender, and sexuality in Hindi cinema; Afro-Asian literature and film; and comparative feminisms. Currently, she is writing a memoir, Not That Kind of Indian, and a monograph entitled Deliberate Designs: Affect and Aesthetics in Postcolonial Literature and Culture.

Rajinder Dudrah is Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Industries in the Birmingham Institute of Media and English, Birmingham City University, UK. He has researched and published widely across film, media, and cultural studies. His books include, amongst others, Bollywood Travels: Culture, Diaspora and Border Crossings in Popular Hindi Cinema (Routledge). He is also the founding co-editor of the journal South Asian Popular Culture.

Introduction

Priya Jha and Rajinder Dudrah

1. Memories of violence: Of emotional geographies and planning in post-Partition Delhi, 1948-62

Aprajita Sarcar

2. Absence of the 'un-exchangeable' monument: Cinematic design and national identity in a time of partition

Aditi Chandra

3. 'Architectures of happiness': Designing the Malltiplex in India

Tupur Chatterjee

4. From deframing the oriental imagery to the making of the alternative other: Remapping the spaces of encounter

Dilpreet Bhullar

5. From craft to couture: Contemporary Indian fashion in historical perspective

Tara Mayer

6. Transnational homespun, citizen-art and Hindu-Muslim Gandhi ashrams: A working note on, against, and toward spirituality

Tim Dobe and Aaron Sinift

7. Evolving sense of visualizing the divine in popular Islam in Pakistan: An ethnographic case study

Ghulam Abbas

8. Counter-epistemologies of the global South: Indian floor drawings re-envisaged

Renate Dohmen

9. Printing princely modernity: Lithographic design in Muslim-ruled princely states

Amanda Lanzillo

10. Designing a visual palimpsest through film: A critical examination of Jodhaa Akbar and the nationalist narrative

Reema Chowdhary, Shaifali Arora and Nirmala Menon