Cultural Landscapes of India: Imagined, Enacted, and Reclaimed
Cultural Landscapes of India: Imagined, Enacted, and Reclaimed
by Amita Sinha
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020 eISBN: 978-0-8229-8786-4 | Cloth: 978-0-8229-4642-7 Library of Congress Classification DS408.S56 2020 Dewey Decimal Classification 954
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Winner, 2022 J. B. Jackson Book Prize
Winner, 2022 Landscape Studies Initiative Award
Most people view cultural heritage sites as static places, frozen in time. In Cultural Landscapes of India, Amita Sinha subverts the idea of heritage as static and examines the ways that landscapes influence culture and that culture influences landscapes. The book centers around imagining, enacting, and reclaiming landscapes as subjects and settings of living cultural heritage. Drawing on case studies from different regions of India, Sinha offers new interpretations of links between land and culture using different ways of seeing—transcendental, romantic, and utilitarian. The idea of cultural landscape can be seen in ancient practices such as circumambulation and immersion in bodies of water that sustain engagement with natural elements. Pilgrim towns, medieval forts, religious sites, and contemporary memorial parks are sites of memory where myth and history converge. Engaging with these spaces allows us to reconstruct collective memory and reclaim not only historic landscapes, but ways of seeing, making, and remembering. Cultural Landscapes of India makes the case for reclaiming iconic landscapes and rethinking conventional approaches to conservation that take into consideration performative landscape as heritage.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Amita Sinha taught in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign from 1989-2018 and was a visiting professor in the Department of Architecture and Regional Planning, IIT Kharagpur in India. She is the author of Landscapes in India: Forms and Meanings, editor of Landscape Perception, and co-editor of Cultural Landscapes of South Asia: Studies in Heritage Conservation and Management.
REVIEWS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Landscape Heritage
Part I: Myth and History
1. Contested Site
2. Lost City
Part II: Ways of Seeing
3. Natural Hierophanies
4. Urban Mandala
5. Period Eye
Part III: Enactments
6. Immersion
7. Circumambulation
Part IV: Nature Improved
8. Pavagadh Hill
9. Kalikho Hills
10. Delhi Ridge
Part V: Nature Perfected
11. Tapovan
12. Indo-Islamic Garden
13. Colonial Garden
14. Garden City
15. Municipal Park
Part VI: Remembering
16. Hazrat Mahal
17. Lakshmi Bai
18. Mayawati
Conclusion. Sustainable Approaches to Heritage Conservation
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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