Welcome to the Scottish Centre for Global History at the University of Dundee
The Scottish Centre for Global History brings together members of the School of Humanities and other academic schools at the University of Dundee with interests in the development of Global History. Our interests span the globe from India to South America, from Canada to South Africa and range from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.
The painting above shows a Hindu princess committing suttee against the wishes of the Emperor Akbar but with his reluctant consent. 18th century By: Mohammad Rizā Naw’ī. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images, images@wellcome.ac.uk, http://wellcomeimages.org
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- Next AHRI History paper (24/10/18): The Colonial Architecture of the Hindu Temple
The Colonial Architecture of the Hindu Temple
The second AHRI/Scottish Centre for Global History seminar will be held at the Fairlie Room, Main Library, on Wednesday, 24 October, 5.00 -6.30 pm. Dr Deborah Sutton, Senior Lecturer, University of Lancaster, will speak on ‘Petrification and Purity: The Colonial Architecture of the Hindu Temple. All welcome.
‘Petrification and Purity: The Colonial Architecture of the Hindu Temple’.
This paper is part of a larger project that examines the colonial creation of ‘the Hindu Temple’ from the late-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. The paper will trace the refinement of the temple structure as ‘vacated’ architecture, divorced from its devotional occupation and socio-cultural environment. The voluminous and intricate decoration that was regarded as ‘typical’ of temple architecture was regarded as both index and illustration of Hindu degeneration. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, an English scholar of architecture remarked that temple architecture could only be erected under ‘a despotic hierarchy or monarchy’. Architectural analysis created a single, unified architectural subject but did so by disassembling the temple into elements that could be distinguished and categorised as representative of specific chronological and regional styles
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