Hachette India

A History of India through 75 Objects

Sudeshna Guha

A Mughal knife made from a meteorite. A precious necklace split between two nations at partition. A butter advert that achieves iconic status.

Through a curatorial selection of objects from the prehistoric ages through twenty-first century India, Sudeshna Guha provides a panoramic view of the rich histories of the subcontinent. The incisive essays in this collection detail not just objects but the histories of their reception: examining how changing times and attitudes cast their presence on the ways in which the past is interpreted and recalled. In doing so, A History of India through 75 Objects inspires us to interrogate our own notions of a knowable past and fixed national history. Teeming with thought-provoking insights and surprising anecdotes, the essays instil a sense of wonder about the continuous processes by which histories are constructed.

Sudeshna Guha

Sudeshna Guha is currently a professor in the department of History and Archaeology at Shiv Nadar University, India. She holds a Ph.D. in archaeology and has a long curatorial and teaching career at the University of Cambridge. She has built upon the scholarship of visual anthropology and ethnographies of material studies for analysing histories of archaeology and is at present developing research on histories of museums, collections and curatorial practices within South Asia. She has published widely, also on histories of heritage, and is the editor and contributor of The Marshall Albums: Photography and Archaeology (Mapin/Alkazi Collection of Photography, 2011), and author of Artefacts of History: Archaeology, Historiography and Indian Pasts (Sage 2015).