The essays in this volume describe certain major fields of cultural practice—textual, visual, aural, ritual, and spatial—in which the twin tasks of dealing with the material and the representational, or of explanation and interpretation, have been tackled in the recent historiography of India. Thus, it explores the continuous morphing of the cultural into the worlds of the social and political—the central idea of the book—and brings into a fresh dialogue the cultural materialities and practices of colonial and contemporary India.

This volume is the third in a series on 'New Cultural Histories of India' facilitated by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. The present volume provides new insights into some of the key transitions in both subject matter and method that characterize the so-called cultural turn in history writing on India.