British India and Victorian-Era Architecture

This is a story of networks and webs, exchange and adaptation, rather than uniform cultural imposition “‘horizontal’ inter-colonial relations as much as ‘vertical’ metropole-colony directed ones”. Empire is no longer understood as something the British did to Other people. Instead, there is an interpretative framework that reasserts the indigenous voice and agency of the colonized - who, in the words of the architectural historian Swati Chattopadhyay, “countered, replaced, modified and bypassed colonial intentions... conferring entirely new sets of meanings upon colonial built forms and their own habitations”. The engineers, builders, artisans and inhabitants of the buildings of Empire also have a history. “In conception, construction, and use, the architecture of the British empire should be seen as a ‘contact zone’”, rather than a simple assertion of Western monumentalism. — Tristram Hunt reviewing Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire in the 2 June 2018 TLS