India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display maps for the first time a series of historical events—from the Raj in the mid-nineteenth century up to the present day—through which India was made fashionable to Western audiences within the popular cultural arenas of the imperial metropole. Situated at the convergence of discussions in anthropology, art history, museum studies, and postcolonial criticism, this dynamic study investigates with vivid historical detail how Indian objects, bodies, images, and narratives circulated through metropolitan space and acquired meaning in an emergent nineteenth-century consumer economy. Through an examination of India as represented in department stores, museums, exhibitions, painting, and picture postcards of the era, the book carefully confronts the problems and politics of postcolonial display and offers an original and provocative account of the implications of colonial practices for visual production in our contemporary world.

More than three hundred full-color illustrations and photographs complement a fascinating look at the best of Indian interior design and decorative art, capturing the unique architectural details, innovative patterns and motifs, furniture, wall decorations, textiles, and colors of India.

A coherent and insightful view of the growing Global Luxury & Fashion Brands market in India, India by Design - The Pursuit of Luxury and Fashion unveils this culturally complex and dynamic market via a series of interviews with global Luxury and Fashion Experts. India has more consumers for luxury goods than the adult population of several countries. For international luxury brands, India is no longer a testing ground, but a lucrative market. India By Design looks at India as more than just an emerging luxury market with high growth potential, but scrutinizes it as a country rediscovering its luxury heritage and bringing it into the present and future in a uniquely Indian way. The authors' sense of detail balanced with their ability to see the big picture bring sense to the kaleidoscope of cultures, businesses and technology which is India today.

Between 2000-2008 India's economic and political ascendancy were charted in the worlds press. This period of dynamism ushered in an increased sense of confidence, aspiration and pride in being Indian. This book is about the response of the design community to India's changing environment. It focuses on fashion, graphic and interior design as metaphors of the complex networks that constitute globalisation within key metropolitan centres of India. Examined within the context of their production and consumption, and through their economic, social, political and cultural underpinnings, a picture emerges which conveys how designers grapple with issues of identity and globalisation, nationhood and modernity, ethics and commerce.

Based equally in the archives of firms such as Louis Vuitton, Boucheron, Chaumet and Hermès, and in palace and private collections, this book explores the role of maharajas in an age of high spending and fashion. It brings together original designs with surviving objects, exploring for the first time the creative dialogue between Indian princes and the skilled tradesmen who produced wonders for their delectation. Married to the objects themselves are the absorbing and often humourous accounts of how maharajas indulged their tastes with unparalleled extravagance and aplomb.

The rise of the regulatory state has been a major feature of modern constitutional democracies. India, the world's largest democracy, is no exception to this trend. This book is the first major study of regulation in India. It considers how the development of regulation in India has altered the nature and functions of the state; how it is reshaping the relationship between business and the state; how it has called for the refashioning of established legal principles; and how it has raised new questions about the relationship between technical expertise and the rule of law. The chapters cover topics ranging from the foundations of the Indian regulatory state to the form of regulation across different sectors to regulation in practice. Together, the chapters reveal the challenges, promise, and limitations offered by contemporary regulatory practices, and they capture the close if sometimes fraught relationship that regulation must inevitably share with the political economy and constitutional schema within which it operates.

The essays in this volume present an analytical appraisal of public institutions in India. The purpose here is not just to give a history of these institutions but to ask what explains their performance and what might be learnt from their experience. It assesses the manner in which they assist, thwart, manipulate, and subvert each other. The aim is to provide a complex account of the modalities through which state power is exercised and policy enacted. This study contributes to debates on institutional change and reform that are currently underway in India by bringing more analytical rigour and enlarging the parameters of the debate. These debates are particularly important given that Indian economy and society have changed profoundly in the last decade and a half. Much of the discussion is on how state institutions like the civil service, the courts, the police, parliament, and regulatory institutions will need to be reconfigured to better adapt to changing circumstances.