Author: Jean-Marie Lafont
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2001
Language: English
Pages: 176
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0 19 565731 4
Description
This book with 50 color plates and several black and white sketches and maps brings together for the first time a collection of unpublished architectural drawings and rare maps of cities and monuments in eighteenth-century India.
Recent research by French and Indian scholars has revealed many new aspects of the interaction that took place between France and India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this book, Jean-Marie Lafont brings together for the first time a collection of unpublished drawings and maps of cities and monuments in eighteenth-century India. The fifty color illustrations of plans and views of palaces, cities and monuments by French and Indian architects and engineers published here are drawn from the Centre des Archives d'OutreMer, Archieves Naionales and the Gentil Album of Palais Indiens at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
A lucid introduction gives the historical background of these collections and traces them to the French Compagine des Indes Orientales with its trading posts on the sea shores of India. It also links them to the French specialists who entered the service of the Indian states which emerged in India after the collapse of the Mughal empire.
India, as seen in this book through its thriving cities and beautiful monuments, is astonishingly modern with its own urban dynamics and its flourishing trade with the world.
Lavishly illustrated and beautifully produced, as part of the French Sources of Indian History series, this book will appeal to historians and general readers interested in India's encounter with the West.