Talk by Swati Chattopadhyay (History of Art & Architecture, University of California-Santa Barbara )

The diffusion of printed books in India in the late eighteenth century, beyond the confines of royal courts, European factories, and missions, changed the spaces of reading, publishing, and literary exchange and archiving. For a while, as in the Western world, books, loose folios, and manuscript scrolls jostled for space in trunks and wall niches before the rectangular freestanding bookshelf became standard. As a modern introduction, however, the bookshelf exceeded its role as a container of books. It anchored political debates, created new modes of social intercourse, and changed the practice of reading in private and public spaces. This talk takes the bookshelf as a figure of space to explore the socio-political import of this historical transformation. We start with the East India Company’s looting of Tipu Sultan’s library following the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War and conclude with the proliferation of neighborhood libraries in Calcutta in the early twentieth century.

Swati Chattopadhyay is a Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, California, Santa Barbara, with an affiliated appointment in Comparative Literature. An architect and architectural historian, she is the author of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2023); Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012); Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005); and the co-editor with Jeremy White Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Taylor and Francis, 2019); and City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Routledge, 2014). Her current work includes Nature’s Infrastructure: The British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880, supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, and two digital humanities projects, Mapping the Ephemeral and Bookscapes. She is a founding editor of PLATFORM.