One of our regular features on this blog will be documents, photos and artifacts that our faculty have found and/or are using in their research.
This entry comes from Associate Professor Abby McGowan. Professor McGowan specializes in modern South Asian history. Her current research project examines changing ideas of home in mid-twentieth century India, as expressed in material objects and domestic space.
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She writes: “This image appears on the cover of a book of house plans put out by the Cement Marketing Company of India, in September 1946, as India was coming out of World War II and struggling to figure out how to overcome a massive housing shortage. In my current project about changing ideas of domestic space and home in late colonial India, I am using the image for how it depicts male mastery of architectural plans and female desire for home, but also for how it assumes that elite couples would themselves oversee the creation of a house at every step from floor plans to sun-bathed physical reality in the background.”
