Many questions arise from the appearance in revised form of Architecture and Independence, a fairly well-known historical survey of architecture. Some of these relate to timing. The volume that was originally published in 1997, and its present counterpart, celebrate fifty and seventy-five years, respectively, of India's independence from colonial rule in 1947. Yet, practically, a generation separates the two releases. The intervening twenty-five years have witnessed key shifts in modes of study and the framing of concepts of architecture, modernity, and colonial or indigenous identity in the South Asian context. The timing of the revised volume prompts us to ask how its approach and contents respond to, and engage with, new scholarship since its first release. A related question follows concerning how the publication adds to what we know in 2022 about modern Indian history through its architecture.Such concerns have also emerged when other key architectural surveys have been published, such as the recent A Global History of Architecture (2017), or the radically reconfigured twenty-first edition of arguably one of the most referenced tomes on the subject, published in 2019 under the title Sir Banister Fletcher's Global History of Architecture.
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