Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Note on Transliteration and Pseudonyms
List of Abbreviations

1. Making the Past in a Global Present: Chennai's New Heritage

Part 1. The Formal City and Its Pasts
2. Governing the Past: Chennai's Histories
3. Memory, Mourning, and Politics
4. Modernity Remembered: Temples, Publicity, and Heritage

Part 2. Restructured Memories
5. Consuming the Past: Tourism's Cultural Economies
6. Recollecting the Rural in Suburban Chennai
7. The Village as Vernacular Cosmopolis
8. Conclusion: "How Many Museums Can One Have?"

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Promotional Information

Space and public memory in the neoliberal city

About the Author

Mary E. Hancock is Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Reviews

"[Hancock] has a keen ethnographic eye and the book reflects many years of immersion in, and thinking about, Chennai/Tamil Nadu. This is an important contribution to anthropology, South Asian studies, and the interdisciplinary field of urban studies." Smriti Srinivas, University of California, Davis "Hancock reintroduced me to the city and to a way of thinking about the secular, the state, and the religious that made me see my experiences of Chennai anew. The book will remain a serious contribution to the discussion of memory, of the complex contours of the secular and the religious, of the construction of spaces, and of the wobbly world of history." - Joanne Punzo Waghorne, Contemporary South Asia, November 2012