Merchant houses as spectacles of modernity in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu

Abstract

This article examines the production of visually spectacular ancestral houses by migrant merchants in colonial South Asia between 1860 and 1930, as well as the recent transformation of these now-abandoned homes into sites of tourism. I primarily consider the elaborately painted houses belonging to the migrant Marwari traders of north India in the Shekhawati region of eastern Rajasthan, and comment upon the south Indian ornamental houses built by the Chettiar merchants in Madras Presidency, now known as Tamil Nadu. I argue that these empty mansions are being rapidly appropriated into new objects of visual consumption through international tourism, thereby transforming spaces of the private into spaces of public access. Visual practices in India have to be understood as part of a global and capitalist modernity, and not just in terms of India's pre-modern past. Through practices of tourism, spatial geographies of diasporic identity formation are being re-created through a visual orientation of the past.