Swati Chattopadhyay-The Architecture of Sovereignty: Making and Unmaking the British Empire in India

Swati Chattopadhyay is an architect and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urbanism, and the cultural landscape of the British empire. As a professor in the Department of Art History at UC Santa Barbara, she is one of the most theoretically innovative historians of Asian architecture and urbanism working today. 

Her public lecture, "The Architecture of Sovereignty: Making and Unmaking the British Empire in India," is an invitation to consider the process by which sovereignty in the modern era is constituted through visual and spatial means. Drawing on the archive of the long career of the British empire in India, Chattopadhyay examines the affective investment in land and territory that enabled the exercise of sovereignty. The argument is anchored in two sets of architectural events: first, the destruction of the Palace of Tipu Sultan in Mysore in the aftermath of the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1798-99) and the coeval construction of Government House in Calcutta (1803), and second, the making of the Memorial Well Monument in Kanpur (1863) in the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion (1857-59) and its unmaking between 1947 and 1950. These events, in precipitating crises of sovereignty, are opportune moments to reflect on the conditions that reside at the core of sovereign claims, colonial or otherwise.

This event is co-sponsored by the Syracuse University Humanities Center, the School of Architecture, the Department of Art and Music Histories, and the South Asia Center as part of the Syracuse University Humanities Center’s 21st annual Syracuse Symposium, focused on the them “Community” for 2024-2025.