Until recently the literature on the architecture and urbanism of colonial South Asia was a revealing illustration of the tenacious nature of the colonial project. Substantially written by and for a western readership of academics and armchair travelers, it was still driven by interests predominantly outside the former colonial societies concerned, and delimited by the unquestioned assumption of the dominance of the imperial regime on the colonial building scene. Although western academia continues to be the dominant context in which the architectural history of South Asia is written, a new generation of scholarship has emerged since the mid 1990s that has actively engaged this field in the broader academic project of postcolonial critical inquiry. Thinking between and beyond the material and symbolic dimensions of architecture, this new scholarship has mobilized interdisciplinary theories and tactics to interpret the hybrid building and dwelling practices of 'colonialmodern' South Asia as forms of social production. Whilst South Asia has been the source and focus of much of the most sophisticated postcolonial scholarship in other disciplines, this paper examines why the architectural historiography of South Asia remained comparatively unengaged with that wider postcolonial discourse until recently, and how it has been shaped by the geographically distant institutional frameworks, including Australasian academia, in which it has emerged.