This dissertation examines coloniality as a process of subjectification by studying the colonial transformation of architectural culture and built environment of post-1857 Jaipur,India. Examining the interrelationship between ideologically coded institutional practices and the aesthetic choices of architectural objects, it weaves together critical readings of documents produced in and around these institutions with more interpretive, but contextually informed, readings of architectural form. Moving between representation (as speaking for) and representation (as in architecture and philosophy) it traces productions of identity in the accommodations and contestations between the hegemonic and stereotypical interests of colonial discourse and the more contingent and location specific ones of its subjects.

Engaging both archival material and contemporary theoretical discussions, this dissertation concentrates on the analysis of selected historical "moments." These are: (i) the organization of and response to an art and craft exhibition (1883), (ii) the establishment and development of a new School of Industrial Art and Craft (1858), (iii) the establishment and transformation of a new Public Works Department (1860), and (iv) the creation of an important new civic monument, an industrial museum named Albert Hall (1876-85).

Describing the terrain of coloniality as inevitably hybridized, this dissertation privileges certain hybrid artifacts by linking them to resistant activities of the colonized subjects. It argues that such hybrids represented more accommodative and transformative inscriptions of their contexts, than those of the colonizers that attempted to more closely fit the impossible objectives of stereotyping.

By way of conclusion it interprets Charles Correa's recent design for Jawahar Kala Kendra (1990)--a center for the preservation and promotion of traditional art and culture--as a hybrid postcolonial text that at one level is symptomatic of the neo-colonial interests of the post-modern culture industry, but at another more subliminal level offer a more complex, historically coded weave that suggests open possibilities for the inscription of postcolonial identity and agency.