"Between history and legend, between archive and affect, this is where the meaning of Delhi's many historic structures - buildings classified as monuments - is generated. Mrinalini Rajagopalan's provocative new thesis, presented as Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern Delhi , operates from within the tense, murky interstices of various contestations over the semiotic quality of heritage, monument, and history. It is a bold new book for our troubled times, venturing innovatively into a territory of urban studies shackled as much with a surfeit of project reports as with an acute lack of sound scholarship. As an aspirational, aggressive India seeks to remake its image, the work of scholars such as Rajagopalan acts as a timely reminder of the deep flux of association and meaning which comes to inevitably frame the affective contours of our cities' many pasts. Building Histories is very well produced, with its many maps, sketches, and photographs having the strength to become points of reference in their own right".