A specialist in the art and cultural history of modern and contemporary India, Guha-Thakurta (history, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) explores the process by which lost pasts in modern India are retrieved from and imagined around a growing corpus of monumental structures, archaeological relics, and art objects. By institution she means both how the object field came to be constituted within the disciplines of archaeology and art history, and how it came to reside within an official administrative apparatus that worked closely with the world of scholarship. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)