The book A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive Lucknow Queerscapes was published by Taylor and Francis in August 2024. The book has received generous support from the Graham Foundation 2022 and also from the Knowledge Unlatched GmbH for open access publication. The book explores the architectural production of nawabs Asaf-ud-Daula and Wajid Ali Shah and reveals the colonial bias against queer expression. It offers methods of using queer strategies to read archival evidence against the grain and rewrite erased, overlooked, and suppressed histories.It simultaneously extracts parameters from queer studies and redefines them to illustrate ways in which queer architecture can be characterized. It reconstructs the footprint of nawabi architecture erased by the colonial enterprise and places it back on map — an exercise not undertaken meticulously until now. The book is co-authored by Arul Paul.
