Delhi today is the capital of the nation state of India, and many think of it as the capital of much of India since the late twelfth century, when Muslim political authority established itself in north India. This is, of course, an oversimplification, for there were periods when Delhi was not the capital of any particular regime. All the same, the city has captured the imagination of a number of scholars working on South Asia. Jyoti Hosagrahar’s book, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architecture and Urbanism, adds to the already rich literature on Delhi by probing the intersection between colonial authority and local residents during the period following 1857, when India was declared a British colony, until 1947, when India became an independent nation. The book is divided into seven chapters, opening with a brief introduction (chapter 1) that calls into question the use of the binary terms modern and tradition in the colonial context. The final chapter is an overview of her complete discussion. The thrust of her argument is that British authorities wished to impose on Delhi a European sense of the modern, in both city planning and architectural form, but that this could not be done successfully, since the...