Books
The Ghurid Architecture of South Asia and Historiography at
the Ends of the Islamic World
This
book project treats the Ghurid foundations in northern India and
Pakistan, bringing them together for the first time in monograph
form. The Ghurids, originally the Shansabani clan from Ghur
(north-central Afghanistan), established the first Islamic
government with enduring ambitions east of the Indus, thus
beginning a succession of Islamic states in the region lasting
through the mid-18th century. The architectural
significance of Ghurid buildings is unquestionable, as they set
the course for South Asian Islamic architecture for centuries to
come. Furthermore, investigation of Ghurid architecture
provides a basis for discerning the development of the scholarly
discourses on medieval Islamic architecture in South Asia, and
on South Asian Islam in general.
Despite the importance of Ghurid buildings as the first
monuments of an Islamic rulership in South Asia, scholars have
given them relatively little attention. The mid-19th-
through early 20th-century studies of the complexes,
as well as those of recent years, have concentrated on the Delhi
and Ajmer foundations (Hillenbrand 1988), and Muzaffargarh,
Kabirwala and Lal Mara Sharif in Pakistan, passing over the
smaller buildings of Rajasthan (India) in virtual silence. These
works have analyzed the buildings’ Persian epigraphs as
legitimizations of Ghurid dynastic control, underscoring the
antagonism between Indic religions and Islam symbolized in the “spolia”
of the Delhi and Ajmer complexes. The buildings and their
patrons have also been co-opted into nationalist political
discourses, as witnessed by Pakistan’s intermediate-range Hataf
V-VII “Ghauri” ballistic missiles. Over the last century,
repetitions and modifications of theories revolving around
political violence and architectural destruction have rendered
the buildings obsolete in their own analyses.
This book will analyze the surviving Ghurid complexes in India
and Pakistan as primary sources. Scholarly works on the re-use
of Roman and Byzantine fragments in later European architecture
will serve as methodological precedents. By means of similar,
meticulous stylistic comparisons and material analyses of the
buildings, we can perceive indices not only of how they were
constructed, but also of the relationships between the builders
and their new Ghurid patrons. Moreover, such analyses can
elucidate these complexes’ receptions by the patrons and
craftspeople who brought them into being, and the communities
who lived and worshiped in their shadows.
Ultimately, the book will examine the broader context of
Islamization, laying the basis for distinguishing between this
historical process in northern India and in other global
regions, until now subsumed without differentiation into the
general discourse on "Islamic history." The work will
demonstrate that there were several moments and processes of
Islamization, rather than one paradigm encompassing all the
regionally specific negotiations between Islam and indigenous
cultural traditions. My emphasis on the architectural history
of early Islam in South Asia will serve as the case study of the
principal historiographical trends. The comparative analysis of
methodologies and conclusions in Iberian Islamic studies will
shed light on the biases inhering in scholarship on Iberia and
South Asia, and more widely the continued imbalances of power
imbued in scholarly frameworks on a global scale.
Collaborative
Projects
1.
Breaking Idols, Making Icons: The
History and Historiography of Reuse in South Asia
This work
on South Asia (modern Pakistan and India) will be Volume LVIII
(2008) of the esteemed journal Archives of Asian Art. It
will treat the historical phenomenon of reuse, wherein
pre-existing architectural, sculptural, and iconographic
components gave rise to, or were integrated within, newly built
spaces and visual systems. The collection of essays will explore
the many historical causes, contexts and receptions of various
types of reuse, which range from the physical to the conceptual
and are amply evidenced in the remains of South Asia’s past.
Eight scholars will make original contributions to the endeavor:
Mr. Ed
Rothfarb, “Dragons on the Spandrels:
An Iranian Motif at a Rajput Court”;
Professor Robert Brown, “The Siva
Nataraja of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”
Architectural, sculptural and iconographic reuse is by no means
unique to South Asia or to the centuries covered in this volume.
The phenomenon has been documented in other artistic traditions
throughout their histories. The motivations for reuse, the
processes by which old fragments and ideas were incorporated
into new contexts, and the results of such practices have been
extensively studied in scholarship on the late Roman empire and
its immediate cultural diaspora (4th-5th
centuries), the Byzantine and Islamic worlds (6th-11th
centuries), and early medieval Europe (12th-14th
centuries).
South Asia is unique, however, in that despite its own
rich and varied history of using old fragments and concepts to
create new built spaces and iconographies, little concentrated
scholarly effort has been dedicated to the phenomenon. To date,
only few and disparate studies have treated instances of reuse
in South Asia. Existing works seem to ensue from a priori
assumptions regarding the meanings and receptions of this long
practiced and eminently pragmatic human activity. The present
volume aims to remedy these significant material and
methodological lacunae in the scholarship on South Asia’s
art and architectural history.
Examination of existing works on architectural and sculptural
recycling in South Asia indicates that one “metaparadigm” seems
to inform their conclusions. Visions of sudden and violent
confrontations of civilizations are a trenchant intellectual
legacy of the 19th-century colonial approaches to
South Asia’s past,
a legacy that does not include conceptual reuse within its
framework at all. Indeed, such narratives of rupture
underpinned early studies of the region’s entire historical
period, explaining sculptural reuse in Gandhara during the first
centuries of the Common Era and the presence of temple fragments
in 12th-century mosques with equal deftness. This
paradigm appears in various guises and largely continues to be
the point of departure for modern studies of reuse. The
historical reality of prior cultural exchanges between
“confrontational” communities, and the possibility of
negotiating differences to yield new forms and visualities, have
only recently begun to alter scholarly approaches to the history
of reuse in South Asia.
The long
currency of the “metaparadigm” of rupture has, nonetheless,
imposed material and methodological limitations on the field of
South Asian art and architectural history. The continuing
proclivity toward this paradigm is evidenced in the tendency of
studies to remain focused on moments of cultural antagonism,
and, due to the current political climate of South Asia,
especially on architectural violence between its “Hindu” (i.e.
Indic) and “Muslim” communities. Moreover, this insidious proclivity has led to the
neglect of intra-community instances of reuse, and has
prevented study of the practice in media other than architecture
and sculpture. Methodologically, it has led to conclusions of
cultural rupture often being posited before the thorough
analysis of the building or composite in which older material is
visible. Finally, the proclivity has been an obstacle in
perceiving the emergence of integral new forms and aesthetics
from the practice of reuse.
Thus, not only has the “metaparadigm” of cultural confrontation
been self-perpetuating in scholarship on South Asia’s past, but
it has also continued to reify ahistorical notions of monolithic
communities in sustained and unchanging antagonism. The
proposed volume will examine the multiple and varied inter- and
intra-community differences and negotiations evidenced in South
Asia’s material past, focusing on the fluidity of community
identities and their ingenuity in employing distant and recent
pasts to create new presents.
2. Building New
Identities in the Diaspora: The Banking and Mercantile
Communities of Hyderabad,
India ca. 1730-1940.
This
collaborative project is undertaken with Professor Karen Leonard
(Department of Anthropology, University of California-Irvine).
It will focus on diasporic merchant and banker families residing
in the Nizam’s princely State of Hyderabad (ca. 1750-1948) in
the Deccan, whose “homelands” were in Gujarat, Rajasthan, and
north India.
Since
the early centuries CE through modern times, artisanal, trade
and financial networks have linked the western Indian coasts of
Gujarat and the fertile plains of north India with the Deccan
and beyond. Founded in 1591 in the Deccan plateau, the city of
Hyderabad was poised to command the central and southern
subcontinent, thereby attracting the attention of the Mughal
emperors and eventually the British Crown. Retaining its
independence from both empires, however, Hyderabad State ceased
to exist only in 1948, when it was incorporated into the
independent Republic of India. As a great Indian metropolis of
the mid-18th and 19th centuries, Hyderabad
was one of the last outposts of Indo-Muslim culture, embodying
architectural, mercantile and financial features that were
giving way to foreign aesthetics and business interests in other
cities.
From
the 18th century onward, Hyderabad State was seen as
a successor state to the Mughal empire, and its Nizam was wholly
dependent on the capital of immigrant bankers and moneylenders
settled in his capital city of Hyderabad. These mercantile
groups included a few Afghani and Bohra Muslims, some Goswamis
(Hindu ascetics) from northern India, and many Hindus, Jains,
and Parsis (Zoroastrians) from Gujarat and Rajasthan in western
India. Members of some of these groups settled in Hyderabad as
early as the 17th century, while others arrived
later. These financiers assumed major political roles, some as
revenue
contractors and members of the nobility.
During fieldwork and research in India between June 2007 and May
2009, we will document the religious and domestic buildings
(many for the first time) these families patronized and in which
they resided. The networks of these prosperous financial
communities of the subcontinent have been relatively little
studied, particularly in their historical contexts and with
respect to changes in patterns of urban settlement,
architectural and artisanal traditions, and the creation and
use of domestic and public spaces. Our study will bring these
socio-historically significant buildings to the attention of
scholars of architectural history in general and of South Asia
in particular. The study will also analyze the architectural
and concomitant social practices originating in the families’
“homelands” in north India, sometimes discernible as early as
the thirteenth century, and trace their early modern
transformations in the new geographical and cultural context of
the Deccan during the 18th through early 20th
centuries. Our combined expertise in architectural and social
history will elucidate the historical extent of transregional
networks throughout India, and the mobility and adaptability of
architectural and social practices.
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