Architecture in Medieval India: Forms, Contexts, Histories

The architectural history of medieval India has been the subject of very diverse writings. The present book pulls together the most significant of these, revealing an impressive array of ideas about India’s past through the study of its monuments. A long introduction examines the intellectual importance of architectural history, showing how buildings and their histories have frequently been polemical and instrumental: they have been politically deployed to construct or fabricate a past. They have been used to provide symbolic meanings which have helped subjugate or unify heterogeneous communities and nations. The architectural history of India’s misnamed ‘Muslim’ period is revealed as the site of tensions between Hindus and Muslims, colonialists and nationalists, traditionalists and postmodernists. The writings reproduced here are also located within the specific intellectual, political, and socio-cultural contexts within which they emerged, making this ‘reader’ a major contribution to Indian history.