Current Projects

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-18^th 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-19^th- through early 20^th-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:

Dr. Alka Patel, “Scholarly Imbalances: the Historiography of Reuse in South Asia”;

Dr. Kurt Behrendt, “Reuse of Images in Ancient Gandhara”;

Professor Vidya Dehejia, “Issues of Reuse, Removal, and Recarving at Mamallapuram”;

Dr. Julia A.B. Hegewald, “Shaiva-Jaina-Lingayat: The Appropriation of Sacred Architectural Space in Central and Southern India”;

Dr. Alka Patel, “Temple or Mosque? The Jageshvara Mandir of Sadadi, Rajasthan”;

Dr. Tamara I. Sears, “From Matha to Madrasa? The Transformation and Reuse of Hindu Monastic Sites during the 11^th through 15^th centuries”;

Dr. Molly Emma Aitken, “Reuse, Recontextualization and an Aesthetic of Parataxis in Mughal Painting”;

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 (4^th-5^th centuries), the Byzantine and Islamic worlds (6^th-11^th centuries), and early medieval Europe (12^th-14^th centuries).[1]  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 19^th-century colonial approaches to South Asia’s past,[2] 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 12^th-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.[3]

    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-18^th and 19^th 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 18^th 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 17^th 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 18^th through early 20^th 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.