In Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India's Mughal Architecture, art historian Santhi Kavuri-Bauer presents a rich and insightful account of the varied desires, fantasies, and denouements that can surround monumental edifices that outlive an original raison d’être. The study's premise is that the idea of the “monument” is inherently a creative and ever-changing process, in which the past is constantly being reinterpreted to suit the needs of the present. These, as Kavuri-Bauer demonstrates, can vary across religious, racial, and national boundaries. The book is focused on grand edifices in Agra and Delhi that were commissioned by imperial Mughal patrons, whose architectural creations are charged symbols that are claimed and contested in modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
The six chapters that constitute the book are arranged chronologically, beginning in the eighteenth century and leading up to the present day. Chapter 1 is concerned with the decades in which the Mughal empire and, by extension, its authority began to wane. In these conditions, Mughal edifices elicited a range of reactions from various actors, including new political aspirants, cultural commentators, and foreign observers. Mughal identity and the desire for association with their empire were manifest as aspiration, nostalgia, reprehension, or even menace among new contenders that included various successor regimes as well as the English East India Company. For Urdu poets affiliated with new cultural centers such as Lucknow, this took the form of poetic lamentations for Delhi and Agra. In the paintings of William Hodges (who was commissioned by the East India Company), Mughal monuments were wreathed in a romantic and isolating nostalgia that concealed the physical and institutional violence wreaked by the Company's territorial expansion. The rare sympathetic foreign observer, such as Fanny Parkes, remarked on the drastically reduced circumstances of a once powerful and extremely wealthy Mughal regime and the imperial family at its center.
In chapter 2, Kavuri-Bauer examines the fate of Mughal monuments in Agra and Delhi between 1802 and 1857 (from the fall of Delhi to the rebellion of 1857). Although several monuments continued to function in their institutional capacities, their endowments were substantially diminished, only occasionally supplemented by financial support from the Company's government. After 1857, however, the British government undertook a systematic survey of all Indian monuments and subjected them to new terms and nomenclatures that were based in racial and religious categories. Kavuri-Bauer suggests that the Archaeological Survey of India and its founding leadership under Alexander Cunningham pursued a policy that framed monuments within new categories of knowledge, thereby demystifying them and nullifying their inherent potential to instigate another revolt. For the next generation of colonial policy makers led by Curzon, the monument's ability to evoke an emotional response was desirable, so long as such reactions were contained within a larger narrative of historical progression that concluded with the inevitability of British rule.
Kavuri-Bauer elaborates on this idea in chapter 3 through a discussion of Curzon's policy of encouraging British tourism to India. Travel was facilitated by the simultaneous, fortuitous rise of the infrastructure of global tourism—steamships, railways, comfortable hotels, guide books, and trained guides—that became available to well-heeled tourist-ambassadors from Britain. In Curzon's larger scheme, Mughal monuments were to be admired for their beauty, but ultimately consigned to an opulent and decadent past that was replaced by an orderly British imperial present. Inevitably, such framings could never be contained within designated boundaries. For Indian visitors to the Red Fort, the trauma of 1857 and the tragic end of the Mughals remained alive in collective memory, and a new generation of historians and artists elevated monuments as symbols of a glorious (if mythical) Indian past.
Chapter 4 is devoted to the role of Mughal monuments, especially mosques, as spaces of healing and unification for the Muslim community after 1857. Several authors articulated the role of these monuments as spaces that were central to the formation of a “moral community,” also the beginnings of the idea of Pakistan as a notional space, before it was ever imagined as a territorial entity or separate state. For some intellectuals, such as Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, monuments and mosques embodied Muslim practice as well as Indian history. Reformists such as Khan began to espouse the ideas of the eighteenth-century activist Shah Waliullah, who sought to purify Islam. The policies of the Mughal emperor Akbar, and Sufi practices in particular, became anathema to this group. Other Muslim intellectuals, such as Maulana Azad, cautioned against such ideas as contradictory to Indian Islam and its millennium of rooted history in South Asia.
In chapter 5, Kavuri-Bauer examines the role of the Mughal monument as a site of active nationalist reclamation at the moment of independence. Several events that preceded the creation of the new nation in 1947, such as the 1911 coronation of George V, the INA trial, and the building of New Delhi, had served to cast the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad and the Red Fort as markers of humiliation and displacement. For Nehru, the unfurling of the Indian flag on the fort's ramparts signaled a symbolic repossession. Other mosques and monuments became arenas for multiple articulations of identity. For Maulana Azad, the Jama Masjid was an anchor for an Indian Muslim identity in the wake of partition and the creation of Pakistan, and for Gandhi, Sufi shrines remained symbolic of Hindu-Muslim unity. In reality, several mosques were converted into temples or gurudwaras and several monuments, including Humayun's tomb and the precinct of the Purana Qila, became temporary refugee camps for Delhi's displaced Muslims. When communal violence abated, and mosques were repaired and restituted, Hindu nationalists were left with a sense of disenfranchisement in an independent but secular nation.
In chapter 6, Kavuri-Bauer analyzes the monument's recasting as the collective heritage of the Indian nation. Any alternate reading of these monuments, exemplified, for instance, by an ill-fated attempt to register the Taj Mahal as waqf property, is viewed as regressive and unviable. The author suggests that in a political climate where the nation's Hindu past is ubiquitous within secular politics as well as within the narratives of right-wing Hindu nationalists, the move to reclaim the institutional roles of monuments can be seen as a form of protest by Indian Muslims. She concludes on an ambivalent note, pointing out that monuments such as the Fatehpuri masjid in Shahjahanabad, which continues to function as a religious and educational institution, occupy an increasingly marginal role in the globalizing Indian economy of the twenty-first century.
Monumental Matters offers a broad and sweeping narrative that is drawn from a wide array of sources, including official archives, literary accounts, and tourist guidebooks. Each chapter tells a cogent story while providing a critical building block in a cohesive and comprehensible narrative. The book is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the “afterlife” of objects and buildings and their entanglements with the discursive trajectories of nationalism and globalization. It will be welcome reading in upper-level undergraduate and graduate courses in art history, architectural history, South Asian studies, and archaeology.
