This important book won the American Historical Association's John F. Richards Prize (2015) and the Association for Asian Studies’ Ananda K. Coomaraswamy Prize (2016). Such prizes are not awarded lightly. Power, Memory, Architecture offers its readers a fresh perspective on the sixteenth-century Deccan that, in turn, has implications for the interpretation of other aspects of South Asian history over the past half-millennium.
Richard Eaton and Phillip Wagoner's main objective is to explore the interactions of political power, state-based memories of the past (often fictitious ones), and monumental architecture among Deccan states as they vied for control of the secondary centers that were the essential economic and political building blocks of their kingdoms. Viewed from another perspective, the book can be said to examine how and why Deccan states sought to validate the legitimacy of their rule, as improbable as that legitimacy sometimes was, to each other and to the rank and file of society.
Throughout their book, Eaton and Wagoner also show how early clashes between Sanskrit and Persianate cosmopolises metamorphosed into something that drew from both cultural spheres and was not wholly Northern or Southern, Muslim or Hindu, but Deccani. The result challenges deeply seated old interpretations, such as those of Robert Sewell a century ago, who envisioned Vijayanagara as a Hindu bulwark in the South standing firm against Muslim invasions from the North. Views similar to that of Sewell are still widely held, but as Eaton and Wagoner demonstrate in example after example, the data simply do not support a “clash of civilizations” argument. What really happened in the past was far more of an accommodating, tolerant, and political nature.
The book's scope focuses on the cities of Kalyana, Warangal, and Raichur, all of which were secondary centers of larger kingdoms, between 1300 and 1600. However, the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Deccan is mainly of interest for what it can help us to understand about the sixteenth century, a time during which Deccan life was particularly challenging. States rose and fell as their armies fought, regrouped, and fought again; as allies intrigued to become enemies; and as a ruler who patronized the arts and pushed architecture in new directions today could just as likely order his or her siblings blinded tomorrow.
Power, Memory, Architecture comprises four sections of two chapters each, brief introductory and concluding chapters, and two appendices. The first section lays out the essential historical background for the southern Deccan between 1000 and 1500. It introduces the Kalyana Chalukyas, whose empire governed much of this region between 973 and the mid-twelfth century, and whose successor states, the Kakatiyas of Warangal among them, dealt with the southward thrusts of the Delhi Sultanate, which began in the late thirteenth century and was continued by the latter's successor states into the sixteenth century.
The second section explores the fictive associations that sixteenth-century Vijayanagara and Bijapur, which were quite different primary centers, forged with the architecture, genealogy, and titles of the Kalyana Chalukya empire of some four centuries earlier. The goal in both cases was clearly to establish the legitimacy of their respective royal dynasties by linking them to collective memories of a glorious past.
A similar pattern is present in the third section, which addresses Warangal, the former capital of the Kakatiya kingdom and one of the major Chalukya successor states in the eastern Deccan. Here a sixteenth-century ruler of the Qutb Shahi sultanate, which was centered on Golconda, drew upon Warangal's Hindu cosmographic plan in his design for the new city of Hyderabad, an approach the authors describe as a blend of “both the Persian and the Sanskrit cosmopolises” (p. 229).
The final main section shifts the reader's attention to the sixteenth-century rivalry between Vijayanagara and the Bahmani sultanate for the control of the city of Raichur. The main objective is to examine how controlled force, the military form of “power,” fits into the framework laid out in earlier chapters. Two topics are taken up: the introduction of gunpowder technology into the region and the symbolic use of major gateways by rulers. Although it is well-argued, chapter 7, on gunpowder technology, is the book's weakest chapter. More attention needs to be given to the effectiveness of plunging fire from guns mounted on high platforms, gun carriages and mounts, the trajectories in which sixteenth-century smooth-bore guns were most effective, the probable rate of fire of large guns like the ones described in this chapter, and the difficulty of determining where a stone ball or solid metal shot of uncertain spherical properties is likely to go after it leaves the muzzle. As demonstrated in Singapore in 1942, big guns sited at the wrong places and in fixed mounts of the wrong type may look formidable, but they can also be utterly useless in a real battle.
Eaton and Wagoner's main points are well illustrated by 158 black-and-white figures and line drawings, as well as five tables. This book's excellent production quality is typical of the Oxford University Press imprint.
The authors rightly envision a broad audience for this book (p. xxv), ranging from those who see the past millennium of South Asian history as mainly a story about North India, to those who envision these centuries primarily in a Hindu-Muslim oppositional framework, and to researchers who hesitate to seek out fresh lines of evidence and new perspectives beyond that defined by the traditional domains of their disciplines. Power, Memory, Architecture brings together disparate data from a half-dozen disciplines and as many languages and weaves them into compelling arguments that build logically one to another across chapter after chapter. It pushes us all to look in new directions armed with new questions. And this is all that a scholar can ask.
