The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India's Mughal Architecture
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monumental matters monumental matters The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture Santhi Kavuri-Bauer Duke University Press | Durham and London | 2011 © 2011 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by April Leidig-Higgins Typeset in Garamond Premier Pro by Copperline Book Services, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. In memory of my father, Raghavayya V. Kavuri contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Breathing New Life into Old Stones: The Poets and Artists of the Mughal Monument in the Eighteenth Century 19 2 From Cunningham to Curzon: Producing the Mughal Monument in the Era of High Imperialism 49 3 Between Fantasy and Phantasmagoria: The Mughal Monument and the Structure of Touristic Desire 76 4 Rebuilding Indian Muslim Space from the Ruins of the Mughal “Moral City” 95 5 Tryst with Destiny: Nehru’s and Gandhi’s Mughal Monuments 127 6 The Ethics of Monumentality in Postindependence India 145 Epilogue 170 Notes 179 Bibliography 197 Index 207 acknowledgments This book is the result of over ten years of research, writing, and discus- sion. Many people and institutions provided support along the way to the book’s final publication. I want to thank the UCLA International Institute and Getty Museum for their wonderful summer institute, “Constructing the Past in the Middle East,” in Istanbul, Turkey in 2004; the Getty Foundation for a postdoctoral fellowship during 2005–2006; and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Grant Award for a subvention grant toward the costs of publishing this book. I would also like to thank my home institution, San Francisco State University (SFSU), for providing me with a Presidential Award for Professional Development in 2007, and SFSU deans Keith Morrison and Ron Compesi for making my professional leaves possible and for their encouragement. My mentors at UCLA were a constant source of support for my research. Robert L. Brown, my dissertation advisor, offered me his enthusiasm, trust, and unwavering encouragement. Irene Bierman-McKinney’s passion for Is- lamic architecture and her innovative approaches to its study helped me dis- cover my love for Mughal architecture and shaped this project. I also thank Donald Preziosi, Swati Chattopadhyay, Robert Nelson, and Tapati Guha- Thakurta for their guidance at different stages of my research and writing. In India the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) facilitated my travel and provided me with a place to stay and exchange ideas with fellow researchers while in New Delhi. At the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) I wish to thank Jahnwij Sharma and Ashis Banerjee. Dr. R.C. Agrawal at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and the staff at AIIS helped open both front and back doors at the Mughal monu- ments. Mr. R.K. Dhiksit and Mr. R.L. Kohli in the Agra Office of the ASI afforded me the rare opportunity to observe the behind the scenes activities at the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. The staff at the National Archive, the Nehru Memorial Library, and the Delhi State Archives extended their help and guidance in accessing collections. I also thank Purnima Mehta, Amita Baig, Adnan Khan, O.P. Mahour, and Radheshyam Gola. x | Acknowledgments Thanks go to the staff of Unesco’s World Heritage Center in Paris, espe- cially Jukka Jokilehto, Minja Yang, Peter Stott, and Sarah Titchen; the staff of the Oriental and India Office Collection at the British Library; the staff of the Huntington Library in Pasadena; and in New Haven, the staff of the Yale Center for British Art. At SFSU I thank the members of my department, especially Richard Mann, Gwen Allen, Candace Crockett, and Barbara Foster. Thanks go to others at SFSU, including Chris Chekuri, Prithvi Datta, Falu Bakrania, Kasturi Ray, Sanjoy Banerjee, Anoshua Chaudhuri, and Lucia Volk, for reading parts of my manuscript and offering thoughtful feedback. I am grateful to Carrie Thaler of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco for taking time out of her busy schedule to thoughtfully read my introduction. I thank Nancy Um for her friendship, encouragement, and advice, and for the invitation to the Harpur College Dean’s Workshop in Visual Culture at Binghamton, where I received valuable feedback from graduate students and faculty. Other schol- ars and friends that offered their support, commentary, and kind advice are: Michael Hatt, Tim Barringer, Fred Bohrer, Bruce Grant, Saleema Waraich, Nicole Watts, Carel Betram, Aftab Ahmad, and Taymiya R. Zaman. In India, Malik Faisal provided excellent help with the translation of Urdu news paper articles when I was seriously pressed for time and offered his interviewing skills in Delhi and Lucknow. Max Bruce and Christine Boucher lent me their language skills and knowledge of poetry. I thank my graduate students, Krystal Hauseur, Eun June Park, Natalie Rico Patton, and Bradley Hyppa, and my undergraduate students, Joy Iris-Willbanks, Leah McNamee, Shelly Fuller, and Matthew Bowen for all their encouragement and help. At Duke University Press I wish to thank Anitra Grisales, Mandy Earley, and Jade Brooks, the editing team, the anonymous readers, and especially Ken Wissoker for his help and patience in ushering me through the overwhelming process of turning a dissertation into a book. Finally, I thank my family for their love, patience, and support. Henning, I thank you for not only listening to me bat around ideas about monuments for over ten years and editing my chapters and Persian translations, but especially for your love and humor. I could not have completed this book without you. introduction Facing a no-confidence vote in November of 1990, V. P. Singh, India’s eighth prime minister, posed a resounding question to an audience of MPs: “What kind of India do you want?” With this question, Singh signaled the irony of a secular nation-state indulging the Hindu nationalist demand to demolish the Babri Masjid, a small sixteenth-century mosque. The ultimate aim of this endeavor, known as the kar seva (service), was to build a Hindu temple in place of the mosque to simultaneously mark the birthplace of the god Ram and symbolize Hindu political resurgence. In fact, the plan was no longer just being debated and was gaining noticeable traction among upper- caste Hindus and Lok Sabha parliamentarians. Singh himself gave a straight- forward answer to the question of what kind of India he wanted: a secular, democratic country based on the rule of law. He thus resolved to protect the small mosque at all costs because that was simply what he, the leader of the world’s largest secular democracy, was charged to do. Unlike the Congress Party governments before and after him, Singh did not waver in his com- mitment to the protection of the Muslim minority and its built heritage. To- ward this end, he had L. K. Advani, the organizer of the planned demolition, arrested. He then deployed security forces to surround the historic Mughal mosque and thwart its planned destruction. The prime minister’s principled stance to protect the space of the mosque enraged Hindu nationalists and compelled their political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to pull support for Singh’s coalition government. This eventually cost Singh his post. What is often overlooked by writers of the now well-studied series of events that culminated with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December of 1992 was that Singh’s question —“What kind of India do you want?”— signaled an ethical approach to the kar seva controversy.1 Asserted here is the notion that the kind of India one wanted could be shaped by how one reckoned with its architectural and national landscape: that with the destruction of this small, inactive historical mosque the promise of Indian secularism could die and communalism could come to reorder the country.2 More crucially, it sug- gests that with the proper perspective on its built environments, India could 2 | monumental matters repel the demagoguery shaping its public space. What Singh implied with his question constitutes the central premise of this book: monuments matter. Monumental environments materialize power relations, influence the social ordering of a nation, produce us as subjects, and finally, and more positively, provide us with a critical space to create, resist, and endure in our everyday lives. As such, monuments are not stable and unchanging but dynamic spaces that can help us understand how political movements and social identities in India have been forged through the imperatives of power, subjectivity, and the spatial practices they influence.3 To begin thinking of Indian monuments as dynamic spaces shaped by the contending concerns of nation-making, identity, and social survival, I ask the reader to imagine a thirteen-year-old Muslim girl entering the sixteenth- century Tomb of Humayun in Delhi today. In the course of a single hour, she will occupy several subject positions in this public space: she is a child under the guardianship of her parents; an Indian citizen visiting the monuments of her nation’s history; and a member of the global culture of humankind, as the monument is on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. She is also a young woman aware of her personal space and the gaze of others. Finally, she is a Muslim who can recognize the forms of the architecture as similar to those of her local mosque and who witnesses her parents proudly proclaim that this is how her Muslim ancestors used to build. This example shows the space of the monument as far more multivalent and active than unified and static.