Built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, India's Mughal monuments-including majestic forts, mosques, palaces, and tombs, such as the Taj Mahal-are world renowned for their grandeur and association with the Mughals, the powerful Islamic empire that once ruled most of the subcontinent. In Monumental Matters, Santhi Kavuri-Bauer focuses on the prominent role of Mughal architecture in the construction and contestation of the Indian national landscape. She examines the representation and eventual preservation of the monuments, from their disrepair in the colonial past to their present status as protected heritage sites. Drawing on theories of power, subjectivity, and space, Kavuri-Bauer's interdisciplinary analysis encompasses Urdu poetry, British landscape painting, imperial archaeological surveys, Indian Muslim identity, and British tourism, as well as postcolonial nation building, World Heritage designations, and conservation mandates. Since Independence, the state has attempted to construct a narrative of Mughal monuments as symbols of a unified, secular nation. Yet modern-day sectarian violence at these sites continues to suggest that India's Mughal monuments remain the transformative spaces-of social ordering, identity formation, and national reinvention-that they have been for centuries.
Santhi Kavuri-Bauer is Associate Professor of Art History at San Francisco State University.
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 Mighal Monuments 127 6. The Ethics of Monumentality in Postindependence India 145 Epilogue 170 Notes 179 Bibliography 197 Index
Focuses attention on the prominent role of Mughal architecture in the construction and contestation of the Indian national landscape
"Monumental Matters is a novel and incisive account of the ongoing re-conceptualization of India's Mughal monuments since the colonial era. Santhi Kavuri-Bauer reaches far beyond architectural and art historical scholarship to probe a range of larger political, ideological, and historical processes that have impinged on the modern life of India's monumental spaces. She examines processes ranging from travel, landscape painting, and archaeological surveys in colonial India to state planning, tourism, and the cultural politics of a more recent era." Tapati Guha-Thakurta, author of Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India "Santhi Kavuri-Bauer's Monumental Matters is an original and innovative study that historians, students of architecture and nationalism, and scholars of place and space will seek out and profit from." Antoinette Burton, author of Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism
