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Literary Review
Mediated forms
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Ebba Koch's book highlights the flexibility of Mughal architecture, marked by reciprocal exchanges between regional building styles and those that evolved at the imperial centres, says MONICA JUNEJA.
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SINCE James Fergusson and Percy Brown gave the field of Mughal architecture its modern disciplinary moorings beginning well over a century ago, there has been a glaring historiographical gap as far as serious overviews of the subject go. The early 1990s saw the publication of two works — the book under review and Catherine Asher's rich account of the historical development of architecture in Mughal India — which have now advanced our knowledge of the subject by bringing greater accuracy, fresher perspectives and a correction of former imbalances.
Ebba Koch's "outline" of the history of Mughal architecture from 1526 to 1858, first published in 1991, is a product of her research of many years in this field and therefore brings to light a wealth of new material. It also relocates our understanding of the subject in a broader area by drawing upon recent research on the architectural histories of Iran and Timurid Central Asia.
Koch's own fieldwork in north India and Pakistan highlights the fluid relationship, marked by frequent and reciprocal exchanges, between regional building styles and methods and those that evolved at the imperial centres. Mughal architecture, as it emerges through her scholarly description of its growth, was marked by great flexibility in its absorption of the heterogeneous traditions it encountered — the Timurid, the many regional styles of the Indian subcontinent, and the European.
Such a refocusing comes as an important corrective to a popular conception of Mughal buildings, which sees in them a visual translation of the personalities or syncretic politics of individual emperors such as Akbar and Shah Jahan. In Koch's book we discover the rich and varied structures of Fatehpur Sikri, for instance, not simply as an expression of their patron's personal predilection for "Hindu" forms and ideas, but as a product of more complex practices of borrowing, rooted in varying and specific historical configurations, borrowings that privileged particular regions and individual structures — from Gujarat, the Rajput kingdoms of central India, the regions of Transoxiana.
The movement of forms took place also in the reverse direction — from the centre at Agra and Sikri to the regions, such as Vrindavana, where the style of Fatehpur Sikri was reworked and adapted to the building of important temples. This was a process rooted in the patronage of Kachhwaha nobles in the Mughal imperial service, such as Raja Man Singh, a subject on which Koch acknowledges her debt to the extensive research of Asher.
The mine of information unearthed by this meticulous and erudite study can be used to prise open a number of questions generally neglected in earlier writings on Mughal architecture — issues of patronage and their imbrication with the workings of authority at different levels, of the ways in which the movement of forms participate in other kinds of movements such as travel, migration, the forging of marriage alliances and processes of state building. This would bring architecture into the centre of historical enquiry, sensitising historians of all kinds to the significance of studying the built environment.
The main text of this book however, densely packed with formalistic detail, does not problematise these questions. Grown out of an article for the Encyclopaedia of Islam, it retains a strong lexical flavour, which detracts from easy and lively readability. The bare minimum of contextualisation that the book attempts is limited to four and a half pages of the Introduction wherein a dynastic history of the Mughals is juxtaposed to a sketch of the buildings they commissioned. This lack of exploration of the more complex and varied mediations between style and the political meanings it is held to transmit is unfortunate as it unwittingly brings through the back door a history-as-background model against which art comes to be displayed. One also misses information on practices of commissioning and building, about the quarrying and transporting of material, and about those who did the actual building. Here even a summary of some of the existing research on these equally important areas of architectural history would have deepened the historical dimensions of this study.
This elegantly brought out book contains excellent photographs by the author and plans drawn up with exemplary competence by the architect Richard Barraud. The content of the visuals could have been made more accessible to non-specialists and students by greater analytical orientation through the text. There is a useful glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography, though the latter could have been updated 11 years after it was first compiled.
Mughal Architecture: An Outline of its History and Development, Ebba Koch, Oxford University Press, 2002 (reprint).
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