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The Architecture of the Indian Sultanates. Edited by Abha Narain Lambah and Alka Patel. Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2006. 116 pp. $66.00 (cloth).

2009; Cambridge University Press; Volume: 68; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1017/s0021911809990544

1752-0401

Robert L. Brown,

Global Maritime and Colonial Histories

The period of the Indian sultanates runs from the late twelfth century to the early sixteenth century (ending essentially with the founding of the Mughal dynasty in 1526), and is a period of many dynasties ruling both large and small kingdoms in South Asia. The dynasties are usually identified as Islamic, and the kingdoms are described as fissiparous and competing. A great deal of architecture was produced over this long period of over 300 years, and art historians have tended to categorized it as of a style or type and thus speak of sultanate architecture. The careful reader will instantly recognize in the pluralization of the word “sultanates” in the title of the volume that some rethinking of the definition and use of the term is involved. Indeed, the volume, with two introductory notes by the editors and eight articles, is intended to stress certain thematic revisions of the art and architecture history of the Indian sultanates.Before turning to some of these revisionist approaches, I will list the authors and their topics to give a sense of the range and variety of sultanates discussed. In their order in the volume, Holly Edwards explores commemorative architecture of the Indus Valley, with an emphasis on its shared religious background; Jutta Jain-Neubauer discusses town planning under the Tughluqs (1320–1413), mainly their extensive building in Delhi; Lambah's focus is on the Sharqis of Jaunpur (1394–1480) and their remarkable mosque façades; Catherine B. Asher writes about Sher Shah Sur's use of architecture as political propaganda (Sher Shah's reign is 1538–45 and thus technically falls out of the sultanate period); Patel returns to a topic on which she has written extensively, which is the architecture in Gujarat, and particularly the use and meaning of spolia in Islamic architecture of the period; Michael Brand looks at the sultanate of Malwa, demonstrating that the architectural complex at Mandu built by Mahmud Shah in the short period of 1437–42 is unique among sultanate monuments in its purposeful interrelationship; Pika Ghosh traces the developments in Bengali architecture of the period, stressing their shared vernacular character; and the eighth and final paper by Phillip B. Wagoner proposes the symbolism of the unique and very different Charminar at the center of Hyderabad as relating to that of local Decanni cosmological ideas of space, both Islamic and Hindu.Thus, the articles' range is broad and varied, both geographically and chronologically, but allows for a discussion of the “center” of the North Indian sultanates (Delhi, Jaunpur, Malwa), and, in addition, a discussion of sultanates of the cardinal directions of the periphery with the Indus Valley, Gujarat, Deccan, and Bengal. My brief mention of the article topics leaves out, of course, many of the important subjects analyzed in the papers.What, then, are some of the approaches the articles bring out? One is the importance of local architectural innovations, which involves the need to look closely at regional differences. Tied closely to this is the acceptance of local vernaculars as shared sources for regional idioms. A second theme is that the categorization of architecture in terms of religious identities, here of course primarily Islamic and Hindu, is rarely helpful if used as opposing groupings. The preference is to see patrons' motivations in terms of politics or economics, rather than in terms of religion. A third theme is to use decentered models of sharing. Rather than a dominant center with peripheries, the center (in this case, for example, Delhi) is placed on equal footing with the peripheries (for example Bengal or the Indus Valley). Multiplicity is always applied to the evidence, and monolithic overarching unities are avoided. These scholarly approaches (of regional and vernacular idioms privileged over periods and dynasties, of political motivations privileged over religious identities, of peripheries equal to centers in innovation, and of the use of multiple explanations rather than monolithic theories) may sound familiar, as they are being applied as well in rethinking South Asian art historical scholarship as a whole. In any event, their application to the architectural history of the sultanate period, as witnessed in this volume, is particularly persuasive.Brand speaks of architects at Mandu, in contrast to those in Gujarat, who “were working within a flexible system that was not confined by the borders of Malwa” (p. 90). Patel, in her article on Gujarati architecture, writes of “a fluidity among building types” (p. 79) between sacred and profane architecture. Ghosh says something similar with the interchange between vernacular and sacred, or Hindu and Islamic, architecture in Bengal. These and other comments in the articles suggest the possible application of a sliding scale of architectural identification that applies across localities and even broad regions. The close studies of regional sultanates will enable scholars to trace lines of transmission, sources of influence, and shared goals with renewed balance and accuracy.