Abstract
Monumental Matters, a book about Mughal architectural monuments in India, is more significantly about the social life of artistic and architectural productions in nation building. Asserting that the role that monuments play in identity formation and the social landscape of the nation-state has been inadequately understood despite their ‘omnipresence and their allure’, in her work she focuses on spatial practices, symbolism and architectural identity (p. 3).
At the heart of Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s work is the examination of why monuments have mattered in the making of modern India. She examines monuments as active spaces with shifting and plural identities, and meanings that are threatening to the power and apparatuses of the state that requires them to have fixed subject positions that can be monitored, controlled and managed as such. Hence, monuments become sites for the state to order and control as well as for those opposed who seek to challenge such power.
Kavuri-Bauer chooses to focus her study on Mughal monuments, reading their spatial practices to reveal the underlying ambivalence of the ways these spaces shaped subjectivity and functioned as sites for the assertion of power and resistance. The study begins with the turbulent 18th century examining of the monuments and their meanings through contextualised readings of landscape paintings in the picturesque style of William Hodges, Urdu poetry such as the shahrashob and British travelogues such as that of Fanny Parker to interpret the aesthetic and symbolic representations of the political, social and cultural turmoil of the time. She then examines Mughal monuments in the 19th century under British Imperialism. In addition to Alexander Cunningham, the establishment of the Archaeological Survey of India and its efforts to order, classify and protect all monuments, the author also investigates colonial narratives of monuments constructed by and for European tourists that structured the experience of the monuments. Especially astute is her exegesis of the colonial construction of the Taj Mahal as a monument of ageless and sublime beauty removed from the chaotic and sordid native life around it.
The author’s textured reading of Sir Syyed Ahmed Khan’s work on monuments and reform as well as that of Urdu poets like Hali and Iqbal offers valuable insights on the changing relationship of the Muslim community in India to the Mughal monuments from the late 19th century to the time of Partition. We see Mughal monuments through Nehru and Gandhi’s differing views of secularism, modernity and the violence of Partition. She finally brings us to contemporary spatial practices of preservation and tourism of the Mughal monuments in the context of nationalist narratives of secularism and egalitarianism.
Monumental Matters is both beautifully written and thoroughly researched. The work is important for going beyond style and chronology to ‘examine how the interplay of power, subjectivity, and creativity produce the monument recursively and radically’ (p. 14). She writes with passion and sensitivity to the point of being almost poetic at times. The book is also a valuable contribution to a much needed understanding of the history of heritage preservation in the Indian context: the values, beliefs, practices as well as people’s changing relationship with it.
For a book on monuments, a question that remains to be discussed is: what constitutes a monument and what attributes designate them as heritage? At a time when architectural historians have been urging postcolonial readings of architecture and urbanism that look at buildings in their settings as cultural landscapes and the recognition of heritage values of ordinary buildings and places, the concept of monuments and heritage as artistic objects needs expansion. She begins to address this in her epilogue in looking at the Fatehpuri Masjid in Delhi as a community space. However, one cannot help wondering how Kavuri-Bauer’s interpretive frameworks would hold up for alternative, indigenous and subaltern notions of heritage and extend to the built environment at large.
The book is passionate about the formation of Indian Muslim social identity through the Mughal monuments. However, a broader conceptualisation of subjectivity seems more in keeping with the book’s stated intent, as would a wider contextualisation in prevalent debates on identity politics and communal identity. Her discussion of nationalism and architecture too merits drawing on the nuanced and fragmented notions of nationalism offered in recent literature. The author’s reading of the events around the Babri Masjid and the Partition is insightful and fine-grained on the connection to the monuments. The book’s larger objective of recognising the role of monuments in the making of modern India would have been better supported by locating her analysis in the larger political complexity and historical circumstances of the events.
This is an exceptional book that expands ways of thinking about histories of art and raises the bar for writing. While scholarship on the relationship between architecture and power has often focused on the making of monuments and their design, the author’s conceptualisation of monuments as the material expression of power relations goes further to their lived lives. She provides also an understanding of how spaces of Indian heritage functioned in history and establishes without doubt how monuments play an active role in social and political transformation, making the book an important contribution.