Book review: Chanchal B. Dadlani. 2018. From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire

A substantial body of scholarship, originating with the historians and archaeologists of British colonial architecture, has customarily discounted the sociopolitical deportment of the Mughal Empire after the death of the emperor Aurangzeb in the early 18^th century by positing it as a period of irrevocable cultural decline. More recent assessments of the 18^th-century Mughal world—bridging the late Mughal empire with the advent of the British colonial powers—have since contested this paradigm of decline, and it is in this framework that Chanchal Dadlani’s From Paper to Stone: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire makes a valuable contribution in providing a refined understanding of the Mughal architectural dynamic as it was compositely appropriated in negotiating and calibrating the Mughal political-cultural identity and, by extension, the larger cultural, geospatial realignments in 18^th-century North India. In bringing under its academic scrutiny the architectural developments under the Mughals as well as its successor states, most pertinently Awadh, this book credibly redefines, challenges and enriches our understandings of the layered complexities which inform the Mughal political-cultural aspirations in the long 18^th century. The legacy of iconic Mughal monuments of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, their urban relationships and the modes of conceptualising and representing architecture through plans and drawings: all these are engaged on their own terms to foreground the forces instrumental in making emergent a codified concept of the Mughal style. Rather than merely furnish an inventory of 17^th-century Mughal architecture, From Paper to Stone, through its methodological unfolding, awakens a timely conversation about how architecture and its forms and urban relationships were mobilised and manipulated to reshape and recast Mughal identities in response to the transformed geospatial and cultural realities of the late Mughal period.

Seemingly chronological in its arrangement, the book unfolds thematically with the first three chapters methodically exploring the articulations of the ‘Mughal style’ rooted in the spatial and ornamental idiom patronised by Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658); it is most eloquently evinced in monuments such as the Taj Mahal. Dadlani, in the first chapter, takes into account Aurangzeb’s commissions—the Moti Masjid in Delhi, the Nagina Masjid in Agra and the Bibi ka Maqbara in Aurangabad among them. Here, through architectural modes of imitation and improvisation framed in the dynamic of istiqbal (active reception), a conscious reordering of architectural forms and ornament, a novel utilisation of red sandstone and white marble (later replaced by stucco) served to appropriate the past Mughal legacy of design and form. In this historically bound deployment of architecture as a means of projecting Mughal imperial authority, ‘both experimentation and regulation were integral to the linked processes of expanding and standardizing what would become a recognizable, reflexive Mughal style’ (p. 55).

Centring on the urban culture of Mughal Delhi, the second chapter delves into the changing modes of imperial and sub-imperial patronage, occasioning a new urban subjectivity over the 18^th century. In a shift from an imperial locus such as the Red Fort, which anchored and organised the urban-architectural relationships around it, investitures by a wide group of patrons—in the form of mosques, funerary structures, residences and gardens, especially in the proximity of the Chishti dargahs of Bakhtiar Kaki or Nizam-al Din Auliya—were instrumental in redefining the urban order of late Mughal Delhi, where spaces outside the walled city of Delhi, especially the representative Sufi establishments, embodied the changing sensibilities about the city’s urban configurations. Dadlani explores these shifts through a close reading of the Muraqqa’-yi Dihli, a travel account by a Deccani noble, Dargah Quli Khan, whose descriptions reveal a rich engagement with the city’s buildings and spaces and communicate the composite experience of 18^th-century Delhi.

The third chapter inscribes the mechanism of appropriating the codified Mughal forms and ornament into a more expanded field by considering the ways in which competing non-Mughal powers—specifically the rulers of Awadh, who also doubled as high-ranking functionaries at the Mughal court—negotiated their authority and legitimacy through a kinship with the codified Mughal architectural vocabulary on the one hand while infusing it with a charged Shi’i iconography on the other, thus introducing marked variations at the spatial, material and decorative levels in the earlier Mughal idiom. This is explicated primarily through an in-depth assessment of the tomb of Abu al-Mansur Safdar Jang (r. 1739–1754), the head of the Awadhi ruling house and the Mughal empire’s vizier at the time. In consciously privileging the monumental funerary form customarily reserved for the Mughal sovereignty, Safdar Jang’s tomb also set the precedent for employing Mughal-inspired architectural vocabulary in later structures in Awadh and elsewhere.

In the fourth chapter, Dadlani proceeds to foreground the shift from architecture to its graphic representation through which ‘various factions aspired to claim and manipulate the Mughal past’ (p. 144). In this formulation, pictorial and graphic representations—the chapter primarily discusses the drawings/representations contained in the Palais Indiens (c. 1774) commissioned by the French Jean-Baptiste Gentil for Louis XVI—not only become a repository of particular historical continuities but also transform Mughal architecture itself into a historicised object. Dadlani then moves to situate the Palais Indiens in the context of other contemporary representations of architecture by Indian as well as European artists (most prominently, William Hodges and the Daniells, working in the Picturesque tradition) to contend that even when Mughal sovereignty was being challenged by regional as well as foreign powers, its cultural authority and legacy was ‘contested and claimed not only through architectural projects on ground, but through architectural representations on paper’ (p. 147).

The final chapter assesses the status of Mughal architecture in the early 19^th century, with the advent of the print culture. Dadlani considers the lasting legacy of 18^th-century Mughal self-reflections on architecture through an exposition of a 19^th-century royal copy of ‘Amal-i Salih, a court history from Shah Jahan’s reign illustrated with ‘architectural portraits’ of Delhi’s major landmarks. The album’s architectural renditions apparently illuminate the prestige of the emperor’s dynastic past and his cultural authority. Regarding other texts produced during the 19^th century, Dadlani contends that at variance with contemporary British surveys, the first printed histories of Delhi architecture (e.g., the first edition of Asar al-Sanadid from 1847) were organised in ways similar to ‘Amal-i Salih: geospatially, rather than historically or typologically.

Succinctly, Chanchal Dadlani’s From Stone to Paper, as it brings historical, literary and art-historical research to bear upon its overall exploration of the hitherto-overlooked late Mughal period, is of singular worth within the growing body of scholarship on Mughal history and architecture. Erudite, eloquent and richly illustrated, it will remain a prized contribution to the area of Mughal studies and its intersections with early modern globalism.