MONUMENTAL MATTERS

The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal ArchitectureBy Santhi Kavuri-Bauer

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4899-3

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………ixIntroduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………11 Breathing New Life into Old Stones: The Poets and Artists of the Mughal Monument in the Eighteenth Century…………………192 From Cunningham to Curzon: Producing the Mughal Monument in the Era of High Imperialism………………………………….493 Between Fantasy and Phantasmagoria: The Mughal Monument and the Structure of Touristic Desire…………………………….764 Rebuilding Indian Muslim Space from the Ruins of the Mughal “Moral City”……………………………………………….955 Tryst with Destiny: Nehru’s and Gandhi’s Mughal Monuments…………………………………………………………….1276 The Ethics of Monumentality in Postindependence India………………………………………………………………..145Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………………………….170Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….179Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………197Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….207

Chapter One

BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO OLD STONES

The Poets and Artists of the Mughal Monument in the Eighteenth Century

In LATE APRIL of 1788 William Hodges exhibited his painting, View of Benares with Aurangzeb’s Mosque, in the Royal Academy (figure 1). It can be seen in the famous print of the exhibition’s opening, hung “above the line” in the Great Room of Sommerset House (figure 2). In the center of the print stands the royal family, with King George III looking over to the left wall (figure 2a). If we follow his line of vision, it might take us to Hodges’s riverfront scene. Exhibited in the most prestigious space of the London art world, the painting presented a picturesque view of the never-before-seen Indian landscape, its architecture, nature, and people. The subject of the print, however, is obviously not Hodges’s work, but the spatial dynamics of the Great Room in which it was viewed. It was one of many paintings hung from floor to ceiling, creating a dizzying quilt of floating frames. Adding to the unruliness of the exhibitionary space was the frenzy of the new art-going public to see, and to be seen viewing, the nation’s most eminent art. In this context the deeper meaning of the art would easily have been lost to the spectacle. To prevent this sort of obfuscation and to fix the contingency of the exhibition to the national principle, the surveying eye/I of the king becomes operational. As the embodiment of the British people and the exemplar of tasteful viewing practice, his magisterial gaze and confident stance fix both the art and the subject into the greater symbolic order of the nation. It is through this context and this viewing practice that Hodges’s View of Benares with Aurangzeb’s Mosque comes to be signified as a British painting.

There is, however, another more submerged component to this visual experience. A person’s viewing of a picture is far from stable and unopposed, but is instead a highly fraught exercise of identification that occurs between the desiring eye and the lacking gaze. The beholder of Hodges’s Indian landscape, while considering the color, form, and control of the artist’s hand, would have sensed something more in a far-off corner: a dark spot or an unrecognized figure. To the late eighteenth-century British public this discordant element would have had the same resonance as the nefarious energy that possessed the newly minted “nabobs” as they tore through the social fabric of Great Britain. The picture contained a stain of the repressed knowledge of British aggression in India that rendered fictitious the transcendent and universal claims of its national ethos. In the picture, this stain is what Lacan called the “gaze,” the returning vision (of India) that transfixes the (British) subject and quietly devastates it with the truth that “there is no there, there.” Such voiceless forms of resistance are rarely represented in writing, historical or otherwise, subsequently causing a distorted picture of the unobstructed movement of power and its knowledge.

The study of the Mughal monument is informed by a similar conceptual predicament, in which only the ideological practices of its spatial ordering are critically considered and the resistance of the monument to this symbolization is left unexamined. I argue that this is a matter of the limited perspective of the full ontology of monumentality. In this chapter I examine poetry, picturesque painting, and travel writings to reveal how, in the eighteenth century, new symbolic orders vied for the domination of Indian reality at the Mughal monument. I also reveal how the realities of subject formation and monumentality resisted this ordering, causing crisis and conflict in the representations of the monument.

The Persistence of Memory and the Poetics of the Mughal Ruin

At the time the British obtained their territorial power in India in 1765, the Indian landscape was still feeling the effects of the political entropy of the Mughal state that had started after the death of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, in 1707. Struggles over succession, the secession of territories, the corruption of nobles, and the torpidity of later emperors are the often-cited principal causes of the decline of Mughal authority. Hastening this decline were the periodic invasions of the Mughal capitals of Agra and Delhi. Between 1739, starting with the invasion of Nadir Shah, and ending in 1787 with Ghulam Qadir’s attack, Delhi was sacked by the armies of the Persians, Afghans, Marathas, Jats, Sikhs, and Rohillas. The residents of the northwestern empire, and particularly those of Delhi, were massacred, and those not killed were left impoverished. The Mughal Empire shrunk from an area that stretched from Kashmir to the Kaveri River to the extent of land between Palam and the Red Fort. The material conditions of the forts, palaces, mosques, and shrines the Mughals had built in their capital cities served as another important index of their declining power. Some religious structures lost their imperial endowments (awqaf) and fell into disrepair; others continued as they were, but without imperial oversight, they too lost the splendor of past centuries. The ruins and decay of these imperial buildings would become the principal subject of artists reflecting on the changing power relations in the Indian landscape and their place within it.

By the mid-eighteenth century power relations in India were no longer based on an imperial configuration but on provincial sovereignty. Power continued to be measured by the maintenance of armies and revenue collection, but it was dispersed among the regional kingdoms that took advantage of Mughal weakness. In 1765 the British East India Company became one of these regional rulers after accepting the diwan of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa from the Mughal emperor. All these new rulers in one way or another adopted aspects of Mughal culture and political procedure to legitimize their new power. In architectural terms this manifested in the grand building projects of the regional rulers that outpaced the concomitant ruination of Mughal structures. In establishing their seats of power, these rulers abandoned old capitals, let them fall into ruin, or repurposed their stones. In the new capitals they commenced public works like bridges, roads, caravanserais, and markets to ensure the efficient movement of trade in their territories. The rulers also built palaces, congregational mosques, and shrines and laid down public gardens. The new built environments found in the capitals of Bengal, Hyderabad, and Oudh often combined Mughal spatial rituals and design with local ornamentation, which helped indicate the ruler’s independence. This can be seen most clearly in the inclusion of the distinctive jharoka, or raised platform topped by a cupola, in the public audience halls of new palaces. The Mughal emperor sat in such an elevated seat for his daily durbar, or public audience, a practice essential to performing the political order and making visible relationships of power.

In addition to architectural emulation, Mughal power continued to be asserted through the nostalgic themes of Urdu poetry. When the finances of the Mughal court in Delhi began to dwindle, court poets sought new patronage from regional rulers. Lucknow, the capital of Oudh, for example, became the foster city of poets, artisans, scholars, and Muslim jurists fleeing the devastating invasions of Mughal Delhi. Among the poets were Mir Hasan, Mir Taqi Mir (known as Mir), Mirza Muhammad Rafi’ Sauda, and Khan-i Arzu who found refuge in Nawab Asaf-ud-daula’s court. Poetry, art, and architecture flourished in Lucknow in the eighteenth century, and the city remained a religious and cultural center until the British annexation of Oudh in 1856. While other artists settled into their new employment in Lucknow, the poets of the Mughal court never accepted the city as the empire’s legitimate heir. Their resistance to the changing power structure expressed itself through the poetry of the shahrashob, or “lament of the fallen city.” The poets’ evocation of the memory of the Mughal city as a perfected space is nostalgic, and the description of its present state is maudlin in tone. When heard in the royal court setting, it would have produced a striking contrast to the well-known and more exuberant verse of the Persian poet Abu Talib Kalim (d. 1651), who wrote of the unequaled beauty of the Mughal cities a century earlier. For example, in describing the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad, Delhi, Kalim writes:

How splendid is the tall fortress, its foundation in the skies!
The earth is honored in your shadow.

Such radiance your beauty has bestowed
That your shadow made a mirror of the ground.

Through you the land has come to know the heavens,
If not [for you], where would one be, where the other?

Through you the land has come to be revered in the world;
At times the father gains his name from the son.

Kalim’s verse describing Delhi’s Red Fort is an indirect tribute to the greatness of Shah Jahan. It also brings the Mughal Empire into the orbit of the larger Persianate world, where it surpasses the progenitor of its culture, the Safavid court of Isfahan. The Red Fort is therefore a space that permits the Mughals to take their place among the greatest powers of Islamic civilization. The shahrashob, a result of turbulent eighteenth-century India, represents the Mughal palace and greater city in a very different state. As a product of the declining times it provides a richly textured picture of how the cultured Muslim elite imbued the Mughal city with poetic symbolism to resist obliteration and to spiritually survive amid the shifting power relations of northern India.

The shahrashob came to India from Ottoman Turkey and Persia and became an active genre after 1739, the year Nadir Shah sacked Delhi and turned what was then still a city of peace and prosperity into a scene of dystopian horror. In India the shahrashob was written in Urdu, which with the decline of the Mughal power displaced Persian as the language of court poetry. The turn to Urdu signaled India’s turn away from pan-Islamic or Persian culture. The subject matter of shahrashob also changed after its adoption in India. In Persia and Turkey it was a humorous genre that used the city merely as a backdrop for mocking descriptions of urban youths and their occupations. In the Urdu variation of shahrashob the focus is directly on the city, the tone is more somber, and the verse is written in a direct and simpler style. The content of the Urdu shahrashob is characterized by an exaggerated nostalgia and despondency over the desperate state of the world. In the poetic figuration of Delhi, for example, the city’s former greatness is juxtaposed to its current state of ruin, evidenced by decrepit homes, empty mosques, decaying palaces, and dirty streets. The ruin in the shahrashob serves as a central metaphor of decline. Written by poets suffering through the material conditions of loss of status, wealth, and Mughal patronage, the shahrashob offers a view into how the Mughal city and its parts were reordered by the demands of eighteenth-century social reality.

Most articulate on this theme of decline was the poet Mir, who left Delhi after Ahmad Shah Abdali, an Afghan invader, sacked the city in 1757. Taking up residence in Lucknow, which he found lacking in the stateliness of Delhi, Mir wrote of his beloved Mughal city: “A hard time I spent in Delhi — stiffening my heart to stone / No honor, no grace, no glory — ignominy [i]ntoned / I did not have a friend to counsel or console — desolate every home / Barren wastes stared in the face, I felt benumbed — weary and forlorn.” Earlier in the poem Mir elaborates on the city’s past perfection: “Delhi’s streets were not alleys but pages of a painting / Every face that appeared seemed like a masterpiece.” Having taken us on a walk through the beautiful streets of Delhi, which he likens to walking through a perfected miniature painting, Mir shows us what has become of this picture in the next few verses: “Thy gift, that picturesque life / The heavens’ lack of sympathy has effaced all those impressions.” The poet’s evocation of painting to describe Delhi’s streets is not just an elegant symbol but also functions as a framing device of the material conditions of a devastated city: the beauty of a miniature painting, whose perfection eludes words, signifies the vibrancy that was Delhi, now all but gone.

Another major poet who wrote on the ruins of Delhi is Sauda. His verse has a satirical edge and is critical of the social and political decline of Delhi after the Persian invasions. Like Mir, he too witnessed Delhi’s ruin and uses the same metaphor of the erased picture: “Delhi, did you deserve all this? Perhaps at one time, this city was the heart of a lover / It was wiped out as if it had been an ephemeral drawing.” The city is here cast as the lover, whose betrayal has cost the people the social order and cultural excellence they were used to Sauda’s satire focuses on the emptiness and ruins of the city.

If I would begin to do speech/poetry about the desolation of the city,
Then having heard it, the wits of the owl would take flight.
There is no house in which the jackal’s cry would not be heard.
If anyone goes in the evening to the mosque for prayers.

There’s no lamp there, except the “lamp of the ghoul.”
In no one’s house does a grinding-wheel or even so much as a stove
remain,
Among a thousand houses, perhaps in one house there burns a lamp.
It’s hardly a lamp! [Rather,] that house has a wound of grief for all the
[other] houses.
And among those houses, in every direction asses bray.

Where in the spring we used to sit and hear the hindol [raga].
They are ruined, those buildings — what can I say to you? —
The sight of which used to remove hunger and thirst.
Now if we look, the heart would become disaffected with life.
Instead of roses, in the flower-beds there’s waist-high grass.

Here a pillar lies fallen, there an archway lies.

…

When did Jahanabad deserve this oppression?

Not even a lamp is lit there, in a place where there was a chandelier,
The pride of mirror-chambers now lies fallen in ruins,
Tens of millions of hearts full of hope, became despairing.
From the houses ladies of the nobility have emerged,
They didn’t get an ordinary palanquin — they who used to be possessors
of fancy litters.

Yet the representation of the ruin in the shahrashob provides more than documentary information about the decline of Delhi in the eighteenth century. The ruin also functioned in this poetry as a space of the poets’ subjective desire to preserve their Mughal identity and worldview and thus resist the new regional power structure.

In the poetical representations of Mir and Sauda the ruins of the Mughal city elevated the architectural space to an object of fantasy. More than an index of the political conditions of the period, the ruin also operated in the symbolic register to transform the subjectivity of the defeated Muslim community and to help it find its way back to order and reason. The principal cause of their suffering was attributed to God’s displeasure with the community of the faithful. For example, Sauda writes of empty mosques and of how they were now less valuable than mule posts. Carla Petievich explains his signification of the empty mosque: “That Muslims should fail to say their prayers, thereby declining to identify themselves as the slaves of Allah, was the most fundamental breach they could make in their contract with the Almighty.” Having once been the ruling class of most of India, a status bestowed by God, the elite Muslims now had to share this position with Hindus, Sikhs, and foreign Christians. A parallel loss of power had occurred internationally, as India could no longer claim an eminent place in the pan-Islamic world.

To help stay this rapid decline and loss of identity the poet introduced the nostalgic motif of the ruined Mughal city. The ruin in the shahrashob functions to give order to the chaotic world, thus in much the same way as the Lacanian point de capiton, or “quilting point,” that holds down the floating signifiers of chaotic times and gives them an order and meaning. The poem uses the ruined Mughal city to center and stabilize the disoriented subject of eighteenth-century India. In this regard the shahrashob and its reiteration of the perfected city frames Mughal space as more than an empty ruin. It instead stands as a symbolic site that thoughtfully veils the contradictions of the period through nostalgia and reaffirms Mughal power relations. The Mughal ruin in the shahrashob is thus a space helping the poet and his audience sublimate the traumas of the declining Mughal Empire and find meaning in and give structure to their lives.

(Continues…)

Excerpted from MONUMENTAL MATTERSby Santhi Kavuri-Bauer Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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