Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526-1858).

• Author: Chandra, Pramod
• Position: Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays - Book Review

Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526-1858). By EBBA KOCH. New Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002. Pp. 160. $45.

Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays. By EBBA KOCH. New Delhi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001. Pp. xxi + 317. $72.

Mughal Architecture is a clear, precise, and short account, based on thorough scholarship, of Mughal architecture from its inception in the sixteenth to the nineteenth century A.D. True, some periods are given greater emphasis than others, but this reflects to a large extent the state of studies. Several of the author's contributions are fresh, particularly the specific connections she demonstrates between Timurid Central Asia and Mughal India; and so are her attempts to emphasize hitherto relatively neglected areas, notably architectural work during the reigns of Jahangir and Aurangzeb as well as the later Mughals. A critical and thoughtful approach is to be found throughout, due attention being paid to setting up a chronological framework on considerations of style. The plans of sites and buildings are excellent, and the largely distortion free photographs copious and informative. The bibliography is extensive and will be of the greatest use to students intent upon further research.

Addressing problems of nomenclature, classification, and patronage, the author opts for a royalist classification, basing her preference on traditional literary testimony which closely associates rulers with the kind of architecture produced, and herself detecting direct royal influence in some of the extant buildings. This is done even as Koch concedes the continuing presence of architectural features of an earlier reign in a later one, a feature that would seem to go against her conclusions. In asserting these views she is in keeping with current practice not only of scholars of Mughal architecture but also some of Mughal painting who have begun to explain essential features of the art in terms of the personality or even the idiosyncrasies of an individual ruler. In these approaches, which I consider elitist and unacceptable, the part that must have surely been played by the actual builders is greatly downplayed. Aside from unreliable literary testimony, which is often filled with pro forma praise of the ruler, we must not forget that the workmen and the supervising architects possessed their own continuing traditions preserved in workshops and guilds, and often of considerable age. These...