Santhi Kavuri-Bauer’s Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture offers a lucid and perspicacious examination of the evolving social lives of major Mughal monuments, an overlooked topic in the now-extensive corpus of literature on Mughal architectural history. In the early 1990s scholars revisited Mughal architecture, a subject that had been neglected since the colonial era. The best-known scholars of Mughal architecture, Ebba Koch and Catherine Asher, provided expansive studies that examine how patronage, politics, and religious concerns shaped the formal, decorative, spatial, and symbolic programs of various Mughal monuments (Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991; Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal, New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006; Catherine Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Kavuri-Bauer picks up in the eighteenth century, where Koch and Asher left off. While Koch’s and Asher’s work offers thorough analyses of the meanings and functions of Mughal buildings to their original audiences, Monumental Matters turns to issues of polysemy and shifting receptions of Mughal monuments at different historical moments after their creation. In its focus on reinterpretations of works of art in colonial and postcolonial South Asia, Monumental Matters joins a small but notable corpus of scholarship, including Richard Davis’s Lives of Indian Images (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999) and Tapati Guha-Thakurta’s Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Post-Colonial India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

As Monumental Matters makes clear throughout, use and perception of the built environment is unstable and subject to constant reinterpretation. Kavuri-Bauer is concerned with how diverse audiences regarded and interacted with key Indian Mughal monuments from the eighteenth century to present, including the Taj Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri, and, in Delhi, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid, and the Fatehpuri Masjid. Rather than offering formal or stylistic analyses of the monuments, Kavuri-Bauer brings them to life, cogently illustrating why and how these buildings matter and to whom. Koch and Asher introduced us to the Mughal emperors through their architectural commissions. Kavuri-Bauer introduces us to the individuals who have interacted with these spaces for a range of reasons—religious, touristic, nationalistic, and destructive.

The book’s introduction commences with Indian Prime Minister V. P. Singh addressing the issue of religious communalism in 1990. Two years later, a mob of Hindu nationalists razed the sixteenth-century Mughal Babri Masjid. This incident had an atrocious ripple effect, which culminated in the Gujerat riots and the loss of thousands of lives. In recounting these events, Kavuri-Bauer convincingly presents what is at stake with the Mughal monuments, and how “the interplay of power, subjectivity, and creativity produce the monument recursively and radically as one of the most critical and unstable spaces of modern India” (14). Mughal monuments are spaces that have been, and continue to be, marked by communal conflict, power struggles, and resistance. At Mughal monuments, such as the Babri Masjid, conflicting factions define contemporary India’s secularism—or lack of it. This chapter introduces the theoretical frameworks that inform the analyses in the ensuing chapters. Kavuri-Bauer’s detailed engagement with diverse sources (Michael Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Lacan, and bell hooks) as well as with literature, film, and ethnography elucidate how power, community, and space intersect and evolve.

Chapter 1 begins with a brief description of the tumultuous political situation in eighteenth-century North India. Mughal decline left Delhi in ruins. Kavuri-Bauer views the Mughal ruins at this moment through three disparate lenses. In their shahrashob (“lament of the fallen city”) verses, the Urdu poets Mir, Sadua, and Akbarabadi poignantly recount Delhi’s and Agra’s desolation and bygone glory. As this chapter makes explicit, not all Indian Muslims regarded the Mughal monuments with the same nostalgia. Followers of the emerging Wahabi movement rallied for reform, which hinged on a spiritual and spatial reorientation toward the Hijaz. The Wahabis disavowed Sufis and their shrines, many of which had been Mughal commissions. The final part of chapter 1 addresses the emerging British voice in North India and the British experience with the Mughal past through ruins. In his picturesque landscapes of North India, the British painter William Hodges presented Mughal ruins as a metaphor for Mughal imperial decay, and by extension, the necessity of colonial rule. For the intrepid traveler Fanny Parkes, Mughal buildings were picturesque, but not silent ruins. Parkes visited Mughal zenanas (women and children’s private quarters in homes and palaces), where she encountered architectural ruin and the living women who inhabited those exclusive spaces. In her accounts of the Taj Mahal, Parkes contrasts two very different communities’ engagement with the monument. For local Muslims, with whom Parkes identifies, the tomb is a sacred space and lieu de mémoire that signifies the Indo-Islamic community at its cultural apogee. Parkes juxtaposes her deeply respectful description of the locals to humorous accounts of stuffy, overdressed, and irreverent British visitors.

Chapter 2 concerns the monuments under their new master, the Raj, in the period of high imperialism, from the second half of the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. In 1861, under Sir Alexander Cunningham, the British established the Archaeological Survey of India to order, catalogue, and negotiate the specter of the Mughal past. Kavuri-Bauer credits Viceroy Curzon (1898–1905) as the single individual most responsible for transforming popular regard for Mughal buildings, particularly the Taj Mahal, from picturesque ruins into “monuments.” Curzon’s motives, she argues, were informed by his desire for British colonial expansion throughout Asia, and shaped by his experiences in Peking, where he initially experienced non-Western urban space. By subjecting India and its monuments to modernity and British aesthetics, Curzon sought to literally and figuratively illuminate India, and to preserve its past, but on his own terms. The paternalistic care that Curzon personally lavished on the preservation of the Taj facilitated the Raj’s selective association with their Mughal predecessors: “The monuments’ contradictory spatiality would be not only transcended but British power would also be able to appropriate some of the aura and mystic of the Mughals” (70). Kavuri-Bauer’s account of Curzon’s landscape “preservation” program at the Taj Mahal describes how under colonial aegis the tomb’s gardens were transformed from an Islamic to an English country garden, complete with carpets of manicured lawns. Colonial domination and ownership of the past was thus complete. Under Curzon’s efforts, the Mughal monument “was now a hybrid space; it was both a historical site that marked the zenith of Mughal rule and a space of British power” (72).

Curzon’s preservation schemes were timely and coincided with the increased British tourist traffic in India in the early twentieth century. Chapter 3 contrasts touristic experiences of Mughal sites with those of Indian nationalists. Kavuri-Bauer offers farcical accounts of Edwardian tourists who are bewildered and frustrated when their experiences at monuments did not match those promised by their guidebooks. The Taj Mahal was, and remains, the pinnacle of most touristic visits to India. Curzon’s efforts ensured that tourists were both appropriately awed by the tomb’s grandeur and mythology, and reminded of the necessary role of empire to protect and preserve India, its history, and citizens. The Raj promoted Delhi’s Red Fort as a monument to British victory in the 1857 Uprising. Conversely, intellectual Indian nationalists regarded the palace and other Mughal monuments as spaces of resistance and symbols of India’s glorious, syncretic past.

Chapter 4 turns to Muslim understandings of Delhi’s Mughal monuments shortly prior to the Uprising and Independence. It offers pre-1857 Persian prose and verses that present Mughal buildings as lively, thriving spaces, as opposed to the uninhabited picturesque ruins of British visual and textual descriptions. Immediately after the Uprising, the British reorganized Delhi, destroying spatial networks and reassigning uses of key buildings. For example, the British army occupied the Jama Masjid, which had been the bustling center of the city’s thriving Muslim community, and prohibited them from using it for several years. Kavuri-Bauer argues that by the end of colonial rule, due in part to these factors, Mughal monuments no longer mattered for the majority of India’s Muslims; they bore the stain of a past with which they no longer sought association. By the 1940s, India’s Muslims, the communities that were culturally and religiously identified with sites such as the Jama Masjid, disavowed these very buildings. Against the growing Muslim nationalist movement, Indian Muslims rejected the Mughal past in favor of self-rule and the global religious community.

Focusing on Jawaharlal Nehru’s and Gandhi’s interpretations of the Indo-Islamic past and their designs for a secular nation, chapter 5 considers the roles of Mughal monuments in the aftermath of Independence and Partition. In their attempts to foster a secular, inclusive nationalism, Nehru and Gandhi stressed the Indianness of Muslim dynasties. To underscore this, Gandhi made frequent references to Muslim integration in Indian society and to Muslims’ many contributions, including their monuments. Gandhi’s most performative attempt to abate communalism was his highly publicized pilgrimage to the dargah (shrine) of Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki in Mehrauli on the saint’s urs (death anniversary).

The final chapter brings the study into the present and investigates the conflicting stakes held by various bodies with regard to the Taj Mahal, including tourism and development agencies as well as the UP Sunni Waqf Board (the bureau that administers the site’s endowment). Kavuri-Bauer demonstrates the monument’s fragility and potential for exploitation through the most shocking instance of corruption involving the Indian built environment in recent history: Mayawati’s plan to connect Agra’s Red Fort and the Taj Mahal by a strip mall (the Taj Corridor Project), which would have threatened the Taj Mahal’s foundation. Kavuri-Bauer then turns to a voice that was given less press. Skillfully drawing from interviews with the president of the Waqf Board, Kavuri-Bauer exposes the cracks in the Indian government’s insistence on the secularity of Mughal monuments. In denying their Muslim history, the government presents the monuments not as spaces of “unity in diversity,” but rather as places that exclude the now-subaltern Indian Muslim community. In the controversial registration of the Taj as waqf property, the board sought to ensure that neither the secular state nor the Hindu nationalists could write Muslims out of Indian history.

The epilogue focuses on the neighborhood Fatehpuri Masjid in Old Delhi and its local community. This building is unique in that it is not a secular monument, but a living site of worship that shapes the social identities of its congregants. Kavuri-Bauer offers insightful interviews with a respected elderly gentleman and students of the madrassa. These voices reveal that the building and the community are at a precarious crossroads as Indian Muslims question their past and future. While the elderly man is highly educated and proud of his religion and heritage, the students, like many Indian Muslim youths, are poor, disenfranchised, and ill-equipped to enter the workforce with their exclusively religious education. The epilogue ultimately questions the fate of the community and its mosque in the face of growing communal polarization.

I had hoped for consideration of a few points that Kavuri-Bauer’s excellent study nonetheless excluded. Chapter 2 would have benefited from examination of how Mughal buildings influenced colonial ones (the Indo-Saracenic style), particularly Curzon’s commission of the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta, whose form is based on the Taj Mahal (see Philippa Vaughan, ed., The Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta: Conception, Collections, Conservation, Mumbai: Marg, 1997, particularly Derek Linstrum’s essay, “The Last of the Augustans: Lord Curzon and Indian Architecture”). A deeper exploration of how the Taj Mahal has been packaged as the nation’s cultural ambassador on the world stage—a visual hook that continues to lure multitudes of tourists from around the world to Agra today—would have enhanced chapter 6. There is a large cache of visual material to draw from, including that of the Incredible India marketing campaign. A notable model is Barbara Ramusack’s study of how the Indian Ministry of Tourism selected aspects of Rajasthani visual culture to present India internationally and in order to attract tourists to this state (Barbara Ramusack, “Tourism and Icons: The Packaging of the Princely States of Rajasthan,” in Catherine B. Asher and Thomas R. Metcalf, eds., Perceptions of South Asia’s Visual Past, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994). Finally, chapter 6 deals tangentially with Hindutva attempts to appropriate Mughal monuments, with P. N. Oak’s publications mentioned in a footnote. Deeper consideration of the Hindutva agenda would have further nuanced this examination of the Taj Mahal.

Monumental Matters successfully weaves diverse sources and personal voices into a rich study of the afterlives of India’s Mughal monuments. Kavuri-Bauer reminds us that monuments live beyond the moment of their creation; their meanings, uses, and functions are constantly reinterpreted in a dynamic process. This important work illustrates why Mughal monuments matter—among other reasons, they still possess enormous potential to inspire and integrate members of their original community, India’s Muslims. With its seamless incorporation of diverse methodologies and theories, this provocative, dense book will contribute to disciplines beyond art history, including history, urban planning, religious studies, anthropology, and more.