[ Panels by World Area Main Menu ]
[ View the Timetable of Panels ]
Monuments, Narratives, and Reinventions of the Past in South Asia
Organizer & Chair: Indira V. Peterson, Mount Holyoke College
Discussant: Ramya Sreenivasan, State University of New York, Buffalo
While the appropriation of usable pasts in South Asia has garnered much attention in recent scholarship, the emphasis of much of this work has been on narrative texts and historiography. Art historians, on the other hand, have illuminated the role of monuments and visual images in the construction of pasts. Both kinds of studies have raised the question of differences between premodern and colonial attitudes towards the past. This panel brings together scholars who examine from diverse disciplinary perspectives the reuse of pasts in the service of multiple goals by individuals as well as communities in the early modern and modern eras, through the creation of institutions and works of art, as well as through verbal texts. How may we compare the strategies of legitimation deployed by the Sisodia rulers of 17th century Marwar and the Maratha ruler Serfoji II in colonial South India, by invoking past regimes and inscribing old and new monuments with narrative “histories”? In what ways do Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s pre- and post-1857 invocations of the Mughals engage with the colonial present and an imagined future? How and why are older styles used in two temples and a mosque in 20th century Jaipur, to fashion a modern present and diverse futures? In addition to examining the issue of the colonial moment as a moment of rupture, and exploring the intersections and divergences between visual and textual evocations of pasts, we seek to illuminate the heterogeneity of the purposes and modalities of “making histories” in South Asia.
Imperial Authority and Legitimacy: Reinventing Mewar's History through Art and Architecture
Jennifer B. Joffee, College of Saint Benedict
Over the past half-century or so, since the dissolution of the princely states, each erstwhile Rajput kingdom has cultivated its own history, replete with romance, valor, and heroism. These histories serve to heavily promote tourism, a necessity since many former princes, unable to maintain their numerous royal residences, have converted their palaces into hotels. Some scholars view the oft-repeated, illustrious history of Mewar as a 19th-century construction first propagated by James Tod in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan and later popularized to promote tourism; however, I argue that this historical narrative is almost wholly a product of a carefully constructed legitimization campaign undertaken by the Sisodia rulers themselves in the 17th century in an attempt to salvage their dignity after being forced to recognize Mughal sovereignty in 1615. It is my contention that imperially sponsored architectural monuments, many with lengthy historical inscriptions such as the Jagdish temple in Udaipur and the ghats at Rajsamand, were an integral part of this campaign, as were illustrated manuscripts and paintings that emphasized Sisodia history, genealogy, and kingship. Created to reinforce a particular historical narrative and to underscore the divine ancestry and imperial legitimacy of the Sisodia dynasty, these works were intended to bolster the image of the Sisodia rulers in the eyes of their constituency, the Mughal empire, and other Rajput houses who had long been thriving under Mughal rule. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which several works of art and architecture functioned in this manner.
Invoking Chola and Maratha Pasts in Colonial Tanjavur: King Serfoji II and the Brihadisvara Temple
Indira V. Peterson, Mount Holyoke College
This paper examines the invocation of multiple pasts in the recentering of Maratha sovereignty through textualization, construction, and ritual at the Brihadisvara temple in Tanjavur by the Maratha Bhonsle King Serfoji II at the beginning of the 19th century. Educated by German missionaries, Serfoji ruled Tanjavur under the constraints of British colonial supervision from 1798 t0 1832. In 1801 the king undertook a pilgrimage around the Tamil regional temples built by the medieval Cholas. In Tanjavur, he renovated the 11th century Brihadisvara temple, built by Rajaraja Chola, and sponsored narrative and performance texts in Sanskrit, Marathi and Tamil, commemorating the Cholas, and his own pilgrimage and rituals. In 1803, in an act that echoed the famed inscription of the Rajaraja on the walls of the vimana of the Brihadisvara, Serfoji had the Bhonsle-vamsa-carita, a long Marathi narrative history of the Bhonsle dynasty of Shivaji and his ancestors, inscribed on the temple walls. Rather than reading the Chola-Maratha nexus as the simple, bifurcated concatenation of mythic and historical pasts for the sake of legitimation with local populations and colonial overlords, I argue for complex agency and complex stances toward modernity and the past on Serfoji’s part, and I show that, at the beginning of the 19th century, Serfoji’s Brihadisvara temple was a new kind of monument, amenable to new sorts of narrative and symbolic inscriptions of the past.
Reusing the Past: Religious Architecture in 20th Century Jaipur
Catherine E. B. Asher, University of Minnesota
With the foundation of Jaipur in 1727 Sawai Jai Singh introduced a new Hindu temple type that resembled a haveli, a radical departure from the shikhara-topped temples of the former capital Amber, and a type that remained the norm in Jaipur until independence. Mosques, on the other hand, although they were not royally sponsored, and thus were small, often emulated domed Mughal models. This paper examines the degrees to which two temples, built in the early and late 20th century, and a 19th-century mosque rebuilt in the late 20th century, evoke the past selectively to meet present and future goals. The exterior of Maji’s 1920’s temple (the last royally sponsored Jaipur temple) follows the haveli model, but its interior is innovative, bearing long inscriptions linked to the paintings on the interior walls. They evoke the Jaipur State’s rich past, but at the same time suggest the promise of the State’s future, however unrealistic that was. By contrast the Jami mosque, in the 1930s the site of considerable political intrigue, was originally a nondescript building, but the style of its eventual rebuilding in the 1980s suggests a desire on the part of its Muslim patrons to link themselves with Jaipur in terms of past, present and future. The white marble Lakshmi Narayan temple, constructed in the 1980’s by the wealthy Birla family, makes some gestures to Jaipur’s past but in large measure proclaims the power of new money and wealth. This paper explores the considerable reasons for these diverse strategies.
Sayyid Ahmad Khan and the Mughal Past
David Lelyveld, William Paterson University of New Jersey
As a young official in the British colonial judicial service, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817-98) took up residence in the khwab-gah, the dream chamber of the old Mughal capital at Fatehpur Sikri. A Delhi man with significant family ties to the weakened Mughal court of his own times, he later managed to devote some fifteen years to the study and celebration of the Mughal and earlier Muslim dynasties of north India, producing two substantially different accounts of the buildings of Delhi, both entitled Asar us-sanadid (1847, 1854), as well as editions of major historical texts, including the A`in-i Akbari and the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri. The rebellion of 1857 forced him ultimately to choose sides and to reinterpret the history of the Delhi Sultanate and the Mughals in ways that served to legitimate British rule but also claims for a privileged status for the descendants of the Mughal ruling class. Traces of his ambivalent loyalties remained in his later writings and in the design of the college that he established at Aligarh in 1875.