The Politics of Interpreting Mughal Monuments

Abstract The significance of architectural vestiges of the past lies beyond the intentions of the patrons who had first commissioned the buildings. This chapter investigates the changing interpretations of Mughal architecture as its material aspects and its functions shifted in new historical conditions, from the eighteenth century to the present. How do communities of scholars, administrators, or members of the local population relate to historical buildings, now classified as monuments, in the centuries following their construction? Drawing insights from memory studies, the chapter suggests that multiple, often contesting interpretations of Mughal buildings are as concerned with the ways individuals and communities choose to imagine the past as with their projections of the future. While contesting claims over the interpretation of Mughal monuments have acquired a particular virulence in postcolonial India, many of the arguments they deploy build on the assumptions of earlier scholarship about the Mughal architecture, published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Studying the politics of interpreting Mughal monuments helps us get a deeper sense of the unstable meanings attached to the past and urges us to be self-reflexive when these meanings are mobilized to redress what we imagine to be the wrongs of that past.