Reuse and Iconoclasm in the Medieval Deccan

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While instances of both reuse and iconoclasm are well known from several medieval buildings in South Asia, the conjunction of these two related-but-distinct processes have seldom been analyzed. In this article, I present two architectural case studies from Daulatabad, a major fortified city in Deccan India, that include unexamined cases of reuse and iconoclasm: its principal eastern gate and the shrine of the Sufi shaykh Ganj-i Rawan. Although occurring within an Islamic context, the instances of reuse and iconoclasm within these palimpsestic spaces are not coeval with what is seen in early Indian mosques—the structures through which issues of reuse and iconoclasm have been most extensively analyzed in existing scholarship. Nor can stereotypical ideas of “Islamic iconoclasm” explain the complex iconographic program of the city gate or the unexpected rituals at the Sufi shrine. I argue that reuse and iconoclasm at the city gate served a political purpose, whereas that at the Sufi shrine had a religious significance. I also propose a way to collectively examine instances of reuse and iconoclasm in the built environment. While the logic of these two processes appears to be in an inherent tension, I theorize that the deployment of reuse and iconoclasm in the built environment served to reinforce a particular agenda—in the current case, a political and a religious one, respectively—and was not guided by disparate concerns. Alongside, I develop the concept of “ideational reuse,” in which later occupant(s) of a site creatively reused narratives and rituals associated with earlier occupant(s).