Review: From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire, by Chanchal B. Dadlani

Abstract

Chanchal B. Dadlani From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018, 232 pp., 97 color and 22 b/w illus. $65 (cloth), ISBN 9780300233179 Chanchal B. Dadlani has produced the first full-length book on late Mughal architecture, a topic often dismissed in older scholarship and in popular literature as essentially unworthy of study. Her richly illustrated volume From Stone to Paper , full of reproductions in superb color, provides deep insights into this period, making us rethink our understandings of the later Mughals and of how Mughal architecture came to be defined. As Dadlani says in her conclusion, “This book has centered on the fundamental question of how the concept of Mughal architecture emerged over the course of the long eighteenth century” (175). An evaluation of its contents provides a response to that question. In the book's introduction, “The Mughal Eighteenth Century,” Dadlani argues that it was during this fraught period that the architectural style now called Mughal emerged. It was the result of architects and patrons looking to the past—that is, to the seventeenth century—for a new architectural style appropriate for their present. She suggests that this process was ongoing throughout the long eighteenth century, although her book's final three chapters make clear that it continued into the mid-nineteenth century, when the Mughal Empire dissolved. In the rest of the introduction Dadlani discusses trends in scholarship on late Mughal architecture as well as the wide variety of sources she used in her study. Chapter 1, “Between Experimentation and Regulation: The Foundations of an Eighteenth-Century Style,” focuses on architecture built during the late seventeenth century under Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). Here Dadlani introduces the concept of istiqbāl , …