Power, Memory, Architecture

Description

Focussing on India’s Deccan Plateau, this book explores how power and memory combined to produce the region’s built landscape, as seen above all in its monumental architecture. During the turbulent sixteenth century, fortified frontier strongholds like Kalyana, Warangal, or Raichur were repeatedly contested by primary centres—namely, great capital cities such as Bijapur, Vijayanagara, or Golconda. Examining the political histories and material culture of both primary and secondary centres, the book investigates how and why the peoples of the Deccan, in their struggles for dominance over the secondary centres, promoted certain elements of their remembered past while forgetting others.
The book also rethinks the usefulness of Hindu–Muslim relations as the master key by which to interpret this period of South Asian history, and proposes instead a model informed by both Sanskrit and Persian literary traditions. Further, the authors systematically integrate the methodologies of history, art history, and archaeology in their attempt to reconstruct the past, as opposed to the standard practice of using one of these methodologies to the exclusion of the others. The book, thus, describes and explains interstate politics of the medieval Deccan at a more grassroots level than hitherto attempted.

About the Author

Richard M. Eaton is professor of history at the University of Arizona, Tucson, USA. His research focuses on the social and cultural history of late medieval and early modern India (AD 1000–1800), especially on the range of historical interactions between Iran and India, and on Islam in South Asia.
Phillip B. Wagoner is professor of art history at Wesleyan University, Middletown, USA. His area of research includes the cultural history of the Deccan region of southern India, primarily in the late medieval and early modern periods.

Reviews

‘Eaton and Wagoner … [deploy] an innovative, multidisciplinary methodology, shaped as much by on-the-ground analysis of historical remains as by the study of Sanskrit, Persian, and Telugu texts…’
—American Historical Association

‘... an adventurous, stimulating and innovative book….’
—Association for Asian Studies

‘This book is a treasure.’
—The Hindu

Table of contents

List of Figures and Tables
Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Abbreviations
Acknowledgements
Introduction

Section I: Orientations

1. Chalukya Emperors, Delhi Sultans, 1000–1350
• The Height of Chalukya Prestige: Vikramaditya VI, 1076–1126
• A Successor State of the Chalukyas: The Kakatiyas of Warangal, 1163–1323
• The Persian Cosmopolis and the Delhi Sultanate, 1296–1347
• The Delhi Sultanate’s Successor States: The Bahmanis and Vijayanagara, 1347–1500

2. Temples and Conquest, 1296–1500
• Pillalamarri, 1309
• Devagiri, 1313–18
• Bijapur, 1320
• Bodhan, 1323
• Warangal, 1323
• Rajahmundry, 1324
• Kalyana, 1326
• Sholapur, c. 1323–47
• Manvi, 1406
• Kondapalli, 1478

Section II: Kalyana and the Chalukya Legacy

3. Reviving the Chalukya Imperium at Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara
• The Character of Chalukya Architecture
• Sixteenth-Century Geopolitics and the Renewal of Interest in Kalyana
• Aravidu Appropriation of Chalukya Titles and Genealogy
• Chalukya Reuse in Sixteenth-Century Vijayanagara Architecture
• The Cult of Bhuvaneshvari and Her Neo-Chalukya Shrine
• Moving a Chalukya Step-Well to the Vijayanagara Capital
• Stages of Chalukya Reuse at Vijayanagara
4. Bijapur’s Revival of the Chalukya Imperium
• Bijapur’s Citadel and the State’s Consolidation
• The Temple-Mosque of Bankapur and the State’s Expansion
• Kalyana Fort and the State’s Maturation

Section III: Warangal and the Kakatiya Legacy

5. Shitab Khan and the Restoration of Kakatiya Cults and Temples
• The Rise of Shitab Khan
• Shitab Khan and the Prize of Warangal, 1504
• From Cult Icon to Dynastic Talisman: Peregrinations of the Svayambhu Shiva Linga
• The Movable and the Immovable
• Warangal’s ‘Venkateshvara-gudi’: The Panchaliraya Temple of Shitab Khan
• The Humiliation of Draupadi, and of Shitab Khan’s Wives
6. Qutb Shahi Warangal and the Foundation of Hyderabad
• The Indianization of an Immigrant Persian Family
• Golconda’s Multi-ethnic Elite: Westerners, Deccanis, Nayakwaris, and Niyogis
• Qutb Shahi Warangal: Form and Meaning
• The Founding of Hyderabad: Form and Meaning of the Millennial City

Section IV: The Raichur Doab in the Age of Gunpowder

7. The Military Revolution in the Deccan
• The Raichur Doab as a Contested Zone, 1294–1520
• Gunpowder Technology in the Deccan, 1450–1520
• The Battle of Raichur, 1520
• The Evolution of Gunpowder Weaponry and Fortifications, 1520–1600
• The Battle of Talikota, 1565
• A ‘Military Revolution’ in the Deccan?
8. The Political Functions of City Gates
• Gateways and the ‘Symbolic Appropriation of the Land’: Raichur’s Kati Darwaza
• Gateway as Palace: Krishna Raya’s Naurangi Darwaza
• Gateway Diplomacy after the Siege of Raichur

Conclusion
Appendix 1: Notes on Method
Appendix 2: Overview of the Three Primary Study Sites
Select Bibliography
Index
About the Authors