ABSTRACT
This is a book about conceptions of Indian architecture: about ways in which India’s historical architecture has been—and ways in which it might be—thought about. The writing of India’s architectural history has always been problematic. The indigenous tradition of scholarly writing on architecture, embodied in treatises known collectively as silpa-sastras, concerns itself with theoretical, esoteric and religious matters; these texts provide little description and critical analysis of extant buildings. Such concerns were established as a domain of art-historical scholarship during the British colonial period, by British pioneer archaeologists and art historians and their Indian associates. Inevitably, the model employed for this exercise was an imported one: it was a matter of applying to Indian material methods and procedures already developed elsewhere. In its formative phase, therefore, the investigation of India’s architectural history—even when undertaken by Indians themselves—was substantially foreign in approach. In recent years, the writings of these pioneers of the last century have been subjected to trenchant criticism, not to say deconstruction, as they have been analysed in relation to their own historical and ideological contexts. Attempts have also been made to seek out alternative models for interpreting India’s great buildings of the past, models perhaps based more closely on indigenous aesthetics and approaches. Complex in themselves, both parts of this project are being undertaken at a time when the wider field of the humanities has been, to say the least, destabilised by recent developments in cultural theory—notably the advancement of ideas about the relationship between objects and ‘discourses’ about them—which challenge the status of any text which purports to offer an explicatory guide to events or artifacts of the past.
