The 'Sultanate' Architecture of Gujarat: A Case Study in Scholarship on Islam in India

The focus of this dissertation is the Islamic architecture of western India (Gujarat and Rajasthan). The monuments span the mid-twelfth through fourteenth centuries. The hypothesis is that there was a continuity between the indigenous temple architecture and the buildings erected for Islamic worship. It is proposed that the latter embodied the confluence of local and imported architectural traditions. While the majority of scholarship espouses the view that Islamic architecture in the subcontinent was stylistically and structurally distinct from the indigenous buildings, examples from western India are analyzed to provide evidence that this commonly held conclusion needs reexamination. Many scholars have assigned religious, social, and political antagonism to the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims, concluding that the two communities remained irreconcilable throughout the centuries preceding British rule. In this view, architecture is thought to provide an additional indication of this enduring religious hostility. One of the bases of the irreconcilable scholarly classification of medieval Indian architecture as "Islamic" and "Hindu" is the reading of textual sources and architectural inscriptions. The religiously separatist propaganda of the chroniclers renders the texts not wholly reliable in their descriptions of historical attitudes. The motivations behind the texts' composition have not been thoroughly examined. Thereby, the uncritical reading of textual sources has colored the study of architecture. Examination of the monuments themselves contradicts the theoretical opposition between "Islamic" and "Hindu." This thesis examines the evidence that has been largely overlooked in the scholarship. It hopes to offer new perspectives not only on the monuments themselves, but also on the ancillary factors that have contributed to the scholarship on medieval Indian architectural history. These other factors include medieval texts and architectural inscriptions, and donatory records as sources of social and religious history. These influential contributions to the study of architectural history have been treated together with a reappraisal of the monuments, with the aim of affirming the significance of architecture itself as a primary source for the historical circumstances of its context.