About the Book
Departing from
the conventional path of describing and explaining the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri, Embodied Vision delves into a series
of representations the Mughal city has been subjected to and concludes that
there is an inexorable tension at its core embodied in the constantly shifting
axes, complex rhythms, raising or lowering of the ground planes, juxtapositions
of mythical symbols and the conflicting pulls of traditions and human will. The
space of Fatehpur Sikri is
revealed to us more through perception than through geometry.
Professor
Mehta's unconventional interpretation of the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri emanates from his
exploration of the history of architectural representation and leads him to
conclude that the tools of designing, representation and analysis, i.e. various
kinds of drawings, which we normally use today, did not exist in sixteenth-
century India when Fatehpur Sikri
was built. These drawings, which assume our "mind's eye" hovering
above the city and taking in the whole of reality at once
have failed to represent the existential lived experience of inhabitation of
architecture. An interpretation of architecture, based on the embodied vision
of the retina, together with all the other perceptual faculties of the entire
body of the observer, moving through the space on two feet, opens up qualities
inherent to the essence of architecture as a thoughtful system of ordering mass
and space through a visual continuum; aided by the temporal, experiential
engagement of the owner of that vision the spectator, us, each one of us. This
generates a narrative, or, more precisely, a thousand narratives, where each
one validates architecture.
About the Author
Jaimini
Mehta, is a practising
architect and an independent academic based in Baroda, India. He studied architecture
at M.S. University of Baroda and at University of Pennsylvania in the Louis
Kahn Studio, and went on to work in the offices of Louis Kahn and Mitchell/ Giurgolo Associated in Philadelphia.
At present he
is a Hon. Director of the Baroda-based Centre for the Study of Urbanism and
Architecture, which he instituted in 2006. He was and
Adjunct Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, NY and at CEPT
University in Ahmedabad, India. He has also worked as
Head of the Schools of Architecture at Baroda and Goa.
His previous
books are Louis l. Kahn, Architect, co-authored with Romaldo
Giurgola and published in 1975, and Rethinking
Modernity: Towards post Rational Architecture (Niyogi
Books, 2011).
Preface
My interest
in Fatehpur Sikri goes back
to the days in 1965 when I was studying urban design at the University of
Pennsylvania under Professor Edmund Bacon. At that time, Professor Bacon was in
the middle of writing his seminal book Design of Cities and assigned each of his students
the task of studying two historical cities - one that we knew something about
and were familiar with and the other we knew nothing about and may approach
with a fresh mind. Many of these cities found a place in his book but mine did
not. I had chosen to study the Persian city of Isfahan, which I did not know
much about but ended up developing a lifelong love affair with; and Fatehpur Sikri, which I thought I
knew something about but found myself increasingly puzzled with as I dug
deeper. Neither of these two cities confirmed with the then prevalent
Eurocentric ideas about city planning and hence could not be analysed,
explained or represented with the tools and ideas available in those early
days. At that time, "Urban Design" itself was a young discipline,
founded mainly on the experiences of European reconstruction after the
devastations suffered during the two wars. Ed Bacon's central theme of spatial
thrust - "the shaft of space" – as a predominant compositional tool,
which he used to analyse most of his European examples, somehow could not be
applied to either of my non-Western cities, which
seemed to answer to a different sense of order not yet understood. Both my
assignments remained inconclusive and even though Professor Bacon awarded
fairly high grades to them for the questions they raised, they could not
provide any supportive evidence for his rather ambitious thesis. However, this
experience did whet my appetite to investigate further. I simply refused to
believe that both Isfahan and Fatehpur Sikri suffered from an absence of systematic planning
skills.
Some
time later, while working as an architect in
Philadelphia, I came across and befriended Kenneth Warrior - a keen mind who
shared my views on Fatehpur Sikri
and often joined me in exploring alternative ways to look at ancient cities.
This collaboration continued when we both taught at the Rensselaer Institute's
School of Architecture at Troy, NY. Ken was an associate professor there and
had invited me as a visiting faculty to spend two days every week from New
York, where I was working. Ken was getting increasingly interested in the
question of representation and we realised that the tools of representation may
be the key to interpreting and understanding Fatehpur
Sikri. Over the years these interactions continued in
a more sporadic manner than a systematic project. In the meanwhile, I had moved
back to India to pursue my practice as an architect and to teach. In 1992, Ken
arrived in India with a group of students from Rensselaer and we visited Fatehpur Sikri to test out a
number of approaches I had developed in the intervening years. Ken too had just
published an excellent paper on interpretation'
and had argued that the dominant feature of Western
metaphysics, "A universal- unified ideal, a single essential core of
truth, for some centuries has been taken as a signal for the superiority of
Western culture and the marginality of the other:' He had held that the
non-Western societies have developed different ways of seeing and making the
environment, which are equally valid and offer the critical foil to unravel the
taken-for-granted assumptions of the dominant Western view of the world. He too
was keen on testing his ideas. Much of what is contained in this book was
crystallised during the hours we spent within the city. Soon enough we both
were pulled away in different directions by other responsibilities and further
attention to Fatehpur Sikri
had to wait. I did refer to Fatehpur Sikri in my last book, Rethinking Modernity, as an illustration of the alternative
conception of space in the Indian subcontinent, which I was exploring then. But
it was evident that a much larger and focussed work is needed on the city.
Ken's sudden passing away last year brought a sense of urgency into the matter.
Thus, this
book has three strands interwoven and interdependent. There are a number of
popular myths attached to the history of this city. Contrary to popular belief
the city was not built in one single act but in several phases and that too
involved changes in the uses of buildings built during the earlier phases.'
There had been a settlement at Sikri
dating back to the early fifteenth century, though its association with the
Moguls seems to have begun with Babur, the founder of the dynasty. Similarly,
it was not abandoned abruptly only a few years later but continued as a trading
town much after Akbar left it in 1585. His
grandson, Emperor Shah Jahan, is reported to have
visited the city and also to have built a palace near the lake sometime around 1650.
The presence of
Saint Salim Chisti in the
hills and the birth of Akbar's first son in 1568-69 after
the saint prophesied it may have something to do with the choice of the
location. However, the reason for shifting the capital here, only 35 kilometres
away from Agra, in the first place and then leaving after inhabiting it for
only thirty years needs to be understood. My guess is that Fatehpur
Sikri was not conceived of as a capital of the Mogul
Empire, as it was eventually consolidated, but in the sense of "capital-
is- where- the- ruler-is". Akbar had not yet consolidated his rule and
built the large empire when he shifted his base here in 1570
to embark on decisive campaigns for Rajasthan,
Gujarat and further south. He was still a ruler and not the emperor. Thus Sikri was a base camp from where military campaigns could
be launched in various directions. The location had a military logic and the
presence of the saint, whose blessings were important for every action, may
have added to this. Still, it seems less plausible to explain the plan of the
new city in terms of the three-layered encampment, as Attilio
Petruccioli suqqests.'
Such camps were temporary tent settlements, erected
wherever the king decided to camp. However, the presence of institutions such
as the Ibadatkhana, a place for religious discourse,
the Caravanserai, the Ekastambha (wrongly named as Diwan-i-Khas) and the Anuptalao pool suggest that far from a temporary camp or a
political capital projecting the might of the ruler, this was a peaceful
retreat during the time of consolidation. It ceased to serve this purpose once
the emperor's attention shifted to other battles in Punjab and Kashmir, for
which Lahore was chosen as the more appropriate campi capital until he finally returned to the
permanent capital at Agra. Besides, the death of Saint Salim
Chisti may have removed the last attraction for this
location. The description of the city in the first part of the book and the
subsequent analysis should be seen in this context. A quiet, relaxed and
contemplative retreat explains Fatehpur Sikri's spatial and formal qualities.
At the same
time, it must be noted that until Fatehpur Sikri, the Moguls had not built any large-scale urban
complexes. Until then, Babur, Humayun, as well as
Akbar had spent most of their lives in the battlefield, building and
consolidating the empire.
The ancestors
of the Moguls, the Timurids, were nomadic people and
carried their settlements with them. Layouts of camps and tents must have
constituted powerful collective memory and architectural and urban imagery.
This is borne out by the fact that names of the various buildings at Fatehpur Sikri - such as the Khwabgah, the Shabistan-i-Iqbal and the Diwan-i-Aam - resemble those assigned to tents used for similar
functions at the camps. And while, as Professor Nadeem
Rezavi has shown, the overall plan of the city
indicates that considerable attention has been paid to functional zoning and
road layouts', the spatial
quality and urban design of the citadel itself need more careful investigation.
The major difference between the nomadic or battle encampment and the citadel
at Sikri is the relationship of architecture with
the
ground plane. On one hand, the encampments were almost always on flat, level
fields and conceived of in abstract terms of organisation such as centralised,
axial, hierarchical, etc. The citadel at Fatehpur Sikri, on the other hand, creates the ground plane
with its many subtle and not-so-subtle variations in Levels - a significant
element in its architectural experience as we shall see Later in this book. Fatehpur Sikri was not only the
first such endeavour undertaken by Akbar but was also his Laboratory wherein he
realised many of his radical visions. The architectonic details, dimensional
and proportional consistency and sophistication came from the culturally-rooted
continuity of such practices, internalised by the Indian architects and
craftsmen of the time.
Representation
is the key to understanding Fatehpur Sikri. This constitutes the second strand the book
explores. For the purpose of this book I have considered representation,
interpretation and reference as meaning the same and essentially
interchangeable. As a work of architecture, besides being an inhabited space, Fatehpur Sikri is a cultural
construct and represents the intellectual and material culture of the time, and
also its values. At the same time, over the years it itself has been
interpreted (represented), both textually and graphically, by various people
and this constitutes the received wisdom, the knowledge base we have about the
city. When more questions stem from what has been written about it or the way
it is depicted in drawings and photographs, one realises that the objectivity
of the interpreters may not be taken as granted as that too involves critical
choice-making. As Gaston Bachelard has so eloquently
noted, "We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being
objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more
about us than we do about it."
Thus, it
becomes necessary to arrive at some clarity on the very act of representation.
In chapter four, "From Sensible to Intelligible", I have attempted to
do the same. In a way, this book extends a Line of argument I had briefly
touched upon in my Last publication', which
implied that architecture deals with two kinds of visual faculties: one, the
embodied vision through the retinal organ of the eye integral to our face and
two, the cerebral vision, popularly referred to as the "mind's eye".
One gives us perception while the other endows us with imagination. All great
architecture of the past is a result of successful resolution of this
dichotomy. However, in this book I have argued that since the
sixteenth century, cerebral vision has acquired such a position of primacy as
to determine the way we represent and interpret architecture, at the cost of
its experiential and perceptual qualities. Once we come to terms with the fact
that representation/ interpretation itself is contextual and may not be taken
at face value, and that one must search for the structure of interest beneath
the ideas, one looks not at the content of the interpretations but their
functions. Fatehpur Sikri
was conceived and built before this ascendancy of the cerebral vision but has
been represented and interpreted through tools and ideas developed during the
last 200 years. In chapter five I have surveyed a number of past attempts to
interpret Fatehpur Sikri
from such a perspective.
All the
buildings in Fatehpur Sikri
fall under one of two categories: those whose built form and spatial
arrangements match their stated purpose and are relatively easy to understand, and those whose architecture or location defy
purposive logic. This is so because over the years many structures within the
citadel have been subjected to uninformed misrepresentation at the hands of ASI
(Archaeological Survey of India) bureaucracy or the tourism industry. These
need to be cleared and I shall rely on the excellent research and thorough
reading of historical records by Professor Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi in this regard. Khwabgah (the place of dreams) as the royal residence of
the emperor, the queens' palace and the Haramsara
(the so called Jodha Bai's
palace) are clear enough. So is the Diwan-i-Aam (the audience hall); their architecture more or less
suggests their intended use. Problematic are the so-called Raja Birbal's palace, the Turkish Sultana's palace, Miriam's
house and the girls' school. Birbal was a close
minister and an advisor to Akbar. Yet, irrespective of how close one may be to
the ruler, placing a male bachelor in the middle of the zenana,
with hundreds of ladies, defies moral logic and norms of the time.
Contents
|
Preface |
9 |
One |
The City of Victory |
17 |
Two |
Feet on the Ground and Eyes on the
Face |
|
Three |
Flesh and The City |
|
Four |
From Sensible to Intelligible |
65 |
Five |
Four Representations of Fatehpur Sikri |
87 |
Six |
The Embodied Vision |
121 |
Seven |
Time and Space of Fatehpur
Sikri |
139 |
|
Acknowledgements |
151 |
|
Appendix |
153 |
|
Extended Bibliography |
155 |
|
Illustration Credits |
157 |
|
Index |
159 |
About the Book
Departing from
the conventional path of describing and explaining the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri, Embodied Vision delves into a series
of representations the Mughal city has been subjected to and concludes that
there is an inexorable tension at its core embodied in the constantly shifting
axes, complex rhythms, raising or lowering of the ground planes, juxtapositions
of mythical symbols and the conflicting pulls of traditions and human will. The
space of Fatehpur Sikri is
revealed to us more through perception than through geometry.
Professor
Mehta's unconventional interpretation of the architecture of Fatehpur Sikri emanates from his
exploration of the history of architectural representation and leads him to
conclude that the tools of designing, representation and analysis, i.e. various
kinds of drawings, which we normally use today, did not exist in sixteenth-
century India when Fatehpur Sikri
was built. These drawings, which assume our "mind's eye" hovering
above the city and taking in the whole of reality at once
have failed to represent the existential lived experience of inhabitation of
architecture. An interpretation of architecture, based on the embodied vision
of the retina, together with all the other perceptual faculties of the entire
body of the observer, moving through the space on two feet, opens up qualities
inherent to the essence of architecture as a thoughtful system of ordering mass
and space through a visual continuum; aided by the temporal, experiential
engagement of the owner of that vision the spectator, us, each one of us. This
generates a narrative, or, more precisely, a thousand narratives, where each
one validates architecture.
About the Author
Jaimini
Mehta, is a practising
architect and an independent academic based in Baroda, India. He studied architecture
at M.S. University of Baroda and at University of Pennsylvania in the Louis
Kahn Studio, and went on to work in the offices of Louis Kahn and Mitchell/ Giurgolo Associated in Philadelphia.
At present he
is a Hon. Director of the Baroda-based Centre for the Study of Urbanism and
Architecture, which he instituted in 2006. He was and
Adjunct Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute at Troy, NY and at CEPT
University in Ahmedabad, India. He has also worked as
Head of the Schools of Architecture at Baroda and Goa.
His previous
books are Louis l. Kahn, Architect, co-authored with Romaldo
Giurgola and published in 1975, and Rethinking
Modernity: Towards post Rational Architecture (Niyogi
Books, 2011).
Preface
My interest
in Fatehpur Sikri goes back
to the days in 1965 when I was studying urban design at the University of
Pennsylvania under Professor Edmund Bacon. At that time, Professor Bacon was in
the middle of writing his seminal book Design of Cities and assigned each of his students
the task of studying two historical cities - one that we knew something about
and were familiar with and the other we knew nothing about and may approach
with a fresh mind. Many of these cities found a place in his book but mine did
not. I had chosen to study the Persian city of Isfahan, which I did not know
much about but ended up developing a lifelong love affair with; and Fatehpur Sikri, which I thought I
knew something about but found myself increasingly puzzled with as I dug
deeper. Neither of these two cities confirmed with the then prevalent
Eurocentric ideas about city planning and hence could not be analysed,
explained or represented with the tools and ideas available in those early
days. At that time, "Urban Design" itself was a young discipline,
founded mainly on the experiences of European reconstruction after the
devastations suffered during the two wars. Ed Bacon's central theme of spatial
thrust - "the shaft of space" – as a predominant compositional tool,
which he used to analyse most of his European examples, somehow could not be
applied to either of my non-Western cities, which
seemed to answer to a different sense of order not yet understood. Both my
assignments remained inconclusive and even though Professor Bacon awarded
fairly high grades to them for the questions they raised, they could not
provide any supportive evidence for his rather ambitious thesis. However, this
experience did whet my appetite to investigate further. I simply refused to
believe that both Isfahan and Fatehpur Sikri suffered from an absence of systematic planning
skills.
Some
time later, while working as an architect in
Philadelphia, I came across and befriended Kenneth Warrior - a keen mind who
shared my views on Fatehpur Sikri
and often joined me in exploring alternative ways to look at ancient cities.
This collaboration continued when we both taught at the Rensselaer Institute's
School of Architecture at Troy, NY. Ken was an associate professor there and
had invited me as a visiting faculty to spend two days every week from New
York, where I was working. Ken was getting increasingly interested in the
question of representation and we realised that the tools of representation may
be the key to interpreting and understanding Fatehpur
Sikri. Over the years these interactions continued in
a more sporadic manner than a systematic project. In the meanwhile, I had moved
back to India to pursue my practice as an architect and to teach. In 1992, Ken
arrived in India with a group of students from Rensselaer and we visited Fatehpur Sikri to test out a
number of approaches I had developed in the intervening years. Ken too had just
published an excellent paper on interpretation'
and had argued that the dominant feature of Western
metaphysics, "A universal- unified ideal, a single essential core of
truth, for some centuries has been taken as a signal for the superiority of
Western culture and the marginality of the other:' He had held that the
non-Western societies have developed different ways of seeing and making the
environment, which are equally valid and offer the critical foil to unravel the
taken-for-granted assumptions of the dominant Western view of the world. He too
was keen on testing his ideas. Much of what is contained in this book was
crystallised during the hours we spent within the city. Soon enough we both
were pulled away in different directions by other responsibilities and further
attention to Fatehpur Sikri
had to wait. I did refer to Fatehpur Sikri in my last book, Rethinking Modernity, as an illustration of the alternative
conception of space in the Indian subcontinent, which I was exploring then. But
it was evident that a much larger and focussed work is needed on the city.
Ken's sudden passing away last year brought a sense of urgency into the matter.
Thus, this
book has three strands interwoven and interdependent. There are a number of
popular myths attached to the history of this city. Contrary to popular belief
the city was not built in one single act but in several phases and that too
involved changes in the uses of buildings built during the earlier phases.'
There had been a settlement at Sikri
dating back to the early fifteenth century, though its association with the
Moguls seems to have begun with Babur, the founder of the dynasty. Similarly,
it was not abandoned abruptly only a few years later but continued as a trading
town much after Akbar left it in 1585. His
grandson, Emperor Shah Jahan, is reported to have
visited the city and also to have built a palace near the lake sometime around 1650.
The presence of
Saint Salim Chisti in the
hills and the birth of Akbar's first son in 1568-69 after
the saint prophesied it may have something to do with the choice of the
location. However, the reason for shifting the capital here, only 35 kilometres
away from Agra, in the first place and then leaving after inhabiting it for
only thirty years needs to be understood. My guess is that Fatehpur
Sikri was not conceived of as a capital of the Mogul
Empire, as it was eventually consolidated, but in the sense of "capital-
is- where- the- ruler-is". Akbar had not yet consolidated his rule and
built the large empire when he shifted his base here in 1570
to embark on decisive campaigns for Rajasthan,
Gujarat and further south. He was still a ruler and not the emperor. Thus Sikri was a base camp from where military campaigns could
be launched in various directions. The location had a military logic and the
presence of the saint, whose blessings were important for every action, may
have added to this. Still, it seems less plausible to explain the plan of the
new city in terms of the three-layered encampment, as Attilio
Petruccioli suqqests.'
Such camps were temporary tent settlements, erected
wherever the king decided to camp. However, the presence of institutions such
as the Ibadatkhana, a place for religious discourse,
the Caravanserai, the Ekastambha (wrongly named as Diwan-i-Khas) and the Anuptalao pool suggest that far from a temporary camp or a
political capital projecting the might of the ruler, this was a peaceful
retreat during the time of consolidation. It ceased to serve this purpose once
the emperor's attention shifted to other battles in Punjab and Kashmir, for
which Lahore was chosen as the more appropriate campi capital until he finally returned to the
permanent capital at Agra. Besides, the death of Saint Salim
Chisti may have removed the last attraction for this
location. The description of the city in the first part of the book and the
subsequent analysis should be seen in this context. A quiet, relaxed and
contemplative retreat explains Fatehpur Sikri's spatial and formal qualities.
At the same
time, it must be noted that until Fatehpur Sikri, the Moguls had not built any large-scale urban
complexes. Until then, Babur, Humayun, as well as
Akbar had spent most of their lives in the battlefield, building and
consolidating the empire.
The ancestors
of the Moguls, the Timurids, were nomadic people and
carried their settlements with them. Layouts of camps and tents must have
constituted powerful collective memory and architectural and urban imagery.
This is borne out by the fact that names of the various buildings at Fatehpur Sikri - such as the Khwabgah, the Shabistan-i-Iqbal and the Diwan-i-Aam - resemble those assigned to tents used for similar
functions at the camps. And while, as Professor Nadeem
Rezavi has shown, the overall plan of the city
indicates that considerable attention has been paid to functional zoning and
road layouts', the spatial
quality and urban design of the citadel itself need more careful investigation.
The major difference between the nomadic or battle encampment and the citadel
at Sikri is the relationship of architecture with
the
ground plane. On one hand, the encampments were almost always on flat, level
fields and conceived of in abstract terms of organisation such as centralised,
axial, hierarchical, etc. The citadel at Fatehpur Sikri, on the other hand, creates the ground plane
with its many subtle and not-so-subtle variations in Levels - a significant
element in its architectural experience as we shall see Later in this book. Fatehpur Sikri was not only the
first such endeavour undertaken by Akbar but was also his Laboratory wherein he
realised many of his radical visions. The architectonic details, dimensional
and proportional consistency and sophistication came from the culturally-rooted
continuity of such practices, internalised by the Indian architects and
craftsmen of the time.
Representation
is the key to understanding Fatehpur Sikri. This constitutes the second strand the book
explores. For the purpose of this book I have considered representation,
interpretation and reference as meaning the same and essentially
interchangeable. As a work of architecture, besides being an inhabited space, Fatehpur Sikri is a cultural
construct and represents the intellectual and material culture of the time, and
also its values. At the same time, over the years it itself has been
interpreted (represented), both textually and graphically, by various people
and this constitutes the received wisdom, the knowledge base we have about the
city. When more questions stem from what has been written about it or the way
it is depicted in drawings and photographs, one realises that the objectivity
of the interpreters may not be taken as granted as that too involves critical
choice-making. As Gaston Bachelard has so eloquently
noted, "We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being
objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more
about us than we do about it."
Thus, it
becomes necessary to arrive at some clarity on the very act of representation.
In chapter four, "From Sensible to Intelligible", I have attempted to
do the same. In a way, this book extends a Line of argument I had briefly
touched upon in my Last publication', which
implied that architecture deals with two kinds of visual faculties: one, the
embodied vision through the retinal organ of the eye integral to our face and
two, the cerebral vision, popularly referred to as the "mind's eye".
One gives us perception while the other endows us with imagination. All great
architecture of the past is a result of successful resolution of this
dichotomy. However, in this book I have argued that since the
sixteenth century, cerebral vision has acquired such a position of primacy as
to determine the way we represent and interpret architecture, at the cost of
its experiential and perceptual qualities. Once we come to terms with the fact
that representation/ interpretation itself is contextual and may not be taken
at face value, and that one must search for the structure of interest beneath
the ideas, one looks not at the content of the interpretations but their
functions. Fatehpur Sikri
was conceived and built before this ascendancy of the cerebral vision but has
been represented and interpreted through tools and ideas developed during the
last 200 years. In chapter five I have surveyed a number of past attempts to
interpret Fatehpur Sikri
from such a perspective.
All the
buildings in Fatehpur Sikri
fall under one of two categories: those whose built form and spatial
arrangements match their stated purpose and are relatively easy to understand, and those whose architecture or location defy
purposive logic. This is so because over the years many structures within the
citadel have been subjected to uninformed misrepresentation at the hands of ASI
(Archaeological Survey of India) bureaucracy or the tourism industry. These
need to be cleared and I shall rely on the excellent research and thorough
reading of historical records by Professor Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi in this regard. Khwabgah (the place of dreams) as the royal residence of
the emperor, the queens' palace and the Haramsara
(the so called Jodha Bai's
palace) are clear enough. So is the Diwan-i-Aam (the audience hall); their architecture more or less
suggests their intended use. Problematic are the so-called Raja Birbal's palace, the Turkish Sultana's palace, Miriam's
house and the girls' school. Birbal was a close
minister and an advisor to Akbar. Yet, irrespective of how close one may be to
the ruler, placing a male bachelor in the middle of the zenana,
with hundreds of ladies, defies moral logic and norms of the time.
Contents
|
Preface |
9 |
One |
The City of Victory |
17 |
Two |
Feet on the Ground and Eyes on the
Face |
|
Three |
Flesh and The City |
|
Four |
From Sensible to Intelligible |
65 |
Five |
Four Representations of Fatehpur Sikri |
87 |
Six |
The Embodied Vision |
121 |
Seven |
Time and Space of Fatehpur
Sikri |
139 |
|
Acknowledgements |
151 |
|
Appendix |
153 |
|
Extended Bibliography |
155 |
|
Illustration Credits |
157 |
|
Index |
159 |