Power, Memory, Architecture - Contested Sites on India's Deccan Plateau, 1300-1600

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.