Indus River Region and South Asian Gardens

http://mughalgardens.org/html/resources.html, 2019

This update of the Gardens of the Mughal Empire bibliography is the result of new questions and avenues of research that have expanded the temporal, geographic, and thematic bounds of Mughal garden sources. It builds on this site’s first bibliography published by Michael Brand (2001), which reflected the many historical sources for and rapid growth of Mughal garden scholarship in the 1990s. In addition to delineating the contours of this body of scholarship, that bibliography became a comprehensive list of sources on Mughal Lahore and its gardens. Notably, even in that early iteration, an understanding of the necessity for multidisciplinary approaches to Mughal gardens is evident. The range of sources identified stemmed from the disciplines of landscape architecture, geography, history, and art history, as well as South Asian and Islamic studies. In 2007, the bibliography was updated with scholarship published since 2001, and its thematic categories were refined to reflect the use of Mughal gardens as an analytic lens into the cultural heritage of Punjab. The update also benefited from detailed excavations and conservation of notable garden sites, such as the Moonlight Garden in Agra, Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, and Babur’s tomb-garden in Kabul. These projects made possible the reconstruction of newly unearthed water systems and pathways and necessitated a new bibliographic category, “Mughal and Islamicate Gardens, Waterworks, Arts, and Conservation.” The 2007 Nagaur palace-garden complex excavations also brought to light the importance of soil profiles and planting techniques, and the bibliography was also updated to include materials on plants and vegetation of South and Southwest Asia. This latest iteration highlights the substantial amount of additional scholarship on Mughal gardens published from 2007 to 2018. As in previous updates, we include earlier items missed in the previous bibliographies. Many of the updates reflect new directions in the field of art history, moving Mughal gardens beyond the visual dimension foregrounded in art historical practice. New emphasis has been placed on multisensorial experiences, bringing oral, olfactory, and affective dimensions of Mughal gardens. In addition, we have expanded the geographic span beyond Lahore and the Punjab to include recent research on regional gardens of Kashmir, Rajasthan, and the Deccan. The wider range of related materials include Pahari painting and Sikh sacred texts. These updates respond to the need for regional approaches to South Asian studies expounded in recent edited volumes on the Punjab and the Deccan, for a cross-regional comparison of gardens and water systems, and for a broader understanding of the geographic and temporal reach of Mughal gardens. This includes sources on colonial and postcolonial garden practices, contemporary Mughal gardens outside of South Asia, and vernacular kitchen gardens.Significant progress has been made in broadening the types of sources considered and making them more accessible on platforms such as academia.edu, researchgate.net, and archnet.org. The underlined articles in this bibliography are linked to PDFs that are available online for free. A number of investigative loose ends remain. While advances in scientific method were used to great effect in Mughal garden research of the early 2000s, a broader exploration of methods across disciplines is necessary, particularly in the realms of digital humanities and anthropology. On the one hand, urban infrastructure development in Lahore raises new challenges for heritage conservation. On the positive side, conservation projects carried out by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has demonstrated successful integration of heritage conservation and community concerns, of those whose lives and livelihoods intersect with historic Mughal gardens, which opens the door for further research on urban landscape heritage conservation in South Asia. List of Sections in the 2008-2018 Update 1. General Indo-Islamic History, Geography, and Culture 2. General Mughal Gardens, Art, Architecture, and Conservation 3. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Punjab 4. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Lahore 5. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Kashmir 6. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Himachal Pradesh 7. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Rajasthan 8. Cultural Landscape Heritage of the Deccan 9. Cultural Landscape Heritage of Colonial and Postcolonial India 10. Contemporary Islamic Gardens 11. Selected Water References 12. Selected References on Plants and Vegetation of Southwest Asia 13. Older Materials on Lahore

2011

Manzar the scientific journal of landscape, 2015

| The paper examines some sixteenth and seventeenth-century Indo-Iranian garden sites of the Deccan in southern India. It argues that terrain and water management practice in southern India resulted in a landscape expression that differed markedly from that in northern India and Iran. The gardens of the Deccan, located near large water storage tanks, were responses to the geographical context and to native cultural practice. This is strongly suggested in the evidence of water pavilions and the detailing of water edges at, or near, Bijapur, in the sultanate of the Adil Shahs. The placement of palaces on hills overlooking expanses of water and gardens, as at Hyderabad and Golconda, in the sultanate of the Qutb Shahs, was also a contextual response. Gardens were enjoyed during the season of the rains, at Bijapur as well as at Golconda/ Hyderabad. Although ladies accompanied the sultans during their visits to gardens, gardens specifically for ladies, called zenana gardens, were located only in the citadels where the privacy of ladies could be ensured. The public, in general, could enjoy royal pleasure gardens only occasionally, following a royal visit. Gardens in the Deccan, in common with those elsewhere in the Indian subcontinent, were used not only by day but especially in the evening. Because many Indian flowers open for pollination in the evening and are white, strongly scented, and tubular to attract nocturnal insects, an Indic tradition of an evening, or moon garden, existed. Traditionally, in the Indian subcontinent, scented flowers have long been associated with love and arousal and it would seem that amorous pursuits were enjoyed in gardens, in particular, at the cooler time of the day when flowers released their fragrances. In conclusion, it could be said that although the gardens of the Deccan share a family likeness with other Indo-Iranian gardens and were used in similar ways, the terrain of the Deccan and the reliance in this region on native Indic practices of water storage and management resulted in landscapes that were rooted in the Indian soil; if, stylistically, these gardens could be considered Iranian, temperamentally they were very much Indian.

ABSTRACT: Gardens, as intervened floral spaces especially landscaped by man, is that unit of nature whose story of origin and evolution is intertwined with the trajectory of environmental history. Moreover, this history is an integral part of the social and cultural history of India. The present article explores the history of evolution of gardens in the context of ancient India. The main focus in the article is directed towards observing and analyzing the many operative historical forces behind the emergence of varied cultural practices related to the creation and nurturing of both the actual gardens and the idealized conception of the same. These practices and imaginings indicate the deep as well as wide range of human engagements with nature from the early emergent public sensitization to the very private spheres of actions and aspirations. While we do get splendid insights into the material and cultural practices related to gardens in literary sources, a marked authentication of these practices may be culled out from epigraphic sources. In fact, the present article has studied select sources to explore the possibilities of utilizing the data from inscriptions in order to look into an aspect of human intervention in nature that had varied and wide political, social and cultural nuances in the context of early Indian history.

in Middle East Garden Traditions, ed. Michel Conan, Washington D. C.: Dumbarton Oaks , 2007

2020

This Series takes as its starting point notions of the visual, and of vision, as central in producing meanings, maintaining aesthetic values and relations of power. Through individual studies, it hopes to chart the trajectories of the visual as an activating principle of history. An important premise here is the conviction that the making, theorising and historicising of images do not exist in exclusive distinction of one another. Opening up the fi eld of vision as an arena in which meanings get constituted simultaneously anchors vision to other media such as audio, spatial and the dynamics of spectatorship. It calls for closer attention to inter-textual and inter-pictorial relationships through which ever-accruing layers of readings and responses are brought alive. Through its regional focus on South Asia the Series locates itself within a prolifi c fi eld of writing on non-Western cultures which have opened the way to pluralise iconographies, and to perceive temporalities as scrambled and palimpsestic. These studies, it is hoped, will continue to reframe debates and conceptual categories in visual histories. The importance attached here to investigating the historical dimensions of visual practice implies close attention to specifi c local contexts which intersect and negotiate with the global, and can reconstitute it. Examining the ways in which different media are to be read onto and through one another would extend the thematic range of the subjects to be addressed by the Series to include those which cross the boundaries that once separated the privileged subjects of art historical scholarship-sculpture, painting and monumental architecturefrom other media: studies of fi lm, photography and prints on the one hand, advertising, television, posters, calendars, comics, buildings and cityscapes on the other.