Indian Nationalist Art History and the Writing and Exhibiting of Mughal Art, 1910-48

(Re)routing and (Re)rooting in Urban Exile:

“…Already during British colonial rule, which lasted from 1858 until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947, the metropolis had become an economic hub used to foreign influx (Franz 2015). As a port city, Bombay was the principal entry point to India for Jewish refugees fleeing National Socialism, who were confronted with ambivalent social and political attitudes of the urban society, at least since if not preceding the beginning of the war (Singh 2017). For exiles associated with the arts, Bombay's broad entertainment and culture sector offered various income-generation opportunities (Franz 2020).…”

Building history: Historiography of architectural history in South Asia

“…The complete absence of seven centuries of an Islamic architectural tradition in their writings was an omission so obvious that it has been commented upon by other scholars. For example, Singh (, pp. 1043–1044) wrote: “The widespread exclusion of the Mughal legacy from major surveys of Indian art, such as Coomaraswamy's History of Indian and Indonesian Art (1927) and from the work of foreign scholars such as that of Heinrich Zimmer attested to the influence of religious and philologist interpretations and ideologies.” This phenomenon would feed into a stream of fringe and alternative architectural histories later, arming a Hindu nationalist narrative about the late medieval and early modern periods.…”

“…Voices of scholars such as Muhammad Abdullah Chughtai (1896–1984) were marginalised in the greater discourse on the history of Indian architecture. They had argued that the period being called Islamic was essentially Indian, and “… embodied the longstanding cohesion of Indian culture,” a view that gained currency again only in the last quarter of the 20th century (Singh, , p. 1044). The early years of the independent nations of India and Pakistan saw a valourisation of their pre‐historic past, a way of making claims to being legitimate ancient nations.…”

“…Voices of scholars such as Muhammad Abdullah Chughtai were marginalised in the greater discourse on the history of Indian architecture. They had argued that the period being called Islamic was essentially Indian, and "… embodied the longstanding cohesion of Indian culture," a view that gained currency again only in the last quarter of the 20th century (Singh, 2013(Singh, , p. 1044 were to become the basis and starting point for narratives of architecture in South Asia. From 1944to 1948, Sir Mortimer Wheeler (1890-1976 The subversion of architecture became a basis for an alternative history-writing from the middle of the 20th century, first with Bhikshu Chaman Lal (b.…”