Landscapes of Conquest and Transformation: Lessons from the Earliest Mughal Gardens in India, 1526-1530

Abstract

Mughal gardens developed within a cauldron of territorial and cultural change. Early Mughal rulers altered the places they encountered and were themselves transformed in the process. Previous studies of Mughal gardens have not paid close attention to these processes of landscape transformation, but instead have emphasized the continuities of form, function, and meaning found in later Mughal places like the Taj Mahal in Agra, Shalamar garden in Lahore, and the Red Fort in Delhi. This paper concentrates on much earlier gardens built during the Mughal conquest of northern India in 1526, a key transition in Mughal garden history. During the early part of the campaign, gardens served as territorial markers and as a way of aggressively making foreign places more familiar. As the campaign continued, indigenous building forms and methods were increasingly incorporated within Mughal projects, but without fully resolving the problems of conquest and acculturation. The final section of the paper draws out the more general implications of these processes.