| The
Current State of Mughal Garden Research
The study
of Mughal gardens, a tradition that originated in Central Asia
and extended into South Asia in the sixteenth through eighteenth
centuries, now faces significant challenges. There has been more
research on these gardens in the past decade than in any other
period of history. Numerous articles have appeared in journals
of landscape architecture, geography, and art history, as well
as South Asian and Islamic studies (see Bibliography and Bibliography
Update below). In 1996, the Smithsonian Mughal Gardens Project
yielded two volumes published by Dumbarton Oaks in Washington,
D.C. and Ferozsons Publishers in Pakistan, and now this Web site
increases accessibility to a variety of research tools on the
subject. For example, the site makes widely available, for the
first time, the most complete chronology on Mughal Lahore, and
the most comprehensive bibliography on the same subject.
What more
can be said about the development of research on this topic? Of
course, compared with European garden research, there are enormous
possibilities for additional investigations of every sort. However,
as recent work on Mughal gardens was being completed, the situation
changed in ways that warrant a reappraisal of the field.
Importantly,
comparative perspectives on garden cultures also raise questions
about the relationship between academic research and the practical
concerns of communities who use, visit, and work in Mughal gardens.
In recent decades, practical and comparative interests in Mughal
garden research seem repressed, unvoiced, or under-examined. Probing
conservation projects, linked with further historiographic research
on Mughal gardens, might illuminate some of the possibilities,
and pitfalls, for comparative research, and thereby contribute
to a constructive reweaving of scholarly and practical interest
in the gardens of the world.
Update
2007. In the five years since this Web site made
its debut, Mughal gardens research has developed in at least two
major ways. First, there has been increased emphasis on scientific
research on the gardens. Scientific inquiry was not lacking previously,
but the questions and methods have now advanced. For example,
research in the 1980s focused on surface surveys and documentation,
which enabled mathematical analysis and interpretation. The past
five years, by comparison, have witnessed the first detailed excavations
of garden sites. The Moonlight Garden project in Agra included
archaeobotanical as well as architectural excavation (Moynihan,
2000), as did excavations carried out at Humayun’s Tomb
in Delhi. The most detailed excavations to date have occurred
at Babur’s tomb-garden in Kabul, under the auspices of the
Aga Khan Trust for Culture and carried out by the Deutsches Archäologisches
Institut (Franke-Vogt et al., 2005). These studies have helped
reconstruct the design of buried water systems and pathways. Excavations
at the Nagaur palace-garden complex in Rajasthan in 2007 also
identified soil profiles and planting techniques.
These scientific studies
have contributed to increasingly sophisticated garden conservation
projects, which is the second major development in Mughal garden
research. Humayun’s tomb-garden in Delhi and Babur’s
tomb-garden in Kabul stand out as completed examples. The Global
Heritage Fund supported conservation at Asaf Khan’s tomb-garden
in the Shahdara area of Lahore, while other conservation projects
have focused on Shalamar Garden and Lahore Fort. There is still
a long way to go in garden heritage conservation (e.g. as compared
with architectural preservation), but the current trend represents
important steps in that direction.
Adapted
from James L. Wescoat, Jr., "The Re-Emergence of Comparative Possibilities
and the Wavering of Practical Concern," Perspectives on Garden
Histories. Washington, D.C., 1999. |
