Athena
Cultural Crusader
ONE of the many reasons that travel is so wonderful is simply that it exposes us to marvellous things we never knew about or even imagined. With that exposure comes enthusiasm and a desire to try to understand what we have discovered more fully. It’s not always easy to know where to start, however. Take, for example, the astonishing and varied architectural heritage of the Indian subcontinent. By every measure—in geography, time and quantity—it is a vast and complex subject. Depending on an individual’s background, moreover, it is one potentially removed in language, religion and culture as well. How does the amazed traveller start to engage seriously with it? A new book by Christopher Tadgell, Architecture in the Indian Subcontinent from the Mauryas to the Mughals (Routledge, £45.99), offers one way forward.
This is, in fact, a successor volume to an earlier and even more broadly framed book by the same author, The History of Indian Architecture: from the dawn of civilization to the end of the Raj (1990). Astonishingly, when this first book was published, the standard, authoritative survey of the subject remained the two-volume Indian Architecture by Percy Brown that first appeared in 1942, five years before Independence. For historical information about buildings off the beaten track, the pre-internet traveller might be fortunate to find something in The Imperial Gazetteer of India in its various editions (assuming they had the means to carry its compendious bulk). Over recent decades, however, there has been an explosion of interest in Indian architecture and, in this new volume, Dr Tadgell presents an updated sur vey covering just over two millennia of building—from the 4th century BC to the 18th century—in a single hardback of mana
