The glorious monuments built in India by the Mughal emperors, from Babur in the early 16th century to Bahadur Shah Zafar II in the mid-19th century, have long deserved a comprehensive illustrated survey in one volume.
George Michell is the ideal author. He is both a great scholar and a fervent communicator on many aspect of India’s cultural history. He has worked as a hands-on archaeologist on major Indian sites and recently established a Deccan Foundation to protect the wonders of that little-known region.
He has been extremely well served in this magnificent book by the photographs of Amit Pasricha, who describes himself as a ‘panoramic photographer’. His photographs are staggeringly beautiful and impossible to praise too highly.
The book principally concentrates on imperial centres of power — Delhi, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Lahore — and the descriptions of the forts, palaces, tombs, mosques and gardens are supported by newly commissioned plans and maps drawn by Rahul Singh. Mughal gardens deserve to be better known and better preserved; their elaborate planting and complex waterworks have suffered from serious neglect, and they are hard to restore.
The device of introducing each major section with a contemporary Indian miniature evokes in detail the colour and activity of the building process. While all the major monuments are illuminatingly illustrated and described, the chapter on Kashmir is a revelation, with its emphasis on elaborate gardens photographed in autumnal light.
Nor is the Deccan neglected by the author, although it was not until the 1680s that the Mughal Prince Alamgir finally conquered the kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda, giving him a brief command over the rich Deccan region.
The reader is utterly convinced by this book of the soaring quality and consistency of Mughal architecture.
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