Building Mughal Burhanpur
Name
1193319868-MIT.pdf
Size
47.94 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
5eed2bd9674835dabba36ec2e47bca29
Author(s)
Hirsch, Rachel Pei.
Advisor(s)
James L. Wescoat, Jr.
Date Issued
2020
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
In 1601, the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) successfully conquered Burhanpur, a major Sufi center and capital of the Khandesh Sultanate. A decades-long process of urban construction followed, transforming the city into a regional capital on the frontier of the Mughal Empire. However, the twenty-first-century challenges of reconstructing the seventeenth-century city have largely obscured Burhanpur's significance, and isolated attempts at textual analysis or conservation fieldwork have provided only partial understandings of the city's history. Responding to these challenges, this thesis proposes a method that privileges the experiential elements of understanding a city--whether gathered from textual accounts, personal observation, or visual evidence--and posits them within a larger discourse of travel and place formation. From this method emerges a reconstruction of a new Mughal capital that was built in a series of spatial and architectural developments carried out between 1601 and 1631. The function and form of these layers of construction shifted rapidly over the course of three decades based on the needs of the expanding Mughal Empire and the priorities of the individuals sustaining it. Taken together, this time-travel account reveals a previously unrecognized three-part urban process constituted by successive shifts in patronage that collectively created a legible Mughal city.
Description
Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, May, 2020
Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 93-98).
Subjects
Architecture.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
Terms of Use
MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.
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