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Abstract

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the urban landscape of the city of Jodhpur, capital of the kingdom of Marwar in western India, was reshaped by a slew of monuments sponsored by women patrons from its royal zenana. These patrons included queens, princesses, queen mothers, and concubines who lived under the strictures of the veil. A majority of the monuments they commissioned were waterbodies and Hindu temples, several of which still dominate Jodhpur’s urban landscape. This corpus of monuments have never received scholarly attention—having been produced in a period of frenetic architectural activity that is nevertheless largely dismissed as a phase of ‘decline’ in evolutionary histories of architecture in the Indian subcontinent. A majority of the female patrons examined in this study are similarly unknown despite their prolific careers as builders. 'Inscribing the City: Women, Architecture, and Agency in an Indian Kingdom, Jodhpur 1750-1850' is centred on two related sets of evidence produced by zenana women patrons in Jodhpur in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the buildings they commissioned, many of which still survive, and an extensive archive of handwritten accounts books of the zenana from the same period. Through a detailed study of mainly these two parallel archives, this doctoral dissertation describes the circumstances and processes that enabled elite women in an early modern Indian city to intervene decisively on its urban landscape. The work outlines the various motives that propelled zenana women patrons to reshape Jodhpur’s urban sprawl through building projects—from material and commercial interests to a desire to memorialise themselves—and examines the afterlives in the city of both prominent patrons and the monuments they built. The study pays close attention to the Jodhpur zenana, the institutional and spatial structures of which fundamentally shaped the lives of the patrons studied here. Issues of agency in architectural patronage are examined through a close examination of archival documents related to construction from nineteenth century Jodhpur. Architecture’s relationship to the city, communities, and collective memory, are explored through an examination of the career of one of the most prolific zenana patrons to emerge from the Jodhpur—the concubine Gulāb Rai. This research project is the first study to systematically address the mechanisms through which architectural patronage unfolded in an early-modern Indian context. It does so by delving deep into the life worlds of a charismatic set of women patrons who lived on the ‘peripheries’ of South Asian art history, in a city on the edges of the Thar desert. The objective of the study is not only to excavate instances of women’s agency in the creation of art and architecture and the building of cities in India, but also to find ways to reconceptualise agency itself in an art historical context, away from fundamentally androcentric models centred solely on figures such as the artist or the patron. Agency is instead conceptualized in this study as a distributed phenomenon—as distributed agency (or agencies), which can be envisioned not as held by certain privileged subject positions but as diffused within dynamic networks of relationships that connected members of a community. Various chapters in this dissertation thus pay close attention to the processes and relationships through which acts of patronage unfolded in Jodhpur in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, situating architectural production against transactional networks that bound zenana women to a range of individuals and groups active in Jodhpur in this period—local and itinerant communities of artisans and labourers, architects/head masons, the officialdom, religious sects, and myriad users of urban space among them. In doing so, this study challenges andro-centric, style-centred narratives about the histories of art in the region it studies, exemplified by terms such as ‘rajput architecture’ that reinforce the gender and caste hegemony of certain elite groups and erases the agency of others. Inscribing the City argues instead for a social-historical approach that relies on the creative use of sources to recover the productive labour and agency of women and lower caste artisanal and labouring communities in architectural production. In addition to being a microhistory of architectural patronage as it unfolded in a largely unexplored region and period, this dissertation is an alternate history of the city of Jodhpur that illuminates the urban landscape from marginalised perspectives, paying attention to the dynamics of both gender and caste. As such, it is of interest to historians of art, architecture, women, and cities, and to the general reader interested in South Asia.