The rekhta of architecture: the development of 'Islamic' art history in Urdu, c.1800-1950

This essay offers a contribution to the 'history of art history' beyond-though not, as we will see, without-Europe. The focus is on publications in Urdu, a major South Asian language that served as the chief lingua franca of colonial India at a time when it also became the main prose language of South Asian Muslims. This sense of dialogue between British and Indian scholars is important to establish from the outset. For not only did Urdu art historical writing develop through close engagements (and direct translations) of English (and occasionally French) works. The rise of Urdu as a language of learned prose and the introduction of printing were also outcomes of the cultural traffic of empire. Art history in Urdu was therefore part of a larger pattern of intellectual exchange that altered the ways in which Indian Muslims not only conceived their own past but also connected themselves to a shared heritage with Muslims elsewhere. The notion of a religiously defined 'Islamic' art history was crucial to this larger agenda that distinguished Urdu art history from nationalist formulations of 'Indian' art.While the focus here will be on Urdu, we will also touch on Middle Eastern Arabic accounts of Islamic art from the same period, both as points of connection and comparison to developments in India. For as we will see, Urdu art history developed through dialogue with European, Indian nationalist, and Middle Eastern studies of art. The gradual outcome was the development of what was explicitly framed as an 'Islamic' (islami) art history in Urdu, a conception which was not merely the projection of European authors. Instead, the language was deliberately adopted by Indian Muslim authors to recover their distinct artistic heritage as Muslims in India and at the same time to link themselves to a wider 'Islamic civilisation', particularly in the Arab Middle East.Rather than describing these developments through the biological language of 'hybridity', to reflect the dual provenance of the new genre of Urdu architectural history this essay adopts a more literary label: the bilingual portmanteau 'architectural rekhta'. Meaning 'mixed' or 'blended', rekhta was the name for Urdu before, in apt architectural metonymy, it was renamed after the Red Fort or Sublime Garrison (Urdu-e Mu'ala) in Delhi. This emic conceptual link between the palace of the last Mughal emperors and Urdu as its language points us from the outset to the importance of buildings for Indian Muslim authors