Silent Splendour: Palaces of the Deccan, 14th-19th Centuries

[...]the volume implicitly perpetuates the illusion of separate (if not opposing) "Hindu" and "Muslim" realms in South Asia; yet the purported duality is nowhere more clearly belied than in the Deccan, with its almost bewildering variety of sectarian affiliations and "synchretisms", some of which are duly indexed in the book; not to mention a shared court culture that transcended the boundaries of religious identity (see Phillip B. Wagoner, "'Sultan among Hindu Kings': dress, titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu culture at Vijayanagara", The Journal of Asian Studies 55/4, 1996, pp. 851-80). [...]a reuse may well have more subtle reasons than the suggested intention not to alienate the local population: a progression from entranceways containing a profusion of figural sculpture to areas characterized by increasingly subdued decoration, sometimes culminating in aniconism, would seem to be a recurrent feature of areas reserved for royal use as early as the thirteenth century in the sultanate architecture of present-day Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh: see Finbarr B. Flood, "Remaking monuments", Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval "Hindu-Muslim" Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 137-259. When the Tughluqs (not considered in this volume) expanded their frontier to the south, incorporating the Deccan, they were heirs to this tradition: witness their careful refashioning of the political-religious centre of Warangal, where the temple's four gateways continued to perform their role as symbolic markers of the four directions: see Phillip B. Wagoner and John Henry Rice, "From Delhi to the Deccan: newly discovered Tughluq monuments at Warangal-Sultanpur and the beginnings of Indo-Islamic architecture in Southern India", Artibus Asiae 61/1 (2001), pp. 77-117.