Building Mughal Burhanpur

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.