Narrative Pasts by Jyoti Gulati Balachandran

Author:Jyoti Gulati Balachandran [Balachandran, Jyoti Gulati]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: N/A
ISBN: 9780190991968
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2020-02-10T08:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.2b Tombs of Gujarat Sultans within the Sarkhej complex. Sultan Maḥmūd Begarha’s tomb is in the middle flanked by the tombs of Sultan Muz̤affar Shāh II and Maḥmūd Shāh II. Photo by author.

In fifteenth-century Gujarat, the Sultans’ decision to invest in the Sarkhej complex communicated the shared vision of authority in state and community building that was inscribed in both courtly as well as Sufi texts produced in the period. As we saw in the case of the Mirqāt and the Tuḥfat, for instance, the state and its representatives were not immaterial to the narrative remembrances around Aḥmad Khattū. In the diverse cast of actors that shaped the memorialization of Aḥmad Khattū’s life, the Gujarat Sultans were often centre-stage. The nature of royal investment into the Sarkhej complex was a further recognition of the joint enterprise of regional state and community formation that had come to fruition by the end of the fifteenth century. While the presence of royal tombs in close proximity to the tombs of spiritual masters had represented the overlapping social spaces that Sultans and Sufis had come to occupy in the subcontinent by the late fourteenth century, the inclusion of the royal tombs in Sarkhej within the tomb complex of Shaykh Aḥmad Khattū was unique for the period. Through the saintly and royal funerary structures, the Sufi and the Sultans were now inseparable from the history and identity of the region. This regional vision of the complex was dramatically enhanced by the unified architectural scheme, where the structures of the complex transitioned seamlessly from one part to the other and matched the architectural style and vocabulary of other monuments built by the Gujarat Sultans, both in Ahmedabad and other parts of their realm.34

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