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Abstract
In the late-fifteenth century members of the royal and martial Hindu Rajput community of northwest India began constructing chatrīs (cenotaphs) to memorialize their ancestors, a practice they continue today. Despite the prevalence of chatrīs throughout the region, scholars of later north Indian art have neglected the subject of Rajput funerary architecture, focusing instead on other Rajput and Mughal architectural and painting traditions. This study therefore represents the first critical investigation of the Rajput chatrīs. This dissertation examines the chatrī traditions of three Rajput dynasties: the Kachhawahas, who ruled the former states of Amber, Jaipur, Alwar, and Shekawati; the Rathores of the former kingdom of Marwar (Jodhpur) and Bikaner; and the Sisodias of the erstwhile kingdom of Mewar (Udaipur).
This study investigates Rajput chatrīs as a religio-political medium through which the rulers of these states visually announced their wealth, authority, and aspects of their communal identities to an audience of their nobles and subjects. By extension, this dissertation is also a study of the visual vocabulary of Rajput public identity, different aspects of which were privileged at different historical moments.
Closely associated with my reading of the chatrī as a signifier of north Indian Hindu kingship is the critical role of memory and the past, not only that of the memorialized deceased, but of the patron, his dynasty, and community at large. Through their archaized formal and decorative programs, certain chatrīs may be understood as palimpsests; they retain traces of the past and function to locate the patron's ancestry in a particular historical moment. This dissertation therefore pays special attention to chatrīs that self-consciously refer to the past, considering the history and memories they were intended to index for their patrons.
The Rajputs adopted and adapted the practice of commemorating their ancestors through architectural memorials after contact with the Indo-Islamic courts, for which tomb building was a potent expression of political legitimacy and authority. Under Rajput patronage, both the sign (tomb) and signified (Indo-Islamic kingship) were transformed into chatrī and Rajput kingship. Accordingly, this dissertation also considers how Hinduism, its mythology, and funerary practices transformed what essentially began as an Islamic memorial tradition into a royal Hindu one.
