Aditi Chandra, "Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

So I will start by asking you the conventional and the traditional, but the very important question, which is what motivated you to write the book?

Firstly, thank you, Sohini, so much for having me and for making time in your busy semester to speak with me about Unruly Monuments.

So why did I write this book and what motivated me to write this book? You know, when you're actually writing the book, Or when you're thinking about it, you don't know what's motivating you.

But as I finished writing it or as I was writing it, I realized that as a child, I was fascinated by historical sites, monuments, if you will.

And I remember during school trips, I would sometimes sit very quietly in like, you know, Buddhist monk cells or like a temple, like, you know, Ajanta Ellora or a mosque or a fort.

I remember a trip to Dolatabad.

And I would touch the stone surfaces and I would wonder who'd been here in the centuries before.

And I always got this sense that, you know, on those stone surfaces that there was a passing of time, that was time that was collecting on the surface.

So I've always been fascinated by layers of time accumulating over surfaces.

And years later, as I began to research this project, I found that there were several other elements that also constituted the built architectural form.

So, for example, the landscape is as much a part of the building as, you know, because often it's seen as two separate things.

Or the on-site museums that are found and monuments are as much as part of that monument's history.

Or the people who visit the site and the different types of people who visit the site or use it or representations of that monument in postcards or film.

I never, like I said before, I never thought of this while I was doing the research at the time.

But it's only, you know, at that time, you think it's just I need to complete my PhD and I need to complete this work.

But as I started writing, I found that these childhood encounters really at some point of being fascinated by how time accumulates.

over surfaces and realizing that the surface of the architecture is not just the building but something else was something that I was probably you know thinking about even as as a kid and then the other more academic motivation is relates to you know the existing scholarship so For example, the existing scholarship on the afterlives of monuments tends to be about the history of institutions, like about the ASI, or more institutional histories or overarching narratives, and not so much about small micro histories at specific sites.

So, for example, one text of which and I and all of the previous scholarship, actually, I really do appreciate and I have greatly learned from.

But one of the text states defines the monument as less by what it looks like and more by what it does.

So the scholarship was already showing that monuments are culturally mutable spaces, but they were doing that by moving away from the study of form.

So, for example, they were like, not by what it looks like, but more by what it does.

And that is true.

But what I wanted to do was I wanted to show what a monument does, but also not lose the focus on what it looks like.

And what it looks like to me was not just the built form, but also the landscape, also the museums, also the postcards, also film.

And sometimes the looking like was also the fact that they were not there, like they were absent, like looking at what is present, but also what is...