Gardens in Late-Mughal Courtly Culture: Political Symbolism and Aesthetics under the Nawabs of Bengal, c. 1707-1757
Baijayanti Chatterjee
Seth Anandram Jaipuria College, University of Calcutta
Although gardens had been central to courtly culture in India long before the arrival of the Mughals, yet Mughal gardens were rich in political symbolism and aesthetic connotations in a manner very different from early Indian gardens. According to James Wescoat, Mughal Gardens, besides their paradisiacal symbolism had two types of political significance: on the one hand they symbolized dynastic claims and on the other hand territorial claims. Even in the twilight years of the Empire, Mughal Garden traditions continued to dominate landscape-designing under the ‘successor-states’ that arose on the ruins of the once great empire.
Even the British adopted the political symbolism of Mughal gardens when the province of Bengal finally passed into their hands by the mid-eighteenth century. Therefore, by exploring the flowering of Late-Mughal Gardens in early eighteenth-century Bengal my effort is to demonstrate how Mughal courtly culture outlived the formal apparatus of the empire with the establishment of several sub-imperial gardens in the different and often remote corners of the erstwhile empire.
