The Archaeology of Religious Conversion: Virtue and Tradition in the Indor valley, North India

Summary

This paper presents the results of an extended project directed at an archaeological investigation of religious conversion to Islam in South Asia. The project combined extensive regional survey, excavations and architectural documentation focused upon the site and valley of Indor, located in the region of Mewat on the borders of Rajasthan, North India.

The medieval residents of Mewat were stereotyped in contemporary imperial chronicles as primitive rebels, living in a forested hilly backwater, beyond the pale of civilized politics. After conversion to Islam in the fourteenth century CE, one group amongst them came to be known as the Khanzada lineage. The Khanzada founded Indor, a fortified city as monumental as any other in the region, and over the next five centuries, a salient attachment to place and a distinctive material repertoire were intrinsic to the Khanzada tradition.

This paper presents a contextualization of the site, its rapid emergence and the variable decline of its urbane capacities over 5 demonstrable phases of settlement in the Indor valley. Through analysis of the unprecedentedly rich assemblages of monumental sepulchral architecture and ornaments from Indor, it argues for the salience of the categories of tradition and virtue for the archaeology of religion.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21988