Castles of the Heartland: Placemaking in Early Modern Bundelkhand

This paper considers how a manuscript bearing a recension of the Amarushataka –– a classical anthology of Sanskrit love poems –– prepared in Bundelkhand in central India in the seventeenth-century constructed an image of a city as a place of multisensory pleasure and desire. Let me elaborate. The manuscript under consideration contains ninety-five folios. Each folio bears a poem on top and a painting of lovers frolicking in a mansion beneath it. Taken together the folios aid a viewer or a reader to imagine a city as a physical place –– where through mansions, fountains and fragrances waft the flirtatious sounds of such characters as an itinerant mercenary, man-about-town, libertine, courtesan, and family woman –– and as a mentality. That is, as a grid of beliefs, perspectives, institutions, and practices and etiquette it spawns, which relates in ambivalent ways to customs, ethics, and rules. Finally, I argue how such multi-layered imaginings of the urban in this manuscript's folios intersected with ongoing efforts of Bundlekhand’s Rajput clans to reconceptualize and defend their fortified households and hometowns against Mughal infiltrations.