Of Brick and Myth: The Genesis of Islamic Architecture in the Indus Valley takes the reader over a fascinating continuum of historical dynasties and occurrences within the Indus Valley, and eventually brings into focus the gradual Islamisation of the valley’s indigenous crafts and building techniques. The book has two major segments: the first contains descriptive chapters that incorporate folklore and research. This part of the book sets a basic timeline of events and personalities.

The second segment, comprising almost half the book, provides a technical, detailed catalogue of selected monuments and sites across the Indus Valley settlements. For each individual entry here, Holly Edwards includes traditional tales associated with the monument and its patrons: for example, a tomb being constructed to commit some local love saga to proud communal memory. The catalogue also provides technical and architectural details, notes on the materials and techniques employed, and other documented evidence. The catalogue is in a reductive format; explanations and extrapolations in the preceding chapters are much more comprehensive.

Within the main text of the book, Edwards continuously switches between her primary sources of knowledge: medieval Arabian, Persian, and Indian historians, verifying them with a stamp of Orien-talist and Western researchers, and commenting on more recent scholarship including inconclusive or ongoing research and excavations in the area. She frequently quotes non-academic sources too, like local legends picked up from wandering elders she meets during on-site documentation, which she then tries to validate through medieval and modern academic works.

There is, for example, the story of Dalu Rai, the raja of Aror, a town near today’s Sukkur. The very provocative verbal account by an enigmatic elder encourages the author to look into why the River Indus changed course near Aror — an earthquake, a torrential storm, an evil invocation by an oppressed trader, and the construction of an artificial dam are all reasonably probable causes, depending on which source you choose to ultimately believe. Many such stories that the author recounts are, in her words: “tantalising, echoing, doubling back, evoke the past like a myth, collapsing history and condensing the general shape of events, which inevitably become vague with the passage of time.” And that is exactly what the book is based upon: how stories and traditions, over time, get passed around, replicated, overwritten, and twisted into new versions of themselves. Using this concept, Edwards focuses on architectural traditions within the Indus Valley: building styles, individual elements, and holistic ornamentation schemes.

Edwards provides enticing verbal walk-throughs: her gaze goes across a mausoleum’s sombre ambience, zigzagging across rough brick vaults, ornamental reliefs in plaster, and intricately sculpted squinches, coming to rest on the majestic interior of the dome. Some descriptions are quite gripping: standing on the topmost level of the Shah Rukn-i-Alam Mazar, looking out onto miles of scattered houses and the vast, dusty landscape receding into the horizon, Edwards describes her feelings as at once both “airborne and acrophobic”. The tomb also speaks, in differing tones, to a variety of people: the devoted pilgrim, the spiritual scholar, and the random passerby, all derive subjective meaning and association from an individual, unmediated visual and spatial encounter with the tomb, an experience that is “neither scripted nor fixed”.

Edwards discusses the remarkable legacy of the Rukn-i-Alam Mazar: it has inspired Bibi Jawindi’s Mazar in Uch Sharif, Sultan Ali Akbar’s Mausoleum in Multan, and Ghazi Khan’s Mausoleum in Dera Ghazi Khan, in addition to some lesser known buildings. According to the renowned scholar on Islamic art and architecture, Robert Hillenbrand, Rukn-i-Alam is “anything but a local product”; the same could be said of many of the buildings in the area that are at once vernacular yet obviously inspired by Turko-Persian influences.

But Edwards takes a different stand, and opposes the overstated importance given to such influences: the architectural relics, tombs, and monuments spread across the Indus Valley sites, such as in Multan and Makli, are neither the result of a direct foreign influence that initiated new architectural styles, nor do they depict a perfection of strictly local techniques. They are, in fact, mere points of reference that hint at the strongly embedded yet constantly evolving endurance of the cultural and aesthetic tradition of a particular geographic region.

In this way, Edwards emphasises the amalgamation of various local values when discussing monuments along the Indus. They are not subservient to overly dominating foreign architectural influ-ences, but stand between inspired imitation and contextual adaptation. It was not a process of replication that resulted in these monuments, but one of assimilation and of producing enhanced proto-types: a process that resulted from ‘dialogic encounters’ between vernacular civilisation and successive waves of invaders. This is what makes these monuments distinct.

The book is not restricted to one region or topic alone. It surpasses an attempt at mere documentation. Edwards undertakes an analytical style of writing: at times formal and technical, at times more poetic and romanticised, at times highly critical and offering an alternate interpretation for past events. She tries to connect across contested geographies and juxtaposed histories, adding a bit of local political assertions, regionalised religious affiliations, and socioeconomic aspirations. The book emphasises the significance of studying art and history beyond merely a chronological or ‘style-based’ history of architecture, as is the standard curriculum in many architecture schools.

The author believes such an approach would reduce the multiple pluralistic interpretations of subjective histories, and would propose viewing them as universal, absolute narratives that cannot be challenged or debated upon. She stresses the need to see history not as an incoherent collection of single events, but as a rich tradition, a complex visual and material culture. Studies into history should be beyond mere reductive or deductive ventures, free from the political or social prejudices of today.

A minor downside of the book is that it is not a very easy read. Its academic, technical vocabulary and concepts make it understandable for those associated with architecture or archaeology prac-tices, but perhaps not the general reader. And this also makes it a highly recommended research source. Of Brick and Myth is sure to make you flick back and forth between the actual text and the bibliographical endnotes for each chapter, so have two bookmarks handy, as I did. You will often find yourself putting down the book and picking up your cell phone or tablet to verify and read more on the internet about something that the author mentioned, perhaps such as the translated Chachnama, or the mythical Tarikh-i Tahiri. This research volume certainly far surpasses being a mere coffee-table book, as one might wrongly infer from its colourful cover page and the photographs inside.

Of Brick and Myth: The Genesis of Islamic Architecture in the Indus Valley

(ARCHAEOLOGY)

By Holly Edwards

Oxford University Press, Karachi

ISBN 978-0195978988

332pp.