The Cultural Heritage Center (CHC) at the U.S. State Department announced that AIIS has been awarded a U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation grant for the project “India: Documentation of 16th-17th-Century Mughal Monuments on the Grand Trunk Road.” AIIS will receive $153,000 for the project, which will last two years. The project will be carried out by the AIIS Center for Art and Archaeology, under the leadership of Dr. Vandana Sinha and Dr. Susan Bean.
This project will document approximately 60 monuments at historic sites along the Grand Trunk Road and record oral history by interviewing local communities in order to explore their connections to the built heritage with which they live. These monuments survive along a 16th century imperial highway which was divided about 75 years ago by the partition of the north-western part of the Indian subcontinent in August 1947 and which now exists in fragments on both sides of the Line of Control in India and Pakistan. This project will create a free, globally accessible online digital research resource on this highway which has never been documented in its entirety.
Mughal rest house (caravanserai), 1658-1707 CE, Taraori, District Karnal, Haryana, India
Roads in history have served as sinews of civilizations and empires, facilitating geographical surveillance and control of spatial mobility of goods, people, and ideas. The Mughal highway from Agra to Lahore is one of the oldest and most significant of such pre-modern roads and an important stretch of an older route in the South Asian subcontinent. The older road was variously known as the Uttarapath, Sadak-i Sher Shah, and the Badshahi Sadak, which ran from Bengal to Afghanistan, and has been used for over two millennia. While it originated as a part of the trans-continental Silk Roads network, it emerged as a critical trade route in the Mughal period. The highway from Agra to Lahore connected several important cities of the empire. This route had been famously enhanced by Sher Shah Suri in the early sixteenth century, and the Mughals later used it as their main east-west artery. The fortunes of the imperial highway began to wane after the Mughals, but the British administrators of India nevertheless continued to maintain it. It was with the partition of British India into two countries (India and Pakistan) in 1947 that the historical integrity of this highway was breached. The Agra-Lahore route now traverses the national boundaries of India and Pakistan. This highway continues to be used today but in a different form.
This year CHC received a total of 141 AFCP proposals from around the world and 28 were selected. The AIIS project was the top ranked project from India.