Sultanate Ahmadabad and Its Monuments- The City of The Muzaffarids (Ahmad Shahis)

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Riyaz Latif is an architectural historian and teaches at FLAME University in Pune. He received his PhD in History of Art in 2011 from the University of Minnesota for his work on the Marinids of North Africa. He has previously taught at Wellesley College and Vanderbilt University in the United States of America. He has written on various aspects of art, cultural, and literary phenomena as they pertain to the Islamic and Indo-Persianate world. He is also a poet, with three collections of Urdu poetry to his credit; in addition, he has translated several works between English and Urdu.

Pushkar Sohoni is an architectural historian and works at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune. He received his PhD in History of Art in 2010 from the University of Pennsylvania for his work on the Nizam Shahs of Ahmadnagat. He has previously taught at the University of British Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, and University of the Arts, Philadelphia. His books include The Architecture of a Deccan Sultanate: Courtly Practice and Royal Authority in Late Medieval India (2018) and Jewish Heritage of the Deccan: Mumbai, the Northern Konkan, Pune (with Kenneth X. Robbins, 2017).

T HIS BOOK WAS envisioned as a guide to the monuments of Ahmadabad which were built under the Muzaffarid sultans (commonly known as the Ahmad Shahi sultans) during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The original medieval city of Ahmadabad, with its suburbs and satellite settlements, is now slowly melding into a single urban agglomeration-rapid changes to the city have transformed its fabric, sensibilities, and texture. With indiscriminate growth and urbanization, the fragmented monuments across the city are losing the urban context in which they were originally situated. In 2017, the city received the honour of being the first in India to get a UNESCO World Heritage tag. Even so, visitors do not have access to good means for engaging with the early city. The authors have, therefore, undertaken to write an architectural guide to the original city, which is quickly disappearing in the morass of the new Ahmedabad. In this book, we have created seven circuits for understanding the capital city of the sultans of Gujarat, along with its suburbs. With its rich tradition of patronizing good architecture, it would be a travesty not to mention later but significant architecture in Ahmadabad, as readers follow the itineraries laid out in this book. Therefore, while the book predominantly focuses on the Ahmadabad of the Gujarat sultanate, it does not entirely exclude other buildings that would be of interest along the way. This is most certainly not a comprehensive account of the sultanate architecture of Ahmadabad, but more accurately a representative set of itineraries for scholars and enthusiasts that will serve as an introduction to the rich legacy of sultanate Ahmadabad.