The Mughal Garden

The literature for garden history is wide-ranging, from art/architectural history, to geography and the history of landscape, to Asian studies and Islamic studies, and even literary studies. Cast a wide net for the best results. If you are interested in specific plants used in gardens, you might wish to visit the Botany Library. For making your own architectural drawings or models you may need to use Art, Planning and Davis Libraries. The Great Buildings Collection has links to modeling tutorials and free software.

Monographs: a very brief selection

Garden History: Issues, Approaches, Methods. Useful for methodology; e.g. includes a chapter on the uses of painting in garden history. [SB451.D85]

Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires. Petruccioli provides a very useful foreword that outlines the historiography of the Indian or Islamic garden. [SB457.8 .G37 1997]

Islamic Gardens [SB457.8 .D85 1974]

Landscape in History: Design and Planning the Eastern and Western Tradition. Includes a chapter on, on Asian landscapes, an overview with a bibliography. [SB470.5 .P74 1999]

Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, prospects. [SB458.4 .M84 1996]

Dumbarton Oaks publications are particularly important.

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Dictionaries and Encyclopedias

The Grove Dictionary of Art (either print or online) is a good starting point. Vol. 12, in the print version, includes a long chapter on gardens: the Indian Subcontinent, p72ff. with a bibliography.

The Encyclopedia of Islam (Davis Reference) may be useful as well.

The Dictionary of the Middle Ages includes an entry on 'Rauda, pl. riyad' (garden) with a short bibliography and cross-references. [Art Ref. D114.D51982, vol. 10]

Microforms

The Art Library has major microfiche sets for Indian art: The Art of India: Paintings and Drawings in the Victoria and Albert Museum (in color) and Archaeological Survey of India (b&w photographs) in the fiche drawers near the photocopier (fiche at the very end of the fiche collection.) Guides are on top of the fiche cabinet.

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Web Resources

Museum web pages may be helpful; see the Virtual Library Museum page.

ARTstor provides curated collections of art images and associated data for noncommercial and scholarly, non-profit educational use.

CAMIO offers rights-cleared, high-quality art images for class projects, art history and studio art programs, course Web sites, lectures, presentations, and research resources.

Digital South Asia Library is an excellent site, not to be overlooked. It includes images, maps, bibliographies, indexes and links to other resources.

Gardens of the Mughal Empire is a site produced by the Smithsonian Institution.

SARAI (South Asia Resource Access on the Internet) is another excellent gateway

Library Catalogs

Important catalogs for architecture are the Avery Library at Columbia and R.I.B.A. (Royal Institute of British Architects) the world's largest architecture library. Another important architecture gateway is the Canadian Centre for Architecture.

For Asian art in general, the Library at the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian is important.

Access to libraries worldwide is simplified through Libweb and to art libraries through the International Directory of Art Libraries.

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Indexes and Abstracts

Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals now includes material dating back as far as the 19th c. Journals such as Gartenkunst, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and Muqarnas as well as many others are indexed; use search terms such as gardens-Mughal, historic gardens, landscape architecture, formal gardens, water gardens, or try keyword searching using both Mughal and Mogul.

Art Index and BHA-Bibliography of the History of Art may be searched online via the Libraries' E-Indexes and Databases page. Remember to search using both Mughal and Mogul. Journals such as Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, Journal of Garden History, Oriental Art, Marg, Mimar and Studies in the History of Gardens and the Designed Landscape and others often have articles on the topic.

Bibliography of Asian Studies (also on the Libraries' E-Indexes pages) will retrieve articles from journals (some may need to be requested via ILL) Even so, it is a useful tool to identify authors writing on the topic.

Historical Abstracts (Libraries' E-Indexes) includes books and journal citations; use term Mughals; history journals such as Indian Economic and Social History Review and Bulletin de 'Ecole Francaise d'Extreme Orient, which would not be located using the art historical literature, may provide useful results. A 20-page article on the Mughal garden in the NW Punjab, for example, appears in South Asia Research.

Index Islamicus covers a vast body of literature (1906-1996.) and the MLA International Bibliography (Libraries E-Indexes) is an important source for 'the garden' in literary sources.

Note: Some garden journals such as Gartenkunst and Garden History include annual bibliographies of garden literature, so be on the lookout for these. Another area to explore is conservation/cultural heritage information. Some of this can be found in indexes like PAIS and journals like UNESCO Courier, and on web sites such as ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites).

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