Death in the City: Funerary Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim South Asia

The tombs of Sufi saints have long been nodes of contact in South Asian cities, gathering devotees from across social classes and confessional groups. These monuments are constantly transforming and expanding, and become significant public spaces, places of sociability and of communal gathering. This talk will  explore how funerary sites and rituals have historically impacted and shaped urban development in the Indian subcontinent.

Fatima Quraishi is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Riverside. Her current book project Necropolis as Palimpsest: The Makli Cemetery in Sindh, 1380-1660 is a longue-duree analysis of a vast funerary site in the south of Pakistan. She completed her doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU and has held teaching positions at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture and at the Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology, both in Karachi, Pakistan. She was also the lead curator of the exhibition, “Paradise on Earth: Manuscripts, Miniatures, and Mendicants from Kashmir,” at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi in 2017. She is currently a fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University.