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Palimpsests Past and Present: The Sufis and Sultans of the Maklī Necropolis, 1380–1660

Author:Fatima Quraishi
ISBN:9789376540129
Binding:Hardcover
Year:2026
Pages:336 with 103 color plates, 7 figures, and 6 maps
Size:16 x 24 cm
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About the Book
The historic role of funerary architecture in South Asia.

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Maklī necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Maklī’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Maklī became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints—and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.

Here, Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Maklī’s built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Maklī, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi’s work speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.
About the Author
Fatima Quraishi

Fatima Quraishi is assistant professor of art and archaeology at Princeton University.
Editorial Reviews



“Maklī has cried out for scholarly attention since entering the World Heritage List in 1981, and Quraishi gives us an authoritative, richly woven fabric of Maklī’s history.”
—Phillip B. Wagoner, coauthor of Vijayanagara: Architectural Inventory of the Sacred Centre
“This richly brocaded study illuminates centuries of history in a region long overshadowed (and divided) by postcolonial politics.”
—Yael Rice, author of The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court
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