Distance and Metaphor: Replicating the Ka‘ba in Deccan India

Scholarship on the Ka‘ba, the most significant site of Muslim pilgrimage, has considered the ways in which knowledge of this sacred site circulated both textually and visually. Less work has been done on spatial replications of the Ka‘ba. I focus on a fifteenth-century royal tomb in the Deccan region of India where a rare conjunction of epigraphic, spatial, and painterly evidence surrounds the building’s self-proclamation as a ka‘ba. Revisiting the relationship between premodern architectural copies and mimesis, I challenge historiographic approaches to visual difference, geographic distance, and replication in regions that have traditionally been deemed “peripheral.”