Prologue: Fatehpur Sikri, January 2007

For a moment, let us leave Delhi and travel a few hours east to the sixteenth-century fort-palace Fatehpur Sikri, where I encountered a young postcard seller in January 2007 who disrupted my leisurely experience and scholarly analysis of the monument. It is winter and I am with a group of graduate school friends on a trip to Fatehpur Sikri and Agra—two popular tourist destinations and the erstwhile capitals of the Mughal empire under Akbar (r. 1542–1605). Both cities have been made famous by the quintessential Mughal red sandstone and white marble architecture. As art historians, we photographed the architecture with our lenses focused on capturing the buildings’ style and shied away from locating ourselves as posed tourists in the photos. In doing so, we disassociated our presence from the commercial act of tourism, using people in our images only to show scale. Feeling smug in our knowledge of the site, we also refused to hire a guide. However, despite our efforts to escape the trappings of touristic activity, the accoutrements of tourism enveloped us from time to time. As we emerged from the Buland Darwaza (Lofty Doorway), a grand and imposing entrance to the Fatehpur- Sikri fort-palace, several souvenir sellers surrounded our group of nine. The most persistent of the lot, a young boy selling postcards, got into an argument with one member of our group. My friend, speaking for the rest of us, kept refusing the advances of the postcard seller, telling him that he should spend his time studying instead of wasting it selling postcards.