The Pantheon’s dome was so improbable that those who entered this umbilicus of history thought it the work of demons. This house of devils, as it came to be called, doesn’t overwhelm from afar; step inside the cavernous rotunda, and it enwraps you in its sorcery even as the oculus releases you into light.Goethe, marvelling at the Pantheon during his two years in Italy, confessed that “the most important monuments I take very slowly; I do nothing except look, go away, and come back and look again”. He concluded that “only in Rome can one educate oneself for Rome.” The same might be said of India, and of Delhi most of all.Sohail HashmiThe Music of Stones Seagull Books, 2025All great cities demand return; each visit reveals a little more. Delhi, too, rewards those who keep looking. Sohail Hashmi has been here for more than seven decades, and he returns again and again – to discern her ceaseless change, which never allows her to be wholly known. Yet there are elements he recognises that resist change: the lotus carved into the spandrels of a mosque, the curve of an elephant’s trunk in a corbel, a kalash beside a Quranic verse. They have always been there, enduring inattention. The joy lies in attempting to understand what time has chiselled away. That is what Hashmi’s book, The Music of Stones, does: it demystifies what myth and forgetting have obscured.Wearing his scholarship lightly, he begins with characteristic humility: “I am not only not a historian, but I am also a geographer,” he writes, recalling Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee, who landed on the wrong shore but made sense of the terrain nonetheless. The modesty hides a steadier assurance. His subject is a confluence of disciplines – engineering, ethnography and history – all governed by a temperament of observation, intent on reclaiming what the ordinary gaze lets slip. The book is not a catalogue of monuments but an invitation to linger before a carved bracket or a half-buried plinth and imagine how many hands once knew its shape. “Somebody has said that God is in the details,” Hashmi adds, “but I am trying to spot the devil in the details.”The devil, in his telling, lies in the heredity of the chisel; his heretics are the craftsmen who carved what their hands remembered and minds trusted. The balance between mind and hand finds its echo in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s contrast between the engineer and the bricoleur. The engineer conceives through theory, the bricoleur through memory; one builds with plans, the other with what is at hand. Delhi’s architecture, as Hashmi reads it, is the work of such artisans, who inherited a vocabulary older than their patrons, adapting new forms to the logic of their own tools, building not from first principles but from cultural recall. In that sense, every arch and finial in the city is both invention and remembrance.It is fitting, then, that the first object the book handles is the pot. “Whether Roman or Grecian amphorae and urns or our own terracotta and painted grey ware,” he writes, “civilizations have been defined by their pottery.” The kalash, he reminds us, is our first experiment in form, a vessel of faith and function. In the early temples it stood for fertility – the garbha kalasha, or womb-pot – and in household ritual it still does. The kalash was not Hindu, only Indian: an emblem of consecration that passed easily from shrine to shrine. From the Alai Darwaza to Adham Khan’s tomb, from the Khazanchi ki Haveli to the Red Fort, it keeps returning, sometimes plain, sometimes layered with lotus and cone, finding its most assured expression at Humayun’s Tomb, where the motif gleams in copper and gold.Sohail Hashmi. Photo: Facebook/Sohail HashmiBetween imagination and execution runs the oldest quarrel: those who design are seldom trusted by those who must build, and genius has never sat easily with a committee. Patrons distrust audacity as readily as masons distrust theory. When Filippo Brunelleschi promised Florence a dome without scaffolding, the wardens of the Opera del Duomo laughed him out. Even small arches required centring; to vault an entire sky without timber seemed lunacy. He was called an ass and a babbler, and for a time he believed his idea would die with him. His solution, legend has it, was to break an egg. Challenged to explain his method, he asked his rivals to make one stand upright on a marble slab. When they failed, he tapped it on the table and balanced it neatly on end. The trick, he said, was obvious once you saw it done. What Brunelleschi proved in Florence was that the improbable could be made inevitable by understanding its balance. The dome was no miracle, it required patience. Delhi’s architects worked from the same grammar of equilibrium.The dome that arrived from Central Asia seemed indecently bare to Indian eyes. The masons set about embellishing this foreign hemisphere, first with lotus petals, then with the serrated amalaka and finally with the kalash. Zafar Khan’s tomb, Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq’s mausoleum, and Isa Khan’s exuberant pile each carry a variation of that crown. By Akbar’s reign, the motif had become standard practice, and under Shah Jahan it was ubiquitous. The finial that crowns Humayun’s Tomb reappears on the Jama Masjid, the Moti Masjid, the Zeenat-ul-Masajid, and on the domes of Fatehpur Sikri. It later crosses to the temple of Gauri Shankar and the Digambar Jain Mandir in Chandni Chowk, and to the domes of the gurdwaras built under Ranjit Singh. The same form crowns temples, mosques, and gurdwaras alike, a continuity of workmanship that needed no doctrine to sustain it. The Pantheon left its oculus open—an aperture for light and a release for weight; Delhi’s masons closed it, giving the dome a finial instead of an eye. The pot that once stood by the hearth now crowns the horizon, its purpose altered, its beauty remembered.The persistent blending of these symbols leads to the book’s central challenge: can architecture be defined by religion? These categorisations are partly a product of insufficient imagination and partly, I suspect, of malice. Hashmi is pointed in identifying the prejudice in such categorisations, which, in reality, is dogma masquerading as terminology. Architecture, he insists, is shaped by climate, materials and technology, not by theology. The dome belongs to dry skies where flat roofs hold; the sloping eaves of Kerala or Kashmir come from rain; if a dome appeared, it was because someone had learnt to balance a curve; if a corbel persisted, it was because no one quite trusted the keystone – not yet; and the minarets, like steeples and shikharas, reach upward not to broadcast the divine but to approach it. To read faith into these stones is to mistake labour for liturgy.Those who prefer legends are unlikely to take kindly to explanation; their comfort is in mystery, their distrust reserved for craft. Yet the truth is in the visible. If you look at the arch in Tughalqabad (a photo of which is in the book), as Hashmi once did as a runaway schoolboy, you cannot but marvel at this most perfect thing: all voussoir and one keystone, bereft, solitary but unfazed in the ruin. That is the true arch, and that also is the sorcery of stones.The Music of Stones is a small book, but like a musical prelude, it is brief, resonant, charged with rhapsodic intensity and a promise of many stories still to be told. Hashmi’s ambition is of a higher order: to tell the truth, and in the process to make people understand, which is so hard nowadays. This is done charmingly, with wit, wisdom, and without breaking an egg. Any city would want an advocate like him.Nikhil Kumar is an independent writer.