We tend to speak of history through the lens of big events and powerful people and often discuss the historical and monumental architecture of India through frameworks of patronage or architectural authority. It is not surprising to hear that “Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal”, “Lutyens built New Delhi”, or even “PM Modi inaugurated the new parliament building”. Yet even in cases such as Lutyens’, which celebrate architectural vision, these claims erase the labour that created intricate buildings and monuments.It is not a simple matter of credit, but a problem of how history is told and whose work, ideas and contributions we remember. Social historians, therefore, raise a different set questions from those posed by traditional history: Who really built India, not just the monuments preserved as the wonders of the world, but even the dilapidated buildings and monuments that lack heritage protection? Who cut the stones, who lifted the marble, who laid down bricks, who prepared the mortar and who chiselled away at rock to leave us with the buildings, structures and monuments we associate with our past? We often see couples inscribe on these sites their names as insignias of love. The labour of stonemasons and construction workers is buried in the mortar and stone of these defaced structures.Indian workers have historically undertaken laborious, complex and sometimes even dangerous stonemasonry work in constructing much of the built environment we admire today. To gaze upon India’s architectural and monumental history is to observe a history of their labour, as they shaped and built the edifices, walls and structures within which we live, work and study.Anyone who has visited a monumental tourist site will be familiar with the problem of historical perspective. Take the Khajuraho temples, located in present-day Madhya Pradesh, that were built between the ninth and twelfth centuries, during the reign of the Chandela dynasty. A visitor might wonder at the beauty of this stonemasonry, but neither guides nor guidebooks reveal much about the skills or knowledge the masons, sculptors and carvers, who laboured on the Hindu and Jain temples at the site, had mastery over.Recent scholarship challenges our assumption that it is impossible to learn more about the workers who built such structures, or that we must be content to remember them only by admiring their work. A forthcoming work from historian of science Eric Gurevich, for instance, considers how inscriptions by masons and other artisans under the Chalukya and Hoysala dynasties in the eleventh and twelfth centuries demonstrated their skilled knowledge and social and caste positions.Art historians Saarthak Singh and Johan Levill explore the knowledge developed by workers in Eastern Malwa in the eleventh century, highlighting both sedentary sculpture workshops and sites of architectural sculpture, where “structural components had to be carved on site and often required the movement of craftsmen”.The specific skills, knowledge traditions and social positions of stonemasons were previously overlooked for several reasons, including that British colonial officials portrayed their knowledge traditions as “lost”. They depicted the stonemasons whom they encountered as “illiterates” lacking in scientific knowledge about their craft, whose work was “degraded” compared to that of their predecessors. Colonial officials idealised pre-Islamic Indian stonemasonry, but believed that very little of the literature and knowledge of those stonemasons had survived. They lamented, in particular, the supposed loss of knowledge of the Shilpa Shastras, treatises on craft and artistic skills, including on temple architecture, materials, proportion and auspicious seasons and times to start work.Tools and stages for building mud walls, depicted in a mid-nineteenth-century Persian language Kashmiri book of trades, now held at the British Library.However, even colonial reports admit that elements of Shilpa Shastras were preserved in oral narratives of artisans through the colonial period. In the 1911 Census, Pandit Jisukhram, a census officer in central India who was initially sceptical that artisans preserved knowledge traditions, identified a stonemason who could narrate vernacularised verses of the Shilpa Shastras.Despite evidence of the persistence and adaptation of these traditions, colonial officials insisted that the rise of Muslim-led dynasties led to an irreparable break in the knowledge of Hindu masons. In 1906, H.S. Crosthwaite composed a Monograph on Stone Carving in the United Provinces, which claimed that “For several centuries the Hindu stonemason had to carve the design approved by a foreign conqueror. Generation after generation was taught to carve solely scroll work, arabesques and geometrical patterns, until the sculpture of figures became almost a lost art.”This black-and-white narrative misrepresents not only the models of patronage under Muslim-led dynasties in India, but also the ways in which Indian stonemasons adapted their skills and knowledge traditions to a variety of patrons, rulers and shifting artistic preferences. Some scholars complicate the binary, pointing to the fact that Mughal rulers, who patronised stone carvers by the thousands, not only built mosques and tombs but also sometimes Hindu constructions, through land and material grants. Of equal importance is the fact that the masons themselves had long adapted their practices to the demands and interests of emerging regional dynasties, as well as new technologies and materials.During the period of dynasties, including the Mughals, marble inlay and other distinctive styles of relief carving became popular. Masons were expected to perfect these new styles to secure work. At the same time, Indian masonry traditions remained highly regionally varied. Some masons, regardless of their personal religious orientation, worked across multiple regional and dynastic traditions and with a variety of patrons.Colonial officials imagined a binary between supposedly pure “Hindu” and “Muslim” traditions of stonemasonry, but often overlooked the impact of their own rule on the practices and social worlds of Indian masons. As the British expanded and formalised their political control over India, they developed new hierarchies of state construction that further invisibilised the labour of masons.The establishment of the Public Works Department as a distinct branch of the government of India in 1855, the colonial state cultivated buildings and architectural styles that placed trained Europeans at the top, middle class Indian intermediaries a rung below them, and a vast, often poorly-paid Indian labour force at the bottom. And it was this labour force that built the physical infrastructure of British India, from bungalows to dak khanas and prison barracks to regional government offices.British accounts mention innumerable encounters with Indian masons. In the late nineteenth century, masons were among the several artisanal and labouring cadres employed to divert water, through tunnels and a massive dam, from the Periyar River to Madurai. Records exist that say “the labour involved was herculean, and the mortality from malaria was high. Indeed it is said that had it not been the medicinal effects of the native spirit called arrack, the dam might never have been finished”. Yet colonial accounts credited this mammoth achievement to military engineers – the masons who laboured in malarial marshes were labelled lethargic and unskilled.These hierarchies and exclusions expanded as the colonial state developed provincial and engineering colleges that trained European as well as Indian engineers and architects. Despite paying lip-service to the idea that hereditary masons and artisans might be worth training, most of these institutions had limited room for illiterate (or semi-literate) artisans. They trained upper-caste and elite Indians instead, who were deemed suitable for professional architectural education. The artisans’ role was to perform manual labour and obey expert instructions.The buildings and infrastructure constructed in the last decades of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from railway lines and bridges to colonial offices reflect an enforced differentiation between hand and mind, mental and manual labour, paper and tool.Stone carvers at work on a jali screen in Agra, pose for a photo. Included in the Report on Modern Indian Architecture by Gordon Sanderson of 1913.Indeed, stonemasonry had often been caste-based work. This remained unchanged in British India, although colonial officials viewed it as a flexible, “occupational caste”, and so recruited potential masons from across caste-marginalised communities. Despite arguing that a wide variety of so-called lower-caste communities embraced stonemasonry to earn a livelihood, colonial officials also recognised the significant caste hierarchies at play within masonry.This, too, impacted the type of work that labourers could secure. Crosthwaite wrote that workers recruited from marginalised caste (present-day Scheduled Caste) backgrounds within independent north Indian stonemasonry workshops were permitted to do only the “rough work of stonemasonry”. On the other hand, masons who did “stone carving on religious edifices”, especially in cities associated with religious prestige such as Benaras, often claimed privilege-caste standing, with some even identifying as Brahmin.Caste thus shaped the types of work that stonemasons could do, and the degree to which they could improve their conditions within labouring hierarchies. In some cases, migration and region of origin also informed the status of masons. Certain regions in India were closely associated with masonry skill, and workers from those regions could secure higher wages and better positions within labouring hierarchies if they migrated.The most renowned, unsurprisingly, was Agra, and Crosthwaite wrote that masons from the city, who numbered about 1,500, were “sent long distances to execute orders in other cities”. Simply claiming Agra origin or heritage could improve a mason’s status.The Begum Nawabs of the princely state of Bhopal sought to cultivate a sense that their state had inherited the architectural styles of the late Mughal state. They, therefore, actively recruited masons from Agra and boasted that those who had settled in the city and worked on their monumental mosque architecture were descendants of Shah Jahan’s renowned builders.The British created new and distinctive forms of prestige and certification within masonry and building work, but they were not immune to the influence of extant forms of Indian prestige. As plans were made to construct the new capital of New Delhi, colonial officials were deputed to Bhopal to interview masons with supposed Agra connections.One such mason was Muhammad Usman, the son of a Bhopali master mason who boasted Agra descent and reportedly knew the traditional method to draw architectural plans, as well as how to oversee cadres of ordinary stoneworkers. Since colonial officials considered people like Usman repositories of traditional knowledge, they brought him to Delhi to work on the new capital. This was an attempt to help showcase the continuity of their new, modern capital with former states and empires in India.In Delhi, however, skilled hereditary stonemasons such as Usman often found themselves pushed downwards in technical hierarchies, no longer allowed to oversee other workers and contribute to planning. These roles were increasingly reserved for trained architects and engineers, European and Indian, who held degrees and certifications that assured the colonial state of their modern knowledge.Some skilled masons, forced to contend with these new hierarchies of labour and knowledge, sought to resist by promoting their own knowledge and authority, including through the emerging vernacular presses. In 1875, Riyasat Ali ‘Sarshar’, a master builder and lead mason from Lucknow, compiled a sixteen-page Urdu treatise on construction titled Tazkirah al-aiwān, or Compendium of Buildings through Dilkushā Press, a small local press in Fatehgarh, present-day Uttar Pradesh. Sarshar lacked the prestige and status associated with engineering and architectural degrees, but he boasted familial connections to master masons and builders who had served the Nawabs of Awadh.He had led the construction of an imambara for a prominent Muslim landlord of the region, and he used these forms of prestige to argue that he possessed forms of knowledge that could not be cultivated through colonial education. This included ways to calculate the auspicious days to begin building projects – in Hindu and Muslim calendrical traditions – and the prayers that Muslim masons should say as they worked.Why has the work, the lives and the knowledge of stonemasons and builders like Sarshar and those who laboured under him been forgotten? The persistent myth that Shah Jahan cut off the hands of workers who built the Taj Mahal reflects popular assumptions and ideas about the nature of stoneworking knowledge. While the story is false, and tells us little about how Shah Jahan treated the workers he patronised, it highlights the fact that many view stonework as embodied knowledge, located in the hands and physical practices of labourers rather than in their minds or texts.Recovering stoneworker histories – like artisan histories as a whole – means attempting to understand what that embodied knowledge might have consisted of, as well as other, overlooked forms of knowledge that workers might have possessed. Ultimately, it means placing these workers at the center of our story about building and construction, and considering the stonemasons – not just Shah Jahan! – as historical actors who built the Taj Mahal.Dr Amanda Lanzillo is Assistant Professor in South Asian Languages and Civilisations at the University of Chicago. Dr Arun Kumar is Assistant Professor in British Imperial, Colonial and Postcolonial History at the University of Nottingham.