The recently published Dilli Ki Imaraat ke Katbon ka Awwaleen Makhtoota—or The Earliest Manuscript on Delhi’s Monuments, based on the 1817 Persian manuscript by Hafeezuddin Ahmad and edited by Ather Farouqui—is nothing short of a historiographical intervention. Unearthed from the archives of the British Library, this rare text significantly alters the foundational narrative surrounding the architectural historiography of Delhi. In a landscape where Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s Asar-us-Sanadid (1847) and Mirza Sangeen Baig’s Sair-ul-Manaazil (1821) have long been considered seminal, the resurfacing of Hafeezuddin Ahmad’s earlier work forces a critical reassessment of authorship, intellectual continuity, and citation ethics in 19th-century Indo-Islamic scholarship.
The manuscript meticulously records inscriptions—some now lost—from a range of Delhi’s built heritage: mosques, temples, city gates, tombs, wells, markets, gardens, and even unassuming gravestones. In doing so, it offers a remarkably unembellished yet invaluable archive for reconstructing the historical topography of Delhi. These inscriptions, typically dismissed as mundane, serve as precise anchors for historians: they provide specific dates, names, patrons, and purposes of structures, helping correct, confirm, or complicate accounts from court chronicles and colonial records. Hafeezuddin’s work thus fills the silences left by grand historical narratives and lends voice to what Farouqui rightly terms the ‘mundane but material’.