‘Heritage’ As A Political Minefield
Amar Farooqui
Building Histories: The Archival And Affective Lives Of Five Monuments In Modern Delhi by Mrinalini Rajagopalan Primus Books, South Asian edition, Delhi, 2018, 244 pp., 1995
September 2018, volume 42, No 9

Iconic heritage structures such as the Qutb Minar, Purana Qila or Red Fort, are usually related by guide-books to a particular historical moment, the initial history of construction, so that their afterlives are often rendered irrelevant. The Qutb symbolizes the foundation of the Delhi Saltanat, the Purana Qila marks the transition to Mughal rule and is associated with the intertwined careers of Humayun and Sher Shah, and the Red Fort epitomizes the splendour of the age of Shahjahan. Yet the destinies of these buildings continued to be shaped and reshaped by later events, closer to our time, events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Colonial presence in Delhi profoundly altered their relationship with the city, in turn determining the manner in which Delhi’s past was perceived. It is this story that interests Mrinalini Rajagopalan. She ‘seeks to redefine the architectural monument as not simply a static repository of the past but also as a site from which multiple histories were and continue to be generated’ (p.23). The process of putting together a modern narrative of Delhi’s past commenced in the early nineteenth century, soon after the East India Company brought the city and its environs under its control following the battle of Patparganj (1803). As colonial officials gradually became acquainted with the large number of historical sites which constituted the city’s landscape, they attempted to place these in a chronological framework that would enable them to make sense of the bewildering variety of these sites. They built upon knowledge produced by preliminary colonial forays into the history of the Indian subcontinent. Delhi figured quite prominently in this history, at least from circa 1200 CE onwards. Thus colonial officials of the early nineteenth century, some of whom were also amateur historians, were not entirely unfamiliar with the ‘medieval’ past of Delhi. The broad contours of historical change, perceived mostly in dynastic terms, were delineated by combining local legends, folklore, and anecdotal evidence with information from historical texts and inscriptions.

It appears that in the 1810s and 1820s some of the Company’s servants posted in Delhi, particularly Charles Metcalfe, William Fraser and Thomas Metcalfe, initiated the project of systematically listing buildings that were considered to be of some historical importance, along with descriptions of these structures. An early outcome of this project was a Persian compilation entitled Sair-ul Manazil, the first version of which was ready by 1821. It then underwent several subsequent revisions. We know almost nothing about the author of the text, Mirza Sangin Beg, except that he was connected in some way with the Company’s establishment, and had easy access to source material on the history of Delhi available in the royal library in the Red Fort as well as manuscripts in private collections of scholars in the city. It is only now through the efforts of researchers such as Shama Mitra Chenoy that we are able to recognize that Sair-ul Manazil was the prototype for later writings of the nineteenth century on the history of Delhi including the much better known work of Sayyid Ahmad Khan, Asar-us-Sanadid (1847). Although Asar-us-Sanadid has a very different format and style, yet the account of the history of Delhi and its monuments more or less follows the brief outline presented in Sair-ul Manazil. Somehow Rajagopalan does not refer to Sair-ul Manazil, even though an Urdu translation of the text has been available for the past few years.

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