Asar-al-Sanadid (1847)

Asar-al-Sanadid (1847)—henceforward referred to as Asar-1—consists of a substantial preface, followed by the main text in four chapters, illustrated with more than 100 sketches. Additionally, it contains four taqariz, or praising statements, by four of the most distinguished citizens of Delhi, who were considerably older than the author but who genuinely admired his youthful energy and intellect.Footnote ⁷

Syed Ahmad begins the book with a verse from ‘Urfi—The ornamentations still left on the ruined walls and gates are the remnant signs of Persia's ancient heroes—that sets the tone of the book, and also provides its title.Footnote ⁸ He then writes an old-fashioned preface, in which, after praising God and the Prophet, he declares that he had long-held a desire to write a book about ‘the buildings in and around Shahjahanabad, the Red Fort, and about the people of the city and their ways’, but was not allowed to do so by ‘the turning Heavens and cruel Time’. However, now that the book was done, he held a particular hope for it:

This impulse to edify the reader is expressed here over fifteen lines; it finds expression repeatedly in the main text too.

Next comes the dedication of the book to Sir Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe (1795–1853), the British Resident in Delhi, written in Urdu prose and Persian verse and spread over four pages. It forms the longest section in the preface. For comparison, we might note that Allah and his Prophet, earlier, had received a mere six lines of prose. The preface closes with the self-confident author asking the reader to do justice to the book, and bear in mind the hard work the author had put into it. It ends with another Persian verse: ‘Grab a pen and write a page like me, only then would you know the pains I took’.

The first chapter of Asar-1 describes the buildings outside the walled city; the second, the Fort and the structures within it; the third, the walled city of Shahjahanabad; and the fourth, ‘Dilli’ and the people of ‘Dilli.’ Arguably, while Shahjahanabad and its suburbs were physically distinct, for Syed Ahmad they were also subsumed within a single entity called ‘Dilli,’ which was culturally more potent than its component parts. His organization of the chapters, therefore, makes perfect sense. Starting from the furthest point south of Shahjahanabad, he moves closer to the city; upon reaching its wall, he goes around it and describes the few notable structures north of the city. Only then does he enter the walled city, where he first visits the Red Fort to offer his respects. When he turns to the city itself, Syed Ahmad first describes the canal that ran through much of the walled city and only then turns to the Jama’ Masjid, pivotal to the rest of the chapter. His choice shows how critically important the restoration of the old canal had been to the people of Delhi.Footnote ¹⁰

Using the three gates of the great mosque as separate starting points, Syed Ahmad proceeds to explore the city itself. He ventures out from one gate, describes the historical buildings in that direction, then returns to the mosque to start out from another gate. The three excursions, plus a few diversions, complete his accounting of the major buildings of the city. In the process, Syed Ahmad also gives us glimpses of what habitually took place at some of the sites. For example, at the start of each excursion, he lingers at the particular gate and lists, not only the exact number of the steps leading down from it, but also the human activities that distinguished one gate from another for any ‘dilliwala’. The South Gate has its trinket-sellers (bisati), faluda-makers, kabab-sellers, and poultry-dealers. The East Gate is where cloth-hawkers sit and bird-sellers gather. While the North Gate not only has its own kababis (kebab-sellers), it is the place to find storytellers and jugglers. Likewise, after detailing the glories of the royal mosque, Syed Ahmad feels it necessary to point out, with obvious pleasure, a far humbler structure close by—the shop of Ghazi, the grain-roaster (bhaRbhunja). One can see how the primarily objective antiquarian of the first two chapters, begins to give way in the third to a more subjective dilliwala that Syed Ahmad very much was at the time.

That enthusiastic dilliwala stands tall and unabashed in the fourth and final chapter entitled ‘Describing Dilli and its people’. He quickly lists the several cities of Delhi, ending with Shahjahanabad, and adds a note on the latter's ‘water and air.’ He also quotes extensively from Amir Khusrau's paean to India and Delhi. One may, therefore, rightly conclude that for Syed Ahmad, in Asar-1, Indarparastha, Kilokhari, Tughlaqabad, and even Shahjahanabad are small spatial entities that are distinguished from each other by chronology and physical details, while ‘Dilli’ refers to something much larger—it encompasses all the small entities and remains unbound to any time. More importantly, Dilli is a habitat, and absolutely integral to it are its people and their multi-faceted lives. And so it is that after conceding that most of the wells in the city had turned brackish and the water in Jamuna was hardly better, and that heat, humidity, and dirt plagued the city, Syed Ahmad cheerfully concludes:

Naturally their language, as he quickly points out, is also exceptional. The concluding paragraph of the introduction deserves to be quoted in full.

The rest of the chapter is essentially a short tazkira or biographical dictionary. It lists some 117 men whom Syed Ahmad held in the highest regard, and whom he had either personally met or seen.Footnote ¹³ His choice of categories and the order in which he lists them are worth noting. The nine categories, and the number of people mentioned in each, are as follows: (1) twenty-one Sufi masters (masha'ikh); (2) nine ‘men of ecstasy’ (majazib); (3) twelve physicians (hukama); (4) twenty-nine religious scholars (‘ulama); (5) five reciters and preservers of the Qur'an (qura aur haffaz); (6) seventeen poets (‘nightingales,’ bulbul-nawayan); (7) eleven calligraphers (khush-nawisan); (8) four artists (musawwiran); and (9) nine musicians (arbab-i-musiqi). In each case, apart from some biographical information, Syed Ahmad also mentions the exceptional qualities of each person in his profession. In the case of the poets and some scholars, he additionally gives samples of their writings, as is always done in a tazkira.

The most striking feature of the book at the time must have been its more than 130 illustrations. Drawn by Faiz Ali Khan and Mirza Shahrukh Beg—both are noted in the fourth chapter—the sketches are attractive and accurate. They are also important for being among the first lithographically produced book illustrations in India, and show how readily Delhi craftsmen of the time took up new techniques and soon excelled in them.

The passion and hard work Syed Ahmad put into the book is evident throughout. Apparently he visited every site and took every measurement himself, a few times using an astrolabe, and often at some risk.Footnote ¹⁴ He transcribed inscriptions, and supervised the artists; he gleaned historical information from many books, and then supplemented it with what he could learn from local people. We can safely assume he must have personally supervised the printing of the book too, particularly the illustrations and inscriptions, for the massive book contains surprisingly few misprints.

Who, When, Where, and Why?

Urdu scholarship on Asar-1 has mostly been concerned with the question of its authorship: who actually wrote the book? Was it Syed Ahmad, or his friend Imam Bakhsh Sahba'i? The other issues—when, where, and why it was written—remain mostly unexplored beyond what Hali wrote in Hayat-i-Jawed.

The debate on authorship chiefly arose out of the following statement in Hali's book.

Imam Bakhsh Sahba'i was a cherished, older friend of Syed Ahmad. Extremely eclectic in erudition, Sahba'i was also a prolific writer. Most importantly, Sahba'i had a reputation in Delhi for doing ghostwriting.Footnote ¹⁶ I have no doubt that most of the Preface, including the panegyrics, was composed by Sahba'i, as was much of the fourth chapter (on the people of Delhi). Their bombast and hyperbole clearly show Sahba'i's hand. The middle chapters, however, contain plenty of internal evidence—personal references, anecdotes and asides—that allows us to conclude that they were substantially drafted by Syed Ahmad himself. Were they then stylistically ‘improved upon’ by his older friend? Perhaps so, but not always or extensively, for the language of the descriptive chapters is not too different from what later became known as Syed Ahmad's trademark ‘plain and simple’ style. In other words, much of Asar-1 emerged out of a truly collaborative effort, and was not composed by Sahbai'i alone.Footnote ¹⁷

Hali makes two statements concerning the time and place of the book's composition. According to him, Asar-1 was written in Delhi after Syed Ahmad moved there from Fatehpur in February 1846, following the sudden death of his only brother, Syed Muhammad, who was six years older than Syed Ahmad. Hali also maintains that the writing and publishing of the book took only 18 months.Footnote ¹⁸ That would put the book's publication around August or September 1847. The title page of Asar-1 carries a statement that the publication was in accord with a contract signed in September 1846, presumably after the author had made significant progress on the book in the preceding six months.

The matter is complicated by the fact that Asar-1 received a favourable notice in the April 1847 issue of the Qiran-al-Sa'dain, the occasional journal of the Delhi College. The unnamed author was most likely Dr Aloys Sprenger, the college's principal and journal supervisor, who, elsewhere, claimed to have inspired Syed Ahmad to write the book.Footnote ¹⁹ Is it possible that this massive and complex book was researched, written and published in barely twelve months by someone who simultaneously worked full-time as the Munsif of Delhi? Not likely, not even with Sahba'i's help.

Fortunately, a rare letter from Syed Ahmad to Henry Elliot, dated 7 September, 1847, has been preserved in the latter's papers at the British Library.Footnote ²⁰ At its end, Syed Ahmad asks Elliot to let him know what sections of Asar-1 he already had (nambar ajza-i kitab-i Asar-al-Sanadid), so that the rest of the book could be sent to him. The remark makes it clear that the individually paginated chapters of the book were published serially and not altogether at one time, and that the note in the Qiran-al-Sa'dain referred only to what had appeared by April 1847. It also establishes that all the chapters were finally in print in September 1847, and were available separately. A letter from Ghalib to his friend Syed Rajab Ali ‘Arastu Jah,’ dated 5 December, 1847, adds an important detail, that the book on sale consisted of three volumes.Footnote ²¹ Hali, therefore, was right in reporting that the book was completed and published within eighteen months after February 1846. But was he also right in suggesting that the book was started only after that date?

While concentrated, organized work on Asar-1—field trips with the two artists, collaboration in writing with Sahba'i—could have started only after Syed Ahmad moved to Delhi in February 1846, I believe the book originated elsewhere—in Fatehpur Sikri. Syed Ahmad had spent three years—1839 through 1841—in Agra before being posted to Fatehpur, from where he continued to visit friends in Agra every week. He thus never lacked access to books and well-informed company that were essential to his project, and could easily have drafted some of the historical portions there.

Akbar's abandoned capital was likely also to be the place where the book's title and its edifying impulse came to Syed Ahmad.Footnote ²² The desolate ruins spread across the hill of Sikri must have starkly reminded him of the devastated shahr-i-kuhna or the Old City of Delhi.Footnote ²³ Syed Ahmad's residence at Fatehpur Sikri was Akbar's khwabgah, the Emperor's bedchamber. It is the only building that still retains traces of the original murals. One can easily imagine him looking at the dimly visible paintings and thinking of the Emperor who had commissioned them, and who once had his most private moments—with wives and scholars alike—in that room. Given Syed Ahmad's intellectual background, how could he not but recall the almost proverbial verse by ‘Urfi? It is not without significance that Syed Ahmad retained the verse and the title, even when he changed almost everything else in the later version of the book (henceforward referred to as Asar-2).

If I argue that Asar-1 was initiated by the strong feelings of nostalgia and melancholy generated by the ruins at Sikri and their close similarity to the ruins of the ‘Old City’ surrounding Shahjahanabad, I do not rule out the monetary motivation suggested by Hali. Syed Ahmad needed additional income in 1846 to support his extended family. But, in that case, we must also ask: how could Syed Ahmad expect to make money from a book like Asar-1?

Urdu publishers in 1847 did not pay royalties; in fact, authors often had to buy several copies themselves in order to get a book published. At best, the author received one complimentary copy of the book by right (haqq-al-tasnif).Footnote ²⁴ That is why two curious notes on each of the two covers deserve attention. The note in Asar-1 reads: ‘[Published] in accordance with the contract dated September 21, 1846’. Since Syed Ahmad actually or nominally owned his late brother's press and newspaper, the contract must have been with the printer, whose name—Abdul Ghafur—appears underneath.Footnote ²⁵ Abdul Ghafur must have cheated Syed Ahmad by not disclosing to him correctly the number of copies he printed and sold. That will explain the blunt note in Asar-2: ‘Any copy without the author's seal should be considered stolen goods’.

But what if Abdul Ghafur had behaved differently? Was Asar-1 a realistic monetary venture? It was massive; it contained numerous illustrations; it must have been a costly book. Ghalib's diwan, one-third the size of Asar-1's first chapter, cost six annas in 1861, and that was too much for most people.Footnote ²⁶ So why did Syed Ahmad, a shrewd enough person, think that he could make money out of a prohibitively expensive book?

A quantum change in Urdu book production took place in the 1840s when lithography rapidly spread across North India. Its simple technology readily accommodated the calligraphers already available everywhere. Overnight, booksellers turned into printers and publishers. Equally significantly, lithography came to North India when two new concepts involving books were taking firm hold there under government auspices: ‘Public Instruction’ and ‘Competitive Examinations’. The first required that officially prescribed textbooks should be made available in large numbers; the second engendered preparatory manuals or ‘keys’ that aspirants to government jobs could quickly study or memorize. Both had a seller's market in Urdu in North India. By 1847 quite a few people were making money by publishing the right kind of books. In fact, a few years earlier, Syed Ahmad had seen several publishers make good money out of one of his own earliest books, Intikhab-al-Akhawain, without sharing any of it with him.Footnote ²⁷

Asar-1, taken as whole, does not belong to either category; if anything, it is a curious conglomerate. One part forms a short history of Delhi; a bigger chunk forms a uniquely illustrated guide to the monuments of Delhi and its surrounding area; while the remaining third, the final chapter, can be read as a tazkira, or memoir, of the notables of the time, complete with samples of their writings. But if one bears in mind that it came out over one year, as individually paginated separate chapters, one may make better sense of Syed Ahmad's project.Footnote ²⁸ One may safely speculate that Syed Ahmad, ambitious as he was, had seemingly sought to retain the old market—the Indian readers of Urdu—while attempting to capture two emerging new markets: the colonial officers who read Urdu, and European visitors and sightseers in Delhi.Footnote ²⁹

Syed Ahmad was well aware of the interest of colonial officers in India's history and ancient monuments. His first book was written at the behest of a British judge. He and his brother had purchased manuscripts and made copies of old historical texts for British officers.Footnote ³⁰ While in Agra, he could have seen or heard about the two Persian books, written on Agra and its monuments, that a British officer had expressly commissioned twenty years earlier.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, as the highest-ranking representative of the government at Fatehpur Sikri, Syed Ahmad must have had occasion to guide foreign visitors around the abandoned imperial buildings, and to answer their questions.Footnote ³²

Here it may be useful to say something about Delhi as a town for tourists. Over the first three decades of the nineteenth century the walled city was transformed both physically and demographically.Footnote ³³ It had also emerged as a major attraction for foreign sightseers, whose favourite shopping site was the revived ‘Chandni Chowk’.

Emma Roberts, who visited the city in the 1830s, noted something out of the ordinary about the new Chandni Chowk.

Not only were there shop signs in English, there were also English traders and entrepreneurs in Delhi catering to the tourist trade. Emma Roberts mentions one such woman, who had local artists paint pictures of Delhi's famous buildings on small pieces of ivory. These were then ‘set in gold and worn as necklaces, or sent as presents by the fair portions of the European community’.Footnote ³⁶ Also available in the market were playing cards that carried a portrait of the Emperor Akbar Shah.

For the foreign tourists, the must-see places outside Shahjahanabad were the Qutub Minar, the tombs of Humayun and Safdar Jang, and the Jantar Mantar. The more venturesome also visited Tughluqabad and the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin. The latter was a special attraction on account of the divers at the nearby Baoli.Footnote ³⁷ Within Shahjahanabad, the big attractions were the Jama’ Masjid, the Red Fort, and the Emperor himself, who readily enjoyed an important source of income from foreign visitors. A royal audience cost an ordinary visitor four gold coins, that is if he did not wish to receive a ‘robe of honour’ or khil'at—which added another four sovereigns.Footnote ³⁸

The fact that Asar-1 was so lavishly illustrated—thus made unduly costly—strongly suggests that Syed Ahmad's major targets could have been the abundant number of would-be historians among the British officials in Delhi and Agra and what we now call ‘the tourist trade’—after all his printer, Abdul Ghafur, or someone else, did make enough money out of Syed Ahmad's Asar-1 project to make him think he had been cheated.Footnote ³⁹

So how was this uniquely and ambitiously conceived book received in 1847?

Many in the ruling circle took favourable notice of the book. The journal Qiran-al-Sa'dain, published by Delhi College under the supervision of its principal, Dr Aloys Sprenger, remarked: ‘This book is excellent and is of great importance to the Society that has been founded at Delhi for the furtherance of researches into the old buildings of the past’.Footnote ⁴⁰ The famous administrator and historian, Henry M. Elliot, thought sufficiently well of it. In a short note, written in 1849, on Syed Ahmad's first book, Jam-i-Jam, he made the following comment on Asar-1:

And Arthur Austin Roberts, a ranking officer in Delhi, thought so highly of it that he took a copy of it to England, where he presented it to the Royal Asiatic Society. But the ardently-wooed Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe must have severely disappointed Syed Ahmad.Footnote ⁴² No record has been found of Metcalfe's personal or official reaction to the book. In fact, Metcalfe seems to have made no effort to acknowledge the book, insofar as he failed even to obtain for Syed Ahmad full membership of the just-founded Archaeological Society of Delhi, of which Metcalfe himself was President.Footnote ⁴³

Three Earlier Accounts of Delhi

Christian Troll, near the conclusion of a most informative essay, writes that ‘the first edition of Asar-al-Sanadid was written and conceived in the manner of earlier topographical and biographical writing in Persian’, but refers to only one book.Footnote ⁴⁴ Irfan Habib agrees with Troll only with regard to the biographical accounts in the final chapter; he flatly states that there was no earlier tradition in Persian of a book about old buildings and their inscriptions.Footnote ⁴⁵ My own limited search also failed to find any publication in the greater Indo-Persian tradition that was fully comparable with Asar-1, except the one that Troll mentions—Sair-al-Manazil by Mirza Sangin Beg, discussed below. But a consideration of two other books that precede Asar-1 in time, and which make some attempt to describe Delhi, may help us to better understand Syed Ahmad's authorial ambitions in 1847.

One of the two books is Zainul Abidin Shirwani's Bustan-al-Siyahat (‘Garden of Voyaging’) written in Persian and completed in Shiraz between 1833 and 1834, when the author was 54 years old.Footnote ⁴⁶ A massive book, running to 700 folio-size pages, it details the various cities the author visited or learned about during his extensive travels that began when he was seventeen. It is mainly a topographical account, but it also contains much in the way of autobiography and learned discourse.

Shirwani, who arrived in India around 1800, claims to have spent eight years moving around the country. He mentions more than forty Indian cities in his book, indicating those that he personally visited and those that he only heard about but considered noteworthy.Footnote ⁴⁷ His account of Delhi, where he spent ten months, reads:

The intellectual concerns that Shirwani and Syed Ahmad seem to share as they describe a city may be listed as follows:

• • The location of a place within a clime, the physical appearance of its land, and the quality of its air and water;

• • the physical appearance of its people;

• • the physical appearance of the built city, and its lack or abundance of prosperity;

• • and some notice of its notable residents.

The second book is also in Persian, but is written by an Indian Muslim—of the same age, incidentally, as Shirwani—who visited Delhi near the end of 1814 but who wrote about it in 1831. Maulavi Abdul Qadir (1780–1849) was a learned man from Rampur, who worked in the British administration in various capacities. Among his more than a dozen books is an autobiography entitled Waqai’-i-Abdul Qadir Khani that contains an account of his trip.Footnote ⁴⁹ It may be read as an index to what an Indian Muslim visitor to Delhi in the early nineteenth century considered significant to see, and then to recall more than a decade later. Significantly, Abdul Qadir had intellectual interests similar to those of Syed Ahmad; his education included music and astronomy, and he too was equally attracted to scholastics and mysticism.

Abdul Qadir starts by giving a very brief history of Delhi—mentioning Mahabharata and Rajatarangini as his sources—dividing it into Hindu and Muslim periods. He adds that he had earlier composed an account of all the kings of Delhi, from Yudhishtra to Shah Alam II, in ‘a sixteen-page pamphlet (hasht warqi risala)’, but didn't have it with him to reproduce in the book. One may safely assume that, like Syed Ahmad's Jam-i-Jam eighteen years later, it too was written to satisfy some British officer's curiosity.

Abdul Qadir next describes the presentation protocol at the Red Fort, and explains some of the Urdu words and phrases peculiar, in his opinion, to the residents of the Fort. As for the buildings in the Fort, Abdul Qadir makes only one remark: ‘they are as lovely as a fairy-faced beauty’. Next he lists the buildings that ‘people go to see’. These include, in addition to the Red Fort, the Kotla of Firozshah, the Jama’ Masjid and two other mosques, two madrassas, fifteen graves of Sufi saints and scholars, the tombs of Humayun and Safdarjung, Jantar Mantar, Hauz-i-Shamsi, the Iron Pillar, and the baoli at Nizamuddin. The Qutub Minar, surprisingly, gets only a passing reference: ‘The grave of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki is situated near the tower which is visible from Hapur towards the Jamuna’.

While the buildings are described in an offhand manner, Abdul Qadir turns quite eloquent when he describes the notable people he met or learned about during his stay. His comments follow a seemingly random order, and describe eleven Muslim scholars, six Sufi masters, and seven Urdu poets. Also included in that section are notes on true and false Sufis, Urdu language and the differences in that regard between Delhi and Lucknow, and the proper use of Arabic and Persian words in Urdu, together with very brief notices of Akbar Shah II, four princes, and eight prominent Muslim residents of Delhi, including Syed Ahmad's maternal uncle. Then follow longer notes on two physicians,Footnote ⁵⁰ four Hindu scholars, and six musicians, ending with brief explanations of some musical terms.

Evidently, for Abdul Qadir too, Delhi was not just a site of antiquities and past glory but also a place made significant by its residents.Footnote ⁵¹ Unlike Syed Ahmad, he puts the ‘Ulama before the Sufis, and subsequently also includes four non-Muslim men of learning—something that Syed Ahmad does not do’.Footnote ⁵² Abdul Qadir's skepticism concerning Hindu beliefs is also more subdued than that of Syed Ahmad. Though Abdul Qadir lists many more buildings ‘that people go to see’ than does Shirwani, his descriptions are extremely brief. Architectural and historical details do not matter to him. Nor does he draw edifying conclusions. In fact, most of the buildings he mentions are classifiable as functioning sites; people visit them not merely to see them but to obtain some spiritual benefit.

Far from being a curious antiquarian like Syed Ahmad, Abdul Qadir is often dismissive of antiquities. Consider his note on Kotla Firoz Shah:

Syed Ahmad, in contrast, writes knowledgeably and at length about the Kotla. For example, he tries to calculate a date for its construction and relates many local stories associated with it. He also offers a translation of the inscription on the pillar, naming its language ‘The Shastri’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Abdul Qadir, however, appears more informed than Syed Ahmad about Hindu myths and legends, and is more aggressive in pushing forward what he considers to be logical concepts. A good example would be his comments on the famous Iron Pillar at the Qutub. He first narrates the story about Raja Pithaura, who was told by his Brahmins to plant the pillar so deeply that it would penetrate the head of the mythical snake on which rested the earth. Then he adds:

The story of Rai Pithaura is narrated at greater length in Asar-1, where Syed Ahmad gives the pillar four full pages, and makes a point of its exact height—‘22 feet and 6 inches’—by personally measuring it twice, once with a yardstick, then again with an astrolabe.Footnote ⁵⁶ But the two explanations he offers for the tower's construction are more interesting for our purposes. They reveal how different his thinking was at the time, not only from Abdul Qadir's but also from his own only a few years later—it still accommodated some space to the supernatural.

Syed Ahmad begins by rejecting the suggestion that the pillar was built by Sultan Mu'izuddin as the needle of a sundial. It was built much earlier, he argues, because it is inscribed with indecipherable ancient writings. He, however, allows that its original purpose could have been just that, and that the Sultan might have preserved the pillar to serve the same purpose in the mosque and also to display Islam's glory (shaukat-i-islam).

Next Syed Ahmad narrates the Rai Pithaura story, and adds,

Mirza Sangin Beg's Sair-al-Manazil, written in Persian, is the book that is most comparable with Asar-1.Footnote ⁵⁸ About the author we know only that he was also called ‘Sangi Beg’, and that his father's name was Ali Akbar Beg. Most likely he was in the private employ of Sir Charles Theophilus Metcalfe (1785–1846), twice resident at Delhi, who, according to Beg, asked him to write a book about Delhi and then generously rewarded him. The precise date of the book's composition has not been established; at best, it was started around 1818 and completed by 1821, or soon after.Footnote ⁵⁹

Beg appears to be reasonably educated in Arabic and Persian, and shows some talent for writing simple, descriptive Persian prose. His knowledge of histories and inscriptions, by his own admission, was quite limited, and so he sought help elsewhere.

The contents of Sair-al-Manazil are arranged in an interesting manner. First, under the heading ‘An account (ahwal) of Delhi’, comes a brief history of Delhi's kings. Next, under the heading ‘An account of the establishment of the capital, Shahjahanabad, and the construction of the Blessed Fort, comes an even briefer account of various measurements and costs concerning the city and the Fort. Then, using the Delhi Gate of the Fort as his starting point, Beg ventures inside and describes its buildings. He then turns to the city of Dehli itself, and basically walks the reader through its various streets and lanes, using a number of key sites as his starting and ending points. Done with the walled city, he similarly uses a few of its gates as new starting points for walks into the surrounding areas, while maintaining his focus on Shahjahanabad.

More than anything, Sair-al-Manazil is about a city throbbing with life, written by a person with a remarkably expansive view of Shahjahanabad as a habitat. It details at length the city's various markets, and informs us where different goods are sold, and various trades practiced. It is as much a general directory of the city as a treatise on its historical buildings. As Beg guides us to some monument, he carefully points out police outposts and homes of the city's notables—Hindu, Muslim, and British—not neglecting the homes of a few famous courtesans. His historical comments, on the other hand, are uneven in length and detail; very often the text of some inscription provides all the information. To put the matter differently, while a historian would find Syed Ahmad's book very useful, any novelist seeking to bring to life the Delhi of the 1820s would find in Sangin Beg a more valuable ‘helpmate’.

Did Syed Ahmad use Sair-al-Manazil in the writing of Asar-1? The answer must be in the negative. Given the shared subjects of the two books—Delhi and its monuments—superficial similarities are easily found; however, in organization, quality and quantity of historical information, and personally observed measurements and details, they vastly differ—the later book being far superior. The originality of Asar-1 becomes the more evident when we note Syed Ahmad's frequent remarks about the provenance of some architectural detail, or the attention he pays to epigraphy in every instance. Sharif Husain Qasimi points out another major difference. ‘Both books’, he writes,

Had Syed Ahmad actually seen the earlier work he could not have failed to include all its inscriptions in his own book.

It should be clear from the above that the three earlier writers and Syed Ahmad of Asar-1 strongly share at least one principle in writing: any description of a city must include some of its residents. With reference to Delhi, Shirwani limits himself to two persons and some general remarks, while Abdul Qadir introduces us to many more men, and at greater length. Sangin Beg does not give biographies, but by pointing out their homes he lets his reader know the names of the men and women who contributed to the making of his Delhi. Syed Ahmad's effort is the most expansive of the four—an entire chapter devoted to the notables of his Delhi, written in the manner of a traditional tazkira.

Asar-al-Sanadid (1854)

The second edition of Asar-al-Sanadid—henceforward ‘Asar-2’—came out in 1854.Footnote ⁶² How different a book it was, is evident from the title page. The cover of Asar-1 (Figure 1) is adorned with elaborate arabesque, and its language exclusively Persian.Footnote ⁶³ The author's name, titles, and genealogy are laid out in full:

Figure 1.

Cover of Asar-1

In contrast, the title page of Asar-2 is quite plain (Figure 2); there are no curlicues and arabesque.Footnote ⁶⁴ The information offered by the author is in Urdu, and that added by the printer in Persian. And the author is listed simply as ‘Syed Ahmad Khan, Munsif, Darja-i-Awwal, at Shahjahanabad’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Figure 2.

Cover of Asar-2

Asar-2 further surprises by turning out to be a bilingual book; its back cover makes for a second title page in English, after which come a brief preface and a short essay, both also in English.Footnote ⁶⁶ The full English title reads: Asar-oos-Sunnadeed, A History of Old and New Rules, or Governments, and of Old and New Buildings in the District of Delhi. The awkward, ‘Old and New Rules, or Governments’, is clearly a translation of the crisper Urdu: nai aur purani ‘amaldariyon.Footnote ⁶⁷ Additionally, the English preface turns out to be a severely abbreviated version of the original Urdu preface, while the essay, entitled ‘A Brief Account of the Minaret which Stands at Kootub’, appears to be an English summary of the paper that Syed Ahmad reportedly read in January 1853 at a meeting of the Archaeological Society of Delhi.Footnote ⁶⁸

Most significantly, neither title page makes a reference to Asar-1 of 1847; on the contrary, both strongly imply that the author composed the book in 1852. No doubt, the distinction between an edition and a printing was not then known in Urdu, as is still generally the case. But in this instance, I believe, Syed Ahmad, through both omission and commission, strongly wished to separate Asar-2 from Asar-1. That wish becomes more explicit in the prefaceFootnote ⁶⁹ where, after acknowledging that there was an earlier book (pahli kitab), Syed Ahmad repeatedly asserts that what he was publishing in ‘this book’ was new and quite different from what was written in ‘that book.’

The title page of Asar-2 also states the book's nature, making it clear that it is a ‘history’ (tarikh), and not a mere ‘account’ (ahwal), as Asar-1 was stated to be in its preface, and it is a history of new and old governments or authorities (‘amaldari), as opposed to being a chronicle of kings. Furthermore, the spatial boundaries of that history are defined in the new administrative idiom, ‘the district of Delhi’ (zila’ dihli), and not as Shahjahanabad, ‘Dar-al-Khilafa,’ or just plain Dihli or Dilli. These changes alert us to a significant shift over five years in Syed Ahmad's perspective on political legitimacy and authority pertaining to Delhi.

By then, apparently, Syed Ahmad firmly believed that the entity ‘whose command prevailed’ was more important in life and historiography alike than any symbolic Emperor.Footnote ⁷⁰ His list of Delhi's rulers in Asar-2 accommodates, from 1803 onward, British sovereigns alongside the Mughal kings. We find George III and William IV side by side with Akbar Shah II and Bahadur Shah II. More revealingly, in the chronological listing of the monuments of Delhi where he also mentions the reigning king of the time, Syed Ahmad excludes the Mughals after 1803. As a result, we not only have ‘Skinner's Church’ described as built during the reign of George IV, we also have Bahadur Shah's ‘Zafar Mahal’ dated to the reign of Queen Victoria.

Syed Ahmad begins the preface of Asar-2 by again quoting ‘Urfi's verse, then he praises God and the Prophet. The sentiments are heartfelt; they also manifest his new thinking. He praises God, not in the conventional manner of Asar-1—‘Praise be to the Creator, who with one word “Kun” [Be] created eighteen thousand worlds, and who will return them to oblivion after they put on thousands upon thousands of colourful displays'—but in a personal and specific manner:

In his praise of the Prophet, Syed Ahmad includes a mention of the Prophet's descendents and companions—a more common and inclusive practice than the one he had followed in Asar-1, where he had mentioned the Prophet alone. Apparently, between 1846 and 1852—the period in which he is reported to have strenuously improved his knowledge of canonical texts—much had also changed in Syed Ahmad's thinking concerning issues of faith and knowledge.

Commencing the actual prefatory remarks, Syed Ahmad first gives his name, leaving out the titles he had received from Bahadur Shah, and the names of his father and two grandfathers, retaining the titles they had received from the Mughals. Then he declares that he had written ‘in 1263 AH/1846 AD, a book containing an account (hal) of the structures in the District of Delhi.’ He next mentions two Englishmen: Arthur Austin Roberts, Collector and Magistrate, who took ‘that book’ to England and presented it to the Royal Asiatic Society, ‘whose members liked it greatly,’ and Colonel Saxson, a member of the Court of Directors in London, who wished the book was available in English. ‘When [Mr. Roberts] returned from England’, Syed Ahmad continues,

Syed Ahmad then lists the improvements as follows (and see Appendix 1):Footnote ⁷²

1. 1. Chapter One of this book was not in the earlier book. It contains a brief description of how India came to be populated, then describes briefly India's earlier and later governments (‘amaldari).

2. 2. Chapter Two of the first book contained the description of the Fort at Shahjahanabad alone. The second chapter of this book contains not only a superior description of that fort, it describes also all the forts and cities that were built at this place from the earliest days of its settlement.

3. 3. The contents of the first and third chapters of the earlier book have been combined to form the third chapter of this book. In fact, newly discovered information about certain buildings augments the contents.

4. 4. The previous book had two shortcomings: firstly, [the author had not yet learned] the true history of some of the older buildings; and secondly, some of the notes and descriptions (bayan-i-halat) contained a few errors. These faults have now been corrected.

5. 5. The descriptive accounts of buildings in the earlier book were discursive (mutafarriq) and disorganized; now they are carefully arranged according to the year of the building's construction.

6. 6. The accounts in the first book were presented without indicating their sources. In the present book, most such statements carry on the margin the name of the book from which they are derived.

7. 7. One excellent thing in the present book is that every existent inscription on an ancient building is reproduced here in its actual shape and style (asli qat’ aur asli khat).Footnote ⁷³

Next, but in no particular order, Syed Ahmad lists his 39 source books, starting with the Old Testament and ending with the history by Abul-Fida. In between come such assorted texts as the Markandaya Purana, his own Silsilat-al-Muluk, Abul Fazl's A'in-i-Akbari, a book called Rajawali, and a book simply referred to as Jugrafia (Geography)—most likely the textbook of that name used at Delhi College. Also included are two English journals—Syed Ahmad calls them kitab (book)—the Journal of the Archaeological Society of Bengal, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

The preface concludes with Syed Ahmad thanking three British officials. The first two are the afore-mentioned Colonel Saxson and Mr Roberts, whose

The third name is of Edward Thomas, the well-known numismatist and historian, who was then the Sessions Judge at Delhi, ‘whose help (madad), support (i'anat), magnanimity (‘ali-himmati), and appreciation alone made possible the book's publication and the spread of its benefits far and wide.’Footnote ⁷⁴

While the preface of Asar-2 indicates at length how Asar-2 was superior to Asar-1, it neglects to mention of those aspects or portions of the latter that were totally excised in Asar-2. The exclusions are both substantial and significant.

• • In Asar-2 Syed Ahmad makes no claim that the book was the fulfillment of an old desire, or that its purpose was to edify the reader and make him aware of the final fate of the mighty in this world—something he had repeatedly dwelt upon in Asar-1.

• • There is no mention now of Thomas Theophilus Metcalfe. In fact, Asar-2 is not dedicated to anyone. Syed Ahmad thanks certain people for their appreciation and kindness, but their patronage is not explicitly sought.

• • No taqriz or paean is included in Asar-2; the book is to be judged on its own merit.

• • Asar-2 contains no illustrations; its monuments and sites are now discrete moments in a chronological history that is composed with words alone. Nothing in the main text entertains the reader's eye or gives him respite from the author's pursuit of a chronology.Footnote ⁷⁵ Even the inscriptions are removed to a separate appendix at the end.

• • Asar-2 does not have the fourth chapter of Asar-1 that praised the virtues of Delhi's climate and the beauty of its people. In fact, the pages of Asar-2 are devoid of any mention of a person who could be said to define Delhi for the author as a city filled with humanity and creativity. Delhi of Asar-2 is not a habitat but only a site of antiquities.

• • Most of the contemporary lore included in Asar-1 finds no place in Asar-2. Instead, emphasis is given to what is supported by ancient texts. For example, the detailed account of the Qutub Minar in Asar-2 is sufficiently evocative of its grandeur, but leaves out this amusing aside of Asar-1: ‘People have had the following experience several times. They climbed to the top of the tower, and then, when they returned to the ground they discovered that it had rained. Only then did they realize—God almighty!—the tower was higher than the clouds’.Footnote ⁷⁶

And when a rare piece of local lore is included in Asar-2, Syed Ahmad seems to clean it up a bit. The dryly academic note on the Iron Pillar at the Qutub in Asar-2 ends with the following remark: ‘Young men try to encircle the pillar with their arms; in doing so they play a game in which the one who succeeds is considered a legitimate child of his parents, and he who fails is deemed illegitimate’.Footnote ⁷⁷ In comparison, the note in Asar-1 includes this charming anecdote:

Earlier in the same note in Asar-2, Syed Ahmad cuts his descriptive remarks in half, calls the legend about Rai Pithaura and his Brahmins totally erroneous (bilkul ghalat), and instead offers explanations that bristle with a new kind of scholarship. He approvingly quotes James Prinsep from the Journal of the Archaeological Society of Bengal, but then disagrees with a part of Prinsep's proposition on the basis of something in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. He uses for authority A'in-i-Akbari and Rajawali, and confidently refers to his own Silsilat-al-Muluk. The joyous spirit of a participant observer evident in the above anecdote in Asar-1is gone in Asar-2, replaced by the dry-as-dust tones of a detached historian.

A great deal, obviously, had changed in the period between Asar-1 and Asar-2 both in Syed Ahmad's thinking and in his authorial ambitions as a historian. Three more comparisons of passages in Asar-1 and Asar-2 may help to identify some of those changes more precisely.

The two notes on ‘Lal Bangla’ (‘Red Bungalow’)

Asar-1:

Asar-2:

Figure 3.

Lal Bangla, near the tomb of Syed Abid

While the first note has a more colloquial tone, the second sounds quite brisk and businesslike. All the necessary information is neatly presented, what is left out is its royal source. The omission becomes the more significant when we note the trouble Syed Ahmad otherwise takes to indicate his sources in Asar-2.

Syed Ahmad's relations with Bahadur Shah were never the most even. Syed Ahmad's father, Syed Muttaqi, had been close to Bahadur Shah's father, Akbar Shah II, who wished to make another son his heir. Bahadur Shah inherited the throne in 1837 only because the British enforced their own rule of primogeniture. When, a year later, Syed Muttaqi died, whatever land he had received from Akbar Shah was not renewed in favour of his sons. However, in his very first book, Jam-i-Jam (1840), Syed Ahmad gives unusual details of Bahadur Shah's annual income, then adds that he was in the process of writing a history of the Emperor.Footnote ⁸¹ The details must have come from Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, who arranged such projects on the Emperor's behalf. The Hakim was a good friend of Syed Ahmad's family—he gets fulsome praise in the fourth chapter of Asar-1—and the projected book could have been a scheme between him and Syed Ahmad to generate some income for the family. As mentioned earlier, the Hakim was instrumental in 1842 in getting Syed Ahmad his grandfather's title.Footnote ⁸² The ceremony suggests that either the book was presented or substantial progress on it was brought to the Emperor's attention, but one finds no mention of such a book in any of Syed Ahmad's biographies.Footnote ⁸³ Most likely it was not even started.

Syed Ahmad treats Bahadur Shah rather shabbily even in Asar-1. The Emperor is not mentioned in the preface—the conventional place; he gets a brief tribute, almost as an afterthought, only at the end of the chapter on the Red Fort.Footnote ⁸⁴ Much worse, Syed Ahmad does not include the Emperor, whose poetic name (takhallus) was Zafar, among the notable poets of Delhi listed in Chapter Four. Heaping further insult, Syed Ahmad then places Shaikh Ibrahim Zauq—he was Zafar's mentor (ustad) in poetry—at the sixteenth place in his list of seventeen poets, putting a few lesser-known poets ahead of him. Was it Syed Ahmad's way of retaliating against the Emperor for some slight or betrayal? Was it an expression of his contempt for the people of the Fort in general, a view some of his senior friends also held?Footnote ⁸⁵

Bahadur Shah, for his part, was by no means neglectful of history; he very much wanted to secure a place in it. Three years after the publication of Asar-1, Bahadur Shah commissioned Ghalib—through the same Hakim Ahsanullah Khan—to write a history of the Timurids in India, bestowing on Ghalib three titles and a salary of six hundred rupees per annum.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ghalib, however, took five years to finish the first slim volume, entitled Mihr-i-Nimroz (‘The Midday Sun’), and had not started on the second volume when the uprising of 1857 ended it all.

The two notes on ‘Lal Diggi’ (‘Red Tank’)

Asar-1:

Asar-2:

The verbosity of the first note is replaced in the second with brevity; the latter is also precise in the matter of dates. Both changes are the rule throughout Asar-2. The second note is also noticeably short on complimentary expressions, even with reference to the British Governor General. These stylistic changes may reflect a desire on Syed Ahmad's part to put into practice what he was learning from the English texts he was getting acquainted with through translations; they may also reflect an enhanced sense of self-confidence and a consequent loss of the obsequiousness toward the British that he (and Sahba'i) showed in Asar-1.

The two notes on ‘Kalika’

In Asar-1, Syed Ahmad devotes three separate sections, consisting of six pages of text and two full-page drawings, to Kalika, an important Hindu religious site. Here is the main section in the first book.Footnote ⁸⁹

Asar-1:

In Asar-2, the much-abbreviated account comes to only two pages.Footnote ⁹¹ The two temples are not discussed separately or at any length, but details are given of the actual ceremonies performed there.Footnote ⁹² In Asar-1, the date for the temple's construction was given as ‘Sammat 1821 Fasli’, just the way Syed Ahmad found it in an inscription on a guarding wall. In Asar-2, however, he gives the same date with a historian's flourish of scholarship: ‘Sammat 1821 Bikramajit, i.e. 1178 Hijri, i.e. 1764 Isawi’. The legend of the Devi is again narrated, but this time it comes with a reference on the margin to the Markandaya Purana. Every statement, however, is made in an objective manner; there are no snide remarks. All personal references are gone, as is any reference to what was contemporary at the temple—its loss of land grant in the new land settlement; the dry tanks; the lack of water in the well; the suffering of the pilgrims that went unheeded. These omissions do not indicate, in my view, some diffidence on Syed Ahmad's part vis-à-vis his British superiors; they more likely reflect a desire to be seen by them as an objective historian or antiquarian.