In September 2001, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) in Delhi ruled against displays of romantic affection between couples at three large, landscaped monuments under its custody: Safdarjung's Tomb, the Purana Qila, and Lodhi Gardens. Without specifying quite how the ban would be enforced, A. C. Grover, the Survey's media officer, warned against what he described as the “abuse” of national heritage by romantically demonstrative couples (Renuka Reference Renuka2001). This desire to impose codes of public conduct at Delhi's monuments was not unprecedented. In 1973, two young lovers, Faqir Chand and Gita Rani, were evicted from the central tomb of Safdarjung's Tomb and shamed by the chowkidar (guard) who took their names and the names and addresses of their parents. The Assistant Superintending Archaeologist at the time complained that Delhi's monuments were visited more often by “couples than the real tourists” and asked for a police constable to patrol the precincts of Safdarjung's Tomb to “check the obscene acts of the visitors” (NAI 1973, 1974).
This moral policing, however impotent, offers an aperture into the two central concerns of this article: the pervasive shortfalls evident in the bureaucratic culture of the ASI, before and after independence, and the social animation that characterizes the everyday life of India's physical past. This article is concerned with the creation and maintenance of Delhi's registered monuments during the twentieth century; in particular, it looks through a local context to address broader questions about the disambiguation of “heritage” by political, legislative, and bureaucratic cultures and the transgression of that disambiguation in the everyday lives of an Asian city.
Reflecting on heritage management in India, architect and conservationist A. J. K. Menon (Reference Menon and Asha Rani2008) elegantly described “the routine compromises so typical of Indian bureaucracy.” Scholarly histories tend to avoid any discussion of the bureaucratic inadequacies and occasional paralysis that characterize state conservation work (Basak Reference Basak2007; Chakrabarti Reference Chakrabarti1988; Ray Reference Ray2008).Footnote 1 Histories of the colonial Archaeological Department chronicle bureaucratic development and scholarly discoveries with little consideration of either the very particular epistemologies that lay behind the imperial ordering of India's physical past or the friction that developed between official and popular uses of designated heritage sites. Instead, commentaries on India's archaeological heritage tend to lament a diffuse inadequacy of preservation. “Why is it,” asks artist Debasish Mukherjee, “that there is such little appreciation or respect for heritage in India?” (Chaudhuri Reference Chaudhuri2016). The legislative template for heritage, derived from concepts and practices developed in nineteenth-century Europe and adapted to be more authoritarian by imperial states, created an ill fit between monuments that were imagined to be discrete and the complex rushes of urban life around them in India and elsewhere (Sengupta Reference Sengupta2015; Swenson Reference Swenson2013).
The twentieth-century history of Delhi's physical past offers an opportunity to reorder our understandings of the relationship between cities and their physical pasts. This article traces out a history in which bureaucratic definitions of heritage encountered a range of social and political orders of urbanism in the capital city of Delhi. The idea of two urban orders of “Old” (around the Mughal urban fort of Shajahanabad) and “New” (which denotes the imperial capital built between 1911 and 1931) is significant in terms of the creation and custody of the city's monuments. However, throughout the article, the city at large is referred to as Delhi, designating an urban landscape that exceeds the definitions of planners or municipalities. The city's monuments formed a hinge between the state and the people of the city—small spaces in which the bureaucratic culture of state archaeologists encountered a range of social, religious, economic, and cultural expressions of Delhi's urban population.
Regardless of the strict and possessive terms of monumentality set out in British India by the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act (AMPA) in 1904, under which the majority of the city's monuments were notified, the normative experience of the monument in Delhi has been to offer a space of possibility to the urban poor: shelter, isolation, romantic privacy, social congregation, enjoyment, and occasionally death. All these possibilities transgressed the bureaucratic rules set in place to arbitrate the meaning of the monument. These inhabitations are not exceptional within the lives of the city's monuments but instead reflect the quotidian history and personality of monuments as one conspicuous expression of the city's biography.Footnote 2 Some occupations overwhelmed the monument, resulting in the removal of remains from the registers of monumental architecture in the city. Others—in particular the wholesale appropriation of larger monuments as refugee camps after the partition in 1947—have receded and modifications have been repaired, leaving no trace of the occupied life of the monument. This article examines the often tense and terse but nevertheless constant interactions between different state bureaucracies and publics at these monumental sites and traces the compromises through which inhabited pasts emerged. These hybrid lives refused the neat categories of legislation and were characterized by fragmented and shared custodies. Monuments became sites at which a range of social, devotional, and economic custodies coexisted either despite or in collusion with the claims asserted by state-run bureaucracies.
A number of recent studies have highlighted the variations that characterize the lives of the physical monuments in the city. Hilal Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2014) has explored the custodies expressed over the Jama Masjid in the old city by emergent Muslim political discourses in the twentieth century. The changing biographies of a set of monuments with the colonial and postcolonial city has been described by Mrinalini Rajagopalan (Reference Rajagopalan2017), charting their changing meanings both politically and socially within the fabric of the capital. Anand Vivek Taneja has depicted the dissonance between the culturally monotonal bureaucratic definitions of monuments and the variety of meanings that animate those same spaces for marginalized communities. The archaeological authorities in Delhi are ill at ease with the host of rival narratives, claims, and custodies that coexist with their own bureaucratic definition of monuments within the city (Taneja Reference Taneja2013). In fact, this sense of incomplete and besieged custody has characterized the claims of the archaeological authorities since they were first established at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Fewer than half a million people lived in the city in 1912 when Edwin Lutyens, the architect commissioned to design the new city, complained that “the whole country [near Delhi] is larded with shrines, temples and mosques and wherever you take a line across it, some, several, tombs, shrines are in the way—and will have to be moved” (Royal Institute of British Architects Archive 1912). Since then, Delhi's urbanism has been characterized as “crippled” and “chaotic” as exponential demographic growth consistently outstripped the expectations and capacity of the city's planners.Footnote 3 The city remains richly endowed by its physical past, with 172 registered monuments, three UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and hundreds of smaller monuments listed and often lost during the last one hundred years. The continuation of the discordance between different agencies that will be discussed in this article is indicated by the Indian State's recent postponement, without explanation, of the bid made by the nongovernmental organization The Indian National Trust for Art and Culture Heritage for Delhi to be notified as a UNESCO World Heritage City (INTACH, n.d.). Whatever the reason for the postponement, initially understood as complete withdrawal of the bid, it arguably highlights the complexity of matching globalized heritage, defined and arbitrated by Western trajectories of historicism, to the intricacies of politics in non-Western contexts.
Throughout the twentieth century, the intention of the officers of the Archaeological Department was to set Delhi's registered monuments apart from the city both for their own protection and as salubrious places of leisure and education. However, while the bureaucracy of the archaeological authorities imagined the monument as a physical shell (to be acquired, restored, and subject to annual inspection and occasional tending), the dominant comportment of Delhi's physical heritage during the twentieth century was transformation. The reworking and reuse of objects in South Asia has been subject to extensive scholarly work by historians and art historians who have explored the means by which objects, places, and structures were subject to adaptations that both encompassed and adapted aspects of their pasts in the medieval and early modern periods (Cherry Reference Cherry2013; Eaton and Wagoner Reference Eaton and Wagoner2014; Flood Reference Flood2009; Mathur Reference Mathur2007).
The invention of the modern monument in the nineteenth century was the next, novel enactment of repurposing the fabric of the past. However, it was the first legislated adaptation of those materials that demanded both exclusivity and permanence. The 1904 AMPA, which appropriated selected Indian material pasts in order to cultivate a legitimating heritage for the colonial state, was not the first attempt by the colonial state to legislate its custody of an Indian monumental heritage according to British precedents. However, the Act coincided with Viceroy Curzon's reorganization of the Department of Archaeology and provided the means by which hundreds of monuments in India were created until its replacement in 1956 of a slightly recalibrated Act passed by the independent Indian state (NAI 1904). That the Act lacked cultural traction and was stymied by its own bureaucratic culture has been well-established (Sengupta Reference Sengupta and Ray2009, Reference Sengupta2015; Sutton Reference Sutton2013). This article is less concerned with the specifics of the legislation than the range of deliberate and indifferent defiance encountered by state-curated heritage during the twentieth century.
This article begins with a description of the assumptions under which the monumental legacy of the city was claimed and created by the colonial state in the second decade of the twentieth century. It goes on to explore the many compromises and transgressions of archaeological custody by alternative claims and occupations in the period before 1947. Finally, it explores the realities of the social occupation of the city's monuments as spaces of ritual, leisure, commerce, and romance in the period after independence when the strictures inherited from the colonial bureaucracy faced the rapid tides of demographic and urban growth in the second half of the twentieth century to create a near perpetual outrage of the city's monumental order.
Colonial Archaeology and the Making of Monuments in New Delhi
The intention to create a new imperial capital for British India was announced in 1911 during the durbar held to mark the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary—an extravagant and elaborate attempt to ritually enact and secure British imperial authority. The indulgent exhibition of power was sustained in the violence of the land expropriations that preceded the creation of the city. The majority of the lands desired for the capital—for the central arteries; the bureaucratic, residential, and commercial areas; and the provision of adequate hinterlands for potential enlargement—were nazul land, that is, land cultivated by peasants but owned and taxed by the colonial state. Almost 200 villages were entirely appropriated, a project of brutal settlement in which compensation was swiftly calculated and soon followed by destruction and displacement. From the city's inception, monuments were anticipated to provide an essential aspect of the character, form, and meaning of the new capital (Rajagopalan Reference Rajagopalan2017, 75). In contrast to the sweeping aside of existing occupation, selected structures were chosen as monuments around which New Delhi was to be articulated—sites that were simultaneously set apart from the city and integral to it.
While the land for the capital was cleared and structures selected as monuments, two sets of remains were delineated. In 1910, the Archaeological Department had divided the jurisdiction of its officers in the Northern Circle between “Hindu and Buddhist” and “Muhammadan and British,” a redesignation that reflected an earlier division between archaeological and architectural fields of work (IOR 1910). Broadly speaking, Hindu and Buddhist remains were to be the provenance of archaeological enquiry; Muhammadan and British remains were a standing, monumental corpus of architectures. The “List of Religious Buildings under notified acquisition area” compiled in 1912 merged the categories of the “religious” and “historical,” marking Hindu and Muslim “monuments” in blue and red respectively (DSA 1912). In subsequent lists, the categories of “historic monument” and “religious building” were gradually separated and “Hindu” monuments were assigned almost exclusively to the latter. The recognized heritage of the new city was, therefore, predominantly Islamic and was cultivated to offer a material continuity between Mughal and British authority (Metcalf Reference Metcalf1989). The imperial city would self-consciously cradle the stately remains of the Mughal nobility and inherit, by suggestion, the grandeur of scale, vision, and legitimacy of the Mughals who had been removed from power during the horrific violence of counter-insurgency that had taken place a mere fifty-three years before plans for the new capital were announced. Thereafter, the money and effort expended on “Muhammadan” monuments in northern India, including New Delhi, were vast and unprecedented (NAI 1910). In the 1910s and 1920s, great pains were taken to evict residents of monuments and to clear space around them and release what was described as their “vast educative influence” (IOR 1914). Monuments in the city received substantial renovation in preparation for the darburs of 1903 and 1911 (Guha Reference Guha and Guha2010). Director General of Archaeology John Marshall was adamant in defending the cost as a necessary part of the imperial project:
I maintain that such expenditure is justifiable from every point of view. We now spend vast sums of money on scholastic and academic education; but we do little for the education of those who have left school or have never been to school. We ought to make accessible to Indians the vast educative influence which resides in the monuments of a great past; but we cannot hope to establish this influence unless we can convert the monuments into places of popular resort. It is not for instance enough accurately to cement the falling walls of Firozshah Kotla. We must make it accessible by some other means than leaping the city sewer; we must fence it round in order to keep out the grazing buffalo, and the contractor's donkey; we must plant the surroundings so that the eye may rest on something more attractive than brown dust and broken brickbats. (IOR 1914)
Marshall describes the landscape from which the monument was to be redeemed: from sewer, buffalo, and dust. The Sher Shah Fort was “swept bare of the squalid villages which encumbered it, its walls and gateways have been cleared of debris and repaired” (ERC 1915). Rajagopalan (Reference Rajagopalan2017, 65–71) has described the tense negotiations that characterized the acquisition and categorization of properties during the establishment of the city. Proper conservation required a calibration of bureaucratic authority and scientific knowledge that could first and foremost ensure the boundaries of the monumental landscape, establishing the physical parameters of a domain in which scientific authority could exercise itself unencumbered by contingencies and intersections of urban life.Footnote 4 Obtaining structures as monuments was a lengthy process that involved the attempt to extricate the materials of the city from the very subaltern populations who were ultimately, according to Marshall, to benefit from access to them. The creation of the new city had created a trade in stone from disused structures, and officially defined “ancient buildings” became sources of much-needed materials. Other “monuments” had to be redeemed through the eviction of human occupants or livestock by whom they had been adapted to provide shelter (DSA 1920). When the registration of the capital's monuments began in the second decade of the twentieth century, it was not anticipated that physical conservation would immediately follow the establishment of custody by the archaeological authorities. John Marshall noted in 1913 that substantial repair work might wait for up to fifteen years and he did not, in the meantime, foresee problems beyond visitors who were “likely to scribble their names and commit other nuisances” (DSA 1913b). In Marshall's imagination, the public that pressed in at the edges of monuments were not rivals for the space of the monument. They were delinquent merely by virtue of their ignorance of proper conduct.
In Delhi, extensive rebuilding and relandscaping work was carried out to define monuments physically. The transformation and demarcation of monumental spaces depended not just upon structural work but also upon the delineation of spaces that marked out and articulated the monument as a place of urban leisure. The Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Archaeology in the first years of the city's planning, Gordon Sanderson, conceived of a “grand programme” through which a chain of monuments would be created stretching from the Red Fort in the north to the Qtab Minar in the south. Sanderson cleared away a “large untidy village” from the Purana Qila and evicted the people living within the vaults of the Kila Kohna Masjid in 1913 (The Pioneer 1914). Access roads were built into and paths through groups of monuments. Courtyards were paved and pillars were straightened to create passable space within and around monuments (DSA 1915a). The addition of grassy lawns around monuments was deemed essential (Sharma Reference Sharma2007; Singh Reference Singh, Liddle and Lopez2010). It was, Marshall claimed, “absurd … to substitute the old fashioned Indian beaten earth in place of a far more beautiful lawn of grass” (Marshall Reference Marshall1923). At Feroz Shah Kotla, grass replaced “a confused mass of crumbing ruins and an even greater display of dirt, dust and debris” (DSA 1915b). The garden was fundamental to the constitution of the monument as an exceptional, orderly space, set apart from the city's present. Space around monuments was considered essential in order to “popularise the monuments and stimulate the interest of the general public” (DSA 1913c). The landscape around monuments also formed barriers, or insulation, from structural incursions. Only within assured physical boundaries could the anachronistic fabric of the monument be preserved. The garden and lawns created boundaries around the monument and replaced disorder and debris with order and calm.
Competing Custodies and Monumentalities
The constitution of Delhi's monuments, therefore, was directed by clear legislative and design templates and underwritten by a set of assumptions about how the nascent publics of the new city would be both inclined and disciplined to interact with the curated physical past. Monuments, once restored, were supposed to be socially sterile and physically static, subject only to maintenance of the correct degree of restoration to maintain their authentic monumentality. In practice, that expectation created fraught relationships within the bureaucracy of the Archaeological Department and tension with both other state agencies and the publics of the city.
In 1930, Zafar Hasan, as Superintendent of Muhammadan and British Monuments, recommended the removal of seventeen structures from the list of notified monuments in the city. Among the seventeen were monuments that were in a state of decay or that were being used as storehouses or homes. J. A. Page, as Director General of Archaeology, acerbically pointed out that eleven of seventeen monuments had been recommended by Hasan himself, and twelve had been notified in the last six years (NAI 1930). Page's censure overestimated Hasan's capacity to maintain as well as create monuments amid a city experiencing rapid change. The archaeological authorities had custody but no authority to evict inhabitants or demolish constructions added to or around any registered monument. In any case in which archaeological officers believed that the terms of a monument's custody were being breeched, they could only appeal to the Deputy Commissioner's Office to carry out an eviction. As the population of the city grew, the relationship between the archaeological authorities and the inhabitants of the city, and, indeed, the other local government and planning agencies of the city, became increasingly fractious. The monuments that had been initially imagined as landmarks around which the urban order of the new imperial capital would articulate itself were now regarded as inconvenient and impractical. Monuments were considered to be particularly troublesome in areas of high urban density. The Old City was associated with large and unruly urbanism that was threatening to monuments (Hosagrahar Reference Hosagrahar, Scriver and Prakash2007). In 1942, the Director General of Archaeology, Kashinath Narayan Dikshit, refused to make Turkman Gate of Shajahanabad a monument, stating, “there is no point in adding Turkman Gate to our books especially as it leads to one of the most congested parts of the city.”Footnote 5
The ordinances put in place set the monuments beyond congestion and disorder and assumed that social occupation would be limited to orderly public visits, between prescribed hours and according to prescribed forms of movement and comportment. Visitors at protected monuments were forbidden from “unseemly or unpleasantly noisy behaviour” and, more specifically, were to refrain from spitting, plucking flowers, walking on the lawns, making meals, and firing guns.Footnote 6 Tea could be prepared but only using a small spirit lamp. The rules framed in 1905 also explicitly forbad visitors from entering or remaining in the monument's grounds after 10:00 p.m. (DSA 1935b).
Allowances were made for the continuation of religious practice at several large sites. The existence of eight mosques in the grounds of centrally protected monuments was assured by the terms of their registration, and visitors were required to either remove their shoes or wear the overshoes that were provided.Footnote 7 In 1915, the Chief Commissioner ordered a public monument notice be removed from within the mosque, “a place of worship,” at Purana Qila and instead placed on a building outside it (DSA 1915d). These accommodations, however, did not delimit or curtail the use of the city's monuments for devotional purposes. In the administration of smaller monuments, overlapping custodies muddied the legislative clarity of “the monument.”
The Pir Ghaib, near Hindu Rao Hospital on the Ridge, had been acquired and registered as a protected monument in 1913 and was described in various accounts as an observatory, hunting lodge, and mosque (Hasan [Reference Hasan1919] Reference Hasan1997, 2:278; INTACH 1999, 2:35). Two years after its acquisition and official notification, a row erupted about ceremonies being conducted each Thursday by Barashat Ali, who claimed the structure as a tomb and himself the hereditary mujawar or guardian. Barashat Ali and the devotees who now came to the site had made the Pir Ghaib into a site of memory and meaning for local Muslims, an understanding that was entirely at odds with the singular, vacant purpose of the secular monument. Three sources of authority were drawn into the dispute: the Archaeological Department, the Delhi Notified Area Committee (which oversaw the development of what became the Delhi Municipality), and the office of the Chief Commissioner who was responsible for civil authority across the new capital. The Superintendent of Archaeology strenuously objected to the occupation and insisted that the whitewash that had been applied by devotees to portions of the building be removed, that the rights claimed by Ali be scrutinized, and ideally that all the ceremonies at the monument end. The Delhi Notified Area Committee had provided information about the activity in the tomb but refused to prosecute due to a lack of clear accountability—how could the specific identity of the whitewasher be established?—and reminded the Superintendent of Archaeology that the monument was entirely under his purview. The Chief Commissioner registered his displeasure that an old door in the upper story of the tomb had been painted. However, he did not regard the custody of the Archaeological Department to be exclusive and saw no reason why the ceremonies should not continue or the interiors be whitewashed and lamps lit within. To the Chief Commissioner, the Pir Ghaib was a visual resource, significant only as a façade within the urban landscape. The appearance of, and any activities within, the interior were irrelevant. The dispute illustrates the complex and informal accommodations of custody that were reached despite the singularity of the monument's legislated purpose. Although the Delhi Notified Area Committee refused to prosecute, a letter was sent to Barashat Ali warning him of the (potential) legal ramifications of any alterations of the monument's fabric. His occupation of the site was left undisturbed, and the Chief Commissioner warned that any written agreement reached between Ali and the Archaeological Department for the removal of the whitewash by Ali would be tantamount to giving formal recognition to his claim at the site (DSA 1915c). Ali's occupation of the tomb continued and two years later, apparently mindful of the jurisdiction of the Archaeological Department, he approached the authorities to have the interior of the tomb whitewashed. The Commissioner's office again warned against giving permission, not because of any fundamental objection to the whitewashing but because permission would recognize Ali's claim to custody at the tomb, a position Ali appears to have exercised anyway with little if any sense of transgression (DSA 1917).
These exchanges epitomize the colonial tendency to rule by consistency in principle and widely variant practice. The colonial bureaucracy accommodated transgressions as inevitable to the point of necessity. Sunil Kumar has described, with exceptional knowledge and insight, the generation and transformation of Sufi shrine sites in Delhi. The attentions paid to particular sites varied over time, as did the self-identification of the individuals and institutions claiming custody, creating dramatic structural and cultural transformations (Kumar Reference Kumar2011). Custody under the 1904 AMPA could only be expressed through the suspension of physical change of the monument after the department's supposedly definitive restorative intervention. The archaeological authorities, therefore, enjoyed only a surrogate authority; their role was to set aside and preserve the past for the future amidst a rapidly changing present. That surrogacy—in deliberate defiance of the fluidities of urbanism—could do nothing to challenge the socioeconomic and divine dynamics of a shrine site. Publics at these sites were regarded as repeatedly delinquent, yet the archaeological authorities had no legislative means, or recourse, to enforce their exclusive claim to arbitrate the meaning of monuments.
Bureaucratic amnesia compounded the department's struggle to assert its custody over monuments. In the mid-1920s, at the tomb of Atgah Khan in Nizamuddin, a series of archaeological inspection reports complained that the tomb was occupied by a household. The courtyard around the tomb was “littered with debris and all sorts of domestic furniture,” limiting, if not preventing, public access. The initial censure of the tomb's guardian, Mirza Bulaqi, was tempered when the Archaeological Department's attention was drawn to the terms under which the tomb was protected. The agreement was reached in 1905, under the terms of the AMPA, and divided custody between the Archaeological Department and the tomb's hereditary guardians. The agreement required that physical conservation of the site be directed by archaeologists. The cost of all repairs was to be met by the government and, in return, public access to the enclosure around the tomb was permitted, with the exception of closure for urs (ceremonies to mark the Pir's death anniversary). The central tomb was closed to the public at all times (DSA 1924). Although the tomb was not included in the centerpiece monuments Sanderson imagined for the imperial city, the agreement predated and did not anticipate the scale of “public access” that was created by the expansion of the city as an imperial capital.
In another case, when the Superintending Archaeologist asked for the mullah of Abdul Nabi's mosque to be evicted in 1928, he was reminded that, only two years before, the Secretary of State had agreed to hand custody of the mosque to the Muhammadan Cemetery Committee. The agreement created a joint custody shared between the Cemetery Committee and the Archaeological Department whereby the mosque would be repaired by archaeologists at the expense of the committee and would remain open to the public as a monument (DSA 1928b). These divided custodies assumed that two different functions could be accommodated and that the interests of two very different publics could be reconciled at the site by virtue of the presence, and in theory complementary responsibility, of two agencies.
The regulation of agreed occupation of monuments was also exacerbated by the problem of invigilation. In 1936, after the Deputy Commissioner assured the Superintendent of Archaeology that structural changes made at the mosque at Mubarakpur in South Delhi had been removed, the Conservation Assistant reported that they were still standing (DSA 1935a). An inhabitation at Chauburj (“four domes”) monument on the Ridge, described in January 1943, was reported as having been removed in February by the City Magistrate but was back by March. In 1946, the Archaeological Department complained to the police about the occupation of Tripolia Gate by Ghosis, traditionally a herding community. However, the police constable charged with removing them claimed that their occupation had taken place with the permission of the Archaeological Department's own chowkidar at the site (DSA 1941b).
These compromises and inconsistencies were not out of place in the bureaucratic culture of the new capital. Indeed, it echoed the tendency in Delhi for split jurisdictions over particular spaces. During the planning process, from the second decade of the twentieth century on, control over budgets, planning, and authority was divided between different agencies, causing friction and delay and allowing ample opportunity for unofficial, and officially transgressive, activity and inhabitation (Sharan Reference Sharan2015). The civil authorities, faced with a spectrum of budget shortfalls and challenges to their authority, were reluctant to press the claims of the Archaeological Department. At the inception of the new city, Chief Commissioner Hailey advised accommodation in cases of residential or ritual occupation (or both) of monuments, reminding officers that “we don't want to add to our religious difficulties at present” (DSA 1913d). When Shah Fayuz-ud-din pressed his claim as mutwalli of the tomb of Makhdum Shah Alam at Wazirabad in North Delhi, therefore, an agreement was made for the continuation of annual urs ceremonies, despite the tomb being on government land and despite Fayuz-ud-din having provided a government mafi (agreement) for another tomb, that of Shah Sadar Jahan, as proof of his claim (DSA 1913a). At the same shrine in 1928, a new grave was dug for the father of Azimuddin, who claimed a long-standing right to bury within the mosque's precincts. The archaeological authorities had initially insisted that the tomb would have to be destroyed. Ultimately, however, neither the Deputy Commissioner nor the Archaeological Department were prepared to take action against the family (DSA 1928a).
The Archaeology Department was beholden not only to its own, often forgotten or mislaid, agreements but also to the rapidly changing urban fabric of the city. In 1943, an imam moved into the Chaurburj (“four domes”) monument on the Ridge and claimed it as a mosque. Students from the newly relocated St. Stephen's college attended prayers there, and handbills and posters circulated locally invited a congregation to pray there. The mosque emerged from the changing locality regardless of the Superintendent of Archaeology's insistence that the Chaurburj monument was “at best a mausoleum” (DSA 1943a). The dispute escalated beyond its locality when politician and advocate K. B. Haji Rashid Ahmed became involved in negotiations and an agreement was reached that no overnight occupation of the Chauburj, now defined as a mosque, would take place. The archaeological authorities were entirely isolated in their claim that the structure never was, and therefore could not be, a mosque. The determination, and credibility, of the archaeologists to maintain the function of the structure as an empty monument was not helped by the civil authorities; a note added to the correspondence, possibly by the Deputy Commissioner Evans, stated: “Actually I do think it is a mosque, whatever the Arch. Dept may say” (DSA 1943b).
The involvement of anjumans (councils) in the regulation of Islamic shrines, mosques, and madrasas was cultivated by the civic authorities from the 1920s on, as were Hindu organizations that offered, though did not achieve, the same system of regulation of Hindu shrines.Footnote 8 In an attempt to create uniform regulations for Muslim sites in the city, in 1943, the Sunni Majlis-e-Auqaf was created under the terms of the Delhi Waqf Act. The auquf was to take control of all Muslim religious sites in the city, overseeing the appointment of religious functionaries at mosques and provide the management of waqf property.
In the context of disputed custodies, the anjumans and auquf became redoubtable advocates for the sacred inhabitation of monuments. Their participation in a dispute consistently increased the chances of contested monumentality. Given the desire of the civil authorities to deal with recognized, centralized authority in the city, the archaeological authorities were in no position to limit or challenge the anjumans’ claims to regulate the social and sacred function of religious sites. From the 1920s onwards, these organizations not only challenged the exclusive custody claimed by the Archaeological Department, they assimilated and trumped it.
In the mid-1920s, custody of the tomb and mosque at Kotla Mubarakpur was taken by an anjuman that had repaired the mosque and appointed an imam. After the Archaeological Department objected, the anjuman offered custody of the site on condition that the department compensated it for the amount spent on repairs, agreed to supply water to the site for devotees’ ablutions, and deputed a Muslim chowkidar who would act as both guard and imam (DSA 1928b). These compromises established the sacred function of monuments and the authority of the anjumans. The assimilation of the chowkidar as imam represented the most significant compromise in the department's jurisdiction and yet was passed in the correspondence without remark or protest. At Wazirabad in North Delhi in the same year, the local anjuman removed an imam from the mosque after the Public Works Department appointed a Muslim chowkidar who would act as mouezzin (DSA 1928a). The anjumans could accommodate compromise and, in setting the terms of the agreement, made the religious use of the site preeminent. As far as the anjuman was concerned, any claim the Archaeological Department may have had was made obsolete by its own, more recent, investment. Rather than full custody under the 1904 Act, archaeological custody was made one of several overlapping and potentially competing jurisdictions.
By the 1930s, the colonial state was rapidly losing credibility across British India. In Delhi, political actors seeking chinks and weaknesses in the governance of the city questioned state custody of the monuments by presenting them as sacred spaces in which the colonial state was failing to protect communal, and sensitized, identities. In 1931, the Al Aman newspaper complained that Hindu chowkidars posted at “Muslim protected monuments … use these sacred places as dens for sinful deeds” (DSA 1931b). The Deputy Commissioner, without challenging the Al Aman’s redesignation of the monuments as “Muslim,” ordered a report from the Superintending Archaeologist. The Public Works Department, responsible for employing chowkidars for the monuments, assured the Deputy Commissioner that it had a policy of employing “Muslim chaukidars in Muhammadan Monuments.” The matter attracted modest, if telling, attention when pleader Abdul Rahman petitioned the Chief Commissioner, claiming to have the signatures of hundreds of “respectable and responsible Muhamedans of city”:
In the vicinity of this ancient city there are many tombs of distinguished Mohamedan saints and emperors. They are regarded by the Muslim community as objects of great religious veneration and sanctity. And for the protection of those sanctuaries the department concerned has kept Hindu chaprasis which appointment are [sic] high objectionable from a religious point of view. (DSA 1931a)
The archaeological authorities appear to have done nothing to counter the politicization of the sites as spaces of community identity and communal sensitivity. In 1939, the Anjuman Arab Sarai supported Chanda Baker's claim to be the hereditary attendant of the mosque at Arab Sarai. Baker denied that his rights had been compensated when the whole area was acquired by the government in March 1914. Revenue records showed that Rs1221-4-10 had been sent to the District Judge as compensation for landholders, a practice in keeping with the brutal and final land acquisition proceedings of the time (DSA 1939). Times, however, had changed and by the late 1930s, the archaeological authorities were in no position to press their claim. The singular rights claimed by the archaeological authorities over monuments were those with which the civil authorities felt they could most conveniently dispense.
The difficulty in defining and limiting rights in monuments led to the archaeological authorities increasing invigilation in order to ward off the initiation of ritual activity. In 1941, Assistant Superintendent of Archaeology Hilary Waddington sent a police patrol to the Makhdum-ki-Masjid monument at 11:30 p.m. (after the 10:00 p.m. curfew imposed on public visits to the city's monuments) to check on inhabitation and warned the Deputy Commissioner of Delhi that “it is not wanted that this should develop into an Urs.”Footnote 9
After two decades of oversights, compromises, and occasional, small assertions of the Archaeological Department's authority, the city was transformed by partition. The creation of the separate sovereign states of India and Pakistan from British and Princely India in 1947 precipitated the arrival of half a million refugees in the city and the displacement of 300,000 Muslim inhabitants. The city's monuments were used to provide immediate shelter for those forced to migrate out of, through, and into the city.Footnote 10 The Purana Qila, Humayun's Tomb, and other sites in Nizamuddin were requisitioned by the Ministry for Refugees as transit camps for Muslim refugees leaving or displaced within the city until the end of 1947. The following year, along with Safdarjung's Tomb, they became camps for Hindu refugees moving into or through the city (NAI 1951b). Permission for the transformation was never sought by the Ministry for Refugees, a fact that grated on the archaeological authorities who lost entirely, if temporarily, their claim on the city's physical past. Occupation of the large camps continued into the early 1950s and extended to the end of the decade at the Purana Qila and Ferozshah Kotla (NAI 1953e). The sites’ use as refugee camps required substantial physical modification. Latrines, baths, and very simple residential structures were made (NAI 1951b). At Humayun's Tomb, scores of latrines and baths were built and the twenty-two marble graves on the first floor of the tomb were encased in masonry to protect them (DSA 1948a). Schools were started by refugees in the mosque at Safdarjung's Tomb, at Masjid Kotla Mubarakpur, and at Moth-Ki-Masjid (DSA 1949, 1951; NAI 1949). Archaeological officers complained incessantly about the damage inflicted by refugees at these sites. At Safdarjung's Tomb, archaeological officers complained of broken jalis (perforated stone screens) and plinth stones being deliberately raised and broken to be used for washing clothes (NAI 1949). At the Purana Qila, Sher Shah's tomb, the black marble inlay work in the walls was removed (NAI 1951b). Families living in and around the tomb cut trees and plants, cooked, bathed, urinated, defecated, beat their clothes, drew and wrote on the walls of the tomb, and put cow-dung cakes out to dry (NAI 1949). The lawns at all three sites, complained the Ministry of Education, had been “ruined and altered beyond recognition” (NAI 1951b). In addition to the sites appropriated as official camps, by 1948, most of the city's monuments had been occupied by refugees, according to the Archaeological Department (DSA 1948b). Although the partition was an exceptional hiatus, the tone of the complaints made against refugees was distinct only in scale from those that preceded and followed them. The vast majority of monuments were restored to the custody of the newly designated ASI, and few physical signs remain of the monuments’ lives as refugee camps or the lives of those who were forced to inhabit them.
The occupation of monuments by partition refugees, and their subsequent clearance from the monuments, marks a turning point in the management of the city's Islamic monuments. Occupations and devotional use had been an accepted part of the lives of many registered monuments, not least the eight mosques that were accommodated within larger monumental landscapes and the use of which was specified and guaranteed by the Archaeological Department's custody of the sites. Despite the frequency of terse correspondence about the performance of rituals or the accommodation of religious officers within the monuments’ precincts, that the Islamic monuments had, and could contain, other lives was an accepted component of their existence as monuments. The Archaeological Department, which had been happy to suspend the restrictions of the 1904 AMPA in the cases of mosques and allow the continuation of urs in registered monuments, now put in place more categorical and exclusive claims (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2014). Before independence and partition, Islamic structures were, both de facto and de jure, hybrid monuments in which devotions to God and the monumental order of national history were combined. The order of national heritage that emerged after independence was more stringent and exclusive. Living mosques within complexes of monuments were no longer permitted and religious activity in and around buildings, while it continued, was now viewed as transgressive.
This change is one manifestation of the changed position of Muslims in the city of Delhi. After partition and independence, the city's Muslim population was dramatically reduced and spatially curtailed. Urdu, the language of all the city's inhabitants before 1947, was gradually diminished by educational policy and became singularly affixed to Muslim identity. The grandeur of the city's Islamic monuments was no longer regarded as one aspect of the city's profuse Islamic cultural heritage. As Muslims became a community marginal within the space of the city, Islamic monuments became physical marginalia within the city's present; in Taneja's (Reference Taneja2015) words, “dead congregations of stone.” The largely Islamicate monuments of the city have become a manifestation of the separation of the city of Delhi's Muslim past from its present.
The Everyday Lives of Monuments in Delhi after 1947
Bureaucratically, the ASI emerged from the colonial Archaeological Department largely unchanged. The tendency of the colonial Archaeological Department to define transgression more effectively than the meaning and purpose of monuments continued and, if anything, increased. After the politics and violence of partition, the ASI withdrew from any formal agreements with religious bodies. Ahmed (Reference Ahmed2014) has charted the confrontations that took place between the Jamma Masjid Committee and the archaeological authorities since independence and made clear the boundaries that the Committee has succeeded in establishing around both the monument and its own religious sovereignty. The final section of this article examines the diffuse, urban appropriations of the city's monuments in the wake of rapid, post-independence urban expansion.
As the city expanded, bureaucratic process and public discourse pitted urban planning and heritage against one another. City planners after independence echoed Lutyens's irritation with the plethora of physical remains in the city. In 1953, officials complained that in addition to around 150 registered monuments in the capital, over 1,200 others were known and the archaeological authorities were constantly coming across “fresh ones” (DSA 1953). These complaints were joined by voices that lamented the encroachment of the rapidly changing city around its most prominent monuments. In the early 1950s, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru complained about buildings erected around the Red Fort and in the area around the Tomb of Khan Abdur Rahim in Nizamuddin, the development known “by the uncouth name of ‘Nizamuddin Extension East’” (now one of the most expensive and desirable residential areas in the city) (DSA 1954, 1955a). Soon after the Delhi Development Authority was formed to oversee the creation of new residential areas in the city, the Superintendent of Archaeology complained that the rapid pace of construction had resulted “not only in spoiling the setting of these monuments but also an opportunity has been lost to integrate the monument to the lay out of the colonies, so that a monument which could have enhanced the perspective of the habitations nearby now looks disregarded” (DSA 1955b). Sixty centrally protected monuments located in vicinities where new housing colonies were being established were found to be damaged and neglected. In order to integrate monuments and new residential colonies, he recommended that a minimum distance of 200 feet should be allowed around the monument and that no new building should be higher than any proximate monument. A. V. Ventatasubban, Chairman of the Delhi Improvement Trust, agreed and suggested that the work of the newly formed Delhi Development Authority be carried out in consultation with the Department of Archaeology (DSA 1955b). This agreement did not extend beyond the paper upon which it was printed.
During the 1960s, attempts were made to enlarge and consolidate the lands around monuments as part of one of the government's five-year plans (NAI 1967a). Mapping the area of ground associated with the sites under the terms of their original registration was far from straightforward; frequent, and often unresolved, queries were sent to patwaris (revenue officers) to establish and settle the boundaries of protected areas. The Archaeological Department was often unsuccessful in even establishing the spatial limits of its jurisdiction, let alone enforcing it.Footnote 11 During the 1960s and 1970s, monuments were cut off from their immediate environs by roads and construction, and even isolated on traffic islands.
The Archaeological Survey struggled to maintain an exclusive physical claim on listed monuments as the city experienced rapid expansion. In the late 1960s, eight householders were at an advanced stage of constructing homes on land attached to the Sultanate remains at Bijay Mandal in Begumpur. All of the households claimed that occupation had been established by their forefathers. The Superintending Archaeologist expressed incredulity that construction had advanced so far and squarely laid the blame for the encroachment on the Conservation Assistant, Thomas Koshy, whose responsibility it was to inspect the protected sites regularly. However, the homes were paying corporation tax and had been allotted house numbers. In other words, their occupation had been affirmed by other, municipal, authority (NAI 1967b). Shared and overlapping jurisdictions were unresolved and sometimes fractious. A request from the New Delhi Municipal Corporation to the Superintending Archaeologist to remove rubble from the carpark outside Safdarjung's Tomb earned the terse response that the Municipal Engineer should first prevent his sweepers from throwing rubbish into the cells that surrounded the tomb's grounds (NAI 1978).
As the city transformed around them, the archaeological authorities struggled to control the precincts of larger, delineated monuments. Occupation within the grounds of monuments was a constant bugbear, not least because very often it was employees of the Archaeological Department who took up unofficial residence. In 1958, Pahlwan Singh Bahadur, a peon in the office of the Director General, along with three of his male relatives and their families, were evicted from the first floor of the southern gateway of Humayun's Tomb (NAI 1958a). In the late 1960s, Shyam Raj, a night chowkidar, moved his family into the cells behind Safdarjung's Tomb and opened a tea stall (NAI 1969c). By the early 1970s, the monuments and the spaces around them could also be condemned as vessels for the incursions of the poor. The Residents Association in Green Park complained that the spaces around ASI-protected monuments on Mehrauli Road were “an eye sore in a posh locality” and demanded that those sleeping there should be evicted and the enclosures cleared and secured (NAI 1969b, 1972). Monuments were, and continue to be, spaces in which the urban poor—with the right connections—could find ad hoc shelter.
The presence of a delinquent visiting public at the monuments became a recurring theme in correspondence and inspection reports. The docile, improvable publics of the imperial imagination were replaced with people who flocked to the monuments. In the early 1950s, in order to deter “the rough element who crowd out the place,” the department appealed for an increase to the entrance fee charged at the Red Fort, the only monument for which an entry fee was levied until the late 1960s (when entry tickets were introduced to Safdarjung and Humayun's tombs) (NAI 1953c). The ticket cost of 2 annas had been set in 1904, and the department hoped that an increase to 8 annas would reduce the very large number of visitors to the site: 36,000 a month and up to 2,000 on the weekend (NAI 1954b). Officers of the Archaeological Department did not embrace their role in managing or facilitating public access to heritage, for example, ensuring the presence of lavatories, tea and photo stalls, and coolers in ventilated spaces. The need to manage the archaeological monuments as spaces of public leisure, albeit supposedly regulated and didactic ones, was regarded as an unnecessary burden on officers who regarded themselves as scholars and inspectors. Repeated requests for a public lavatory at the Qutab Minar in 1950 caused the superintendent to observe laconically “that the public bladder seems to be getting less retentive than here to fore” (NAI 1951a).
The reports of the Archaeological Department create an impression of monuments under besiegement. Copper lightning conductors, iron chains, and flowers were constantly stolen from monument precincts (NAI 1954a). At Humayun's Tomb, in 1954, barbed wire fencing was erected to “discourage the miscreants” (NAI 1954a). The gateway on the southeast corner, leading to the Nila Gumbad monument, was strengthened with metal sheets to prevent it from being used as a thoroughfare by people from Nizamuddin, who had broken the locks in an assertion of their right of way, a right the department disputed (NAI 1954a). At Hauz Khas in the early 1950s, walls were heightened and gates repaired in order to prevent the through access of villagers and to block out the “ugly view at the back ground” on the northeast side (NAI 1953b).
Perhaps inevitably, given the restricted nature of what was officially acceptable behavior, delinquencies were commonplace. Inspection reports on Delhi's monuments written in the 1950s and 1960s identify a huge range of transgressive activities: posters were repeatedly torn from walls, wickets were removed from lawns, “well-to-do ladies and their children” were told to stop picking flowers, and the local police station was appealed to for help in preventing students from singing, dancing, and playing musical instruments on the lawns (NAI 1953d, 1959a). A secretary from the Ministry of Tourism and Aviation complained at the end of the 1960s that the Moti Masjid, Red Fort, and Humayun's Tomb “resound with the blare of transistor radios” (NAI 1969a). In 1958, attempts were made to remove a group of boys who would sit on the roof of Humayun's Tomb and occasionally throw stones onto other visitors (NAI 1958b).
Appropriations of the monuments extended to tragedy; ten people—five women and five men—committed suicide by jumping from the Qutab Minar between 1947 and 1953 (NAI 1953a). The Archaeological Department was expected to prevent these suicides on behalf of the state. Rajeshwar Prasad Bhatnagar jumped to his death after failing his examinations in June 1950. As a result, a rule was introduced under which only parties of three persons or more could ascend the minar (NAI 1950). Suicide attempts continued. On the morning of July 19, 1959, a young woman was handed over to the police after attempting twice to mix with crowds of visitors in order to climb and jump from the minar.Footnote 12 Das Ram, an unfortunate monument attendant, having once been beaten up in July 1959 by a young man after stopping him from ascending the minar, was struck as another, unidentified, man fell to his death in December of the same year (NAI 1959b).
The tone of dissatisfaction about monuments was directed both at the unruly publics who visited them and at the inadequacies of the ASI's management of these sites. The Ministry of Tourism directed its complaints about the social and physical environs at Delhi's monuments in the late 1960s and 1970s at the ASI: “No effective steps are taken to prevent scribbling on the walls, littering of the grounds and floors by visitors, … to prevent bare-faced begging by persons young as well as old, who obviously do not need to beg, to prevent the depredations of pimps and unauthorised money changers” (NAI 1969a). The ASI was to address and correct “the way knots of young men lounge about places of tourist interest and close round foreigners whenever they come along and jeer at them most impudently causing extreme annoyance and embarrassment” (NAI 1969a). By the 1960s, appeals to improve the monuments hinged on “the impression carried by foreign tourists,” whose own behavior was presumed to be beyond reproach. The emphasis on a foreign gaze arguably underlines the remote discordance that existed between the regulated and real lives of the city's largest monuments. Tellingly, the authoritarian excess of the Emergency, when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended democracy and introduced draconian suppression of political opponents after she lost the elections of 1975, effected an immediate, but temporary, improvement in the maintenance of monuments in Delhi (NAI 1975). Only in the context of an excessive and unsustainable enforcement of state authority could the Archaeological Department, briefly, exercise its authority as it had been imagined in 1904. By the second half of the twentieth century, the archaeological authorities had reached an uncomfortable equilibrium in which both public and bureaucratic transgressions were a part of the monuments’ and the ASI's quotidian existence.
Conclusion
There is considerable disparity between the dominant version of Delhi's heritage and the dynamic realities of how the past lives in the city. Memories of the city's past in exhibitions, coffee table books, and lectures repeat and reinscribe with very little deviation the spatially confined triumvirate of Shahjahanabad, the seventeenth walled city of the Mughals; the Mutiny city of the mid-nineteenth century; and finally, Lutyens's Delhi, the modern, imperial city built in the first half of the twentieth century. Through these fabrics and themes, the dominant history of the city becomes that of the assertion, disruption, and restitution of state authority across a reductive axis of an old city in the north and a new city to the south. In fact, the physical pasts of the city extend far beyond these realms and far exceed the narratives of state control and organized rebellion. The everyday lives of the city's physical pasts bear little if any relation to this scheme. Created in order to signify the colonial state's relationship with India's dynastic past and urban future, the monuments became sites in which state custody was singularly asserted and repeatedly challenged. During the colonial period, a clear dogma of appropriation and curation was articulated for the proper care and appearance of monuments. This aesthetic and bureaucratic dogma, when tested, was quick to compromise and tended to create a living heritage articulated by the continuation of religious practice, if by accident rather than design. After independence, the ASI provided less latitude in the enforcement of state custody and failed to extend protection to physical remains as the city rapidly extended and population density increased in the post-independence period. Arguably, the Indian state heritage regime has found itself at an impasse, having failed to generate a new, postcolonial philosophy of archaeological custody but simultaneously unable or unwilling to regenerate or enforce older aesthetic conventions.
Throughout the twentieth century, the archaeological authorities regarded their custody of Delhi's monuments as being frustrated and undermined both by unruly publics and by its own compromised jurisdiction. The biographies of the city's monuments have always depended upon hybridity, being animated by the plural lives of the city that lay beyond the reach and relevance of the ASI but operated within the physical and bureaucratic regime of conservation. Hybrid monumentality, a heritage that combines living engagements and aloof guardianship, has formed the history of the city's monuments, from the initiation of the colonial state's appropriations to the present day.
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the British Association of South Asian Studies conference at Royal Holloway in 2014. I would like to thank the five anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments and suggestions.
