MONUMENTAL MATTERS

MONUMENTAL MATTERS

The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture

Santhi Kavuri-Bauer

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS | DURHAM AND LONDON | 2011

© 2011 Duke University Press

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Why Mughal Monuments?

The Power of Monuments

The Subject of Monuments

The Space of the Monument

Making Monuments Matter

1: BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO OLD STONES: THE POETS AND ARTISTS OF THE MUGHAL MONUMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The Persistence of Memory and the Poetics of the Mughal Ruin

Subject and Subjection: Hodges’s Encounter with the Mughal Monument

The Terror and Tyranny of a Mughal Mosque

The Melancholy and Horizons of Mughal Agra

Fanny Parkes: Performing Difference in Agra’s Mughal Spaces

The Contingent Poetry of Agra by Nazir Akbarabadi

2: FROM CUNNINGHAM TO CURZON: PRODUCING THE MUGHAL MONUMENT IN THE ERA OF HIGH IMPERIALISM

Setting up the Survey of the Mughal Monument

The Style of the Survey: Science versus Art

Out of the Light Comes the Dark: Lord Curzon’s Mughal Monuments

Curzon’s Indian Policy and Practice of Monument Preservation

Lighting up the Taj Mahal

3: BETWEEN FANTASY AND PHANTASMAGORIA: THE MUGHAL MONUMENT AND THE STRUCTURE OF TOURISTIC DESIRE

Inviting the Tourist to India

Touring the Indian Monuments

The Guided Tours of the Mughal Monuments

The Multiple Narratives of Delhi’s Red Fort

The Other Story of the Mughal Monuments

4: REBUILDING INDIAN MUSLIM SPACE FROM THE RUINS OF THE MUGHAL “MORAL CITY”

Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Hybrid Ordering of the Mughal Monuments

Reclaiming Muslim Space after the Uprising of 1857

The Return of the Mughal Mosques

From Mosques to Monuments of Muslim India

The Mosque and the Production of Communal Space

Resisting New Delhi through the Mosques of Delhi

From Community to Nation and the Politicization of Islamic Monuments

Muslim Nationalism and the Spaces of the “Moral Community”

5: TRYST WITH DESTINY: NEHRU’S AND GANDHI’S MUGHAL MONUMENTS

Delhi’s Descent in Novel Form

The Indian National Army Trial at the Red Fort

The Partition’s Mughal Monument

How Congress First Figured the Mughal Monuments

Gandhi’s Ordering of the Mughal Monuments

6: THE ETHICS OF MONUMENTALITY IN POSTINDEPENDENCE INDIA

The Mughal Monuments and the Development of Heritage

The Taj Corridor Project and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

The Taj Corridor Project as International Crisis

The Muslim Waqf and an Ethical Reproduction of the Taj Mahal

A Monument to a New India?

EPILOGUE

NOTES

Introduction

Chapter 1: Breathing New Life into Old Stones

Chapter 2: From Cunningham to Curzon

Chapter 3: Between Fantasy and Phantasmagoria

Chapter 4: Rebuilding Indian Muslim Space

Chapter 5: Tryst with Destiny

Chapter 6: The Ethics of Monumentality

Epilogue

BIBLIOGRAPHY

In memory of my father, Raghavayya V. Kavuri

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK is the result of over ten years of research, writing, and discussion. Many people and institutions provided support along the way to the book’s final publication. I want to thank the UCLA International Institute and Getty Museum for their wonderful summer institute, “Constructing the Past in the Middle East,” in Istanbul, Turkey in 2004; the Getty Foundation for a postdoctoral fellowship during 2005–2006; and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Grant Award for a subvention grant toward the costs of publishing this book. I would also like to thank my home institution, San Francisco State University (SFSU), for providing me with a Presidential Award for Professional Development in 2007, and SFSU deans Keith Morrison and Ron Compesi for making my professional leaves possible and for their encouragement.

My mentors at UCLA were a constant source of support for my research. Robert L. Brown, my dissertation advisor, offered me his enthusiasm, trust, and unwavering encouragement. Irene Bierman-McKinney’s passion for Islamic architecture and her innovative approaches to its study helped me discover my love for Mughal architecture and shaped this project. I also thank Donald Preziosi, Swati Chattopadhyay, Robert Nelson, and Tapati Guha-Thakurta for their guidance at different stages of my research and writing.

In India the American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) facilitated my travel and provided me with a place to stay and exchange ideas with fellow researchers while in New Delhi. At the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) I wish to thank Jahnwij Sharma and Ashis Banerjee. Dr. R.C. Agrawal at the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), and the staff at AIIS helped open both front and back doors at the Mughal monuments. Mr. R.K. Dhiksit and Mr. R.L. Kohli in the Agra Office of the ASI afforded me the rare opportunity to observe the behind the scenes activities at the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. The staff at the National Archive, the Nehru Memorial Library, and the Delhi State Archives extended their help and guidance in accessing collections. I also thank Purnima Mehta, Amita Baig, Adnan Khan, O.P. Mahour, and Radheshyam Gola.

Thanks go to the staff of Unesco’s World Heritage Center in Paris, especially Jukka Jokilehto, Minja Yang, Peter Stott, and Sarah Titchen; the staff of the Oriental and India Office Collection at the British Library; the staff of the Huntington Library in Pasadena; and in New Haven, the staff of the Yale Center for British Art.

At SFSU I thank the members of my department, especially Richard Mann, Gwen Allen, Candace Crockett, and Barbara Foster. Thanks go to others at SFSU, including Chris Chekuri, Prithvi Datta, Falu Bakrania, Kasturi Ray, Sanjoy Banerjee, Anoshua Chaudhuri, and Lucia Volk, for reading parts of my manuscript and offering thoughtful feedback. I am grateful to Carrie Thaler of the Lacanian School of Psychoanalysis in San Francisco for taking time out of her busy schedule to thoughtfully read my introduction. I thank Nancy Um for her friendship, encouragement, and advice, and for the invitation to the Harpur College Dean’s Workshop in Visual Culture at Binghamton, where I received valuable feedback from graduate students and faculty. Other scholars and friends that offered their support, commentary, and kind advice are: Michael Hatt, Tim Barringer, Fred Bohrer, Bruce Grant, Saleema Waraich, Nicole Watts, Carel Betram, Aftab Ahmad, and Taymiya R. Zaman. In India, Malik Faisal provided excellent help with the translation of Urdu newspaper articles when I was seriously pressed for time and offered his interviewing skills in Delhi and Lucknow. Max Bruce and Christine Boucher lent me their language skills and knowledge of poetry. I thank my graduate students, Krystal Hauseur, Eun June Park, Natalie Rico Patton, and Bradley Hyppa, and my undergraduate students, Joy Iris-Willbanks, Leah McNamee, Shelly Fuller, and Matthew Bowen for all their encouragement and help.

At Duke University Press I wish to thank Anitra Grisales, Mandy Earley, and Jade Brooks, the editing team, the anonymous readers, and especially Ken Wissoker for his help and patience in ushering me through the overwhelming process of turning a dissertation into a book.

Finally, I thank my family for their love, patience, and support. Henning, I thank you for not only listening to me bat around ideas about monuments for over ten years and editing my chapters and Persian translations, but especially for your love and humor. I could not have completed this book without you.

INTRODUCTION

FACING a no-confidence vote in November of 1990, V. P. Singh, India’s eighth prime minister, posed a resounding question to an audience of MPs: “What kind of India do you want?” With this question, Singh signaled the irony of a secular nation-state indulging the Hindu nationalist demand to demolish the Babri Masjid, a small sixteenth-century mosque. The ultimate aim of this endeavor, known as the kar seva (service), was to build a Hindu temple in place of the mosque to simultaneously mark the birthplace of the god Ram and symbolize Hindu political resurgence. In fact, the plan was no longer just being debated and was gaining noticeable traction among upper-caste Hindus and Lok Sabha parliamentarians. Singh himself gave a straightforward answer to the question of what kind of India he wanted: a secular, democratic country based on the rule of law. He thus resolved to protect the small mosque at all costs because that was simply what he, the leader of the world’s largest secular democracy, was charged to do. Unlike the Congress Party governments before and after him, Singh did not waver in his commitment to the protection of the Muslim minority and its built heritage. Toward this end, he had L. K. Advani, the organizer of the planned demolition, arrested. He then deployed security forces to surround the historic Mughal mosque and thwart its planned destruction. The prime minister’s principled stance to protect the space of the mosque enraged Hindu nationalists and compelled their political arm, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to pull support for Singh’s coalition government. This eventually cost Singh his post.

What is often overlooked by writers of the now well-studied series of events that culminated with the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December of 1992 was that Singh’s question—“What kind of India do you want?”—signaled an ethical approach to the kar seva controversy.[1] Asserted here is the notion that the kind of India one wanted could be shaped by how one reckoned with its architectural and national landscape: that with the destruction of this small, inactive historical mosque the promise of Indian secularism could die and communalism could come to reorder the country.[2] More crucially, it suggests that with the proper perspective on its built environments, India could repel the demagoguery shaping its public space. What Singh implied with his question constitutes the central premise of this book: monuments matter. Monumental environments materialize power relations, influence the social ordering of a nation, produce us as subjects, and finally, and more positively, provide us with a critical space to create, resist, and endure in our everyday lives. As such, monuments are not stable and unchanging but dynamic spaces that can help us understand how political movements and social identities in India have been forged through the imperatives of power, subjectivity, and the spatial practices they influence.[3]

To begin thinking of Indian monuments as dynamic spaces shaped by the contending concerns of nation-making, identity, and social survival, I ask the reader to imagine a thirteen-year-old Muslim girl entering the sixteenth-century Tomb of Humayun in Delhi today. In the course of a single hour, she will occupy several subject positions in this public space: she is a child under the guardianship of her parents; an Indian citizen visiting the monuments of her nation’s history; and a member of the global culture of humankind, as the monument is on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites. She is also a young woman aware of her personal space and the gaze of others. Finally, she is a Muslim who can recognize the forms of the architecture as similar to those of her local mosque and who witnesses her parents proudly proclaim that this is how her Muslim ancestors used to build. This example shows the space of the monument as far more multivalent and active than unified and static. It is also unpredictable and constantly shifting in meaning according to the subject position and identity of the visitor. This volatile aspect of space seems intolerable to state powers and their apparatuses, which require one public subject position to be assumed and monitored at all times. Hence the state deploys a spatial framework based on the simple binary of the national self and the other as it removes from view the multiplicity of monuments and the reality of their instability. More critically, such a framework also conceals the fundamental reason why monuments have mattered throughout modern Indian history. Put simply, because of their multiplicity, instability, and our desire to learn about ourselves through them, monuments both have been subjected to the ordering of power and, as this book will reveal, are often the chosen sites to challenge such power.

The monument in India is today a social fact. There are currently over five thousand officially registered monuments throughout the nation, and they range from ancient to modern, religious to secular, and rural to urban. Indian monuments, and especially Mughal monuments like the Taj Mahal, are also famous, drawing millions of tourists to their doorsteps every year. Despite their omnipresence and allure, these sites continue to be the most misunderstood, mystifying spaces of our social landscape. Most of us are able to sense the power monuments have in shaping our reality, yet few of us can (or want to) express what lies behind this influence. Ordinarily, this condition of mystification does not require urgent action or analysis. However, every now and then irreplaceable buildings are threatened or, like the Babri Masjid, destroyed, tearing apart the national landscape. Thousands of lives have been claimed over monumental matters.[4] Such events provoke questions regarding the role that monuments play in identity formation, national heritage, and the topographical landscape of the contemporary nation-state; but only a few of these questions have been critically investigated.

The movement to destroy the Babri Masjid is a case in point. Both the perpetrators of the destruction and those opposed to it have written hundreds of books and essays to give sense to the seemingly nonsensical. The discourse surrounding the contingency of monumental destruction that has arisen over recent years can be divided into two groups: the historiographic and the social scientific. The former focuses on the symbolism, historical imperatives, and rhetorical logic of the parties involved in the destruction of the mosque.[5] The latter has focused on the social changes the events leading up to the destruction and the destruction itself have wrought in secular India.[6] While both approaches have provided rich and nuanced analyses of the political, ideological, and social conditions of the mosque’s destruction, neither considers the mosque itself, in its material presence and excesses, as another important player in shaping the events that unfolded between 1989 and 1992. What is also critically missed is that by 1989 the Babri Masjid actually had a monumental profile dating back to the eighteenth century, shaped by the spatial practices of the declining Mughal Empire and the ascending power of the British. The contestation and later destruction of the Babri Masjid were therefore episodes in a longer history of practices of representation, repression, and renewal that signify the Indian landscape through its monuments. The present volume is concerned with broadening the analysis of Indian monuments by making their genealogy, radical physicality, and spatial practices the central focus of study.

Why Mughal Monuments?

With so many officially recognized monuments in India to choose from, I want to clarify why I limit the scope of this study to the Mughal monument. First, there are practical reasons, as it is impossible to systematically or critically examine the diversity of all Indian monuments. Second, of all these monuments, the set of majestic palaces, tombs, mosques, forts, and gardens of the Mughal emperors (1526–1857) has mattered more than any other. Since their construction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, monuments like the Taj Mahal, Fatehpur Sikri, Delhi’s Red Fort, and Jami Masjid have captured the imagination of poets, artists, political leaders, and ordinary people. Their ineffable beauty, grandeur, and association with one of the most powerful empires ever to rule India have contributed to their long history of representation and preservation. The Mughal monument has also been the setting of wars of conquest, rebellions, death, independence, and national celebration. In this book I demonstrate how its distinctive qualities and history order the Mughal monument as an ambivalent site and, more crucially, animate a spatial dynamic defined by crisis and its repression through political ideology and other intellectual practices.

Almost everyone who has visited them has experienced the sublime, ambivalent, and uncanny qualities of Mughal monuments; the more sensitive of these visitors have recorded the experience on sketch pads, in verse, travel journals, letters, and on postcards. These records reveal the multiplicity of encounters with these sites and provide an array of visual and literary data that enables me to trace the production of the Mughal monument from the first anxious encounters of Indian poets and British artists in the eighteenth century to the present. They offer insight into the spatial practices of the Mughal monument, and through their narrative contradictions reveal how the underlying ambivalence of these spaces shaped the subjectivity and desires of visitors and promoted creativity and resistance. This sort of spatial-subjective reading enables the present study to move beyond style and ideology to excavate the recursive and hidden trauma of the space, which also gives meaning and order to the monument. In this endeavor I do not take power, identity, or space as fixed objects but rather demand that they be calibrated with the specific dynamics and contingencies of Indian history.

At this point I should explain how history functions in this book. First, history helps trace the shifting meaning of the monument as a temporal function. By choosing to order the chapters chronologically I do not imply that the history of the monument moves in an evolutionary fashion with a definite point of origin. Instead, following Michel Foucault’s concept of genealogy, I write a history of the monument that results from the contradictory and contingent rather than the providential.[7] Yet it cannot be denied that the Indian monument was radically transformed by certain critical events, such as the Uprising of 1857 and independence, and by personalities such as Lord Curzon and Gandhi. By using these events and personalities as anchoring points, I trace how the monument changes in meaning and spatial ordering through symbolism and around the dialectics of conflict and creativity. While the book follows chronology, the analysis of the monument that takes place within its chapters is framed synchronically, and the monument’s ordering and meaning are presented as shaped by its particular historical context and the vectors of power, subjectivity, and space.[8] I will now explain how these three vectors function at the monument.

The Power of Monuments

Indian monumental discourse commonly understands power as acting on the monument without internal resistance; if contestation is seen to take place, it originates from external sources. For example, as the recent agents of violence against Indian monuments, radicalized Hindus are often represented as crossing the political and cultural parameters of the nation-state, instead of in fact emerging from within the same power network. Using terms like sickness and virus to describe radical movements, writers on the crisis of monumentality represent Hindu nationalist resistance as arising from the margins of secular society and as giving “testimony to the weakness in practice of secularism in India.”[9] Yet this strategy of representing resistance at the monument as exterior to power distances the space from the contingencies of history and contributes to the monument’s mystification. The first step in addressing this predicament is to incorporate a model of relational power into the analysis of Indian monumentality.

I thus examine the monument as a terminal point of power that is ordered and signified through the spatial practices both of the state and of those which resist it. This understanding of the expression of power is derived from Foucault’s theory of power relations, which posits that power and resistance emerge from the same place: “Where there is power there is resistance and yet this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to the power.”[10] Therefore power is not wielded from a singular and centralized position but “is exercised from innumerable points, in the interplay of non-egalitarian and mobile relations.”[11] Foucault further explains that in modern times, power has had a more efficient economy based on “procedures which allowed the effects of power to circulate in a manner at once continuous, uninterrupted, adapted, and ‘individualized’ through the entire social body.”[12] Dispersed like a web over time and space, power reveals itself not as one locus of law or sovereignty, or through several nodal points, but through the myriad power relations that emerge everyday and everywhere along the power network. They become apparent to us at those points of resistance or crisis.[13]

In the late 1980s and 1990s scholars of colonial studies adopted Foucault’s theory of power relations to argue for a view of European culture as imbricated with the colonial other.[14] More recently, scholars seeking to assert the materiality of place in colonial analysis, after years of examining placeless texts, have used Foucault’s theory to explore those spaces, like cities and towns, in which power and resistance shape each other.[15] Taking this relational understanding of power as the starting point for the study of the Indian monument, a very different story of its past and current status can be told, one that originates from the point of crisis. This theory of power as relational allows for a methodology that moves beyond the examination of the narrative of the triumph of reason over unreason to the stories of constant, internal resistance actuating power and causing the monument’s spatial practices to evolve and transform over time. In framing the Indian monument as the terminal point of power and as informed by relations of power, this book follows the example of South Asian histories that concentrate on points of cognitive failures and procedural crisis.[16] Through a focus on the frictional dynamics of power relations, the Indian Mughal monument is revealed as both a contradictory space of the state and a radically open space where new possibilities of power are expressed and alternative social orderings and better futures imagined.

The Subject of Monuments

In the Hindi film Lal patthar (1971), the narrator’s opening lines prepare the audience for an unusual story of love, loss, and historical monuments: “This is Fatehpur Sikri founded by King Akbar. There is a strange appeal in its silence and desolation. A kind of magic. That is why I keep getting drawn here, and still don’t feel satisfied.” As the opening credits roll, we accompany an Indian family on a typical tour of Akbar’s palace complex, Fatehpur Sikri. When the family comes to rest in a quieter area of the monument, one of the women walks off alone to study the surrounding structures. She puts her hand on a nearby building, whereupon an angry voice shouts, “What right do you have?” Startled, the woman screams, and the other visitors rush toward her. A disheveled old man supporting himself on a cane explains that he called out to her only to prevent her from touching the bloodied stone, and proceeds to ask the group if they have heard the story of the red stone, the lal patthar. One of the visitors answers that they have not, as the guidebook does not mention it. “To hell with your guidebook!,” the old man retorts (tellingly, he switches to English for this outburst). Reverting to Hindi, he lists the text’s crucial omissions: “Does the guidebook mention how many conspiracies, how many murders were committed here? How many lovers met here and parted ways? But does that make it a lie? Will that make it a lie?” He offers to tell “the historic story of the red stone,” and his audience, spellbound at this point, listens eagerly. The old man’s tale, which makes up the bulk of the movie, tells of the machinations of a jealous prince who has his wife killed at Fatehpur Sikri by the man he suspects to be her lover. As she lies dying on the red sandstone floor, the prince learns too late that she was in fact faithful to him. The burden of guilt causes him to compulsively return every year on the full moon of the Hindu month of Magha to clean the once bloody stone. The film thus reveals in its opening and closing scenes the multiplicity of the monumental space, containing hundreds of stories of love, betrayal, and power. More critically, it also exposes the dynamics of subjectivity that recursively and unconsciously draw individuals to monuments.

I recall the story of Lal patthar to demonstrate that the question of monumental multiplicity cannot be adequately answered through the study of the discourse and practices of power alone, but that it has to move more deeply into the consciousness of people interacting with the monument. Why exactly are they drawn to these sites, and what do they gain from their visits? Ultimately, any study of monuments must have at its core a practical understanding not only of the psychical connection the modern individual forges with the site but also of the processes governing the constitution of a subject’s identity through her or his interaction with it.

To gain a deeper understanding of the social significance of monuments, we must first outline the cognitive processes that emerge from an encounter with a monument. I argue that any encounter with a monument is always split between three registers of subjectivity: the visual-imaginary, the ideological-symbolic, and the unconscious-Real. In the first order of an encounter, the monument serves as a mirror, reflecting back to us an ideal and objectivized image of ourselves as complete and unified subjects.[17] In other words, the monument functions as the other that reflects an ideal image of who we are while veiling the drives and needs that fragment our perception of self. The effect of this visual register is revealed when we take pictures of ourselves with monuments to display to friends and family. Our presence at the monument says something about, if not who we are, then who we aspire to be. The need for alignment with the perceived meaning of the monument is by no means the exclusive domain of the so-called common citizen or tourist: artists, poets, viceroys, nationalists, and prime ministers of India are united in their desire to see an ideal picture of themselves reflected in the monumental mirror. In the present study the imaginary register of subjectivity is presented as the primary draw of the Mughal monuments from the beginnings of sightseeing in India in the late eighteenth century to the present day.

The process of subjectivity at the monument begins with the need for an ideal picture of the self in the visual-imaginary encounter, but it is then further structured and differentiated by the dialectics of desire. In the second, ideological-symbolic register, the monument itself is imagined as lacking something that only the subject can complement.[18] This desire to satisfy the monumental lack draws us even closer to the monument and the pleasure of anticipating its completion. Just as the monument bestows something on us—the affirmation of ourselves as the idealized subject—we feel that the monument deserves our veneration, that our proper, prescribed perception of it in turn constitutes an affirmation of it and what it stands for. Like good children who perceive their goodness corresponding to a need for it on the part of their parents, we abandon our subjectivity in the ideological-symbolic register as we seemingly fill the lack in the other and shape ourselves into what we imagine its desire for us to be.

Through the fantasy of desire we become ideological subjects, subjected to the codes and symbols of the monumental space. At the Red Fort in Delhi, for example, an Indian tourist may come to the monument because she feels it needs to be seen by her, but while there, she is called on to take the subject position of a citizen of secular India through the signage, the government tour guide’s descriptions of the fort’s history, and through other mechanisms that interpellate or “hail forth” the subject through a national ideology.[19] Therefore, due to the fantasy of monumental lack—without us it has no meaning—we end up in a state of subjection to its ideological order.

The visual-imaginary and ideological-symbolic registers do not operate independently of each other, but constantly circulate through the monument and the subject, suturing them together while constituting the subject as complete and stable and giving order and meaning to the monument. It is, however, important to recognize that the functionality of these registers does not go uninterrupted. The third and final register of the monument, the unconscious-Real, at times breaks through both the first two orders, questioning their truth. The Real is the unnamable part of the monument that is not readily apparent to us but that, as Jacques Lacan explains, “has to be sought beyond the dream—in what the dream has enveloped, hidden from us, behind the lack of representation of which there is only one representative.”[20] Many have discovered that behind the fantasy of lack that binds us to the monument there is a more horrifying and powerful truth: that nothing lies beyond the matter of the monument. This other truth belongs to the monumental Real, which becomes apparent in moments of crisis such as war and social trauma, when ideology and social identities are rendered ineffectual and the orderly world is inundated with unruly signs and non-sense. In this book, the monumental Real reveals itself in the wars of colonial expansion of the late eighteenth century, after the Uprising of 1857, Partition in 1947, and the destructive rise of Hindu nationalism in the 1990s. The monumental Real and its disruptive truth are embedded in travel and tourist writings, speeches, and art produced after crises. Its unsettling presence is indicated in the repetition of stereotypes, tropes, and other rhetorical devices that cover up its truth, and it is in these reiterations that I locate the influence of the monumental Real and the stain it leaves behind on the ideological order and meaning of Mughal structures, much like the disconcerting and indelible blood stain of Lal patthar.

In the following chapters, the stain of the monumental Real is shown to structure British, Muslim, nationalist, and secularist spatial practices. It haunts William Hodges’s eighteenth-century paintings of Mughal monuments in the form of the suppressed colonial trauma, and nineteenth-century tourists see it when their vision is disrupted by the native non-sense of recalcitrant tour guides. Lord Curzon experiences its effects in the sublime and haunting beauty of Mughal monuments, prompting him to attempt, unlike more repressive British administrators, to address the Real openly and directly. Finally, Muslim and secular leaders will grapple with the national stain of Partition and try to order the Mughal monuments around its disruptive truth. As we will see, all these moments of crisis not only order the experience of the Mughal monument but also reflect how the impossibility of its truth generates the repetition of ideological formations: “That is why I keep getting drawn here, and still don’t feel satisfied.”

The crucial point of this discussion of the three registers of subjectivity is that at the core of every monument lies a cognitive failure caused by the disconnect between imaginary and symbolic orderings and the Real. Yet the realization of such a failure does not signal the dissolution of symbolic or visual orderings but rather strengthens them and sometimes compels their transformation, ushering in a new chapter for the Mughal monument.

The Space of the Monument

The third vector that shapes the monument is space, or more precisely the dynamics of space. In light of the discussion of the Real and its disruptions, it can be argued that all monumental space is unstable space due to the gap between the physical matter of the monument, encountered in brute sensuousness, and the monument’s imaginary and symbolic ordering, which matter eludes. The instability of a monument prompts some to redouble their efforts to pin down its meaning to an ideal view or ideology. This process ends with a totalitarian schema of monuments as singular symbols of a state. For others, the gap is seen as a radical opening for critique, creativity, and imagining alternative possibilities for a better society. The following nasheed, or song, exemplifies the creative innovation that monumental space offers.

- Oh Babri Masjid! We are guilty

- We claimed we would save you

- Would win you back from the Unbelievers

- Would bear the blows and bear the bullets

- We never dreamt we would bear this pain

- Oh Babri Masjid! We are guilty

- We attacked our own people

- And confused them with rhetoric

- Meanwhile we created ruckus

- And basked in our false pride

- Oh Babri Masjid! We are guilty[21]

The verses express not only a lamentation for the loss of the mosque but also offer a rare glimpse into the complexity of Muslim reactions to the destruction of the site. There is nostalgia for the past and criticism of fellow Muslims for ignoring the importance of the mosque. But above all, the nasheed signals an important shift in disposition: it suggests a return of the imaginary significance of architectural space for Muslim identity after years of viewing these sites as purely functional prayer spaces. In the song, the mosque also serves as a restorative space in which Muslim subjectivity can be re-empowered: the progressive weakening of the Muslim social body is described with the implied hope of seeing the reversal of this trend. Through song the Babri Masjid is thus turned into what Henri Lefebvre called a differential space.

To expose the creative potential that grows out of the inherent instability of the Mughal monument, I utilize a little considered aspect of Lefebvre’s theory of the production of social space: differential space, the productive space that arises out of the contradictions of power and ideology to offer something different. As differential space, the materiality of the Mughal monument, in all its excesses, plays an integral part in the generative process of the subject’s transcendence of everyday contradictions, alienation, and suffering. In this capacity, differential space provides a critical space of creativity and a new ethics of monumentality.

Differential space, as demonstrated in the nasheed’s construction of the space of the Babri Masjid, arises from the contradictions of abstract space, or the conceived space of ideology, “where the tendency to homogenization exercises its pressure and its repression.”[22] In the example of the Babri Masjid, the mosque became an abstract space when the government had it locked in 1949 after Hindu idols were surreptitiously installed inside. Fearing communal violence, the state thus erased the religious history, memory, and practices formerly associated with the mosque’s functioning. The state’s role in allowing the mosque to fall into ruin and disuse is kept behind the veil of secular idealism reordering the Babri Masjid into a monument of Jawaharlal Nehru’s commitment to secularism. By abstracting the mosque into an ideological space, however, contradictions develop. As Lefebvre elaborates: “To the degree that there are traces of violence and death, negativity and aggressiveness in social practice, the monumental work erases them and replaces them with a tranquil power and certitude which can encompass violence and terror.”[23] Abstraction is thus just a part of the process of transforming a social space into a monument, and it is also where most writers conclude their exploration of the meaning of monuments. They therefore remain aligned with the same categories and practices of power that abstracted the monument in the first place.

Lefebvre urges us to not accept the representations of space produced by ideology, but to go further and seek contradictions within the illusory existence of abstract space. The material, poetic, and sensual in space then becomes an essential locus for recovering contradiction and ambivalence: “The more carefully one examines space, considering it not only with the eyes, not only with the intellect, but also with all the senses, with the total body, the more clearly one becomes aware of the conflicts at work within it, conflicts which foster the explosion of abstract space and the production of a space that is other.”[24] As one becomes attuned to the sounds, rhythms, movements, disjunctive practices, art, and poetry—that is, the “other”—more creative practices of the monument come to light. Crucially, these disruptive practices make space creative and productive of change: “Spatial practice is neither determined by an existing system, be it urban or ecological, nor adapted to a system, be it economic or political. On the contrary, thanks to the potential energies of a variety of groups capable of diverting homogenized space to their own purposes, a theatricalized or dramatized space is liable to arise. Space is liable to be eroticized and restored to ambiguity, to the common birthplace of needs and desire, by means of music, by means of differential systems and valorizations which overwhelm…. An unequal struggle, sometimes furious, sometimes more low-key, takes place between the Logos and the Anti-Logos.”[25] Abstract spaces such as national monuments will contain within them this underlying creative potential—which arises as differential space and on which an ethics of the subject can be built. By ethics of the subject I mean an ethics that, rather than suturing a unified but alienated subject out of fragments, is built on the universality of difference, not in the multicultural sense but in the radically open sense that guarantees the right to difference. The ludic and adventurous, the artistic and erotic, the destructive and violent are all aspects of social space that lead individuals to their self-empowerment. These creative possibilities, which emerge from the material realities of the monument, from power relations and subjectivity, are productive of differential space. In this book I examine the differential aspect of the Mughal monument as the basis for the creative and resistant acts that take place in and around it. Whether in the form of art, poetry, or conservation, I examine these acts to reveal how the monument is at its core a site of radical openness.

Making Monuments Matter

The triangulation of power relations, subjectivity, and differential space gives shape, order, and meaning to the Mughal monument in a dynamic manner. Each chapter of the present book studies this integrated process through a focus on specific events and persons that reckoned with the monument either creatively or through ideological policy. In my focus on the monumental encounters I have chosen the most representative events and actions from each era of history, beginning in the late eighteenth century. This study will help readers understand two important facts about monuments. First, that monuments are essential spaces of the public sphere because they provide the vital ethical space needed to resist the homogenizing influence of the state. Second, that monuments matter to people because they simultaneously and contradictorily constitute them as good citizens and critical agents of imagined alternatives. At stake in my analysis of Indian monuments are three critical shifts in view: a reconsideration of monuments as merely the effects of the urgencies and contingencies of power relations; an account of monuments as vital factors in the social formation of the subject; and the consideration of the tactical, nondiscursive, artistic, and sublime aspects of the monument that are constitutive to its order and meaning. In other words, each of the following chapters seeks to expand the study of monuments beyond their formal and ideological registers to examine how the interplay of power, subjectivity, and creativity produce the monument recursively and radically as one of the most critical and unstable spaces of modern India.

The turbulent context of the late eighteenth century provides the setting of chapter 1. At this time, Mughal power continues to assert itself across the landscape through the spatial practices of regional rulers and in the Urdu poets’ recollections of life under Mughal rule. Also at this time, British power begins to cast its net over larger expanses of Northern India through wars of expansion. I begin this chapter with a discussion of the Urdu poetry called shahrashob, or the “laments of the city,” and consider how the ruins of the Mughal city provided poets, like Mir Taqi Mir, with the space to comment on Muslim society and understand its violent decline. At the same time, the British landscape artist William Hodges looked to Mughal structures and ruins to give meaning and order to an Indian landscape upended by British wars of expansion and a fathomless desire for enrichment. The chapter closes with the poetry of Nazir Akbarabadi and the picturesque writings of the traveler Fanny Parkes. Both see in the Mughal city and its monuments a space of change, which is celebrated for its ushering in of new possibilities for the social order.

In chapters 2 and 3 I examine the Mughal monument during the period of high imperialism and Indian nationalism. After a discussion of the attempts made by the Archaeological Survey of India to classify and order the Mughal monument, I consider how Lord Curzon, the eleventh viceroy of India (1898–1905), enacted an entirely new strategy of preservation to reckon with these sites. His efforts transformed the Mughal architecture of India, and especially the Taj Mahal, from ruins and curiosities into veritable monuments. Curzon, I argue, did not seek to hide the sublime power of the monument, but instead strove to yoke it to British power. In chapter 3 I discuss the practices of tourism and the constitution of the British imperial subject at the Mughal monument. I conclude with an examination of how the tourist narrative offered in guidebooks structured tours of the Mughal monument, and how Indian nationalists inverted the British narrative strategy to critique power and offer their own structured tour based on nationalist ideology.

In chapter 4 I trace the changing relationship of the Indian Muslim community to the Mughal monument. I begin with Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s great work on monuments and the implications of the Uprising of 1857 on the built environments of Delhi. Subsequently, I demonstrate how the Mughal mosques of Delhi became critical spaces to resist British power and assert a new Muslim identity in the public sphere. Through their representation in the Urdu press, all mosques were transformed from regional historical spaces into spaces expressing a common Indian Muslim identity. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Hali’s and Iqbal’s poetic representations of the Indian landscape and the ideological birth of Pakistan. I examine how the imagined space of a separate Muslim nation proposed by writers, as well as by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League and Pakistan’s first prime minister, restructured and resignified the Mughal monument as antithetical to Muslim empowerment and statehood.

Chapter 5 considers how Mughal monuments were again brought into the public sphere after independence and Partition in 1947. I examine the ideological rhetoric of Nehru and how it failed to frame these historical sites as secular spaces in the wake of the traumas of Partition and communal violence. I next turn to Gandhi’s public efforts to put an end to the volatile situation and to violence by turning the Mughal monuments of Delhi into symbolic spaces of the Congress Party’s secular ordering. Gandhi managed to force this transformation through his final fast and various public events. However, his rhetoric and spatial practices, I argue, also indirectly veiled the truth of the social traumata facing both Hindus and Muslims, which remain a stain on the nation to this day.

How the resistant force of the stain returns to disrupt the national space of the Mughal monument is examined in chapter 6. I am concerned here with how the government’s practices of economic development, tourism, and preservation have functioned to sublimate the trauma of independence that these sites contain. The universal ethics of Indian secularism, best encapsulated by the motto “unity in diversity,” are rendered contradictory by the historicity of matters of preservation, corruption, and the critical spatial practices currently introduced to make these sites differential, egalitarian, and truly ethical.

I want to conclude here by stating that the study of the Mughal monument also tells an important secondary, indicative story. This is the story of Indian Muslim social identity and how it has been forged through its ambivalent relationships with the Mughal built environments since the decline of Mughal power. The epilogue provides a mise-en-scène of a lesser-known Mughal monument, the Fatehpuri Masjid of Old Delhi. Ordered by the material contradictions of today’s India and the social struggles of the Muslim community, the Fatehpuri Masjid has become what bell hooks calls a “homeplace,” the most ethical form of monument ordering.[26] Beyond speaking to history, preservation, and tourism, this Mughal mosque stands as a monument to difference and creativity, one in which social pain is not sublimated but becomes an accepted force shaping the present realities and choices of people.

The study of Mughal monuments, and monuments in general, is essential to achieving a more complete grasp of Indian politics, society, and culture. For it is at these Indian sites that power seeks to legitimize itself time and again, but where it is also radically challenged, where new identities are forged, and alternate imaginings of the nation put forward. By providing a critical understanding of how the spaces of Indian heritage functioned in history, the current work adds to the historiographic and social science accounts of the communal and secular ordering of today’s national landscape. The critical interrogation of the monument I perform here offers key insights into the complex ways we reckon with monuments and shows how this encounter affects our lived reality. Without such knowledge we will forever be returning to these monuments, not knowing why, and leaving somewhat dissatisfied with the experience.

Fig 1: William Hodges, View of Benares with Aurangzeb’s Mosque, ca. 1781–82. Oil on canvas © British Library Board, Foster 94

1    BREATHING NEW LIFE INTO OLD STONES
The Poets and Artists of the Mughal Monument in the Eighteenth Century

IN LATE APRIL of 1788 William Hodges exhibited his painting, View of Benares with Aurangzeb’s Mosque, in the Royal Academy (figure 1). It can be seen in the famous print of the exhibition’s opening, hung “above the line” in the Great Room of Sommerset House (figure 2). In the center of the print stands the royal family, with King George III looking over to the left wall (figure 2a). If we follow his line of vision, it might take us to Hodges’s riverfront scene. Exhibited in the most prestigious space of the London art world, the painting presented a picturesque view of the never-before-seen Indian landscape, its architecture, nature, and people. The subject of the print, however, is obviously not Hodges’s work, but the spatial dynamics of the Great Room in which it was viewed. It was one of many paintings hung from floor to ceiling, creating a dizzying quilt of floating frames. Adding to the unruliness of the exhibitionary space was the frenzy of the new art-going public to see, and to be seen viewing, the nation’s most eminent art. In this context the deeper meaning of the art would easily have been lost to the spectacle. To prevent this sort of obfuscation and to fix the contingency of the exhibition to the national principle, the surveying eye/I of the king becomes operational. As the embodiment of the British people and the exemplar of tasteful viewing practice, his magisterial gaze and confident stance fix both the art and the subject into the greater symbolic order of the nation. It is through this context and this viewing practice that Hodges’s View of Benares with Aurangzeb’s Mosque comes to be signified as a British painting.

There is, however, another more submerged component to this visual experience. A person’s viewing of a picture is far from stable and unopposed, but is instead a highly fraught exercise of identification that occurs between the desiring eye and the lacking gaze. The beholder of Hodges’s Indian landscape, while considering the color, form, and control of the artist’s hand, would have sensed something more in a far-off corner: a dark spot or an unrecognized figure. To the late eighteenth-century British public this discordant element would have had the same resonance as the nefarious energy that possessed the newly minted “nabobs” as they tore through the social fabric of Great Britain. The picture contained a stain of the repressed knowledge of British aggression in India that rendered fictitious the transcendent and universal claims of its national ethos. In the picture, this stain is what Lacan called the “gaze,” the returning vision (of India) that transfixes the (British) subject and quietly devastates it with the truth that “there is no there, there.” Such voiceless forms of resistance are rarely represented in writing, historical or otherwise, subsequently causing a distorted picture of the unobstructed movement of power and its knowledge.

Fig 2: (Above) Pierre Antoine Martini, The Royal Family at the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1788. Engraving © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Fig 2a (detail): (Right) Detail of Pierre Antoine Martini, The Royal Family at the Royal Academy Exhibition, 1788. Engraving © V&A Images/Victoria and Albert Museum, London

The study of the Mughal monument is informed by a similar conceptual predicament, in which only the ideological practices of its spatial ordering are critically considered and the resistance of the monument to this symbolization is left unexamined. I argue that this is a matter of the limited perspective of the full ontology of monumentality. In this chapter I examine poetry, picturesque painting, and travel writings to reveal how, in the eighteenth century, new symbolic orders vied for the domination of Indian reality at the Mughal monument. I also reveal how the realities of subject formation and monumentality resisted this ordering, causing crisis and conflict in the representations of the monument.

The Persistence of Memory and the Poetics of the Mughal Ruin

At the time the British obtained their territorial power in India in 1765, the Indian landscape was still feeling the effects of the political entropy of the Mughal state that had started after the death of the last great Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, in 1707. Struggles over succession, the secession of territories, the corruption of nobles, and the torpidity of later emperors are the often-cited principal causes of the decline of Mughal authority. Hastening this decline were the periodic invasions of the Mughal capitals of Agra and Delhi. Between 1739, starting with the invasion of Nadir Shah, and ending in 1787 with Ghulam Qadir’s attack, Delhi was sacked by the armies of the Persians, Afghans, Marathas, Jats, Sikhs, and Rohillas. The residents of the northwestern empire, and particularly those of Delhi, were massacred, and those not killed were left impoverished. The Mughal Empire shrunk from an area that stretched from Kashmir to the Kaveri River to the extent of land between Palam and the Red Fort. The material conditions of the forts, palaces, mosques, and shrines the Mughals had built in their capital cities served as another important index of their declining power. Some religious structures lost their imperial endowments (awqaf) and fell into disrepair; others continued as they were, but without imperial oversight, they too lost the splendor of past centuries. The ruins and decay of these imperial buildings would become the principal subject of artists reflecting on the changing power relations in the Indian landscape and their place within it.

By the mid-eighteenth century power relations in India were no longer based on an imperial configuration but on provincial sovereignty. Power continued to be measured by the maintenance of armies and revenue collection, but it was dispersed among the regional kingdoms that took advantage of Mughal weakness. In 1765 the British East India Company became one of these regional rulers after accepting the diwan of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa from the Mughal emperor.[1] All these new rulers in one way or another adopted aspects of Mughal culture and political procedure to legitimize their new power. In architectural terms this manifested in the grand building projects of the regional rulers that outpaced the concomitant ruination of Mughal structures. In establishing their seats of power, these rulers abandoned old capitals, let them fall into ruin, or repurposed their stones. In the new capitals they commenced public works like bridges, roads, caravanserais, and markets to ensure the efficient movement of trade in their territories. The rulers also built palaces, congregational mosques, and shrines and laid down public gardens. The new built environments found in the capitals of Bengal, Hyderabad, and Oudh often combined Mughal spatial rituals and design with local ornamentation, which helped indicate the ruler’s independence. This can be seen most clearly in the inclusion of the distinctive jharoka, or raised platform topped by a cupola, in the public audience halls of new palaces. The Mughal emperor sat in such an elevated seat for his daily durbar, or public audience, a practice essential to performing the political order and making visible relationships of power.

In addition to architectural emulation, Mughal power continued to be asserted through the nostalgic themes of Urdu poetry. When the finances of the Mughal court in Delhi began to dwindle, court poets sought new patronage from regional rulers. Lucknow, the capital of Oudh, for example, became the foster city of poets, artisans, scholars, and Muslim jurists fleeing the devastating invasions of Mughal Delhi. Among the poets were Mir Hasan, Mir Taqi Mir (known as Mir), Mirza Muhammad Rafi’ Sauda, and Khan-i Arzu who found refuge in Nawab Asaf-ud-daula’s court. Poetry, art, and architecture flourished in Lucknow in the eighteenth century, and the city remained a religious and cultural center until the British annexation of Oudh in 1856. While other artists settled into their new employment in Lucknow, the poets of the Mughal court never accepted the city as the empire’s legitimate heir. Their resistance to the changing power structure expressed itself through the poetry of the shahrashob, or “lament of the fallen city.” The poets’ evocation of the memory of the Mughal city as a perfected space is nostalgic, and the description of its present state is maudlin in tone. When heard in the royal court setting, it would have produced a striking contrast to the well-known and more exuberant verse of the Persian poet Abu Talib Kalim (d. 1651), who wrote of the unequaled beauty of the Mughal cities a century earlier. For example, in describing the Red Fort of Shahjahanabad, Delhi, Kalim writes:

- How splendid is the tall fortress, its foundation in the skies!

- The earth is honored in your shadow.

- Such radiance your beauty has bestowed

- That your shadow made a mirror of the ground.

- Through you the land has come to know the heavens,

- If not [for you], where would one be, where the other?

- Through you the land has come to be revered in the world;

- At times the father gains his name from the son.[2]

Kalim’s verse describing Delhi’s Red Fort is an indirect tribute to the greatness of Shah Jahan. It also brings the Mughal Empire into the orbit of the larger Persianate world, where it surpasses the progenitor of its culture, the Safavid court of Isfahan. The Red Fort is therefore a space that permits the Mughals to take their place among the greatest powers of Islamic civilization. The shahrashob, a result of turbulent eighteenth-century India, represents the Mughal palace and greater city in a very different state. As a product of the declining times it provides a richly textured picture of how the cultured Muslim elite imbued the Mughal city with poetic symbolism to resist obliteration and to spiritually survive amid the shifting power relations of northern India.

The shahrashob came to India from Ottoman Turkey and Persia and became an active genre after 1739, the year Nadir Shah sacked Delhi and turned what was then still a city of peace and prosperity into a scene of dystopian horror. In India the shahrashob was written in Urdu, which with the decline of the Mughal power displaced Persian as the language of court poetry. The turn to Urdu signaled India’s turn away from pan-Islamic or Persian culture.[3] The subject matter of shahrashob also changed after its adoption in India. In Persia and Turkey it was a humorous genre that used the city merely as a backdrop for mocking descriptions of urban youths and their occupations. In the Urdu variation of shahrashob the focus is directly on the city, the tone is more somber, and the verse is written in a direct and simpler style. The content of the Urdu shahrashob is characterized by an exaggerated nostalgia and despondency over the desperate state of the world. In the poetic figuration of Delhi, for example, the city’s former greatness is juxtaposed to its current state of ruin, evidenced by decrepit homes, empty mosques, decaying palaces, and dirty streets. The ruin in the shahrashob serves as a central metaphor of decline. Written by poets suffering through the material conditions of loss of status, wealth, and Mughal patronage, the shahrashob offers a view into how the Mughal city and its parts were reordered by the demands of eighteenth-century social reality.

Most articulate on this theme of decline was the poet Mir, who left Delhi after Ahmad Shah Abdali, an Afghan invader, sacked the city in 1757. Taking up residence in Lucknow, which he found lacking in the stateliness of Delhi, Mir wrote of his beloved Mughal city: “A hard time I spent in Delhi—stiffening my heart to stone/No honor, no grace, no glory—ignominy [i]ntoned/I did not have a friend to counsel or console—desolate every home/Barren wastes stared in the face, I felt benumbed—weary and forlorn.”[4] Earlier in the poem Mir elaborates on the city’s past perfection: “Delhi’s streets were not alleys but pages of a painting/Every face that appeared seemed like a masterpiece.”[5] Having taken us on a walk through the beautiful streets of Delhi, which he likens to walking through a perfected miniature painting, Mir shows us what has become of this picture in the next few verses: “Thy gift, that picturesque life/The heavens’ lack of sympathy has effaced all those impressions.”[6] The poet’s evocation of painting to describe Delhi’s streets is not just an elegant symbol but also functions as a framing device of the material conditions of a devastated city: the beauty of a miniature painting, whose perfection eludes words, signifies the vibrancy that was Delhi, now all but gone.

Another major poet who wrote on the ruins of Delhi is Sauda. His verse has a satirical edge and is critical of the social and political decline of Delhi after the Persian invasions.[7] Like Mir, he too witnessed Delhi’s ruin and uses the same metaphor of the erased picture: “Delhi, did you deserve all this? Perhaps at one time, this city was the heart of a lover/It was wiped out as if it had been an ephemeral drawing.”[8] The city is here cast as the lover, whose betrayal has cost the people the social order and cultural excellence they were used to.[9] Sauda’s satire focuses on the emptiness and ruins of the city.

- If I would begin to do speech/poetry about the desolation of the city,

- Then having heard it, the wits of the owl would take flight.

- There is no house in which the jackal’s cry would not be heard.

- If anyone goes in the evening to the mosque for prayers.

- There’s no lamp there, except the “lamp of the ghoul.”

- In no one’s house does a grinding-wheel or even so much as a stove remain,

- Among a thousand houses, perhaps in one house there burns a lamp.

- It’s hardly a lamp! [Rather,] that house has a wound of grief for all the [other] houses.

- And among those houses, in every direction asses bray.

- Where in the spring we used to sit and hear the hindol [raga].

- They are ruined, those buildings—what can I say to you?—

- The sight of which used to remove hunger and thirst.

- Now if we look, the heart would become disaffected with life.

- Instead of roses, in the flower-beds there’s waist-high grass.

- Here a pillar lies fallen, there an archway lies.

- …

- When did Jahanabad deserve this oppression?

- Not even a lamp is lit there, in a place where there was a chandelier,

- The pride of mirror-chambers now lies fallen in ruins,

- Tens of millions of hearts full of hope, became despairing.

- From the houses ladies of the nobility have emerged,

- They didn’t get an ordinary palanquin—they who used to be possessors

- of fancy litters.[10]

Yet the representation of the ruin in the shahrashob provides more than documentary information about the decline of Delhi in the eighteenth century. The ruin also functioned in this poetry as a space of the poets’ subjective desire to preserve their Mughal identity and worldview and thus resist the new regional power structure.

In the poetical representations of Mir and Sauda the ruins of the Mughal city elevated the architectural space to an object of fantasy. More than an index of the political conditions of the period, the ruin also operated in the symbolic register to transform the subjectivity of the defeated Muslim community and to help it find its way back to order and reason. The principal cause of their suffering was attributed to God’s displeasure with the community of the faithful. For example, Sauda writes of empty mosques and of how they were now less valuable than mule posts.[11] Carla Petievich explains his signification of the empty mosque: “That Muslims should fail to say their prayers, thereby declining to identify themselves as the slaves of Allah, was the most fundamental breach they could make in their contract with the Almighty.”[12] Having once been the ruling class of most of India, a status bestowed by God, the elite Muslims now had to share this position with Hindus, Sikhs, and foreign Christians. A parallel loss of power had occurred internationally, as India could no longer claim an eminent place in the pan-Islamic world.

To help stay this rapid decline and loss of identity the poet introduced the nostalgic motif of the ruined Mughal city. The ruin in the shahrashob functions to give order to the chaotic world, thus in much the same way as the Lacanian point de capiton, or “quilting point,” that holds down the floating signifiers of chaotic times and gives them an order and meaning.[13] The poem uses the ruined Mughal city to center and stabilize the disoriented subject of eighteenth-century India. In this regard the shahrashob and its reiteration of the perfected city frames Mughal space as more than an empty ruin. It instead stands as a symbolic site that thoughtfully veils the contradictions of the period through nostalgia and reaffirms Mughal power relations. The Mughal ruin in the shahrashob is thus a space helping the poet and his audience sublimate the traumas of the declining Mughal Empire and find meaning in and give structure to their lives.

Na’im Ahmad further explains that the representations of the shahrashob had social importance and states that although the poet identifies with the general sorrow and pain of the times, he is not powerless. Ahmad explains the restorative possibilities of shahrashob and tells what it can teach us about the worldview and historical struggles of Indian Muslims: “A look at the genre as a whole does not give an impression of throwing down one’s weapons in the face of difficulties, but rather evokes the courage to stand up firmly against unfavorable circumstances. The shahr-ashob teaches us forcefully about man’s ability to endure sorrow, and his unconquerable power of repelling disasters.”[14] Ahmad thus importantly suggests here that the ruins of Mughal India were never completely abandoned. In the poet’s efforts to make sense of tragic times, preserve the memory of Mughal power, and offer a space to imagine a stable Muslim identity, the ruin becomes a pivotal space. More precisely, the ruined Mughal city serves to restore the fragmented and traumatized subject through an imagined relationship with the glorious past.

Not all Muslims agreed with the backward-looking poets and their longing for the old ways of the Mughal city. While they shared with the poets the notion that Mughal decline resulted from God’s disfavor, they found different solutions. Instead of identifying with the lost glories of bygone days, they sought religious reform. One such movement, led in the eighteenth century by the Sufi philosopher Shah Waliullah (1703–62) and his sons, was influenced by the reforms the Wahhabis had initiated in the Hijaz of the Arabian Peninsula. Waliullah called for the careful study of the Qu’ran and the hadith, or the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed. He also wanted the Indian Muslim community to identify solely with the ummah, or universal community of Muslims. Like the Wahhabis, Waliullah criticized the corruption of Islam by the introduction of non-Islamic beliefs and rituals. His followers would translate this spatially by disavowing the veneration of the heterodox Sufi saints and the pilgrimage to their shrines.

In the eighteenth century many Sufi leaders lost Mughal financial support, or awqaf, for the shrines and either sought alternative support from local rulers or became self-sustaining through reformist programs. It was at this time that Waliulla, a follower of the Sufi order of Naqshbandi, initiated his restructuring of Indian Islam. The schools founded after this movement, such as the Deoband and the Ahl-i Hadis, and the ulema or legal scholars they produced, increased their suspicion of the cult of shrines, casting them as seats of corruption and duplicity. Social unruliness was particularly associated with the festival of the urs, the commemoration of the death anniversary of the saint.[15] In this context of reformist Islam, the ruination of the Sufi shrines and the decaying city signaled not the end of a golden age but the end of the era of Mughal debasement of Islam and heterodoxy: the shrines and decaying city were spaces at which to imagine Muslim renewal and a reorientation to the pure religion of the Arabian Peninsula.

The Sufi shrines, however, did not altogether go away in the eighteenth century. The descendents of the orders continued to attend to the spiritual needs of local worshippers, both Muslim and Hindu. Some, like the Chishti order, went through their own revival, placing a new emphasis on the shariat, or Islamic law.[16] By the end of the eighteenth century, two general perspectives existed in Indian Islam regarding the Mughal era and the Sufi shrines built during Mughal rule. The reformists saw the shrine as an obstacle to their ultimate goal of uniting Indian Muslims with the international umma and cleansing it of all non-Islamic customs. The Sufi orders, on the other hand, continued to emphasize cultural syncretism and preserved the shrines of saints as the spatial axis on which their Islamic teachings and practice turned. Like the Mughal city and its architecture presented in the shahrashob, the shrines of Sufi leaders were also rendered critical spaces whose symbolization helped the Muslim community survive the tumult of the times and reorient itself.

Subject and Subjection: Hodges’s Encounter with the Mughal Monument

As the eighteenth century wore on, the poets of the shahrashob began to share the spaces of Mughal architecture with British artists. For the new British rulers, both the ruins and the still functional palaces, tombs, gardens, and mosques of the Great Mughal became spaces of desire, parallactic objects that continuously vacillated between affirming the ethics of colonial subjectivity and rejecting its very possibility.[17] Emerging from the gap between the two points of identity, the monument simultaneously represented the colonial Real—with its terror, unrestrained expansion, and unethical actions—and the colonial imaginary based on the natural progress of civilization, divine providence, and moral duty. Sara Suleri identifies the gap as the Indian sublime, whose articulation she finds in the speeches of Burke. His speech in Parliament in support of Fox’s East India Bill that sought to place the East India Company under parliamentary control, for example, offers image after image of colonial terror and epistemological failure, making India unrepresentable by the usual methods of cataloguing, mapping, and inventory. As Suleri explains his rhetorical representation of the Indian sublime: “India as a historical reality evokes the horror of sublimity, thus suggesting to the colonizing mind the intimate dynamic it already shares with aesthetic horror; such intimacy provokes the desire to itemize and to list all the properties of the desired object; the list’s inherent failure to be anything other than a list causes the operation of sublimity to open into vacuity, displacing desire into the greater longevity of disappointment.”[18] It is important to note here that in Burke’s rhetoric the sublime sanctions rather than negates colonial expansion. His pointing out of the current failure to know India does not mean that the British should stop trying to know it, and indeed he wanted the British not to leave India but to govern it more ethically. Burke’s strategy of colonial rule was one organized around the essence of failure and lack. The Mughal ruin arises from this epistemological tension of wanting to understand, control, and rule India and from the knowledge that behind these efforts always lies the impossibility of Real, that will not underwrite the symbolization of colonial representations but that nonetheless sanctions the effort to find ever more precise operations of knowledge as ethical endeavors. The void or gap that results from the Real’s objection to the symbolization of Indian architectural spaces will thus be perceived by the colonial artist as the monumental lack, which only he or she can complete through picturesque imagery and writing.

The clearest representation of the volatile encounter with Mughal monuments occurs in the pictorial and written representations of William Hodges. The son of a blacksmith, Hodges apprenticed with Richard Wilson, the landscape painter and founding member of the Royal Academy. His first important appointment was as the commissioned artist of Captain Cook’s second voyage to the South Pacific. On his return he applied to the East India Company to travel to India, hoping to find similar success in depicting foreign landscapes and people there. He arrived in Madras in 1780 and one year later came to work under the patronage and protection of Warren Hastings, the governor general. For the following three years he toured northern India, sketching its landscape and noting geographic details. The paintings he made from these sketches would later earn him membership in the Royal Academy, but he was quickly eclipsed by more objectively disposed picturesque artists like the uncle-and-nephew team, Thomas and William Daniell. Art historians who have studied Hodges focus on establishing the nascence of a colonial aesthetic in his art and often represent his Indian landscapes as the visual and ideological translation of the English picturesque landscape style.[19] My aim is different. I want to examine Hodges’s encounter with the Mughal monument as it was informed by the material realities of eighteenth-century British India and the ideological process of framing the Indian landscape. The questions I seek to answer are how the monuments structured his reckoning with the Indian Real, and, more critically, how the process of identification and symbolization of his art produced a fundamentally different perception of the Mughal monument from that of Burke.

Hodges spent four years in India, from 1780 through 1783, but most of the firsthand information we receive about his tours of the country comes from his travel journal, published in 1793. It is vital to note that the book, written ten years after his return to London, speaks directly to the current debates of colonial policy and the trial of Hastings for committing high crimes and misdemeanors while governor general in India. The style of the text is divided between the spontaneous, ethnographic, topographic, and reflexive writing of the monumental encounter and the distant, philosophical, and disinterested meditations of an artist-philosopher. The two written modes are structured by the parallactic view through which the nondiscursive encounter with the Mughal monument is first mediated in its material existence; only later—ten years later, in fact—does it become signified by colonial ideology. That Hodges preserves both moments in his published book renders his narrative disjointed and difficult. At the same time this disorderly text provides us with a rare glimpse into how Mughal monuments were produced between the artist’s encounter with their raw or sublime state, causing awe and desire, and his idealized encounter when he retroactively inserts himself and the sites into the symbolic order of colonial rule.

The Terror and Tyranny of a Mughal Mosque

Among the many sites that Hodges visited, the one that most exemplifies the parallactic view of the Mughal monument is Aurangzeb’s mosque in Benares. After destroying the Vishvanath temple in 1669, Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughal emperors, ordered the Gyanvapi mosque to be raised in its place. The original temple, built by Raja Man Singh of Amber, provided the foundation and building materials for Aurangzeb’s monumental construction. The mosque was meant to project across the otherwise Hindu cityscape the power of the Mughal state and the religion that it identified with and in whose name it ruled. But the choice of destroying a Hindu temple to construct a mosque was most certainly made to psychologically punish Jai Singh II, the grandson of Raja Man Singh, for offering succor to Maratha Shivaji, the Mughal’s archenemy.[20]

The morphology of the mosque, defined by tall minarets and domes, thus had two principal imperatives: to proclaim the presence of Mughal rule in India and to identify this rule with Islam. When Hodges came to Benares, the mosque, which continued to be used by local Muslims, proclaimed to the new British power the unsettling fact of continued Mughal influence over the landscape. Hodges’s paintings and subsequent writing of the mosque done in London veil this reality and represent the British as ethical actors in an unethical landscape, and Aurangzeb’s mosque, while awe inspiring, was ultimately symbolized as an example of Muslim depravity. This well-ordered representation of the Mughal mosque, however, belies the truth of how Hodges originally encountered it. Shortly after his arrival in Benares, Hodges witnessed the trauma of war that followed Governor General Hastings’s arrest of Raja Chait Singh, the zamindar of Benares, for not paying the extra tribute above the amount agreed on in a prior treaty. The raja’s troops came to rescue him, killing British soldiers and Indian sepoys. A war quickly ensued that eventually led to the absorption of Raja Chait Singh’s lands into the Company’s dominion. Hastings would later be tried and impeached for this and other similarly impulsive acts that would be described in dramatic detail for the British public.

In light of these events, Hodges’s representations of Benares are informed by his aesthetic goals of capturing the Indian geography in the idiom of British landscape art and the sublimation of his experience of a war instigated by his patron. In his journal he states his great desire to see the sacred Hindu city, for here he would for the first time be “able to contemplate the pure Hindoo manners, arts, buildings, and customs, undepraved by any intermixture with the Mahomedans.”[21] Hodges then notes that “the unhappy events that immediately succeeded frustrated, for the present, those designs.”[22] These words present the basic outline of British perception of India and the internal crisis of such perception that will come to destabilize any representation of the Mughal monument. The symbolic ordering of the Indian landscape, traumatically interrupted by the realities of colonial rule and war, will shape Hodges’s encounter with Aurangzeb’s mosque and inform the painting and writings that follow with ambivalence. After another ill-fated battle in the town of Ramnagur, the raja’s soldiers turned against the British in Benares, and Hodges was ordered to evacuate, “leaving behind me the whole of my baggage, excepting my drawings, and a few changes of linen.”[23] He remained in Chunar—a town twenty miles upriver from Benares—until peace was restored. Hodges devotes the remainder of his first two Benares chapters to descriptions of the fighting, records of the number of deaths, and an account of the Company’s final victory.

What Hodges elides in this written report, however, is the cause of the war and the fact that it resulted from economic urgencies wrought by the shifting power relations in India that saw British influence spread without reason or restraint outside the territories of the presidencies. Spurred on by the demand to draw a profit for the Company after the costly wars with Hyder Ali,’ Hastings demanded extra tribute from allied zamindars or landholders. Back in London, politicians like Charles Fox, William Pitt, and Burke saw in these acts evidence that more government oversight of the East India Company was needed. Interestingly enough, when making his case, Burke entered his view of the Indian monument as an ethical sign to contrast the arbitrary and spontaneous misjudgments of the British in India. As he stated in 1783 in support of Fox’s East India Bill: “Every rupee of profit made by an Englishman is lost forever to India. With us are no retributory superstitions, by which a foundation of charity compensates, through ages, to the poor, for the rapine and injustice of a day. With us no pride erects stately monuments which repair the mischiefs which pride had produced, and which adorn a country out of its own spoils. England has erected no churches, no hospitals, no palaces, no schools; England has built no bridges, made no high roads, cut no navigations, dug out no reservoirs. Every other conqueror of every other description has left some monument, either of state or beneficence, behind him.”[24] Burke might easily have been referring to the practice of religious endowments or awqaf of Muslim rulers, which he saw as still operative and as a testament to the endurance of Mughal authority and its spatial practices. Company rule, in contrast, based on unethical commercial practices and power gains, ruined the landscape and erected no monuments or other structures to serve the public good.

Hodges saw the same monuments very differently. Due to his emplacement in the power relations of British India and to his unquestioning support of Company rule in India, he regarded the monument not as an ethical symbol of Indian rule but as a sign of Indian lack (civilizational, political, economic, etc.).[25] He allocated an entire separate chapter to this perception, in which he locates the Mughal monument as the principal site to fathom this lack. All around the monument Hodges delineates the limits of colonial perceptibility and presents his own symbolic meaning of the various forms he encounters in the landscape now under Company rule. In his paintings and prints of the monuments, the real terror of war, the unbridled use of power, and resulting suffering will be suppressed and sublimated in the Mughal ruin. Conversely, the same suppressed reality becomes evident in Hodges’s prose when it appears in the illogical turns the narrative takes as he attempts the impossible insertion of Indian architecture into the symbolic order of British colonialism.

At the start of chapter 4, Hodges reintroduces Benares as a city that is interesting for only one reason: “The same manners and customs prevail amongst these people at this day, as in the remotest period that can be traced in history: and in no instance of religious or civil life have they admitted of any innovations from foreigners.”[26] This idea of timelessness is pictorially represented in the painting he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1788 (figure 1). The Hindus are presumably the small figures moving about on the ghats above the river, engaged in everyday activities; the architecture itself is crumbling and reveals no trace of modern improvements. More telling is the rendering of the climate; as one reviewer in the Morning Post noted: “This picture is stiff and hard; there is no appearance of air throughout, and it is full as cold and heavy as anything we have seen of this artist.”[27] The lack of life and improvement that Hodges projects onto the cityscape of Benares is represented as climatic stagnation. In this view British power is cast as not arbitrary but ethical. It is destined to fulfill Indian lack by protecting India from the forces of unethical tyrants and by ushering in the winds of progress. The illegal annexation of the city from the Hindu Raja Chait Singh is thus transformed in Hodges’s painting into a fantasy of the Hindu city’s desire for British presence and protection.[28]

Having set up the temporal frame, Hodges then begins to describe the physical attributes of the city distinguished by tall buildings and horizontal ghats lining the river. He interestingly mentions the construction of gardens along the river that were meant for enjoying the cool breeze of the evening air. These structures, Hodges explains, were “erected by the charitable contributions of the wealthy, for the benefit of the public.” The positive observation of the construction of public gardens is then quickly mitigated by the introduction of “a considerable Mahomedan mosque” raised “by the most intolerant and ambitious of human beings, the Emperor Aurungzebe, who destroyed a magnificent temple of the Hindoos on this spot, and built the present mosque, said of the same extent and height as the building he destroyed.”[29] Hodges proceeds to describe the streets and houses of Benares. He completes his description of the city with the outlying areas. Amid the distant rubble he spies the remains of a Hindu temple and takes the opportunity to iterate his core assertion about Muslim culture: “Surrounding the city are many ruins of buildings, the effects of Mahomedan intolerance.”[30] Hodges’s framing of the ontological field of northern India now becomes clear. It is structured around the Mughal monument: the Gyanvapi mosque becomes a point de capiton that interpellates the British subject, who then retroactively signifies the mosque by way of colonial ideology. After the process is complete, Hodges becomes an ideological subject of the mosque, and for its part the mosque is turned into a fantasy space of Indian loss that desires fulfillment through the British subject. The mosque and the man are now connected and mutually signifying.

Yet this retroactive process of signification produces its own residue, what Slavoj Žižek calls “the objectal remnant of the signifying operation.”[31] In Hodges’s text and paintings of the Mughal monument the objectal remnant is the excess of its materiality that cannot be represented yet points out the truth of British colonialism: that the current activities of the British—the ousting of native rulers—ultimately do not differ from those of the Muslim tyrants of the past; and that greed and ambition can be found in all people no matter their place of birth, skin color, or religious identification. It is this unspeakable truth that haunts Hodges’s images and texts and renders them ambivalent representations of the Mughal monument.

The Melancholy and Horizons of Mughal Agra

The vicissitudes and shifting power relations of the eighteenth century also shaped the Mughal city and architecture of Agra, where the poets of the shahrashob and the artists of British colonialism intersect. Like Delhi, Agra suffered loss of trade, violence, and ruin at different times in the eighteenth century. As the poet Nazir Akbarabadi (1735–1830), known popularly as Nazir, writes of the city’s status between 1780 and 1781: “Be they Noblemen or artisans, all are helpless for want of livelihood/The wind of disaster seems to have blown away everything.”[32] Of the city’s once beautiful riverfront gardens he writes: “All the gardens in Agra are lying desolate/Without thorns, not to speak of fruits and flowers/Fruit trees stand scorched and dried and alleys covered with dust/In short, all are in the grip of devastating autumn.”[33] The desolation Nazir describes followed the great famine of 1780 that lasted to 1784. Additionally, the decline of the noble classes of Agra is indexed in his verse about the dried-up gardens, as it was they who planted these gardens and built pavilions along the Jumna River. The trading classes and bankers actually prospered during this period of unrest, and commerce continued to grow in Agra. Only the mosques and tombs that had imperial endowments continued to function and meet the needs of the local population and of pilgrims. The shifting demographics, Agra’s marginal status, the material ruin of the built environments of the old Mughal noble classes, and the new growth in trade made the city a heterogeneous urban landscape, defined simultaneously by decline and productivity.

Hodges and Mir both represent Agra through their respective artistic idioms, Hodges through the picturesque and Mir through the shahrashob. This section will consider how Hodges’s and Mir’s encounters with the city were structured according to their respective tropes of decline. Their writing and art veil the multiplicity of Agra’s Mughal monuments. As Lefebvre describes the effects of the symbolic operation that they enact: “The world of images and signs exercises a fascination, skirts or submerges problems, and diverts attention from the ‘real’—i.e., from the possible. While occupying space, it also signifies space, substituting a mental and therefore abstract space for spatial practice—without, however, doing anything really to unify those spaces that it seems to combine in the abstraction of signs, so the produced differences are supplanted in advance by differences which are induced—and reduced to signs.”[34] As we will see, in their encounter with the diversity of the Mughal city of Agra, Mir and Hodges abstract its monuments into signs of decline and ruin that veil the spatial practices of the mosques, shrines, and tombs they seek to describe. This is why their representations meet resistance both internally, from the monument’s refusal of the symbolic ordering of both colonialism and the shahrashob, and externally, from the contending aesthetic practices that emphasize and celebrate the productive, differential nature of Agra and its spatial practices.

Hodges reached the outskirts of Agra on 23 February 1783 in the company of Major James Brown and his troops. At this point the artist had been in India for almost four years. He had trekked back and forth across the territory in and around the British diwan, but it was not until his tour with Brown that Hodges ventured into a land peripheral to British influence. Brown was sent into the Mughal heartland by Hastings to gain a foothold in the emperor Shah Alam’s greatly divided court and to drive out Maratha influence there. The power of the Great Mughal, while nominally honored, was understood as fragmented along many factions and open to intrigue. Along with the Jats, Marathas, and Afghans, the English circled the court in Delhi, ready to make use of any clear opening to gain influence. It was in the accompaniment of this mission that Hodges came to Agra, and once again his actions and goals would be informed by the demands of military conquest and the desire to expand British colonial power. The attempt to weaken the emperor’s power would be represented by the British back home as unethical. Of the twenty-two charges Burke and his colleagues brought against Hastings, the second charge concerned the continuous mistreatment and impoverishment of Shah Alam that began with Hastings’s denial of imperial tribute in 1772.[35] Hastings for his part defended his actions as appropriate to the context and claimed that he performed them to protect the Company’s territorial and business interests, which the ineffectual Mughal emperor jeopardized.

Hodges would help Hastings build this case through the exhibition of his representations of the Mughal heartland with its monuments in ruin. However, as in Benares, these representations must be understood as retroactively signified by the ideology of British colonialism. While on the ground in Agra, standing in the midst of the Mughal monuments, Hodges would have witnessed the material decline of the Mughal Empire, but he could not have missed the concurrent continuation of its culture in the activities at the tombs, mosques, and other shrines that continued to be visited by both Hindus and Muslims. In his representations of the Mughal monuments, he suppressed the spatial practices in the sign of ruin, fragmenting the landscape along the lines of the Mughal past and the empty present and foreclosing on the possibility of the city’s rebirth. These practices do not totally disappear but leave traces in the text. As Michel de Certeau explains: “But whatever this new understanding of the past holds to be irrelevant—shards created by the selection of material, remainders left aside by an explication—comes back, despite everything, on the edges of discourse or in its rifts and crannies: ‘resistances,’ ‘survivals,’ or delays discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of ‘progress’ or a system of interpretation.”[36] Therefore the spatial practices that kept Agra’s monuments animate were not definitively erased from Hodges’s representations. The indelible ambivalence of the monumental sign threaten to expose the history imposed by colonial power as a fiction, as no more than a rhetorical device holding no claim to the truth. In Hodges’s text this threat manifests itself in the iteration of the Mughal monument as nothing more than an empty space of a distant and irretrievable past.

This spatial operation, whereby the multiplicity of Agra is submerged under the sign of ruin, is demonstrated in Hodges’s visit to and subsequent representation of Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra. His visit begins with his entering the garden through the main gateway, a monumental structure decorated with multicolored marble and two stories of arched windows. He descends into the garden and sees Akbar’s tomb through the trees lining the pathway leading to it. Hodges describes the hot sun and its blazing rays on the tomb’s surface as producing a sublime and ineffable effect, “a glare of splendour almost beyond the imagination of an inhabitant of these northern climates to conceive.”[37] The tomb is then described in great detail, lending credibility to his representation. Desirous to see the sarcophagus, he meets “an old Mollah,” presumably the mutawalli (caretaker) of the tomb, who unlocks the entrance for him. This man leads Hodges into the inner chamber, where he is confronted with the truth of Akbar, “an Emperor, whose great actions have resounded through the world” and whom Hodges, in contradiction to his usual tropes of ruin and decay, acknowledges to be “still held in veneration.”[38] The persistence of the memory of and reverence for Akbar in the everyday life of Agra, which Hodges is forced to recognize, resists the historicizing gaze that would otherwise render the site a ruin. But he is quick enough to cover the gap between his own symbolism and the spatial practices of the tomb through an immediate moralizing description of what he sees after climbing to the top of the tomb’s gateway minaret and looking out across the landscape: “From the summit of the minarets in the front… a spectator’s eye may range over a prodigious circuit of country, not less than thirty miles in a direct line, the whole of which is flat, and filled with ruins of ancient grandeur: the river Jumna is seen at some distance, and the glittering towers of Agra. This fine country exhibits, in its present state, a melancholy proof of the consequences of a bad government, of wild ambition, and the horrors attending civic dissensions; for when the governors of this country were in plenitude of power, and exercised their rights with wisdom, from the excellence of its climate, and some degree of industry, it must have been a perfect garden; but now all is desolation and silence.”[39] This sorrowful description of the monumental landscape of Agra, one of the oldest Mughal capitals, along with a graphic representation of the monumental gate of Akbar’s tomb (figure 3), veil the spatial practices at the site under the trope of ruin. Although figures are presented walking into the tomb and sitting around it, that they are diminished by the broken architectural ornaments reaffirms Mughal demise rather than survival—forestalling any onset of guilt over British trespasses on the realm of the emperor’s authority.

The Taj Mahal produces a deeper crisis in Hodges’s narrative of Mughal ruination. With money coming from revenues of land endowed to the tomb by Shah Jahan himself, the site did not fall into ruin like other structures in its vicinity. At the Taj Mahal the spatial practices of prayer, veneration, and monument preservation put in place by Shah Jahan continued. The caretakers Hodges describes “appear most orderly and decent,” differing from others he had encountered.[40] The efficient custodians, working fountains, well-maintained gardens, and the architectural masterpiece of the tomb itself produced a tableau of sublime beauty that resisted Hodges’s symbolic order of Mughal decline and decay more than any other monument he encountered. The tomb’s undiminished presence, Hodges remarks, was due to “the lands allotted for the support of the building not being dismembered from it,”[41] a clear acknowledgment of the endurance of Mughal charitable endowments. The striking beauty of the tomb cannot be contained by Hodges’s architectural categories and thus forces him to abstract it even further from the surrounding landscape, signifying it as an exceptional space, separate from all other Mughal monuments. As he writes: “The center building is in a perfect state; but all those which surround it bear strong marks of decay.”[42] The spatial practices that explain the persistence of the Taj Mahal’s preservation (that it was attached to the charitable lands left by a munificent Muslim ruler to maintain his memory) is again suppressed, and the ethereal beauty of the monument is all that comes to signify its space in Hodges’s text.

Fig 3: J. Brown after William Hodges, A View of the Gate of the Tomb of the Emperor Akbar at Secundrii, 1786. Engraving © British Museum

Both Akbar’s tomb and the Taj Mahal could be said to contain within their space the monumental Real that refused Hodges’s symbolization of decline. The Real and the survival of Mughal spatial practices work to “discreetly perturb the pretty order of a line of ‘progress’ or a system of interpretation” in the artist’s text and image.[43] Spatial practices that menace the text also mark the place of the differential; as Certeau further explains, they “symbolize a return of the repressed, that is, a return of what, at a given moment, has become unthinkable in order for a new identity to become thinkable.”[44] Thus the ideological impossibility of Mughal spaces rendered them to be more than abstract spaces of Mughal decline, as a pure ideological reading of Hodges’s art would have them appear. On the contrary, Hodges’s pictures and writing were inflected by the heterogeneity of Agra, where materiality intersected with memory to produce the city as a differential space, a space of corporal experience. Through his visit to Agra, his march up the minarets, his treks through the ruins, and his visits to tombs, Hodges confronted the spatial practices of Mughal India. Traces of that contradictory confrontation suppressed in his representations return in the anxious iteration of the trope of Mughal ruin.

A similar practice of the suppression of the spatial practices of Agra and of its monuments takes place when Mir comes to the city in 1763. He too uses melancholy and memory to perceive the city, much as he did with Delhi, in a state of decline. As he writes of his impression of the city in his autobiography:

Two or three times I walked through the city end to end and met with its scholars, Sufis and poets. But I did not find any person to talk to who could comfort my restless heart. I said to myself, “Allah be praised! This is the same city whose every street once had [its share of] Gnostics; perfect masters; scholars; poets; writers; sages; jurists; dialecticians; philosophers; Sufis; scholars of the Hadith; school teachers; dervishes; spiritual mentors; mullas; Qur’an memorisers; Qur’an reciters; imams of mosques and those who called to the prayers, as wells as madrasas, mosques, hospices, abodes of faquirs, inns for travellers, family homes and gardens. But now I see not one place where I can sit and enjoy myself, and I find not one man whose company I may share.” All I saw was a terrifying wasteland. And so I grieved and returned [after] I had spent four months in the city of my origin. I left with my eyes awash with tears of longing and reached the forts of Suraj Mal.[45]

In Mir’s description, Agra’s ruins serve the same function as the ruins of Delhi, to keep the memory of the city’s former greatness alive as a means to resist the spatial practices and power relations of the present. The extent of Mir’s suppression of Agra’s life, its flux and energy under his trope of decline, will be observable when I discuss the poetry of Nazir below. The crucial point I am making here is that both Hodges’s and Mir’s representations are aligned with the powers of the eighteenth century, and both want to present their patrons, the East India Company and the Mughals, respectively, as ethical. To create a pleasing prospect, the spatial practices of Agra—the brutal truth of power, of Mughal decline and British ascendancy—were suppressed in the poetic and pictorial representations of the landscape.

Fanny Parkes: Performing Difference in Agra’s Mughal Spaces

Both Hodges and Mir erase the multiplicity of Agra through the tropes of Mughal ruin and nostalgia. Their creative processes, shaped by the distinct power relations and processes of identification of Delhi and the British diwan, veiled the antagonism between their symbolization of Mughal space that fragments the built environment into past and present, as well as the spatial practices that continue to unify and signify it. Hodges work in Agra has been critiqued as aesthetically unsuccessful due to the difficulty of representing the monument in the style and mode of British landscape art. Giles Tillotson remarks that the awkwardness of Hodges’s scenes of the Taj Mahal resulted from the limitations of the picturesque style he employed: “Quite apart from the symmetry and formality which it shares with many other Mughal buildings, every salient quality of the design powerfully disqualifies it: the material is smooth, the colour unified, large surfaces are plain, and its perfect finish is a defiant challenge to decay.”[46] While this stylistic conflict is certainly present, a crumbling ruin being much better suited for the picturesque style, the problem of representing the Taj Mahal must also be linked to the persistence of Mughal spatial practices that contradicted Hodges’s symbolism of the decay of Mughal India. The Taj Mahal functioned as a social space whose practices and ordering were maintained indefinitely by the emperor’s charitable endowment that had supported the veneration of the tombs, regular prayer, gardening, and restoration of the Taj Mahal since the structure was completed. Both the Taj Mahal and even Akbar’s tomb were living monuments whose space not only ensured the persistence of these sites in the lives of Agra’s inhabitants but also connected them to the economy, rhythms, and everyday life of the rest of the city. As such, they refused to lend themselves to picturesque perceptions and categorizations.

Not all artists reduced the multiplicity of Agra into signs of ruin and lack. Some saw the waning status of Agra not as a difficulty but as an opportunity to explore the creative possibilities its sites held. They used the spaces of the Taj Mahal, the gardens, the bazaar, and other sites to recreate themselves, to celebrate everyday life, and to engage with the spatial practices that informed it. Two artists that offer such a view of the multiplicity of Mughal monumental space are Parkes and Nazir.

Fanny Parkes was the wife of a lower-level servant of the East India Company and lived in India between 1822 and 1846. Not taking to life in the company’s service, Parkes routinely struck out on her own and crossed India on horseback and by riverboat. Fluent in Urdu, respectful of Indian history and customs, and constantly in pursuit of picturesque scenery, she entered the space of Mughal palaces, tombs, and gardens, joining in native practices whenever possible. Writers of women’s space in British India who have studied Parkes’s travel narratives focus principally on her text and its symbolic ordering of space.[47] These writers abstract the geographical and monumental materiality of the landscape that Parkes reckoned with into an idealized construct of gender and colonialism. Sara Suleri, for example, views Parkes’s encounter with the Indian landscape in this way: “Parks’s picturesque dehistoricizes the subcontinent into an amorphously aesthetic space.”[48] The starting point of most postcolonial writing on gender and colonial space is the symbolic or tropological constitution of this space, that is, space that already comes disposed as a picturesque art object for the subject. Suleri’s assessment that “the shrines that Fanny Parks seeks out are already relics, experiences to be represented with an elegiac acknowledgment of their vacated power,”[49] is predicated on this assumption. However, Parkes’s accounts of her visits to the Mughal palaces and tombs not only contradict such a representation but also provide us with a chance to see how these sites can become radically open spaces of social ordering and resistance in the colonial era.

Parkes’s visits to the women’s quarters, or zenana, of the Mughal palace in Delhi and to the Taj Mahal were, as we will see, unique for her time and gender, and her description of these visits resists the symbolization of colonial or even postcolonial ideological orders. Unafraid to point out—and at times celebrate—the lived spaces of these monuments, or to grieve their slow decay, Parkes’s writings provide a striking contrast to Hodges’s and should certainly not be regarded as the repetition “in diminution proportions of the male sublime.”[50]

Parkes’s vision of Indian life focuses strongly on the status of women, the present state of architectural ruins, and religious customs. Her writings offer a rare blend of visual description, historical explanation, and social critique. This triangulated narrative is apparent in Parkes’s portrayal of the zenana in the Red Fort in Delhi. She describes the women’s quarters as “mal propre [not very clean],” the fountains of a “superb hall” as not working and filled with black water from the kitchen drains. She then remarks on the relative beauty of the women in the zenana, “there be two or three handsome women and all the rest remarkably ugly.”[51] Finally she writes of the gifts she received as she departed: two necklaces of jasmine flowers and a bag of spices. Parkes was later chastised by the British authorities for accepting these presents, but she knew that this gift giving was a custom, and she herself offered one gold mohur, or coin, in return. What she goes on to write about her time in the palace is very telling of her particular sensitivity to the pathos of the exchange: “Look at the poverty, the wretched poverty of these descendents of the emperors! In former times strings of pearls and valuable jewels were placed on the necks of departing visitors. When the Princess Hyat-ool-Nissa Begum in her fallen fortunes put the necklace of freshly-gathered white jasmine flowers over my head, I bowed with as much respect as if she had been the Queen of the universe. Others may look upon these people with contempt, I cannot; look at what they are, at what they have been!”[52] Unlike Company servants and British historians, who looked down on the Mughals in their declining years, Parkes acknowledges their authority, which in her eyes remains undiminished. The Red Fort and the private quarters of the palace are represented as spaces enlivened with the memory of Mughal culture and practices. They are not the dominated spaces of British power or the empty shells her male counterparts represent.[53]

Parkes’s visit to the Taj Mahal in 1835 illustrates more precisely how her participation in the spatial practices of the Mughal monument structured her understanding of these spaces. Her written narrative is a heterogeneous representation comprising a description of the tomb and its history as well as of its present use by the Muslim community: “The Musulmans who visit the Taj lay offerings of money and flowers both on the tombs below and the cenotaphs above; they also distribute money in charity, at the tomb, or at the gate, to the fakirs.”[54] She represents the relationship of the Taj Mahal with the rest of Agra in her portrayal of the festival of Eid held both outside the great gateway and inside the first courtyard of the tomb complex. She describes the diversity of the scene: “Crowds of gaily-dressed and most picturesque natives were seen in all directions passing through the avenue of fine trees and by the side of the fountains to the tomb: they added great beauty to the scene, whilst the eye of taste turned away pained and annoyed by the vile round hats and stiff attire of the European gentlemen, and the equally ugly bonnets and stiff and graceless dresses of the English ladies.”[55] Parkes is struck by the oddity of the British in this scene, where it reveals their estrangement from such lively contexts in which tradition, history, and religion commingle. The spatial practices that give meaning to the space unsettle the ideological symbolization of the monument as an empty ruin that Hodges and other picturesque artists represented in their work.

The radical dimension of the Taj Mahal that Parkes captures is described by Lefebvre as a monument’s open horizon of meaning, “a specific or indefinite multiplicity of meanings, a shifting hierarchy in which now one, now another meaning comes momentarily to the fore, by means of—and for the sake of—a particular action.”[56] Through her sensory experience with the space, Parkes was in sympathy with the spatial practices of the monument itself. In the context of the festival and party at the Taj Mahal, the monument becomes a differential space whose lived realities and practices contradict the ideological ordering of the dominant power.

Parkes’s writing of the physical upkeep of the Taj Mahal and its constant renewal by its caretakers also resists the symbolic order of British power and the trope of Mughal ruin. “The marble is cleaned every year and kept in a state of perfect purity and repair. Constant attention is requisite to remove the grass and young trees that shoot forth in any moist crevice: the birds carry the seeds of the peepal tree to the roof, and the young trees shoot forth, injuring those buildings that are in repair while they impart great beauty to ruins.”[57] Parkes does not end her visit to the Taj Mahal without performing an act of communion with its female occupants. She goes to the less visited tombs inside the Taj Mahal complex, the tomb of Akbarabadi Begum, from which she takes away a piece of the fallen red stone, and of Fatehpuri Begum, made of white marble. As a parting gesture she follows the local custom, practiced by both Hindus and Muslims, of leaving rupees and roses at the cenotaph of Shah Jahan’s wife, Mumtaz Mahal. This gesture, she points out, brought her in “favour in the eyes of the attendants.” To express their respect they in turn offered Parkes bouquets of flowers and turned on the fountains as she walked through the gardens and kept them on until she left. The sight of a British woman showing deference to the customs of the tomb and recognizing it as a historical Muslim space, while others of her kind used it for lunch parties, no doubt touched the attendants. Her experience at the Taj Mahal sets Parkes apart from her social group and caused her to realize that she occupied a space different from theirs: “Can you imagine anything so detestable? European ladies and gentlemen have the band to play on the marble terrace, and dance quadrilles in front of the tomb!”[58]

Parkes ends her description of the Taj Mahal by asserting that the tomb is first and foremost an Islamic space where the memory, rituals, and religion of the Mughals are still alive and renewed daily: “I cannot enter the Taj without feelings of deep devotion: the sacredness of the place, the remembrance of the fallen grandeur of the family of the Emperor…, the solemn echoes, the dim light, the beautiful architecture, the exquisite finish and delicacy of the whole, the deep devotion with which the natives prostrate themselves when they make their offerings of money and flowers at the tomb, all produce deep and sacred feelings; and I could no more jest or indulge in levity beneath the dome of the Taj, than I could in my prayers.”[59] Parkes’s writings offer us a view of the Mughal monuments of Delhi and Agra through the prism of spatial practice. Although she may share the same picturesque aesthetic and historical disposition as Hodges, her marginal status as a woman allowed her a certain freedom to express her awareness of realities that contradicted the images of the British colonial project. In her writings, Mughal monuments are accorded a greater horizon of meaning and represented as spaces pulsating with Mughal culture and power.

The Contingent Poetry of Agra by Nazir Akbarabadi

The other example of nonauthorized representations of the Mughal monument come in the poetry of Nazir. Celebrated for their catholic reach, greater than even that of the shahrashob, Nazir’s poems are concerned not only with the nobility but also with the wider social fabric of Agra. What further distinguishes Nazir’s poetry is the level of creative freedom he enjoyed due to his employment as a teacher (rather than being a court poet). Although he was invited repeatedly to work at the court of the nawab of Oudh, he remained in Agra to live a life of austerity. His writings are focused on the subject of everyday life in the Mughal city, its nature, festivals, games, rituals, lovers, climate, and space.[60] He writes about Muslim festivals like Eid-ul-Fitr and Shab-i Barat as comfortably as he does about the Hindu holidays of Holi, Diwali, and Basant.

When Nazir’s poetry focuses on the subject of the city, it provides a new perspective of the tumult of the end of the eighteenth century, or more precisely, of the resulting creative opportunities to restructure society based on the ideal of egalitarianism. As Ishrat Haque writes, “Nazir’s writings present a refreshing response to the ‘times of troubles,’ instead of expressing a sense of nostalgia or frustration for the world that was no more, he faced the challenge of the age by exploring the present and by seeking inspiration for his poetry from the common man.”[61] In his satirical poem “Life Is a Great and Varied Show,” he outlines the many wonderful contradictions of his world: “The whole scene seems to have been created by one great spell of magic.”[62] Although he produces an inventory of oppositions—the weak are strong, the strong weak, the poor are rich, and the rich poor—each stanza ends with the euphoric surrender to the great show. Unlike Mir and Sauda, whose verse resists the perceived decline in the Mughal social order, Nazir takes an ironic and almost giddy tone as he explores the possibilities of a new social order that this decline offers. The built environments of Agra, its palaces, river, gardens, and mosques, are suffused with Nazir’s awareness of the radical reordering of society spurred on by the challenging times.

In his poem “Swimming in Agra,” the banks of the Jumna, once a leisure space for Mughal nobility, are transformed into a free public space. In the swimming season in Agra, the beautiful ones go to the river. Some spectators go to watch them, but others are genuinely interested in watching the performance of expert swimmers. However, it is mainly a festive occasion for the majority of the crowd. The young boys, the grown-ups, even old people love to join in the fun. The crowd extends for miles along the bank of the river.[63]

The rest of the poem describes the integrated crowd constituted by the young and old, the handsome and ugly. The rich in their fancy houses and on their barges play music and drink. They are presented as enjoying the swimming presentations with “ordinary folk.” Everyone is in the moment, and for a time the sensuality of the swimming festival overtakes the burdens of everyday life and turns the banks of the Jumna River into the differential space of play and enjoyment. If one juxtaposes this lively scene with Hodges’s view of the ruins, the contradictions inherent in the latter’s perception become clear: while the decay of built environments may signal a change in power relations, the social landscape continues to be abundant and vital in Agra.

When Nazir writes of the Taj Mahal, he criticizes the extravagant outlays made by the rich to maintain the architecture of the Taj Mahal, but in the end he agrees that the money is well spent, pointing to the Taj Mahal’s global fame. The poem is not among his best, as his verse is better attuned to descriptions of the lively scenes of Agra than to outlines of architectural form, but in its relative simplicity it affords us a glimpse of the entire complex of the tomb through Nazir’s eyes. He describes the beauty and perfection of the tomb, its color, decoration, and parts, and he even recognizes those that maintain the complex: “The care-takers who live in [the few other buildings] are fortunate. The smell of jasmine and roses in the flower-garden around the buildings is all-pervading.”[64] Nazir presents the monument as embedded in the living fabric of its environment—a stark contrast to Hodges’s perspective, which abstracts the Taj Mahal from its social meaning and cultural context.

The poetry of Nazir and the travel narrative of Parkes, alongside the shahrashob and Hodges’s paintings, reveal the eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Mughal monument as a parallactic object that is not simply a ruin of history but an unstable space defined by multiplicity. For Hodges and the shahrashob poets it was the impossible object of desire that also signified the shifting power relations of Mughal India. Nazir and Parkes, free of ties to the courts or governments in power, were at greater liberty to experience the Mughal monuments on a visceral level that defied the logic and logos of such power.

After these poets and artists, the Mughal monument would remain to defy all those that came next to impose a symbolic order on it. This is the impossibility of the parallactic object that, as Žižek explains, “eludes the symbolic grasp and thus causes the multiplicity of symbolic perspectives.”[65] By tracing the Mughal monument’s condition of multiplicity back to the late eighteenth century I have shown how the symbolization of the Indian landscape was marked by failure and frustration, but also by radical openness and creativity. The failure, however, does not mean that artists and officials would stop trying to make sense of the Mughal monuments. Indeed, it ignited their desire to find other and better strategies of reckoning with these spaces, as the ensuing chapters will reveal.

2    FROM CUNNINGHAM TO CURZON
Producing the Mughal Monument in the Era of High Imperialism

BETWEEN 1803 AND 1857, some Mughal structures in Agra, Fatehpur Sikri, and Delhi continued to function as palaces, mosques, forts, and shrines. However, since revenues from land controlled by the British government supported their operations, they faced several disruptions in their spatial practices. First, the Islamic institution of awqaf, the charitable and tax-free endowments of land made by the emperors and nobles for the upkeep of Islamic structures, was altered. Soon after the territory of the Upper Provinces came under British rule, local governments assumed custodianship of the charitable lands and rescinded their tax-free status. In 1816 the pensions of the khadims, the keepers of the Taj Mahal, were discontinued, “and the fruit grown in the gardens was sold for the benefit of Government.”[1] The state allocated funds for the repair of major monuments only when it desired. For example, in 1808 Lord Minto appointed a Taj committee to oversee the repairs of the tomb and provided a stipend.[2] In 1818 Lord Hastings provided funds for and directed repairs of Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra and the Sufi tombs of Fatehpur Sikri. Then in 1847 this trend of monument protection ended when Lord Hardinge directed the collector to discontinue the revenue-free status of the villages connected with the dargah (shrine) of Sheikh Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri, hastening its decay.[3] The Mughal monuments of Delhi faired better. In 1822 all waqf properties held for the emperor in a British government trust were transferred to a special magistrate called a daroga.[4] Unlike in the district of Agra, it seemed that revenues from the waqf lands were used to repair and clean Delhi’s mosques.[5] Yet even as the religious spaces were conserved, other structures like palaces and gardens fell into a state of shocking disrepair.

The noncommittal relationship of the British government with the Mughal monuments came to a sudden halt after the calamitous events surrounding the Uprising of 1857.[6] Ignited by the sepoys (Indian soldiers), who feared that the British army was planning their collective religious conversion, the rebellion quickly developed into a mass uprising that drew support from other groups of society. Among these were native aristocrats, who felt their independence arbitrarily rescinded, and Hindus and Muslims who saw their social practices threatened by Christian missionaries and British academic curricula.[7] Fueled by these intersecting grievances, the Uprising constituted a desperate attempt to stay the forces of change by overthrowing the British ruler. Touching all classes, castes, and religious communities, the Uprising proved that the new social order arising from British reform policies and the cultural arrogance of the first half of the nineteenth century did more to alienate the rulers from the ruled than to bind the two closer together.

While the Gangetic plains served as the theater of the insurgency, the city of Delhi was center stage. Here the Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah II—or as the British depreciatively called him, the King of Delhi—still held court. Rallying to the shout of “Chalo Dilli!,” or “let’s go to Delhi!,” the sepoys of Meerut turned in the direction of the Mughal city. They arrived on 10 May and headed straight for the Red Fort, and from there to the palace of the emperor. Their actions there would mark the climax of the Uprising. First, they forced their way through the Lahore Gate, killing several British residents en route. Next, they entered the diwan-i amm, the public audience hall, and called for the emperor to appear. When he did, the sepoys demanded that he, the reigning sovereign of India, take his position as their leader. The aged emperor demurred at first, but faced with the threat of further killings, he eventually agreed.

British retaliation did not begin until July, and the fighting lasted for several months. In September, after the British had regained Delhi, they captured the emperor and his sons in Humayun’s tomb, where they had taken refuge. Bahadur Shah was forced to stand trial in the Red Fort. He was found guilty of treason and exiled to Burma, where he lived out the rest of his days. His sons Mirza Mughal and Mirza Khizr Sultan, as well as Bahadur Shah’s grandson, Mirza Abu Bakr, were shot dead by a Captain Hodson upon capture. Thus ended the Mughal line.[8]

After calm returned to Northern India, the power relations between British rulers and Indian subjects were recalibrated in light of Indian resistance to the British state’s reforms. Part of this recalibration consisted of a change in the identity of British rule itself. The East India Company was relieved of its administrative duties and replaced by the crown, known in India as the British Raj. British rule over India thus received royal sanction, and the Mughal emperor was supplanted with a British empress who was to be the new “focus of Indian loyalty and the fountain of Indian hope.”[9] The state also gained a new understanding of its function in India. Unlike the preceding Utilitarian government of Lord Bentinck and Thomas Babington Macaulay, which saw Indians as subjects capable of reform, the British Raj eschewed this view, citing biological and cultural differences.[10] Rudyard Kipling wrote of this unsentimental abandonment of social reform: “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”[11] After the traumas of the Uprising the British required a new master-signifier to restore order and give meaning to their presence in India.[12] This mastersignifier would be race. As Ann Laura Stoler describes its structural function in the era of modern imperialism: “In the nineteenth century… race becomes the organizing grammar of an imperial order in which modernity, the civilizing mission and the ‘measure of man’ were framed. And with it ‘culture’ was harnessed to do more specific political work; not only to mark difference, but to rationalize the hierarchies of privilege and profit, to consolidate the labor regimes of expanding capitalism, to provide psychological scaffolding for the exploitative structures of colonial rule.”[13] This signifying power of race enabled Kipling’s articulation of the new ethics of British Indian power relations—“the white man’s burden.” Race also underwrote the governmental discourse of cultural protection and preservation. It was the new point de capiton, pinning down the nondiscursive and floating signifiers of imperial India and arranging them into a presentable tableau of reason and munificence.

The power relations that developed in this late nineteenth-century context between the ruler and the ruled had profound effects on the spatial ordering of the Mughal monument. This chapter begins by examining the government’s agonizing scheme of suppressing the sublime monumentality of Mughal architecture through the practices of the archaeological survey. It will then consider how the discourse of monumentality displaced the discourse of science when Viceroy Curzon took control of the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and reinstated Mughal architecture as imperial monuments. I argue that rather than trying to hide the contradictory lived realities of the monument behind the discourse of science—the strategy of the surveyors—Curzon encouraged a certain fear of and fascination with the unknowable other, the monumental Real, in these spaces. At the same time Indian nationalist ideology reordered the Mughal monument that rendered the dominant order paradoxical and ambivalent.

Setting up the Survey of the Mughal Monument

In the years following the Uprising, the British government took several disjointed and discrepant steps toward ordering the Mughal monuments. The first of these was the establishment of the ASI in 1861. Lord Canning’s memo outlining the mission statement echoes the ethical imperative of the archaeological survey: “To place on record for the instruction of future generations, many particulars that might be rescued from oblivion and throw light upon the early history of England’s dependency.”[14] Although race is not mentioned here, the metaphor of “light” and the state’s paternalist responsibility for its “dependency” resonate with Kipling’s injunction, “Take up the White man’s burden/Send forth the best ye breed.”[15] In the field of archaeology, Britain sent forth Alexander Cunningham, the first director of the ASI, who based his archaeological practice on the trigonometrical survey and limited his work on monuments to information gathering.[16] Between 1862 and 1872 Cunningham and his assistants compiled data on the historical remains of Delhi and Agra; the activities of taking measurements, making drawings, ascertaining dates, and noting locations marked the parameters of their investigational practice. The government then published the data as annual reports of the ASI. These texts represent the Mughal monument as a museological artifact, one excised from the landscape and placed in the religio-historic category of Islamic architecture.

The ASI’s categorization of architecture along religious divisions was not novel; rather, it continued the parsing practices of the architectural historian James Fergusson and the historian James Mill. Both scholars placed Mughal monuments under the rubric of “Saracenic” or “Mahomedan.”[17] Their labeling may seem a minor analytic operation, but it determined the framework for all later investigations into Indian architecture and persists uncontested to this day in the art historical study of Indian architecture. This new mode of ordering was fundamental to the supposedly objective and dispassionate study of India. Counterpoised to the subjective mode of Romantic study with its personal flourishes and philosophic embellishments, the new analytic, as described by Mill, offered the most effective means of uncovering the universal truths of this country: “But the mental habits which are acquired in mere observing, and in the acquisition of languages, are almost as different as any mental habit can be, from the powers of combination, discrimination, classification, judgment, comparison, weighing, inferring, inducting, philosophizing in short; which are the powers of most importance for extracting the precious ore from a great mine of rude historical materials.”[18] Fergusson applied this method of study to the Mughal monument and radically transformed its representation from the sensuous and melancholic space of Hodges’s text into an object of British will and authority. In the appendix of the expansion to his Illustrated Handbook of Architecture, he explains that the scientific method allowed him to read architecture as a trace of past races and to arrange these traces into a discernable and universal order: “And when these [traces] are read,—when all the phenomena are gathered together and classified, we find the same perfection of Order, the same beautiful simplicity of law pervading the same complex variety of results, which characterise all the phenomena of nature, and the knowledge of which is the highest reward of intellectual exertion.”[19] Fergusson and Mill both operated under what Lefebvre calls the “illusion of transparency,” a kind of perception that reduces the space of architecture to an elegant design or code. For the architectural scholar transfixed by its genius there is nothing beyond this design that needs further investigation; the representation appears “free of traps or secret places.”[20] By the same token Lefebvre explains, “anything hidden or dissimulated—and hence dangerous—is antagonistic to transparency,”[21] and thus left outside the field of vision. The spatial practices of Indian temples, shrines, and mosques, the rituals, recitations, redolence, and revelry that Fergusson encountered in his travels in the 1840s, were cast into the shadows, from where they antagonized his illuminating text.[22]

After the events of 1857, when Fergusson was writing his architectural histories in London, he realized how his work could intersect with the interests of the state. As Tapati Guha-Thakurta explains: “The empire in India was crying out for the institution of discipline. The subject nation, as Fergusson was all too aware, could best be kept in control ‘by the superiority of our knowledge and the perfection of our organization.’”[23] In its service to the government—a government that wanted to suppress or deny the persistence of other authorities, especially that of the Mughals—the ASI would adopt Mill and Fergusson’s methodology. Consequently, the ASI reports continued the agonizing process of fragmenting the Mughal monument from the landscape, veiling its spatial practices and its connection to the material realities of its surroundings.

The categorization of Mughal architecture as Islamic, coupled with the “objective” mode of analysis, I argue, must be understood in terms of the overall political aim of reducing its very monumentality. Lefebvre describes monumentality as informed by “all the aspects of spatiality”: the ideological, the material, and the creative, or “the spaces proper to each faculty, from the sense of smell to speech; the gestural and the symbolic.”[24] But because the ASI’s practices suppressed knowledge of the religious and of other unquantifiable spatial practices, they restricted the view of what made a monument monumental. The codification of its space produced a certain kind knowledge of the monument that essentially countermanded its inherent multiplicity. As Lefebvre explains: “The codifying approach is quite unable to cover all facets of the monumental. Indeed, it does not even come close, for it is the residual, the irreducible—whatever cannot be classified or codified according to categories devised subsequent to production—which is, here as always, the most precious and the most essential, the diamond at the bottom of the meltingpot.”[25] This “diamond” was precisely what gave the Mughal monument the power to awe; it moved Indians to identify with it and to imagine new futures through it. That the sepoys amplified their resistance to Company power at the monumental Red Fort took the British administrators by surprise. The ensuing program of retaliation thus aimed to suppress the power of these sites and to prevent the imagination of the Indian people from regaining entry. In the period immediately following the Uprising, many Mughal-era structures of Delhi such as river pavilions and mansions were reduced to rubble, while the larger monuments, like the Red Fort and the Jami Masjid, were held in the government’s possession, and Mughal urban practices were replaced by modern urban practices. The Islamic practices of prayer, festivals, and veneration that made these sites living monuments were thus arrested, hollowed out, or forced into the private space of the home.

The ASI, instituted four years after the disfigurement of Delhi, completed the emptying out of the Mughal site’s spatial practices. Through the codification of the sites into dates, measurements, and history, the ASI’s reports made the Mughal monument appear controlled and transparent. The textual act, as postcolonial theory has argued, was how power took possession of a non-discursive entity like space, though only partially and violently. As Lefebvre outlines the logic and limits of this intellectual enterprise: “And, indeed, they [those with the words] do posses them [these spaces] up to a certain point—a terrible point. As a vain yet also effective trace, the sign has the power of destruction because it has the power of abstraction—and thus also the power to construct a new world different from nature’s initial one. Herein lies the secret of the Logos as foundation of all power and all authority; hence too the growth in Europe of knowledge and technology, industry and imperialism.”[26] With this secret also lies the limitation of power that depends primarily on the Logos to understand space, and in so doing suppresses the Eros. Lefebvre describes Eros as the sensual knowledge of space, the mystery, spirituality, and awesome beauty that activates it and attracts intense attention. In monuments the Eros constitutes its monumentality. The Eros never goes away but unsettles the Logos of space, staining the tableau of perfected knowledge, as was the case with the ASI survey reports.

The Style of the Survey: Science versus Art

The work of the ASI, according to Cunningham, was to be “a careful and systematic investigation of all the existing monuments of ancient India.”[27] However, the form of this “systematic investigation” was open to interpretation. Some thought Cunningham’s surveys not systematic enough. Cut through with opinion, personal research interests, and conjecture, the information he gathered was regarded by his replacement, James Burgess, as compromised. Taking up the directorship in 1885, Burgess ushered in a new period of increased systemization at the ASI.[28] His aspirations also met with resistance, however, and on more than one occasion he had to justify his methods. Major J. B. Keith and H. H. Cole were two of Burgess’s prominent opponents.

Keith came into Burgess’s employment after the latter became director of the ASI. As director, Burgess’s first order of business was to reorganize the survey into independent circles, each managed by a regional director with two assistants.[29] Keith was appointed the regional director of the North Western Provinces circle, which covered Agra, Delhi, Fatehpur Sikri, and Oudh. Keith’s assistants were A. Führer, a scholar of Indic languages and Arabic, and E. W. Smith, a master draftsman. Burgess, wanting to censor the interpretative reporting of Cunningham, placed stricter emphasis on a scientific and uniform method of measurements and lobbied for the increased professionalization among ASI surveyors.[30] These requirements were described in a letter to the Home Department, in which he explains that the archaeological survey is “a science requiring special knowledge and training” and that only men with “a high class education” can be expected to produce this sort of knowledge.[31] He goes on to point out that any man that comes with only a curiosity or fondness for the Indian arts, the dilettante, “cannot be expected to describe accurately early Hindu or Moslim [sic] buildings and remains; and he must fail in fixing with any approximation to truth the dates of the monuments he meets with—one of the most essential and useful qualifications of the surveyor.”[32] Among Burgess’s surveyors to be labeled a dilettante was Major Keith.

Keith started his career in India in the military, but he found the art and architecture of the country more appealing and took a position as an assistant to the curator of Indian monuments, H. H. Cole. Under his supervisor, Keith worked in central India to reassemble the Buddhist monument of Sanchi and to repair and restore the Gwalior Fort. Both men sought primarily to awaken in Indians a respect for their past and to awaken in the British a feeling for the excellence of the Indian artisanal practices that were slowly dying out and being replaced by modern work. Keith claimed British neglect of the Indian arts to be responsible for the monuments’ declining material existence. “Be it recorded with regret,” he wrote in the Journal of Indian Art, “that the Anglo-Indian philistine has been a greater enemy to Indian art than either Mahomedan or Mahratta.”[33] Keith’s prescribed orientation to the Indian monument sought to weave together the monumental survey with the uplift of the Indian artisan and was therefore opposed to Burgess’s vision of the survey’s limitation to scientific inquiry. Not surprisingly, the two men squabbled over the goals of the survey.

Burgess made no secret of his antipathy toward Keith and his methods. In a letter to the Home Department he decried the wasted resources given to a man he considered to have little competence. Keith’s survey reports of 1887, Burgess explained, contained “manifest errors and omissions in them, such as must deprive them of all confidence for accuracy in those details which can only be tested on the spot,… and they have been prepared in a way which renders them useless for the processes of reproduction. Even the scales attached to them manifest gross ignorance.”[34] The bulk of Keith’s survey reports stated his own views about conservation: he wrote essays on the matters of “(a) the apathy of the Native public, (b) special difficulties in Central India, (c) popular error and regard to monuments, &c., being personal property, (d) growth of utilitarianism, and (e) lack of popular interest.”[35] His concern with seeing the appreciation of Indian art converge with the monumental survey frustrated Burgess, who finally wrote, “Major Keith excites in me a feeling of sincere pity as a man who has been so weak as to accept a position for which he has none of the necessary qualification, and who, to screen his deficiencies, endeavours to evade his responsibilities by the assumption of a special position of his own.”[36] The powerful rebuke offers us a window into the ambivalence, the split between art and science, that defined the ASI’s representation of the Mughal monuments in the late nineteenth century.

While Burgess and his followers saw their work limited to the measurement, dating, and delineation in drawings of a monument, the conservationists, like Keith and Cole, wanted more. They wanted something of the monument’s power, of its ineffable beauty, to be represented in the ASI’s framework, as this kind of knowledge would protect the monuments from destruction, dismemberment, and decay. In his own defense, Keith described his vision for the survey of monuments as oriented to their protection and in sympathy with their surroundings: “Each Surveyor ought to feel that he is working for the credit of a particular province, of a particular Local Government, and not for the benefit of a particular Department of a few European Orientalists. He ought to above all things try to awaken Native sympathy for the work—an aim that has hitherto escaped notice. In a large country like India where there are such divergences of style and so many peculiarities, it would be impossible to adopt one uniform system of work. The Archaeological Survey cannot be treated as either the Trigonometrical or Geological Surveys.”[37] After two years under Burgess, Keith was forced to retire due to his failing health. Burgess’s plans for the survey could now move forward unencumbered. Führer took over the position of superintendent of the North Western Provinces, and under his leadership accurate surveys, supplemented with precise illustrations, ground plans, and photographs, constituted the limits of the information collected about the Mughal monuments.[38] Drawing on his knowledge of Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit, he translated and published inscriptions, while Smith produced the architectural drawings of the related sites. Führer’s texts read like the writings of a gazetteer and show no trace of the personal experience or judgment of his encounters with any of the Mughal monuments he visited.[39] Smith’s methodical drawings impressed Burgess greatly, and he established a new position of architectural assistant and appointed him chief surveyor. The most celebrated of Smith’s projects was the complete survey of Fatehpur Sikri that commenced in 1889. With the help of seven native draftsmen, Smith spent four years compiling and delineating the principal monuments of the city. Smith’s self-described aim was “to prepare no more drawings than are absolutely necessary to give a complete, useful, and truthful idea of the Mughal architecture of the City.”[40] In Führer and Smith Burgess had finally found the kind of professionalism he desired, and he was greatly relieved by their uncritical espousal of the ASI’s scientific method.

After Keith returned to England, he continued to advocate for the rights of Indian artisans, and he later added his voice to those of Ananda K. Coomeraswamy and E. B. Havell to promote Indian industrial design and traditional arts in the education of Indians. Keith’s ambitions were therefore not as abnormal as Burgess would have had the government believe. Indeed, Burgess faced a similar debate of procedure when Cole was appointed the Curator of Monuments in 1880. H. H. Cole was the son of Henry Cole, the manager of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 and the first director of the South Kensington Museum. The exhibition presented examples of art and industry from around India and, for the first time, brought them into comparison with other examples of human skill, so as “to illustrate [India’s] resources, and to add to the interests of the great national exhibition of which his Royal Highness is the Patron.”[41] Here power, empire, and aesthetics intersected to the great satisfaction of both the elites and the public. The younger Cole learned from his father the importance of sustaining the industrial arts and reverence for Indian design, and he understood that both worked for the greater good of society. When he assumed his position as the Curator of Monuments, he would have come with a desire to instill the same appreciation for Indian industrial arts in India that his father had generated in England. His mission, however, would be at odds with the practices of the ASI, which sought to look past the quality of a monument’s design and focus on the quantifiable. This happened most explicitly at the Mughal monuments, whose progressive decay Cole tracked in detail.

The job of the Curator of Monuments was simple, “to prescribe remedies for the conservation of artistic monuments.”[42] Despite his short tenure of three years, Cole had a lasting impact on the physical and ideological ordering of the Mughal monument. His reports and memoranda on the repairs he supervised at Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar’s tomb, and the Red Fort of Agra offer a glimpse into the slow transformation of the Mughal monuments from active spaces of Islamic practice into ghostly husks of their former existence. His sensitivity to the relationship between the living arts and the conservation of monuments allowed the spatial practices of economics, worship, and tradition to be brought into the framework of his reports.

To provide a context for his own project, Cole included a history of the conservation of Indian monuments in his report for the year 1881–82. His findings reveal the gradual governmental disruption of the spatial practices of the Mughal monuments soon after the territory of the Upper Provinces was taken by Governor General Richard Wellesley in 1803. At this time the local government authority assumed custodianship of awqaf properties.[43] The connection of venerated Muslim tombs to the society and economy of Agra was thus severed. Cole noted that the state only allocated funds to help repair the major monuments when it deemed it necessary. His report also alluded to the social changes caused by the government’s appropriation and management of both the charitable properties and the monuments their endowments maintained. The khadims, mutawallis, and imams of mosques, whose families had been connected to the monuments for generations, were, for example, made government pensioners. This new status meant that their incomes diminished. At Fatehpur Sikri some of these khadims acted as tour guides to augment their earnings and presented themselves to tourists as descendents of Sheikh Salim Chishti himself. Tourist writings register a similar adaptation of the Indian caretakers to tourism at the Taj Mahal, the Moti Masjid in Agra’s Red Fort, and Akbar’s tomb in Sikandra.[44]

The strategy Cole adopted to reverse this neglectful situation was to exploit the beauty of the monuments to win them the sympathy of Indians and British alike. The quickest means to accomplish this was the photographic album, to the preparation of which Cole dedicated a large percentage of his resources and time. It was over this project that he would debate Burgess, who believed that the surveys of conservation and archaeology should be uniform. Cole noted in a letter to the government that Burgess’s surveys and drawings were not attuned to the architectural qualities of the monument and that they “have small claim to being considered artistic or perfect representations of architecture.”[45] Cole’s own wording of his interests—for example, “the systematic delineation of beautiful architecture,” “artistic delineation,” and “wonderful architecture”—divulges a marked contrast to the objective and scientific undertaking of the ASI. His method of course sought to “induce the Natives” to properly maintain their architectural treasures instead of neglecting them. On the whole, Cole’s language might seem a minor factor, but it severely vexed Burgess, who wanted no such subjective impressions associated with the work of a survey that produced photographs and drawings primarily for the architect, the artist, and the historian of Indian architecture. When Cole’s term ended, the position of curator of monuments was discontinued, thereby limiting the operations of the ASI to the objective collection of data.

The opposition between Cole and Keith’s mission to foster sympathy for the artist and the living history of the Mughal monuments and Burgess’s vision of these monuments as purely archaeological sites constituted a schism within the ASI. Their differences rendered the study of the Mughal monument a highly ambivalent endeavor in the nineteenth century. Unable to discern the clear mission or even a consistent meaning or logic in the ASI’s practices, the government chose to downsize the survey after Burgess retired in 1889. The office of surveyor general was abolished and replaced by smaller regional departments, with a chief surveyor placed under the supervision of the local governments. Without a strong centralized authority supervising operations throughout the country, a sustained program of conservation and survey was unachievable, and the Mughal monuments once again fell into disorder and decay. As long as the state’s interest in these spaces ran the gamut from intensive efforts toward their upkeep to their total neglect, the Mughal monument was destined to remain a stain on the Raj’s mandate of preservation and protection. This was the state of the ASI in 1899, when Lord Curzon accepted the mantle of the protector of India’s historical monuments.

Out of the Light Comes the Dark: Lord Curzon’s Mughal Monuments

After years of disorganization, a lack of a proper mandate, and internal contradictions, the ASI received its first comprehensive and philosophically based program from Curzon, the eleventh viceroy of India (figure 4). By the time of his appointment in 1899, the importance of historical monuments to social identity and the government’s responsibility toward their preservation and protection were popular assumptions in Great Britain. However, these values did not easily translate in India, and it took someone of Curzon’s position and strong personality to compel a change in vision. In England, John Ruskin’s philosophical discourses on the necessity of preserving historical architecture for the social good had become widely accepted and would have certainly influenced Curzon’s own approach to India’s monuments. Ruskin’s ideas were born out of the condition of modern development and its destruction of old architecture. In his writings, he strives to convince the public to view old buildings not as picturesque ruins or obstacles to progress but as irreplaceable national treasures. His Seven Lamps of Architecture of 1849 introduced this outlook in the section called “The Lamp of Memory.” Ruskin first defines architecture, a “distinctively political art,” as not merely utilitarian but as the receptacle of social goals.[46] He then explains why it is essential to preserve such structures: “We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.”[47] In Ruskin’s estimation, architecture as a historical document was the best purveyor of a nation’s past: “How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears!”[48] He thus advocated a policy of architectural preservation, so that the values, desires, and accomplishments of Great Britain’s forbears might be remembered and might continue to inform the culture and identity of the nation.

Ruskin’s other important theory, which would have an impact on the Mughal monument, was his idea of the age value of architecture. This value, he claimed, was not what the picturesque artists prized when they admired an old castle or abbey. For them, age was an aesthetic quality, one they attached to an emotional sentiment. Ruskin wanted to move beyond this sort of encounter to see in historical architecture its “inherent character” as the “exponent of age.”[49] That character, in Ruskin’s estimation, was the “original character,” which only grew in value with each passing year. This perception opened the way for the British to view the ruins in the landscape not as impediments to modernity but as milestones that helped mark their nation’s progress. With such a sensibility in place, it was easy to understand why spaces that encased the national spirit needed to be preserved and protected.

Fig 4: Lord Curzon. Bain Collection, Library of Congress

While Ruskin provided the argument for architectural preservation, it was William Morris who formulated the practical mechanisms and measures for what would become a national movement of preservation. His first major steps were to form the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) in 1878 and to author its famous manifesto. Morris and his supporters then took the fight to protect historical architecture to local parishes and counties, where modern development and misguided restoration projects threatened the original forms of churches, abbeys, and castles. The Foreign Committee of the SPAB exported many of the same domestic concerns to Egypt and India. Later it would come to advise John Marshall, the director of the ASI (1902–28) appointed by Curzon, on matters concerning the restoration of Mughal monuments. At the time of Morris’s death in 1897, a national awareness of the monument had taken shape, and most British citizens were sympathetic toward the notion of protecting Britain’s ancient buildings. India would only have to wait two more years, until Lord Curzon assumed his position as viceroy, for the same convictions to shape the preservation policy of the country’s monuments.

Curzon, a voracious reader, would have certainly come across Morris’s and Ruskin’s writings and, while differing with their socialist ideology, would have agreed with the merit of protecting the nation’s historical buildings. As a member of the Souls, an aristocratic social club dedicated to aesthetic pursuits, he may have even debated the philosophical and moral importance of architectural preservation. Various members of the Souls and Curzon himself were also active in saving manor houses and castles from ruin.[50] After his return from India he became a strong proponent of expanding legislation to protect British monuments.

Curzon’s restoration program for Indian monuments proved atypical in that it was not only informed by the ideology of the British preservation movement but also by the memorable, visceral experiences he had had throughout his early travels. His travel writings of 1883 reveal how the monumentality of ancient sites first struck an emotional cord in him. In Italy he let “the greatest historic memories of the world” wash over him like a fierce tide that made him forget the present.[51] In Greece he expressed admiration for the country’s architecture and a desire to discover the key to the beauty of its art. Lord Elgin’s transference of the Parthenon’s marbles to Britain caused him great sorrow because it signaled the rejection of the practice of in situ preservation, which Curzon believed in.[52] In Egypt he learned how to reconcile the contradictions between the grand and noble architecture of a society’s past and its current state of impoverishment. “Here are the same men of the same build and stature, with the same dress or undress and the same implements, plying the same business as did their ancestors of five thousand years ago, so wonderfully depicted on the bas reliefs of royal and private tombs… civilisation is foiled by a country which refuses to be civilised, which cannot be civilised, which will remain uncivilised to the end.”[53] The racial ideology that Curzon would use to frame and order Indian monuments reveals itself incipiently at this stage.

After entering Parliament as a representative of Lancashire and quickly assuming a leadership role among the Tories, Curzon made his second excursion around the world in 1887. He first visited the American West and then crossed the Pacific to tour Japan, Korea, China, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, and India. At every stop he wrote down his observations of local nature, cities, and people. These early writings show his ability to seamlessly meld the political concerns of strengthening the British Empire with the traveler’s interest in picturesque description. His Problems of the Far East, written after his Asian tours of 1887 and 1892, reveals this double vision. The “aesthetic impressions” of these countries presented in the preface, he inexactly claims, function merely as background for his descriptions of the more important “problems” of “national character, resources, and organization of those countries as affected by their intercourse with foreign or Western Powers.”[54] While this separation of the aesthetic from the political may have been his intention, the text discloses a blurring of the two as Curzon weaves the aesthetic encounter with a space into the political fabric of a nation.

His visit to China clearly demonstrates how the mystery and impenetrability of a space could serve to destabilize and weaken British power. It would be in China that Curzon learned his most important lessons of monumentality that would influence his work at the Mughal monument. Curzon’s sightseeing in Peking was informed by his desire to bring this unruly country into the British orbit and to begin the process by representing China as desiring British influence. He starts his narrative with an acknowledging nod to China’s great and long history, but he proceeds to devote much of his text to outlining its political decline and urgent need for modernization. Taking the reader layer by layer into Peking’s spaces and monuments, Curzon makes an argument to increase British influence in China. He begins at the outer limits of the city, where he drops his reader into the whirling dirt and grit of the congested commercial district, which he describes as “a phantasmagoria of excruciating incident, too bewildering to grasp, too aggressive to acquiesce in, too absorbing to escape.”[55] This lack of order or intelligibility is reduced to the quintessential marker of the non-Western city, where the light of logic and rationality cannot penetrate. More precisely, it is a space where the symbolizing order of modernity cannot master the other’s cultural order and where the inhabitants and forms object to such mastery. The next stop is the Imperial City, accessed between the commercial district and the Forbidden City. Inside are monuments, temples, palaces of the nobility, and public offices, all similarly shrouded in mystery and, as far as Curzon is concerned, “far more exasperating” to the Western traveler than the disorder of the outer district.[56] He interprets this inaccessibility, this objection to his gaze, as a sign of Chinese arrogance, for nothing about the Western visitor requires such exclusionary measures. Even more opaque is the Forbidden City, the most formidable of Peking’s spaces, where sits the monarch, admitting no foreigners and projecting a spectral power. In the Forbidden City Curzon loses his bearings altogether and subsequently finds nothing but utter indignation for a power that lets no light (or British influence) penetrate its walls. Perhaps it was here that he also came to realize the monument’s power as a nondiscursive reality, encasing an impossible kernel of the Real. He may furthermore have learned how the monument’s power to at once unsettle and awe could be yoked to political power.

The tour of Peking impressed on Curzon the unsettling power an ancient city can exert on the traveler and the moral lessons it can provide to those willing to read it. China, he later rationalized, was nothing more than a “monstrous but mighty anachronism” sitting on the fringe of the world, indifferent to the march of progress. He read its lack of interest in European commerce and industry as a sign of its stupefaction with its own past. He remarks that where Japan buries this past under modernizing projects, China “worships its embalmed and still life-like corpse.”[57] From Curzon’s perspective, China does not conform to the desires of the British gaze and thus refuses interpellation into the modern order of nations. His negative experience in Peking, in the shadows and sites of the weakening Manchu Empire, along with his other experiences of travel to monuments in Persia, the Arab world, Southeast Asia, and India, gave him an uncommonly nuanced understanding of how the pasts of these societies, like their historical built environments, not only impeded progress but—more importantly—thwarted Western influence. In his three major books, Russia in Central Asia (1889), Persia and the Persian Question (1892), and Problems of the Far East (1894), he repeatedly notes the absence of separation between the spaces of the past from the everyday lives of the people of Asia. Only when the past was put in its place, far from the active, modern present—as Curzon observed it to be the case in Japan—could the British move freely, make alliances, sign treaties, and protect the interests of the empire. Thus by the time Curzon was appointed viceroy he clearly understood how the monumental spaces of Asia and of the Near East functioned and how they could either thwart the ambitions of British power or, if signified and ordered properly, be used to promote its interests.

Curzon’s Indian Policy and Practice of Monument Preservation

Before taking office as viceroy, Curzon came to strongly believe in India’s importance to the vitality of the British Empire and its mastery of the world. As he argued in the preface to Problems of the Far East, India was “the true fulcrum of Asiatic dominion.”[58] Behind this statement was also his belief in the good the British could do in this part of the world: “The best hope of salvation for the old and moribund in Asia, the wisest lessons for the emancipated and new, are still to be derived from the ascendancy of British character, and under the shelter, where so required, of British dominion.”[59] For Curzon the viceroy, these convictions translated into a modernizing mission. No longer “a kind of living museum of the European past,” India would be reformed in the image of the European present, replete with industry, schools, railroad tracks, telegraph wires, museums, and monuments.[60] The modernization of India was the greatest gift the British could bestow on this country, and Curzon’s restoration of Mughal monuments, in this context, can be read as his desire to banish the darkness of the past into the confines of their stones, so that British power and its progress could move unimpeded everywhere else.

Curzon had already noticed the ASI’s disorganization while in London. In his first year as viceroy, he toured the country and evaluated its archaeological work. He found extreme mismanagement and neglect of the architectural structures by both the provincial governments and the public at large.[61] His remedy for this condition was to put the ASI back under the direct control of the central government. He also committed himself to raising public awareness of the political and social importance of monument preservation for the legitimacy of the British Raj. In his seminal speech delivered to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta on 7 February 1900, Curzon outlined his preservation program and its underlying logic, which incorporated the racial ideology that had emerged after the Uprising of 1857. First, he explained to his audience that the British were the only people in India capable of such a service. He based his claim on Indian shortcomings: Indians, by themselves, had neither the resources to protect their historical structures nor an understanding of the importance of this practice. He told his audience that during his tours, he had observed “a local and ignorant population, who see only in an ancient building the means of inexpensively raising a modern one for their own convenience.”[62] In light of these conditions, Curzon argued that the British, as the more enlightened people, had to assume the “peculiar responsibility” of preserving India’s monuments.[63]

Curzon elaborated on this racial division by citing Indian communalism and the impassioned antipathy the Hindu and Muslim communities each had for the other’s architectural spaces. The British, on the other hand, were “better fitted to guard, with a dispassionate and impartial zeal, the relics of different ages of sometimes antagonistic beliefs, than might be the descendants of the warring races or votaries of the rival creeds.”[64] To support this claim he asked his audience to view the visible scars left by “oriental” religious fervor: “When the Brahmans went to Ellora, they hacked away the features of all seated Buddhas…. When Kutub-ud-din commenced, and Altamsh continued, the majestic mosque that flanks the Kutub Minar, it was with the spoil of Hindu temples that they reared the fabric,… When we admire his [Aurungzeb’s] great mosque with its tapering minarets, which are the chief feature of the river front at Benares, how many of us remember that he tore down the holy Hindu temple of Vishveshwar to furnish the material and to supply the site?… These successive changes, while they may have reflected little more than a despot’s caprice were yet inimical both to the completion and to the continuous existence of architectural fabrics.”[65] Having described the dire circumstances of Indian historical architecture, Curzon turned back to the need for a uniquely British disposition, defined by rationality and tasteful appreciation. It was at this point that Curzon combined Burgess’s and Cole’s projects to outline how the ASI might teach the native population how to appreciate the past and at the same time order the monumental spaces rationally. Their scientific disposition and eye for the beautiful would thus usher the British past the pretensions of religious and local knowledge and gain them admittance to a monument’s universal value: “Viewed from this standpoint, the rock temple of the Brahmans stands on precisely the same footing as the Buddhist Vihara, and the Muhammadan Musjid as the Christian Cathedral.”[66] Curzon’s speech invited the audience to admire not just the monuments of India but also itself within this space—empowered and just. The vision of the enlightened British ruler casting out the shadows of “religious fanaticism, of restless vanity, [and] of dynastic and personal pride” became the trope of Curzon’s imperial program and the constant refrain of his speeches both in regard to monument preservation and the preservation of British rule in India. Seen from the context of the power relations of the times, when the nationalist movement entered a more strident period, his rhetoric also belied the real tension and fear the dominant power faced in India.

Once Curzon had convinced the British in India to support a preservation program for the Indian monument, he moved on to the reorganization of the ASI. On 23 September 1900 he wrote a note to the Revenue and Agriculture Department outlining the previous work of the ASI and its failures to protect the country’s monuments. He faulted the provincial system, which put the work of conservation in the hands of local governments that had “grosser and more material concerns” and left the direction of such work to “the caprice of the local Governor.”[67] Curzon’s solution was to employ a corps of men firmly dedicated to the service of monument preservation and to reestablish the position of the director general. In February 1902 John Marshall was appointed to this position for a five-year term with the principal duty of conservation.[68] Curzon’s other great accomplishment was the authoring of the Ancient Monuments Preservation Act of 1904. After putting these mechanisms in place, Curzon himself oversaw the restoration of the Mughal monuments. His personal attention to the work at the Taj Mahal turned that monument into the flagship of British preservation policy and practice.

Lighting up the Taj Mahal

Of all of India’s historical architecture, it was Mughal architecture in which Curzon took the most interest, and of all the Mughal structures, it was the Taj Mahal that captured his imagination most strongly. Standing before the Taj Mahal during his first visit to India in 1887, he experienced sublime transport: “I stood there and gazed long upon the entrancing spectacle, the singular loveliness of it pouring in waves over my soul and flooding my inner consciousness till the cup of satiety was full, and I had to shut my eyes and pause and think.”[69] It also was the only building in the world that Curzon encountered that he could not critique: “I could not find it in me to devise wherein, even according to my own faulty notion of beauty and style, it was imperfect or capable of improvement.”[70] Clearly moved by the building’s arresting beauty, Curzon appreciated the aesthetic power of the Taj Mahal, which gainsaid all the carefully constructed theories of Muslim barbarism and lack of culture. It was also to align himself with this power that he selected it as the space to best represent his worldview.

Curzon introduced his restoration program for the Mughal monuments in a speech in December 1899: “I shall examine all these buildings, which are already well known to me, with the most minute care; and shall not rest satisfied until, in each case, the structure has been rendered secure against the ravages of further decay and has received such attention as may be feasible and desirable in faithful renovation, or reproduction of that which has been injured or destroyed.”[71] With these words Curzon marked a radical change in the spatial dynamics of Mughal monuments. Their space would no longer be divided between the knowledge of nondiscursive beauty and scientific archaeology, between the Eros and the Logos. Through his efforts the Mughal monuments’ contradictory spatiality would be not only transcended but British power would also be able to appropriate some of the aura and mystic of the Mughals.

In practical terms, Curzon compiled lists of repairs and left them with the local governments’ superintendents and the ASI, supervising their work from Calcutta. He also made six tours to the Mughal monuments during his tenure to ensure that the work met his exacting standards. Among the restoration projects that he completed were Akbar’s tomb, where he had the marble minarets of the main gateway rebuilt; The Tomb of Humayun, where he restored the garden and fixed the water channels. In Delhi’s Red Fort he superintended the restoration of gardens and the diwan-i khass, or private audience hall, and ordered the mosaic representing Orpheus returned from the Victoria and Albert Museum and reinstalled inside the diwan-i amm. At Fatehpur Sikri he supervised the restoration of stone screens, rescued the Rang Mahal from private ownership, and built a dak bungalow to board overnight visitors. While all Mughal monuments were of interest to Curzon, it would always be the Taj Mahal he singled out for the most careful and personal attention.

The Taj Mahal’s restoration to its original state of grandeur was paramount for Curzon: “If I had never done anything else in India, I have written my name here, and the letters are a living joy.”[72] Indeed, the attachment of his name to the Taj Mahal is revealed in tourist descriptions that mention him along with Shah Jahan as the author of the building’s moving presence. Even Nehru commented on the Mughal monument’s restoration as defining Curzon’s legacy: “After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”[73] But what precisely did Curzon actually do at the site to warrant such commemoration? Of course, there are the physical alterations. Among these was the installation of the famous hanging lamp that illuminated the central dome of the tomb. After six months of correspondences with the consul general of Egypt, the Earl of Cromer, and a personal trip across the Arabian Sea, he procured what he considered to be the most perfect lamp in Cairo. He also supervised the restoration of the marble inlays and the carved panels inside the tomb, as well as that of the mosque and its mirroring structure, the jawab, which sat across from each other. This stonework and the clearing of the area just outside the Taj Mahal restored to the tomb a suggestion of its original opulence. However, Curzon’s design for the garden introduced a thoroughly modern configuration to the monument and marked it with the character of British power.

Fig 5: The Taj Mahal, from the top of the gateway, Agra, 1860. Photograph by Col. E. C. Impey © British Library Board, Photo 971/(24)

In Curzon’s estimation, the garden of the Taj Mahal had lost its Mughal character since “no longer was there an orderly arrangement of compartments filled with flowers and low shrubs and trees.”[74] The overgrown trees and cypresses that lined the central canal hindered an immediate view of the tomb on entry into the garden (figure 5). Curzon did not realize—or he may not have cared—that the obscuring verdure was part of an Islamic garden aesthetic. This knowledge did not escape Bishop Heber, who wrote of the garden and its relationship to the Taj Mahal in 1824: “Beautiful cypresses, and other trees, and profusion of flowering shrubs, contrasts [sic] very finely with the white marble of which the tomb itself is composed, and takes off, by partially concealing it, from that stiffness which belongs, more or less, to every highly-finished building.”[75] The contrasting colors and textures that Heber found so appealing appeared to Curzon a mere obstruction. As a follower of the theories of Ruskin, he saw in historical architecture only the universal values of beauty and history. The concealing effect was removed along with the cypresses and trees on the outer sides of the garden. Curzon then put down lawns on either side of the central canal and fixed the water channels and fountains (figure 6).[76] Although he claimed to have followed recently discovered Mughal plans of the garden and channel system, his landscaping made the “setting take on a subtly English character.”[77] Curzon’s activities at the Taj Mahal extended past the monument’s perimeter walls. He cleared the areas outside of modern structures, creating a buffer zone between the dense and busy Taj Ganj area and the monument. After all these alterations, Curzon was satisfied that he had restored the Taj Mahal to its original appearance. “The Taj itself and all its surroundings are now all but free from the workmen’s hands. It is no longer approached through dusty wastes and a squalid bazaar. A beautiful park takes their place; and the arcaded streets and grassy courts, that precede the main building, are once more as nearly as possible what they were when completed by the masons of Shah Jahan.”[78] Although the Taj Mahal was finally restored and repaired, it was certainly not the same monument that Shah Jahan had intended it to be. The monument was now a hybrid space; it was both a historical site that marked the zenith of Mughal rule and a space of British power. The Eros that had been identified with the Islamic quality of the Taj Mahal, with the paradisiacal signification of the Rauza-i Munawwar, the Illustrious Garden-Tomb, as the pilgrims and devotees spoke of it, was now identified with British monumentality and the ineffable sentiment of age it valued. As Ruskin elaborates on the moving power of age: “[A building’s greatest] glory is in its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in the walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things, in the strength which, through the lapse of seasons and times, and the decline and birth of dynasties, and the changing of the face of the earth, and of the limits of the sea, maintains its sculptured shapeliness for a time insuperable, connects forgotten and following ages with each other, and half constitutes the identity, as it concentrates the sympathy, of nations, it is in the golden stain of time, that we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of architecture.”[79] The Taj Mahal after Curzon’s restoration was to be experienced through this prism of “Age.” The “golden stain of time” thus suppresses the Indian Real, which persists in the unsettling rituals and economic practices that disrupt the order of the monument. But these rituals do not concern the British visitor, who could now identify the experience of the Taj Mahal in uniquely national and racial terms. This ability to differentiate British order from Indian disorder is revealed in the words of J. M. Graham, a tourist visiting the Taj Mahal after the completion of Curzon’s restoration: “Of late years the Indian Government has spent a good deal upon the building and its surroundings, and prevented the near approach of sordid native life, with its dirt, its noise, and its petty thefts.”[80] The caretakers, which Curzon permitted to continue their service to the tomb, only served to heighten the contrast now set up between the tenuous transitory nature and the positive permanence of the tomb: “They pressed upon us, as we turned to go, withered and much-be-handled roses, with dirty sugared cakes, and we thrust the usual rupee into their ready clutches.”[81] Such fleeting and irksome obtrusions of native life could no longer mar the experience of monumentality as the ageless and sublime beauty of the Taj Mahal washed these elements away. In actuality, the “sordid” locals and the newly cleaned space of the monument remained mutually signifying and reciprocal signs of the tomb.

When Curzon outlined his proposal for monument preservation to the Asiatic Society in 1899, he was doing more than relating feasible solutions to the problems of British Indian archeological practice. He also revealed how the Indian monument would be produced through a series of conceptual separations and negations that served to render it a modern space of enlightened British imperialism. The framework of this procedure is encapsulated in his description of the British approach to the Indian monument: “What is beautiful, what is historic, what tears the mask off the face of the past, and helps us to read its riddles, and to look it in the eyes—these, and not the dogmas of combative theology, are the principal criteria to which we must look.”[82] Taking this statement at its face value would suggest that once Curzon was finished with his restoration of a monument like the Taj Mahal, it would shine forth as a space of universal transparency and that power, with the help of science, would have expressed itself through this illumination. But this transformation constituted only half of the spatial operation. As Anthony Vidler has pointed out, there was a covert side to this desire for transparency and its aim to “eradicate the domain of myth, suspicion, tyranny and above all the irrational.”[83] Refuting Foucault’s theory that power after the Enlightenment operated through the eradication of dark space, Vidler argues instead that the dark space was an inherent product of that operation: “The moment that saw the creation of the first ‘considered politics of spaces’ based on scientific concepts of light and infinity also saw, and within the same epistemology, the invention of a spatial phenomenology of darkness.”[84] This realization shows us that Curzon’s overt intentions to illuminate the monument were undergirded by a hidden deference to and fascination with the darkness he sought to eradicate.

Fig 6: A marvel of beauty—looking N. to Taj Mahal, marble tomb of a Mogul Queen, Agra, India, 1903. Photograph by James Ricalton © British Library Board, Photo 181/(66)

Curzon intended to illuminate the Taj Mahal, as he proposed in his speech of 1899, according to the universal criteria of beauty and history, but his reordering of the spatial realities of the monument produced a different outcome. For example, as a monument was swept clean and restored to its former grandeur, the contingent did not vanish, but resurfaced as the dark space of the monument. This was the case at the Taj Mahal and at other Mughal tombs and mosques—which were still living monuments—where religious practices had to be accommodated by the state. The acts of prayer, pilgrimage, veneration, and death, as well as the sublimity of monumental form and everything else that was incommensurable and unruly, were subsequently signified as the dark space of the monument. These dark elements overstep their boundaries and enter the light space to contradict the norms set by power, disrupting its rigid conceptual order and questioning the authority of its knowledge. In this manner, a monument like the Taj Mahal easily turned from being a dogmatic space of empire to a dialectic space of native resistance and imperial reiteration. The implications and crises of this dimorphic existence and Curzon’s genius in shaping this sort of existence are revealed most clearly in the new practice of tourism, the subject of the following chapter.

3    BETWEEN FANTASY AND PHANTASMAGORIA
The Mughal Monument and the Structure of Touristic Desire

CURZON’S CONSERVATION and restoration efforts promised that the Mughal monuments would be read as spaces of enlightened British power. He alone combined the Logos and the Eros, obliterated the distinction between science and art, and produced the Mughal monument as a productive space for the British Empire. In this regard, the subjects of empire, both Indian and British, were to be interpellated by the monument and to identify with the idea of British rule and Indian subjection: “Without India,” Curzon insisted, “the British Empire could not exist.”[1] To which the monument is fantasized as responding, “without the British, India would not exist.” However confident Curzon was in the power of this ideational dialogue to shape the spatial dynamics of his newly reconditioned Mughal monument, he also knew that the process would not always go uninterrupted. The monumental Real would always seep back in. Located in contingent and contestatory spatial practices, this reality refused the symbolic order of imperial power. It was for this reason that Curzon called on British tourists to perform empire by conducting themselves ethically in these moments of doubt and dread and thereby veiling the Real behind the reconstituting mirror of the monument and the Indian other.

Inviting the Tourist to India

By the turn of the century, many more British tourists were able to undertake a trip to India than previously. The technological innovation of the steam engine and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 shortened the trip from Europe to India from around five months to about sixteen days. Once in India, tourists could reach any part of the country by train; rail lines, Curzon proudly announced, had reached 28,150 miles in 1905.[2] Well-appointed hotels like the Maiden’s in Delhi, the guidebooks of Keene and Murray, and comprehensive packages offered by Thomas Cook and Sons also made a trip to India manageable. Among the British public who could afford such a journey was the growing number of people of some “means and leisure,”[3] who might have wintered in Egypt or the Riviera and now saw India as an exciting new alternative. Beckoned by good weather, dramatic landscapes, and historical monuments, the tourists committed on average three to four months to travel to the “show-cities,” stopping along the way to see the ruins.[4] Eustace Reynolds-Ball, the travel writer, called this new visitor the “fashionable globe-trotter,” differentiating the type from its predecessor, “the intelligent traveler.”[5]

However, the trip to the fulcrum of empire, as Curzon called India, was more than a recreational adventure. British tourists were meant to bring the goodwill of their nation to the Indians. The Prince of Wales, addressing the British public in 1906 after his tour of India, urged his compatriots to go to India for this reason: “I cannot but think that every Briton who treads the soil of India is assisting towards a better understanding with the Mother Country, helping to bring down prejudice, to dispel misapprehension, and to foster sympathy and brotherhood. Thus he will not only strengthen the old ties but create new ones—and so, please God, secure a better understanding and a closer union of hearts between the Mother Country and her Indian Empire.”[6] A visit to India, the Prince of Wales assured his subjects, would strengthen the nation’s cause of empire through a spirit of mutual understanding. Curzon similarly presented India as a significant facet of his compatriots’ national identity: “To me it is the greatest thing that the English people have, or are doing now; it is the highest touchstone of national duty.”[7] Seen in this light, a touristic visit to India could be construed as a service to country. India needed the tourist there—and so did Great Britain.

India may have beckoned with the promise of exciting cities and romantic monuments, as well as the possibility of forging lasting relationships with the natives, but in reality, touristic encounters were conditioned by anxiety and social isolation and mediated by fantasy. Tourists to India were meant to stay in a preset and prescribed program of travel. The spaces of tourism—the train, the hotel, the city, the restaurant, and the monument—were guarded and guided sites of social control. Many British tourists later published these sightseeing experiences as encounters with the “real India.” Kipling mocked this practice in his sardonic portrayal of the tourist as “the man who ‘does’ kingdoms in days and writes books upon them in weeks.”[8] But not everyone scoffed at these texts the way Kipling did. Publishers like John Murray, Chapman and Hall, George Routledge, and Sampson Low, to name a few, reproduced these travel journals to meet an evident demand for entertaining descriptions of India. Part of these texts’ allure derived from their presentation of the ambivalent aspects of empire, revealing that the controlled spaces of India, such as monuments, were in actuality shot through with moments of shock and apprehension enabling tourists to test their traveler’s mettle. These texts now provide invaluable information about the monuments’ function as spaces to live out the fantasies and contradictions of empire.

Touring the Indian Monuments

Another important aspect of the touristic visit is how power actualized itself at the monument. As Anthony Vidler explains, power is not the result of transparency but emerges from a “pairing of transparency and obscurity.”[9] Monuments, like “all the radiant spaces of modernism… should be seen as calculated not on the final triumph of light over dark but precisely on the insistent presence of the one in the other.”[10] Viewed in this manner, Curzon’s restored Mughal monuments operated on three registers: they affirmed the subject as a subject of imperial power, they subjected the tourist to the desires of India, and they also brought the subject into contact with the Real. Indian monuments were thus not open to unobstructed viewing and walking but were, more precisely, sites that oscillated between light and darkness, between fantasy and phantasmagoria.

In Out of India, Kipling perceptively illustrates this oscillation between light and dark by transporting the reader into the place of a tourist walking through a historical monument in Rajasthan. In chapter 2 of the book, he provides us with a description of Jaipur, the city founded by Jai Singh II (1688–1743), the maharaja of Amber and a vassal of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Kipling frames the city as a conflicted space in which the old exists in dialectic tension with the new. Starting with its origins, the city is said to have been planned “with huge streets straight as an arrow,” replete with palaces, gardens, and temples. Jaipur is characterized by the ruler’s social reforms (“he did his best to check infanticide”) and his investments in science and learning, particularly astronomy. But then a new layer of meaning is superimposed on this illustrious past: “Later on came a successor, educated and enlightened by all the lamps of British Progress, and converted the city of Jey Singh into a surprise—a big, bewildering, practical joke.”[11] Kipling reveals the person responsible for this modern urban planning to be Colonel Swinton Jacob, the superintending engineer of the State of Jaipur. Eager to bring the pink city into the modern era, Jacob advised the raja to put down trottoirs (sidewalks) of hewn stone to outline the main street and construct waterways and gas works, as well as a school of art and a museum. The new structures stood in “startling contrast” to the old ordering of the city.

Watching over this “strange medley,” Kipling tells us, were the surrounding fortress-studded hills, one of which contained a large welcome sign set up originally for the Prince of Wales when he visited the city in 1876. Nearly twenty years later, it hailed another visitor, “the average traveler of to-day,” who “may appropriate the message to himself, for Jeypore takes great care of strangers and shows them all courtesy.”[12] In this observation Kipling reveals the capability of the tourist at the turn of the century to fantasize himself or herself into a position once reserved for royalty: British nationality and the space of Jaipur conspired to elevate the tourist from the middle class to the ruling class.

In the next chapter Kipling takes us on a walk with a tourist visiting the desolate palace of the city of Amber, Jai Singh II’s former capital. The narrative reveals the ambivalent realities of a visit to a monument and the taut act of mediating the given truth of the space and the unconscious realization of another more troubling one. The tourist leaves behind Jaipur with its pavements and educational institutions of enlightenment to come on miles of “semi-decayed Hindu temples—brown and weather-beaten—running down to the shores of the great Man Sagar Lake,” where he (or she) encounters “more ruined temples, palaces and fragments of causeways.”[13] The ruins signal the tourist’s passage into another time, and as he reaches Amber in the dawn’s light, he sees a city “that will never wake.” He ascends the causeway to the palace and finds himself in a great courtyard, where he decides against taking a native guide, as the Oriental “is undiscriminating and sets too great a store on corrugated iron-roofs and glazed drain-pipes.”[14] Walking by himself, the tourist anxiously maintains the illusion of a past separated from the present. Before describing the tourist’s entry into the palace proper, Kipling frames what is to follow by introducing Eugène Viollet-le-Duc’s idea that “a building reflects the character of its inhabitants.”[15] Accordingly, the dark, narrow, recessed passages “where a man might wait for his enemy unseen,” and the maze of stairs “leading nowhither” along with the screens of marble tracery “that hide or reveal so much” confer on the palace and the people that once inhabited it the character of inscrutability.[16] This uncanny atmosphere would unsettle more susceptible minds, but the rational tourist of Kipling’s account cannot be so confounded. Armed with his guidebook and the certainty that the palace and its inhabitants are long dead, he does not feel fear but only “impertinent curiosity.”[17] He explores the palace, taking note of the reassuring signs of its ruin: “[A] creeper had set its hands upon the lattice there, and there was dust of old nests in one of the niches in the wall.”[18] He does allow himself a moment to imagine the past as it might have been lived by the women in the zenana, or by the kings in the forty-pillared Hall of Audience; but this fantasizing, Kipling points out, is far removed from any understanding of the true causes of the surrounding decay: “The wise man will visit it when time and occasion serve, and will then, in some small measure, understand, what must have been the riotous, sumptuous, murderous life to which our Governors, Lieutenant-Governors, Commissioners and Deputy Commissioners, Colonels and Captains and the Subalterns after their kind, have put an end.”[19] The tourist’s travel guide, however, safely steers his gaze away from such offensive deductions. Only the rare “wise man” would pause to contemplate exactly what path led to the palace’s present decay, and whether the British rulers did not at the very least do their part to hasten it along.

Finally reaching the top of the palace, whose grounds cover two-thirds of the city, Kipling’s tourist “looked into its very heart—the heart that had ceased to beat.” Everything is bared to his view, even the zenana’s rooms, and the noble houses appear as stone heaps. Kipling evokes Lord Byron’s Romantic poetry in the tourist’s thoughts as he wonders, faced with the fading structures of the palace, how one “could have ever believed in the life of her.”[20] The grandiose vista and its stillness have impressed and satisfied him in the way grandiose natural scenery is likely to do; the stillness of the desert or the sea have a comparably peaceful effect. However, as the tourist turns from this view to descend the monument and returns to the present day of his time, he is beset by a sense of unease. The modern intrudes aggressively on the tranquil vision he has just experienced: “The Englishman went down through the palace and the scores of venomous and suggestive little rooms, to the elephant in the courtyard, and was taken back in due time to the Nineteenth Century in the shape of his Highness, the Maharajah’s Cotton-Press, returning a profit of twenty-seven percent, and fitted with two engines of fifty horse-power each, an hydraulic press, capable of exerting a pressure of three tons per square inch, and everything else to correspond. It stood under a neat corrugated iron roof close to the Jeypore Railway Station, and was in the most perfect order, but somehow it did not taste well after Amber. There was aggressiveness about the engines and the smell of the raw cotton. The modern side of Jeypore must not be mixed with the ancient.”[21]

Why this distaste? Clearly, the sight of the “neat” and efficient machinery does not elicit from the tourist the sense of pride in British industrialization he might otherwise feel; Kipling’s seemingly matter-of-fact description of the formidable power and pressure exercised by the machine evokes something menacing, even violent, which, in such proximity to the ruined palace complex, unpleasantly conjures the possibility of a causal connection between the two: behind the rhetorical representations of an ordered and improving British India lies the brutal force of iron and steel, in other words, the kind of power capable of producing not just “a profit of twenty-seven percent” but also death and devastation on a large scale. It represents the barbarity that inevitably underlies the imposition of any kind of civilized order.

What Kipling provides in his description of the palace of Amber is the messiness of a typical tourist visit to a monument and the unease that rests at the core of every touristic experience. Drawn to the monument through the fantasy of desire, British tourists are constituted in its space as both subjects of and as subjected to empire. They do not find a transparent space of knowledge and linear timekeeping at the Indian monument, but rather an opaque space in which time is cyclical and simultaneous, pulsating with the life of the Indian past, present, and future. In order to survive their immersion in this recalcitrant India, the tourists hold fast to their travel guides and repeatedly perform the role of ethical tourists at the monument.

The Guided Tours of the Mughal Monuments

Tourist writings of visits to Mughal monuments in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth reflect the same destabilizing experience of simultaneity and opaqueness of Kipling’s tourist. These writings also disclose a particular desire for, not opposition to, the contingent, as read in this description of a tourist’s visit to the monuments of Delhi: “My record of Friday, December 22, 1899, runs as follows: ‘A great day, for it has taken us over ground occupied by various successive dynasties, conflicting religions, and contending races,—a task in sight-seeing which, according to Keene’s Handbook for Visitors, ought to occupy one for not less than two days.’ But our most interesting and distinctive experience was not in the way of visiting ruined palaces, tombs, and mosques, and—guidebook in hand—laboriously digging out details of history and description, but in the form of what might have been a very serious encounter with a crowd of rascally natives.”[22] The writer goes on to describe the aggression his party faced after they refused to pay more than a rupee to see two Indian men perform a stunt called well-jumping. Wells were a common feature of Mughal palaces and forts, and they provided an easy form of entertainment for the newly arrived tourists. After diving into the murky depths of a stagnant pool from heights of sixty to seventy feet, young men and boys would ask for remuneration. Most tourists paid for these feats, but those who did not were subject to verbal abuse or threats that left them disoriented. The well-jumping incidents reveal how at the Indian monument natives were free to alter the controlled order of the space through unauthorized performances and thus turn a space of transparency into a space of refusal.

Such local disruptions often came as a shock to tourists due to their spectacular effect, but what made them even more alarming was that they were never mentioned in the tourist guidebooks whose maps, itineraries, descriptions, and practical information were supposed to render the visit to India predictable. The guidebook was an essential tool of touristic travel, something that Kipling’s globetrotter described as “a thing you can carry in your trunk y’ know—that gives you plain descriptions of things without mixing you up.”[23] The book of choice was Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in India, Burma, and Ceylon. Revised and updated every two or three years, the book made sure the tourist knew everything necessary for safe and informed travel.

The cities and monuments of India, in Murray’s Handbook, were divided into thirty-five routes. Each route was described with the same set of information, such as a destination, which railway to take there, the size of the population, its map coordinates and relative distance from other cities. Hotel information, the whereabouts of social clubs, post offices, banks, and the location of the main governmental structures completed the general description. The tourist was also provided with suggestions about how to spend each day sightseeing. This section often included art historical and archaeological information gleaned from James Fergusson’s architectural texts or from ASI reports. James Burgess, the former director of the ASI, also lent his archaeological expertise to the guide by checking the facts and figures of the monuments for accuracy. Maps, diagrams, and floor plans of major structures were added to help the tourists orient themselves. In the 1909 edition of the handbook the Mughal monuments of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri were included in Route 13, and those of Delhi in Route 14.

With Murray’s Handbook always open to the relevant page, the tourists made their way through the monuments of Mughal India. They quickly discovered, however, that the lived realities of these spaces did not conform to the guidebook’s ordered information. An American tourist who visited Fatehpur Sikri described this contrary condition: “A troop of guides lay in wait for us, and luck let us have another of those stupid parrots who, in embroidered caps and winding chuddas, mislead one over all the show-places of India. This one stuttered—may all others know and avoid him by that sign!—and, like all of his gild, reversed the guide-book order of sight-seeing. We had already suffered enough in that way, and we ordered him to right about face and march to the Turkish queen’s house, first on the Murray list and first object before the Hall of Records. ‘But, ladyship, I wish f-f-first to sh-sh-show you the mosque and my ancestor’s grave.’ But we wanted none of his ancestors, except in their regular order.”[24] The tourist is here doubly interpellated by the space of the monument. First, her realization that her racial brethren prepared and ordered this site allows her to symbolically identify with the dominant power. But then the paranoia of losing this power to the native is reflected in her fantasy of the duplicitous native who desires her respect and admiration. The space of Fatehpur Sikri is thus ever oscillating between control and lack of control, through which the subject anxiously constitutes her identity.

The American tourist’s experience can be compared to a touristic experience of an earlier period where such an oscillation was not entertained and the subject’s principal concern was the demystification of the monument. A tourist calling himself an “old Indian” narrates the story of his visit to the dargah of Sheikh Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri (figure 7). Having availed himself of a guide who claimed to be a descendent of the sheikh, he entered the tomb, which was located in the courtyard of the congregational mosque: “Our guide, on entering, reverently left his slippers at the entrance, but did not seem (so degenerate is the age) to expect us to follow his example: nor did we. We found a crimson cloth covered over the marble tomb under the inlaid canopy, and being curious to know if there was aught to be seen beneath, begged our guide to upraise it. He, however, protested against this, though unable to assign any reason for his objection; and we therefore insisted on having the cloth removed, seeing that even any outward form of reverence to the place has long since been considered unnecessary. Nothing was visible except the usual form of a marble tomb.”[25]

Fig 7: General view of the tombs of Sheikh Salim Chishti and Islam Khan, Fatehpur Sikri, India, 1885. Photograph by W. Caney © British Library Board, Photo 1003/(620)

Curzon would surely have bristled at behavior that showed such lack of reverence for the mystery of the Mughal monument. Moreover, the viceroy was well aware that overt displays of dominance weakened the British subject and the imperial cause: “Depend upon it, you will never rule the East except from the heart, and the moment imagination has gone out of your Asiatic policy your Empire will dwindle and decay.”[26] The “Old Indian’s” comportment at the tomb reveals his lack of knowledge, his lack of respect for the mysterious, and an almost poignant inability to reckon with the unknown. Tourists heeding Curzon’s advice were better equipped to meet the unfamiliar—and commune with the Eros—because they had the control offered by imagination and fantasy. They were elevated rather than abased by the humility they exhibited, as is readily apparent in the account provided by a post-Curzon tourist of her entry into the Taj Mahal: “We passed through into an eloquent silence: love and death were thus reigning supreme, and beside the eternal power of both life itself seemed small and incomplete.”[27]

Incidents like those cited above reveal the spatial dynamics at play at the Mughal monuments. Restored to their former grandeur by Curzon, the materiality of these sites—the repairs, flowing water channels, and freshly laid lawns—was meant to reflect the symbolic ordering of a compassionate and enlightened empire. But tourists were not expected to constitute their imperial identity at the sites by simply identifying with this symbolization. They were also expected to actively engage with the spatial practices, the nondiscursive elements of the site, and to mediate these contingencies through the touristic fantasy, a fantasy whereby the British tourist sees himself or herself as the object of Indian lack: who, after all, would take care of these invaluable sites, this precious country, if not them? The legitimacy of empire, which around the turn of the century had begun to be challenged by rising nationalist movements, was thus reasserted at the Mughal monuments of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri. The crucial point to note here is that through the fantasy of the protector and preserver of Indian history and life, British power imagined bridging the gap between the symbolic order and the Real. In an analogous vein, touristic fantasy imagined connecting with the impossible other—Lefebvre’s “diamond at the bottom of the melting-pot.” Through the practice of fantasy the tourist thus affirmed, mediated, and transformed the opaque monuments of India not into scientific objects but into monuments of desire.

The Multiple Narratives of Delhi’s Red Fort

Not all Mughal monuments were open to such plays of touristic fantasy as the Taj Mahal and Fatehpur Sikri. For example, the British governments before and after Curzon sought a less improvised, more circumscribed approach to the ordering of Delhi’s Red Fort, which was still known to many people as the site of the Great Mughal’s last stand and the symbolic center of the Uprising of 1857. The Red Fort was after all where Mughal authority was allowed to persist, albeit in impoverished form, into the nineteenth century, and for a few short months it represented the inversion of British Indian power relations. At the Red Fort, the freedom of touristic fantasy that defined the other Mughal monuments was limited. At this particular monument the tourist was at too great a risk of being overtaken by the horror and tragedy of the Uprising. Subsequently, a different strategy of spatial ordering was deployed here: that of the narrative.

The spatial narrative at sites that are defined by multiplicity, as Certeau points out, “makes possible the isolation and interplay of distinct spaces.”[28] It can create out of an old monument a brand-new field of experience and action. In the case of the Red Fort, the narrative of the “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857 was expected to displace Mughal authority and render it an entertaining yet powerless spectral entity. In the authorized narratives of the Red Fort, the gardens, courtyards, and palatial buildings were no longer seen as significant spaces of Mughal imperial power, and their function during the great durbars, festivals, ceremonies, and day-to-day lives of the emperors was veiled behind other kinds of stories. The spaces of the Red Fort, the magisterial gateway, the audience halls, the Pearl Mosque, and the like were reordered by the codification of architectural surveys. When the fort was allowed to come alive and appeal to the reader’s or visitor’s imagination, it was only through the official story of the Sepoy Mutiny. In spatial terms the Red Fort was fitted into what was known as the Mutiny tour, which Manu Goswami describes as “the ‘monumentalization’ of particular sites and events of the rebellion of 1857.”[29] The shrines, scenes of battle, and monuments of Lucknow, Kanpur, and Delhi were ordered according to the official symbolization of the traumatic events that surrounded the Uprising. The tourists’ visit to these sites, Goswami argues, constituted their identity as British subjects and was imbricated with the process of imperial consolidation. Through the prism of the Mutiny tour, all pre-British history in Shahjahan’s Delhi and palace was supressed. It was no longer seen as the seat of the Great Mughal but as the spot where the British Empire was inaugurated.

The essential stop on the Mutiny tour was Delhi’s Red Fort, where the official narrative of the events of 1857 reaches its climax. For most tourists, the story was imparted through tourist literature such as Murray’s Handbook of 1909. Following the directions of the Handbook, tourists entered the fort through the Lahore Gate, identified as the spot where the commissioner of the division was murdered on 11 May 1857. The rooms above the gate were described as the scene of the murders of the collector and the commandant, as well as of the chaplain and of two British ladies. In the Handbook’s edition of 1903, these details were given beforehand, in the general history section in the front of the book, remaining separate from the description of the actual monument. In 1909 the story of the Uprising was incorporated directly into the tourist’s walk through the Red Fort. This change resulted in the creation of a more direct sympathy with the space of the fort—and with those British killed there during the Uprising—and with the enlightened authority that now controlled it. The other structures of the palace to which the tourist was guided called forth descriptive information gleaned from Fergusson’s and other architectural histories, and, where relevant, that information was supplemented with accounts of the events of the Uprising. For example, after passing though the gate and a long covered corridor, the tourists entered a courtyard: “The vaulted arcade ends in the centre of the outer court, which measured 540 ft. by 360 ft., of which the side arcades and central tank have been removed.” After this physical description the tourist reads that at the edge of the tank “were murdered, on 16th June 1857, some fifty Christians who had escaped the massacre of the 11th.” The tour of the Red Fort is completed with the Delhi Gate, at a structure where, tourists are informed, Bahadur Shah II was held by British authorities in September 1857: the story of the Uprising thus ends at a space of Mughal imprisonment. Murray’s Handbook devotes three times the space to describing the events of 1857 than it accords to Delhi’s other histories.[30] Furthermore, when sites that have nothing to do with the Uprising are presented, they are abstracted into mere museographical objects, listed with dates, measurements, and other descriptive information.

The spatial practice of authorized storytelling enabled British power to control the imaginary identification of the Red Fort and transform it into a space of triumph. The narrativized space structured the tourist’s experience and rendered the Red Fort a threshold marking the death of the Mughal Empire and the birth of the British Empire. Through the tourist’s reading of the Red Fort, Mughal authority was cast into the shadows and rendered nothing more than a fading echo of the distant past, a bygone power that had abandoned its political center. As Goswami writes: “The official discourse on the mutiny had operated to repress contestatory narratives and the Royal Mutiny tour expressed the colonial will to authoritatively stamp and reiterate British constructions of ‘India’s past.’”[31] While this is certainly how hegemonic power uses textual practice to suppress other histories, it does not describe the entire spatial process. If power is informed by resistance, then how that resistance manifested itself in the Mutiny tour itself needs to be studied. In the context of the Red Fort, the narrative as a strategy of spatial control as produced in Murray’s Handbook did not function without impediments. The palace itself resisted the symbolic ordering, as the trauma of the Uprising could not be entirely contained by narrative. This truth of the unthinkable events that occurred at the Red Fort still resonated in the walls and functioned for Indians and some British that experienced the British treatment of the Mughals before and after the Uprising as a stain of resistance. This excess of symbolization that cannot be contained in text rendered the Red Fort a contradictory space and left it open to the possibility of counternarratives, other perspectives, and different modes of spatial ordering of the Mughal monument. In other words, as soon as the dominant power set down its authoritative version of the story of 1857, the Red Fort could do nothing but resist it and become a radical space, a differential space, that enabled others to produce their own modes of symbolization, to make their own meaning out of the meaningless.

The Other Story of the Mughal Monuments

Among the groups that used the space of the Red Fort to contest the dominant narrative of the monument were the Indian nationalists. The space of the Red Fort presented a means for them to tell their own story and to provide an alternative social ordering in which the British were rendered estranged and their knowledge false. To many educated Indians, the Red Fort, as signified by the Uprising narrative of Murray’s Handbook, represented the contradictions of British knowledge and power. From their subject position, the Red Fort was not the site of the triumph of good over evil but the site of the social death of Indian society. The Red Fort and its urban surroudings continued to resonate with scenes of indiscriminant killing, evacuation, and pillaging—of Indians. This is what united it with the rest of the city, whose streets, buildings, and neighborhoods were inscribed with the same bloody events. Although material conditions in the city improved after 1857, the memory of the post-Uprising trauma would haunt Delhi’s residents for years to come. The Mughal monuments in their restored and preserved state did not announce the dawn of a new liberal rule, but resounded with sounds of loss and death: the loss of British liberal policy, the social death of the city’s Muslim community, and, above all, the loss of truth. From the Indian perspective the preserved and restored Mughal structures thus functioned as a space that belied the barbarity coexisting with British civilization.

The other storytellers of the Red Fort and of other Mughal monuments were highly educated Indian urban elites, like the historian Jadunath Sarkar. His retelling of the story of the Red Fort takes a decidedly spatial approach and contests the guidebooks’ touristic knowledge. It appeared in the Indian nationalist journal Modern Review in 1908 and was titled, “The Daily Life of the Mughal Emperors.”[32] Sarkar begins by questioning the touristic knowledge of the Mughal monuments: “What is it that the common tourist sees in them? He may feast his eyes on their delicate mosaics and reliefs; he may soothe his spirit in the cool recesses of these pure white domes. But what he looks at is after all stone, bare stone. Does he ever think that these halls were once full of life, crowded with all the moving pageants of a Court? Does he try to realize that life of a bygone world, so distant, so unlike his? If so, what is his mental picture of it?”[33] After posing these questions, Sarkar explains to his readers that this sort of limited perspective resulted from the utilitarian point of view practiced by Thomas Macaulay and his followers. These writers made Indian kings look like “heartless brainless despots, full of pride and ignorance, surrounded by pimps and sycophants, squeezing the last farthing from a down-trodden peasantry, and spending their hordes on sensual pleasure or childish show… men whose animal existence was never ennobled by intellectual exercise or spiritual musing, aesthetic culture or the discipline of work.”[34] To contest this knowledge, he exhorts the reader to look directly at the materiality of the Red Fort and asks, “Could this work have been done by sleepy voluptuaries?” Appealing to reason, Sarkar then states, “An empire like that of the ‘Great Mughals’ could not have been a dead machine; administration, arts and wealth could not have developed, as they did develop in that period, if we had faineants on the throne, in the Council-chamber, and at the head of armies.”[35] Having exposed the contradictions of British knowledge, Sarkar attempts to correct this misrepresentation. He consults the Padshahnama (1628–38), Shah Jahan’s official record, for alternative information about how the monuments were originally used. The second part of the article outlines an average day in the life of Shah Jahan as he would have spent it in his palace in Agra. Public and private audiences, prayers, councils, and artistic appreciation are the activities that signify and order palace spaces such as the diwan-i khass, diwan-i amm, zenana, and Shah Burj (lofty tower). Sarkar further describes who stood where during such proceedings, where the emperor sat, how he disposed himself before his courtiers, the courtiers’ comportment, and the timing of each activity. This information intended to reinscribe the space of the Mughal fort according to the rhythms, logic, and spatial practices of the seventeenth century.

Sarkar’s article on the Mughal fort is significant in that it reveals the multiplicity of meaning inherent in the space of the Mughal monument in this period of high British imperialism. As touristic discourse produced this space as a triumph of enlightened rule, Indians were simultaneously reappropriating and reordering it through their counternarratives. By telling their own stories of a given space, they challenged both the validity and the function of British knowledge. Sarkar’s article also tries to awaken the Indian tourist to see the Mughal palaces of Agra and Delhi not as recumbent spaces of a dead and distant Mughal but as spaces that still carry the spirit of a time during which India was ruled by an enlightened emperor who gave “peace, prosperity and contentment to his people.”[36]

Although Sarkar was not a nationalist, his thoughts on British representations of the Mughals did accord with the general mission of the Modern Review and its nationalist editor, Ramananda Chatterjee. Founded in 1907, the journal was intended for educated middle-class Indians with an interest in issues ranging from politics to culture. Over the years the publication inculcated a nationalist sensibility among its readers and promoted new theories of art and architectural history that refuted British tropes of decline and disorder. Historians like Sarkar, as well as resolute Indian nationalists like Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, Arun Sen, and Sister Nivedita contributed essays presenting the spiritual logic, aesthetic criteria, and artistic practice of India’s art and architecture. These authors also challenged the British stereotype of the communal antipathy between Hindus and Muslims. For example, Sen countered the dominant representation of communal division with a description of an Indian landscape defined by cultural tolerance: “Buddhists, Jains, Hindus, Moslems in their eternal attempt at mutual synthesis have attained a glorious union. Racial antipathies have been forgotten, religious persecution have ceased, bitterness of feeling and rancour of heart soothed…. The Mussulman mosque and seraglio are settled facts and they stand in close proximity to the Hindu temple. Jainism has worked beautifully for its own self as well as for the pleasure or the devotion of Islam…. The great trinity of Moghul Emperors employed Hindu artists and furthered Hindu tradition as ever did Hindu monarch [sic] of old.”[37] Although highly idealized, the image of Indian sympathy and cooperation could be read as a direct response to Curzon’s accounts of fragmentation and enmity provided to the Asiatic Society of Bengal thirteen years earlier.

Contemporary artists, too, were keen to link their work to the mythical and legendary stories of the ancient and medieval past and to produce a sense of Indian cultural revival. Abanindranath Tagore accomplished this in 1903 in an art exhibition that coincided with Curzon’s Delhi Durbar. Tagore chose to exhibit three evocative watercolors, The Capture of Bahadur Shah, The Construction of the Taj, and The Final Moments of Shah Jahan. Like Sarkar’s article, Tagore’s exhibition of these romantic watercolors, later published in the Modern Review, was a tactical choice meant to help Indians imagine a more affirming process of identification than the one offered by the dominant power. Exhibited in the context of Curzon’s Durbar, which sought to revive and embody the pageantry of Mughal public ceremony, Tagore’s watercolors were offered in a spirit of resistance to the British appropriation and signification of Mughal culture, symbols and, most important, space.

These nationalist narratives and representations of the Mughal monument, while providing new symbols and tropes, did not, however, renounce the logic of the modern ordering of the monument. Instead, they inverted the British signification of its light and dark spaces and thus retained the premise that monumental space is constituted by this binary order. Whereas for the Western tourists the Mughal monuments reflected the good of empire and of their race, Indian historians and nationalists increasingly elicited different stories from the same monuments, reshaping the way Indian tourists experienced the sites.

The Indian touristic experience after the acceptance of the nationalist spatial narrative of the Mughals is revealed in the autobiography of the writer Santha Rama Rau. Rama Rau visited Akbar’s city as a girl with her mother, Dhanvanthi, in the 1930s, when Indian demands for self-government were at a high pitch. At this point, most educated Indians knew the nationalist story of Mughal India as imparted by the writers and artists of the Modern Review. The production of the space of Fatehpur Sikri through this story of the British usurpation of Mughal authority and its lack of legitimacy is illustrated in Rama Rau’s description of her visit:

Fatehpur Sikri, the half-finished walled city, capital for Akbar, the greatest of the Moguls, remains as a disintegrating symbol of the old power of the princes. We found it, in contrast to the Taj Mahal, alive and intimate. We walked through the palace rooms, saw the queen’s bedroom with its covered bed and unfinished murals, visited the temples of different denominations within the royal city for the courtiers of different religions. Even in those days Indians believed in religious tolerance. It was on that basis, Mother told us, that Akbar had unified India.

“We have,” she pointed out, “a far longer history of unity and tolerance than any of the Western countries. More than two hundred years B.C. we had a great emperor Ashoka, who united India and preserved religious freedom for all his subjects. That’s why many of us find it a little hard to believe that what we are given to understand about the present religious unrest in India is either entirely true or particularly deep-seated. At the time Akbar ruled, about seventeen hundred years later, we had tolerance, unity and freedom too. Fatehpur Sikri proves some of those things, and our own—records which you never learned about, and which I read only after I left school—show that Indians have always valued those qualities. Whenever we are given the chance we do act as a nation to institute a unified government.”[38]

Her mother’s iteration of the nationalist story of Indian rulers and their tolerance has the effect of a decoding stencil structuring Rama Rau’s view of Akbar’s palace and beyond: “The sun burned on the deep red sandstone buildings with their marble decorations, on the great courts, causeways, and half-completed throne-rooms and galleries, the domestic buildings and the more recent, poor little houses clinging to the city walls. We gazed out from the terraces and balconies down the ravine, the sides of which were encrusted with the huts of the peasants, to the immense burnt plains of central India. We saw, but no longer commented on, the flat, shocking contrast between the old decaying splendor and the new shoddiness and poverty.”[39] Rama Rau would go on to become a prominent literary figure of postcolonial India. Perhaps her pointed awareness of the fundamental power of monumental space helped her in her greatest project, the adaptation of E. M. Forester’s Passage to India into a stage play performed in London and New York between 1960 and 1962.

After decades of neglect and especially after the Uprising of 1857 the Mughal monument began to matter again. It became one of the nodal points of the new racial discourse that legitimated the British Empire. The first attempts to preserve and study the space vacillated between the Logos and Eros of monumentality and turned Mughal monuments into ambivalent spaces of British India. Curzon’s insistence on combining the two aspects of monumentality in his programs of restoration and preservation turned the Mughal sites into fantastical spaces of power that affirmed British imperialism and subjectivity. However, as the twentieth century wore on, power relations began to shift again and the legitimacy of British governance became strongly contested. The freedom—championed by Curzon—to experience the Mughal monument through the senses was displaced by more structured narratives coming from both Indian nationalist and British texts.

While these texts were being written and disseminated, a group largely ignored by both nationalists and imperialists enacted other tactics aimed at recoding the Mughal monument. These alternative spatial practices were authored by the principal victims of the backlash of the 1857 Uprising—Muslims. In the following chapter I will show how the Mughal monument was also produced as a space of alternative social ordering by Muslims, who informed its space with their desire to forge a discrete and modern identity and with their struggle to survive the shift in power relations during the critical period after the Uprising and before Indian independence.

4    REBUILDING INDIAN MUSLIM SPACE FROM THE RUINS OF THE MUGHAL “MORAL CITY”

WHILE THE British and Indian nationalists were writing stories to reorder the Mughal monuments as ideological spaces for their respective communities, certain Muslims, too, were forging a unique relationship with these historical sites. This chapter will examine how the Muslim elites re-empowered the community and re-constituted a modern identity at the Mughal monuments. The account begins two decades before the Uprising of 1857 and ends with Indian and Pakistani independence from the British Raj. The distinctive spatial practices at the monuments were born out of the particular struggles these men engaged with, to first defend against the social death of their religious community, then to seek social justice and equality, and finally to obtain political representation in an India increasingly defined by electoral politics. In this period of social and political change, the Mughal monuments, once integral parts of the Islamic “moral city,”[1] become divested of their power to shape Muslim identity. Forced into a self-protective disposition after the Uprising, many Muslims looked exclusively to the space of the mosque to orient themselves and to construct a social identity. When the electoral principle and the discourse of secular nationalism started to inform and order the public sphere, the Mughal monuments, the historical spaces of Indian Islam, were abandoned to imagine a separate national identity. India, in this new Muslim geography, was a land of loss, moral decay, and confusion, and the Mughal monument stood as the principal spatial signifier of the unhomely reality of an Indian Muslim nation existing within secular India.

Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s Hybrid Ordering of the Mughal Monuments

In the decades before the Uprising of 1857 a handful of Muslim intellectuals attempted to study and represent the eminent monuments of the great Mughal cities. Most notable among these was Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817–98). Sir Sayyid hailed from a noble family of the sharif class that traced its ancestry to Central Asia and Persia. After his family fell on hard times, he took a job as a clerk for an East India Company court in Delhi and was quickly promoted to subjudge. Outside of his work, Sir Sayyid’s interests turned toward the study of the city’s culture, history, and architecture. He was a new kind of Muslim intellectual who possessed a modern sensibility and a deep desire to preserve Muslim cultural life. Sir Sayyid’s architectural research appeared when Bahadur Shah still held court in the Red Fort and Delhi was a hub of Urdu culture. As he sensed that Indian Muslim culture was in the throes of dissolution he sought ways to stay this movement. Rajmohan Gandhi describes this exercise with respect to his writings: “Like other sharif Muslims he too turned to the past to compensate for decline; unlike most of them he did so with skill.”[2] The text that exemplifies this skill is his famous Athar alsanadid (Works of the nobles) of 1847. Published in Urdu, it provides insight into his research and theories on the Hindu and Islamic historical sites of Delhi. Beyond its informative purpose it also contradicted British representations of Indians trapped under the weight of religious observations, lacking objectivity, and being blind to historical progress. More important, his text preserved the Muslim practices and memory that enlivened Delhi’s monuments. In the pages of the Athar al-sanadid, Islamic and especially Mughal monuments emerged as spaces of multiplicity; they were simultaneously the practiced spaces of the Muslim community and historical markers of their Indian past.

The Athar al-sanadid was not completely new in its epistemological syncretism. British officials would often commission Indians to illustrate and write descriptions of monuments as souvenirs of their times spent in Indian cities. The collector and magistrate of Agra, John Steven Lushington, for example, commissioned a student at the Government College, Lalah Sil Chand, to compile a history of Agra and a description of its buildings in 1824. Called the Tafrih al-’ imarat (Account of the public buildings), it was written in Persian and contained thirteen color drawings of the city’s monuments.[3] Sil Chand’s descriptions provided the monument’s measurements, its functions, and the names of patrons—in short, all the supposedly objective information that would have satisfied his sponsor. On a subtextual level, Sil Chand allows the history and memory of Mughal authority to continue to signify the city. He refers, for example, to Agra as Akbarabad, its Mughal name, and to the Taj Mahal as the “illustrious garden of the Taj-e Ganj.” He also resurrected the names and locations of the now demolished palaces of the nobility, thus inscribing them in the account of the city. These are perhaps minor details, but they assure the endurance of local Muslim memory and perspective on the sites in the records of the British power.

Another work that performs this blending of knowledge is the Mir’at Gitinuma of 1850, a geographical work by ‘Abd al-Karim Mushtak of Jhajjar. Also written in Persian, it presents a survey of Islam that ends with its entry into India.[4] Moving through the eras of Muslim rule in India, Mushtak brings the reader to Mughal Delhi. He writes of the city in flowery prose: “And the width and length and height and fine arrangement [of the gardens, houses, courts, mosques, etc.] cannot be grasped by the intellect, for they are wider than the face of the earth and higher than the circle of the highest heaven, and to the inhabitants [of the city] everyday is like a celebration and every night is shivaratri; one cannot have worldly thoughts there.”[5] Delhi is represented here as a sublime effect that no objective inquiry can fully capture. In stating this, the author elevates the lived and imagined experience of the city beyond the positivist knowledge that is to follow. He also orients the city for us, calling the Jama Masjid the “navel of the city.”[6] The sensuality and centrality of the great mosque is then further elaborated for the reader in the description of the activities that occur in its southeast corner: the gathering of people buying and selling silk, pigeons, livestock, children’s toys, instruments, weaponry, food, and kebab.[7] The evening, he relates, brings the storytellers telling their tales and claiming their due. The din of trade, the shouting of merchants, the haggling, the meetings of neighbors, and the sale of objects that came from as far as Kabul and Shiraz signify the space of the Jama Masjid as much as its presence as a historical monument. The author takes the opportunity of a commissioned geographical history to bring the reader over to his view of the Mughal monument, where its space is not solely defined by its placement in the linear history of past events but by the acts of praying, selling, buying, haggling, and just walking, in other words, by the spatial practices of Delhi’s everyday life.

Following in the tradition of these writers, Sir Sayyid’s Athar al-sanadid also endeavored to achieve the goal of enlivening the spaces of Delhi through a description of Muslim culture, urban activity, and memory. Unlike the previous histories, written in Persian for British patrons, his text was written in Urdu and intended for the Muslim community as much as for the British. He visited the monuments he wrote about and consulted the Persian histories available to him, such as the Mir’at aftab-nama of 1802.[8] Sir Sayyid’s six hundred–page book had 130 woodcut illustrations made by Mirza Shah Rukh Beg and was divided into four parts—miscellaneous monuments of Delhi, the Red Fort and its buildings, the buildings of Shahjahanabad, and the cultural life of Delhi.[9] In the second edition of the Athar al-sanadid of 1854, he reduced the final part to a few pages and updated and rearranged the order of the monuments according to building type. In contrast to the British view that saw Delhi as a set of ghost cities surrounding Shahjahanabad, Sir Sayyid represented his Delhi as coterminous with the past Delhis. As Narayani Gupta observed, “Athar was not an architectural history” but endeavored to create “a homogenised past for Delhi, where the ‘Hindu’ buildings… continued into ‘Islamic’…”[10] Such a mode of writing stood in opposition to the ASI’s later dissection of Delhi’s architecture into Hindu and Muslims parts. In Sir Sayyid’s book, history comes alive to inform the present, itself “described in terms of people—the diviners, the poets, artists, writers and musicians—as well as of the built environment.”[11] His description of the Jama Masjid exemplifies such an enlivening of history. Like Mushtak, he brings in the lived reality of the mosque and presents it alongside more positivist information concerning the style and form of the structure. Also like the earlier author, he presents the business and cultural activities as integral to the mosque’s meaning. The north gate of the mosque, he mentions, is next to the great market where one finds money-changers and kebab sellers.[12] Here, Sir Sayyid points out, Madari Sufis perform feats of strength; there, the jugglers perform their art. The scene is so exciting, he explains, that it renders the young old and the old young.[13] Close by, storytellers sitting on carpets narrate the legends of Amir Hamza, Hatim Tai, and Bostan Khayal to the hundreds of people who come to hear these tales.[14] Before the eastern gate of the mosque is the Khas Bazaar, a daily fair offering songbirds, pigeons, and a horse market can be found. Through the presentation of the Jama Masjid as the center of such profuse activity, Sir Sayyid, like the poet Nazir Akbarabadi before him, gives the reader a sense of how the local community enjoyed the sights, sounds, and smells of the space of the great mosque beyond their daily worship. In describing the great mosque both as a great specimen of high Mughal architecture and as a space of everyday life in Delhi, he demonstrates the multiplicity and openness of these spaces to forge alternative knowledge alongside, or even contradicting, that of the dominant power.

The life and power of the Jama Masjid is put into highest relief when one reads it against Sir Sayyid’s description of Humayun’s Tomb and the surrounding garden. He takes a more sorrowful tone as he compares its former greatness to its present state: “There was a time when the garden was well cared for: water channels ran everywhere, there were tanks into which the water fell in a cascade or from which it came up in water fountains; beautiful flowers bloomed there and the nightingales made their song heard there. But now all is destroyed. The cypress, whose elegant bearing excited the jealousies of beauties, and the rose, whose crimson defied that of their lips, do not exist anymore, even in memory. The channels have left their beds, the tanks are dry, the fountains no longer run, the wells are deprived of water, there is no trace of the waterfalls that beautified the place, only a few ruins give an idea of things that have been destroyed.”[15] After this lyrical description of the garden, which resembles in tenor and tone Mir’s shahrashob, Sir Sayyid concludes his account with factual data: the name of the tomb’s patron, Begam Nabob Haji; the year of its construction (973 Hijra; ca. 1565 CE); the time it took to construct the building (sixteen years); and how much the project cost (15 lakhs of rupees). This hybrid style of architectural discourse that is “ornate and literary, and not burdened with factual details” enlivens the tomb and thwarts the feeling of stasis that results from the scientism of modern architectural history.[16]

The interspersion of the literary in the otherwise positivistic text of Athar al-sanadid reveals a desire for a synthesis of British and Indian epistemological practices. In this age of social decline, Muslim elites writing of the monuments of the past found an elegant method for preserving their culture in a landscape increasingly shaped by British utilitarianism and Indian resistance to its scientific codification of monuments and geography. Without resorting to open confrontation or insularity, Sir Sayyid’s Athar al-sanadid produced the monument as a space of multiplicity in which both the British and the Indian Muslim could find a familiar ordering. Tangentially, the text also reveals the tolerant scholarly culture of mid-century Delhi, when Indians and British came together as peers in the pursuit of archaeological study.

On 5 August 1852 Sir Sayyid was voted in as a member of the Archaeological Society of Delhi and joined the growing group of native members that included Ibrahim Khan Bahadur, the principal suddur amin of Delhi, and Nawab Ziya al-din of Loharu.[17] Theophilus Metcalfe, a resident of Delhi, served as the society’s president.[18] Convening monthly between 1847 and 1857 to read papers, prepare translations, and participate in gentlemanly debate, the society offered a space in which British and Indians could freely exchange ideas about architecture. The society offered Sir Sayyid and other native elites an opportunity to share their interest in the built heritage of Delhi and to advance their cultural understanding of these spaces.

Reclaiming Muslim Space after the Uprising of 1857

In the aftermath of the Uprising, the shared sense of purpose and open exchange exemplified by the Archaeological Society would be lost. The field of archaeology was now the exclusive domain of the British government, and Indians its employees.[19] At this moment of great trauma, Muslim intellectuals directed all their energies toward helping their community survive both spiritually and materially. The particularly desperate social condition of the Indian Muslim community after 1857 and his aspiration to modernize Muslim society compelled Sir Sayyid to change his approach to Islamic architecture. This shift is most apparent in his opinion of monuments built and maintained by the Muslim charitable institution of the waqf. In his estimation, these buildings hindered the progress of the Indian Muslim community: “The grand mosques and monuments and religious madrasas and maktabs, which were supported by charitable endowments from the Muslim nobility, were to Sir Sayyid symbols of their greed masked with a façade of piety, betraying only the builders’ lack of concern for the collective well-being of the Muslim.”[20] Influenced by the teachings of the great reformer of Indian Islam, Shah Waliullah (1703–62), Sir Sayyid started to censure the same public monuments of his community that he had extolled in Athar al-sanadid. The turn away from their beauty or history and toward the social aspect of Muslim buildings radically reordered these sites: mosques, shrines, and schools would no longer prove vital spaces in the network of Muslim economic and social practices, in which the waqf played a central role gathering and dispersing money. Instead, they were recast as the contradictory spaces of Islam, constructions intended to preserve the wealth of the few at the expense of the many. Speaking to all and for all Muslims from the site of these structures, Sir Sayyid designated these spaces signs of Indian Muslim decline. The new disposition exemplifies how the oppression Muslims suffered after the Uprising and their struggle to survive in the new urban order altered the relations between the community’s leaders and its built environments.

The deterioration of the Islamic urban order of Delhi, while starting years earlier, reached its climax in the post-Uprising period. The British rulers dissolved the Islamic “moral city,” and its constellation of interconnected spaces that included mosques, the palace, schools, homes, neighborhoods, and the market. The modern ordering, based on hygiene, control, and the separation of the public and private spheres of activity, disconnected the moral city and then reassembled its parts to create a new urban space. After the suppression of the Uprising, Delhi’s citizens, who had once identified themselves through the system of unified spaces, were left disoriented. The poet Ghalib, returning to Delhi at this time, expressed this loss of place: “Between the Jami Masjid and the Rajghat Gate, there is nothing but a vast wasteland, dreary and desolate” (see figure 8).[21] After describing the city’s ruins, he asked how his culture could possibly endure in this devastation: “So how can Urdu survive? I swear to God, Dihli is a town no more. You might call it a military encampment, but the Fort and the city are no more. The Bazar [sic] and the lovely canal are no more.”[22] The same fragmentation occurred in Lucknow, long considered the last great city of Muslim culture. The city’s Jami Masjid and the Asafi Imambara were occupied by the British after the Uprising. The former was never again allowed to be used as a Friday mosque, thus falling into ruin. Without “the heart of the Muslim socioreligious life in the city” the social order deteriorated, and the enmity between the Sunni and Shiite communities of Lucknow that still persists today can be traced to that spatial deprivation.[23] As Lucknow was made safe for the dominant power to reassume its authority, spatial practices that had made it an Islamic moral city, like Delhi, were eradicated.

Another significant change to the urban order of Muslim society in the aftermath of the Uprising was the division of social space into the private realm of religion and domestic life and the public realm of politics and government. Prior to this division, the mosque, school, market, and palace were signified as public spaces by the activities of community leaders, whose exemplary actions (prayer, study, discourse, debate, etc.) constituted and created the moral city and community.[24] In opposition to this stood the nondiscursive realm of carnal and mystical activity engaged in by women and Sufis. After the Uprising the state relegated all things religious to the private realm, and mosques and madrasas—previously understood as the public spaces of Indian Islam—were placed in the same category as the home and the Sufi lodge. This resignification, Faisal Fatehali Devji argues, made them spaces of the zaif, or the weak, “of slaves, youths and women, where rational or responsible discourse neither occurred nor was heard.”[25] Without the open and public status of spaces like the mosque, Muslim leaders had no place to address or interpellate their community. To change this condition of displacement, these leaders needed to first take back the public spaces lost in the Uprising, to then return them to the public sphere.

Fig 8: “Delhi. General view of the Jumma Musjid.” Photograph by E. C. Impey © British Library Board, Photo 971(14)

It is against this background of social decline and urban reformation that the Mughal monuments of Delhi and Northern India emerged as ambivalent spaces of the weakened Muslim community and the newly empowered British Raj. Of the Mughal monuments, the Jama Masjid and the Fatehpuri Masjid of Delhi were selected by Muslim leaders as the spaces for whose restoration they would petition the state. Shaped by the power relations of the period, these mosques were separated from the other public sites that once constituted the Mughal moral city, such as the Red Fort, the Chandni Chowk market, madrasas, and the tombs. The two mosques alone emerged as the space of Indian Muslim social survival and identification.

The Return of the Mughal Mosques

When Muslims were allowed back into Delhi in 1859, they found the city in a state of physical and social disorder. Their ruling-class status, their Urdu culture, and the Mughal authority were no more. Furthermore, the state’s policy of retribution left the Muslim community, more than any other group, alienated from the great city they called home. Dastanbuy, or Nosegay, a narrative of the Uprising written in Urdu by Ghalib, provides a window onto the imbalance of the city’s social order:

In January of 1858, the Hindus were given a proclamation of freedom by which they were allowed to live again in the city, and these people have begun to return from the places where they had found refuge. But the houses of the dispossessed Muslims had long remained empty and were so covered with vegetation that the walls seemed to be made of grass—and every blade of grass tells that the house of the Muslim is still empty.[26]

When this account reaches the hands of my friends, I want them to know that the city is empty of Muslims—their houses are not lit at night and during the day their chimneys give forth no smoke. And Ghalib, who had thousands of friends in the city and acquaintances in every house, now is in his loneliness, has none to talk with except his pen and no companion but his shadow.[27]

When Muslims could finally return to Delhi, the British authority remained aloof and indifferent to their demands for rehabilitation aid. Adding insult to injury, the populace was denied access to the city’s principal congregational mosques, the Jama Masjid and the Fatehpuri Masjid, effectively prohibiting them from coming together as a community to pray on Fridays.

Two years after the threat of reprisals and insurgency dissipated, the state was still undecided as to what to do with these two Mughal mosques. In the meantime, the Jama Masjid was being used to billet the Thirteenth Punjab Infantry. Suggestions for alternative uses for the mosque were also forwarded. For example, A. A. Roberts, the officiating financial commissioner for the Punjab, wanted to preserve the city’s great mosques from further decay but keep them under British control. In their empty and static state the confiscated mosques would serve “as grand but silent monuments of the successes which was [sic] vouchsafed to us in September 1857.”[28] Roberts added that they would act “as tokens of our displeasure towards the blinded fantasies” of the Mughal king and the rebels.[29] Philip Egerton, the city magistrate of Delhi and another staunch supporter of retaining custody of the Jama Masjid in British hands, wanted it to be converted into a Christian cathedral and have the marble slabs of its floor inscribed with the names of Christian martyrs.[30] While such ideas circulated, the mosque remained occupied by the army and no prayer took place. Then in 1858 the viceroy, Lord Canning, let it be known that he was “averse to the continued occupation of the musjid [sic] by our troops, and he trusts that Brigadier Longfield will be able to locate them elsewhere.”[31] Plans and conditions for the restoration of the mosque to the Muslim community were drawn up next.

The secretary of the government of India confirmed the government’s plan for the handover in 1860: “If at any time the respectable Mahomedans of Delhi should ask for the restoration of the Jumma Masjid, and agree to make proper arrangement for keeping it in repair, the Governor General considers it desirable that it should be restored.”[32] The secretary to the government of Punjab then clarified that the Jama Masjid would be restored to the Muslim community only after the appropriate terms for handing it over had been outlined and agreed on. The Muslim community had first to come forth with a united voice. This meant that the Shiite and Sunni sects had to suppress their sectarian differences, that the conservative Wahhabis had to compromise with the progressive Bida’ites, and that all parties had to mind the authority of the mosque’s managing committee.[33] The influence of the British government, while officially prohibited inside the mosque, was discernible in two ways: in the selection of managers deemed loyal to the government; and in limiting the discourse and practices in the mosque to religious matters.

Two years later, on 19 April 1862, a group of men finally stepped forward to request that the mosque be restored to the Muslim community. After their loyalty had been ascertained, the government made preparations to restore the mosque to Delhi’s Muslims. Four general conditions had to be accepted before the actual handover took place.

1st Keeping the peace within the Mosque.

2nd Settling disputes with regard to the building or its purposes.

3rd Preventing or reporting the occurrence of offences against the State within the Mosque.

4th Keeping the Mosque in repair and keeping accounts of the endowment property.[34]

Along with these stipulations, the men had to acknowledge the government’s right to confiscate the mosque should there be any sign of seditious behavior taking place inside.[35] The final step in the process of restoration was the selection of ten managers composed of respectable and loyal men of Delhi’s Muslim community. Once this committee of managers had found approval the mosque would be handed over to the Muslim community for religious services.

After the papers were signed and the managing committee constituted, the matter of the actual return was discussed. The secretary of the government of Punjab wanted the transfer of the mosque to occur quietly and ordered that “no public demonstrations should take place.”[36] On the morning of 28 November 1862 the deputy commissioner of police wrote to the commissioner and superintendent of Delhi that he had the honor to report that the Jama Masjid had been opened to the Muslim population for worship. Six rules of conduct were first read to the attendees and then hung in English and Persian at the mosque gates. Rule one and two stated that non-Muslims were prohibited from entering the mosque during prayer and that no one, excluding the khadim and the muezzin, was allowed to stay overnight. The third rule permitted Hindus to visit the mosque as long as they did not stray from “ordinary decent behavior.” The fourth rule stated that European officers and gentlemen, civil and military, “can enter without restrictions as to shoes” and that dogs and smoking were restricted. According to rule five, European soldiers needed permission from the district officer or commanding officer to enter the mosque. The sixth rule stated that two sentries would be appointed to stand at the North and South Gates and that the managers, not the government, would pay their wages from the mosque’s waqf. Once these rules were heard, the Jama Masjid was open for gathering and prayer and assumed its place as the central space of Muslim public life in Delhi. However, as the rules suggest, the mosque remained a government-regulated space—far from an ideal situation, but one the community accepted as a necessary first step toward regaining its public viability.

The second Mughal mosque of note to be given back to the Muslims was the Fatehpuri Masjid. Built by Fatehpuri Begam, a wife of Shah Jahan in 1650, it sits at the western end of the great avenue called Chandni Chowk, facing the Lahore Gate of the Red Fort. After the Uprising of 1857 a Hindu merchant named Lala Chunna Mal bought the inner courtyard and surrounding shops of the mosque for Rs. 40,000 at a public auction. After he died, it was passed down to his son Umrao Singh, who continued to collect rents from the shops located in the courtyard and outside the mosque. The mosque was still in limited use, and people routinely complained that their prayers were disturbed by the affairs of business conducted in the shops. The Hindu ownership and contradictory use of the mosque’s interior as a market served as a constant reminder of the unequal reprisals meted out to the Muslims after the British seized Delhi. The conditions at the Fatehpuri Masjid thus belied the official policy of religious tolerance and the evenhandedness of the British Raj.

The incongruous spatial practices at the Fatehpuri Masjid lasted for twenty years, until the government in Punjab forwarded to W. G. Davies, the commissioner and superintendent of the Delhi Division, a confidential letter containing Viceroy Lord Lytton’s opinion that “it would be a very polite measure to restore if possible those mosques which are now in the possession of Hindus at Delhi, to the Muhammudans on the occasion of the Imperial Assemblage; unless there are any great objections.”[37] Inquiries were subsequently made into whether the proprietor of the mosque was willing to release its ownership. After some negotiation, Singh agreed to sell the mosque for a cash sum of Rs. 1,10,000. The exchange was made, and on 1 May the government handed the shops and courtyard of the mosque over to a board of managers composed of seven reputable Muslim men from the community approved by Davies. The same rules of conduct that were hung at the gateways of the Jama Masjid were placed at the entrance of the Fatehpuri Masjid.

The return of the Fatehpuri Masjid was unlike the quiet handing over of the Jama Masjid. Speeches and newspaper articles proclaimed the greatness of the event. The mosque was used to give a spatial dimension to the tolerance of British imperial rule, and the building’s restoration to the Muslim community was seen as punctuating the official acts surrounding the Imperial Assemblage of January 1877 in Delhi. The assemblage marked the ascension of Queen Victoria to the title of Kaiser-i Hind, or empress of India. The new distinction symbolized the power relations between the British and Indians and reaffirmed the government’s promise to end its policy of religious interference. Committed to protecting the feudal order, the British rulers now styled themselves as not the ousters but as the inheritors of Mughal authority. Like the emperors Akbar and Shah Jahan, the new empress would protect the diverse communities of India and demand allegiance from the remaining royalty. Queen Victoria had announced these intentions in 1858, when the crown took nominal control of India from the East India Company, but the assembly of 1877 would perform this new social ordering through processions and public ceremony. The gathering and distribution according to the ranks of the diverse subjects, princes, chiefs, retainers, and military forces spatially demonstrated the British Raj’s resurrection of the old and familiar feudal idiom of the Mughal durbar.[38] Yet the liberal policies and Mughal practices of this new power were contradicted by the continued occupation of the mosques of Delhi.

In planning for this assembly, Lord Lytton and his advisors selected Delhi as the location due to its historical association with Indian imperial history. But because the city still retained vestiges of the biased policy of retribution following the Uprising, it remained a conflicted space of empire. The fact that the Fatehpuri Masjid and other mosques remained in non-Muslim hands, for example, clashed with the representation of impartiality assumed by the new imperial government. The viceroy therefore proposed a strategy to infuse the government’s impartial sentiment into Delhi by returning the confiscated mosques to the Muslim community in time for the assembly. The return of Fatehpuri Masjid and the Zinat-ul Masjid, located to the south of Red Fort’s Delhi Gate and built by a daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb, were listed among the government’s “various acts of grace” and later published along with the proceedings of the assembly in a special gazette.[39] Circumscribed by the events of the assembly, the space of the Fatehpuri Mosque was signified as a symbol of the new relationship of the British rulers toward the Muslim community.

The Annual Register reported the Muslim community’s satisfaction with the government’s actions. Altaf Hussain Hali (1837–1914), an Urdu poet and a protégé of Sir Sayyid, hailed the policy of restoration and toleration as a new chapter in the social struggle of Muslims under the British Raj. In his poem Musaddas of 1879, he wrote of the community’s new freedom to worship:

No one wishes your religion and faith ill. No one is hostile to the Traditions and the Quran.

No one damages the pillars of the community. No one forbids observance of the Holy Law’s commands.

Pray without fear in places of worship. Loudly proclaim the calls to prayer in your mosques.[40]

For the next three decades, the committee of managers exercised control of the financial and preservation matters of the Jama Masjid and the Fatehpuri Masjid without criticism. Neither was the state’s interference challenged, as it exercised its power over these mosques by approving or rejecting new members of the managing committees and pressuring them to ensure that no seditious behavior transpired in the mosques. The deputy commissioner of Delhi annually received reports from the managing committee’s office and was kept appraised of changes in management and maintenance matters.

This stable situation changed as the Mughal mosques entered the twentieth century. Members of the Muslim community raised questions regarding the managing committee’s ability to represent them, the restriction of political discourse inside the mosques, and the government’s lack of oversight of the waqf. The community began to challenge the policies of the state from the space of the mosque and called into question its noninterference policy, which according to Ayesha Jalal was a fantasy more than a reality: “Far from eliminating politics from the realms of religion and culture, the colonial state did much to bring these spheres closer than ever and reshape them in the process.”[41] One area in which the government’s involvement with the mosque was most visible and could therefore be challenged directly was the waqf, which was protected by the law. The other area was the public condemnation of the destruction or desecration of mosques in the press. The Muslim community utilized the courts and the press to challenge British practices and to reshape the mosque to fit its own needs and aspirations. No other structure or space offered this radical possibility—not the palace, not the fort, not the garden or the shrine. Through court cases and newspaper reports the mosque was transformed from a local structure limited to religious practices into a nationalized space of the Indian Muslim community, a site where political resistance and social desire for recognition could find expression. At Delhi’s Jama Masjid, this transformation started to take shape in the first decade of the twentieth century.

From Mosques to Monuments of Muslim India

At the start of the twentieth century new political pressures on the Muslim community forced a reordering of the Mughal mosques and monuments. No longer would they function solely as religious spaces and touristic sites devoid of explicit political meaning. With communal politics framing Muslim identity, especially in Northern India, the mosque became a critical space in which to convene, discuss, and express dissatisfaction with the government. To prevent this kind of politicization of the large and important mosques of Delhi, the government made the management committees of both the Jama Masjid and the Fatehpuri Masjid sign agreements to prohibit political discussions inside the buildings. This policy of indirect supervision of the Jama Masjid through the managing committee worked for almost five decades, but in 1909 the political forces shaping the outside landscape also entered the mosque. In the summer of that year two men, Haji Fazil-al-Rahman and Muhammad-ud-din, of Delhi, filed a petition to take the managing committee of the Jama Masjid to civil court.[42] The petitioners intended to publicize the managing committee’s complicity with government interference in religious matters, its unchecked practices of collecting and distributing the waqf revenues, and its lack of concern for and misrepresentation of the Muslim community at large. Although the Delhi District Court dismissed the case, a closer inspection of the charges reveals how the demand for justice for all Muslims rendered the Mughal Jama Masjid a space of political and social transformation.

According to Act XX of 1863, or the Religious Endowment Act, any party can sue the managers of a mosque for misfeasance, breach of trust, or neglect of duty in the civil court.[43] The plaintiffs’ primary contention in the case of 1909 was that the Jama Masjid was a space not devoted to Muslim practice but to the spreading of pro-government, loyalist propaganda. Fazil-al-Rahman claimed that he submitted his petition for no other reason than to see proper management of the mosque where he prayed regularly and to which his family contributed large sums of money.[44] The plaintiffs further stated that previous complaints regarding the mosque’s mismanagement had gone unacknowledged. Six of these complaints were included in the petition and were directed against the managing committee: (1) that the committee had an illegitimate monopoly over all waqf properties; (2) that the committee members were not representative of the community and that they reserved jobs at the mosque for family members or friends; (3) that the imam, who was both an employee and a committee member, kept the money given by native rulers for the upkeep of the mosque; (4) that there were no accounts or audits made of the budget, which was supposed to be shared with the Muslim community; (5) that the committee prohibited the recitation of the Qu’ran in the mosque, a pious act allowed by the Mughal emperors; and (6) that vacancies in the committee were not announced publicly but reserved for friends and family.[45]

The deputy commissioner, C. A. Barron, was forced to disagree with this assessment of the committee as he and his predecessors had selected the men based on their good character. In further defense of the mosque managing committee, he cited a letter of 8 August 1909 from its members in response to the plaintiffs’ allegations. The committee began by asserting that the suit was nothing more than “the result of personal enmity and jealousy.”[46] The reputation of the plaintiffs was then individually discredited. First, Fazil-alRahman’s character was questioned for having serious family differences with Haji Abdul Ghani, his brother and a managing committee member, and for associating with people of notorious repute like Mirza Hairat Dihlavi, who had been arrested for forgery. In fact, the latter edited the Curzon Gazette, a newspaper that published reports critical of the British government. For example, in 1902 it printed an article blaming the British for engendering a culture of corruption at religious structures and questioned the government’s noninterference methods that left large Muslim endowments open to abuse: “From the time the protecting hand of Government has been removed, lakhs and even crores of Rupees… have been wasted… the Mutawallis or managers are filling their pockets and no Hindu or Mohammadan has the power of demanding accounts of them.”[47] According to the committee’s letter, Mirza Hairat published the plaintiffs’ petition in his newspaper to publicize their grievances with the larger Muslim community and thus to incite public agitation. The second plaintiff was also discredited as “not a man of any consequence.”

The managing committee’s letter went on to refute the claim that it had prohibited the recitation of the Qu’ran; rather, preaching was restricted in the mosque. The committee reasoned that if anyone was allowed to preach, it would open up the mosque to seditious discourse, and it stated that the preachers that were invited knew the pulpit was “for purely religious purposes and not to be utilized for controversial or other undesirable purposes.”[48] The letter against the court petition thus gave the committee an opportunity to reaffirm its commitment to prevent sedition in the mosque. Accepting the points made in the letter, the Delhi District Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ petition on the grounds of this character assessment and for lack of detailed argumentation and evidence.

Although Fazil-al-Rahman and Muhammad-ud-din’s case never made it to court, the petition still had an impact on the space of the Jama Masjid and its meaning to the Muslim community. First, under the provisions of Act XX, the mosque was turned into a node in the web of power relations, where the petitioners could openly challenge the practices of the committee of managers as contradictory to the spirit of a Muslim mosque. Working in collusion with the state, the petition asserted, the committee turned what was supposed to be the most egalitarian space within Delhi’s Muslim world into a hierarchical and thus contradictory space. The publication in Urdu of this petition and the subsequent commentary by Mirza Hairat reproduced the mosque as an ambivalent space of the Muslim community. In this particular case, the Muslim community of Delhi received neither the justice it sought nor control of the mosque. But the case and the accompanying press support proved instrumental in shaping how the Muslim community of Delhi would begin to politically identify itself through the space of the Jama Masjid. The community also did not have to wait long to get its desired waqf reforms: in 1914 the government convened in Delhi a Religious Endowments Conference to discuss the concerns of Muslims for better management of the waqf endowments; out of these meetings and through constant pressure from the press came the Charitable and Religious Trusts Act XIV of 1920 and the Mussalman Waqf Act XLII of 1923 that made managers subject to public oversight. They now had to keep careful records of their expenditures and payments and had to annually publish their accounts.[49]

The Jama Masjid case of 1909 proved that the state could no longer ignore the general displeasure of the Muslim community regarding the mismanagement of waqf properties. Beyond motivating the government to reform its laws regarding Muslim endowments, the case revealed a shift in the disposition of the Muslim community toward its public spaces. Through the practices of prayer, gatherings, and festivals, the mosque could be defined as a lived space. The palaces, forts, empty shrines, and gardens might have gone the way of history, but the mosque still constituted the center of Muslim life. It was the spatial embodiment of the universal and central principle of Islam—unity. The mosque unified the ummah like no other Islamic structure did: through the practice of prayer that occurred there, it brought man to God. Though times might change and empires might fall and rise, tawhid, the unity of God, remained constant and was externalized in the social unity of the ummah.

Accepting these concepts, the poet and Indian Muslim nationalist Iqbal projected the idea of tawhid further outside of India and named the Kaaba in Mecca the external symbol of unity.[50] Mosques in this cosmology locally materialized the principle of universal unity. Every mosque was oriented toward the Kaaba, and the faithful faced in that direction as they prayed together. This orientation and practice subjected the mosque to a vastly different ordering than the public spaces of the British government and the spaces of the Hindu majority and thus symbolized the uniqueness of the Muslim community. Once the mosque was understood as the spatial heart of this community that linked it to God and the rest of the Muslim world, its protection became a prime political concern of all Muslims. This recognition engendered the national and political significance of the mosque as a monument of Muslim India. From the first decades of the twentieth century until the introduction of the concept of Pakistan, the mosque functioned as a practiced and iterative space forging a Muslim national identity as distinct from the other communities of British India.

The Mosque and the Production of Communal Space

In the years following the petition against the managing committee of the Jama Masjid, other mosques and Islamic sites began to receive coverage in the Muslim press. Like the Jama Masjid, these sites were publicly discussed and debated and reordered through the struggle for social survival and the desire to forge a national sensibility among India’s Muslims. In 1913, Madina, an Urdu newspaper out of Bijnor, reported the joyful return of the Mughal Sunehri Masjid of Delhi, built in 1751, to the community. The story explained how after 1857 it had been occupied and no one was allowed to engage in namaz, or prayer, there. After several unsuccessful attempts by Muslims in the community to gain access to the mosque for prayer, it was finally opened: “It has been heard happily that now the Chief Commissioner of Delhi allowed Muslims to perform namaz in the mosque.”[51] Several months later, Madina reported on restoration work at the Red Fort: “There is good news that the Government of India has started to adorn some buildings of Red Fort in the same way as they looked before the Mutiny.”[52] Uplifting stories like these, however, remained few and far between. The more typical reports concerned the British destruction and desecration of mosques. The most widely known example of such a transgression was the Kanpur mosque incident, which galvanized Muslims all over India into demanding social justice.

A modest mosque built by bisatis, or peddlers, the Kanpur mosque was brought to national prominence in 1913 through strident reports in the Muslim press. The crisis at the mosque revolved around the local government’s destruction of the dalan (causeway) used for ablutions to widen the street. While the dalan was not actually part of the mosque’s sanctuary, the community and the press represented it as a sacred space whose demolition amounted to an act of trespassing. Months before its destruction, the Muslims of Kanpur petitioned the government to abandon the demolition plan, and a fatwa was issued in support of this demand. The local and provincial governments, however, went ahead with the dalan’s demolition because the mosque was not a waqf property and the dalan not part of the mosque proper. These technical definitions of what constituted a mosque were rendered moot by the press, which presented the government’s tampering with any part of the mosque as an act of intrusion. Government officials, like the lieutenant governor of Uttar Pradesh, James Meston, were blind to the mosque’s evolving role as a radicalized space, and that the press was transforming a local mosque of little renown into a national space of Muslim social identification. For months the Urdu press ran provocative headlines signifying the demolition of the dalan as a symbol of British disregard for Muslim space and society. On 23 April the editor of Madina, Agha Rafiq, wrote a perspective piece regarding what he called the municipality’s takeover of Islamic places of worship and on how such a move should be read: “We are surprised to know that the local municipality wants to acquire a portion of the Bisti Bazar Mosque in Kanpur to build roads…. To respect the places of worship of Indian communities is the prime responsibility of the Government of India.”[53] He goes on to equate the destruction of mosques with the oppression of the religion itself, and he ends by warning the government that the demolition of the dalan will only lead to the destruction of the social order. On 8 July Madina reported the dalan’s demolition under the provocative title, “Demolition of Islamic Places of Worship.”[54] This incident was then linked to the demolition of another mosque, that of Sheikh Abdul Haq in Delhi, which the paper claimed “clearly express that the Government of India has no respect for Islamic places of worship” and that it “gives no value to the religious sentiments of Muslims.”[55] Later in September, in response to an opinion printed in a British daily, the Pioneer, Madina linked the Kanpur mosque to the Mughal Fatehpuri Masjid of Delhi. The Pioneer had advised the Muslim community not to see the incident at Kanpur as reflecting the government’s ill will toward the community, saying that they should instead focus on the return of mosques, like that of the Fatehpuri Masjid, as proof of its goodwill. Madina responded by pointing out that the Fatehpuri Masjid had been sold to a Hindu before it was given back in the context of the Imperial Assembly and went on to clarify the Muslim position: “But we would like to tell the Pioneer that Muslims remember such incidents including the Fatehpuri Mosque in which mosques have been restored to Muslims by the Government. Muslims are thankful for such graceful acts. At the same time it does not mean that mosques would not be demolished in the future and that Muslims could be targeted without any mistake.”[56] Madina presented itself as the voice of a united body of Muslims—and the government as its opponent. The space of the Kanpur mosque, like the Fatehpuri Mosque, had become a pivot on which the power relations of Muslims and their government now turned.

As the weeks went by, other newspapers read by Muslims like Comrade, al-Hilal, and Zamindar continued to press the government for restitution after interfering with the community’s religion.[57] Further agitations, arrests, and even deaths surrounding the demolished dalan functioned to crystallize Muslim opinion against the British on a national scale. To put an end to this trend, the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, at the request of the Muslim League, finally visited Kanpur. The Muslim community’s victory came soon after, on 14 October, when the viceroy agreed to pardon prisoners arrested in agitations and to rebuild the dalan.

In the aftermath of the Kanpur mosque incident, several transformations can be observed in the ordering of Muslim social space and the community’s sense of place in larger British India: first, it turned the mosque from a local place of worship into a national space for the formation of a Muslim community; second, it revealed to Muslims all across India that their displacement from the public realm was probable if they did not remain vigilant; and third, the mosque was returned to the public realm as a space of debate. The rhetorical ordering of the small and local mosque of Kanpur as a protected space of Indian Muslim identity was also used to defend the small mosques of Delhi from destruction between 1913 and 1929, when land was cleared to make room for the capital city of New Delhi.

Resisting New Delhi through the Mosques of Delhi

The construction of New Delhi forced the displacement of Indians who owned land and buildings on the land demarcated for the new city. To stave off agitations, the government approached this relocation process judiciously. It counted monuments and divided them into two categories: those that should be saved and restored and those that could be purchased for later demolition. The deputy commissioner, H. C. Beadon, further divided the buildings considered worthy of preservation into three groups: ancient monuments of historic interest; religious buildings still in use and of more than local repute; and sacred tombs and recognized graveyards. All other structures, Beadon reasoned, could be bought out from their owners and demolished. Mughal monuments of all kinds would be spared.[58] What seemed a simple and reasonable solution to the problem of making room met with opposition from the Muslim press. Unlike the British, who divided Muslim structures along historical importance, level of use, and renown, the press signified all Muslim structures as protected spaces of the Muslim community, thus thwarting the ordering imposed by Beadon. The demolition of any of these structures could now be framed as proof of the government’s illiberal rule. The Hamdard daily, edited by Muhammad Ali from Delhi, wrote of the British destruction of Delhi’s Muslim spaces in a two-part piece titled “Old Graves and Mosques of Delhi,” registering the difference in the British perception of these spaces: “The old monuments, whether they be graves, mosques or shrines, are loved and respected by all communities, but mosques and graves are especially respected from the religious point of view by Muslims…. On the one hand, these graves and mosques have deep relevance to the history of Muslims. On the other hand, the graves of both the poor and the King are given the same religious respect.”[59] The article goes on to insist that the Muslim community does not want its religious structures disturbed and that although the chief commissioner of Delhi, William M. Hailey, having assured Muslims of Delhi that he would not hurt their sentiments, had nevertheless gone ahead and demolished a “famous mosque” by the Koki Bridge. The mosque’s fame derived from being the location at which the Sufi Sheikh Abdul Haq Muhaddis Dehlavi had delivered his sermons during the reigns of the Mughal emperors. Since all Muslims were aware of the mosque’s special status, it should not have been slated for destruction. The commissioner acknowledged his mistake and rebuilt the mosque.

In the second news piece, the Hamdard took Hailey to task for designating some mosques and graves as of limited local interest and subsequently fit for demolition. In response to this bias, the newspaper stated: “The view of Mr. Hailey that all the ‘essential religious buildings and graves of top personages’ would not be disturbed is confusing. Indeed no discrimination can be made among the religious buildings. A broken old mosque of which all the walls are fallen and whose history is unknown is religiously no different from the big Jama Masjid of Delhi.”[60] The Hamdard continued to follow the planning and demolitions of Delhi for two years. In 1915 it reported three unfortunate incidents in regard to mosques and graves in Delhi. Using the law of land acquisition, the Hamdard explained, the government had bought the Burji Masjid, where prayer was done five times a day and where the Hazrat Shah Bahauddin shrine was located. This, Hamdard stated, ran counter to the government’s intention of sparing the good sentiments of the people of Delhi in building its new city.

Another Delhi newspaper, the Muslim, reported in July 1922 that the Bagh Kalali mosque located inside the precincts of New Delhi was destined for demolition according to a map the writer had seen. The paper asserted the Muslim point of view regarding the destruction of mosques: “The laws about mosques in Islamic jurisprudence are so strict that once a mosque is built it becomes sacred and respectable until the Day of Resurrection. Even an inch of its land cannot be used for any other purpose.” This observation was followed by an implicit warning to the government: “Firstly, the mosques were occupied. We tolerated it because we were helpless. Now the mosques are being martyred for roads and buildings. If this condition prevails, it will be difficult for Muslims to tolerate.”[61] From the Muslim’s stance concerning the history of mosques in Delhi it becomes clear that these structures, no matter their historical value, were uniformly understood as symbolic spaces of Muslim social identity. The article also bears testimony to a growing sense of empowerment derived from the community’s critique of governmental actions against its mosques. By 1922 the mosque had become a space of Muslim social identity serving the community as a public line of defense against what were seen as British attempts to bring about the community’s social death.

In the decades before independence the mosque, more than any other Islamic structure, became the principal space of Muslim social identification. Therefore, of all the Mughal monuments only the Jama Masjid and the Fatehpuri Masjid were selected as representative spaces of the Muslim community. Considering this reality, the state presented their restoration as symbols of its goodwill toward India’s Muslims. But the British underestimated the true significance of the mosque as a lived space at the heart of the community. While Muslims certainly appreciated the return of the Mughal mosques, the supposedly grand British gesture did not settle the issue of their social subjugation; rather, it merely marked the beginning of the community’s efforts to reclaim control over their public spaces of social identification and resistance. British rule prevailed at the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal because it went largely uncontested by the Muslim community. But at the Jama Masjid, the Fatehpuri Masjid, and other religious sites, Muslims rejected the power structures put in place by the British. From the space of the mosque, other horizons of action would open up in the 1930s and 1940s and guide the Muslim community through the struggles for independence and state formation.

From Community to Nation and the Politicization of Islamic Monuments

By the 1930s New Delhi was a completed city, the ASI stood on solid footing, and the Muslim press had secured the mosque as the representative architectural space of Indian Muslim identity. Also at this time, the electoral principle began to frame the political landscape and the All-India Muslim League was defining Muslim nationhood as distinct from the symbolic ordering of the Indian nation by the secular Congress Party. This difference was pinned to the Muslim community’s minority status. Initially this position helped the community negotiate its place “within the paradigm of ‘inclusionary secular nationalist’ politics articulated by the Indian congress.”[62] But by the 1930s the Congress Party had changed its tactics from a policy of inclusion to what Ali Riaz described as a secular form of majoritarianism, “because they perceived it as an antidote to the rising influence of Muslim identity politics.”[63] From this standpoint, both the Muslim League and the Hindu nationalist party were negatively figured as “religious communalists” and labeled as divisive and therefore harmful to the goals of national independence and democracy.

The Muslim League rose in influence after the passing of the Government of India Act of 1909, which introduced the electoral principle and the promise to give Indian Muslims a reserved number of seats in local and imperial governments. The British government included this last and controversial provision to quell Muslim fears of domination by a permanent Hindu majority. This tactic of claiming unfair representation may have had its effectiveness in balancing power, but the Muslim League knew it could also weaken its cause for greater overall Indian power in government. Thus in 1916 the Muslim League came together with the Indian National Congress in a spirit of compromise. For its part, Congress agreed to the principle of weighted votes, separate electorates, and a one-third reservation of seats for Muslims in the imperial government. These proposals were written into law in the Government of India Act of 1919. But the climate of compromise began to dissipate as Congress secularists increasingly claimed these electoral measures to be antithetical to the democratic process. The Nehru Report of 1928 all but rescinded the previous compromises and a policy of secular majoritarianism began to inflect Congress decisions and tactics. The Muslim League responded by separating from the Congress and injecting the discourse of Muslim nationalism into the sphere of political policy and debate. This alteration of native power relations initiated a new spatial disposition to the geography and the Mughal monuments of India. Muslim leaders positioned their community as a separate nation existing within the secularist and Hindu ones. Those elements of the Indian landscape that contradicted this vision, such as the Mughal monument, celebrated for its syncretic form, were either reordered to align with Indian Muslim nationalism or purged from the newly constituting communal space.[64]

The rhetorical logic of the Indian Muslim political elite framed the Mughals, long admired and imitated by the British rulers and by secularist Indians for their integrationist ethos, as contradictory to the idea of Muslim nationhood. For example, the Muslim League shunned Akbar, the greatest historical unifier of Hindu and Muslim India.[65] Nehru observed this rejection on Akbar’s four hundredth birthday in 1942, when “all classes of people, including many Muslims joined, but the Muslim League kept aloof because Akbar was a symbol of India’s unity.”[66] The Mughal monument, a sign of Indian Islam’s cultural heterodoxy, was also expunged from the imagined landscape of the emerging Indian Muslim nation. This distancing from the Mughal era and its heritage was not an entirely recent development but the final stage of a movement initiated by Islamic reformists in the eighteenth century.

In their efforts to make sense of the deteriorating state of Indian Islam after the demise of Aurangzeb in 1707, some Muslim reformists pointed to the corruption of their religion by Hindu customs. To counteract this decline, they urged Muslims to simplify their faith, to look to the Prophet and the customs of the Arabs for guidance in everyday matters. Shah Waliullah led this charge in Delhi after the city was devastated by a series of attacks starting with Nadir Shah’s in 1739. He advised his followers to look past the local and to the Arabian Peninsula to find their cultural bearings and to reclaim their sense of community and spiritual character: “We are Arab people whose fathers have fallen in exile (ghurba) in the country of Hindustan, and Arabic genealogy and Arabic language are our pride.”[67] Following this logic, he condemned the local traditions that had developed around Sufi mystics, like the pilgrimage to the tombs of Sufi saints, venerated by both Hindus and Muslims.[68] When Muslims again experienced devastating loss, disorientation, and fragmentation after 1857, Shah Waliullah’s teachings found new purchase. Educated Muslims like Sir Sayyid saw in them a way to save the soul of the community by insulating it against the assaults of British modernization while preparing a communal mirror based on an idealized vision of Indian Islam.

Although reformists slowly stripped Indian Islam of its Hindu accretions throughout the nineteenth century, the process took on a quality of political urgency after 1857, when the British government separated and codified the Indian public according to communal categories. New dispositions and relationships to the state were thus mediated through religious practice and conflict. At the intersection of the movement of Muslim reformism and British identity politics, the Indian Muslim community began to take shape as a distinct social formation.[69] Official representations of public agitations manifest this new communal figuration; whether they originally derived from personal, local, or class conflicts, they were almost always represented as altercations between Hindus and Muslims in official documents.[70] Muslims that had identified with their degree of wealth, ancestry, and regional or sectarian affiliation found it expedient to assume the religious identification to “compete more effectively for government patronage.”[71] To put flesh on the bones of this invented category, a new Indian Muslim morality, history, and culture were constructed. The first to give shape to this embodiment of the “Indian Muslim” was Sir Sayyid. Starting with his Causes of the Indian Revolt of 1858, Sir Sayyid defended the Muslim population against the misconceived notion that they were the enemies of the British Raj. This kind of critique became especially necessary after W. W. Hunter’s scathing study of 1871, The Indian Musalmans: Are They Bound in Conscience to Rebel against the Queen?[72] One year later the first census was taken, making it a quantitative reality that Muslims constituted twenty-two percent of India’s population, thus cementing their minority status.

Confronted with misconceptions and demographics Sir Sayyid became concerned with producing a favorable representation of Muslims and, more practically, with their social survival. This need took on a new urgency after the various India Council Acts began to open the local and municipal councils to natives. Here the Muslims would be at a disadvantage because, unlike the Hindus, they did not adapt their education to meet the demands of a modernizing world. Sir Sayyid built his famous Mohammedan Anglo-Oriental College, later known as Aligarh Muslim University, in 1875 with the aim of addressing this deficiency. The modernization of Indian Muslim education brought with it a new national sensibility whereby the community began to see and represent itself as a distinct group with its own history, culture, and social order.

Another stimulus for the constitution of Indian Muslim national identity, and one that would affect the space of Mughal monuments more directly, was the epic poem, Musaddas, written by Hali at the urging of Sir Sayyid in 1879. Musaddas narrates the rise and decline of Muslim culture from the eminent early caliphs to the decadence of the late nineteenth century and offers the community a way out of its weakened state. Hali begins by describing the great heights reached by Muslims in the arts and sciences. In the section called “The Monuments of Islam” he writes, “There is no continent upon this globe in which their buildings do not stand firm; Arabia, India, Egypt, Spain, Syria, Dailam, the whole world is filled with their foundations.”[73] In the poem, these monuments function as symbols of the greatness of early Islamic culture, but in their present state they stand as contradictory spaces: “Those palaces of stone and their brilliant purity, to whose ruins moss clings today!”[74] Like Shah Waliullah and Sir Sayyid, Hali ascribes this decline to the lost purity of faith, which the community must again attain to save itself.

In Musaddas the monument signals the trajectory of Muslim decline that leads readers at last to India. Here, Hali proceeds to describe the poverty, indolence, and general lack of readiness of the Indian Muslim community to take its place in the larger sphere of British rule. The reason for the community’s sorry state is its loss of moral direction, which can be rediscovered by looking to the Prophet’s timeless message. Hali maintains that by reacquainting itself with Arab culture and history, the community may be directed to a “moral realm immune to temporal cycles of progress and decline.”[75] In this framework, monuments akin to the forms of early Islam are lauded, while those that show local variations in style and function are considered degraded. By this logic the syncretic Mughal monuments inevitably symbolized the beginning of Muslim decline, when the classical simplicity of early Islam was lost for good.[76]

The movement away from present day India and back to the Hijaz of the Prophet reoriented the community temporally and spatially and helped it differentiate itself from the other communities. Progress for the good of the community was thus not seen as the forward movement of modernism per se but as the return to the simple, unchanging character of classical Arab Islam. While secularists and the British government alike vied for legitimacy by looking to the Mughals as their model, Hali instructed the Muslim community to sever such affiliations with the past and to see itself as a separate Islamic nation—though part of the larger Islamic world—living and functioning in an alien modern India. In so doing, Hali transposed Islam and modernity, making the former the new master-signifier of the Indian Muslim. As national independence loomed on the horizon and the political terrain was shifting underfoot, Islam, and the symbolic order it signified, would stabilize the community and direct its identification with the Indian landscape and its monuments.

Muslim Nationalism and the Spaces of the “Moral Community”

By the late 1930s and the 1940s, the secularist Congress and the British government put increasing pressure on Muslims to reveal where they stood in the struggle for freedom and the larger political landscape. Sensing that the independence movement was gravitating toward Hindu symbolism and cultural idioms, Muslim leaders altered their demands for electoral privilege to call for a separate nation status based on Islamic symbolism.[77] Underscoring this demand were the cultural arguments of Sir Sayyid, Hali, and the poet and reformist Iqbal. In 1940, at the historical meeting of the Muslim League in Lahore, the party’s leader, Muhammed Ali Jinnah, summed up this reasoning in a speech that inaugurated the new object of Indian Muslim desire, Pakistan: “Hindus and the Muslims belong to two different religions, philosophies, social customs and literature…. It is quite clear that Hindus and Muslims derive their inspiration from different sources of history. They have different epics, different heroes and different episodes…. To yoke together two such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent and final destruction of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a state.”[78] This view introduced the conception of the Indian Muslim community as a nation living separately within a nation and lacking a place of its own. A separate territory was now desired in order to manifest the Muslim nation.

Pakistan, it must be remembered, began as an ideological imagining and did not become a territorial reality until 1946. Until then, Muslim elites thought of it as a useful concept for constructing an imagined “moral community” but considered its actual creation an unattainable goal, given the geographic dispersion of Indian Muslims throughout the subcontinent. As David Gilmartin points out, the primary concern of the Pakistan movement was “to create a Muslim political community, to define a symbolic center to give moral and political meaning to the concept of a united ‘Muslim community’ in India.”[79] This overarching Indian Muslim identity then supplanted regional social formations and spaces such as town mosques, schools, and shrines. Before the Pakistan movement, the political moral order of most Indian Muslims was conceived on a local level, “with its own distinctive structures of authority, subordination, and conflict.”[80] This moral order was further constituted through the spatial dynamics of local arenas of public performance, which by the 1930s and 1940s were for many Muslims limited to mosques and yearly festivals at Sufi shrines.

Another way of defining Muslim unity, before the introduction of the concept of Pakistan, was through tajdid, or reform, which “long played a central role in the discursive articulation of Muslim moral community.”[81] Reform at the heart of the national movement provided Indian Muslim political elites with a radical ideology that the British state or the Congress Party could neither assimilate nor debate.[82] Finally, the public agitations surrounding the destruction of mosques, the corrupt waqf administration, and the demise of the Ottoman Khilafat, also helped produce a common identity out of common interests. However, none of the local and reformist forces ordering the social space and identity of the Muslim community could provide a “fixed image of unity,” which was needed to move forward the Muslim League’s claim of nationhood. To bring this about, first, local public arenas were framed as representative spaces of division; then, Pakistan, as an idea and subsequently as a state, was conceived “in sharp moral opposition to this world of conflict and division.”[83] Therefore Pakistan, the universal and desired space of the Indian Muslim community, was imagined as a place to supersede the local and historical spaces of Indian Islam.

While Pakistan was just an idea, there seemed a possibility for Muslims to divide their allegiances between the imagined space of the national community and the local spaces of their everyday lives. But in 1946, as independence drew closer to the horizon, a choice was forced on the Muslim League’s leadership: to allow Pakistan to remain an idea or to redefine it as an object in terms of territorial statehood. The latter choice was not solely reflective of Jinnah’s desire to further the moral unification of the Indian Muslim community but might also have been forced by Nehru’s conception of an independent India. As Gilmartin explains, Nehru’s India derived from a secular national ideology that was “a sort of rationalist statism tied to science, modernity, and the individual ethics championed by Gandhi.”[84] A direct product of this secularism was the replacement of the religious identity structured by British imperialism with an identity based only on territory. For a Muslim community faced with a loss of power and electoral seats in this new social order of individual citizenship, Pakistan as a territorial entity seemed the only option for retaining its integrity. Jinnah and the Muslim League chose a territorial Pakistan over the idea of Pakistan, and the Congress Party accepted their choice as a sacrifice necessary for the founding of an independent Republic of India as a secular state.

The territorial reality of Pakistan shook the Indian Muslim social order to its core. As long as the notion of a separate Indian Muslim nation was no more than a symbol of moral unity, it did not challenge the sense of place through which most Indian Muslims experienced their everyday lives.[85] Those spaces that organized daily encounters, provided moral guidance, and helped negotiate relationships inside and outside the community could coexist with an imagined Pakistan. However, when the idea emerged as a physical reality in the negotiations among the British, the Congress Party, and the Muslim League, what ensued was “the disjuncture between place and territory,” which for those Muslims remaining in India meant a loss of place and local identity.[86] Muslim leaders who had supported Pakistan as a moralizing ideal able to unite a disparate community and to help them negotiate local relationships were dismayed by its sudden transformation into a physically bounded reality. Men like Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad and Maulana Muhammad Zakariyya saw Pakistan and Partition as destructive to the culturally mediated sense of place that had helped Muslims identify themselves in the Indian landscape. These men had tried to suture the community to “the places that had already been sanctified in the Ganges-Jamuna doab by the blessedness (barakat) of the community’s pious forbears.”[87] However, as Gilmartin explains, their efforts were overwhelmed by the more powerful draw of Pakistan: “This desperate attempt to maintain the linking of place, ancestry, sanctity, and moral order was cast against the backdrop of a fixed partition of territory that had symbolically torn these linkages asunder.”[88] The Mughal monument in this vortex of social and political change was cast adrift along with all other signs of Muslim connectedness to the Indian landscape.

The Congress leader and staunch supporter of Hindu-Muslim cooperation, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, warned Indian Muslims in April 1946 that when Pakistan became a reality, they would “awaken overnight and discover that they have become aliens and foreigners… left to the mercies of what then would become an unadulterated Hindu Raj.”[89] The absurdity of denying a thousand years of Muslim history in India, of abandoning the rich Indo-Islamic civilization, and the profound relationships that had grown between Hindus and Muslims was the keynote of his argument against Pakistan. In the end, the physical reality of Pakistan offered little more to the Indian Muslim community than the loss of a place that had been carefully constructed over hundreds of years of living, struggling, and dying. With the separation of Pakistan from India, the sense of an overarching moral community no longer defined Indian Muslim life for those who remained. Along with that loss came the fragmentation of the leadership of the Muslim community, as many elites left their homes in the big cities for a future in Pakistan. Finally, as Gilmartin correctly argues, without a regional identity or a sense of place in India, the only recourse the Muslim community had to express its social conditions of conflict and pain was through violence.[90] The other way, and one taken by the majority in later years, was through silence.[91]

From the post-Uprising period to independence, the Mughal monument that had once been a beacon of Indo-Islamic glory and achievement slowly faded from the lives of the Indian Muslim community. This process started soon after the demise of the moral city, when the monuments were severed from the social network they once maintained, and only the mosque rose in prominence as the principal symbolic space of the community. However, it was not until the prospect of independence drew near, when Muslim leaders adopted the symbolism of the reformist movements, that the Mughal monuments were shunned for their Indo-Islamic significance. Through the leaders’ desire to constitute an identity by the master-signifier of Islam, Pakistan became a point de capiton, fixing in place the free-floating signs of territory, nation, culture, and architecture. In this new symbolic order the Mughal monument was meaningful if it served Islam and the national aspirations of the Muslim community. When Pakistan finally became a territorial reality on 15 August 1947, neither the ideologies of Islamic nationalism nor secular nationalism could contain the sublime trauma of Partition. In the atmosphere of chaos, death, and suffering that ensued, Mughal monuments would once again be enlisted as spaces to help bring order and meaning to the new nation-state of India.

5    TRYST WITH DESTINY
Nehru’s and Gandhi’s Mughal Monuments

ON 15 AUGUST 1947, at 12 a.m., India became an independent nation-state, and Nehru read his famous speech, “A Tryst with Destiny,” at the Constituent Assembly. Reminding his listeners of the struggle that led up to Indian independence, Nehru accentuated the importance of that singular moment, which would subsequently be evoked again and again as the trope of India’s crossing from a “period of ill fortune” into an unbounded future. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children exemplifies the hold the temporal metaphor continues to have on the national imagination with regard to this fateful occasion in 1947.[1] What often goes unnoticed in Nehru’s speech is the spatial metaphor with which he ends: “We have to build the noble mansion of free India where all her children may dwell.” The spatial symbolism was carried into the following day, when another significant event took place at the Mughal Red Fort: the unfurling of the Indian tricolor (figures 9 and 10). The choice of this location for the public performance has as much, or more, to reveal about the power relations of the newly independent secular state as the timing of its freedom alone.

The choice of the Red Fort to fly the Indian flag for the first time and to address the public gathered below connects these events to others that reach back ninety years. The monument was the setting for the climax of what many Indians regard as the first revolution for Indian independence, the Uprising of 1857. The fort’s occupation by the sepoys and subsequent retribution continued to haunt the imagination of Indians. The Red Fort was where Bahadur Shah had been reinstalled as the legitimate ruler of India by rebelling Hindu and Muslim sepoys, where the colonial power structure was overturned for a time, and where the Mughal Empire finally died. It was in the diwan-i amm of the Red Fort that Bahadur was later tried for rebellion, treason, and murder; and it was where he answered “not guilty” to the charges brought against him.[2] The aged king, the last Mughal ruler of India and a talented Urdu poet, was found guilty and forced to leave his palace at the Red Fort and live out the five remaining years of his life imprisoned in a bamboo hut in Burma. After the trial, the fort passed into government ownership and was converted into an army cantonment and a protected historic monument. The Red Fort’s visible gates, along with the high domes and minarets of the Jama Masjid, loomed over the city and served as a daily reminder to the local population of the loss and humiliation meted out by the British rulers after the Uprising.

Fig 9: (Right) Nehru at the Red Fort look- ing down at crowd assembled, 15 August 1947. © AP/Wide World Photos

Fig 10: (Below) New Indian flag, Red Fort, Delhi, India, 15 August 1947. © AP/Wide World Photos

Delhi’s Descent in Novel Form

The pathos of living in the shadows of these great monuments between 1857 and 1947 is eloquently related in Ahmed Ali’s novel of 1940, Twilight in Delhi. Sitting on the steps of the Jama Masjid, Mir Nihal, the patriarch of an eminent Muslim family, ruminates on the past, present, and future of Delhi. Passing below him is the long procession of British soldiers, dignitaries, and leaders assembling for the coronation ceremony of King George V in 1911. Taking in the scene from an awry position, Mir Nihal sees a conflicted tableau stained by the specter of death. It causes him to reject the veracity and ethicality of the authors of the scene in the historical city: “Right in front of him was the Red Fort built long ago by Shah Jahan, the greatest of artists in mortar and stone, but which was now being trampled by the ruthless feet of an alien race. On his right, beyond the city wall, was the Khooni Darwaza, the Blood Gate; and beyond that still was the Old Fort built by the Feroz Shah Tughlaq many more centuries ago. Still beyond stretched the remnants of the past Delhis…. Today it was this very Delhi which was being despoiled by a Western race who had no sympathy with India or her sons, thought Mir Nihal.”[3] The coronation ceremony staged as a durbar was meant to remind Indians of their past and show them that their British rulers respected the country’s bygone authority enough to emulate its processions and ceremonies. However, the spatial dynamics of early twentieth-century Delhi and its Mughal monuments only produces in Mir Nihal an effect of estrangement from the city. The history, old social codes, and high culture of Delhi no longer provide him with a stable and familiar place to dwell. The Delhi of 1911 offers him only a sense of exile, where praying, walking, and observing the surroundings prove agonizing and alienating acts in his everyday life. Even the sight of the congregational mosque, the nexus of Muslim life in Delhi, fills him with disgust: “The procession passed by the Jama Masjid whose façade had been vulgarly decorated with a garland of golden writing containing slavish greetings from the Indian Mussalmans to the English King, displaying the treachery of the priestly class to their people and Islam.”[4] Delhi’s historical monuments, restored and controlled by the British and by Indian loyalists, do not afford Mir Nihal’s hopes, dreams, and desires much space. The city that was his and his ancestors’ home no longer exists leaving him lost in time: “The past, which was his, had gone, and the future was not for him.”[5]

Set in the years 1910–19, Ali’s novel takes place in the intimate and homely space of the mohalla, or neighborhood, comprised of a labyrinth of galis (narrow lanes) and havalis (multi-story houses sharing a central courtyard). Mir Nihal’s story unfolds in both the private space of the home and neighborhood and the public spaces of the main shopping bazaars of Chandni Chowk and the Jama Masjid. Linking them together is the canopy of the sky above, filled with kites and pet pigeons, and time is kept by the muezzin’s call to prayer. The book tells the story of the slow loss of this dwelling space’s safety as the modernizing projects of the British encroach on it. The familiar is made unfamiliar to reflect the growing anxiety of the Muslim community struggling to find stability amid the political changes, the building of the new capital, the non-cooperation movement, new fashions, and social formations. The subplot of the novel is the spiritual draining of Muslim Delhi, of its culture, language, practices, and spaces. Like the Jama Masjid, emblazoned in gaudy gold letters, other spaces once ordered by the needs of the Muslim community are reordered by the government. The widening of the grand bazaar of Chandni Chowk in 1913 provides another example. The street was stripped of its original social purpose, rendering it unfamiliar and hostile: “Worse than all the changes which were felt so deeply by the people was the disfiguring of the Chandni Chowk whose central causeway was demolished and the expansive peepal trees which had given shelter to the residents and the poor from the scorching rays of the sun, were cut down. The road did look wide and broad, a real boulevard, but its uniqueness and oriental atmosphere were destroyed. This affected the people more deeply than anything else. For that was the bazar through which they had walked day in and day out throughout their lives.”[6] The final blow in this psychological displacement of Delhi’s residents is the building of New Delhi, which brought in new people “who would have no love for her nor any associations with her history and ancient splendor.”[7] Ali’s account of the transformation of the erstwhile Mughal city is accented with irony and contradictions and provides an earnest picture of the ambivalent reality of its residents after the development of New Delhi and the reordering of Old Delhi. Not all saw the restructuring of Old Delhi and its monuments as a termination of future possibilities of survival and liberation. Nehru and the Congress members, for example, used the contradictory nature of these spaces tactically, turning them into differential space to creatively resist the dominant ordering of the city and to produce an alternative identification with its monuments.

The Indian National Army Trial at the Red Fort

This tactical use of space was demonstrated in 1946 at the Red Fort with the trial of the Indian National Army (INA). The defendants were high-ranking officers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s army that had become prisoners of war after their capture by the Japanese in Burma. These soldiers of Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, and Christian faiths committed themselves to the Axis powers in their fight against the British. “Chalo Dilli!,” or “let’s go to Delhi!” the slogan of the Meerut sepoys during the 1857 rebellion, became the INA’s battle cry.[8] After the INA’s defeat in 1945, three of its officers did go to Delhi to be put on trial for war crimes. The trial would take place at the Red Fort. The selection of the site, according to Bose’s biographer, resulted from its associations with the trial of Bahadur Shah and the defeat of a similarly composed group of renegade soldiers in 1857.[9] The British hoped to iterate the lessons of the past with the highly publicized contemporary trial. However, India, Delhi, and even the Red Fort had changed in the ninety years that had passed since the Uprising. A pan-Indian movement to oust the British had now reached fever pitch, a native press kept the population informed of all government malfeasance, and a well-organized and ideologically sophisticated native political party was leading the fight. Furthermore, the INA did not resemble the sepoys, who had been dismissed by both British and Indians as uncouth and of low social stock. The INA soldiers were well respected as a symbol of national unity and Indian patriotism. The Indian public understood the prosecution of such men for treason as yet another attempt by the British Raj to destroy the country’s unity and damage its self-respect.

In this new historical context and through the symbolization of nationalism, the trial was unlikely to be understood as a recurrence of that of Bahadur Shah. Instead of underscoring the guilt of the mutinying soldiers, the location of the Red Fort served to punctuate the illegitimacy of British rule. In Frank Moraes’s biography of Nehru, we see the Congress leader fully appreciating the radical potential of the monumental space, which allowed him to turn the trial into a performance of national unity, thereby strengthening his cause: “In the following months the trial of three Indian National Army officers was held in Delhi’s Red Fort. Because the Congress had interested itself in their defense, Nehru appeared formally in court wearing his barrister’s gown which he had discarded thirty years earlier…. The three officers on trial were a Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, and this again gave their appearance a symbolic significance. The accused were convicted, but were released almost immediately by order of the then Commander-in-Chief, General Sir Claude Auchinleck. New Delhi was on the retreat.”[10]

Stirring up memories of the Uprising, the trial at the Red Fort offered the Congress Party an opportunity to subvert imperial power and turn its social ordering of India—defined by the idea of intercommunal hatred—on its head: “It was not they [the INA] who were on trial but the judges and the authorities who had appointed them.”[11] Would this sort of reordering have been possible had the trial taken place in Edwin Lutyens’s New Delhi? The trial that rendered the Red Fort a differential monument of British rule also opened up a space to express the possibility of independence. The Red Fort thus emerged after the trial in 1946 as a space to mark the inauguration of the Indian nation, a new beginning of social life based on the secularist principles of equality. When the Indian flag was raised for the first time at the Red Fort it signified not only the fulfillment of the wish to one day rid the country of the British but also the exchange of one symbolic order for another. Only at this Mughal fort could India declare itself a new nation and could the public have its tryst with destiny.[12]

Nehru and the majority of Indians read the flag raising at the Red Fort as a sign of transition from the bondage of imperialism to the freedom of swaraj (self-governance). Nehru told his audience how to look on the ceremony, lest there be confusion: “We have gathered here on a historic occasion at this ancient fort to win back what was ours. This flag does not symbolize the triumph of individuals or the Congress but the triumph of the whole country. The free flag of India is the symbol of freedom and democracy not only for India but for the whole world.”[13] This message would be reiterated in speeches, public meetings, and radio addresses during the following year to promote an identification of the public with the secularism of the Congress government. The symbolic correspondence between Indians constructed in the beautiful tableau of Nehru raising the flag at the Red Fort would, however, quickly be unsettled by the stain of communal hostility as northern India and Delhi was hit hard by the wave of Partition related violence. Nehru’s answer was to redeploy the symbolism of the Mughals through a stern warning: “If the people continue to take the law in their own hands, the result will be absolute anarchy like the one that followed the fall of the Mughal empire.”[14] His historical statement suggests that only the communal harmony once offered by the Mughals, and now offered by the Congress Party, would bring India prosperity and peace, that anything else would lead to its death. These words, however, did not win Nehru immediate support for his vision, and it would take help from Gandhi and other national leaders to veil the stain of Partition’s trauma, the indelible dark spot on the national landscape.

The Partition’s Mughal Monument

While a new community was drawing its first breath at the Red Fort, other Mughal monuments resounded with the death rattle of an old one. The events surrounding the partition of India and Pakistan after independence turned the Tomb of Humayun and the Purana Qila, or the Old Fort, into refugee camps that held tens of thousands of Delhi’s recently expelled Muslims. The price of Indian independence came at the heavy cost of amputating the western and eastern territories with their Muslim majorities from the Indian subcontinent. Congress leaders had expected that in exchange for these territories India would not only be freed of British domination but also of the divisive ideology of communalism. Communalism, however, would arise as a force of resistance to the secular power of Nehru’s government. To challenge the powerful symbolism of the Red Fort, the surrounding Mughal monuments and mosques would become the spaces of resistance.

Fear, coercion, and political conviction led 12 million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims to migrate across the borders. Nehru and Muhammed Ali Jinnah were faced with the unexpected and unprecedented problem of how to resettle hundreds of thousands of refugees. Graver than the logistic problems this entailed was the political problem of how to forge a national ideology based on secular ideals, to which both leaders were committed, when communal violence was coming to define the birth of their nations. Just one month after Nehru talked about building a “noble mansion” in which all could dwell, and fulfilled his promise by repossessing the Red Fort, 121,000 Muslims were taking refuge in Mughal monuments.[15] Zakir Hussain, the founder of the Jamia Millia Islamia (National Muslim University) in New Delhi and a later president of India, described to Nehru the scene at the monuments as “areas in which humanity was dumped.”[16] Forced out of their houses by recently displaced Punjabi Sikhs and Hindus, Delhi’s Muslims camped out in the open courtyards of the monuments with limited personal possessions, water, or sanitation. The irony of Muslims living in these conditions is expressed by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre: “Between 150,000 and 200,000 people were going to live in those relics of Islam’s ancient grandeur in conditions of undescribable filth, without shelter from the sun or the monsoon’s cataracts.”[17]

Maulana Azad, who had warned Indian Muslims that the creation of Pakistan would alienate them from India, spoke to his qaum, or community, from the pulpit of the Jama Masjid in November 1947. First he laid the blame for the current social trauma squarely on the misguided separatist aspirations of his audience. Then he asked them to think about their historical embeddedness in Delhi and in the space of the mosque: “I told you that the two-nations theory was the death-knell of a life of faith and belief…. Those on whom you relied for support have forsaken you, left you helpless…. Behold the minaret of the mosque bend down to ask you where you have mislaid the pages of your history! It was but yesterday that your caravan alighted on the banks of the Jamuna…. How is it that you feel afraid of living here today in this Delhi, which has been nurtured by your blood?”[18] With these words Azad rendered the Jama Masjid the one space in Delhi where Indian Muslims could begin again to have a sense of place and from where they could regain their bearings in an independent India. The great mosque’s marble domes, tall minarets, and red sandstone represented hundreds of years of Muslim presence in India. India was the only place where the community of the faithful, much like the structure itself, belonged. Gandhi would pick up this line of argument against those Hindus and Sikhs hoping to drive all Muslims out of Delhi, calling them foreigners in a Hindu nation.

Yet while Nehru and Azad tried to render the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid symbolic spaces of an Indian nation ready to move forward, Muslim refugees continued to flood into the Purana Qila and the area outside the Jama Masjid. These spaces challenged the leaders’ idealism and rendered all Mughal monuments contradictory spaces. Moreover, they revealed that communal rather than secular ideology was shaping the public consciousness of Indians all over Delhi. On 21 November 1947, Gandhi reported in his daily prayer meeting at Birla House that during recent riots 137 of Delhi’s mosques had been destroyed or converted to temples by Hindus and Sikhs.[19] In a letter to the first home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, Nehru condemned the practice of conversion: “It is obvious that this business of not only destroying a mosque but converting it into a temple is of the utmost significance and very grave consequences will follow from it, apart from our prestige suffering greatly.”[20] The destroyed and converted mosques with flags of the Arya Samaj and Hindu Mahasbha flying over them, and the Mughal monuments filled to capacity with Muslim refugees, clearly demonstrated to Congress leaders that their image of the Indian nation was not being accepted by all Indians. Of greater urgency to Indians was trying to understand and reckon with their leaders’ irrational decision to sever Pakistan from India. The sense of meaninglessness emanating from an arbitrary decision that called into question not only the concept of nation but also the power of those who rule in its name grew like a black hole swallowing up all the cultural meaning and social order that the nascent secular government had expected to establish. The collapsed figure and future of the nation needed addressing; meaning and social ordering needed to be pinned down through secular symbolization. The first step toward this goal was to give the darkness that swept India a name — communalism. This naming enabled the nation’s leaders to veil the initial trauma of Partition and to identify the resistance to the secular as religious, and then to delegitimize it. The new context of post-Partition power relations thus forced secularists like Gandhi and Nehru to redefine the meaning of a secular nation after years of signifying it with the contradictory motifs and symbols of Hinduism.

How Congress First Figured the Mughal Monuments

During the forging of the independence movement Mughal monuments were signified as Muslim space, foreign and un-Indian to certain members of the nationalist movement. When the Congress Party took hold of the reins of the movement it did not refute this vision, but due to its efficacy tacitly supported a vision of an India divided between Muslim and Hindu culture and history. The vision itself was produced a year after the Uprising. Partha Chatterjee’s study of the early nationalist formations of the swaraj locates the emergence of this spiritually based imagined community in the Bharatbarser Itihas (History of India, 1858) by the Bengali Tarinicharan Chattopadhayay.[21] Divided neatly into three stages of history—Hindu, Muslim, and British, each ushered in by conquest—his history is a tale of the birth, blossoming, and eventual decline of the Indian national spirit, which, according to the author, was born in the Vedic era, when the great Hindu canonical texts and epics were composed. It then experienced its full bloom during the Gupta Empire and fell into decline soon after. Chattopadhayay and his followers attributed exceptional courage, honesty, and exploratory prowess to the Indians of the years 1500 b.c.e. to 550 c.e. This view stood in contrast to the nineteenth-century British portrayal of Indian Hindus as meek and fearful of travel. Early nationalists also conceived of a “Golden Age,” in which all Indians existed in a state of social, cultural, and territorial unity. This belief allowed them to argue that India, having once before been a true nation, could again become one—an important first step in challenging the assertion that British rule created the Indian nation.

Yet by implication this argument also rendered the idea of an Indian nation synonymous with a purely Hindu past: Indian Muslims not only belonged outside this nation but were the reason for its decline. Mahmud of Ghazni’s conquests in Somanath in 1084 were cast as the defining moment of India’s entry into “the night of medieval darkness,” and British stereotypes were adopted to characterize Muslims as bigoted, warlike, and resolutely un-Indian.[22] Hindu nationalist historians iterated the rhetorical logic of Chattopadhayay’s historiography, whereby the national past was distinctly a Hindu past and non-Hindus were non-Indian. Parties like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, National Volunteers Union) that formed in 1925 and the Hindu Mahasabha, founded in 1915, built their Hindutva, or “Hinduness” movements around these assumptions and conceived of the Hindu nation as the “the superimposition of a religion, a culture, a language, and a sacred territory.”[23]

Before Indian nationalist history transmuted into Hindutva history, the Congress Party had already accepted its beliefs and logic. To proclaim their sovereignty in India and to justify the delivery of state powers into their hands alone, the Congress leaders accepted the fantasy of a pan-Indian Hindu culture and that it alone could restore to India a state of unity. Nehru, for example, adopted the Sanskrit term Bharat Mata or Mother India, to designate the homeland.[24] His narrative of Indian history, written in The Discovery of India in 1946, follows the same general trajectory and periodization—Hindu, Muslim, British—of the early nationalist histories. In line with his secularist ideology, Nehru normalizes the integration of foreign migrants and conquerors into the fabric of Hindu society and culture. In his history, in fact, the continued assimilation of those who entered India into Hindu social, cultural, and political customs and traditions “became the symbol of nationalism.”[25] Nehru thoroughly sanctioned the rise of Hindu nationalism in the swaraj movement as an inevitable process: “Thus it was natural for the old Brahminic faith to become the symbol again and again of nationalist revivals.”[26]

Tellingly, Nehru’s chapter on the Muslim phase of Indian history is titled “New Problems,” thus setting the stage for an interruption of Hindu cultural growth. But even the Islamic conquerors, who came with the ambition of spreading their faith and subjugating all other religions, Nehru explains, were assimilated.[27] Unlike the British, they settled in India and controlled it from within. The Afghan rulers, such as the Delhi Sultanate and the Tughlaqs, were essentially Indian. They spoke the Sanskritic Pashtun language and had once been within the Indian Buddhist orbit. In Nehru’s view these facts allowed them to be seen not as foreign invaders belonging to an alien race but as ancient Indians returning home. Nor are the Mughals, and especially Akbar, represented as Muslim rulers, but as leaders assimilated to the normative standard of the Hindu nation.[28]

Nehru departs from earlier nationalist representations of Muslim rule as a historic rupture that marked the subjugation of Hindus. He instead contends that underlying the Indian nation is an unbroken history of Hindu culture. Indeed, he argues that since most Muslims were or are Hindu converts, Hinduism continues to inform their culture: they don the same clothing style, eat the same food, practice similar arts, and enjoy the same hobbies, such as hunting and polo.[29] Overall, Nehru’s history presents Hindus and Muslims as united in their geographical and cultural development in India and pitted against the British rulers, the only rulers of India that did not assimilate to the country’s culture.[30] Surveying the long history of cultural syncretism, he rejects the idea that the culture of Indian Muslims is separate and different from that of Hindus and that they therefore constitute their own nation.

Gandhi, for his part, also adapted symbols and idioms from Hindu culture to frame his ideal image of the Indian nation. Like Nehru, Gandhi saw India as “a harmonious collection of religious communities all placed on an equal footing.”[31] Hinduism could permeate all aspects of Indian society and culture because it was a religion tolerant of other religions. There was no need to demand separate nation-states, because Gandhi “promoted a syncretic and spiritual brand of the Hindu religion in which all creeds were bound to merge, or converge.”[32] But the actions of Hindus and Sikhs migrating to India after Partition told a different story: the forced expulsion of Muslims from their homes and mosques proved that they were in fact seen as foreigners and outside the protection of the new nation-state. The Hindu-centric idiom of nationhood espoused by the Congress Party, although based squarely on tolerance, did not stay the hand of violence and subsequently made empty gestures of Nehru’s promise to build a mansion for all Indians to dwell in. To clear away the ugliness of this reality of Indian independence, Nehru needed the help of Gandhi, who came to Delhi and labored until his death to change the process of identification of independent India. It was for this cause that the Mughal architecture of Delhi would again be put into service.

Gandhi’s Ordering of the Mughal Monuments

According to Kumkum Sangari, Gandhi’s secularism, which would come to reorder India after Partition and independence, was based on his “recognition that even a pluralist or reformed Hinduism could not be a binding force in a multireligious society, and that violence destroyed or transformed the ‘inside’ of all religions.”[33] In the fight for independence, the spirituality of Indians was taken into the public sphere as a means to prove that the materialistic British state was unsuited to rule India. This position changed after the reality of Pakistan and Partition. The state cast religion out of the public sphere and deemed it a personal matter.[34] Furthermore, based on its ideology of secular universalism, the Indian nation-state would not recognize the individual as part of a group but only as a singular entity. This direct relationship meant that religion would no longer serve as a mediator between the public and private social realms. Furthermore, like Nehru, Gandhi began to argue that “conversion from one religion to another did not alter the deeper bonds of patriotism or nationality or common culture or social affiliations or regional allegiances, it only altered religious denomination.”[35] This idea of a “combined” or “composite” culture was essential for mending the broken ties and social fragmentation that occurred in Delhi after Partition: “Muslims were now explicitly included as co-sharers in a wider Indian cultural exceptionalism.”[36]

After the question of the place of Indian Muslims in the imagined national landscape was resolved, the question of how they would be reintroduced into a newly independent nation-state had still to be answered. Nehru was too busy contending with the logistics of moving and resettling thousands of refuges to attend to this issue, so it was up to Gandhi to spearhead the cultural transformation of India from a communally divided nation-state into one ordered by secular universalism. Once in Delhi, Gandhi set to work convincing Hindus and Muslims to see each other not as enemies but as the children of a common Mother India.[37] Delhi, for Gandhi, became the symbolic center of the new Indian social order. He visited the Purana Qila, talked to Muslim leaders, and publicly took up the cause to care for the Muslim refugees. In a prayer meeting he could not help but bring the audience’s attention to the historic fort that had once served both Hindus and Muslims but was now a camp for the disenfranchised of Delhi:

It is said that in the Mahabharata period the Pandavas used to stay in this Purana Quila. Whether you call it Indraprastha or Delhi, the Hindus and the Muslims have grown here together. It was the capital of the Mughals. Now it is the capital of India…. The Mughals came from outside. They identified themselves with the manners and customs of Delhi. From among them some happened to be Ansari Sahebs, Hakim Sahebs and some became Hindus too. The Hindus also joined their services. In such a Delhi of yours the Hindus and the Muslims used to live together peacefully. They did fight occasionally. But they would fight for a short while and then be united again. On one occasion, some fanatic made a murderous attack on Shraddhanandji [an Araya Samaj activist]. But earlier the Muslims with great affection, had taken Shraddhanandji to Jama Masjid where he addressed them. This is your Delhi.[38]

Guiding the public through these historic moments and monuments, Gandhi attempted to construct a national mirror of unity and used the spaces of Mughal Delhi to symbolize the unity of Hindus and Muslims. At a prayer meeting on 13 September 1947, he reiterated this symbolism to order the Jama Masjid and the Red Fort: “Delhi is no small place. It is the capital of the country. Here we have the grand Jama Masjid and also the fort. You have not built these nor have I built them. They have been built by the Mughals who ruled over us. They had become part of India. By telling the Muslims today to leave the country do you mean to say that you are going to take possession of the Jama Masjid? And if that is your intention, do you know the implication? Just think about it. Are we going to stay in the Jama Masjid? I cannot agree to any such proposal. The Muslims must have the right to visit that place. It belongs to them. We are also proud of it. It is full of great artistic beauty. Shall we raze it to the ground? That can never be.”[39]

On 18 September Gandhi brought up the Jama Masjid again and addressed the attempts to convert it into a temple, as had been done with other, smaller mosques of the city. In his speech he outlined the contradictory nature of such a spatial practice and implicitly affirmed the secular ordering of the space, whose preservation would be symbolic of India’s unity and religious freedom: “We have got the Jama Masjid which is the largest mosque in the world. What will happen to that mosque if we kill most of the Muslims or they go away to Pakistan? Will you transfer that mosque to Pakistan? Or will you destroy that mosque or turn it into a Shiva temple? Suppose some Hindu in his pride wants to turn it into a Shiva temple, or a Sikh wants to turn it into a gurdwara—I would say that it would be an attempt to bury Hinduism and Sikhism. No religion can be built up in this manner.”[40] The idealized space of the Mughal monument continued to figure in his speeches and became a trope of his universal secularist ideology. The Jama Masjid, for example, reappeared in Gandhi’s speech against educational reforms that sought to erase Muslim contributions from national history. In the speech he demanded reason rather than blind parochialism to prevail: “By way of example, if we make the vain attempt of obliterating the Muslim period, we shall have to forget that there was a mighty Jama Masjid in Delhi second to none in the world, or that there was a Muslim University in Aligarh, or that there was the Taj in Agra, one of the seven wonders of the world, or that there were the great forts of Delhi and Agra built during the Mughal period. We shall then have to rewrite our history with that end in view.”[41] In his writings and speeches Gandhi iterated the question of what kind of image of India would appear if Muslims were turned out and their great monuments razed. The ruinous landscape he conjured meant to compel Hindus and Sikhs to reacquaint themselves with the realities of Indian culture and history. More crucially, he wanted them to realize that not long before the events of Partition their everyday life had been a vibrant tableau enlivened by Muslim culture, neighbors, and monuments.

To reinforce the principle of “combined culture,” Gandhi performed his vision publicly. He started to read from the Hindu epics, the Qu’ran, and the Bible at his daily prayer meetings. But of greater impact was his participation in the urs, or death anniversary fair, at the dargah of the Sufi saint, Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki, in Mehrauli three days before his assassination (figure 11). The popular shrine sits within a larger complex of architectural structures. Built by Sher Shah in 1542, it came under the guardianship of the Mughals, who built a marble mosque and tombs for the later emperors near the shrine. The last great palace of the Mughals, the Zafar Mahal, was built adjacent to the dargah in 1842, symbolizing the Mughals’ continued reverence for the great Sufi saint. In the aftermath of Partition the complex was closed and locked and the area around it vacated due to Hindu and Sikh violence. This left the Muslims of the surrounding area homeless and made the site a grim monument to the communalism now ordering the Indian landscape. In a prayer meeting, Gandhi explained that the vacated shrine, with barbed wire and locks, gainsaid the values of the new nation and the past: “Last September this shrine was subjected to the wrath of Hindu mobs. The Muslims living in the vicinity of the shrine for the last 800 years had to leave their homes. I mention this sad episode to tell you that, though Muslims love the shrine, today no Muslim can be found anywhere near it. It is the duty of the Hindus, Sikhs, the officials and the Government to open the shrine again and wash off this stain on us.”[42]

Fig 11: Mahatma Gandhi at the Mehrauli shrine, 27 January 1948. © AP/Wide World Photos

In India the urs festival of a Sufi saint of the Chishti order embodies the “convergent, composite traditions of popular worship” and thus provided a perfect stage for enacting the historical union of Hindu-Muslim culture.[43] At the festival at Mehrauli on 27 January 1948, Gandhi made a short speech to add further significance to the reopening of the shrine, in which he asked the visitors to perform an exercise: “I request you—Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who have come here with cleansed hearts—to take a vow at this holy place that you will never allow strife to raise its head, but will live in amity, united as friends and brothers…. We might be different outwardly but after all we are the offshoots of the same tree.”[44] As the Mughal emperor Akbar had done in the sixteenth century, Gandhi used the syncretic site of a Sufi tomb to redraw the Indian community of Hindus and Muslims as a combined culture. Gandhi’s participation in the urs festival turned the shrine into a symbolic space of his vision and into a radically open space to creatively remake the social order of India.

But even before his visit to Mehrauli Gandhi performed another public act to give greater meaning to the urs festival. Seeing that the violence in Delhi had not abated after several months and that Mughal and Muslim spaces remained physically threatened or occupied, Gandhi reemployed a strategy he used in Calcutta in September 1947 to bring peace to that city. On 13 January he pitched his final battle against the divisive forces of Indian society and commenced what would be his final fast. Moved by his suffering, government employees, police, Hindu nationalists, Sikh and Muslim leaders, and the Pakistani high commissioner were among many others who signed a pledge to end the violence. The deputy commissioner of Delhi took Hindu and Sikh leaders to Mehrauli to repair the shrine of Khwaja Qutubuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki so it would be ready for the urs.[45] Other Muslim structures of Delhi were also repaired in intercommunal efforts. The built environments of Delhi were finally being produced through the practice of intercommunal cooperation as symbolic sites of Gandhi’s idealism, and the government promised to preserve them as such. It was to celebrate this change in the course of the Indian nation that Gandhi in his weakened state visited Mehrauli.

In hindsight it seems that Gandhi’s fast proved too effective, as it left Hindu nationalist parties feeling alienated and disempowered in the secular reordering of the public sphere. Angered to have lost their power so suddenly, a radicalized segment of Hindu nationalists retaliated for what they perceived as too many concessions to Muslims, and Gandhi was assassinated thirteen days after he ended his fast and three days after his visit to Mehrauli. This violent act, in turn, also had unintended consequences for those who perpetrated it, for instead of gaining them a space in the political landscape, it brought about their banishment from it. After Gandhi’s assassination, political parties founded on the theory of the separate Hindu nation were cast out of the public sphere and the secularists maintained the single authority to represent India.

Muslims welcomed the barring of Hindu nationalist parties from the public sphere. Gyanendra Pandey writes of the changes Muslims felt in Delhi after Gandhi’s death: “The assassination of Gandhi wiped out the blaze of Hindu-Muslim violence in such a way that ‘the world veritably changed.’”[46] Pandey quotes one Muslim as stating more emphatically: “Gandhiji made it possible for Muslims to continue to live in India.”[47] Throughout the long process of shifting power relations from British domination and nationalist resistance to Congress domination and communal resistance, the Mughal monuments of Delhi functioned as spaces of creativity. They gave tangible shape and order to the secularist ideology Gandhi shared with Nehru, and after the final banishment of communalist ideology, they continued to remind the newly independent nation of the historical roots of one of the great religions existing within it. However, communalism continued as a blemish on the Mughal monuments of India, no matter how many times the secularists try to wash it away. The specter of communalism and its violence, emerging from the unconscious register, continued to signify the national landscape.

After Gandhi’s assassination and the expulsion of communalism from the public sphere, the business of nation-state building could finally proceed with Nehru at the helm. The violence of Partition, the desecration of Muslim mosques and tombs, and governmental neglect of the remaining Muslim community would remain a repressed memory at the Mughal sites but periodically resurface to unsettle the symbolic ordering and ideology of the new state. When the Mughal monuments were turned over to the ASI, its mandate was to present and preserve them as nothing more than artifacts of the Islamic and British past, devoid of any more particular or recent meaning. But the sites had born witness to a violent creative moment in the story of Indian independence: the contradictions of the new nation had been laid bare before them, and Gandhi had utilized them to constitute an alternative vision of the nation. The erasure of the trauma of the post-Partition period from public memory would require continuous and repeated efforts, and even so, that trauma would leave traces that could never be entirely suppressed. In the following chapter I will examine both how Nehru’s development policies and the practice of heritage production worked to keep the stain left behind by the sublime and incomprehensible events of Partition invisible, and how private individuals are using the contradictions inherent in such efforts to critique and recreate definitions of Indian nationhood.

6    THE ETHICS OF MONUMENTALITY IN POSTINDEPENDENCE INDIA

WITH THE VIOLENCE of Partition subdued and communalism banished from the public sphere, the Indian government with Nehru at the helm was finally free to launch a “multifront attack on poverty, ignorance, and economic stagnation.”[1] While these problems emerged from the economic realities inherited from a colonial government, Nehru believed they could all be traced back even further to the recalcitrant processes of Indian social identification. Identification based on religion, region, and caste would have to be replaced by identification with secular nationalism and the principles of liberal humanism; otherwise, Nehru contended, Indian society would remain in a state of inertia.[2] Therefore the state’s most immediate task was to promote processes and spaces of secular identification. This, however, meant that the government would deny access to those who identified with other communities besides the national one to the public sphere. In justification of this contradictory logic of a democratic state, Nehru asserted that separatist movements based on group identification simply could not serve an India that needed to solve the immediate economic problems of inflation, food shortages, and low agricultural output.[3]

According to Sandria Freitag, the decision to remove all processes of communal identification from the public sphere left unresolved the question of how the nonsecular members of civil society would engage the state about their needs.[4] After Partition and Gandhi’s assassination, communal groups quickly became India’s other, and the opportunity to develop a new inclusive ordering for Indian civil society seemed foreclosed on. Furthermore, deprived of official recognition and legitimate access to the state, these others could only gain visibility in the public sphere through violent acts, such as the ones we saw in the 1980s and 1990s and in 2002.

If we accept the premise of this argument—that the postindependence state engendered communal violence because it did not resolve the issues of religious representation in the public sphere—then it would follow that if Nehru and Gandhi had allowed communal groups into the public sphere, a truly democratic and peaceful civil society could have been constructed. I argue that this notion is too imprecise, as it derives from an analytic perspective limited to the realm of discursive (ideological) space. The problem with this perspective is that the contestatory and contradictory nature of the process of national identification itself is unproblematized and the nondiscursive (violent, exploitative, artistic, ludic) spatial practices of both the state and those that contest it remain unexamined.

Judith Butler has remarked that the very foundation of a national identity is perforce an imagined and inherently impossible ideal: “Every description of the ‘we’ will always do more than describe; it will constitute and construct an imaginary unity and contrived totality, a phantasmatic ideal, which makes the ‘representability’ of the we into a permanent impossibility.”[5] What this means is that in the process of constructing the national “we” an exclusion of the other must first take place, and this excluded other will always remain a surplus that will “haunt the very claim of representability that it [the state] seeks to make.”[6] The Indian political landscape of the 1990s clearly reflects this point and has proven that even if Hindu nationalists are allowed legitimate access into the public sphere, and if government positions are reserved for Muslim representatives, the real problems of social equity and justice remain unsolved and a new other is simply created to divert attention away from the contradictory social realities of Indian nationhood. It is precisely the non-discursive social realities of subjectivity and economic development, and not the secular-communal divide, that structure the public sphere and render it ambivalent.

To more adequately understand how development and national identification have worked to shape the Indian public sphere, of which the Mughal monument forms an essential part, it is important to leave the level of ideology and probe more deeply into the spatial practices of economics and interpellation. From such an analysis emerges the realization that there is a more fundamental drive at work in the ordering of the public sphere. This drive operates at the very foundation of the Indian nation-state and shapes its desires and ideological illusions. It is the drive to suppress the Real of Partition, the unspeakable, violent, and arbitrary act that inaugurated Indian independence. Without a national purgation of the traumatic events of postindependence, through commissions, commemorations, histories and testimony, Partition has remained to haunt the national unconscious and, as does most trauma, resurfaces periodically as social violence. Yet on a day-to-day basis the Real does not directly affect us because of ideology, which diverts our gaze from its destructive truth as it “masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel.”[7] As Slavoj Žižek further explains, ideology operates on the level of fantasy to support our reality and structure our social relations; it functions “not to offer us a point of escape from our reality but to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel.”[8]

Invested in this ideological operation, the postindependence state is not one concerned with policing the borders of the public sphere against the entry of other ideologies. In fact, it would welcome them as an opportunity to reinforce its own ideological claims. Instead, I want to argue that the policing effort of the state has been directed to the suppression and control of the Real, that unruly sign of impossibility that can unsettle its social reality. In the first decades of the postindependence era, it was the difficulty of the Indian Real, constituted by Partition, communal violence and the disenfranchisement of religious communities, that threatened the secular tableau and needed to be masked. One of the forms this mask would take was national culture as disseminated through the practices of heritage and tourism. The Mughal monument became a key site at which this masking function was deployed and to which the principle actors and ideologues of the Indian political landscape would return again and again to cover the presence of the Real.

The Mughal monument emerged as radically different after Gandhi’s assassination, an event the secularists strategically used to blot out the bloody events of Partition from the national landscape.[9] No longer an openly differential space used to harmonize communal division, the monument was now cast as a terminal point of Nehruvian power and its social order. Generally speaking, two vectors shaped the spatial practices of this power: the ideology of liberal humanism, encapsulated by the phrase “unity in diversity”; and Nehru’s obsession with the transformation of India into a modern and industrialized nation. The first vector informed the imaginary identification the government set up between Indian citizenship and its mirror, the national monument, while the second underwrote the monument’s new symbolic ordering through the practices of heritage and tourism development. The practices of identification and tourism functioned not only to veil the Real but to mystify the realities of governmental intolerance toward alternative spatial practices and of the aggressive practices of development at play.

In this chapter I first examine how the practices of heritage and tourism development have ordered the Mughal monument to veil both spatial practices and the trauma of the Indian Real. Subsequently I consider how the Mughal monument, after decades of intensive development programs, has once again become a differential space enabling people to challenge national symbolization by calling attention to the material realities of overdevelopment, corruption, and disregard for the social fabric of these sites. Additionally, the past ten years have revealed how the spatial practices of Muslim religious authorities have transmuted the Mughal monument into a differential space, a creative site to transcend the contradictions of secularism, face the ghost of Partition, and bring the imagined nation into closer alignment with the social realities of the Indian people.

The Mughal Monuments and the Development of Heritage

In the political context defined by Nehru’s ardent secularism, the Mughal monuments were radically and singularly reframed as sites of national heritage. This did not mean the erasure either of the Mughal monuments’ excesses or of the traumatic memory they contained. Instead, it meant that the space of the monument, after being symbolized as “heritage,” obscured this other meaning. Raphael Samuel outlines the inexhaustible purview of the heritage operation: “ ‘Heritage’ is a nomadic term, which travels easily, puts down roots—or bivouacs—in seemingly quite unpromising terrain…. It sets up residence in streets broad and narrow, royal palaces and railway sidings, canalside walks and town hall squares. It stages its spectacles in a promiscuous variety of venues…. It attaches itself to an astonishing variety of material artifacts…. Lexically, ‘heritage’ is a term capacious enough to accommodate wildly discrepant meanings.”[10] In India the deployment of the term heritage enabled the state to cast its net over the diverse built and natural environments of India and to assimilate them into the homogenous category of national culture. Though not introduced into the lexicon of monument preservation in India until the 1970s, the concept of heritage structured the Mughal monument since independence. Heritage was especially useful to Nehru and later governments, who used it to justify tourism development schemes that radically and indiscriminately altered the ordering of the cultural and social environments around monuments.

The conversion of the Mughal monument into a heritage site occurred shortly after independence, when it was ordered by the exigencies of nation building. In setting up its new rule, the Indian government and its army of civil servants had to replace older practices based on “the colonial injunctions to collect taxes and preserve law and order to distributing resources and taking leadership in rural reform and industrial management.”[11] One of these industries was tourism, which the state developed through careful planning. The newly created Tourism Department initiated various projects to exploit the economic potential of the famous Mughal monuments, and the Planning Commission integrated these projects into national economic and social policies. In the years following Indian independence these spaces would emerge as national heritage sites, desirable tourist destinations, generators of foreign currency, and sources of growth for local economies.

The first three decades of governmental development of the Mughal sites as spaces of national heritage remained confined to the building of touristic infrastructure (roads, hotels, parks, etc.), allocating money to publish brochures and publicity “to counteract the influence of a century-old propaganda against [India].”[12] Another significant mechanism of transforming monuments into spaces of heritage and tourism was the Planning Commission’s Five-Year Plan. First introduced on 8 December 1951 and chaired by Nehru, the Five-Year Plan outlined a method of rapid and intensive nation-wide economic development based on the Soviet model. It was not until the second Five-Year Plan (1956–61) that the Planning Commission took a direct interest in the tourism industry and allocated special funds of Rs. 336.38 lakhs ($7.1 million) to the Tourism Department for development projects on both the national and state levels.[13] The socialist leanings of Nehru and his immediate successors prevented rampant development or private capital investment. The government was more concerned to balance the needs of foreign tourists with the needs of the local economy and of domestic tourists.

By the end of the 1970s, the nation’s most-visited monuments were equipped with amenities such as electric lighting, plumbing upgrades, new roads, and hotels. The personnel at these monuments also expanded, and archaeologists shared their management and publicity duties with the tourism industry’s economic advisors, market researchers and developers. The government of Indira Gandhi, adopting Nehru’s ideological disposition, focused tourism development on the further diversification of the tourist base and invested in the expanding industry of domestic tourism. Among the benefits of tourism listed in the sixth Five-Year Plan (1980–85) were the “promotion of national integration and international understanding, creation of employment opportunities, removal of regional imbalances, opening up of new growth centres in the interior of the country.”[14] As part of its mandate, the Tourism Department invited the prominent National Institute of Design (NID) to study regional imbalances and draw up development plans for Fatehpur Sikri. Of all the Mughal monuments in the Agra-Delhi circuit, Fatehpur Sikri was the least able to accommodate visitors wishing to stay overnight, and the least integrated with the local economy. After a careful survey of the monument and the adjacent neighborhoods, the NID made several recommendations in a published report, Fatehpur Sikri Integrated Development Plan.[15]

The NID’s aim was not only to advise the government on how to exploit the tourism market at Fatehpur Sikri but also to express that the monument’s conservation and social uplift were integral to this development. It argued that projects of economic expansion unrelated to the monument, if left unchecked, would lead to increased traffic, stone quarrying, construction activities, and population growth.[16] All the NID’s recommendations were aimed at offsetting encroachment and damage to the monument while creating “conditions for the participation of local population in tourist activities.”[17] Not a single one of these recommendations was implemented and there continues to be disquieting displays of poverty close to the monument, shocking tourists that venture off the guided path and revealing the contradictions of heritage development in India. Additionally, in 2003 the Times of India reported that quarrying activities have resumed and that the monumental gateway of the monument, called the Buland Darwaza, and the western wall of Fatehpur Sikri have shown cracks and destruction due to dynamite blasts.[18]

The NID’s report marked the end of an era of Nehruvian economics that sought to bridge tourism development at the Mughal monuments with social uplift and equity. In the next phase of development, which began with the government of Rajiv Gandhi, we see the transposition of social integration and equitable growth with more concentrated schemes of commercial growth and private-sector partnerships. Following these tourism developments the contradictory ordering of the Mughal monument as national heritage became more apparent and resistance to the state began to grow in strength.

The Taj Corridor Project and the Contradictions of Neoliberalism

Rajiv Gandhi’s government recognized tourism as one of the fastest-growing industries in India. Its strength lay in its low level of capital investment compared to other industries and in its ability to attract foreign currency and generate tax revenue. In light of these positive qualities, between 1985 and 1990 the Planning Commission allocated Rs. 326.2 crores ($16.6 million) to tourism development, the highest expenditure yet, to achieve a 7 percent growth rate. To meet this goal, the seventh Five-Year Plan proposed four areas of action: “(i) faster development of tourism; (ii) according the status of an industry to tourism; (iii) re-defining of the role of public and private sectors to ensure that the private sector investment is encouraged in developing tourism and the public sector investment is focused mainly on development of support infrastructure; and (iv) exploiting tourism potential to support local handicrafts and other creative arts and to promote national integration.”[19] The earlier strategy of spreading investment evenly across India was replaced by a strategy of investing in overseas marketing and the aggressive redevelopment of popular destinations into safe and protected tourist enclaves.

The new profit-driven orientation of the tourism industry in India compelled the state to streamline and consolidate its public-sector agencies and to invite private sector initiatives. The conservation of national heritage monuments was also reoriented to the new tourism industry that sought “to exploit advantages of India’s unique place as a cultural tourism destination and to utilise tourism as a major force in support of conservation of national heritage.”[20] The last point discloses the state’s conviction that tourism and conservation were not opposing forces but could be mutually sustaining. Yet throughout the 1990s a momentum of development built up and outpaced conservation demands and social-integration policies at the heritage monuments. In 2002 this imbalance reached a critical point when an ill-conceived revitalization project for the Jumna riverbank threatened the structural stability of the Taj Mahal.

The Taj Corridor Project is probably the greatest catastrophe ever averted at a Mughal monument. The project now stands suspended in time as an empty space symbolizing a nation-state cut loose from its socialist moorings. The project emerged during the ninth Five-Year Plan when the state asserted its desire to become one of the world’s top tourism destinations. Under pressure from the Ministry of Tourism, the Uttar Pradesh State Tourism Department invited faculty and graduate students of the Landscape and Architectural Department (LAD) of the University of Illinois to produce a new plan for incorporating Agra’s Red Fort, the Taj Mahal, and the Jumna River front into an environmentally sound and unified tourism zone. The report they compiled became known as the Taj Mahal Cultural Heritage District Development Plan. The LAD mainly wished to incorporate the inhabitants of the surrounding rural neighborhood into the tourist zone and to promote extended stays in the city. The heritage component of the plan was designed to bring to light the riparian culture of the nobility that had vanished after the Mughal capital shifted to Delhi in the mid-seventeenth century. New building and landscape design proposals focused mainly on the river’s edge: “Its main feature would be a movement promenade that would link the remaining historic sites and bring the riverfront landscape into the civic realm.”[21] In this way, the developed riverfront, “the spine of the Taj Cultural Heritage District,” would have legal and administrative protection and ensure public access.[22]

In the estimation of the LAD, everyone besides the locals underused the riverfront, especially tourists. To this day, farmers bring their animals to the river, and a train of camels walking in line along the sandbank and water buffaloes grazing below the Taj Mahal are not uncommon sights. Locals also use the riverfront to bathe, to pray at the ghats, to play cricket, to fly kites, and as a commons. The LAD study implicitly discounted such traditional uses of the space and recommended incorporating the waterfront into the tourist experience. The planners were, however, careful to explain that locals were not to be displaced, but assimilated: “They would have an opportunity to participate in the tourist economy (if they so desire) as boatmen, caretakers of orchards and public gardens, and makers of arts and crafts displayed in the arrival centers.”[23] The LAD’s plan, while never fully implemented, provided a rough sketch of how to alter the spatial practices of the Mughal monuments and their surroundings to expand the touristic spaces and routes in Agra so visitors would prolong their stay. The state of Uttar Pradesh especially welcomed the design for a promenade, and from it was born the Taj Corridor Project. Controversial, destructive, and eventually aborted, the project would reveal the underlying contradictions and oppositions of economic development and of the promise of heritage protection at the Taj Mahal.

Fig 12: The Taj Corridor seen from the Agra Red Fort © Ebba Koch 2004

The LAD advised against new building projects pending further studies of the impact waterfront revitalization would have on the monuments. These studies were never completed, but the construction of an esplanade that stretched along the riverfront, connecting the Taj Mahal to the Red Fort, was nonetheless begun in 2002. No one knew at this time who had sanctioned the project, but A. G. Krishna Menon, an architect and the director of the TVB (Tulsi Vidhya Bharatiya) School of Habitat Studies, faults the Uttar Pradesh state government with the rapid transformation of an academic study into a development reality. To push the project through, the state government worked with the National Project Construction Corporation, “a commercially aggressive public sector consultancy and construction company.”[24] The first stage of the esplanade’s construction was a landfill comprising a twelve-foot base of soil, stretching one mile long, and covering an area of seventy-two acres. A sixteen-hundred-meter long wall was also built to keep the river from carrying away the landfill (figure 12).[25]

Without the knowledge of the minister of tourism and culture, Shri Jagmohan, the project proceeded at an atypical speed and would have been completed if an Indian Express reporter, Prarthna Gahilote, had not publicized the undertaking. Gahilote’s investigation revealed that the Taj Corridor Project disturbed the protection of two World Heritage Sites, the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal, which was legally mandated by the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958 and overstepped the Indian Supreme Court’s ruling of 1996 that defined a no-development zone of two hundred meters around the monuments. Gahilote also discovered that the local civic authorities at the Agra City Municipal Corporation and the Agra Development Authority had little knowledge of the project except that the Uttar Pradesh Central Pollution Control Board had approved it in August 2002.[26] Most alarming and telling of how fragmented and insular the administration of heritage sites had become was the ASI’s response to the project at the Agra Circle office: they informed Gahilote that since the construction was taking place outside the borders of the monument, the work did not fall under ASI jurisdiction.

After her article ran in June 2002, other newspapers picked up the story, leading to a public outcry. From New Delhi, Jagmohan immediately stopped the project, and the Supreme Court asked the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to discover how the corridor had been authorized, where the funding of Rs.175 crores ($36 million) had come from, and how it had been spent. The case eventually led to the resignation of the chief minister Mayawati on charges of corruption.[27] In the wake of the scandal, an eyesore of concrete and red sandstone intended as a shopping promenade connecting the major Mughal sites of Agra sits instead as a symbol of the discord between the national trend of rapid development and the protection of the nation’s heritage.

The Taj Corridor Project also signifies the inauguration of a wider public consciousness regarding Indian heritage. In the aftermath of the crisis, interested members of the public demanded transparency of political institutions and revealed their intolerance for negligent conservation practices. Nongovernmental members of the public additionally demanded a greater share of power in the practices of conservation and sought to introduce a new integrated approach to tourism and heritage policy. One of the most prominent figures of this concerned public is Amita Baig, a heritage management consultant for the World Monument Fund, who has written and lectured extensively on the social impact of heritage development. Baig calls on conservators, the tourism business, and government administrators to synchronize their economic exploitation of the monument with the social needs of the local landscape. Development schemes like the Taj Corridor Project in Baig’s estimation symbolize the danger of putting profits above people.[28] Without greater oversight of such schemes, she argues, Agra and the Taj Mahal will not remain vital heritage spaces: “Agra will be a city of monuments and hotels, devoid of life and culture, or worse, the people to whom this heritage is home. The cultural significance of the Taj Mahal would thus alter radically, perhaps even diminish its importance as the cultural icon of India, for icons can only be sustained where there is a healthy environment, where the living cultural heritage is vibrant and there is synergy.”[29] Offering fresh perspectives on how to integrate conservation and development, private citizens like Baig are influencing the policies and practices of the ASI and the tourism industry. They are also redefining the terms of capitalist development: “Public-private partnership is not the mere grant or receipt of funds, it is the sharing of knowledge, of custodianship. Most crucially it expands the base for decision-making and enlarges the stakeholder’s role. The management of the cultural heritage is more than ever before, a transdisciplinary undertaking. It must become one of the key building blocks for the future.”[30] Baig’s thoughts on cultural heritage development reveal how public advocacy has become another dimension of the heritage monument, brought to greater prominence after the disapprobation of the privatization schemes of this decade. Other advocates have followed in Baig’s footsteps and publicized the mismanagement of Mughal monuments at the hands of the ASI and other governmental bodies, and some have even taken these organizations to court.[31]

The crisis of the Taj Corridor Project not only promoted internal national resistance to state heritage policy and practice but also uncovered how pressures to conform to international standards of values and practices can shape heritage sites. The relations of UNESCO and the Indian state offer another layer of controversy and contradiction to the heritage dimension of the Mughal monuments.

The Taj Corridor Project as International Crisis

The ASI, like all bureaucratic institutions, has an entrenched culture of precedents and rules sustained by an inflexible system of file keeping. This culture, inherited from the British imperial machine, enabled the ASI to thwart new conservation principles and methods for twenty-five years. The only authority the ASI served in these years was the Archaeological Remains Act of 1904 and later the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act of 1958, which replaced the former. Both acts provided the legal parameters of ASI activity and focused it principally on the matters of monument ownership and protection. This limited scope of activity, combined with the bureaucratic culture of the organization, restricted its adaptation of new methods of conservation and prevented the ASI from coordinating effectively with other social and economic sectors such as education, urban development, and tourism. This would begin to change in 1972, when the United Nation’s Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) initiated its World Heritage Project. The project’s aims were the establishment of an international set of principles and standards of heritage conservation and the exchange of methods and resources to prevent the further deterioration of the world’s monuments. Born out of these goals was the concept of the World Heritage Site and a system of inscribing these sites on the prestigious World Heritage List. Desiring this designation for Indian sites to increase their profile internationally, Indian officials and delegates of UNESCO put pressure on the ASI to reorder the great Indian monuments to meet the cultural and conservational criteria required of a World Heritage Site. Starting in the 1970s the space of Indian national monuments would begin to conform to the principles and practices established by a multinational group of delegates and conservation experts. The process of synchronizing national spaces with the demands of an international body would shape the Mughal monuments according to global methods and codes of conservation and give rise to new contradictions at the sites.

The first Mughal monuments to be listed on UNESCO’s World Heritage List were the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort in Agra. This status meant increased publicity for these sites as well as a subsequent increase in tourism, which then added pressure to exploit the profit potential of the monuments and their surroundings. Other problems expose an underlying contradiction of World Heritage. As monuments selected as the finest examples of the diversity of human achievement come to be ordered by a standardized set of global values and touristic practices, the surrounding culture is reduced to spectacle, and handicraft production and festivals become mere historical reenactments. Local economies are forced to assimilate to a service industry and to provide labor and resources to keep the hotels, bars, restaurants, and visitor centers running. Ironically, a World Heritage Site that is supposed to express the uniqueness of a nation’s cultural accomplishments ends up attracting capital investments ensuring that these sites become what David Harvey calls a “serial replication of homogeneity.”[32] The challenges posed to World Heritage monuments by capitalist development became a greater concern after nation-states like India began to privatize their economies. In response to these concerns, the World Heritage Committee sponsored a study of the development dilemma and advanced new theories and practices to make the opposing forces of commercial interests and heritage protection mutually supportive.

The World Heritage Convention was one of a group of conventions signed into treaties at the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Emerging from this broad framework, the World Heritage Program had as its goal the establishment of a link between the human environment and economic development.[33] Translated into the preservation of cultural heritage, this meant that a monument would be protected only when a village, town, or city surrounding it was developed. UNESCO’s ideal of a symbiotic relationship emerging between a heritage site and its social environment was not articulated as a focused planning strategy until the late 1980s and the 1990s. The World Heritage Program called this concept “sustainable development” and introduced it as part of the practice of the preservation of natural heritage sites such as parks and animal preserves. In the late 1990s the program expanded the concept to cover cultural heritage as well. In 1998 the director of the World Heritage Center, Bernd von Droste zu Hülshoff, outlined the meaning of sustainable development: “Sustainable development has been defined as a rate of economic development that can maintain both economic growth and the fullness of the planet’s biological and cultural diversity.”[34] With this new directive, the application process for monuments has become more comprehensive and requires the state party to submit information about the population surrounding the structure as well as practical plans for integrating them into the care for the site.

The World Heritage Center’s ability to influence national and local development programs at Indian monuments was clearly demonstrated in its response to the Taj Corridor Project.[35] After becoming aware of the plans for an esplanade connecting the Agra Red Fort to the Taj Mahal, the World Heritage committee sent a group of conservationists to inquire about the state of the sites. The corridor, it was reported back to UNESCO headquarters in Paris, was devised by the Taj Protection Mission Management Board (TPMMB) under the chairpersonship of the chief secretary of the state government of Uttar Pradesh. The TPMMB was set up in 1998 after the Supreme Court had issued a recommendation in connection to an environmental protection case. The board, however, overstepped its authority in sanctioning the purely commercial Taj Corridor Project and in requesting funds for its construction from the Central Government Ministry of Environment and Forests. Upon concluding its investigation, the World Heritage Committee determined that the Taj Corridor Project did in fact endanger the Taj Mahal and related Mughal sites. The building activities altered the flow of the Jumna River and raised its water table, hastening the sinking of the Taj Mahal.

The committee issued a draft decision expressing “grave concern” about the preservation of the site and put forth several requests based on the premise that the Taj Corridor Project development stood in contradiction to the values and practices of the World Heritage Convention. These requests were: to allow closer monitoring of the sites by the World Heritage Center and the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and to accept their advice on better conservation methods; to carefully analyze and assess the impact of development projects on World Heritage Sites and assess the damage already done; to ensure better coordination between local and state management parties and to establish effective management of the sites; and finally, to submit a report on the status of its conservation to the twenty-eighth World Heritage Committee session in 2004.[36] The implications of the Taj Mahal coming under international scrutiny registered with officials in Parliament.

Several Lok Sabha ministers questioned the minister of environment and forests, Shri A. Raja, in December 2004 and again in December 2005 regarding the progress made in removing the debris threatening the Taj Mahal.[37] These proceedings are indicative of the influence of the World Heritage Committee’s recommendations and the central government’s desire not to lose the World Heritage standing of any of its monuments. They also add another layer of symbolization to the Mughal monuments; not only are they national heritage sites representative of Indian “unity in diversity” but also universal symbols of human achievement.

Yet both the national and global symbolic orders of heritage mystify the social reality of its production and its integral relationship to tourism development. If we consider the spatial practices that order heritage monuments, the underlying ambivalence of the concept of heritage becomes apparent. Among the practices that compel this ambivalence are the promotion of homogenized space instead of the preservation of diverse spatial practices; the displacement of the local economy in favor of a tourist economy; and finally the state’s exchange of its ideological moorings in the equity of Nehruvian socialism for a more aggressive, neoliberal capitalist model of investment. These practices do not simply rest quietly in space but, as Lefebvre has argued, reveal the contradictory nature of our social reality: “The contradictions of space thus make the contradictions of social relations operative. In other words, spatial contradictions ‘express’ conflicts between socio-political interests and forces; it is only in space that such conflicts come effectively into play, and in so doing they become contradictions of space.”[38] In the case of the Mughal monuments, the state’s economic practices and its conflict with the democratic social ordering have rendered them ambivalent sites of the Indian nation. It is in these spaces that contradictions of social reality are experienced and from where they are contested and not—and this is the crucial point—in the discursive field of ideological struggle. The contradictions of space, in other words, open up new possibilities, new orderings at the monument. One of these possibilities is for the monument to become a differential space, or a radically open space to encounter once again the traumatic and mediate it through other more creative spatial practices. The next section will consider this creative or differential quality of the Mughal monument.

The Muslim Waqf and an Ethical Reproduction of the Taj Mahal

The Taj Corridor Project crisis brought into focus the opposition between the capitalist development of heritage preservation and the realities of social inequity and homogeneity it produces. It also effected change in the ASI’s conservation practices, forcing it to commit to a more comprehensive approach and to incorporate internationally accepted modes and values of heritage preservation. The ASI’s new openness and the state’s commitment to sustainable development were thought to put the Taj Mahal and other Mughal monuments on stable footing. Then on 13 July 2005 crisis visited again: the chairman of the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh, Hafiz Usman, registered the Taj Mahal as a waqf property (figures 13 and 14). As soon as the waqf registration was announced, reporters from Indian news outlets and from CNN and the BBC raced to Lucknow and to the office of the chairman. The ensuing headlines and sound bites warned of a looming disaster: an Islamic trust had claimed ownership of the Taj Mahal! The reason underlying the registration was assumed to be profit, as most reports mentioned that the Waqf Board stood to claim 7 percent of Rs. 20 crores ($4.6 million) of yearly ticket sales. This fact was typically followed with the ASI’s promise to challenge the registration in light of the danger that the Waqf Board’s ownership allegedly posed to the physical conservation of the Taj Mahal and its World Heritage status. The chairman subsequently saw himself vilified in blogs, newspaper editorials, and chat rooms for communalizing a national monument. Ifran Habib, a prominent historian of the Mughal era, and Parliament members of the Rajya Sabha called for new legislation to exclude national monuments from the Waqf Board’s purview.

The hostile responses to the waqf registration exposes the symbolic ordering of the Taj Mahal and the misrecognition that underlies the identification of a national “I” in the mirror of the monument. To maintain the fantasy of wholeness and national unity, the monument must be rendered a space limited to representing Indian national heritage, and any act that alters this illusion is viewed as illegitimate and pernicious. When one steps outside this perspective and views the space obliquely, the waqf registration of the Taj Mahal takes on a different aspect. It becomes immediately apparent that the singular identification of the monument with the secular and democratic ideals of the nation renders the spatial ordering of the Taj Mahal a symptom of the ambivalent and conflicted process of national identification. The uniform “public” outcry to exclude from the spatial ordering of the Taj Mahal the Indian Muslim practice of waqf reveals the ambivalent reality of the Indian monument: it is not a space of secular acceptance but is in fact a space of secular refusal.

Fig 13: Hafiz Usman, chairman of the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh, India 2007. Photo by the author

Fig 14: Entrance to the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, India. 2007. Photo by the author

After independence the Indian government took over the historical monument’s proprietary rights and ordered it as a national space of Nehru’s socialist secularism. Mughal monuments with their hybrid Hindu and Islamic architectural style offered an ideal space to close the division between the Hindu and Muslim communities in the wake of Partition. Like other public sites, the monuments were also used to produce a nation of individuated private citizens, a necessity for rapid development. Basing the new national culture on the universal principles of secular humanism, science and technology, Nehru expelled all other interests, especially those of religious groups, from the public sphere. It was Nehru’s desire, as Partha Chatterjee explains, for the Indian state to “stand above conflicts and provide an autonomous political will to control and direct the economy in the interest of the people as a whole.”[39] The Indian monuments as national spaces would both reflect this secular, democratic social order and orientation of the state and also obfuscate the real trauma that such an ordering forced on people already suffering from the violence of Partition. Any attempt to assert the religious meaning of a national monument was represented as antithetical to India’s national goals and regressive in its aspiration. As a result of this symbolization, the Taj Mahal’s relevance to Islamic culture and religious practices was fixed to its historical origins, and its original funerary function was subordinated to its national significance. The waqf registration that asserted the Taj Mahal’s religious significance created a crisis in the state’s ordering of the monument and revealed the contradictions present in its process of national identification.

The waqf registration itself is a simple process that occurs on a regular basis. The Taj Mahal’s registration begins when a man from Faizabad, Mohammad Irfan Bedar, filed a Public Interest Litigation suit with the High Court of Allahabad in 2004. His intention was to force the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh to at last decide on a request he made in 1998 to be named caretaker or mutawalli of the Taj Mahal. Before the claim could be adjudicated, the court had to ascertain the status of the Taj Mahal, and it turned to Section 36 of the Waqf Act of 1995, which entrusts a waqf board with the authority to collect information and inquire about the waqf status of a property. The court then asked the same Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh to provide this information, knowing that once a property is determined to be a waqf, the decision is final.[40]

Usman told me in an interview in 2007 that the Waqf Board, following the High Court’s orders, consulted documents from libraries and archives in Kolkata, Aligarh, Rampur, and London to discover if in fact Shah Jahan had designated the Taj Mahal a charitable endowment, or waqf. The historical text at the center of the argument is the Badshahnama, written by Abdul Hamid Lahori between 1629 and 1632. Usman claims that the text confirms that the Taj Mahal was indeed intended as a waqf property. The other part of the investigation was to determine if Muslim practices were still being performed at the Taj Mahal. Since the complex contains a mosque and several tombs in addition to the main tomb, the site was designated a qabristan, or Muslim cemetery. Further noting that Friday namaz, prayer, had been occurring regularly at the mosque since 2000, that the imam was still paid a government salary of Rs. 100 a month, as per Shah Jahan’s orders, and that the urs celebration on the anniversary of Shah Jahan’s death has been held for the past 352 years, Usman decided to register the Taj Mahal as a waqf property.

After the registration Usman publicly announced the new ordering to take place at the site: “From today, the ASI ceases to have absolute right of possession over the monument. Henceforth, we will have the right to manage all religious rituals carried out inside the Taj Mahal premises.”[41] This challenge to the symbolization of secular ideology resulted in the immediate public vilification of the Sunni Waqf Board members as opportunists bent on communalizing the nation’s preeminent heritage monument. The ASI immediately filed a petition with the Supreme Court to rescind this registration, citing as reasons that the Sunni Waqf Board had illegally claimed ownership of a central government property and that it did not have the ability to conserve the Taj Mahal. The court, however, stayed the board’s registration of the Taj Mahal in December 2005.[42]

When major English-language newspapers reported the waqf registration in July 2005, Indians began debating the issue in Internet chat rooms and message boards. Both the press and the Internet-using public rendered their verdict in favor of the ASI and its secular mandate without fully exploring the practice of Muslim charitable endowments. In doing this, they effectively closed the debate on this request for representation. Had the waqf registration of the Taj Mahal been framed differently—for example, as a tactical means of enfranchisement—the public might have reacted less antagonistically and viewed the act not as a destructive move but perhaps as a creative solution to the problem of spatial representation at the nation’s monuments. Presented this way, Usman’s registration of the Taj Mahal becomes a bid to make visible Muslim spatial practice and history at the tomb.

To further appreciate Usman’s tactical production of the Taj Mahal through the waqf registration, the action must first be viewed in the context of the power relations of the past two decades. This context is defined by Hindu nationalist resistance to secular power and through the focus on the destruction of the built heritage of Muslim culture and society. Starting with the Ram Janmabhoomi movement of the 1980s, Hindu nationalists, a confederation of Hindu organizations led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), radicalized themselves around the spaces of Mughal and other Muslim architecture. The culminating moment of this radicalization was the destruction of the Mughal Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992. The BJP and its partners insisted that a temple commemorating the exact birthplace of the Hindu god Ram had been razed to accommodate the construction of the mosque, which was built in 1528 by Mir Baqi at the behest of Babur, the first Mughal emperor (1526–30). The subsequent destruction of the sixteenth-century mosque marked a significant blow to the secular ideology of Indian politics. The Babri Masjid, the epicenter of this political and social shakeup, was a waqf property, registered with the Sunni Waqf Board of Uttar Pradesh, and thus protected by law. A Hindu temple to the god Ram planned for the site has not yet been built on the grounds of the mosque (in spite of several attempts by Hindu nationalists to do so).[43] Even though the Ram temple remains only an imagined space of radical Hindu nationalism, it has served its primary purpose: the transformation of the Indian social order from one based on Nehru’s secular individualism to one based on communal separatism and Hindu ascendancy.

The BJP clarified the aim and logic of the mosque’s destruction in its justification of the demolition: “These structures and mosques are not—and were never intended to be—symbols of the purely religious sensibilities of Muslims which every Hindu ought to respect; but were intended to be, and are mementoes of the atrocities on this great nation perpetrated by the Ghaznavis, Baburs and Aurangzebs and of their victories, as also of the defeat of our countrymen and their spiritual and political humiliation.”[44] The BJP contended that the secular government had obscured the history of these Islamic sites by falsifying their true nature and thus rendering them conflicted spaces: “This historical background of the Mohammedan invasion and the provocative ocular reminders of that violent and barbaric invasion were completely ignored even after the partition of India. This neglect resulted in the failure to evolve a sound basis for Indian nationalism and durable relationships between Hindus and Muslims. The effort was to suppress the historical facts from history books, and explain away irrefutable facts by falsehoods such as claiming that Babur was secular and tolerant.”[45] At the same time that Hindus are reminded of their historical suppression at the hands of Muslim rulers, myriad examples show them how the Indian state perpetuates their weakness: the alimony case of a divorcée, Shah Bano, in which the state allowed Muslim family law to supplant a Supreme Court decision; Muslim militancy in Kashmir; and the state’s policy of Indian Muslim appeasement for fear of agitation.[46] To turn the tide in favor of Hindu society, nationalists claim they must first erase or reconvert the monuments or “mementoes” of their subjugation.

The demolition of the Babri Masjid initiated a series of violent acts against Muslims that includes the Bombay riots of 1992 and 1993 and the massacre, in 2002, of more than two thousand Muslims in the state of Gujarat by the BJP’s youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, and other Hindu nationalists.[47] The dire state of the Indian Muslim community—defined by random acts of violence and social inequity—certainly weighs on Usman’s mind. In our interview he pointed to this condition as that which compelled his waqf registration of the Taj Mahal. While the Taj Mahal is in no immediate danger of physical demolition, Hindu nationalists have already begun to seize it rhetorically, threatening to erase the site’s Muslim identification and putting a Hindu one in its place. Usman points out that the waqf registration means to frustrate this process and to save the Taj Mahal from Hindu appropriation: “The fundamentalists might gain power over the next fifty years. If they claim that this is the Shiv Mandir or Kali Mandir or some other Mandir, who will tell them that this is not a Shiv Mandir or Kali Mandir, but that this is the Taj Mahal, it has two graves inside, there is a mosque next to it? This is one of the reasons why we registered the Taj Mahal under the waqf.”[48]

The chairman’s fears may also have been fed by the events of October 2001, when young Hindu men stormed the Taj Mahal. Following a two-day convention of the BJP in Agra, more than a thousand members of another youth wing, the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha, stormed into the site. Moving easily past the guards, they made their way into the tomb complex. While there, they carved their names into the marble, chanted “Jai Sri Ram,” or “victorious Ram,” urinated in the pools, picked flowers, intimidated female visitors, and planted saffron flags.[49] When police regained control of the monument, they forced the youths out but made no arrests for damaging a World Heritage Site, nor were reports filed or anyone charged with a crime. Indian Muslims might read this failure to assert accountability as the state’s tacit consent to the destruction of all signs of Muslim rule and life in India. The incident received only nominal coverage from the press, but it shocked the local community just the same.

As a response to such forceful Hindu nationalist agitation and the lack of adequate state protection of Muslim historical spaces, Usman’s anxious bid for the public acknowledgment of the Taj Mahal’s Muslim genealogy becomes not only reasonable but in his view singularly urgent. The waqf registration, the chairman explains, not only renders the Taj Mahal a protected Muslim space but also allows it to be represented as such: “[It] is a symbol [alaamat] of Muslim rule [in India]. It is a sign [nishani] that they were once kings. The Taj Mahal proves that Muslims had their glory and that Muslims could build beautifully, and that they had a good administration.”[50] Balraj Puri, a human rights activist situated in Jammu and Kashmir, follows the same logic in viewing Mughal and other Islamic monuments as critical spaces to reassert Indian Muslim emplacement in the national landscape: “The Red Fort, Taj Mahal, Ajmer Sharif, Deoband and Aligarh represent political glory, aesthetic achievement, spiritual centre [sic], seat of religious learning [sic] and symbol[s] of modern Muslim resurgence respectively not only of the Urdu region but also of the Muslims all over the sub-continent.”[51] But this identification is only part of the process of the waqf registration of the Taj Mahal. It also creatively reveals the gap that exists between the symbolizations of Indian Muslims as either alien deposits on Indian soil or equal citizens of the nation state and the complex reality of their existence in India.

A Monument to a New India?

The Taj Mahal waqf registration invokes the Lacanian ethical imperative to realize that we are all the same in our struggle to mediate the gap between the contingent impossible kernel of the Real and our impossible desire to fill its lack (through the fantasy of ideology). When this perspective is taken, the Indian Muslim appears neither as an other to be banished for his or her internal impossibility (which is the stance taken by the BJP and its allies), nor can he or she be falsely cherished as the same (the symbolic deception of which Hindu fundamentalists accuse the secular government). Instead, in relation to the gap our neighbors appear like us, as individuals constituting a plurality that is produced by what Žižek describes as the “multitude of responses to the same impossible-real kernel.”[52] Usman’s registration thus did not mean to swap one ideological ordering for another at the Taj Mahal. His act, I argue, was more poetical than political in its search for an ethical alternative to the closure of Mughal monuments to India’s other(s).

Usman’s waqf registration as a creative act echoes the ideas of Muslim leaders like Maulana Wahiduddin Khan, who believe that Muslims must work with Hindus and leave behind the siege mentality developed after Partition if they wish to live in India: “The self-styled intellectuals would say that in this the Muslims were not to blame. That the real culprits were the Hindus. They would put forward the argument that after partition the Muslims had been continually thwarted by prejudice and injustice on the part of the majority and had, as a result, fallen pray to feelings of insecurity. As such, their psychology had become defensive. No one who developed such a psychology could be capable of playing a creative role.”[53] The productiveness of the chairman’s act is further elucidated by his response to my question if the waqf registration was a political move to gain the votes of the Muslim community for his Samajwadi party. He says he aimed not to please a particular group but had filed the registration at the behest of the court, simply following the law: “Those who believe in secularism and in the constitution of India are happy with that decision.” Because the Waqf Board works lawfully with the secular government, it cannot be easily dismissed as acting against the state: “The Waqf Board is a legal institution created by a Parliamentary Act…. This institution should be strengthened by Muslims as their own, so that we will be able to protect our buildings under the law.” This last aspect of the waqf registration allows the chairman to open a space within the national landscape of India and to lawfully and cooperatively stand for the truth of the monument’s—and India’s—multiplicity.

The waqf institution, in Usman’s view, provides Indian Muslims with a means to peacefully and creatively negotiate a place within the national landscape. Yoginder Sikand explains the importance of accepting a solution like the waqf registration as a tactic to transcend the contradictions of Indian social reality, especially after the failure of secularism in the past two decades: “At a time when religious militancy has emerged as a major challenge in large parts of the world, including in many Muslim communities, the need for more reasoned understandings of religion that seek to creatively relate to the reality of growing religious pluralism, with the fact of the nation-state and global system of nations, and with all the many question that these pose for contemporary existence, has never been more urgent before.”[54] Yet Usman’s waqf registration as a poetic move to produce a pluralistic space at the national monument is veiled by the ideology of dominant power. More precisely, the communalist labeling of the waqf registration makes it easy to overlook the inherent contradictions of nationhood in India. It also causes the continued repression of the trauma of Partition and sanctions the permanent state of estrangement of Indian Muslims for the sake of the illusion of a unified nation.[55] If the supreme court sides with the ASI and rescinds the waqf registration the country will miss a chance to broaden the meaning of Indian nationhood, to elevate India’s “unity in diversity” to more than a slogan, and to finally produce Shah Jahan’s sublime tomb as a monument of Indian plurality.

From independence to today, there has been a consistent effort to turn the Mughal monuments of India into national spaces of social unity and shared heritage. The ideology of secularism that symbolized these sites was, however, structured around the missed encounter with the trauma of Partition, which remained an unsettling presence at the Mughal monuments in the years following it. Economic development, World Heritage designations, conservation mandates, and Hindu fundamentalist history have supported the closure of ideological meaning and in so doing have maintained the veil of the traumatic truth of the nation’s birth. The waqf registration of the Taj Mahal challenges the closure of ideological meaning and has exposed its inherent contradictions. But the state and its secular public have been unwilling to accept this reality for fear of fragmenting their national identity. In the meantime, communal violence continues to threaten the landscape and the Mughal monuments. It is against this backdrop that the Mughal monument in its radical openness is emerging again as a critical space for resisting power and addressing social trauma.

In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the breakthrough occurs when patients not only learn the source of the trauma that caused their suffering but also when they realize that the void caused by this original trauma that leads to the multiplicity of meaning is not something they have to avoid. Instead of veiling or repressing it through ideological symbolization, they can—and indeed must—face its radical contingency and learn to live with the void. As Žižek explains: “There is no solution, no escape from it; the thing to do is not to ‘overcome,’ to ‘abolish’ it, but to come to terms with it, to learn to recognize it in its terrifying dimension and then, on the basis of this fundamental recognition, to try to articulate a modus vivendi with it.”[56] Usman’s registration of the Taj Mahal as a waqf property is in line with this ethical imperative: he asks the nation to recognize the constitutive trauma of its birth and, more important, to realize that living with the void, with the plurality of meaning and spatial practices, does not lead to the dissolution of the self but to the enjoyment of the positivity and productivity of being.

Because of their sublime presence and radical openness, monuments matter. From the conquests of Nadir Shah, through British rule, freedom movements, and nation building, Mughal monuments were used time and again to help stay social dissolution, resist power and achieve ethical breakthroughs. As they begin to see this dynamic and creative aspect of the monument, Indian citizens will finally visit these sites not to reject but connect with the hard kernel of their past and that of their neighbors. Otherwise, like the old man of Lal Patthar, they will keep returning to the Mughal monuments never knowing why and vainly engage in washing away the bloody stain of their nation’s traumas.

epilogue

EVERY DAY, Muslim Ahmad leaves his courtyard house in the Khari Baoli mohalla, the neighborhood flanking Chandni Chowk, and makes his way to the Fatehpuri Masjid for noon prayers. As the slight eightyfive-year-old moves through the narrow lanes of this predominantly Hindu section of Old Delhi, men, both young and old, stop to greet him with great reverence. They touch their heads and hearts, prostrate themselves to touch his feet, or simply hold their hands in a gesture of namaskar. “I am a very respected man here,” Mr. Ahmad explains to me. After his prayers, he often spends the afternoon sitting in the courtyard of the mosque speaking to friends and neighbors who seek his council, his blessings, or simply conversation. For those who come to pray here, the Mughal-era mosque would be much like any other place of worship in contemporary Delhi were it not for the connection to the past that Mr. Ahmad provides. His family has prayed at the Fatehpuri Masjid for two centuries, and he might be the only person in the community that can speak with authority of its history during the past one hundred years. His erudition in this regard is not merely that of a longtime worshipper but is based on a connection with the people and place that was forged by his grandfather and father.

Mr. Ahmad’s grandfather was Deputy Nazir Ahmad (1836–1912), the social reformer, best-selling Urdu novelist, and a close friend and supporter of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan.[1] Nazir Ahmad traveled with Sir Sayyid to speak to the Indian Muslim community on the subjects of social uplift and educational reform, and he is revered as an early advocate of women’s education and rights. After his death, his son, Bashiruddin Ahmad Dehlavi (1861–1927), Mr. Ahmad’s father, quit his post as deputy collector for the nizam of Hyderabad and moved to Delhi to manage the family properties. The change in occupation left him with a lot of free time. It was then, Mr. Ahmad explains, that Sir Sayyid presented Athar al-sanadid to his father. He showed me the book and the inscription inside that reads, “If there are any shortcomings with this book, please complete it.” Dehlavi honored the request and wrote Vaqiat-i darul-hakumat-i Dihli,[2] a meticulously researched, three-volume exposition on the monuments of Delhi. When I asked Mr. Ahmad about his father’s intended audience, he replied: “All those persons who believe in their glorious past, [wanting to know] what was the condition, what is the condition, and what will be the condition of the community, those gentlemen read this record of Bashiruddin Ahmad Dehlavi.”[3] Considering this family history and Mr. Ahmad’s depth of knowledge, I asked him to offer his thoughts and perceptions on Mughal monuments, the condition of Indian Muslims, and their sense of place in the Indian landscape today.

We met a few days later in the Fatehpuri Masjid to talk of Delhi’s monuments and the Muslim community in the city and in India. I saw him sitting against a broken stone screen of the small cemetery in the courtyard of the Mughal mosque (see figure 15). The setting could not have been more appropriate, for the mosque’s history is inextricably linked to Mr. Ahmad’s life and ancestry, and its ideological message and physical condition have informed his worldview, which lately is characterized by much despondency regarding the future of Muslims in his country. When asked how Indian Muslims relate to the historical sites of their past, he takes in his surroundings and explains: “The [Muslim] nation is sleeping, with no eyesight. The whole nation is nowhere.” Does he think that the people he prays with every day are aware of the historical importance of the mosque? His answer is a resounding, “Not at all.” Asked to expand, he elaborates: “My dear, keep it in mind, historical importance is valuable for those people who are having knowledge, who are educated. The whole Muslim society is demoralized, illiterate, uncivilized. Every shortcoming in life, you will find in Muslims in India nowadays.” This answer confirms Chairman Usman’s assessment of the condition of the Mughal heritage spaces—which he aimed to remedy by registering the Taj Mahal as a waqf property—as utterly disconnected from the lives of Indian Muslims today. Clearly, the Muslims that Mr. Ahmad has known see neither the Fatehpuri Masjid nor other Mughal monuments as historical spaces of their community. Perhaps realizing the dismal direction our conversation was taking in this regard, Mr. Ahmad brought up a talk he was invited to give to an audience of Hindus on the subject of Islam and Hinduism. He said he spoke to them for two hours and concluded the talk by relating what he thought was the greatest achievement of Hindus vis-à-vis the Muslim community in the post-Partition era: “Listen with care: it is their hate for Muslims. Hate us—[but] we love our religion, so our religion is not dead, and the credit goes to the hatred which is in the heart of the Hindus for Muslims. Not against Islam, for Muslims.” These words summarily describe a major part of the social condition compelling the Muslim ordering of not only the Mughal monument but the entire Indian landscape. As in the period between the Uprising and Partition, this landscape is still ordered by the only thing that cannot be dominated, redefined, and dismissed by the state and its social forces—the timeless and unmappable ordering of Islam. By reiterating this truth Mr. Ahmad ended our conversation on Mughal monuments in the crumbling courtyard. “Islam is not in stones,” he says. “Islam is not in walls and doors. Islam belongs to the beautiful depth of your heart.”

Fig 15: Muslim Ahmad in the courtyard of the Fatehpuri Masjid, Delhi, 2007. Photo by the author

The spatial practices of Muslim social life in India, expressed by a spiritual relationship to the world, shape and order the space of the Fatehpuri Masjid: largely detached from the other social networks of the city, it is now no more than a neighborhood mosque adjoined by a small madrasa. Unlike other Mughal monuments of Delhi and Agra, the Fatehpuri Masjid has not been fully integrated into the tourist circuit or government conservation programs. Only a very few intrepid foreigners, Lonely Planet guide in hand, ever make it down the dusty and congested bazaar of Chandni Chowk. After passing through the mosque’s main gate, they quickly notice this Mughal monument’s difference from the rest. The Fatehpuri mosque is not under the direct care of the ASI, and since it is a waqf property, it depends primarily on the Delhi Waqf Board for its preservation. The board’s resources, however, are stretched thin across almost 2,000 properties, 193 of which are mosques, leaving the Fatehpuri Masjid in a state of neglect. Thoughtful visitors might wonder why the government allowed this particular site to fall into such ruin. It is after all a Mughal structure, built in 1650 by Begum Fatehpuri, one of Shah Jahan’s wives. Part of the larger “moral city” of Shahjahanabad, the Fatehpuri Masjid, along with the Red Fort east of it, served to bracket the Chandni Chowk. It was once surrounded by a fifty-four-acre garden that tied it in with the shade trees, water channel, and fountains lining the great market corridor. Today, the mosque’s walls are lined with shops, obscuring it from view. The mosque’s physical state inside can be defined as slow ruination: the carved stone fence of the small cemetery is broken and lies in pieces on the ground; the madrasa, housed in the courtyard, needs renovation; and the main sanctuary could benefit from conservational study.

Many people who come to pray at the Fatehpuri Masjid also come to seek the legal council of the Shahi imam, Mufti Mukarram. Representing his community for the past thirty years, the imam is a respected scholar of Arabic, Urdu, and sharia law, as well as an outspoken critic of the treatment of Muslims both in India and around the world. Interestingly, however, he does not possess any knowledge of the architectural history of the mosque.[4] This kind knowledge is of little use to his primary duty, that is, helping his community navigate the complexities of everyday life. While the imam represents the present condition of Indian Muslims at the Fatehpuri Masjid, the young students of the madrasa represent its future. Between their classes they can be seen about the courtyard, playing and conversing with their schoolmates. When I asked them how it feels to go to school in such a historical context, the young men seem puzzled by the question, but then stated that they were proud of it, realizing that this was probably the desired response. But their answer, especially after their initial hesitation, rang not so much with conviction as with confusion and reflected the general disorientation they experienced in the changing urban landscape of Delhi.

Indeed, rapid development is burying what is left of the Mughal ordering of Delhi under metro lines, overpasses, tourism corridors, and shopping malls, leaving the residents of Old Delhi increasingly estranged from the greater city. In the bleak landscape that emerges, the teachings of the madrasa provide the spiritual grounding its students cannot find in the silent stones of the ancient mosque. But this is nothing new. After the fateful weakening of Mughal authority in the eighteenth century, the Uprising of 1857, and the trauma of Partition, madrasa education proved vital to the survival of a community that needed to find a means to orient itself, renew its identity, and educate its youth in a shifting political climate. However, its curriculum is in desperate need of revision if its students are to compete in today’s economy. Once the young men leave the limited—and at times limiting—space of the Fatehpuri Masjid, they will enter a national landscape ordered by the inexorable forces of economic growth, in which traditional learning and culture cannot guarantee them a place to grow and prosper. Their estrangement from this landscape is clearly outlined in the Times of India television campaign of 2007, “India Poised.” Recited with great emotional affect by India’s legendary Hindi actor, Amitabh Bachchan, the spot offers an energetic and arguably divisive representation of today’s India:

There are two Indias in this country.

One India is straining at the leash, eager to spring forth and live up to all the adjectives that the world has been recently showering upon us. The Other India is the leash.

One India says, “Give me a chance and I’ll prove myself.”

The Other India says, “Prove yourself first, and maybe then, you’ll have a chance.”

One India lives in the optimism of our hearts; the Other India lurks in the skepticism of our minds.

One India wants, the Other India hopes…. One India leads, the Other India follows.

These conversions are on the rise.

With each passing day, more and more people from the Other India are coming over to this side.

And quietly, while the world is not looking, a pulsating, dynamic, new India is emerging.[5]

It is not hard to imagine where the young men of the Fatehpuri Masjid, with no more than a madrasa education, stand in the divided India this commercial evokes. As the new economy spreads forth, powered by English-speaking technocrats and capitalists, opportunities for the untrained segment of India’s citizens to pursue material and spiritual happiness are increasingly limited. These pressures and contradictions will then compel a new cycle of creativity, as young men with traditional educations find new ways to transcend the contradictions of daily life to avoid social death. As it has done in the past, the Fatehpuri Masjid will continue to provide the productive space for doing so, and it is this function that separates it from the state-controlled Mughal monuments.

Despite its imperial pedigree, the Fatehpuri Masjid remains a neighborhood mosque, ordered by the community it serves and standing as a monument to its daily struggles: it mediates its memories, refracts its social and political movements into familiar religious terms, and reflects the temporal flows and material realities that order its life. In contrast to the Mughal monuments protected by the state, the Fatehpuri Masjid still operates as a homely, comforting, and recognizable space, what bell hooks calls a “homeplace,” a “space of care and nurturance in the face of brutal harsh reality.”[6] As homeplaces, mosques have always given the Indian Muslim community a place to re-create itself and to critique and resist dominant society. They have provided the essential differential space needed for the forging of visions of a new future, as well as for the remembrance of the beloved past. Such homeplaces are critical for the development of a strong society. But instead of promoting and protecting them, the state’s strategy, since the era of British rule, has been to empty them of creative spatial practices in order to impose control. Mughal shrines, mosques, gardens, bazaars, and palaces, all once integral parts of the moral city, were fragmented and reordered by modern social and economic practices and signified by colonialism and secularism. With the exception of the twenty years during which it was in Hindu custody, the Fatehpuri Masjid has escaped this systematic process of separation and has remained a homeplace of the community. But it, too, might eventually be lost as new development schemes are introduced to integrate Old Delhi and its spaces into the commercial and touristic circuits of the greater city.

Fig 16: Heritage-Walk sign in front of the Fatehpuri Masjid, 2007. Photo by the author

While the local community contemplates its future in the mosque, the Delhi Municipal Corporation Heritage Society, with the help of the Indian National Trust for Cultural Heritage, is busy finding ways to incorporate the Fatehpuri Masjid with the heritage monuments of the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid. The Master Plan for Delhi 2021, produced by the Delhi Development Authority and the Ministry of Urban Development and Poverty Alleviation, aims to unite the Fatehpuri Masjid with the other monuments through the beautification of Chandni Chowk. When this project is completed, the main corridor will be a raised pedestrian walkway enabling tourists to walk safely to the Fatehpuri Masjid from the Red Fort, passing shops and spending money on the way. Of all the groups that have taken an interest in the tourism and heritage potential of the mosque so far, only the Delhi Tourism and Transport Development Corporation has made any real attempt to integrate it as a site into the tourist circuit. At the entrance to the mosque, a black metal sign with ornate openwork corners is prominently displayed. The number “30” designates the mosque as a “Heritage Building” and as part of a self-guided heritage walk (figure 16). The sign also provides a brief history of the mosque’s founding, form, and significance in colonial history: “To fight against the Britishers the Namazies and Ulemas of this mosque actively participated under the leadership of Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar.” The list of precise dates, relevant actors, and climactic events signals the attempt to absorb the Fatehpuri Masjid into the metanarrative of Indian national history and its ordering by the practices of heritage conservation.

However, as one looks at the mosque from Chandni Chowk, one cannot help but feel that the emblems of modern taxonomy and development practices are having difficulty adhering to this Mughal monument. The metal sign proclaiming it as a “Heritage Building” stands at an odd angle—probably the result of a collision with some passing conveyance—and the clock above the main gate, which enters the field of vision as one recedes further along the dusty bazaar, is missing its hands, as if to inform passersby that time will not be marked here unless it is by the call to prayer of the muezzin (figure 17). Through centuries of war, colonial conquest, the Uprising of 1857, the assembly of 1877, independence, Partition, and nation building, the space of the Fatehpuri Masjid has remained a homeplace for its community, helping it weather the cycles of change, face the contradictions of life in India today, and survive into the coming era.

Fig 17: Main entrance to the Fatehpuri Masjid, 2007. Photo by the author

Remembering that day at the Fatehpuri Masjid and my encounters with the students, the imam, and especially with Mr. Ahmad, I can say that here is one Mughal monument that functions as a differential space, a space of creative survival. At the end of this long and varied history of the production of the Mughal monument, this mosque allows us to remember that the impossible kernel of the Real lying at the bottom of these spaces does not have to be veiled, and that instead it is only when a community and a nation are able to face its truth that uncertainty can turn into hope and suffering into survival.

notes

Introduction

1. Gopal, Anatomy of a Confrontation; Rao, Ayodhya 6 December 1992; Noorani, The Babri Masjid Question, 1528–2003.

2. Communalism in India refers to social divisions based on the belief of religious difference and is often used to describe the religious tension between the Hindu and Muslim communities.

3. I am using the term spatial practice to designate the multiplicity of processes that occur at the monument to produce its meaning. I am therefore diverging from Henri Lefebvre’s more limited use of the term, which describes the material production of space. Michel de Certeau’s notion of spatial practice, as the everyday practices of lived space, defined by multiform-resistant procedures, is closer to my use of the term. See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 33; and Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 96.

4. After the destruction of the Babri Masjid in December of 1992, religious riots claimed two thousand lives, and in related communal riots in Gujarat in 2002 between one thousand and two thousand people, mostly Muslims, were killed.

5. Gopal, Anatomy of a Confrontation; Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, 268–303; Oza, “The Geography of Hindu Right-wing Violence in India”; Desai, Slouching towards Ayodhya.

6. Nandy, Trivedy, and Mayaram, Creating a Nationality; Engineer, Politics of Confrontation; Hansen, The Saffron Wave; Deshpande, “Communalising the Nation-Space.”

7. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.”

8. This strategy of chronological ordering and synchronic framing is not necessarily contradictory and can offer a robust understanding of how the meaning and function of monuments have changed with time and are adapted to the present concerns of Indian society. Exemplifying this kind of strategy are Davis, Lives of Indian Images; Deshpande, Creative Pasts; and Thapar, Somanatha.

9. Gopal, Anatomy of a Confrontation, vii, 11.

10. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 95.

11. Ibid., 94.

12. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 61.

13. Legg, “Beyond the European Province,” 267.

14. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism; Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire.

15. Among these scholars is Stephen Legg, with his compelling examination of the colonial construction of New Delhi in relation to its double, Old Delhi. See Legg, Spaces of Colonialism. Similarly, Swati Chattopadhyay’s examination of the urban planning of Calcutta is based not on the usual epistemological separation of the “Black Town” from the “White Town” but on their mutually constituting realities. Chattopadhyay, “Blurring Boundaries.”

16. Examples of such texts are, Amin, Event, Metaphor, Memory; Pandey, Remembering Partition; and Haynes and Prakash, Contesting Power.

17. The fundamental process of identification in the imaginary is theorized by Jacques Lacan as the “mirror stage” and marks the subject’s first alienation from the natural order: “The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and, lastly, to the assumption of the amour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development.” Lacan, Écrits, 4.

18. The fantasy of lack is derived from Lacan’s theory of the symbolic process of subjectivity as structured by the dialectic of desire, Lacan, Écrits, 310–17. See also Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 30–33.

19. Louis Althusser, a student of Lacan, identified this process of subjection to ideology as “interpellation”: “I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by the very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’ ” Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays, 118.

20. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 60.

21. The song, called Babri Masjid (Masjid-e-Babri Hum khatakar hain), was uploaded to YouTube by a Pakistani student who collects taranay or Urdu songs that are militant and jihadist in nature. I do not know who wrote the song or if the student was Pakistani or Indian. The student calls himself Ugerwadi.

22. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 307.

23. Ibid., 222.

24. Ibid., 391.

25. Ibid.

26. hooks, “Homeplace,” 41–49.

Chapter 1: Breathing New Life into Old Stones

1. By accepting the diwan, the British became the financial and judicial administrators of the Bengal territories for the Mughal Emperor.

2. Kalim, Divan-i Abu Talib Kalim Hamadani, 208.

3. Lehmann, “Urdu Literature and Mughal Decline,” 126–27.

4. Kanda, Masterpieces of Urdu Rubaiyat, 49.

5. Ibid., 39.

6. Mir, Kulliyat-i Mir, 131.

7. Schimmel, Pain and Grace, 14.

8. Sharma, “The City of Beauties in Indo-Persian Poetic Landscape,” 78.

9. Ibid.

10. Mirza Muhammad Rafi ‘Sauda,’ ”Mukhammas on the Desolation of Shahjahanabad.” Never formally published, Frances W. Prichett offers an annotated translation of the poem that can be found under the link “Urdu/Hindi Language and Literature” on her Columbia University website: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/#fwp (last accessed 3 November 2010).

11. Sauda writes: “Whatever holymen’s mosques there are are less valuable than mule posts/For seated there like asses are men, old and young/The mullah gives the call to prayer with his mouth shut.” Petievich, “Poetry of the Declining Mughals,” 107.

12. Ibid.

13. As Lacan explains the point de capiton: “This point around which all concrete analysis of discourse must operate… the point at which the signified and the signifier are knotted together, between the still floating mass of meanings that are actually circulating…. Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of a material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively.” Lacan, The Seminars of Jacques Lacan, 267–68.

14. Ahmad, Shahr-Ashob. The translation here is that of Frances W. Pritchett, available online at the website for her workshop, “What is a shahr-ashob?” It can be accessed in “Resources: Urdu/Hindi language and literature” found on her main webpage: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/#fwp (last accessed 29 October 2010).

15. Umar, Muslim Society in Northern India during the Eighteenth Century, 438–39.

16. Gilmartin, “Religious Leadership and the Pakistan Movement in the Punjab,” 490.

17. For a discussion of the parallactic, as I am using it here, see Žižek, The Parallax View, 17–20.

18. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 28–29.

19. For the ideological study of Hodges’s work, see Quilley and Bonehill, William Hodges, 1744–1797. For studies on Hodges’s forms and style, see Bann “Antiquarianism, Visuality, and the Exotic Monument”; and Tillotson, The Artificial Empire.

20. Eaton, “Temple Desecration and Indo-Muslim States,” 264.

21. Hodges, Travels in India during the Years 1780–1783, 47.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 52.

24. Burke, “Speech (December 1, 1783),” 453.

25. Hodges’s view was thus in accord with Hastings’s representation of the Indian landscape as a negative sign of Mughal governmentality. As the latter claimed: “Sovereignty in India implies nothing else; for I know not how we can form an estimate of its power but from its visible effects—and those are everywhere the same, from Kabul to Assam. The whole history of Asia is nothing more than precedents to prove the invariable exercise of arbitrary power. It will, no doubt, be most happy for the inhabitants of Asia when the despotic institutes of Jengheez Khan or Tamerlane shall give place to the liberal spirit of a British legislature. I shall be amply satisfied in my present prosecution, if I shall tend to hasten the approach of an event so beneficial to the great interests of mankind.” Warren Hastings, quoted in Davies, Strange Destiny, 242–43.

26. Hodges, Travels in India during the Years 1780–1783, 59.

27. Morning Post, 30 April 1788, quoted in Stuebe, The Life and Works of William Hodges, 208.

28. Tillotson makes a similar point in Artificial Empire, 3.

29. Hodges, Travels in India during the Years 1780–1783, 61.

30. Ibid., 62.

31. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 104.

32. Haque, Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture, 117.

33. Ibid., 118.

34. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 389.

35. Malleson, Life of Warren Hastings, First Governor-General of India, 451–52.

36. Certeau, The Writing of History, 4.

37. Hodges, Travels in India during the Years 1780–1783, 122.

38. Ibid., 123.

39. Ibid.

40. Ibid., 128.

41. Ibid., 127.

42. Ibid.

43. Certeau, The Writing of History, 4.

44. Ibid.

45. Mir, The Autobiography of the Eighteenth Century Mughal Poet, Mir Muhammad Taqi ‘Mir’ (1723–1810), 96–97.

46. Tillotson, Artificial Empire, 82.

47. Mills, “Knowledge, Gender, and Empire,” 42–46.

48. Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India, 85.

49. Ibid., 83.

50. Ibid., 93.

51. Parkes, Begums, Thugs, and Englishmen, 313.

52. Ibid.

53. An example of this sort of representation of Mughal Delhi is Thomas Metcalfe’s, “Delhi Book,” which describes the monuments of the city. Illustrated by Indian artists, the book was produced for his daughters in 1844. The folios, now in the British Library, were published in facsimile in the book The Golden Calm. Metcalfe spent considerable time with the emperor, Bahadur Shah, as the agent of the governor general in Delhi from 1835 to 1853. Despite this proximity his descriptions never give the details of court life and culture. Instead, he limits himself to describing individual structures of the palace, their form, decay, and if and when a historical event that led to the decline of the Mughals took place there. See Bayley and Metcalfe, The Golden Calm.

54. Parkes, Begums, Thugs, and Englishmen, 180.

55. Ibid., 182.

56. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 222.

57. Parkes, Begums, Thugs, and Englishmen, 183.

58. Ibid., 184.

59. Ibid., 184–85.

60. Das, A History of Indian Literature, 64.

61. Haque, Glimpses of Mughal Society and Culture, 47.

62. Akbarabadi, “Life Is But a Great and Varied Show,” in Abbas, The Life and Times of Nazir Akbarabadi, 71. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi and Frances W. Pritchett have also translated this poem as “The Vile World Carnival,” Annual of Urdu Studies, 4 (1984), 25–35.

63. Abbas, The Life and Times of Nazir Akbarabadi, 149.

64. Ibid., 151.

65. Žižek, The Parallax View, 18.

Chapter 2: From Cunningham to Curzon

1. Cole, First Report of the Curator of Ancient Monuments in India for the Year 1881–1882, 5.

2. Ibid., 4.

3. Ibid., 5.

4. Gupta, Delhi between Two Empires, 1803–1931, 17.

5. Ibid.

6. Also known as the first war of Indian independence and the Sepoy Mutiny, the event will be referred to as “the Uprising” in this book.

7. Smith, The Oxford History of India, 665.

8. One son fled to Hyderabad, but he never assumed the title of a Mughal prince.

9. Smith, The Oxford History of India, 675.

10. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence, 73.

11. Kipling, “The Man Who Was,” 48.

12. Slavoj Žižek provides a useful description of the master-signifier: “Let us imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency: in such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous ‘quilting point,’ which stabilizes the situation again and makes it readable…. The Master adds no new positive content—he merely adds a signifier which, all of a sudden, turns disorder into order, into ‘new harmony,’ as Rimbaud would have put it.” Žižek, The Parallax View, 37.

13. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire, 27.

14. Lord Canning, minutes, 22 January 1862, Council on the Antiquities of Upper India, in Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India Reports, i.

15. Kipling, Gunga Din and Other Favorite Poems, 52.

16. Ibid., iv.

17. Fergusson, History of Indian and Eastern Architecture, 104–8; and Mill, The History of British India, 3:458–59.

18. Mill, The History of British India, 1:12–13.

19. Fergusson, History of Modern Styles of Architecture, 494.

20. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 28.

21. Ibid.

22. Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, 12–15.

23. Ibid., 14.

24. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 220.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., 135.

27. Cunningham, Archaeological Survey of India Reports, iv.

28. Imam, Sir Alexander Cunningham and the Beginnings of Indian Archaeology, 204–9.

29. Roy, The Story of Indian Archaeology, 1784–1947, 57.

30. Ibid., 66.

31. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/P/3218 Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department, Government of India, Archaeology, 1888 (Letter from Dr. J. Burgess, Dir. Gen. Arch. Survey of India to the Secretary to the Government of India, 16 March 1887).

32. Ibid.

33. Keith, “Indian Stone Carving,” 111.

34. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/P/3218 Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department, Government of India, Archaeology, 1888 (Letter from Dr. J. Burgess, Dir. Gen. Arch. Survey of India to the Secretary to the Government of India, 16 March 1887).

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid.

37. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/P/2519 Proceedings of the Home Department, Government of India, 1885 (Letter from Major J. B. Keith to the Secretary of the Government of India, 14 October 1885).

38. British Library/India Office Records/P/3218 Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department, Government of India, 1888 (Letter from Dr. J. Burgess to the Secretary of the Government of India, Home Department, 16 March 1887).

39. Führer, The Monumental Antiquities and Inscriptions in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh.

40. E. W. Smith, The Moghul Architecture of Fathpur-Sikri, 1:xii.

41. Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole, K. C. B., 138.

42. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/P/1681/Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department, Government of India, 1882 (Letter from H. H. Cole to Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, 27 March 1882).

43. H. H. Cole, Preservation of National Monuments, 4.

44. Arnold, India Revisited, 202, 204–5.

45. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/P/1681 Proceedings of the Revenue and Agricultural Department, Government of India, 1882 (Letter from H. H. Cole to Officiating Secretary to the Government of India, Home Department, March 27, 1882).

46. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 2.

47. Ibid., 165.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 183.

50. In 1911 Curzon purchased Tattershall Castle and reputedly saved it from being removed to the United States by William Randolph Hearst. See New York Times, 7 November 1911.

51. Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon, 73.

52. Ibid., 76.

53. Curzon quoted ibid., 81.

54. Curzon, Problems of the Far East, vii–viii.

55. Ibid., 253.

56. Ibid., 261.

57. Ibid., 399.

58. Ibid., xii.

59. Ibid.

60. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 78.

61. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/MSS EUR F111/620, George Curzon, “Indian Archaeology, 1899–1905,” Correspondence, Speeches, and Papers of Lord Curzon, 1906.

62. Curzon, “Ancient Monuments,” in Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: January to December 1899, 57.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid., 58.

65. Ibid., 59–60.

66. Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, 183–84.

67. British Library/Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections/India Office Records/MSS EUR F111/620, George Curzon, “Indian Archaeology, 1899–1905,” Correspondence, Speeches and Papers of Lord Curzon.

68. Ibid.

69. Quoted in Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon, 128.

70. Ibid.

71. Curzon, Speeches, 172.

72. Ronaldshay, The Life of Lord Curzon, 336.

73. Linstrum, “The Sacred Past,” 1.

74. Ibid., 14.

75. Heber, Narrative of a Journey through the Upper Provinces of India from Calcutta to Bombay, 1824–25, 10.

76. Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, 199.

77. Linstrum, “The Sacred Past,” 15.

78. Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, 198–99.

79. Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 173.

80. Graham, The Land of the Lotus, 128.

81. Ibid.

82. Curzon, “Ancient Monuments,” in Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal: January to December 1899, 57.

83. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 168.

84. Ibid., 169.

Chapter 3: Between Fantasy and Phantasmagoria

1. Curzon, Persia and the Persia Question, 4.

2. Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, 283.

3. Reynolds-Ball, The Tourist’s India, 1.

4. Ibid., 3.

5. Ibid., 2.

6. Ibid., 52.

7. Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, 35.

8. Kipling, Out of India, 8.

9. Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, 172.

10. Ibid.

11. Kipling, Out of India, 16.

12. Ibid., 17.

13. Ibid., 22.

14. Ibid., 24.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid., 24–25.

17. Ibid., 25.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 26.

20. Ibid., 27.

21. Ibid., 27–28.

22. Ladd, Intimate Glimpses of Life in India, 99.

23. Kipling, Out of India, 15.

24. Scidmore, Winter India, 204.

25. Wyman, From Calcutta to the Snowy Range, 171–72.

26. Curzon, Lord Curzon in India, 41.

27. Graham, The Land of the Lotus, 126.

28. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 123.

29. Goswami, “Englishness on the Imperial Circuit,” 54.

30. Gorra, “Questions of Travel,” 59.

31. Goswami, “Englishness on the Imperial Circuit,” 70.

32. Sarkar, “The Daily Life of the Mughal Emperors,” 186–91.

33. Ibid., 186.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid.

36. Ibid., 191.

37. Sen, “The Rise and Decadence of Art in India,” 601–2.

38. Rama Rau, Home to India, 151–52.

39. Ibid.

Chapter 4: Rebuilding Indian Muslim Space

1. Al-madinat al fazilah (the moral city, also translated as the virtuous city) is the name of the book by Arabic philosopher al-Farabi (c. 870–950). In it he describes the conditions for a well-governed city. Among these is a king or governor who provides care and protection for each part of the city, knowing that each part is integral to the health of the whole. Al-Farabi also posits that when a city and its parts are governed well and function together, the citizens are more inclined to act morally. See Adam-son and Taylor, The Cambridge Companion to Arabic Philosophy, 276–80.

2. Gandhi, Eight Lives, 22.

3. British Library, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, Persian Manuscript Collection, Or. 1845, Sil Chand, Tafrih al-’imarat (1825).

4. British Library, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections, Persian Manuscript Collection, Or. 1891, ‘Abd al-Karim Mushtak of Jhajjar, Mir’at Giti-numa (1850). Loosely translated, this poetic title means “Universal History.” Giti-numa refers to the mirror carried by Alexander the Great that showed him the history of all things.

5. Ibid., folio 16a. Shivaratri is a Hindu festival that honors and celebrates the god Shiva.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid., folio 18a, 19b.

8. Mi’rat aftab-nama is a general history written by ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahnavaz Khan Dihlavi for the emperor Shah Alam. Its title translates to “sun-reflecting mirror.”

9. Nath, Monuments of Delhi, Historical Study, v.

10. Gupta, “From Architecture to Archaeology,” 58.

11. Ibid.

12. Khan, Description des monuments de Delhi en 1852, 450.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid., 434.

16. Gupta, “From Architecture to Archaeology,” 58.

17. Journal of the Archaeological Society of Delhi, 5 August 1852.

18. Metcalf also commissioned a book of monuments with written descriptions and illustrations called The Delhi Book preserved in the British Library.

19. Among the very few exceptions is the linguist and scholar Rajendralal Mitra (1824–1891) of the Asiatic Society, Calcutta.

20. Malik, “Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Doctrines of Muslim Nationalism and National Progress,” 226. Maktabs are elementary schools.

21. Ghalib, Urdu Letters of Mirza Asadu’llah Khan Ghalib, 133.

22. Ibid., 134.

23. Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial Lucknow, 1856–1877, 36.

24. Ibid., 25.

25. Devji, “Gender and the Politics of Space,” 26.

26. Ghalib, Dastanbuy, 58.

27. Ibid., 67.

28. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office, File no. 238/Box 9/70, Correspondence to the Secretary to Government from A. A. Roberts, offg Financial Commissioner for the Punjab, 22 November 1869.

29. Ibid.

30. Raikes, Notes on the Revolt in the North-Western Provinces of India, 78.

31. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office, File no. 238/Box 9/70, Major R. C. Lawrence, Military Secretary to Chief Commr., Punjab to Lieutt Coll E. C. Ommanney, Officiating Chief Engineer, Punjab, 14 December 1858.

32. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office, File no. 238/Box 9/70, Letter Secretary of the Government of India to the Secretary to the Government of Punjab, 20 April 1860.

33. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office, File no. 238/Box 9/70, Letter to Secretary of Government, Punjab to the Commissioner and Superintendent Delhi Division, 3 February 1862.

34. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office, File no. 238/Box 9/70, “Abstract of Correspondence Referring to the Jama Musjid.”

35. Ibid.

36. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office, File no. 238/Box 9/70, Memo from Secretary of the Government Punjab, A. H. Diack to Commissioner and Superintendent, Delhi, 11 November 1862.

37. Delhi Archives/Chief Commissioner’s Office/File no. 196/Box 21/70.

38. Cohn, “Representing Authority in Victorian India,” 648–49.

39. Burke, The Annual Register, 89.

40. Hali, Hali’s Musaddas, 203.

41. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 38.

42. Delhi Archives/Deputy Commissioner’s Files/5/1909, “The Plaint of 16 August 1909.”

43. Woodman, A Digest of Indian Law Cases, col. 136.

44. Delhi Archives/Deputy Commissioner’s Files/5/1909, “The Plaint.”

45. Ibid.

46. Delhi Archives/Deputy Commissioner’s Files/DC/5/1909, Letter to C. A. Barron, C. S., Deputy Commissioner, Delhi from Secretaries of the Managing Committee, Jama Masjid, Delhi, 3 August 1909.

47. Curzon Gazette (Delhi), September 1902, 2, quoted in Rashid, Wakf Administration in India, 20.

48. Delhi Commissioner’s Office, Files/DC/5/1909, Letter to C. A. Barron, C.S., Deputy Commissioner, Delhi from Secretaries of the Managing Committee, Jama Masjid, Delhi, 3 August 1909.

49. Rashid, Wakf Administration in India, 27.

50. Ahmad, Islamic Modernism in India and Pakistan, 1857–1964, 157.

51. Madina (Bijnor), 15 September 1913.

52. Madina (Bijnor), 8 December 1913.

53. Agha Rafiq, “Editorial Note,” Madina (Bijnor), 23 April 1913.

54. Madina (Bijnor), 8 July 1913.

55. Ibid.

56. “Terrible Incident of Kanpur,” Madina (Bijnor), 1 September 1913.

57. Minault, The Khalifat Movement, 47.

58. Delhi Commissioner’s Office, Files/DC/44/1912, to Mr. A. Meredith, Commissioner and Supervisor, Delhi Division from Major H. C. Beadon, Deputy Commissioner, 27 May 1912.

59. “Old Graves and Mosques of Delhi (1),” Hamdard (Delhi) 29 June 1913.

60. “Old Graves and Mosques of Delhi (2),” Hamdard (Delhi), 1 July 1913.

61. “An Issue of a Mosque,” Muslim (Delhi), 1 July 1922, 3.

62. Riaz, “Nations, Nation-State, and Politics of Muslim Identity in South Asia,” 54.

63. Ibid.

64. Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 180.

65. Misra, Identity and Religion, 125.

66. Quoted in ibid., 125n47.

67. Shah Waliullah, At-Tafhimat II, quoted in Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 157.

68. Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 157.

69. Robinson, “The British Empire and Muslim Identity in South Asia.”

70. Pandey, The Colonial Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India.

71. Jalal, Self and Sovereignty, 40.

72. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans, 1872.

73. Hali, Hali’s Musaddas, 131.

74. Ibid.

75. This is the Urdu scholar Abdul Haq’s view, quoted in Shackel and Majeed, Hali’s Musaddas, 51.

76. Ibid., 53.

77. Ahmed, Jinnah, Pakistan, and Islamic Identity, 75–76.

78. Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, 243.

79. Gilmartin, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History,” 1071.

80. Ibid., 1073.

81. Ibid., 1076.

82. Ibid.

83. Ibid., 1080.

84. Ibid., 1082.

85. Ibid., 1084.

86. Ibid., 1083.

87. Ibid., 1084.

88. Ibid.

89. Azad, India Wins Freedom, 144.

90. Gilmartin, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History,” 1087. Gilmartin is looking at the events of Partition in Punjab when he makes this observation.

91. Nile Green correctly argues that those Muslims living near Sufi shrines did not face the same loss of space and continue to the present day to identify with the territorial presence of these sites and their saints. Green, “Stories of Saints and Sultans,” 419–46.

Chapter 5: Tryst with Destiny

1. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.

2. Proceedings on the Trial of Muhammad Bahadur Shah, 2.

3. Ali, Twilight in Delhi, 105–6.

4. Ibid., 106. It is interesting to note that Ali has the same distrust for the managing committee of the Jami Masjid as Haji Fazil-al-Rahman and Muhammad-ud-din, whose petition against the committee was examined in chapter 4.

5. Ibid., 107.

6. Ibid., 143–44.

7. Ibid., 144.

8. Wolpert, A New History of India, 337.

9. Jog, “Jai Hind, 1945–1947,” 196.

10. Moraes, Jawaharlal Nehru, 312.

11. Jog, “Jai Hind, 1945–1947,” 197.

12. It is important to note that not all Indians felt the optimism of the Congress Party and its supporters, nor did they read the choice of the Red Fort as the site for the proclamation of the new social order as appropriate. Some Muslims wrote to the Meerut daily Dawn expressing their disquiet over the choice of the Red Fort for the flag-raising ceremony. They saw the site as a historical monument to the greatness of Muslim rule, rather than as a symbol of the protosecular policy of the Mughals or as an important site of the independence struggles. For these Muslims, the Red Fort marked the terminus of Muslim culture and power in India, and when Nehru replaced the Union Jack with the Indian tricolor he was in their eyes merely signifying the replacement of one mode of domination with another. The resistance to the dominant power of the secularist party could be seen evolving from the same historic moment and space that inaugurated a new nation. See Tan and Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia, 59–60.

13. Nehru, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, 2; hereafter cited as SWJN.

14. Ibid., 126.

15. Pandey, Remembering Partition, 123.

16. SWJN, 79.

17. Collins and Lapierre, Freedom at Midnight, 383.

18. Gandhi, Eight Lives, 248–49.

19. Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, 90:79; hereafter cited as CWMG.

20. SWJN, 174.

21. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 95–115.

22. Ibid., 102.

23. Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism, 15.

24. Nehru, The Discovery of India, 60.

25. Ibid., 138.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 238–39.

28. Ibid., 241; 257–60.

29. Ibid., 268.

30. Ibid., 238.

31. Jaffrelot, Hindu Nationalism, 3.

32. Ibid.

33. Sangari, “A Narrative of Restoration,” 3.

34. Freitag, “Contesting in Public,” 215.

35. Sangari, “A Narrative of Restoration,” 9.

36. Ibid., 11.

37. Ibid., 10.

38. CWMG, 96:363.

39. Ibid., 96:367.

40. Ibid., 96:387

41. Ibid., 97:155.

42. Ibid., 98:98.

43. Sangari, “A Narrative of Restoration,” 17.

44. CWMG, 98:309.

45. Pandey, Remembering Partition, 144.

46. Ibid., 145.

47. Ibid.

Chapter 6: The Ethics of Monumentality

1. Adams, “History and Context,” 4.

2. Ibid., 5.

3. Nehru, The Discovery of India, 534.

4. Freitag, “Contesting in Public,” 214–15.

5. Butler, “The Force of Fantasy,” 199.

6. Ibid.

7. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 45.

8. Ibid.

9. Khan, The Great Partition, 181–82.

10. Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 205.

11. Adams, “History and Context,” 6.

12. India National Congress, Communications, 50.

13. Ibid., 69–70.

14. Rahman and Khan, “Domestic Tourism in India’s Five Year Plans,” 90.

15. National Institute of Design, Fatehpur Sikri.

16. Ibid., 15–20.

17. Ibid., 40.

18. “Stone Quarries Threaten Fatehpur Sikri,” Times of India, 3 September 2003.

19. Government of India, Planning Commission, Seventh Five Year Plan, 1985–90, 234.

20. Ibid.

21. Harkness and Sinha, “Taj Heritage Corridor,” 67.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., 68.

24. Menon, “Book Reviews.”

25. Gahilote, “A Monumental Scandal.”

26. Ibid.

27. Mayawati was re-elected chief minister in 2007.

28. Baig, “Managing Cultural Significance.”

29. Ibid.

30. Ibid.

31. An example of this is the public interest litigation in 2003 of Rajeev Sethi et al., which sought to protect Delhi’s Red Fort from outmoded conservation techniques. The particulars of the case can be found in Seminar under the heading “Document.”

32. Harvey, “From Space to Place and Back Again,” 8.

33. Von Droste zu Hülshoff, “World Heritage and Development,” 1.

34. Ibid.

35. UNESCO, Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage World, WHC-03/27.COM/7B.Corr, 2003.

36. Ibid.

37. Government of India, Ministry of Culture, Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question, no. 1430, to be answered on 09.12.2004, World Heritage Properties in India; Government of India, Ministry of Culture, Lok Sabha, Unstarred Question, no. 379, to be answered on 19.12.2005, Taj Corridor Project.

38. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 365.

39. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, 158.

40. See section 38 of Wakf Act (1995) in Government of India, Ministry of Law, Acts of Parliament.

41. Debasish Roy Chowdhury “Tug-of-War over the Taj Mahal,” Asia Times, http://www.atimes.com (last accessed 27 January 2008).

42. At the time of this writing Usman’s term as chairman has ended and the Sunni Waqf Board has ended without a decision by the Supreme Court over the case of ownership.

43. On 30 September 2010 the high court in Allahabad handed down a verdict on the demolition of the Babri Masjid and ordered a three-way division of the disputed land. Two parts would go to Hindus and one part to Muslims. The ruling sanctions the Hindu fundamentalists’ claims of the existence of a Ram temple and the violent act of destroying a Muslim place of worship.

44. Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP’s White Paper on Ayodhya and the Rama Temple Movement, 9.

45. Ibid., 10.

46. Ibid., 12.

47. The repeated occurrence of such attacks could be read as a symptom of the larger trauma that the state refuses to acknowledge. Instead, the antagonism underlying modern Indian reality lives on within the national unconscious, where it gives rise to social anxiety, hatred, and prejudice toward the nation’s Muslim other. More important, it reveals how the nation’s largest majority has been allowed to exist in substandard living conditions, made evident by statistical data on the income, education, and social status of Indian Muslims made available in the widely disseminated Sarchar Committee Report of 2006. A PDF version of this report can be obtained at minorityaffairs.gov.in/newsite (last accessed 13 March 2009).

48. Chairman Usman, interview by the author, video recording, Lucknow, 12 January 2007. The Shiv Mandir, or temple to the Hindu God Shiva, that the chairman refers to is an idea derived from a revisionist history written by P. N. Oak, which is now widely accepted as doctrine regarding Mughal architecture among Hindu nationalists. Oak himself is a Hindutva-inspired journalist and the president of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History. His texts share one basic thesis: Mughal and other Muslim monuments are wrongfully attributed, and their builders were actually Hindu royalty. His titles include the Taj Mahal Was a Rajput Palace (1965), reprinted as The Taj Mahal Is Tejo-Mahalaya: A Shiva Temple (1981) and reprinted a second time as The Taj Mahal Is a Temple Palace (1991). Who Says Akbar Was Great! (1968) and Delhi’s Red Fort Is Hindu Lalkot (1976) are among Oak’s other books claiming Hindu patronage of famous Mughal structures. A fellow member of the Institute for Rewriting Indian History, Hansraj Bhatia, completed the Hindutva canon on Mughal monuments with Fatehpur Sikri Is a Hindu City (1969) and Agra Fort Is a Hindu Building (1971).

49. Deepshikha Ghosh, “BJP Activists on the Rampage at the Taj,” Indo-Asian News Service, 14 October 2001, http://www.rediff.com.

50. Chairman Usman, interview, 12 January 2007.

51. Balraj Puri, “Crucial Role of Urdu-Speaking Muslims,” Milli Gazette, 1–15 December 2004, 9.

52. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 4.

53. Khan, Indian Muslims, 25.

54. Sikand, Muslims in India since 1947, 3.

55. Gyanendra Pandey makes a similar argument when he states that the fragment (the Muslim Indian community) perspective has the ability to reveal the contradictions of social reality and should therefore be taken seriously: “Part of the importance of the fragmentary point of view lies in this: that it resists the drive for a shallow homogenization and struggles for other, potentially richer definitions of the nation and the future political community.” Pandey, Routine Violence, 15.

56. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 5.

Epilogue

1. Deputy Nazir Ahmad’s Bride’s Mirror of 1869 is revered as the first best-selling Urdu novel.

2. Ahmad Dehlavi, Vaqiat-i darul-hakumat-i Dihli, 1919.

3. Muslim Ahmad, interview with Santhi Kavuri-Bauer and Malik Faisal, Delhi, 20 January 2007. All of Mr. Ahmad’s answers and statements are taken from this interview.

4. The imam did know that the Fatehpuri Masjid was the site of an important meeting of the ulema to discuss the part they would play the All-India Muslim League in 1918.

5. See the video on YouTube, “Amitabh Bachchan Recites ‘India Poised’ Anthem” (last accessed 16 September 2010).

6. hooks, Yearning, 42.

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Santhi Kavuri-Bauer is an associate professor of art history at San Francisco State University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kavuri-Bauer, Santhi, 1968–

Monumental matters : the power, subjectivity, and space of India’s Mughal architecture / Santhi Kavuri-Bauer.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8223-4899-3 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8223-4922-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Architecture, Mogul — India—History.2. Monuments — India — History. 3. Islamic architecture — India—History. 4. India — History — 1526-1765. I. Title.

NA1502.K388 2011

720.954’09032—dc22       2011015606