Building Histories offers innovative accounts of five medieval monuments in Delhi—the Red Fort, Rasul Numa Dargah, Jama Masjid, Purana Qila, and the Qutb complex—tracing their modern lives from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.
Mrinalini Rajagopalan argues that the modern construction of the history of these monuments entailed the careful selection, manipulation, and regulation of the past by both the colonial and later postcolonial states. Although framed as objective “archival” truths, these histories were meant to erase or marginalize the powerful and persistent affective appropriations of the monuments by groups who often existed outside the center of power. By analyzing these archival and affective histories together, Rajagopalan works to redefine the historic monument—far from a symbol of a specific past, the monument is shown in Building Histories to be a culturally mutable object with multiple stories to tell.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: The Modern Lives of Medieval Monuments between Archive and Affect: The introduction sets the stage for a more capacious definition of the monument—one that expands beyond those prescribed by experts, the state, or bureaucracies of planning and preservation. Instead it urges a serious consideration of the affective potentials of monuments, which sometimes happen through quotidian reclamations and other times through dramatic reinscriptions. The introduction also tackles the colonial origins of preservation in India and its insidious legacies, which persist in the postcolonial present.
Chapter One: Mutiny, Memory, Monument: Following the Rebellion of 1857 the Red Fort went from being the residence of the last Mughal Emperor to a British military camp. Between 1857 and the early twentieth century, the Red Fort was successively the locus of imagined and manifest vengeful destruction, mournful memorialization, and historic preservation. The Red Fort carried within it the haunting specter of Indian revolt long after the British military personnel and various bureaucrats had laid decisive claims to the monument.Managing the menace of this memory was a key project of colonial preservation. )
Chapter Two: Interrupting the Archive: Indigenous Voices and Colonial Hegemony: This chapter overturns colonial rhetoric regarding illiterate Indians who were lethargic about preserving their built heritage. Instead it shows the passionate claims and histories presented by a local community to save a small Sufi shrine, the Rasul Numa Dargah, from British expropriation and possible demolition during the building of New Delhi.
Chapter Three: A Menacing Mosque Reveals the Limits of Colonial Power: Starting in the 1930s the Jama Masjid was frequently coopted for anti-colonial demonstrations. As one of the few spaces in the city outside of British surveillance, the courtyard of the mosque brought together Hindus and Muslims united in their struggle for self-determination. This chapter looks at the enduring history of the Jama Masjid as a space and symbol of Indian nationalism and traces the anxious responses of the colonial government to such unexpected appropriations.
Chapter Four: The Many Origins of Partitioned Nations, Cities, and Monuments: In 1947, at the moment of Indian independence and the partitioning of the subcontinent, the Purana Qila became a refugee camp to tens of thousands of stateless persons. This chapter positions the Purana Qila at the intersection of two origin stories of Delhi—the first as the capital of a nation-state born in the shadow of Partition’s violence and the second as the modern manifestation of the mythical Hindu city of Indraprastha. The modern life of the Purana Qila has been colored by the spectacular traumas of dispossession as well as the determined search for Delhi’s mythical Hindu past.
Chapter Five: Secular Nations and Specters of Iconoclasm: This chapter traces the representation of iconoclasm in the Qutb Minar and the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque from the colonial past to the postcolonial present. As a group of Islamic monuments built from the fragments of Hindu and Jain structures, modern histories of the Qutb complex have cast it as symbolic of the violent intrusion of Islam into the subcontinent. Such representations, articulated variously by colonial authorities, global preservation bodies, Hindu nationalists, and the secular nation-state, have positioned the Qutb Complex precariously between national and international reverence and religious reclamations that appear as modern iconoclasms themselves.
Epilogue: Making New Monuments: The concluding section of the book looks at the most recent reclamations and recasting of architectural monuments in Delhi. One example of a medieval ruin refashioned as a Hindu site and another of the declaration of New Delhi as a heritage zone illustrate the ongoing project of creating new histories for old monuments and old histories for new monuments. Most importantly, the epilogue stresses the blurred boundaries between affect and archive in the creation of monuments—both medieval and modern.