Dissatisfied with the narrow streets of Agra, which he felt were too small for grand imperial processions, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan decided to move his capital to Delhi. In 1648, his palatial residence—originally called Qila-i Mubarak or the “Auspicious Fort”—was completed. Today, it is known as the Red Fort. The city he built around it, Shahjahanabad, also became home to the Masjid-i Jahannuma (now the Jama Masjid), constructed on the highest point near the fort.
In her book, Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture (Cambridge University Press), art and architectural historian Aditi Chandra argues that besides being the symbols of state power, monuments are also spaces where that very authority is challenged. The active questioning “makes it difficult for the state to use these monuments effectively for nation-building,” she writes.
Reclamation by people
History is not frozen in stone for Chandra. Heritage buildings also belong to the people. She mentions the farmers’ march to the Red Fort in 2021 to protest farm laws—the same fort used by the nation’s leaders—activist Therese Patricia Okoumou climbing the Statue of Liberty in 2018 to oppose US immigration policies, Adivasis protesting against the inauguration of Statue of Unity, and many more such instances.
While referring to such protests in one of the chapters, Chandra writes about American political scientist James C. Scott’s argument that “every act of domination is necessarily accompanied by acts of resistance”. “When peasants, serfs, untouchables, slaves, labourers and prisoners are not free to speak their mind in presence of power, Scott suggests that resistance emerges through everyday forms of subtle protests that he calls ‘hidden transcripts’.”
Her work also sheds light on Delhi's Islamic architecture from the 12th to the 17th centuries, exploring how these sites became “modern monuments” in the colonial and postcolonial eras, and “how these sites were assimilated into the archive of the public imaginary as spaces for tourism, leisure, and intellectual contemplation during the colonial and early postcolonial eras.”
Built on memories
Chandra’s fascination with monuments has grown from her personal experiences. She recalls school trips where she would sit in the shade of centuries-old walls and wonder, “Who touched the stone before me?” Growing up in colonial-era bungalows on tea estates in Assam, surrounded by manicured lawns, she later recognised how such beauty was linked to histories of exploitation of indigenous communities, Chandra writes.
The book is the result of more than a decade of research by Chandra, after having started her work in 2007 as a PhD student, visiting the Delhi State Archives, the Archaeological Survey of India’s record rooms, National Archives of India, and collections at the British Library. A big chunk of the information was sourced from documents and personal papers obtained from these archives.
But the challenge, she says, was that “archives tend to be the voice of the officials, they are the voice of the state.” She had to “read between the lines” to find traces of the non-elite people whose lives gave different meanings to these architectures.
Histories hidden in plain sight
Apart from these monuments the author mentions Fatehpur Sikri, and Delhi’s Purana Qila. Additionally,the book notes–while the Qutub Minar is one of Delhi’s most visited heritage sites, Chandra points out a lesser-known part of its history, which is the landscaping at the Qutb mosque complex (built after the Ghurid conquest in the late 12th century). “There’s no account of it in academic scholarship, nor do tour guides or guidebook narratives pay any attention to it,” the book reads.
The mosque was the first congregational mosque in Delhi, it stresses. In 1828, British authorities began transforming the Qutb mosque complex into a leisure space for European visitors.
Similarly, Chandra digs into overlooked aspects of other well-known monuments. She pens down about museums that were housed inside the Red Fort in the past, however, have since disappeared; the Jama Masjid as seen through old postcards, and Purana Qila’s use as a refugee camp during Partition. “If we go to Purana Qila today, none of the tourist signage or materials speak about the history of this site as a refugee camp. These are histories, which are hidden that I am trying to unearth,” the author adds.
“Physical care of Indo-Islamic architecture also, necessarily, means care and deep attentiveness towards how the sites’ heterogeneous, expensive histories are written,” the epilogue reads, adding, “to genuinely listen to and to rehabilitate those who live in or around these sites and to make diverse ways of being at the site.”