What Syed Ahmad Khan’s 1847 architectural history of Delhi says about contemporary India

As Aligarh Muslim University marks the birth month of its founder, one aspect of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan’s life remains severely underappreciated – his passion for architecture and his pioneering work in architectural history.

How did a jurist in service of the East India Company, coming from a lineage of Mughal courtiers, come to write the first modern architectural history of India? And what is significant in the way that he did it?

Syed’s book Asar-us-Sanadid (Remnants of Heroes), published 1847, is a rigorous survey of the historical buildings of Delhi. It was produced as a lithograph and contains 130 illustrations made by artists Faiz Ali Khan and Mirza Shahrukh Beg. It has a preface by the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib. Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, a professor of Persian at Delhi College, also contributed to the writing.

It was translated into English by Rana Safvi in 2018.

The lithograph – a new revolutionary technology then – enabled the inexpensive reproduction of the Urdu-language book, taking the architectural history of Delhi to a broad reading public. The illustrations meant that even those who were not literate could still access this comprehensive documentation of the historic buildings of Delhi.

As British power grew towards the end of the 19th century, the book became an essential text for those preparing for the civil services examinations at the time.

Asar-us-Sanadid came in the context of major colonial erasures. With the establishment of the Asiatic Society in 1784, colonial history writing had started defining how the “natives” should remember their past – especially their art and architecture. Syed’s undertaking of this project was a silent act of resistance to this colonial project of history writing.

Historian Faridah Zaman notes that the British had a “natural curiosity” towards the architecture of their predecessors but viewed it as either picturesque ruins and monuments – a thing of the past with no relevance henceforth – or as outdated infrastructure in decline, a sign of the demise of the Mughal regime.

These attitudes, in service of the colonial project, sought to end the use of important buildings and to relegate them to the past – converting the city into a museum depicting an era gone by.

By the mid-19th century, the project of tabular history writing – where British historians would compile history of the sub-continent as large tables – had taken hold. Historian Manan Ahmed Asif notes that such projects were meant to simply create an archive of the native’s past by “dissecting” manuscripts for what the British deemed useful, making tables out of them and sending the manuscripts back to London to be stowed away. This meant that Indians could not access their past on their own terms.

Similarly, architectural history was written without any description of how a building was used or who lived in it. Even buildings in Delhi that were in active use (and are still in active use), were written about as if they belonged to nobody and nobody to them.

In Asar-us-Sanadid, Syed pushed back. In the first three chapters of the book, he situated residents and their lives in an intimate relationship with architecture and invoked memory and belongingness by placing anecdotes about buildings alongside their architectural details.

Writing about the Jama Masjid, for example, Syed described the various activities that occurred around its four gates inseparably from the gates themselves. He mentioned stalls selling kebabs, magicians performing tricks, storytellers narrating Hatim Tai and other legends, and people trading in the markets.

He described this as “ahwal”, an account for tourists that introduced Delhi to the reader from the eyes of a resident of the city, instead of the city being an uninhabited, British-owned museum.

Syed presented architecture and the people of Delhi as one entity as opposed to looking at buildings without the people or at people without their architecture.

Chapter 4 of Asar-us-Sanadid made the belongingness of people to Delhi more explicit. Compiled by Imam Bakhsh Sahbai, Syed in his section included information about his contemporaries and the histories of the places that they owned and inhabited.

He listed 117 personalities under nine categories: masheiks (sufis), majazib (men of ecstasy), hukama (physicians), ulama (religious scholars), qura and hafiz (recite and preserver of Quran), bulbul nawayan ( poets), khush-nawisan (calligraphers), musawwiran (painters), and arbab-i-musiqi (musicians).

By writing about streets as markets, homes as lives, and public spaces as repositories of culture, Asar-us-Sanadid asserted the belongingness of people to their architecture with a rigour that few other works of architectural history have

Asar-us-Sanadid was also a manifestation of Syed’s anxieties, as he was witnessing the decline of the Mughal regime and the sunrise of the British Empire. He was the first member of his family not to serve in the Mughal court. Historian David Lelyveld has noted that this made him very uncomfortable: it came with anxieties of colonial association and a guilt of betraying his family.

By documenting the remnants of the heroes of the past, Syed faced the behemoth of colonialism and fought back against colonial erasures by establishing a space for “native” voices in architectural history writing. In the process, he pioneered modern architectural history writing in India.

Today, architecture continues to be the subject of toxic politics. The destruction of buildings enhances the spectacle of the power of the state over its citizens. New cities built by the state further a supercilious insensitivity towards the people who inhabit it.

In the negligence and fabrication of a past, in the destruction of heritage, homes and markets, and in narratives that cast a hateful glance over India’s Islamic heritage, the project of taking architecture away from the people continues.

Fahad Zuberi is a doctoral scholar in architectural history, theory and criticism at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has studied at Aligarh Muslim University, CEPT University and University of Oxford.