How did Delhi’s Sultanate and Mughal architecture become ‘modern’ monuments?

In 1848, Emily Metcalfe climbed hundreds of steps in the 12th-14th century Qutb Minar to eat mangoes and oranges in seclusion and wild abandon because her father Thomas Metcalfe felt that these juicy fruits should not be eaten publicly by women.

During the 1903 Delhi Durbar, a certain Mrs Thompson, wife of a British government official, described a picnic at the Qutb mosque complex explaining that she was very fearful and nervous when “crowds of natives” went up the minar behind her husband who had gone up alone.

During the same durbar’s State Ball, held at the 17th-century Lal Qila’s (Red Fort) Diwan-i-Am, Vicerine Lady Curzon dazzled in what was described as a kinkhwab diamond-studded dress with a peacock feather trail.

A few years later, in 1906, Colonel Osborne refused to follow the rule of wearing shoe coverings before entering the Jama Masjid and got into an altercation with the khadims at this 17th-century mosque – an event certainly not represented in the idyllic postcards he must have purchased as a tourist.

During the next Durbar in 1911, when Delhi was announced as the capital of British India, King George V and Queen Mary replicated a Mughal performative gesture by displaying themselves on the jharokha-i darshan (balcony with a curved bangla roof), located on the Mussaman Burj, which projects out of the Khas Mahal (Special Palace, used as the Mughals’ private residence).

Rome of Asia

And yet, when it came to acquiring objects for the museums that the colonial ASI and the Delhi government began to create within the Lal Qila, they often refused to purchase items related to the fort or the Mughals in favour of unrelated items. Decades later, this opulence in a fort was replaced by refugees when the 16th-century Purana Qila (Old Fort) became an official refugee camp during the India-Pakistan Partition and remained one until early November 1963, when the last, most destitute refugees were evicted.

Eight to ten years after the partition, two hyper-patriotic films with the same storyline were released in India (Jagriti, 1955) and Pakistan (Bedari, 1957). Both films used travel to historical architecture to shape patriotic citizens out of wayward students and yet both films are absent their shared Indo-Islamic past by not including any Sultanate or Mughal sites in the travel scenes and song.

Often described in late 19th and early 20th century tourist literature as the “Rome of Asia,” Delhi is dotted with several historical architectural sites some popular on the tourist circuit. Representations of these structures can be found on many an advertisement – either for tourism to the city or to India, or even in unrelated contexts such as food festivals or on Delhi metro signage. Their omnipresence in the media and, indeed, our visits to them lull us into believing that we are completely familiar with them.

Each of the anecdotes described above shows that these historical architectural sites were more than simply a built form. Rather, they included designed landscapes that facilitated picnics, they were occupied by royalty and viceroys but also by refugees and villagers, they contained difficult encounters between tourists and local inhabitants while also circulating as idealised visions in postcards, and conversely, they were absented in patriotic films in a post-Partition moment when they could not be idealised and instead revealed the fissures of the nation.

Questioning the State

Historical monuments have long been claimed as tools of nation-building through which the nation shapes its “glorious and cohesive” identity. Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi’s Islamic Architecture argues that monuments are also those spaces from which the power and authority of the State is actively questioned, making it difficult for the State to, in fact, use these monuments effectively for nation-building. It examines how some of Delhi’s Sultanate and Mughal architecture, dating from the 12th to the 17th centuries, became modern monuments, 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 (1820s-1960s).

This ordering process, however, faces considerable challenges and it is here that we can locate resistance. Therefore, conversely, the book also focuses on instances when Indo-Islamic architecture remains unruly and unassimilable even as the State tries to grasp and control its narrative, revealing the hypocrisy of the nation claiming success by declaring itself inclusive while simultaneously excluding marginalised, subaltern groups.

Distinguishing between historical architecture and monuments, the book argues that physical, material, spatial, and experiential modifications, including landscaping, performative displays, on-site museums, postcard stalls, and the eviction of refugees, transformed architectural sites into modern, touristic monuments signifying state authority and national glory. Becoming a monument—that is, being grasped and apprehended as a monument – occurs through material processes that define a site’s function as purely touristic and related to leisure travel.

Unruly Monuments takes the reader to unfamiliar corners of these well-known sites by showing what is hyper-present yet remains un-noticed such as the landscaping design around the Qutb mosque complex or the history of museums and display practices in the Lal Qila and what remains absent such as the history of refugee presence in the Purana Qila or the resistance by local villagers to touristic modes of comportment or the excising of Mughal history from a Mughal fort. It employs what might be the site’s “public transcript” or that which is known about it from the perspective of the State and its “hidden transcript” or the voices of the marginalised that remain hidden in the archives to show how historical architecture was transformed into modern tourist monuments in the colonial and early post-independence eras (1820s-1960s). The becoming of the modern tourist monument depends upon both adding certain forms to the site while also excising other objects, people, and histories from it. In Unruly Monuments, dear reader, you will meet Delhi’s familiar Sultanate and Mughal monuments anew and discover their surprising heterogeneous histories of order and resistance to that imposed order.

Aditi Chandra is the author of Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi’s Islamic Architecture, published in 2025 by Cambridge University Press.