There wasn’t just one original Mawlid that appeared fully formed in early Islamic history and then remained unchanged over the centuries. The earliest Muslim communities don’t seem to have held an annual public celebration of the Prophet’s birthday in the way many modern Muslims might recognise today. The first well-documented, state-sponsored celebrations appeared under the Fatimid rulers in Cairo during the tenth century, where the birthdays of the Prophet and other members of his family became part of a larger ceremonial calendar. These celebrations were tied to a specific political and religious context, and their decline under Saladin didn’t mean the idea itself disappeared. By the early 13th century, Muzaffar al-Din Gökböri of Erbil organised a large Sunni celebration with scholars, Sufis, poetry, and public feasting. At this point, Mawlid had already shown something that would be true throughout its history: Muslims were willing to adapt inherited devotional ideas to fit the society, politics, and culture in which they lived.

Meanwhile in Mecca, the house traditionally associated with the Prophet’s birth became part of the city’s sacred geography, and medieval sources record people visiting it during Rabi al-Awwal. Ibn Jubayr, who visited Mecca in 1183, recorded that the birthplace was opened to visitors, particularly on Mondays, allowing pilgrims and residents to enter and seek blessings. Later Ottoman ceremonies surrounding the occasion became more elaborate, with judges, scholars and officials gathering in the Grand Mosque before proceeding towards Bayt al-Mawlid. It served as a material memory of the spiritualism that allowed Muslims to stand in a place associated with the beginning of the Prophet’s life and make his memory tangible through geography.

This becomes particularly relevant when we come to India. For the majority of Muslims living in this part of the country, Mecca belonged to a world that was emotionally central but physically distant due to Portuguese looters, pirates and high tides of the Gulf. Hajj was not something an ordinary person could undertake casually, and the sacred landscape associated with the Prophet’s life was inaccessible to most people except through imagination, stories, books, and the accounts of those fortunate enough to travel. South Asian Muslim societies therefore developed their own forms of devotional proximity. The pilgrimage networks connected India with the Hijaz, while scholars, merchants and Sufis moved between the two regions, carrying religious texts and practices. At the same time, the Chishti, Suhrawardi, Qadiri and Naqshbandi traditions helped create a culture in which mahabbat al-Nabi, love for the Prophet, became deeply embedded in poetry, gatherings and religious life. Early Indian Mawlid gatherings could involve Qur’anic recitation, Arabic and Persian poetry, naats and the During his time in the Hijaz in the 18th century, Indian scholar Shah Waliullah Dehlawi documented being present at the Prophet’s birthplace in Mecca on the day linked to his birth. People had gathered there to send blessings and recount the events and signs associated with his birth. In Fuyud al-Haramayn, he described seeing lights believed to be from divine mercy and angels attending these gatherings. Regardless of any theological interpretations, the key detail remains: Shah Waliullah, a major figure in South Asian Islamic scholarship, personally observed people celebrating the Prophet’s birth at his birthplace.

The Mughal era deepened the complexity because their court had a highly refined ceremonial culture. The emperors knew well how public rituals could express power, authority, and identity. Akbar’s birthday celebrations could be grand imperial occasions, but the Prophet’s birth was seen very differently. Under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, Id-i-Maulid involved Qur’anic recitation, Persian praise poetry, and charitable giving to scholars, Sufis, and the poor. Over time, princes in places like Bhopal and Hyderabad helped raise the public profile of Mawlid. In the 19th century, colonial India brought about changes as different Sunni groups began to define themselves through debates over religious practices. Barelvis supported the observance of Mawlid and other Sufi devotional traditions, while Deobandis acknowledged the Prophet’s importance but opposed certain rituals. Ahl-e-Hadith and Salafi scholars rejected the celebration altogether. Mawlid was no longer just a practice; it became a symbol of identity.

By the twentieth century, an extraordinary geographical inversion had taken place. In the Hijaz, older forms of visitation and devotional attachment to physical sites associated with the Prophet were increasingly suppressed under Saudi rule, and the traditional role of the Prophet’s birthplace disappeared as the building was transformed into the Makkah Library. At precisely the same time, South Asia was making the Prophet’s memory more public than ever before. The mehfil increasingly moved into the street, and the modern Jaloos-e-Muhammadi developed around flags, Qur’anic inscriptions, naats, food distribution and large public processions. There is a perfectly understandable political history behind this development as well. In increasingly contested public spaces, religious visibility became a form of communal identity. To occupy the street was, in some sense, to announce that a community existed and could not be ignored.

But this is where I think the modern story becomes uncomfortable, particularly in India.

We now live in a country where almost every form of religion is gradually being transformed into spectacle. This is not an attack on any particular community. It is a broader cultural phenomenon. Religion in India increasingly has to be visible in order to feel significant. It must occupy roads, generate crowds, produce dramatic visuals and become larger every year. Pilgrimage is packaged as an experience; Holi sites become destinations designed for enormous visitor numbers; religious events are built for cameras and drones; and public displays of faith increasingly operate according to the logic of scale. The biggest crowd, the largest structure, the loudest procession, and the most elaborate decoration all serve as ways of proving seriousness.

Muslims have not remained outside this culture. In fact, this is what bothers me about the modern form of Mawlid in many Indian cities. A tradition that historically developed through poetry, scholarship, devotional gatherings and the desire to create proximity to the Prophet is increasingly being absorbed into the same culture of competitive religious spectacle that has taken over everything else around us. Nobody seems willing to ask whether the biggest procession is necessarily the deepest expression of devotion, or whether an increasingly expensive public production actually brings anyone closer to the person whose birth is being commemorated.

That is where, for me, the question of jahalat begins. Not in the existence of Mawlid itself, and certainly not in the idea that Muslims should love and remember the Prophet. The historical record makes it impossible to dismiss centuries of devotional culture as though millions of Muslims simply invented it yesterday. The jahalat lies elsewhere. It lies in confusing noise with devotion and scale with sincerity. It lies in believing that if something is larger, brighter and louder, it must therefore contain more love.

We have all seen what happens when religion begins operating according to this logic. One locality organises a procession, another needs a larger one. Someone creates a decorative structure, someone else needs to build something more elaborate the following year. Speakers become louder, lights become more extravagant, and the entire thing slowly develops the psychology of a public carnival. Nobody necessarily begins with the intention of turning a religious tradition into entertainment, but spectacle has its own momentum. Once public visibility becomes important, escalation becomes inevitable. Next year must be bigger because this year has already established the standard.

And this is what I mean when I say that we should be careful about the Disneyfication of religion. I do not mean that religion should be colourless, joyless or stripped of beauty. Muslim civilisation itself produced some of the most beautiful poetry, architecture and ceremonial traditions in human history. The problem is something else. Disneyfication happens when something historically and spiritually complicated is reduced to a visually consumable experience. The appearance survives, often becoming more impressive than before, while the deeper meaning becomes increasingly irrelevant.

That danger exists for everyone, including Muslims.

You can construct an enormous replica of Madinah without understanding the society the Prophet actually built. You can spend enormous amounts on decorations while ignoring the poor living a few streets away. You can listen to abrohant songs blasting out of speakers throughout the night and still treat your family, employees and neighbours in ways completely incompatible with the Prophet’s example.

Perhaps that is the question Indian Muslims need to confront. Are we continuing a tradition of remembrance, or are we simply reproducing the larger Indian obsession with making religion into an event? Are we gathering to remember the Prophet, or because public visibility itself has become a form of religious competition? At what point does devotion stop being about the person you love and become a performance designed for everyone else to see?

Mawlid doesn’t have to fade away for these questions to be asked. Love for the Prophet shouldn’t shrink or silence itself. But it may need to become more thoughtful. The biggest threat to a religious tradition isn’t always outside opposition. Sometimes, it’s when the tradition becomes so focused on showing itself that it forgets why it was there in the first place.

On 23 October 1947, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad stood on the steps of the Jama Masjid and addressed the Muslims of Delhi. His speech was an appeal to people who had begun to wonder whether they could still remain in the city. He reminded them that Delhi was their home, that their ancestors had lived and died there, that its mosques, shrines and streets were bound up with their history, and asked why they should abandon it now. His appeal came at a terrible moment, because for many of those listening, the question was no longer simply whether they wanted to stay in Delhi but whether it was safe for them to do so.

The violence that had accompanied Partition in Punjab had already reached the capital. Refugees were arriving from West Punjab with stories of killings, abductions and the destruction of homes, while stories of Muslim attacks circulated through Hindu and Sikh neighbourhoods. Fear produced retaliation, retaliation produced further fear, and Delhi’s streets began to acquire the atmosphere of a city under siege. By September, about 30,000 refugees were already being accommodated in twenty-four camps across Delhi, while thousands more were staying with relatives, sleeping in the open or occupying whatever temporary shelter they could find. Homes and hospitals were attacked, shops were looted, and vehicles carrying refugees and relief supplies were ambushed.

The worst violence moved through some of the busiest parts of the capital. Paharganj, Sabzi Mandi, Karol Bagh, Pahari Dhiraj, Lal Kuan and Sadar Bazaar all became associated with attacks, arson and retaliation. Knife attacks took place in the streets, while bombs were thrown into crowded commercial areas. The neighbourhoods that had once been ordinary units of urban life began organising themselves as defensive communities. Iron gates were erected across lanes, grain was stockpiled, residents kept watch from rooftops, and red and green lamps were used as signals to warn people when mobs were approaching. What had previously been a mohalla, a place where people lived, worked and knew one another, was increasingly becoming a fortified enclosure.

Initially, the relationship between refugees and Delhi’s older Hindu population was not hostile. Early on, refugees were seen as victims of Punjab’s turmoil, and local families, religious groups, and neighbourhoods helped accommodate them. However, as temporary refuge turned permanent, sympathy waned. Refugees began taking over houses, shops, shrines, and other spaces, often bringing relatives and friends with them. Anis Kidwai noted that refugees tried to secure localities for their kin “by hook or crook” as soon as they arrived. Resentment grew not only among Muslims whose homes were occupied but also among Hindu religious authorities. At Kalkaji Mandir, about 300 refugee families remained in the temple complex, and by 1949, the temple’s pujaris petitioned authorities over damages, destroyed chabutras, slaughtered animals, damaged murtis, killed birds, cut trees, and cattle inside dharamshalas. They also reported threats against those opposing the refugees.

For Muslims, the fear was compounded by the transformation of the institutions that were supposed to maintain order. Under Sardar Patel and the local administration, Muslim police officers were disarmed, removed from active duties or replaced, while firearm licences held by Muslim residents were revoked and weapons seized. This was particularly devastating at a moment when communal attacks were rapidly escalating from individual street stabbings into organised attacks on entire groups. In Karol Bagh, armed men reportedly entered a school while examinations were underway, separated the Hindu and Muslim students and killed Muslim boys, with only one student surviving to carry the news out of the school. At Lal Kuan, a man in military uniform reportedly stepped off a tram and opened fire at point-blank range into a Muslim shop, firing six bullets and killing four men while wounding another. In Sadar Bazaar, a bomb explosion tore through the crowded market, injuring between seventy and eighty people with shrapnel, after which the remaining Muslim shops were looted. At Pahari Dhiraj and Qutub Road, Muslims were hunted down in the streets and inside their workplaces, among them the young son of a local cleric and Mian Sultan Ashraf, a prominent citizen who was trapped and lynched.

The authorities meanwhile imposed curfews from six in the evening until six the following morning, and searches became routine in Muslim neighbourhoods. The definition of what constituted suspicious material could become extraordinarily broad: a pen-knife used to sharpen a reed pen, a box of matches or an ordinary household utensil could be treated as evidence of possible violence and become grounds for arrest under the Public Safety Act. At the same time, licensed firearms were being confiscated from Muslim residents, leaving many of those facing attacks without even the means to defend their homes. Strict press censorship further restricted what could be reported about the violence. The Criminal Investigation Department, inherited from the British colonial administration, continued its surveillance work, but the political circumstances had changed; the machinery that had once been used against revolutionaries and political opponents was now operating in a city where Muslim identity itself had become associated with suspicion.

The scale of the killing is difficult to establish with certainty, but one estimate places the number of Muslims killed in the Delhi riots at around 10,000. Approximately 44,000 Muslim homes were left behind, and roughly 329,000 Muslims eventually left the city as nearly half a million refugees arrived. The figures are staggering, but what mattered to those living through the violence was much more immediate. A family leaving its house at night could not know whether it would ever return. A shopkeeper who locked his shop might come back to discover that someone else was now selling goods behind his counter. A family that had gone into hiding for a few days could return to find that its absence had been interpreted as evidence that it had gone to Pakistan.

This was particularly dangerous because of the way property was being administered. Muslims were increasingly pushed out of mixed neighbourhoods and towards areas around the Jama Masjid, Turkman Gate and Ballimaran. These were described as protected Muslim areas, but protection increasingly meant confinement. Families who had lived beside Hindu and Sikh neighbours for generations were being concentrated into increasingly defined communal territories, while the Custodian of Evacuee Property began sealing houses and taking possession of properties whose occupants were believed to have gone to Pakistan.

The distinction between someone who had left Delhi and someone who had temporarily fled for safety could be dangerously thin. Chand Khan of Jangpura-Bhogal provides one particularly revealing example. During the violence, two of his brothers and several nephews were killed, and Chand Khan took refuge in neighbouring Nizamuddin. While he was away, the Custodian assumed that he had either died or gone to Pakistan and took possession of three of his properties. Chand Khan had not abandoned Delhi or crossed the border; he had simply left his neighbourhood because it had become unsafe. Yet his temporary absence was enough for the machinery of evacuee property to begin treating his possessions as available for redistribution.

The Custodian had originally been conceived as a guardian of property belonging to people who had left, with the expectation that some of them might return. The enormous refugee crisis gradually changed the nature of the institution. There were hundreds of thousands of people arriving in Delhi who needed houses immediately, while thousands of Muslim properties stood empty or were believed to be empty. The Custodian increasingly became involved not merely in protecting property but in allotting and redistributing it. For Muslims who had fled temporarily, this created a terrifying uncertainty: by the time they returned, their house might already have acquired another occupant, and their absence might have been converted into an official claim that they had abandoned it.

The old houses of Shahjahanabad were particularly vulnerable to this process. Delhi’s great havelis were more than residences; they were places where families had lived for generations, where libraries had been accumulated, literary gatherings held and businesses conducted. Partition turned many of them into disputed property almost overnight. The residence of Deputy Nazir Ahmad, which also housed the office of the literary journal Saqi, was occupied by a police sub-inspector. Properties associated with figures such as Muhammad Husain Azad, Munshi Zakaullah, Deputy Fidaullah, Allama Rashid-ul-Khairi, Professor Mirza Muhammad Saeed, Khwaja Fazl Ahmad, Ehtishamuddin and Agha Tahir were occupied by refugees or converted to commercial purposes.

The transformation of these houses was therefore also the disappearance of a particular social world. A literary office could become a police station or a residence; a family haveli could become a refugee home; a courtyard that had once belonged to one extended family could suddenly be divided between strangers. The process was rarely as orderly as the language of government files suggested. Refugees themselves were desperate, and many began securing accommodation for relatives and friends almost as soon as they entered a neighbourhood.

At Humayun’s Tomb, the gardens filled with refugees. By February 1948, around 17,000 people were living around the monument. Latrines and bathing facilities had to be constructed in the grounds, while families cooked, washed clothes and attempted to create some semblance of domestic life around the mausoleum. At Purana Qila, refugees initially lived in tents and in the recesses beneath the fort walls before small tenements with asbestos roofs were constructed within the sixteenth-century fortress.

The conditions were miserable, but the people living there had few alternatives. The monuments were not being treated as monuments by the refugees because, for them, the immediate question was where their children would sleep and where the next meal would be cooked. Archaeological officials complained about the damage. At Safdarjung’s Tomb, the jalis were broken, and pieces of the stone platform were used to wash clothes. At Humayun’s Tomb, marble graves had to be encased in masonry for their protection. At Purana Qila, parts of Sher Shah’s Mosque were damaged, and black marble inlay was removed from the walls. The Archaeological Department complained about refuse, cooking fires and makeshift structures appearing among buildings it had spent decades trying to preserve.

But the same crisis was unfolding in Delhi’s mosques and shrines. Hundreds of religious buildings were occupied during the refugee influx, some as temporary homes, others as schools, shops or workplaces. The government subsequently undertook to repair 106 mosques damaged during the disturbances or through occupation, with seventy of these concentrated in the old-city triangle of Kotwali, Paharganj and Sabzi Mandi. Nineteen mosques in this area were reported to have been destroyed during the violence.

The records reveal how improvised and confused these occupations could be. At one mosque on Church Road, three men from Uttar Pradesh had established a buffalo dairy. The walls had been marked as a Lakshmi Narain temple, but no deities were actually present inside. At Katra Bhangi, near Chandni Chowk, a cloth merchant occupied a mosque bearing a sign reading “Mandir Mahatmaji”. Such cases could be interpreted as religious conversion, but the records also reveal the more mundane desperation behind some occupations: people needed somewhere to live, somewhere to keep animals, somewhere to conduct a business, and sometimes a religious label or sign made it harder for the authorities to remove them.

The problem became particularly acute at Nabi Karim. Refugees had occupied around 300 houses surrounding the shrine, while Muslim families who had fled were trying to return. The Sunni Majlis-e-Auqaf-i-Hind demanded that the refugees be removed, arguing that their presence obstructed worship and that hundreds of Muslim families were ready to return. The refugees, however, had been assured that their occupation was secure, and the superintendent of police at Paharganj warned that removing them would constitute a “breach of faith”. The new secular state could guarantee Muslims access to the shrine, but it could not necessarily guarantee their return to the houses surrounding it.

Margaret Bourke-White encountered this problem through the story of a Delhi taxi driver. His wife’s entire family had fled Pakistan, and he had managed to house them in the tomb of a Muslim saint. Gandhi’s demand that refugees leave occupied mosques and shrines meant that the family might soon be turned out. The driver’s own home was too small to accommodate his wife’s relatives, and if they were evicted from the tomb, several of them would have nowhere to sleep except an open lot. It was an ordinary domestic problem produced by an extraordinary historical event: a man who had survived Partition was now being asked to surrender the only shelter he had managed to find, while the family whose shrine he occupied was asking for it back.

The same dilemma persisted at Nabi Karim and elsewhere. The state had to decide between the right of displaced Muslims to return and the immediate needs of refugees who had themselves lost their homes. There was often no empty house waiting to resolve the dispute. Heavy rains in the summer of 1949 forced some refugees who had been evicted from mosques and tombs to return, breaking the locks when necessary. The Dargah Sharif near Connaught Place remained occupied for five years. In 1950, twenty-nine men living with their families in a mosque near New Delhi railway station petitioned the government for alternative accommodation because the building had become dangerous and dilapidated after four years of occupation.

Meanwhile, the city’s physical and commercial character was being remade around the refugees. In Chandni Chowk, traders from Punjab set up wooden platforms outside their shops and began selling textiles, grain, and cooked food. Their presence altered the commercial rhythm of the bazaar, while new meat stalls appeared around Ghanta Ghar and in Hindu neighbourhoods. Municipal water posts became places for bathing, pavements became trading spaces, and the streets filled with carts, animals, cooking fires and temporary structures. The municipality struggled to remove the stalls and accumulated refuse, but it was attempting to impose the rules of an older city upon a population that had already transformed it.

The transformation could be seen even at the city’s gates. At Ajmeri and Kashmiri Gates, refugees began erecting huts and laying foundations. When archaeological officials objected, the police refused to remove them, arguing that the huts offered protection against the Delhi winter and that eviction would require force. The refugees, the police understood, would simply return because there was nowhere else for them to go.

That was the central difficulty of Delhi after Partition. Almost every dispute contained two histories of suffering. The Muslim family wanted its house back because it had lived there for generations and had been driven out by violence. The refugee family wanted to remain because its own house in Lahore, Rawalpindi, Amritsar or elsewhere had been destroyed or lost. The government wanted to restore a mosque because it was a place of worship, while the people sleeping inside it needed somewhere else to go. A monument had to be preserved, but thousands of people were living in its gardens. A property had an owner, but the owner might be missing, and a refugee family might already have made it a home.

By 1951, the demographic transformation was stark. Muslims, who had made up 33.22 per cent of Delhi’s population in 1941, represented only 5.71 per cent ten years later. Roughly two-thirds of the city’s Muslim population had left, around 329,000 people, while nearly half a million refugees had entered the capital.

But the census could not record what the change had felt like to the people who experienced it. It could record that hundreds of thousands had left and hundreds of thousands had arrived, but not the fear of a family leaving its house after dark, the shock of returning to find another occupant, the uncertainty of a refugee family living inside a mosque, or the indignity of twenty-nine families having to petition the government after four years of living beside railway tracks in a dilapidated building. It could not record what happened when a literary office became a policeman’s residence, when a shrine became a shelter, when a Mughal tomb became a refugee camp, or when a neighbourhood that had once been shared by different communities became increasingly divided along religious lines.

By the end of 1947, the physical landmarks of Delhi remained largely where they had always been. The Jama Masjid still overlooked Shahjahanabad, Chandni Chowk still carried its centuries-old commercial life, and the great Mughal monuments still stood across the city. What had changed was the population around them, the ownership of the houses and shops, the security of the streets and the relationship between communities that had lived beside one another for generations.

Mera dard-e-st andar dil agar goyam zabaan sozad,

Wagar dam dar kasham tarsam ke maghz-e-ustukhwan sozad.

“There is a pain in my heart: if I speak it, my tongue burns;

and if I hold my breath, I fear the very marrow of my bones will catch fire.”

Primary and contemporary sources

• Dilli Ki Bipta — Shahid Ahmad Dehlavi

• Azadi Ki Chhaon Mein — Anis Kidwai

• “The Scramble for Houses: Violence, a Factionalised State, and Informal Economy in Post-Partition Delhi” — Rotem Geva

• “Masjids, Monuments and Refugees in the Partition City of Delhi, 1947–1959” — Deborah Ruth Sutton

• “Muslim Pasts and Presents: Displacement and City-Making in a Delhi Neighbourhood” — Saeed Ahmad

• The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia — Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar

• Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants of Delhi — Ritu Kaur

• Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India — Gyanendra Pandey

• Greater Delhi: A Study in Urbanisation, 1940–1957 — P. B. Rao and V. K. R. V. Rao

• Delhi Gazetteer — Delhi Administration

• Delhi: A Multi-Faceted City — V. N. Datta

• Margaret Bourke-White’s writings and photographs on Partition and Delhi

To understand this, we have to go back to 1744, when Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab allied with Muhammad ibn Saud. Their movement condemned shirk and bid’ah, particularly practices such as visiting saints’ tombs, seeking barakah, and building mausoleums, many of which were deeply embedded in Sufi devotional traditions across the Muslim world, including India.

When the First Saudi State captured Mecca in 1803 and Medina in 1805, the mausoleums of Jannat al-Mu’alla, including the tomb associated with Khadijah, and structures at Jannat al-Baqi were demolished.

The state collapsed in 1818.

Then Abdulaziz Ibn Saud conquered the Hejaz in 1924–25. The Hajj continued, but Sufi and Shi’a devotional practices and shrine visitation came under increasing restriction.

In 1926, Jannat al-Baqi was demolished again. Its mausoleums had marked the graves of Hasan ibn Ali, Ali ibn al-Husayn, Muhammad al-Baqir, Ja’far al-Sadiq, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib and members of the Prophet’s family.

The destruction caused outrage far beyond Arabia. In British India, the Khilafat movement and Indian Muslim leaders protested the destruction of Islamic sacred heritage and sent a delegation to the Hejaz in 1926 to investigate and raise the issue with the Saudi authorities.

Then came the modern Saudi state.

1932: Saudi Arabia was founded.
1933: Ibn Saud granted an oil concession to Standard Oil of California.
1938: Dammam Well No. 7 struck commercial oil.

Oil wealth transformed the scale of development.

The House of Khadijah was excavated during the Grand Mosque expansion, covered over, and public toilets were subsequently built on the site. The House of Abu Bakr was demolished and incorporated into the Hilton complex, while Dar al-Arqam disappeared beneath the Grand Mosque.

Even the Green Dome was condemned by Grand Mufti Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz as an impermissible structure over a grave. He acknowledged that removing it could cause fitnah and widespread unrest.

And in 2002, the Ottoman Ajyad Fortress was demolished for the Abraj Al-Bait complex.

What disappeared was not simply architecture. It was a physical landscape of Islamic memory, including traditions that had connected Muslims from India and across the world to the sacred geography of Mecca and Medina.

Children run along the ramparts. Couples sit on the grass. Tourists photograph the walls and read plaques describing Sher Shah Suri and Humayun. The fort appears exactly as a monument is supposed to appear: stable, timeless, safely enclosed within the distant past.

Yet for a few months in 1947, Purana Qila was not a monument at all.

It was a city of the displaced.

The standard modern history of Delhi describes an epic of arrival, where the city’s post-1947 rebirth is credited almost exclusively to the industriousness of roughly half a million Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing West Pakistan. The physical, demographic, and cultural renewal of the capital through the creation of iconic residential and commercial colonies like Lajpat Nagar, Patel Nagar, and Karol Bagh is celebrated as a triumphant testament to postcolonial state planning and Punjabi entrepreneurial resilience. However, this celebratory focus on structural renewal has systematically obscured a parallel, deeply traumatic occurrence: the violent displacement and outward migration of approximately 300,000 to 350,000 Muslim residents of Delhi. This departing population represented over one-third of the city’s pre-Partition demographic and formed the cornerstone of its cultural, intellectual, and mercantile life.

The marginal place occupied by Delhi’s departing Muslims in Indian public memory is not an accidental oversight but an epistemological necessity of the postcolonial nation-building project. The nascent Indian state under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru sought to project itself as a secular, democratic republic that had successfully triumphed over religious communalism. To validate this national self-image, the state prioritised the physical and economic integration of incoming non-Muslim refugees, effectively treating Delhi as a showcase of secular rehabilitation. Consequently, the trauma of the city’s departing Muslims was bureaucratised and sanitised. In official archives and public discourse, these citizens were stripped of their historical agency and recast through cold, administrative categories such as evacuees, intending evacuees, or potential fifth columnists. Recent scholarship by historians such as Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar in The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia and Rotem Geva in Delhi Reborn has begun to deconstruct this state-mediated silence, demonstrating that decolonisation was a protracted, violent, and highly bureaucratised process extending well into the mid-1950s.

Before the catastrophic disruptions of 1947, Delhi was characterised by a complex, highly stratified, and deeply rooted Muslim social landscape. According to the 1941 Census of India, the total population of Delhi Province stood at approximately 918,000, with Muslims constituting roughly 33 per cent, or 300,000 individuals, and Hindus representing 62 per cent of the population. This population was heavily concentrated in specific urban quarters, particularly the historic seventeenth-century walled city of Shahjahanabad, as well as suburban developments like Karol Bagh, Paharganj, and Subzi Mandi. The population nearly doubled by the 1951 Census to 1,744,072 due to the influx of West Pakistani displaced persons, causing the Hindu population to climb to roughly 88 per cent while the Muslim demographic suffered a catastrophic drop to just 7 per cent. This marked a complete spatial transformation, shifting Delhi from a native-born majority where migrant-born residents were under 15 per cent to a city dominated by displaced persons at 58.9 per cent.

Pre-Partition Muslim society was organised around distinct class, caste, and occupational lines. The aristocratic Ashraf, mainly in Shahjahanabad’s neighbourhoods like Kucha Chelan, consisted of descendants of Mughal courtiers, scholars, bureaucrats, and writers. They preserved Taksali Urdu and led cultural institutions like Delhi College and Saqi magazine. The merchant elite, Punjabis known as Saudagaran-e-Delhi, traced their roots to West Punjab and settled in areas like Ballimaran and Chamra Mandi, controlling trades in leather, textiles, and spices through self-funded welfare groups. The working class—artisans, butchers, weavers, metalworkers—lived in outer districts like Qasabpura and Chitli Qabar, connected through Sufi networks and traditional music guilds such as the Delhi Gharana. This social fabric was held together by the Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb, a syncretic culture expressed through language and shared devotion at Sufi shrines, though histories like Brij Krishna Chandiwala’s Dilli Ki Khoj show that tensions also simmered beneath the surface, exploited by communal organisations in the late 1930s and 1940s.

The declaration of independence on 15 August 1947 did not immediately trigger a mass exodus of Delhi’s Muslims, many of whom expected to remain as equal citizens in their ancestral homes. However, by late August 1947, the arrival of thousands of traumatised non-Muslim refugees from West Punjab, carrying accounts of horrific massacres, shattered this fragile peace. By early September 1947, systematic, retaliatory violence erupted across the capital, progressing from isolated stabbings to highly organised, armed assaults on Muslim homes and commercial properties by mobs frequently assisted by militant refugee organisations and complicit local police forces. Mixed-population neighbourhoods like Karol Bagh, Paharganj, and Subzi Mandi, which lacked the collective defence networks of the walled city, were heavily targeted. In his Partition memoir Dilli ki Bipta, the Urdu writer and editor Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi recorded how, on 6 September 1947, an explosion near a mosque in the Hindu-majority Khari Baoli grain market served as a signal for armed mobs to systematically burn and loot Muslim shops, forcing hundreds of families to flee under thick smoke.

To escape this onslaught, over a hundred thousand Muslims became internal refugees within their own city. The Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation, established in September 1947, was entirely unprepared to protect these citizens and subsequently suspended the historic monumentality of Delhi’s iconic Mughal-era sites, converting them into massive, segregated transit camps for departing Muslims. The Purana Qila became the primary transit camp for Muslims awaiting rail evacuation to Pakistan, reaching an estimated peak population of 80,000 to 100,000 people. Humayun’s Tomb grounds served as an auxiliary transit and holding camp for 25,000 to 60,000 displaced Muslim families. Safdarjung’s Tomb provided temporary shelter for thousands of displaced families from the New Delhi suburbs, while the Arab Sarai was converted into a holding camp for several thousand Muslim artisan families. The Jama Masjid Maidan served as an immediate open-air relief camp for 5,000 to 12,000 rural Meo and local Muslim refugees. Today, the heritage fate of these sites involves a total structural erasure of this history; restored by the state as pristine archaeological or UNESCO World Heritage monuments, their official narratives and public museum displays completely omit their history as refugee camps.

The physical and social conditions inside these monumental transit camps were harrowing. In her structural diary-memoir Azadi ki Chaon Mein, the social worker Begum Anis Kidwai documented the extreme deprivation inside the Purana Qila camp, recording how tens of thousands of people, including infants, expectant mothers, and the dying, shivered under open skies with virtually no access to clean water, food, or medical care. The camp’s administration was severely compromised, with corrupt officials cornering relief blankets and medicines, leaving the vulnerable to die of exposure and cholera. Deeply embedded social and caste hierarchies also persisted within these spaces of absolute displacement, as Dalit refugees, historically categorised as Chuhras or sweepers, were pushed to the most unsanitary, garbage-laden margins of the Purana Qila courtyards near the outer stone walls while privileged Muslim families occupied the relative shelter of the Mughal-era stone barracks. Moreover, as the historian Gyanendra Pandey notes, while Hindu and Muslim populations were being systematically separated and transferred across the border, Dalit sweepers were explicitly barred from migrating by local authorities, who coerced them into remaining in Delhi to sweep the empty, blood-stained streets of the cleansed neighbourhoods under the threat of violence and administrative denial of relief.

The physical expulsion of Delhi’s Muslims was systematically formalised and consolidated through a sophisticated legal-bureaucratic framework designed to manage property and regulate human mobility. Faced with a catastrophic housing shortage for incoming refugees, the Indian state utilised refugee rehabilitation as a mechanism to expropriate Muslim assets. This process was anchored by the Office of the Custodian of Evacuee Property, established on 20 September 1947. Under the evolving legal architecture of the Administration of Evacuee Property Act of 1950, any property whose owner had left Delhi, even temporarily, to seek safety in a local refugee camp or to visit family in Pakistan, was declared abandoned. The Custodian assumed full administrative control over these assets, consolidating them into an Evacuee Pool that was subsequently allotted to non-Muslim refugees.

This legal regime introduced the highly controversial category of the intending evacuee under Section 2(e), which empowered the Custodian to preemptively seize the homes, factories, and bank accounts of any Muslim citizen if there was administrative suspicion that they intended to migrate to Pakistan, had transferred funds to relatives across the border, or had simply acquired travel documents. This bureaucratic framework effectively established an internal frontier within the private domestic spaces of the Muslim minority, subjecting their daily economic transactions and family communications to intense state surveillance. Even those who never left Delhi, or who returned shortly after the restoration of peace, found themselves trapped in a labyrinth of administrative court cases to prove their national allegiance and reclaim their homes. The state introduced the Permit System in July 1948 to regulate the physical return of Muslims from Pakistan, converting a previously open border into a highly militarised barrier where anyone returning without a valid state permit was classified as an illegal alien, arrested, and subjected to deportation. This documentary regime was further solidified in October 1952 with the implementation of the India-Pakistan Passport and Visa Scheme, which permanently terminated fluid, split-family migrations across the border and legally constructed the Muslim returnee as a foreign national.

This systemic dispossession generated severe political and ideological fractures within the Indian state apparatus. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Education Minister Maulana Abul Kalam Azad consistently clashed with Home Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel and local Delhi administrators over the aggressive enforcement of evacuee property laws, with Nehru arguing that the Custodian’s actions compromised India’s commitment to secularism and caused grievous hardship to loyal citizens. This ideological struggle culminated in Mahatma Gandhi’s final fast-unto-death from 13 to 18 January 1948, undertaken to demand the immediate cessation of violence, the restoration of seized mosques to the Muslim community, and a guarantee of safety for Delhi’s Muslims. While Gandhi’s fast successfully forced locals and Congress representatives to sign a seven-point Delhi Declaration promising the return of Muslim properties and the protection of sacred sites, it could not halt the administrative momentum of the Custodian, and the systemic seizure of Muslim assets continued unabated throughout the 1950s, institutionalising a state of permanent economic insecurity and precarious citizenship for the remaining Muslim population.

The mass displacement of Delhi’s Muslim elite to Pakistan, particularly to the newly established capital of Karachi, resulted in a highly distinct formulation of refugee identity. Unlike the total, localised population exchange that occurred along the partitioned border of East and West Punjab, the migrants from Delhi and the broader United Provinces entered a complex demographic landscape in Sindh where they possessed no contiguous territorial homeland. To negotiate this displacement, the Delhi elite deployed their immense linguistic, educational, and cultural capital to establish a position of socio-political hegemony within the nascent Pakistani state. Commonly categorised within the broader Muhajir identity, these migrants understood their displacement not as a triumphant arrival in a promised land, but as a tragic exile, an unmitigated tragedy described as a severing akin to separating nails from flesh. This profound sense of loss was articulated through the preservation of Dilli culture, which they positioned as the peak of South Asian Islamic refinement.

The intellectual elite established key cultural and educational institutions in Karachi to reproduce the lost world of Shahjahanabad, as detailed in the file “Delhi Muhajir Partition Memory”. Foremost among these was the Anjuman-i Taraqqi-i Urdu, relocated to Karachi in 1949 under Maulvi Abdul Haq, who successfully lobbied the Pakistani government to adopt the highly polished, courtly Taksali Urdu of Delhi as the sole national language of Pakistan, effectively marginalising indigenous languages such as Sindhi, Punjabi, and Bengali. Similarly, literary figures like Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi reissued the monthly journal Saqi from Karachi, establishing a vital intellectual space that memorialised the bazaars, musical traditions, and syncretic social life of pre-Partition Delhi, while actively critiquing the cultural landscape of their new home. Maulvi Abdul Haq also founded the Urdu College in Karachi to promote Urdu-medium higher education and construct a modern, Urdu-speaking middle-class intelligentsia. On an economic level, the powerful merchant biradari of the Punjabi Saudagaran-e-Delhi reconstructed its ancestral trade networks with extraordinary speed by reconstituting itself as the Kul Pakistan Anjuman Punjabi Saudagaran, bypassing the state’s slow rehabilitation machinery and pooling collective capital to build highly organised, self-sufficient housing projects, cooperative banks, and schools, such as the Shamsi Society in Malir, Karachi. This insistence on cultural and linguistic exceptionalism distinguished Delhi migrants from other Urdu-speaking refugees, as the Dilliwalas claimed a unique, historically verified custody over the imperial legacy of the Mughal capital to assert an aristocratic superiority within Karachi’s institutions.

However, this cultural dominance generated severe demographic and political friction in Sindh, where the local Sindhi population increasingly viewed the Delhi elite’s cultural chauvinism and state-backed linguistic policies as a form of cultural imperialism that displaced Sindhi language and economic interests, laying the foundational groundwork for the highly volatile, ethnically fractured politics that would come to define Karachi in the post-Partition decades.

The mass departure of Delhi’s Muslims and the concurrent settlement of half a million refugees permanently reshaped the spatial geography and architectural identity of the Indian capital, initiating a process of systemic ghettoisation. Following the September 1947 massacres, the Indian government, attempting to balance security concerns with its secular commitments, designated specific, highly concentrated neighbourhoods in Shahjahanabad, Nizamuddin, and Jamia Nagar as Muslim Zones. While these zones successfully protected the remaining Muslim population from physical violence, they also functioned as mechanisms of spatial containment, and their physical boundaries were under constant encroachment as the Custodian of Evacuee Property actively intervened within these designated enclaves, declaring any vacant or temporarily locked Muslim home as evacuee property and systematically allocating it to incoming non-Muslim refugees. This dynamic created a domino effect where growing pressure from incoming refugees led to the progressive containment and reduction of Muslim-majority areas, as documented by the Delhi Criminal Investigation Department’s confidential files.

Empirical data from these confidential files reveal that between October 1948 and 1952, the spatial presence of Muslims in Delhi was systematically reduced through bureaucratic action and informal property encroachments long after the formal termination of Partition violence. In the Faiz Bazar zone, the number of Muslim localities dropped from 32, which had housed a population of 42,600, down to 19 localities, representing a 40.6 per cent reduction in Muslim spatial presence. The Sadar Bazar zone saw its Muslim localities contract from 17 localities, with a population of 39,500, down to just 6 localities, marking a 64.7 per cent reduction. The most drastic contraction occurred in the Hauz Qazi zone, where 31 Muslim localities housing a population of 57,310 were reduced to a mere 7 localities, representing a crushing 77.4 per cent reduction in Muslim urban pockets. Neighbourhoods such as Karol Bagh, Paharganj, and Subzi Mandi, which had historically featured diverse, integrated populations, were entirely cleansed of their residents, transforming into homogeneous commercial hubs. Within the walled city of Shahjahanabad, once-grand havelis belonging to the departing elite were partitioned, subdivided, and converted into dense, multi-family tenements or commercial warehouses, permanently dismantling the traditional architectural fabric of the Mughal capital. Furthermore, in suburban developments like Jangpura-Bhogal, the gradual, everyday displacement of Muslim properties, graves, and shrines occurred below the radar of public violence, as historic Muslim cemeteries and mosques were steadily replaced by non-Muslim commercial markets and residential quarters through administrative reclassifications, municipal development projects, and informal takeovers, producing a new urban geography characterised by highly segregated, socio-economically marginalised Muslim ghettoes like Jamia Nagar, Seelampur, and Jaffrabad.

The displacement of Delhi’s Muslims has been subjected to a highly structured dual amnesia by the nationalist histories of both India and Pakistan, with each state constructing selective commemorative narratives that erase the lived realities of the displaced. In India, the state-mediated narrative of Partition is characterised by a cultivated amnesia regarding Muslim departure, where the physical monuments that served as sites of absolute trauma for departing Muslims, such as the Purana Qila, have been scrubbed clean of their Partition histories. Maintained by the Archaeological Survey of India as pristine, manicured heritage sites, these spaces celebrate medieval dynastic histories while completely omitting their post-independence function as refugee transit camps, presenting global tourists with clean, aesthetic backdrops that effectively erase the material memory of displacement from the nation’s self-image.

Conversely, in Pakistan, the state’s official historiography relies on a teleological, ideological narrative that celebrates Partition as a unified, heroic exodus toward a promised Islamic homeland framed around the Two-Nation Theory. This narrative systematically suppresses the localised, melancholic grief of the Delhi Muhajirs, as the state’s insistence on a homogenised Islamic identity has historically silenced complex feelings of nostalgia and regret, framing any lingering attachment to the Indian homeland as a form of national disloyalty. Furthermore, the structural struggles of the Muhajir community in Karachi, marked by ongoing battles over evacuee property allotments, socio-economic marginalisation, and violent ethnic clashes with indigenous Sindhi populations, are completely sanitised to maintain the myth of a seamless national integration. To bypass these structured silences, contemporary research relies on a comprehensive, multi-layered methodology that integrates official government documents with the lived, subjective testimonies of the displaced.

By analyzing files from the Ministry of States, the Ministry of Relief and Rehabilitation alongside literary testimonies like Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi’s Dilli ki Bipta and Begum Anis Kidwai’s structural diaries, and synthesizing them with transnational oral history repositories like the 1947 Partition Archive, modern history moves beyond conventional, state-centered narratives to demonstrate that the story of Delhi’s departing Muslims is a critical, unresolved history that continues to shape the contemporary politics of citizenship, belonging, and memory in South Asia.

Today, fragments of that palace have travelled far from Afghanistan via Italy. Carved marble panels and architectural remains from the structure are now being exhibited in Delhi, offering a glimpse into the courtly world of the Ghaznavids.

When we speak about the beginning of Muslim political power in North India, the story is often told from the moment of the Ghurid conquests in the late twelfth century. The campaigns of Muhammad Ghori and the rise of the Delhi Sultanate tend to mark the starting point of that narrative. Yet long before the Ghurids arrived, the Ghaznavids had already established deep political and cultural connections with the Indian subcontinent.

The Ghaznavid Empire emerged in the late tenth century under Sebüktegin and his son Mahmud when the Caliphate weakened, eventually stretching from eastern Iran across Afghanistan and into the plains of northern India. The wealth and resources flowing from the Indian campaigns transformed their capital at Ghazni into one of the most prosperous cities of Central Asia. It became a court that attracted scholars, administrators and poets, including figures such as Al-Biruni, who wrote extensively about India while living under Ghaznavid patronage.

It was within this flourishing imperial setting that Sultan Masʿud III commissioned his palace in 1112 CE. Archaeological evidence shows that this was a vast royal complex built around a monumental courtyard nearly one hundred metres across. The layout followed the four-iwan architectural plan common in Persianate palatial architecture, where four vaulted halls opened onto a central courtyard that functioned as the ceremonial heart of the complex. At one end stood the throne hall where the sultan received visitors and conducted the affairs of state.

The palace also reflected the cultural world of the Ghaznavid court. Although the dynasty was Turkic in origin, Persian language and literary culture dominated their administration and intellectual life. The walls of the courtyard were once lined with hundreds of carved marble panels containing Persian poetry, elaborate vegetal patterns and decorative arches. These inscriptions celebrated the sultan and connected the dynasty with the heroic past of the Iranian world.

What makes these fragments particularly fascinating is the evidence they carry of the empire’s connection with the Indian subcontinent. Some carving techniques appear to continue traditions associated with earlier Hindu-Shahi craftsmen in the region, suggesting that local artisans who had worked under earlier dynasties were absorbed into the Ghaznavid court workshops. The artistic vocabulary of the palace, therefore, reflects a blend of Iranian, Central Asian and Indic traditions that existed long before the later Indo-Islamic courts of Delhi.

The history of the palace itself was turbulent. Ghazni was sacked by the Ghurids in the mid-twelfth century and later devastated by the Mongols. Over time, the palace fell into ruin, leaving behind scattered fragments buried beneath the soil of the city.

The modern story of these fragments began in 1957, when the Italian Archaeological Mission to Afghanistan started excavations at Ghazni. Led by scholars such as Giuseppe Tucci, the team uncovered the remains of the palace courtyard along with numerous marble panels, terracotta elements and objects from the Ghaznavid court.

Some of the artefacts recovered during these excavations were later transferred to Italy under a formal archaeological sharing agreement known as the partage system. Under this arrangement, Afghanistan retained the majority of the finds while a selected portion was sent to Italy for conservation, research and display. These pieces eventually became part of the collection of the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

It is through this journey that fragments of a twelfth-century palace in Ghazni have now appeared in Delhi. Seen today inside Humayun’s Museum, they are the remnants of a court that once stood at the crossroads of Iran, Central Asia and India. Long before the Delhi Sultanate emerged, the Ghaznavids had already laid down many of the political and cultural connections that linked these regions together.

Constructed in the late eighteenth century, the Rani Mahal was commissioned by Raghunath Rao II of the Newalkar dynasty, who governed Jhansi as a Maratha subedar. Unlike the fort, which functioned as a military stronghold, the palace was intended as a residential and administrative space within the city. Ragunath Rao is credited to increase the state revenue of Jhansi; thus is palace in the main market complex rather than a fort is a strategic choice. The palace followed a haveli-style layout, organised around a central courtyard, with arched corridors and painted interiors that reflected Maratha and regional Bundelkhandi aesthetics.

Jhansi’s transition to Maratha control itself followed the decline of Mughal authority in the region. In the early eighteenth century, the Bundela ruler Maharaja Chhatrasal sought Maratha support against Mughal pressure. As part of this alliance, territories including Jhansi passed from Bundela control centred at Orchha to Maratha administration. Over time, the Newalkars established themselves not merely as governors but as hereditary rulers, investing in temples, palaces, and urban infrastructure to consolidate their legitimacy.

Architectural evidence and historical accounts suggest that the Rani Mahal was originally a four-storeyed structure. During the events of the 1857 uprising and the subsequent siege of Jhansi in 1858, the palace suffered heavy damage from British artillery. Two of its upper floors were destroyed in the bombardment, leaving the two-storeyed structure visible today.

One of the most prominent features of the interior is the extensive use of stucco relief across arches and wall panels. The corridors and main halls are repeatedly articulated with rosettes flanked by peacock motifs. Within South Asian visual culture, the peacock has long been associated with royalty and divinity, appearing across Hindu and Mughal iconographic traditions. These motifs appear as a localised adaptation of earlier Mughal and Bundela ornamental vocabularies, particularly the chini khana tradition, where repetitive niches and floral elements were used to create rhythm and surface depth.

Its wall paintings are among the better-preserved examples of late eighteenth-century mural painting in the region. The themes are predominantly floral and faunal, occasionally framed by geometric borders. The murals depict stylised gardens, trees, and a range of bird species, reflecting artistic conventions seen across Central Indian traditions such as Pichwai and Kalamkari. Among the recurring motifs, the Kalpavriksha or wish-fulfilling tree is particularly notable. These compositions present dense, branching forms laden with flowers and fruit, often populated by peacocks and other birds, and the most architecturally distinctive interior space is the durbar hall on the upper floor.

Its defining feature is a painted wooden panelled ceiling, an element rarely found in a region where stone and lime construction predominated. The use of timber points towards deliberate stylistic borrowing from Maratha residential architecture in western India, particularly the baradari traditions of Pune and its surroundings. The ceiling panels are arranged within square and rectangular frames and decorated with floral and geometric designs. Despite damage sustained during the events of 1857–58, substantial traces of vermilion and indigo pigment remain visible, indicating both the original vibrancy of the scheme and the quality of materials used.

The political significance of the Rani Mahal increased sharply after 1853, following the death of Raja Gangadhar Rao and the annexation of Jhansi under the Doctrine of Lapse. Rani Lakshmi Bai was compelled to vacate the fort and relocate to the palace, which became her primary residence. From here, she conducted a prolonged legal battle against the British East India Company, submitting petitions and negotiating through intermediaries. In the years leading up to the revolt, the palace functioned as a centre of political deliberation, and during the uprising, it became a space for military planning, mobilisation, and governance.

Today, the ground floor of the Rani Mahal functions as an archaeological museum under the Archaeological Survey of India. It houses a substantial collection of stone sculptures dating from the ninth to twelfth centuries, recovered from villages and temple sites across Bundelkhand and the neighbouring Lalitpur region. These include Hindu and Jain deities, architectural fragments, and monolithic carvings associated with Chandela and Pratihara-period temple complexes. While removed from their original ritual contexts, these objects are crucial for understanding the religious and artistic history of the region.

The sculptural collection housed within the Rani Mahal has been assembled from multiple archaeological sites across Bundelkhand, reflecting the religious and artistic landscape of the region between the ninth and twelfth centuries. A substantial portion of the material comes from Lalitpur, which functioned as a major regional centre during the early medieval period and was surrounded by numerous temple complexes. Sculptures from this area predominantly include Brahmanical deities, representing a wide range of Hindu iconographic forms.

Another important source is Madanpur, a Chandela-period site known for its fort and temple remains. The objects recovered from Madanpur include finely carved stone idols as well as architectural fragments, indicating the scale and ornamentation of temple structures that once stood there. Material from Barua Sagar is associated with the ninth-century Jarai-ka-Math temple. These sculptures belong to an early medieval phase and display stylistic features that retain elements of Gupta-period influence, particularly in proportions and surface treatment.

The collection also includes large-scale material from Dudhai, a site known for the Badi-Mandiya temple complex and its rock-cut Jain Tirthankara figures. Sculptures from Dudhai are notable for their monumental scale and include both Hindu and Jain imagery, often carved as monolithic forms rather than assembled architectural elements. Additional material originates from Chandpur, an ancient settlement with surviving remains of Vishnu and Shiva temples.

Together, these objects form a cross-section of Bundelkhand’s medieval religious production. Their presence within the Rani Mahal situates the palace not only within the political history of nineteenth-century Jhansi but also within a much longer continuum of regional artistic practice.

The Rani Mahal thus holds multiple historical layers within a single space. It is a Maratha urban palace, a site closely associated with Rani Lakshmi Bai’s political resistance, and a repository of early medieval sculpture.

Its location within the market area of Jhansi, rather than in an isolated monumental zone, reinforces its character as a lived and contested space rather than a purely commemorative one.

The Taj Mahal diamond is one of the few surviving Mughal jewels whose historical value rests as much on epigraphy and documentation as on material splendour. Its significance lies not in brilliance or rarity alone, but in the fact that it is an inscribed object whose biography can be traced across empires, markets, and legal regimes.

The diamond dates to the final years of Emperor Jahangir’s reign. It is a heart-shaped table-cut Indian diamond, almost certainly sourced from the Golconda mines, which supplied the Mughal court with stones prized for clarity rather than optical performance. The table cut is crucial. Unlike modern brilliant cuts designed to maximise fire, this form creates a broad, flat surface intended to receive inscription. The diamond was conceived as a readable surface.

The inscription is executed in Persian nasta‘liq using Arabic characters and consists of three elements: the name Nur Jahan Begum Padshah, the number 23 indicating Jahangir’s regnal year, and the Hijri date 1037. Using standard Hijri–Gregorian conversion, this places the inscription between 1627 and 1628 CE, during the end phase of Jahangir’s rule. The presence of Nur Jahan’s name is not incidental. It reflects her exceptional political authority and cultural patronage, positioning the jewel as both an intimate object and an assertion of power.

In Mughal court culture, inscribed gemstones functioned as documents. They recorded ownership, commemorated relationships, and fixed memory in durable material. The Taj Mahal diamond operates within this tradition. It is not anonymous luxury. It is personalised, dated, and explicitly attributed.

The diamond is mounted in a carved grey jade frame, likely nephrite rather than jadeite, given the material availability in South Asia at the time. The jade mount is edged with red spinels, historically referred to as balas rubies, and accented with thirteen smaller table-cut diamonds. The reverse is decorated with enamel latticework in a floral Mughal idiom, demonstrating that attention was paid to all surfaces, including those not immediately visible. This emphasis on completeness reflects courtly standards of craftsmanship rather than later European display logic.

After Jahangir’s death, the jewel passed to Shah Jahan. It was later associated with Mumtaz Mahal, whose death in 1631 prompted the construction of the Taj Mahal mausoleum. While the diamond was not originally named after the monument, Western scholarship retrospectively applied the name, linking the object to the architectural expression of imperial mourning and devotion.

The diamond’s departure from India is most plausibly linked to the sack of Delhi in 1739 by Nadir Shah of Persia. This event resulted in the removal of a substantial portion of the Mughal treasury, including the Peacock Throne and numerous jewels. Following Nadir Shah’s assassination in 1747, many of these objects dispersed further, entering European and Russian collections through opaque channels. The Taj Mahal diamond’s whereabouts during this period remain uncertain, reflecting the broader fragmentation of Mughal material heritage.

The jewel re-enters documented history in the twentieth century through Cartier, which acquired the pendant in 1971. At that time, the diamond was suspended from a traditional silk cord, consistent with earlier South Asian modes of wear. Cartier designer Alfred Durante replaced the cord with a woven gold chain set with cabochon rubies and old mine-cut diamonds. The chain was deliberately designed to mimic textile movement, translating the object for modern wear while preserving a reference to its original suspension.

In 1972, Richard Burton purchased the necklace for Elizabeth Taylor’s fortieth birthday. Under Taylor’s ownership, the diamond became highly visible, worn publicly and frequently. Taylor’s treatment of the jewel is notable for its openness. She allowed guests to handle it, reinforcing its status as a historical artefact rather than a sealed collectable. This period effectively transformed the diamond into a Hollywood archive object, layered with new associations without erasing earlier ones.

Following Taylor’s death in 2011, the diamond’s instability resurfaced. At Christie’s auction, it was estimated at $300,000–$500,000 but sold for $8.8 million, setting a record for Indian jewellery. The sale was subsequently rescinded when the buyer questioned the extent of its Mughal provenance. This led to prolonged litigation between the Taylor Estate and Christie’s, raising issues of fiduciary duty, provenance representation, and institutional authority. The dispute was settled only after several years, underscoring how historical value is continually negotiated through legal and market frameworks.

The diamond’s recent reappearance in public view should be understood as part of this ongoing biography rather than as a revival or rediscovery. The Taj Mahal diamond has never been a static object. It has moved through courtly systems, imperial violence, commercial reinterpretation, celebrity custodianship, and legal contestation.

What distinguishes it from many historic jewels is the persistence of its documentary core. The inscription remains legible. The date remains fixed. The object continues to assert its origin even as it circulates globally.

Dargahs did not become influential because people believed in miracles. They became influential because there was no Muslim bureaucracy, no Muslim welfare state, and in many regions, not even a stable Muslim government when Islam arrived and took root in India. Shrines and khanqahs stepped into that institutional vacuum. They offered settlement to migrants, food to the poor, mediation to disputants, vernacular instruction to converts, and legitimacy to rulers who lacked inherited authority. They also produced a public Muslim space that did not require literacy, lineage, or elite courtly competence to participate.

From Early Sufism to Institutional Life

Sufism did not begin as a shrine culture. In its early centuries, between the eighth and tenth centuries, Sufi practice was largely individual and itinerant. Figures such as Hasan al-Basri, Rabi‘a al-Adawiyya, and Junayd of Baghdad emphasised moral discipline, asceticism, and inner transformation. Their authority rested on reputation and learning rather than on permanent institutions.

A transformation took place between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries and it was shaped by catastrophe. The Mongol invasions devastated the major intellectual centres of the eastern Islamic world, including Khurasan, Nishapur, Balkh, and Baghdad. Libraries were destroyed, scholars killed, and entire scholarly networks displaced. Many Sufis fled these regions and settled in safer territories, including the Indian subcontinent.

Migration created a need for stability. Khanqahs emerged as permanent spaces for teaching, hospitality, and community life. Over time, the burial sites of prominent Sufi figures became dargahs, drawing disciples, patrons, and pilgrims across generations. They were the institutional response of displaced religious communities attempting to rebuild continuity after political collapse.

Creating Muslim Space Without State Power

Many influential Sufi figures in India operated at a deliberate distance from political authority. The Chishti order is a clear example. Mu‘in al Din Chishti settled in Ajmer without state sponsorship. Nizamuddin Auliya refused court patronage and kept a distance from the Delhi Sultanate. This refusal of political patronage was not romantic asceticism. It ensured that Islam had a public face outside imperial bureaucracies and court culture.

As a result, khanqahs remained socially accessible. Peasants, artisans, travellers, women, and new converts could participate without adopting Persianate courtly norms. Participation was not mediated by class, lineage, or literacy.

Richard Eaton writes that Islam spread in eastern Bengal not through military conquest but through networks of Sufi settlements linked to land reclamation and community building. Shrines appeared alongside newly cultivated agricultural land and anchored Muslim presence economically and socially.

Urbanism and the Sufi Wilayat

The institutional presence of shrines shaped urban formation. The concept of the Sufi wilayat or spiritual territory acted as an early spatial infrastructure. Cities grew around them. Delhi’s Mehrauli formed around the dargah of Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki in the thirteenth century. The Nizamuddin precinct became an urban node that later absorbed monumental Mughal projects such as Humayun’s Tomb. Ajmer Sharif attracted Sultans and later Mughal emperors and became a pilgrimage hub intertwined with state legitimacy. Gulbarga’s shrine facilitated the social integration of the Bahmani Sultanate as it consolidated its Deccan identity.

Khanqahs included guesthouses, meeting rooms, madrasas, hospitals, and kitchens. In many cases performed the role of an urban nucleus before the emergence of formal municipal planning. The shrine thus functioned neither as an ornament nor as a peripheral monument. It functioned as a civic centre.

Language and the Archive of Lived Islam

Perhaps the most concrete evidence of shrine influence lies in linguistic history. Arabic and Persian dominated formal Islamic discourse in medieval South Asia. The ulama largely operated within these languages, which limited access for non-elite populations. Khanqahs disrupted this hierarchy by using local languages for preaching, poetry, and instruction.

Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali, Pashto, and Hindavi were not only spoken but sanctified as vehicles for Islamic ethical reflection. Bulleh Shah composed Punjabi verse critiquing moral hypocrisy. Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai composed in Sindhi and embedded Quranic concepts in local folklore. In Bengal, Sufi authors used Bengali idioms to convey Islamic thought long before Bengali gained recognition as a formal religious language.

These traditions survived primarily through oral transmission. Poetry was memorised, sung, and recited across generations. Shrines provided the social spaces through which transmission occurred. When a shrine disappears, this chain of memory weakens.

Khanqahs as Welfare Institutions

Shrines played a central role in welfare. The langar or free kitchen is among the most documented examples. Langars attached to khanqahs provided daily meals to the poor, travellers, and residents. Access was unconditional.

Travel accounts from the medieval period confirm this dimension. Ibn Battuta, visiting India in the fourteenth century, repeatedly noted the generosity of Sufi lodges, often surpassing royal establishments. Mughal waqf records show sustained endowments toward shrines for feeding programmes, salaries, and maintenance. Welfare was not a modern state innovation. It was administered through waqf and shrine networks centuries earlier.

The Dargah as Civic Space and Mediating Authority

Long before the rise of modern legal infrastructures, the shrine functioned as a civic node where disputes could be mediated, petitions heard, and social tensions diffused without the blunt instruments of coercive state power. The dargah blurred the line between sacred and civic activity.

In medieval and early modern India, institutions like shrines and Hindu temples often acted as intermediaries between local populations and state authority. They managed competing claims over land, trade, and social obligations. This mediatory capacity explains why rulers across dynasties patronised shrines. The relationship was functional. Shrines delivered social cohesion and legitimacy in return for protection and endowment.

The principle of reconciliation resonated with imperial ideology during the Mughal period. The doctrine of sulh i kul, or peace with all,l was presented as a political principle but relied on pre-existing practices of civic mediation within Sufi institutions. The shrine provided an accessible forum for negotiation in a plural society that lacked a uniform legal system. Its authority could be invoked across caste, linguistic, and religious boundaries, which gave it a stabilising function unmatched by state courts.

The Spiritual Economy: Trade, Pilgrimage, and Artisan Guilds

Dargahs were also the engines of a spiritual economy in which sanctity generated measurable economic activity. Pilgrimage created flows of labour, trade, and hospitality. Shrines anchored markets, attracted craftspeople, and supported specialised occupational groups.

The waqf system expanded the economic reach of shrines by endowing land and revenue for religious and charitable functions. These assets produced rental income, supported custodial salaries, maintained kitchens, and funded festivals. The shrine also shaped work ethics within artisan groups. Sufi advice encouraged adherents to retain their professions rather than withdraw from labour. This linked spiritual discipline with craftsmanship and dignity of work.

In South Asia, the relationship between Sufi networks and weaver communities illustrates the integration of artisanal ethics into shrine culture. The Julaha and Ansari communities often traced religious orientation to Sufi or Bhakti lineages. The symbolism of spinning, weaving, and unravelling in Sufi poetry reinforced this connection. The shrine was thus embedded in the artisanal economy rather than external to it.

The Reformist Critique: Wahhabism, Ahl i Hadith, and Deobandi Purism

The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the rise of reformist movements that challenged shrine practices on theological grounds. Wahhabism emerged in the Arabian Peninsula in the mid eighteenth century under Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab. It rejected shrine visitation, tomb veneration, intercession, and the attribution of supernatural agency to saints. These practices were classified as shirk or idolatry and therefore incompatible with tawhid or divine unity. Pilgrimage routes, trade networks, and later Saudi state patronage enabled these ideas to circulate widely.

In India, reformist critiques acquired distinct institutional forms. The Ahl-i-Hadith movement rejected adherence to legal schools and condemned shrine rituals as un-Islamic innovations. The Deobandi seminary at Deoband, founded in 1867, promoted scriptural discipline and moral reform and warned against shrine practices perceived as excess or deviation. By the twentieth century, the Tablighi Jamaat intensified reform at the level of daily practice, emphasising personal piety, purification of ritual, and conformity to normative religious behaviour. These movements differed in intellectual genealogy but converged in suspicion of shrine culture.

The reformist critique gained credibility among urban middle-class Muslims who were increasingly literate, bureaucratically engaged, and exposed to modern print culture. It presented shrine scepticism as evidence of orthodoxy and intellectual seriousness rather than as a departure from historical norm.

Colonial Bureaucracy and the Juridification of Sacred Space

British colonial governance introduced a second layer of disruption. The colonial state was unsettled by institutions that commanded popular loyalty, operated autonomous economies, and made decisions outside state bureaucracy. Shrines fit all three categories. The British responded by reclassifying shrines as charitable trusts and subjecting them to legal and administrative oversight. Custodians were required to maintain accounts, report income, and operate within defined regulatory frameworks. Authority shifted from community management to bureaucratic supervision.

This juridification altered the meaning of the shrine. It ceased to be a living institution embedded in community life and began to be treated as property. Disputes between custodial families that were previously settled through lineage precedent or community arbitration became legal cases adjudicated in colonial courts. The transformation persisted after 1947. Both India and Pakistan retained waqf boards and legal frameworks that regulated shrine properties and introduced new avenues for state oversight.

Commercialisation, Heritage, and the Tourist Gaze

The twentieth and twenty-first centuries introduced pressures unrelated to theology. Increased devotional tourism and heritage branding converted shrines into commercial zones. The sale of amulets, services, and ritual goods altered the public perception of shrine culture and provided reformists with evidence of corruption and charlatanism. Simultaneously, heritage conservation projects often prioritised architectural restoration over living ritual. Conservation removed ritual spaces in the name of aesthetics and sanitised shrines to meet tourist expectations. These interventions misunderstood the shrine as a monument rather than a lived institution.

Litigation and the Shrinking of Ritual Rights

The legal system has become a major arena in which shrine futures are contested. Litigations invoke property law, religious rights, and heritage regulation. Disputes involve custodial families, waqf boards, state agencies, and political actors. The Gujarat High Court’s orders to remove ancient dargahs for urban development projects illustrate how legal instruments can erase shrines in the name of progress. Bulldozers replace lineage and historical memory.

Urban redevelopment adds another layer. Transit-oriented development, metro corridors, and heritage redevelopment projects have transformed the socio-economic fabric around shrines. Rising property values displace the communities that traditionally served or depended on shrine economies. Industrial godowns and working-class settlements in older precincts are converted into boutique commercial spaces that no longer integrate shrine life.

The Stakes of Disappearance

The erosion of shrine culture carries consequences that extend beyond Muslim theological debates. Shrines maintained archives of oral tradition, linguistic diversity, welfare practices, mediation, and plural coexistence. Their disappearance narrows the social field. Pluralism retreats from the quotidian and reappears only as policy rhetoric. Sectarian categories harden. The absence of shared space makes the difference combustible.

The modern claim that shrines matter only to believers is a misunderstanding of the historical record. Belief was never the determinant of institutional relevance. Shrines were institutions of settlement, welfare, language, justice, and pluralism. Their decline has less to do with disbelief than with reform movements, bureaucratic reclassification, commercialisation, communal politics, and sectarian violence. A society can function without saints. It struggles without the institutions that historically managed diversity.

Early Life in the Doab and Shahjahanabad

Begum Samru was born Farzana around 1760 in Kutana, a village in the western Doab between the Yamuna and the Ganga. The area was already marked by instability. Marathas, Rohillas, Jats, and Mughal nobles competed for influence across the region, often relying on European mercenary groups.

After the death of her stepfather and then her mother, Farzana arrived in Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi), where she was taken into the household of Khanum Jan, a well-established tawaif in Chawri Bazaar. This environment introduced her to refined Indo-Persian courtly culture: etiquette, conversation, performance, and negotiation. cted. Some historians argue about this narrative, stating that she was in the Harem of Jawahar Singh, the Jatt ruler of Bharatpur, and she was given up because his mother didn’t like his closeness with the Muslim Woman.

The Mercenary World of Walter Reinhardt

Farzana encountered Walter Reinhardt in the 1760s. Known in various sources as Reinhardt, Reinholdt, Somers, Sombre, or Samru, he was a European mercenary commander whose battalion frequently shifted employers depending on military opportunity.

Reinhardt’s troops earned notoriety for the 1763 killings at Patna, where he, with Nawab Mir Qasim, executed approximately 150 English prisoners held in Patna, which brought him the title “Butcher of Patna” and made him a figure of interest to British, Mughal, and local powers alike. Yet in the fractured political landscape of the time, such men were valuable. Their battalions were disciplined, trained in modern musketry, and often more reliable than the levies of local chiefs.

By 1776, after years of service to various claimants around Delhi and Agra, Reinhardt received the jagir of Sardhana from Emperor Shah Alam II. Sardhana was no minor holding. It yielded significant revenue — around six lakhs annually — and controlled crucial routes in the Doab.

Farzana, now widely known as “Samru’s Begum,” lived with him at this estate and accompanied him on campaigns, gaining practical knowledge of military administration, command structures, and regional diplomacy.

Succession and Recognition as Jagirdar (1778)

Reinhardt died in 1778. His death created an immediate struggle for succession.

French officers within the battalion attempted to advance the claim of Zafaryab Khan, Reinhardt’s stepson. The scenario reflected the norms of private military organisations in India at the time: troops often resisted transitions that threatened their pay, privileges, or internal hierarchy. However, the Sardhana battalion supported Farzana. Their endorsement proved decisive.

Shah Alam II issued a formal sanad, confirming her as the rightful holder of the Sardhana jagir. This act established her legal authority, firmly locating her within the Mughal administrative system.

From this moment, she appears in official records as Begum Samru.

Military Engagements and the Consolidation of Power

During the late 1770s and early 1780s, Begum Samru’s battalions were integral to the campaigns of Mirza Najaf Khan, the Mughal empire’s most effective wazir of the late eighteenth century. She supported Mughal forces in operations against the Jats, Rohillas, and various regional insurgents — conflicts that were critical to maintaining even nominal Mughal authority around Delhi. Najaf Khan viewed her forces as dependable, especially compared to the shifting loyalties of regional chiefs.

One quality consistently noted in contemporary accounts is the discipline of the Sardhana troops. Unlike many jagirdari forces, which were part-time or irregular, her battalion received regular salaries and had a clear command hierarchy.

This stability allowed her to intervene decisively in high-stakes military engagements, including those concerning the security of Delhi.

The Ghulam Qadir Crisis (1787–88)

One of the defining episodes of her career occurred during the occupation of Delhi by Ghulam Qadir Rohilla. His rebellion culminated in the imprisonment of the Mughal royal family and the blinding of Emperor Shah Alam II.

When the Maratha general Rane Khan advanced to retake the city, Begum Samru joined the expedition with her battalions. Her involvement was not symbolic. Her troops contributed materially to the efforts to re-establish imperial control.

After the crisis, Shah Alam II bestowed upon her the title Zebun-Nissa, an acknowledgement of her loyalty and the effectiveness of her forces.

Conversion and the Politics of Identity

When Begum Samru converted to Catholicism in 1781 and took the name Joanna, it was not a purely spiritual shift; It was a calculated decision shaped by the political vocabulary of her time. Northern India was filling rapidly with European Company officials, soldiers of fortune, and missionaries, and each of them brought their own assumptions about legitimacy and authority.

For someone already commanding a European-trained battalion, baptism did something subtle but significant. It placed her within a recognisable framework for European powers. A jagirdar who was, at least nominally, Christian became easier to engage with, harder to dismiss, and more difficult to categorise as a mere “native intermediary.” It also gave her access to a network of priests, translators, and diplomats whose influence extended well beyond their religious roles.

But conversion didn’t peel her away from the Indo-Persian world she inhabited. She continued to participate fully in Mughal court culture — the etiquette, the administrative traditions, the social fabric of Delhi’s nobility. Her life remained culturally layered. The architecture she patronised, the rituals she observed, the bureaucrats she employed all belonged to different traditions, and she moved between them with the confidence of someone who understood that power in eighteenth-century India did not belong to those who chose a single identity. It belonged to those who could hold several at once.

A Mutiny, a Marriage, and the Near Collapse of an Estate

The early 1790s brought one of the most volatile episodes in her rule, a crisis that almost ended her authority. When she married the French officer Le Vassoult, the reaction within Sardhana was immediate and tense. European officers had always held influence in her battalion, but marriage carried a different kind of symbolism, and rumours spread quickly that Le Vassoult planned to take control of the estate.

For an army that depended on her leadership and her long-established administrative structure, this was a threat. The battalion mutinied. The Begum and Le Vassoult attempted to escape, but the plan unravelled on the road. Le Vassoult, overwhelmed by the chaos and convinced all was lost, took his own life. She was taken back to Sardhana by force, tied to a gun carriage, a moment that revealed just how fragile power could be when the loyalty of troops was shaken.

Yet the story didn’t end in collapse. George Thomas, once her trusted commander and by then a regional military power in his own right, intervened. With the cooperation of the Maratha governor of Saharanpur, he persuaded the mutineers that Sardhana’s stability depended on the restoration of the Begum. It worked. Order returned. And remarkably, she resumed control of the estate with enough authority to govern for decades afterwards.

The British Move North, and the Stakes Change

By the early nineteenth century, the British East India Company had begun its decisive push into northern India. The capture of Delhi in 1803 rewrote the political boundaries of the region. Jagirdars who once operated under Mughal patronage suddenly found themselves evaluated through the logic of Company rule, where efficiency, revenue, and perceived loyalty mattered more than historical legitimacy.

Begum Samru’s estate made the British uneasy. Her troops had been trained by French officers, and in the geopolitical climate of the Napoleonic wars, any French influence in India was treated with suspicion. Wellesley openly considered reducing her jagir to a pension, effectively ending Sardhana’s autonomy.

But the Begum understood the new rules. When G. D. Guthrie, the Company’s collector at Saharanpur, was captured by Sikh chiefs, she stepped in. Her intervention wasn’t symbolic: she negotiated directly, paid the ransom herself, and ensured Guthrie’s safe return. It was a precise demonstration of her diplomatic reach at a moment when the Company was still calibrating its foothold in the region.

The gesture was not ignored. With the support of David Ochterlony, one of the most influential British officers in Delhi, the Company recognised her right to retain Sardhana for life. In an era when jagirs were being dissolved, annexed, or reduced, this was a notable exception.

Building an Estate That Outlived Empires

Once her position was secure under British oversight, Begum Samru turned her energy towards strengthening the physical and administrative presence of Sardhana. Her architectural projects were neither ornamental nor impulsive; they were statements of authority, identity, and permanence.

The Basilica of Our Lady of Graces remains the most striking of these projects. Its European lines, grand proportions, and sculptural programme were unlike anything else in north India at the time. But it wasn’t her only undertaking. She built palaces, gardens, bridges, guesthouses, and civic structures, transforming Sardhana into a regional centre that reflected both her wealth and her cosmopolitan sensibilities.

Her governance followed Mughal administrative conventions, revenue officers, recordkeepers, and a judicial structure, blended with the discipline inherited from her European troops. Observers consistently described her as hands-on, exacting, and attentive to detail.

Her philanthropy cut across communities. Churches, shrines, mosques, neighbourhood institutions, and public works all benefited from her endowments. Sardhana under her was not a military cantonment; it was a functioning principality with a distinct cultural identity.

The Final Years and the Closing of an Era

Begum Samru ruled for nearly sixty years, a rare feat in a period marked by constant political upheaval. Towards the end of her life, she prepared for succession by transferring her property to her adopted son, David Ochterlony Dyce Sombre, through a hibba nama. When she died in 1836, she left behind not just a jagir but a shaped landscape, a political legacy, and an administrative model that survived beyond the Mughal system that had once legitimised her.

Within a few decades, the British had absorbed or dismantled most remaining princely structures in the region, but Sardhana retained the memory of a ruler whose authority had not come from lineage or conquest, but from her ability to read, adapt to, and command the changing world around her.

Jogeshwari, which should have been the bridge between the Buddhist world of Ajanta and Kanheri and the later Hindu and Jain monuments carved at Ellora and Elephanta. Instead, it ended up buried under neglect, encroachment and a long list of academic disagreements.

The early history

Jogeshwari is one of the earliest surviving cave temples dedicated to Pashupata Shaivism, one of the oldest Shaivite traditions. The caves were most likely carved in the sixth century, though scholars still debate the date. They were excavated on Salsette Island around the same time as Kanheri and Elephanta, back when the coastline and the ports of Sopara, Chemula and Kalyan were tied into long-distance trade routes.

The site was once called the Amboli Caves. Today, the patron deity is Jogeshwari or Jagdamba Devi, worshipped by local Marathi and Gujarati communities, which is how the caves received their present name.

The architectural thread connecting Jogeshwari, Elephanta and Ellora

When you cross through a slum to get into the cave, you will immediately see why scholars treat Jogeshwari as the missing link. A large linga shrine sits at the centre of the complex, just like Elephanta and Dumar Lena at Ellora. Pillared halls recall older Buddhist forms. Female guardians and dwarf figures flank the entrance, echoing Badami and Ellora. These small echoes become a pattern once you keep looking.

Carvings of Shiva’s marriage and a scene of Shiva and Parvati playing chausar survive on the walls. A nearly lost figure of Lakulisa, the key philosopher of the Pashupata sect, once watched over the shrine. Devotees of the present day have added a Hanuman temple, a Ganesh shrine painted bright orange and layers of fabric and jewellery that cover the footprints of Goddess Jogeshwari.

The People who built the Cave

After the death of Harishena of the Vakataka dynasty in the late fifth century, patronage at Ajanta collapsed. The same artisans had to move. Western India, especially the coastal belt, became their next arena. Shaivite and Jain patrons began commissioning monuments. Jogeshwari stands right at the beginning of this shift.

Many scholars believe the Kalachuris of Mahishmati supported these new projects in the sixth century. Krishnaraja I is often credited with commissioning early work at Elephanta and Ellora, and possibly Jogeshwari as well.

Who really built Jogeshwari

Historians have argued about this cave for more than a century.
Some believe the Rashtrakutas created it.
Others point to the Chalukyas.
Spink, Bob Lee and Colin Smith place it in the Kalachuri period.

There are reasons for each theory. The Kalachuris had marital ties with the Vakatakas. The temples at Badami and Pattadakal show Pashupata influence similar to Elephanta and Ellora. Stella Kramrisch noted that Jogeshwari, Mandapeshwar, Ellora’s Cave 29 and Elephanta share almost identical planning.

Some scholars even argue that Jogeshwari and Lonad were originally Buddhist, pointing to the pillars and certain sculptural styles. Their conclusion suggests a time when Buddhism was losing its ground in Maharashtra and artisans and patrons shifted to Shaivite and Vaishnavite traditions.

Rediscovery in the colonial period

When the British took over Bombay in 1668, travellers and administrators began exploring the caves on the Island. Charles Boone had the caves sketched by an Indian artist. Governors like Bourchier recorded descriptions. By the nineteenth century, the site was part of a broader academic project that included Mahakali, Magathane, Kanheri, Elephanta and Mandapeshwar.

James Fergusson and James Burgess eventually produced the landmark publication Cave Temples of India in 1880. Burgess was clear in his analysis of Jogeshwari. He wrote that it did not resemble a Buddhist vihara at all. Instead, he believed it anticipated later structural temples at places like Pattana, Somnath and Ambarnath.

After independence

Ajanta, Ellora and Elephanta eventually received UNESCO status. Jogeshwari did not. The cave is protected by the Archaeological Survey of India, but protection on paper has not translated into actual care. The dense settlement has pushed right up against the monument. Water leakage, sewage seepage, discarded waste and encroachments have eaten into the carvings.

A PIL was filed in 2005 asking for the rehabilitation of residents and the preservation of the site. The High Court approved a plan for clearing the protected zone, but implementation remains slow. Thirteen thousand square metres around the cave were supposed to become a garden and resettlement area. Very little of that has materialised.

Why Jogeshwari matters

To be honest, as you stand in the main hall for a minute, you feel its importance immediately. This is one of the earliest experiments in carving a subterranean Shaivite space. It ties Buddhist forms to Hindu iconography. It connects Ajanta to Elephanta. It carries the first outline of ideas that became full masterpieces at Ellora.

Jogeshwari should have been taught alongside those sites. It should have been protected with the same seriousness. Instead, it has been left to collapse under the weight of a city that grew too fast around it.

If we ignore Jogeshwari, we lose the beginning of one of the most influential architectural journeys in India. And that is something worth writing about, studying and, most of all, protecting.

So the next time you are in Mumbai, take out some time and visit this wonderful heritage site.

Everything here is free, but you can contribute below if you wish.

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Yet, every time I visit, I encounter narratives that have no historical basis. Some call it Delhi’s most haunted site. Others, more recently, describe it as India’s queer monument. Both claims are unsupported by evidence.

For those of us who work with archives, inscriptions, and architectural history, this kind of casual myth-making is not only frustrating but also profoundly damaging. It erases the cultural and scholarly value of one of Delhi’s most refined early sixteenth-century monuments.

The Historical Identity of Jamali

Shaikh Fazlullah Kamboh, known by his pen name Jamali, was a distinguished Sufi poet of the Suhrawardi order. He served in the courts of Sikandar Lodi, Babur, and Humayun. His Persian poetry reflects devotional themes rather than romantic ones.

In his collection Mir’at-ul-Haqaiq (“The Mirror of Realities”), Jamali’s verses explore repentance, human frailty and spiritual surrender. His language is metaphorical, but the beloved in Sufi literature is always divine, not mortal.

Jamali died in Gujarat in 1535 CE during Humayun's campaign against the Gujarat Sultan. His remains were brought to Delhi and interred in a tomb he had commissioned during his lifetime. The tomb adjoins a mosque constructed around 1528–1536 CE, which typifies the final phase of the Lodi style and anticipates early Mughal elements.

The Architectural and Epigraphic Record

One of the first detailed documentation of the site appears in Maulvi Zafar Hasan’s List of Muhammadan and Hindu Monuments, Delhi (Archaeological Survey of India, 1916). Hasan’s survey remains the foundational reference for Delhi’s Islamic architecture.

His description of the mosque is purely architectural:

“The mosque, which is an interesting example of the Lodi style, contains Qur’anic inscriptions in bold relief around the central and northern mihrabs… The parapet level is richly ornamented with pendant lotus buds, a feature much used by the Mughals soon after.”

He describes the tomb as a chamber “entered from the south and paved with marble”, containing “the grave of Jamali, while to its east is another said to be that of Kamali, but there is no authority to corroborate this statement.”

That line, “no authority to corroborate this statement,” is the only contemporary comment on the supposed second burial. Hasan clearly states there is no evidence of any person named Kamali.

He also records Persian verses incised in plaster beneath the tomb’s ceiling. These are Jamali’s own compositions, still visible today. One of them reads:

“Even if our wickedness may approach to blasphemy, still we cherish hope of Thy pardon.”

These verses demonstrate the Sufi ethos of divine love and penitence. They have no romantic or erotic content.

Clarifying the Second Grave

Dr Salim Zaweed, in his 2015 paper “Medieval Monuments of Mehrauli: Reality and Myth” (Indian History Congress), identifies the second grave as belonging not to “Kamali” but to Zainuddin, possibly a disciple or later burial.

Zaweed notes that the dual-grave layout was not unusual in Sufi contexts. Shared burial chambers often represented spiritual lineage rather than companionship.

He concludes unequivocally:

“Nothing in the archaeological record, or in any contemporary text, hints at haunting or romance. The so-called legend is a fabrication of recent decades.”

This statement is consistent with both the epigraphic evidence and the absence of any references in Persian chronicles such as Ain-i-Akbari or Siyar al-Arifin.

The Graph of Prayers

The Jamali Kamali mosque was declared a national monument on 8 February 1915, and the prayers were stopped after that. Eventually, it became isolated and in ruin after that, with partition and a good amount of Muslims migrating to Pakistan, adding to the seclusion. In 2009, a group attempted to restart prayers at the site despite ASI restrictions. When refused, they forced entry and held namaaz inside. The official in charge, KK Muhammed, called the police’s silence “mysterious and inexplicable,” warning that such incidents risk eroding the sanctity of protected monuments.

The Decline and Informal Occupation of the Site

Post Independence, the Mehrauli monuments had deteriorated. The Jamali Kamali complex, unlit and unguarded, became a secluded location used by drug users and petty criminals. Local accounts from the 1980s describe how the site’s isolation made it a convenient refuge. To discourage outsiders, these groups circulated stories of supernatural activity, whispers, shadows, and “djinns guarding the tomb.”

These rumours served a practical purpose: they kept the police, journalists, and residents away. The “haunting” was not folklore inherited from the past; it was a deterrent created by those occupying the site illegally. When local guides and journalists later repeated these tales, the myth escaped its source. By the mid-1990s, Jamali Kamali had entered the media’s catalogue of “Delhi’s most haunted places” and when the Internet arrived, the blogs picked it up and fueled the SEO with the haunting stories of Jamali Kamali

Oriental Romanticisation: Karen Chase and Fictionalisation

In the early 2000s, British writer Karen Chase visited Mehrauli and encountered the haunted stories circulating locally. In 2005, she published “Ghosts of Mehrauli: The Lovers of Jamali Kamali”, followed by her 2011 poetic novel Jamali-Kamali: A Tale of Passion in Mughal India.

Chase transformed the rumours into a narrative of forbidden homosexual love between a saint and his disciple. Her book presented fiction as historical reconstruction.

As Zaweed observes:

“The fascinating story behind the monument is fiction. It comes from her imagination, not from historical fact.”

Despite the lack of evidence, her work influenced how the monument was presented in English-language media. Travel websites, guidebooks, and blogs began referring to Jamali Kamali as “India’s queer monument.”

This transformation — from unverified rumour to published literature — gave the legend cultural legitimacy. Yet it remains entirely unsubstantiated.

The Problem of Queer Historicisation

From the 2010s onwards, Jamali Kamali was adopted by sections of Delhi’s queer community as a symbolic site of erased same-sex love. While this cultural re-appropriation is understandable, there is no archival or textual evidence linking the monument to sexuality. In Sufi literature, metaphors of love, intoxication, and the beloved refer to the divine. To interpret them as expressions of physical desire is to misunderstand the mystical framework of Islamic poetry.

What this myth has effectively done is erase a more historically grounded queer presence elsewhere in Mehrauli. Nazir ka Bagh, located 200 meters from Jamali Kamali, is in fact the only space with a verifiable association to queer cultural history. Nazir ka Bagh was established in the early 18th century by Nazir, the chief eunuch and darogha of Emperor Muhammad Shah Rangila’s royal harem. It served as his private garden estate on the outskirts of Shahjahanabad.

A responsible heritage discourse must distinguish between symbolic reclamation (which is cultural) and factual history (which is empirical).

The Role of Neglect and the Failure of Public Communication

The persistence of these myths also reflects institutional neglect. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has historically focused on the structural conservation of the monument, not its interpretation. The official signage outside the site provides no historical clarification beyond basic dates and materials. This silence leaves the narrative vacuum that sensationalism quickly fills. Where official interpretation is absent, oral and online myths thrive.

Moreover, the repeated closure of the tomb’s interior to visitors has allowed speculation to flourish. Most people have never seen the inscriptions or tilework for themselves. In such an information void, fantasy becomes plausible.

Re-examining the Monument on Its Own Terms

Architecturally, the Jamali Kamali Mosque represents the mature Lodi style transitioning toward Mughal refinement.

• It features five arched openings, the central one framed by marble bands and fluted sandstone pilasters.

• The parapet, adorned with lotus-bud ornamentation, anticipates later Mughal decorative vocabulary.

• Inside, the five bays each contain mihrabs; the central and northern are inscribed with Qur’anic verses.

• The dome rests on elegant pendentives, transforming the square chamber into an octagon.
  

  The tomb chamber, square and marble-paved, once glowed with blue and green tiles. The plaster inscriptions carry Jamali’s verses:

“O Jamali, resort for protection to the door of the Friend, for our refuge is the door of the Beloved.”

Reclaiming Historical Integrity

Reversing decades of misinformation requires clear and public correction. Heritage communication must be transparent, not evasive.

1. Accurate interpretation: ASI and heritage NGOs must clearly state, on-site and in official materials, that there is no historical basis for the existence of “Kamali” or for the haunted narrative.

2. Access and visibility: Controlled access to the tomb’s interior and proper illumination would allow visitors to read the inscriptions themselves rather than rely on hearsay.

3. Contextual education: Heritage tours and digital projects should foreground the architectural and literary context of the fusion of Lodi and Mughal forms, and Jamali’s contribution to Persian devotional poetry.

Without these steps, the myths will continue to shape public memory more powerfully than the facts. To many, this debate may seem trivial - whether a tomb is haunted or not. But for those of us who document and conserve India’s architectural heritage, the distinction is essential.

Let the Record Speak

There is nothing haunted or queer about Jamali Kamali in the historical sense. There is only Jamali, a Sufi poet who wrote of divine mercy; a mosque and tomb that bridge two architectural worlds; and an inscription that still shines, six centuries later. It is time to restore historical accuracy to public memory. As professionals in heritage, we owe that honesty to the sites we claim to protect.

Jamali Kamali deserves to be understood not through fiction, fear, or modern projection, but through its own words, its own stone, and its own history.

By mid-morning, headlines were already describing it as a “brazen theft of national treasure.” Yet as someone who’s spent years studying where such treasures actually come from, I thought: they were stolen long before last night.

The sapphires, the emeralds, the gold, all of it came from the outer edges of empire, mined under colonial systems that made luxury possible for a few and misery inescapable for many.

So yes, the Louvre has been robbed, but the irony is hard to ignore. For once, it isn’t France doing the taking. Lol

The sapphire tiara and necklace were created in Paris, but the stones were mined in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, when it was under British colonial rule. French jewellers acquired them through trade networks built on imperial exploitation. The emerald parure came from the Muzo mines of Colombia, where Indigenous and African workers laboured under conditions that would today be called forced or bonded labour. The gold and diamonds were taken from West and Southern Africa, extracted by concessionary companies that served European demand.

The Louvre’s inheritance

The Louvre has long described itself as a museum for all humanity, yet much of its splendour was built upon colonialism, much like the British Museum. From Egyptian sarcophagi to Benin bronzes, it remains a storehouse of imperial ambition, a place where beauty and conquest coexist under the same light.

And the Louvre has been here before. The Mona Lisa was famously stolen in 1911, only to be recovered two years later. Yet this time, the loss feels more symbolic than sensational.

When we speak of stolen jewels, we should ask from whom they were stolen in the first place. France did not mine the sapphires, it did not cut the emeralds, it did not sift the diamonds from riverbeds in the heat of Africa. It simply purchased, polished, and possessed them, converting global labour into European luxury.

Now that these jewels have vanished once again, France finds itself mourning artefacts that were never truly its own. The display cases have been emptied twice, once by empire, and now by history itself.

Decolonisation as a mirror

Decolonisation is often imagined as a bureaucratic process, the return of artefacts to their countries of origin. But it is also a psychological and moral reckoning. It asks nations to look closely at what they call “heritage” and to acknowledge what lies beneath the glass.

If we were honest, the jewels of Empress Eugénie would be displayed not only as works of beauty but as evidence of a global system that turned extraction into elegance. They were designed to display refinement, but what they truly show is dependence, the way European wealth relied upon the forced transformation of colonial materials into art. Let’s look into the brief history of the artefacts

1. The Sapphire Tiara of Empress Eugénie

Commissioned by Napoleon III shortly after his marriage to Eugénie de Montijo in 1853, the sapphire tiara was part of a parure (matching set) designed for imperial ceremonies and portraits.

The sapphires were mined in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka), then under British rule. They entered the French market through gem dealers in Bombay and Paris, particularly via the firm of Bapst & Fils, which collaborated with Lemonnier on court commissions.

The tiara features nine graduated cushion-cut sapphires set in diamond clusters, framed by foliate scrolls in the neoclassical style. It was worn by the Empress at state receptions and depicted in several portraits by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1855–1860).

2. The Sapphire Necklace and Earrings

Created to accompany the sapphire tiara, this parure included a necklace of eleven oval sapphires alternating with diamond motifs, and earrings with single-drop sapphires surrounded by diamond halos.

The gemstones share provenance with the tiara, sourced from Ceylon and selected for colour uniformity. The necklace was exhibited in 1855 at the Exposition Universelle, symbolising French imperial prosperity and technical artistry in gem-setting.

This set, though less elaborate than the tiara, demonstrated the influence of mid-Victorian jewellery trends and the close stylistic dialogue between French and British court fashion during the mid-nineteenth century.

3. The Decorative Bow Brooch of Empress Eugénie

The diamond bow brooch was among Eugénie’s most characteristic jewels, reflecting her admiration for the Rococo revival style popularised by the court of Marie Antoinette.

This particular brooch consisted of over 250 rose-cut diamonds, arranged in a naturalistic ribbon motif with articulated loops and trailing ends. The diamonds were sourced through Antwerp dealers from South African deposits, possibly early Kimberley finds, following their discovery in 1866.

The piece was worn regularly as part of the Empress’s evening court attire and appeared in her official portrait by Winterhalter (1864). It entered the Crown collection after her exile in 1870.

4. The Small Diamond Brooch (Cluster Type)

This smaller cluster brooch formed part of the Empress’s personal ornament collection rather than state regalia. Its simple design, a single large diamond surrounded by smaller stones, reflected the Second Empire preference for understated brilliance during daytime functions.

The diamond cluster design, derived from eighteenth-century court jewels but was revived in the 1850s. The diamonds themselves were likely from Brazilian or African sources, imported via Parisian brokers such as C. F. Gaillard.

The brooch was catalogued in the Louvre’s 1887 inventory as “Broche à diamants, modèle Eugénie.”

5. The Tiara of Empress Eugénie (Emerald and Diamond)

This emerald and diamond tiara was created for Eugénie’s marriage to Napoleon III in January 1853. It formed part of an extensive wedding parure that included a necklace, brooch, bracelets, and earrings.

The emeralds were mined in Muzo, Colombia, an area controlled since the sixteenth century by Spanish colonial and later republican authorities, who supplied European jewellers through transatlantic trade. By the 1850s, emerald exports were largely monopolised by European firms operating through Bogotá and London.

The tiara’s design combined scrollwork and classical laurel motifs, aligning with the imperial iconography of the Napoleonic dynasty. It was displayed at the 1867 Exposition Universelle and later entered the national collection after 1887.

6–10. The Emerald Wedding Gift Set (Five Stolen Components)

Five components of the original emerald parure were among the stolen items. These included:

1. A central emerald brooch with a detachable pendant drop.

2. Two bracelet panels with cushion-cut emerald centres.

3. Two smaller clasp elements from the matching necklace.

The emeralds originated from the same Muzo deposits as the tiara stones. Documentation from the Musée du Louvre’s 1994 catalogue, “Les Joyaux de la Couronne de France,” lists these as fragments of the disassembled wedding set retained after the 1887 auction of Crown Jewels.

Post-Imperial History and Museum Transfer

After the fall of Napoleon III in 1870, Empress Eugénie fled to England. Many of her personal jewels were sold privately or dispersed through auction. However, the Crown Jewels of France, including the Lemonnier sapphire and emerald sets, were nationalised.

In 1887, the French Third Republic sold a significant portion of the Crown Jewels, but retained several pieces for their artistic or historical value. These were transferred to the Louvre Museum, later installed in the restored Galerie d’Apollon in 2004.

Each of the stolen items carried a unique inventory number, provenance documentation, and photographic record in the Louvre’s digital database. Their disappearance represents the most significant loss of French regalia since the 1887 sale.

When an empire loses its grip

I have often said that history does not vanish; it rearranges itself. The 2025 Louvre theft feels like one of those moments of rearrangement, when the past reaches out to remind us that nothing is ever truly secure.

The jewels may never resurface, or they may be recovered intact. Either way, their absence now speaks louder than their presence ever did. The empty cases have become unintentional memorials to everything the museum has tried to contain — empire, memory, and the uncomfortable truth that beauty and exploitation have always shared a frame.

What the empty case tells us

Museums are built to stop time, yet time has an inconvenient way of moving through the cracks. Perhaps this is what we are witnessing, not simply a loss, but the return of history’s unfinished business.

For those of us who work in heritage, it is a reminder that the past cannot be curated into silence. Eventually, it will speak, whether through research, restitution, or, in this strange case, disappearance.

A personal reflection

I do not celebrate theft, but I also cannot ignore its symbolism. The Louvre has lost a handful of jewels, but it may have gained a rare opportunity to look at itself. For too long, European museums have treated decolonisation as a threat to their prestige, rather than a path to truth.

If the empty display in Paris teaches us anything, it is that the past is not as safely contained as we imagine. The empire that built these objects into beauty is gone, yet its traces remain in the way we value, preserve, and protect them.

France may one day recover them, but it will still have to face the deeper question their disappearance has raised, not who took them, but how it came to possess them in the first place.

For now, the Louvre’s most eloquent object is the one that is missing.

And yet, in all the stories people tell about Delhi’s saints, one name rarely comes up: Chirag Dilli. Everyone knows Mehrauli and Nizamuddin - the two grand shrines that frame Delhi’s spiritual landscape. Mehrauli, where Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki lies under a canopy of stone and silence; and Nizamuddin, alive with the rhythm of qawwali, the smell of rosewater, the pulse of faith. But the third shrine, the one that completes this triad, often goes unmentioned: the Village of Chirag Dilli.

Discovering the Chiragh

I first came across its name in Siyar al-Auliya, Amir Khurd’s chronicle of the Chishti saints. A brief line, Nasiruddin Mahmud, the Lamp of Delhi. That image stayed with me. The idea that a man could illuminate a city without ruling it.

Nasiruddin Mahmud was born in Ayodhya around 1274 CE, a Sayyid by lineage; his early life was marked by loss. His father died when he was young, and it was his mother who raised him — a detail preserved even in the dry entries of Zafar Hasan’s early 20th-century List of Monuments. Around the age of forty, he came to Delhi seeking the companionship of Nizamuddin Auliya, the city’s most revered Sufi.

Under Nizamuddin’s guidance, Nasiruddin learnt what the Chishti order stood for — Ishq-e-Ilahi (divine love), Khidmat-e-Khalq (service to humanity), and Fana fi-Allah (annihilation in the divine). He was not a preacher in the loud sense. His faith was inward, reflective. While Nizamuddin’s charisma filled the air like fragrance, Nasiruddin’s presence was that of quiet radiance — hence, the name Chiragh-i-Dilli, the Lamp of Delhi.

There’s even a local folklore that when Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq stopped the oil supply for lamps at Nizamuddin’s baoli, Nasiruddin took a matka of water and, through his prayer, turned it into oil so that the chiraghs could stay lit. Whether miracle or myth, the story captures why people saw him as Delhi’s enduring light.

A City in Flux

The 14th century was a restless time for Delhi. The Tughlaqs ruled with ambition and volatility, shifting capitals, building fortresses, and making cities as if permanence could be forced into being. Shams-i-Siraj Afif, in his Tarikh-i-Firoz Shahi, mentions how Firoz Shah Tughlaq respected the saint deeply. The Sultan would visit him often, though Nasiruddin maintained the Chishti principle of detachment from political power. His refusal to court favour turned his khanqah into a moral refuge.

When Nasiruddin passed in 1356 CE, Firoz Shah built his tomb — a square, red sandstone chamber capped with a low dome. Around it grew a settlement of disciples, artisans, and pilgrims — the beginnings of what we now call Basti Chirag Dilli.

Delhi’s Sufi landscape can almost be mapped as a constellation. To the south, Mehrauli, the foundation. To the east, Nizamuddin, the flowering. To the southwest, Chirag Dilli is the illumination. Catherine Asher calls this the “spiritual topography of light,” where each dargah symbolises a stage of divine revelation.

Pilgrims once walked from one shrine to another, performing ziyarat, weaving an invisible circuit of remembrance. In this way, Delhi was once a geography of devotion. But modernity, with its roads and zoning, broke that geometry apart.

The Outer Ring Road now loops around Chirag Dilli like a fortress wall. To most commuters, it’s nothing more than a flyover’s name. Few realise that within its loop lies one of Delhi’s oldest living Sufi settlements — a place older than many of the colonies that surround it.

My first visit to Chirag Dilli was unplanned. I was on a Monument hunt and decided to step off the road where an archway stood, cracked, whitewashed, plastered with posters of tuition classes. It was one of the original four gates of the enclosure mentioned in Selina Abraham’s dissertation, The Heterotopic Space of Chirag Delhi (2013). She wrote that the fort walls, first raised under Muhammad bin Tughlaq and later reinforced in the 18th century, once defined a near-perfect square.

Now the gate is just an entrance to a ghettoised village. The lane beyond it is narrow, dimly lit, and lined with workshops and homes pressed close together. Yet as I walked further in, the rhythm changed. The city’s noise faded. The air thickened with incense and the faint echo of azaan. The dargah appears almost suddenly, not at the end of a grand axis, but tucked modestly into the middle of the basti.

The Saint’s Tomb

The shrine, though altered by time, still carries the dignity of Firoz Shah’s architecture. Zafar Molvi’s notes describe it precisely: “The tomb, whitewashed, measures 18 feet square, crowned with a dome supported on twelve red sandstone columns; between the columns are red sandstone jali screens.” Each corner of the superstructure holds a turret capped by a miniature dome.

Inside, the dome’s inner surface is painted in faded gold and vermilion; the colours, long dulled, are still visible under the right light. An iron chain hangs from the keystone, once, it is said, it held a golden cup that caught the lamplight. Zafar Hasan’s 1919 record notes that Mirza Ghulam Haider, a son of Akbar Shah II, built a verandah around the shrine, supported on red sandstone columns and intended as a shaded ambulatory for pilgrims. The structure, however, collapsed soon after completion; beneath the dome, the saint’s grave lies surrounded by the marble balustrade gifted by Khurshid Jah of Hyderabad in 1885, a donor who offered similar railings to all of Delhi’s major Chishti shrines.

The tomb is quiet. The only sound is the low murmur of visitors reciting the fatiha. Two caretaker sweeps the marble, and a child leaves a single marigold on the grave. The majlis khana still stands in one corner — a wooden throne once offered by Dukhni Begum in 1729, its carving dark with age. Nearby is the mosque now completely modernised, attributed to Farrukhsiyar, built of rubble masonry, its three bays opening into what is now a courtyard shaded by neem trees.

There are numerous other tombs and mosques from the Lodhi era which are breathing their last breath.

A Village Grown from Light

Stepping outside the complex, you feel the shift. The lanes grow tighter, the air busier. The dargah’s stillness is replaced by the hum of livelihood. This is where the idea of heterotopia becomes visible — a term borrowed from Michel Foucault to describe spaces that are both inside and outside the social order. Chirag Dilli, she wrote, “is a space of difference — integrated into the city’s function yet isolated from its form.”

The basti still follows its medieval morphology — narrow streets that open into small chowks, inward-facing houses with wooden balconies, their courtyards serving as both living and working spaces. INTACH’s 2016 survey recorded over twenty minor tombs and heritage structures within the precinct. Most are encroached upon or transformed — absorbed into the logic of survival.

Monuments in Disguise

When you enter Chirag Delhi today, it feels less like stepping into history and more like moving through layers of time that never fully settled. The basti doesn’t exist in a past-tense sense; it’s a continuous negotiation between what was built, what’s lived in, and what’s been buried. The irony is that while Delhi celebrates its grand ruins — the Humayun’s Tomb, the Qutub Minar, the Red Fort, the quieter spaces where faith lived and breathed have been left to fend for themselves. Chirag Delhi is one of them, and can’t talk about Chirag Delhi without mentioning the other very important tomb that defines its historical topography: The tomb of Sultan Bahlol Lodi, founder of the Lodi dynasty.

Just beyond the Dargah, it was built by his son Sikandar after Bahlol died in 1489; it was meant to be the royal anchor to a saintly landscape. Babur mentions visiting it in his Baburnama, remarking on the gardens and the “resting place of the Sultan of good nature.” Today, there’s no garden, no grandeur. The tomb's surroundings and gates have been converted into a home.

A few yards away stands a mosque that was once part of this royal ensemble, unfinished, according to Molvi, with its domes never completed, and is now completely encroached in the ghetto.

Walk a few hundred metres southeast, and you’ll find another remnant, the Tomb of Haji Begum, or as Zafar Hasan and later ASI reports call it, Haji Khanam’s Tomb. Built of rubble masonry, it once stood within an enclosure with turrets and fluted plaster, each corner crowned with small domes. There was even a wall-type mosque built into the western façade.

Today, it’s something else entirely. The Tomb and the Gateway are still there, but the monument has been absorbed into a single building, flat and the kitchen of a mithai shop. The grave chamber is now a kitchen. Flames rise where lamps once burned.

I stood there once, watching a man making Khoa outside the dome, preparing for Diwali, and thought of how this transformation is neither desecration nor preservation, it’s adaptation. The tomb survives precisely because it’s still in use.

The Gates of the fortification

The old fortification of Chirag Delhi once had four main gates, the Delhi Gate, the Takht Darwaza, the Lahore Gate, and the Darichi Gate — each facing a cardinal direction, forming the square that still defines the village’s core. Muhammad bin Tughlaq’s builders aligned the gates with both the stream (the Satpula tributary) and the bazaar axis, creating a symbolic geometry between trade, water, and faith. The bazaar ran through the heart of the fort. Today, two gates still exist, though barely.

The Nullah and the Edge of the Village

Chirag Delhi sits within the Kushak Nullah basin — one of the oldest and largest watershed systems in Delhi, stretching from the Ridge through South Delhi to the Yamuna. Once a flowing network of nahrs and johars that fed the Satpula dam and irrigated fields around Jahanpanah, the nullah is now a grey-brown trench carrying the city’s waste.

The DDA’s City-Level Project Report describes the area clinically: “The nullah has been transformed from a nahr to a drain. The edge has become a solid-waste accumulation site. Water pipelines run beneath the bridge; pedestrian crossings have turned into vehicle paths.” That language — bureaucratic, dry — doesn’t capture the smell, the flies, or the irony of a saint’s village surrounded by sewage.

The Ain-i-Akbari, in its topographical listings of Delhi’s suburbs, even mentions the “Basti of Nasiruddin,” noting that it was known for its chashma-e-shirin — “a spring of sweet water.”. Today, that same channel is a blackened nullah, the Kushak drain, choked with plastic, silt, and the city’s waste. What once carried water that was blessed is now little more than a foul scar running along the village’s edge. The DDA’s city-level report describes it mechanically: “The nullah has been transformed from a nahr to a drain. Its edge has become a solid-waste accumulation site.”

The Urban Village

After Independence, Chirag Delhi changed more than it had in five centuries. The Delhi Gazetteer of 1883 recorded it as a small Muslim hamlet of around 600 residents. By the 1950s, after Partition, many khadim families migrated to Pakistan, and the land was taken over by Jat and refugee communities. The DDA acquired the surrounding farmland for resettlement — the agricultural edge disappeared.

By the 1991 census, the population had reached 13,000; by 2001, the precinct housed over 45,000 people within just 1.84 square kilometres. Most buildings are now three to five storeys high, built cheek-by-jowl, each level added as need or rent demanded. The original courtyard typology has nearly vanished, replaced by concrete boxes with metal staircases, yet one thing from the hyperlocal architecture that survives is its chowks, open squares that act as both social and spatial anchors. Chirag Delhi has three: Bohran Chowk, Bazaar Chowk, and Sadela Kuan Chowk.

Bohran Chowk sits on the main axis connecting the four gates. Its name comes from the Bohran Muslims who once lived nearby, known for their well-digging skills. middle has been covered for safety, but people still gather around it, drinking tea, gossiping, and arguing about cricket.

Bazaar Chowk, just outside the dargah, is the busiest. It has vegetable stalls, flower vendors, and food carts. Then there’s Sadela Kuan Chowk, ironically named after its “sweet water well.” Local lore says a tunnel once connected it to Tughlakabad Fort. Whether true or not, it shows how deeply myth runs through this village’s soil.

Encroachments as Continuity

To an outsider, the word “encroachment” sounds negative. But in Delhi’s heritage settlements, it’s often a synonym for survival. The tombs, mosques, and courtyards of Chirag Delhi have been encroached not by greed, but by habitation, by the need to live.

The boundary wall of the dargah has rooms built into it. The space that once held the baoli is now filled with concrete foundations. Zafar Molvi noted as early as 1919 that many of the minor tombs had been converted into homes or storehouses. Over a century later, the situation is the same — except that the homes now have electricity and satellite dishes.

Geographically, it’s at the centre of South Delhi, ringed by Panchsheel Enclave, Sheikh Sarai, and Soami Nagar, all orderly, gated colonies. Yet it belongs to another rhythm entirely. The Outer Ring Road rushes around it, the Metro passes above it, but time inside moves differently.

It’s an inverted village, as Abraham describes: once inward-looking, with its soul at the dargah, now forced to face outward — toward roads, traffic, and modernity. The saint’s lamp still glows, but it now does so behind a screen of cables, neon signs, and mobile towers.

Epilogue: The Quiet Survival of Faith

When I leave Chirag Delhi, I always pass through the Gate. It’s barely a gate now — just a fragment of a later Mughal arch, half-swallowed by concrete. But as I cross it, I imagine the processions that once passed through, disciples carrying lamps, pilgrims singing hamd and natiya kalam, the air thick with the scent of oil and dust.

I think of Nasiruddin Mahmud, the Lamp of Delhi, who once held a pot of water and made it burn. Maybe that’s what Delhi does too, it takes whatever it’s given, even the most impure, and turns it into light.

The saint’s dargah may be hemmed in by encroachment and decay, but its essence still holds. It’s a reminder that cities, like faith, survive not through preservation alone, but through participation, through people living among the ruins, keeping the lamp lit, even when the oil runs low.

با کارم و بے کارم چوں مد بہ حساب اندر
With and without my deeds, as if counted inwardly.

Reading Material

1. Nizami, K.A. The Life and Times of Shaikh Nasiruddin Chiragh-i-Delhi. Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 1991.

2. Asher, C.B. Architecture of Mughal India. Cambridge University Press, 1992.

3. Gupta, N. “Encroachment and Cultural Memory: Delhi’s Forgotten Sufi Spaces.” Indian Journal of Heritage

Studies 5(1), 2018.

4. Sharma, R. “The Village Within the City: Chirag Dilli’s Transformation.” Urban India Journal 40(2), 2020.

5. Archaeological Survey of India, Annual Report 2019 2020.

6. INTACH Delhi Chapter Report, 2016.

7. Koch, E. “Delhi and Its Monuments: Forgotten Urban Layers.” Oxford Art Journal, 2006.

The Arrival of Purity

In the early 18th century, thousands of miles away in the Arabian Peninsula, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab launched a movement to purge Islam of what he saw as “innovations”, practices like saint veneration, shrine visitation, and intercession. His alliance with the House of Saud gave birth to a militant reformism whose rallying cry was tawḥīd, or absolute monotheism, reinterpreted in the narrowest possible sense.

Wahhabism saw centuries of Muslim devotional practices as corruption. Its logic was not one of inclusion but of purification, an obsession with rooting out anything “impure.”

At first, this ideology seemed distant to South Asia’s Muslims. But the world was shrinking. And with colonial disruption came new channels for Wahhabi thought.

Colonialism and the Crisis of Muslim Identity

The British Raj upended South Asia’s traditional power structures. With the fall of the Mughal Empire, Muslim elites faced a crisis of authority and identity. Reformers sought to “save” Islam from decline, not by returning to its inclusive local traditions, but by purifying it.

Wahhabi ideas found new life in the writings of Shah Waliullah of Delhi (1703–1762) and his followers. Though Waliullah’s vision was more complex and rooted in renewal rather than eradication, later generations, such as Sayyid Ahmad Barelvi and Shah Ismail Dehlvi, imported a distinctly Wahhabi-like zeal for “cleansing” Indian Islam of local customs.

These reformers led militant jihads against both British and “idolatrous” Muslims, declaring shrine visitation and intercession acts of shirk (polytheism). Their wars were crushed, but the intellectual aftershocks remained.

The Deoband Revolution

In 1866, just nine years after the failed Indian Rebellion, a group of scholars founded the Darul Uloom Deoband seminary in north India. Their goal: rebuild Islam from the ashes, brick by brick, free from Western influence and local “corruptions.”

Though Deoband was not Wahhabi in origin, it absorbed much of Wahhabism’s austere literalism. The emphasis on scriptural purity, the suspicion of Sufism, and the rejection of music and shrine culture slowly displaced the region’s softer spiritual traditions.

The irony was profound: in resisting colonial modernity, the Deobandi reformers imported a theological modernism of their own — one that reduced Islam to rules, codes, and binaries.

Recently, when a scholar from Darul Uloom Deoband met a Taliban minister, they had a chance to question the regime’s harsh treatment of women, but chose silence instead. That silence was telling: a movement once rooted in moral revival now hesitated to defend justice, revealing how political caution had replaced prophetic courage.

The Saudi Oil and the Global Spread

In the 20th century, Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth globalised Wahhabism. South Asian students flocked to Medina and Riyadh on scholarships, returning with new certainties and new enemies, especially against Sufism, Shi’ism, and syncretic Islam.

Gatherings that once echoed with qawwali and devotional poetry now hosted sermons denouncing “innovation.” Shrines that once fed the poor became targets of derision — and, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, of violence.

Groups like the Ahl-i-Hadith and Jamaat-e-Islami became conduits for this austere Islam. And in the 1980s, during the Afghan jihad, Wahhabi funding and ideology flooded the region, arming not only militias but also minds.

What had once been a living tradition of tolerance and emotional faith was replaced by an imported puritanism that sought to erase difference.

The Cultural Consequences

South Asian Islam’s richness lay in its hybridity, its ability to absorb and adapt. The poetry of Rumi and Rahman Baba, the rituals of Urs festivals, and the languages of devotion (Persian, Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Bengali) once connected faith to daily life.

Wahhabism severed that link. It desacralized culture itself.

In its drive for “authenticity,” it stripped Islam of its regional beauty. Shrines were rebranded as superstition. Devotional poetry as heresy. Women’s spiritual authority, once present in Sufi networks, was diminished. The faith became more masculine, hierarchical, and literal.

Today, the imprint of Wahhabism can be seen across South Asia’s religious landscape, from sectarian violence in Pakistan to the rise of caste discourse in India and Bangladesh. The homogenising impulse of Wahhabi-inspired reform has eroded centuries of intercommunal coexistence.

Where once Islam was woven into the local — in music, in art, in festivals — it now often stands in opposition to it.

Reclaiming the Lost Soul

But the story isn’t over. Across South Asia, young Muslims are rediscovering their heritage — turning back to Sufi music, local spirituality, and intellectual pluralism. Scholars and artists are reclaiming the Islam of the saints, the poets, and the weavers of peace.

South Asia’s Islam once taught that the heart has its own theology. Perhaps it is time to listen again.

Recommended Reading

• Robinson, F. (2000). Islam and Muslim History in South Asia. Oxford University Press.

• Nasr, S. V. R. (1994). The Vanguard of the Islamic Revolution: The Jama‘at-i Islami of Pakistan. University of California Press.

• Reetz, D. (2006). Islam in the Public Sphere: Religious Groups in India, 1900–1947. Oxford University Press.

But even as a boy, some details felt… off. The sloping red-roofed bungalows. The neat clubs. The old libraries full of technical manuals stamped with German names like Krupp and Siemens. My grandfather in Jamshedpur could read a little German.
I never asked about it then. But as I grew older, the question took shape:

Why were there so many traces of Germany in our steel towns? And were they just traces — or something deeper?

A Post-War Puzzle

India in the 1950s was desperate to build. Nehru’s dream of self-reliance rested on steel. But we didn’t have the technology or the engineers to produce it at scale.

So we looked outward — and because we were non-aligned, we could work with everyone. Bhilai came with the Soviets. Durgapur with the British. And Rourkela, with the West Germans.

On paper, it was a clean deal. A consortium of four German industrial giants - Krupp, Mannesmann, Demag, Siemens - would provide machinery, training, and experts to set up the first Indian plant using the cutting-edge Linz-Donawitz process.

But here’s what makes me pause. These weren’t ordinary companies. They had been the industrial backbone of Hitler’s Germany. Krupp, especially, had manufactured weapons and used slave labour from concentration camps. Its leaders were tried at Nuremberg but released early when the West decided to rebuild Germany quickly.

And then, less than a decade later, their engineers were here — in Odisha — building our steel plant.

Where Fact Ends and Suspicion Begins

Officially, Rourkela was a partnership with a democratic West Germany. Unofficially, it’s hard not to wonder how many of the men who came to India had served the Nazi war effort. Denazification was famously lax. Millions of engineers, managers, and technicians who had worked for Hitler’s regime were quietly absorbed into the post-war industry.

So when I picture those bungalows and manuals now, I can’t help but feel there’s more to the story. Maybe it wasn’t just technology we imported, but a workforce shaped by an ideology the world was still trying to forget.

And then there’s Kurt Tank.

In 1956, Nehru personally invited this Nazi engineer, who had designed fighter planes for the Luftwaffe, to come to India. He lived in Bangalore, where he developed India's first indigenous jet fighter, the HAL Marut. That is not a conspiracy. It’s a documented fact.

If we brought a man like Tank for aircraft design, is it really impossible that other former Nazis — lower-profile engineers and specialists — found their way into our steel projects too?

Jamshedpur: Not So Separate After All

Everyone says Jamshedpur is different. Tata Steel was founded in 1907, long before Hitler. Its 1950s expansion was led by the American firm Kaiser Engineering, not the Germans.

And yet, as a child, I saw those same German traces here too. The manuals. The accents. My Abba’s bits of German, he mentioned working with German “Sahibs”, the names and bungalows that felt more European than Indian.

Was it just the global spread of technology? Or were some of the same men moving quietly between these industrial towns, leaving faint fingerprints of a history we don’t like to look at too closely?

I don’t know. But it feels plausible.

Memory, Myth, and Possibility

This is what fascinates me. On paper, there’s no proof that Nazis came to India to build our steel plants. But there is proof that India recruited at least one high-level ex-Nazi for its fighter jet programme. There is proof that the companies behind Rourkela were the same ones that had powered Hitler’s war machine. There is proof that denazification was soft and selective.

All of that together makes me think the neat, official story might not be the whole story.

Maybe those bungalows I remember weren’t just German-style houses. Maybe the men walking through them weren’t just anonymous engineers. Maybe my childhood glimpses of “foreignness” in Jamshedpur and Rourkela were fragments of a bigger, hidden history — one where post-war German expertise quietly built the skeleton of India’s modern industry.

I can’t prove it. But when I look back now, I feel it.

What You See, and What You Don’t

On the surface, the Red Fort is impressive enough. Massive red sandstone walls, Lahori Gate standing tall, the Diwan-i-Aam where emperors once addressed their people, the Diwan-i-Khas where Shah Jahan supposedly declared: If there is paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this. You stroll past the Rang Mahal, a few marble pavilions, and gardens that look orderly enough.

But here’s the thing: what you’re seeing is only a shell. The Red Fort, as it stands today, is a ruin not because time wore it down, but because it was gutted on purpose. After 1857, when the British recaptured Delhi, they made sure this fortress-palace could never again be a symbol of sovereignty. They demolished close to 80% of its inner structures.

Think about that for a second. Imagine Versailles bulldozed to rubble. Imagine the Forbidden City reduced to a handful of courtyards. That’s what happened here.

The sprawling palatial complex, the harem apartments said to be twice the size of any European palace, the Mehtab Bagh (Moonlight Garden), the Moti Mahal (Pearl Palace), all of it flattened. The debris wasn’t even treated with respect. The British used the rubble as filler to build their military barracks. The gardens you walk on today are literally levelled over ruins.

So when you visit, you’re not inside a Mughal palace; you’re inside an absence that has been landscaped into neat lawns.

A Stage for Humiliation

The story gets worse. After the 1857 Uprising, the Red Fort became a stage for colonial vengeance. The British didn’t just occupy it—they used it as a courtroom.

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was 82 years old at the time. He barely had real authority, yet he was put on trial inside his own palace. The Diwan-i-Khas, once the jewel of imperial Delhi, was turned into a makeshift courtroom where Zafar was accused of treason, waging war against the Crown, and even the murder of Christians

It wasn’t a trial-it was theatre. An inquisition dressed up as legality.

Nearly ninety years later, the same fort was used again for the INA trials. Once more, the halls of the Red Fort were weaponised as stages of humiliation, designed to remind Indians of their subjugation.

From Palace to Barracks

After the demolitions, the Red Fort was stripped of its character and turned into a military garrison. Barracks replaced pavilions. Marble walls were painted white or plastered over. Mughal pillars were substituted with brick. A 200-yard security clearance zone was established by literally bulldozing houses around the fort so cannons could fire unobstructed. It was military re-engineering. A conscious attempt to make the fort unusable for any future native power. What had once been the Qila-e-Mubarak, the Blessed Fort, became a cantonment.

Imagine the psychological effect: the heart of Mughal Delhi, the palace where emperors once presided, now filled with British soldiers living an austere barracks life. The displacement of grandeur by military monotony was itself a form of conquest.

Restoration or Cosmetic Repair?

By the time Lord Curzon stepped in around 1900, the damage was irreversible. Curzon, for all his flaws, did have an interest in conserving India’s monuments. He condemned the earlier vandalism and tried to restore what could be restored. He ordered repairs, reconstructed walls, replanted gardens, and even demanded stolen artefacts back from museums and collectors

But the truth is, no amount of restoration could bring back what had been erased. You can repaint walls and rebuild fountains, but you can’t resurrect an entire vanished palace. What we see now is a curated ruin, not a revival.

A National Symbol

Post-1947, Nehru hoisted the tricolour from the Lahori Gate, and since then, the Red Fort has become the annual stage for Independence Day. That symbolism is powerful, no doubt. Every year, millions watch the flag being raised from the same ramparts where the British once proclaimed their victory.

But here’s the paradox: the fort as it stands today is not a Mughal palace, not even fully a colonial garrison. It’s a scar. It embodies absence more than presence. Independence Day speeches, security perimeters, and tourist photographs can’t mask the fact that the fort we inherited is already a broken monument.

And perhaps that’s why it unsettles me so much. Unlike Humayun’s Tomb, which still carries an aura of grandeur, or Jama Masjid, which remains alive with prayer, the Red Fort feels empty. It is a museum of erasure, a symbol of how much was lost, and how little could be recovered.

Why It’s My Least Favourite

So when people ask me why I’m not enamoured with the Red Fort, this is what I mean. It’s not about crowds or ticket lines or even “overhype.” It’s about the violence baked into its very walls.

The Red Fort is a reminder that history is not just built, it’s also demolished, plundered, and repurposed. The grandeur of Shah Jahan’s Delhi could be reduced to rubble and replaced with barracks. That a symbol of sovereignty could be hollowed out and staged as a courtroom of humiliation.

Yes, it is important. Yes, it is iconic. But for me, it will always be the least favourite, because when I walk inside, I don’t see power or glory. I see a void where a palace once stood. I see a scar that Delhi still hasn’t healed.

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But who was P.N. Oak, and why are his theories considered "pseudohistory" rather than legitimate historical contributions?

The Man Behind the Theories

P.N. Oak was born in 1917 and served in the Indian National Army (INA) before becoming a journalist. In 1964, he founded the "Institute for Rewriting Indian History". The name of his organisation is a clear giveaway—it wasn't about objective historical inquiry, but about changing the existing historical record to align with his specific worldview.

Oak's claims went far beyond the Taj Mahal. He also asserted that the Kaaba in Mecca, the Vatican, and even Westminster Abbey were all originally Hindu temples. He even claimed that Christianity was a derivative of Hinduism and that English was a dialect of Sanskrit. His ambitious project aimed to recast global history through a Hindu-centric lens.

The Taj Mahal: A Case Study in Flawed Logic

Oak's most famous theory is that the Taj Mahal was originally a Hindu temple palace called "Tejo Mahalaya". He claimed to have "109 proofs" to support this idea, a tactic meant to create the illusion of comprehensive scholarly work.

Let's break down some of his key "proofs" and the actual evidence that debunks them.

• The Name: Oak argued that "Taj Mahal" isn't found in Mughal records and that it's a corruption of "Tejo Mahalaya". However, the name "Taj Mahal" is a popular reference to Mumtaz Mahal, whose name is in official records. Contemporary European visitors also used the term "Taj-e-Mahal".

• Architectural Features: He pointed to elements like the dome and the trident-shaped pinnacle, claiming they were Hindu motifs. In reality, the Taj Mahal is a masterpiece of Indo-Islamic architecture, a style that intentionally blends Hindu and Islamic forms. Mughal buildings often used Hindu motifs because Hindu craftsmen built them.

• Documentary "Evidence": Oak cited the Badshahnama, a court chronicle of Shah Jahan, as proof that the complex was a pre-existing mansion. But this completely misinterprets the text. The Badshahnama actually states that Shah Jahan acquired a piece of land—a garden retreat—from Raja Jai Singh and compensated him with four mansions. This was a common practice for imperial projects and is not evidence of usurpation.

Overwhelming Counter-Evidence

The historical record is clear. The construction of the Taj Mahal was started by Emperor Shah Jahan around 1631 AD, and the main mausoleum was completed by 1648 AD. Contemporary European travellers like Peter Mundy and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier even documented the construction while it was happening.

Furthermore, official bodies have conclusively dismissed Oak's claims. In 2000, the Supreme Court of India rejected his petition to declare the Taj Mahal a Hindu temple. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), the official custodian of the site, has repeatedly stated there is no evidence of a prior temple.

Beyond the Facts: The Flawed Methodology

The problem with Oak's work isn't just that his facts are wrong; it's that his entire methodology is flawed.

• "Delusional Etymologies": He used unscientific methods to "prove" Sanskrit origins for words across languages. For example, he claimed "Vatican" came from the Sanskrit word vatika (hermitage) and "Christianity" from Krishna-niti (the way of Krishna). This approach cherry-picks phonetic similarities while ignoring established linguistic rules.

• Fabricating Sources: Oak was known for selectively using and misinterpreting primary sources to fit his narrative. A particularly egregious example is his claim that an Arabic manuscript proved a Hindu king ruled Arabia, a source that no other scholar has ever been able to confirm.

Historians have widely dismissed Oak's work as "pseudo-scholarship" and a "polemical fantasy intended to denigrate Islam". His approach was not a quest for knowledge but a deliberate effort to create a new narrative to serve a political purpose.

Despite being discredited by academics and the judiciary, Oak's theories have found a new audience online. They are often used by right-wing movements to wage "politico-religious battles" and challenge secular narratives. The goal of such actions is not to win a legal or historical argument but to sow doubt and keep the political agenda in the public eye.

In the end, P.N. Oak's legacy isn't about history at all. It's a modern lesson in how a discredited narrative can be revived and weaponised through digital platforms, serving as an ideological weapon to justify political agendas in an age of misinformation.

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Now rewind a hundred years. In 1922, Maulvi Zafar Hasan of the Archaeological Survey of India published his Guide to Nizamu-d Din. His account takes us to a quieter village on the edge of Shahjahanabad, enclosed by a crumbling masonry wall. Pilgrims still came, the saint’s shrine was still the centre, but the atmosphere was slower, the space more open. Monuments stood with their scars, but the weight of the city did not yet press them in.

That was Nizamuddin then, a basti with saints and emperors buried side by side, still rural in its character, but already showing signs of neglect. A century later, the basti has become something else altogether: one of the most crowded localities in Delhi, both sacred and chaotic, where heritage is not a backdrop but part of daily survival.

Nizamuddin in 1922: The Sacred Village

Hasan’s guide is invaluable because it freezes the basti at a turning point. The great days of imperial patronage were over. The Tughlaqs, the Mughals, and the nobles of Delhi all had poured resources into building and repairing the dargah and its surrounding tombs. By the nineteenth century, this had withered into scattered acts of devotion: a noble adding a copper ceiling here, a Nawab repairing a verandah there. By 1922, the Archaeological Department was doing small repairs, but there was no grand vision.

Still, what Hasan describes is not a deserted ruin but a living village. The Pirzadas — descendants of the saint’s sister- occupied the southern enclosure known as the Kot. They were the custodians of the shrine, ensuring that rituals continued and pilgrims were welcomed. Their homes and courtyards pressed close against the old walls. Tombs became extensions of houses, mosques were used for storage or even residence, and open spaces filled up with domestic life. What conservationists today call “encroachment” was, in truth, simply how a community survived in the shadow of its saints.

And yet the sacred map was unmistakable. The dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya remained at the core, its marble verandah ringing with prayers. The Baoli, dug by the saint himself, still drew people who believed its brackish water could cure illness or ward off evil. On the seventeenth and eighteenth of Rabi’ al-Thani, the Urs of the saint brought thousands into the basti. Around him lay the graves of Amir Khusrau, his beloved disciple; the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah Rangila; princess Jahanara Begum, who chose to be buried humbly at his feet; Atgah Khan and his son Mirza Aziz Koka; and countless others who wanted to rest close to the saint.

So, even in decay, Nizamuddin in 1922 was still a sacred village. Its stones were cracked, its walls were falling, but its spiritual pulse was strong.

The Monuments Then and Now

Reading Maulvi Zafar Hasan’s guide, one is struck by how many monuments were already in decline in 1922, yet still recognisable in form and memory. The Baoli of Hazrat Nizamuddin, dug by the saint himself, was described as brackish but holy, its water believed to cure illness and drive out evil spirits, even as its steps descended dangerously deep. In 2008, its eastern wall collapsed, endangering dozens of families who had built homes over it, and it was only through painstaking restoration by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, lime mortar, hand-chiselled stone, engineering blended with craft, that both the monument and the residents survived. Unfortunately, the Baoli is clogged and dangerous for human use.

Not far away stood the Chaunsath Khamba, a marble pavilion with sixty-four pillars enclosing the grave of Mirza Aziz Koka, Akbar’s foster brother. Hasan admired its grace but noted the slow wear of age; today it has been painstakingly dismantled and rebuilt, every marble slab reset with stainless steel dowels in place of the rusting iron, a rare success story of conservation rooted in both engineering and craftsmanship. Atgah Khan’s Tomb, once inlaid with marble and tile, was already peeling by Hasan’s time. Despite ASI protection, its crypt is illegally occupied, its dignity undermined by encroachments that no legal notice has managed to dislodge.

Lal Mahal, the oldest surviving palace of Delhi, was described by Hasan as much dilapidated, its walls gnawed by villagers; in 2008, private builders demolished large portions, and today only fragments remain, a symbol of institutional neglect where no conservation plan could withstand the pressures of real estate. Other structures, too, carried the scars of time: Chini ka Burj was in a “dilapidated state” a century ago, used casually as a diving platform by local boys, and today its fading tiles survive almost invisibly amid the basti; the Khanqah of Bahram Shah, which Hasan found filled with debris and overgrown with vegetation, has been cleaned but still lies forgotten, overshadowed by more famous shrines. The tomb of Khan-i Jahan Tilangani, Delhi’s first great octagonal tomb and a prototype for Humayun’s, was already “thickly populated by the Pirzadas” in Hasan’s day; today it remains absorbed into the life of the basti, its architecture still visible but pressed upon by homes and everyday activity.

Yet amidst this decline, some sites have held their dignity. Hasan described Jahanara Begum’s resting place as a simple marble platform inscribed with her wish to be covered with grass, and even now it retains that simplicity, a pause of humility in the crowded dargah complex. Together, these monuments tell a layered story. Some, like the Baoli and Chaunsath Khamba, have been pulled back from collapse through modern conservation; Many, like Lal Mahal, reveal how legal protection means little without enforcement; others, like Tilangani’s tomb, show how monuments have been domesticated, absorbed into the life of the basti rather than preserved apart from it. A century after Zafar Hasan walked these lanes, the fate of each monument demonstrates the larger truth of Nizamuddin itself: where heritage survives, declines, or transforms not in isolation, but in negotiation with the community that lives among it.

From Neglect to Renewal

By the early 2000s, Hazrat Nizamuddin had become one of Delhi’s most congested neighbourhoods. One in four homes had no toilets, waste piled up in lanes, and drug abuse was rampant. Heritage here seemed to be collapsing quietly. Outsiders dismissed the basti as a ghetto, forgetting the deeper history of how it became so dense in the first place. Partition in 1947 drove thousands of Muslim families to places like Nizamuddin, and every riot after that pushed more people into these “safe” pockets. Over decades, the basti turned into both a sanctuary and prison, a neighbourhood shaped as much by prejudice and displacement as by devotion to the saint. Monuments became homes, courtyards became crowded living quarters, and the grand necropolis of Delhi was slowly folded into the everyday survival of its poorest residents.

When conservation finally arrived in the 2000s, it came selectively. The initiative that began here proved something important: that monuments can be restored when money and skill are available, but it also revealed how shallow these victories are when the wider fabric of the settlement remains overcrowded, underserved, and marginalised.

And yet, amidst the decay and the partial revivals, some threads hold. The Pirzadas are still custodians of the shrine. The dargah still draws pilgrims every evening, its courtyards alive with prayer. Qawwali, once intimate and almost private, has become the basti’s public heartbeat. The rituals, the music, and the faith have outlived empires and neglect alike.

But that continuity is double-edged. It shows resilience, but it also hides a deeper failure: faith and memory are doing the work that institutions, governments, and agencies have repeatedly failed to do.

A century ago, Zafar Hasan walked these lanes and recorded a basti of saints, tombs, and ruins. Today, the same lanes are louder, denser, and poorer, their monuments scarred and hemmed in. Between then and now lies not only a century of neglect, but also the long shadow of Partition and riots that forced Delhi’s Muslims into ghettos of survival.

But something shifted dramatically in the 20th century. A new visual vocabulary emerged, one that, while perhaps well-intentioned, has begun to obscure, and in some cases, actively erase, the very essence of this rich heritage. This is the story of how a distant symbol and a technological revolution converged to paint over centuries of architectural identity, leaving many of our historical mosques, tombs, and monuments cloaked in an aesthetic that is, ironically, destroying their original soul.

The Original Canvas: A story of Stone and Earth

Imagine the great monuments of India's Islamic past: the Qutub Minar, the Red Fort, the Jama Masjid. Their grandeur wasn't just in their scale, but in their profound connection to the land. Red sandstone, quarried from Rajasthan and imbued with iron oxide, lent a "high energy level" and eye-catching presence to structures across the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire. This vibrant red often contrasted strikingly with the pristine white marble, a bold polychromy achieved through nature's palette, distinct from the tiled facades of Persia or Central Asia.

Even seemingly humble materials played their part. Pale stucco and lime plaster, while often serving as a base, could be subtly manipulated to create a unique aesthetic. In Lucknow, for instance, lime plaster developed a "distinct pink colour" due to the inclusion of brick surkhi (pulverised bricks) and marble dust, showcasing a sophisticated regional craft. Lakhori bricks, thin and red, were prized for their ability to create intricate patterns and fine details. However, their inherent colour was typically covered by plaster, serving a functional rather than a primary aesthetic role.

In this pre-modern era, colour was a direct expression of materiality. It was a mirror of local resources and the unparalleled skill of Indian stonemasons. The aesthetic was practical, sustainable, and deeply "rooted in the subcontinent’s geology and artistic traditions".

A Distant Echo, A Local Transformation: The Green Dome of Medina

The rupture in this material-driven aesthetic can be traced, in large part, to a pivotal event far from India's shores: the symbolic painting of the Prophet’s Mosque dome in Medina. While the dome over Prophet Muhammad's tomb was first constructed in 1279 CE as an unpainted wooden cupola, and later painted white and then blue, its iconic green hue is a relatively recent development. It was only in 1837 CE, by order of the Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Hamid II, that the dome was first painted green.

This decision, though an architectural innovation and even criticised by some scholars as a deviation from early Islamic principles, rapidly transformed the dome into a globally recognised symbol of love for the Prophet and the city of Medina. Green, already holding profound associations in Islam with paradise, purity, and the Prophet himself, became amplified through this iconic structure.

The Printing Press: Democratising Colour, Standardising Aesthetics

Concurrently, a technological revolution was sweeping across India: lithographic printing. Introduced in 1820, it truly flourished in the late 19th century, democratising access to religious imagery like never before. Raja Ravi Varma, a pioneering Indian painter, established the Ravi Varma Fine Art Lithographic Press in 1894, mass-producing vibrant images of Hindu gods and goddesses. His oleographs, celebrated for their "stunning use of colour" and "vibrant colour tones," made high-quality religious art accessible and affordable to all, profoundly shaping India's visual culture.

This mass production of religious ephemera, including popular prints and textiles, further normalised a new, often symbolic, colour vocabulary. Green, already imbued with deep Islamic symbolism, became ubiquitous in these widely circulated images. The ability to reproduce any colour, independent of the base material, meant that colour could now be chosen purely for its symbolic meaning and visual impact, rather than its geological origin. This visual conditioning, driven by popular media, primed the public for the acceptance and desire for such symbolic colours in architectural contexts.

The Unintended Consequence: Green Paint and the Erosion of Heritage

The convergence of the Green Dome's iconic status and the democratisation of colour through print and paint led to a profound, and arguably detrimental, shift in Indian Islamic architecture. Green, once rare as a dominant architectural colour, became "ubiquitous" on mosque domes, shrines, and ornamentation across India. This widespread adoption was a powerful act of visual emulation, a desire to connect local structures with a globally recognised symbol of Islamic identity and the ummat.

However, this shift came at a cost. The ability to apply paint and tiles meant that colour was no longer intrinsic to the building material. It became a superficial layer, often obscuring the original red sandstone, white marble, or pale stucco that had defined these structures for centuries. This "democratisation of colour" allowed for symbolic meaning to override the inherent beauty and historical integrity of the original materials.

Today, we see countless historical mosques and tombs, once resplendent in their natural stone hues, now covered in layers of green paint or modern green tiles. While this transformation might be driven by piety and a desire to align with a global aesthetic, it inadvertently erases the unique regional identity and material honesty that characterised pre-modern Indian Islamic architecture. It's a move from the "geology of place to the imagery of the ummah", mediated by paint and popular imagination, that risks painting over the very history we seek to preserve.

The challenge before us is to appreciate the profound symbolism of green in Islam while also recognising the irreplaceable value of our architectural heritage's original material palette. Can we find a way to honour both the global ummah and the unique "geology of place" that shaped India's magnificent Islamic structures? Or will the green veil continue to spread, slowly but surely, erasing the authentic colours of our past?

The Shah Ji Temple in Vrindavan — locally known as Tede Khambe Wala Mandir for its striking spiral-shaped pillars that look like they’ve been gently twisted by some divine force. Thirteen feet tall and thirty-five inches wide, these marble columns hold up more than just the structure — they hold stories.

Dedicated to Lord Krishna, the temple houses a small idol affectionately called Chote Radha Raman, carved from Italian marble and cloaked in delicate beauty. The main hall, or Basanti Kamra, stays locked away most of the year, its secrets revealed only twice annually on Basant Panchami. Inside, Belgium glass, radiant chandeliers, and ornate paintings portray Radha and Krishna not in rustic meadows, but in the courtly robes of Lucknow — a nod to the Nawabi aesthetic that defines this temple.

But why Lucknow in Vrindavan?

The answer lies with the temple's founders — Shah Kundan Lal and Shah Phundan Lal, two banker brothers from Awadh who migrated to Vrindavan after the British annexation of their homeland. In exile, they turned nostalgia into architecture. The Gopikas in the temple panels are not clad in the traditional ghagras of Braj, but in Lucknowi sharara sets, dancing in Krishna's durbar like noblewomen of the Nawab’s court. There are eleven such celestial dancers carved into the ceilings. The twelfth figure? None other than Nawab Wajid Ali Shah himself, painted in the act of devotion to Lord Radha Raman.

And then there's the fountain in the centre, its gentle gurgle echoing through the marble courtyard, softening the might of what feels like a palace as much as it is a temple.

The Naga Commander Who Built and Battled

Among the most fascinating figures tied to Shah Ji Temple is Anupgiri Gossain, also known as Himmat Bahadur — a title given by the Mughals meaning Great of Courage. An ascetic devoted to Shiva, Anupgiri was no ordinary sadhu. He was a Naga warrior — part of an order often described as "naked, ash-smeared holy men" who were, in the 18th century, also fierce cavalry and infantry leaders.

According to William R. Pinch in Warrior Ascetics and Indian Empires, Anupgiri and his brother Umraogiri commanded more than 20,000 soldiers, many armed with rockets and cannons. These ascetic armies were not just symbolic; they were decisive players in the subcontinent’s most volatile power struggles.

Anupgiri’s warriors fought in the Battle of Panipat (1761), supporting the Afghans and the Mughal emperor against the Marathas. He was present again at Buxar (1764), this time opposing the British. Historian William Dalrymple recounts how Anupgiri arrived with 6,000 dreadlocked Nagas and 40 cannon, tipping the balance in multiple conflicts.

By the turn of the century, however, allegiances shifted. In a twist of fate — and perhaps, strategy — Anupgiri aided the British in their conquest of Delhi in 1803, ultimately facilitating the East India Company’s rise as the dominant power in India. A man of faith, fire, and formidable adaptability.

Interestingly, the Ganga statue inside Shah Ji Temple was donated by Anupgiri himself — a quiet nod to a warrior’s devotion amidst a life of chaos.

Even Ahmad Shah Abdali, the powerful Afghan ruler, is said to have feared these Naga warriors — a rare sentiment in a time where terror was more often dealt than felt.

The Sacred and the Strategic

Shah Ji Temple is not just another temple in Vrindavan — it's a layered memory of migration, devotion, artistry, and militaristic might. It is where Awadh met Braj, where Radha’s Ras Lila played out in Lucknowi silk, and where a naked warrior once traded weapons for worship.

To walk through its marble halls is to step into a confluence — where the aesthetic meets the strategic, where devotion dances with displacement, and where history, ever so quietly, rests in spiraled pillars.