Introduction
This article examines the meanings and uses associated with Delhi’s Islamicate sites within the city’s evolving political economy from 1857 to 2010.Footnote 1 Tracing rural and urban land use over the twentieth century, I argue that these sites became incorporated into a topography of monumentality in conjunction with an expanding urban landscape in the twentieth century, and trace the forms of land acquisition over the period. More specifically, the article looks at this shifting relationship through the lens of land acquisition, forms of compensation, and the politics of dispossession in Delhi: first of peasants and then of workers. The shift to an urban, commercial, and industrializing capital over the twentieth century led to a new relationship between the city and the ‘monument’. The city shaped the historical site’s aesthetic through the signifier of monumentality and an emerging colonial discourse on conservation, while the monument itself was (re)produced by changing land-use patterns and mass evictions.
There is a rich literature on the afterlives, reception, and affective associations of Delhi’s monuments. Mrinalini Rajagopalan offers valuable insights into the ‘afterlives’ of five Delhi monuments, primarily in terms of the contested socio-political relationships that destabilize the statist imposition of a fixed meaning on the ‘monument’.Footnote 2 Anand Taneja focuses on the space between statist impositions and more subaltern meanings of monuments by studying forms of religious practices of a heterogeneous ‘subaltern’, subverting the state’s presumption of the monument as a ‘dead’ historical site.Footnote 3 An important contribution to the category of monumentality is provided by Hilal Ahmed, who traces the religious-nationalist politics of the monument, constructed as a ‘dead’ site defined via its physical characteristics, a surveyal and enumerative assessment of the monument, and its periodization, which determines its age value.Footnote 4
A more exhaustive study of monumentality emerges from Aditi Chandra’s work, which considers the topography around historical sites across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in terms of landscaping, as critical to the production of the monument.Footnote 5 The landscaping of the monument resulted in the displacement of and restricted entry for local populations to these sites. Deborah Sutton has also provided important insights on the complex status of monuments over the twentieth century, with Delhi’s residents using them for mixed purposes, often subverting official desires for conservation and displacement, creating a ‘hybrid monument’ that was ‘animated by the plural lives of the city that lay beyond the reach and relevance of the ASI [Archaeological Survey of India] but operated within the physical and bureaucratic regime of conservation’.Footnote 6
I intervene in this literature by focusing on the material impact of conservation, as reshaping the surrounding topography became integral to monument making. Looking at the fate of peasants and workers in Delhi, as the capital city shifted to a new form of urban monumentality based in land acquisition and dispossession, I provide a critique of ongoing conservation policies which have, from the first instance, adversely impacted precarious populations. Focusing on changing rural and urban economies and people’s socio-economic conditions within, I trace how the logic of monumentality within Delhi’s urban process has been situated in recurrent cycles of dispossession. With a direct focus on land acquisition, I assess the growing centrality of monumentality, and then ‘heritage’, to the urban process under capitalist regimes, as well as their foundational basis in increasingly extractive and intensified forms of acquisition.
This article is divided as follows. The first section analyses the changing treatment of historical sites and the conceptualization of Delhi as a historic city after the Mutiny of 1857. The second section looks at the en masse conservation of Delhi’s historical sites, as the colonial state transformed them into ‘monuments’ through acquiring village land and forcefully evicting peasant populations. It contextualizes this emergent monumentality in international discourses around archaeology, the establishment of the ASI, and urban transitions in Delhi. The third section traces the changing contours of conservation policies in the post-Independence period. Forced displacement continues to be a defining characteristic of state-led conservation, but within a changing economic and legislative context in which Delhi’s informal workers now face a disproportionate economic burden of these policies. Conservation has been accepted as the normative treatment for historical sites over the colonial and post-Independence period across different iterations of governance and planning. Today, this drive is still fuelled by the attempt to build Delhi as a ‘world-class’ city which considers ‘elements of the present not suitably world class—most notably the slum—as anachronistic’ to the desired future.Footnote 7 The reproduction of the monument within state-driven and neoliberal urbanism has been based on intensified and cyclical eviction drives to remove workers from its surroundings, particularly with beautification drives during the Emergency, the 1982 Asian Games, and the 2010 Commonwealth Games. By looking at this long temporal framework between 1857 and 2010, this article traces the transitions in economic regimes, land and property systems, and forms of dispossession that have defined the production of modern heritage.
Post-Mutiny commemorative landscapes
The Mutiny of 1857 was a critical moment in defining the fate of Delhi’s economy and built environment. In the aftermath of British victory over the rebels, and with the recapture of Delhi in September 1857, colonial policies (and in some cases arbitrary actions) redefined Shahjahanabad and its surrounding landscape through punitive demolitions, land confiscations, and property exchanges. Alongside, in the decades following the Mutiny, European perceptions and visits to the city reshaped Delhi’s commemorative and historical landscape, setting the framework for an increased recognition of Delhi as a historic city.Footnote 8
In the immediate aftermath of the Mutiny, British officials went on a rampage of looting and destroying Mughal structures as a display of British imperial power and victory over the defeated Mughal empire.Footnote 9 However, over time, colonial attitudes towards historical sites shifted from destruction to remembrance. Delhi became increasingly defined through commemorative architecture for fallen soldiers and the projected supersession of the British empire through control over Mughal architecture.Footnote 10 New memorial sites were constructed to pay homage to fallen officers, existing sites were memorialized as pivotal moments of the Mutiny, and cemeteries were constructed for European soldiers. Together, these sites constituted ‘Mutiny tours’ for visiting Europeans, who could visit all the sites of the Mutiny with the aid of a guidebook, as a form of commemorative practice.Footnote 11
From the 1870s, Mutiny tours became a regular part of European visitor itineraries. Prominent Mutiny sites, such as the Kashmiri Gate, or newly constructed memorials for British soldiers, such as Nicholson’s statue, became important commemorative spaces for emerging tours.Footnote 12 New guidebooks mapped the new commemorative landscape, featuring both Mutiny memorials and Mughal sites of war for visiting Europeans. Guidebooks, which provided an itinerary and charted a tour path, began to grow in numbers from the latter half of the nineteenth century. These and post-Mutiny travel accounts provided a defined route for a tour.
Manu Goswami has argued that there was a specificity to the Delhi Mutiny tour in its ambivalence towards Mughal imperial authority. There was a new production of history and historical memory that rejected other forms of historical remembrance around Delhi. There was also a simultaneous need to incorporate Delhi’s Islamicate architecture into circuits of travel while denying its potency. In the broader circuits of the tour across India, Goswami has also argued that texts overlapped significantly and resembled one another. There was a particular focus on ‘Mutiny cities’ in these guides for European visitors.Footnote 13
We can extend the pattern that Goswami considers in the Indian context to guidebooks that were solely about Delhi. Guidebooks from the 1860s remained almost identical in form. For example, if we look at H. G. Keene and E. A. Duncan’s Handbook for Visitors to Delhi and its Neighbourhoods, A. P. Harcourt’s The New Guide to Delhi, and Carr Stephens’ The Archaeology and Monumental Remains of Delhi, each written approximately a decade apart, we see almost the same structure and narrative across these texts.Footnote 14 They begin with a brief chronological history of imperial rule in Delhi, from the supposed construction of Indraprastha by Yudhishthira to the Mughal period. Either immediately preceding or following this history, they lay out a four-day itinerary for travellers, then proceed to describe the various sites by style and period of construction, along with accompanying anecdotes. Each of these books charts the same path: the area of the walled city on day one; the Purana Qila and Nizamuddin areas on day two; Mehrauli on day three; and Begumpur mosque, Khirki mosque, and the Sultan Garhi tomb on day four. Keene and Harcourt provide specific sections dedicated to noting and describing the sites of Mutiny, while Stephen weaves it into his narrative.
Many of the sites mentioned in guidebooks, such as Khairpur, Purana Qila, Tughlaqabad, Hauz Khas, and others, were inhabited by villagers. The land surrounding them consisted of agricultural, pastoral, and common lands. While there are brief, scattered mentions of villages and huts across these publications, they appear far more as throwaways in the broader context of describing historical sites. The only detailed descriptions are of boys and young men diving for coins at the well in Nizamuddin, as an exotic curiosity.Footnote 15 The evocation of Delhi’s historical sites and surrounding topography is of a barren land, with little mention of the agricultural economy and of the peasantry living and working within them.Footnote 16
Despite increasing visitation, the emergence of new guidebooks, and the construction of a commemorative landscape, most of these historical sites witnessed no radical material intervention in being ‘conserved’ or even repaired. In several cases, the state took direct control of religious property and repurposed it for government use. Property negotiations, which most often concerned claims between individuals and non-state entities, extended to sites that were occupied by state institutions. As Narayani Gupta argues, post-Mutiny Delhi witnessed an increased military presence such that ‘the city functioned solely as a cantonment’.Footnote 17 This growing armed presence and police forces were accommodated in confiscated properties and Mughal sites. For example, part of the Mubarak Begum mosque came into police possession and use after 1857.Footnote 18 This kind of takeover was not an unusual trend in what Nayanjot Lahiri has, following Bernard Cohn, termed an ‘intentional “desacralization”’ of religious and Mughal sites.Footnote 19 In another example, the police had turned the Anglo-Arabic School into barracks after the Mutiny, until the school board negotiated its return and reuse as a school in 1883.Footnote 20 The Zinat-ul-Masjid was used as a bakery by the Commissariat department.Footnote 21 In some cases, Mughal walls and gates lay in the path of proposed urban construction to either decongest the walled city or create new transport networks. The state demolished the Mori Gate and Kabuli Gate to extend road networks to and from the walled city.Footnote 22 Lahori Gate was demolished in 1892 to link the city to the suburbs.Footnote 23
Even archaeologists continued to use historical sites for housing. While supervising excavations at the Qutub complex in the early 1870s, Henry Hardy Cole took residence in the nearby Adham Khan tomb. During his excavation projects, the archaeologist noted, he came across villagers housing a bull within the mosque complex.Footnote 24 Despite prior evictions it continued to be used by villagers in ways that contradicted the desires of colonial officials. Overall, while British victory during the Mutiny reshaped the politics of commemoration both physically and ideologically, there was little shift in the extent of repairs to historical sites. Newly circulating guidebooks of the nineteenth century did not present such sites within their social context and described a purely memorialized landscape emptied of the present. However, it was only in the twentieth century that these tendencies to see villagers as an impediment to touring the historical site were realized through a material emptying of these spaces by forced evictions.
The rise of conservation in Delhi: 1900–1947
Professionalized archaeology in colonial grounds
The basis and logic of producing the conserved monument in Delhi can be contextualized at three different levels. First, the global context of professionalized imperial archaeology, within which the ASI emerged as an institutional body to survey, document, and conserve monuments. Second, the legislative shifts on a subcontinental level that provided the procedural basis and legal stamp for the actual process of conservation. Third, Delhi’s own urban context, which had a new economy, landscape, and historical imaginary emerging from the twentieth century. Taken together, these three levels of historical transformation shaped the material process of conservation.
The archaeological policies and frameworks of conservation in India were constituted through and took form within an increasingly state-led archaeological enterprise at a more global level. The imperative to govern colonial landscapes and people became a critical context to state-led professionalized archaeology. Colonial archaeology and the reuse of historical sites comprised a widespread basis for governance, control, and displacement across West Asia, North Africa, and the Indian subcontinent, as various scholars have demonstrated.Footnote 25 Within this framework, the communities living in the areas surrounding important archaeological sites came to be seen as antithetical to conservation projects, and were often displaced to pursue monument conservation.Footnote 26 Colonial archaeology became one more way to control, discipline, and displace people in the larger drive of economic and political subjugation of colonized lands. Archaeology in the colonies became an important ground for nationalist politics. Increasing pressure from the metropole led to an institutionalized focus on preservation in relation to projecting an ‘enlightened government, and the manifestation of cultural attainment’.Footnote 27
Scholars have pointed to the mid- to late nineteenth century, and particularly from the 1870s, as the moment of a shift to ‘professionalized’ archaeology. Archaeology in India was imbricated within a new imperial matrix across British, French, and German empires, often situated within a growing ‘competitive nationalism’ between empires.Footnote 28 With archaeology turning into an important ground for nationalist politics, and increasing pressure from the metropole, colonial states developed an institutionalized focus on preservation. Melanie Hall, for example, has argued that the ‘formative period from 1870 to 1930 when the protection of specific places, or sites, moved from a cause of national and imperial concern to one of international concern’ was the point at which archaeological sites were rearticulated as ‘monumentalized icons’.Footnote 29
This professionalization of archaeology directly through state institutions was realized in India through the ASI. The ASI was established in 1861 with Alexander Cunningham as director general, subsequently abolished in 1865, and then finally re-established in 1871. After the emergence of the ASI, several archaeological surveys were conducted across the subcontinent, which recorded and indexed historical sites. Forms of working on a built site to maintain and repair can be placed into the categories of restoration and conservation. Restoration involved repairing the built structure to most closely replicate the imagined/supposed aesthetic of the site as it ‘originally’ was. Conservation involved accurately maintaining the monument in its contemporary found form and with no excess alterations, or ‘authentically’ preserving the site.Footnote 30
In the early to mid-nineteenth century, colonial officials of the East India Company followed a mixed logic of restoration, conservation, and repair, allowing for additions to structures in order to assert British imperial legitimacy. For example, renovations to the Qutub Minar (1823–1828) were done on an almost entirely restorative principle, to ‘repair’ the site to its original form while also adding built structures in order to ‘improve’ it, including a new cupola on top of the Minar.Footnote 31 In contrast, the ASI worked more with the principles of conservation, using clearly defined approaches provided to officers that ‘were more or less as they were prevalent in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain: ancient buildings were to be treated as sources of Indian history, with the aim of recovering the historical “authenticity” of built heritage’.Footnote 32 The idea of conservation based on the principles of authenticity was one cornerstone of the shifting form of engagement with the historical site over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote 33
Within conservation norms and in legal definitions, the monument has been understood as a ‘dead’ site to be preserved and witnessed. Tapati Guha-Thakurta argues that the colonial government was a knowledge-producing apparatus in terms of its larger strategy of governance and control, thus archaeology emerged as the imperative to ‘conserve and document’. With the in situ principle of preservation, Guha-Thakurta argues that there was an attempt to map the terrain of ancient India and render the entire terrain of the subcontinent and its archaeological sites into an ‘open air museum’.Footnote 34 Within this context, Hilal Ahmed argues that the monument materialized as a commemorative and legal entity. It emerged as a process of converting the historical into the monumental, a process of selection based on symbolism, history, physical character, and its preservation as heritage. This process presumed the separation of memory and history and a replacement of local histories with paradigmatic official history. The monument was constructed as a commemorative site, a signifier of a static past as history, a legal entity, and through the codification of scientific knowledge via the dominant narrative of history.Footnote 35 From the early twentieth century, Delhi’s historical sites were slowly swept up into this paradigm of conservation and monument making, made possible by new legislation, as discussed in the next section.
Conservation via dispossession: Legislative frameworks
The procedural basis of state-led conservation lay in two key pieces of legislation. The first of these was the Land Acquisition Act 1894. Prior to 1857, compensation for land acquisition was uneven and without a uniform legislative basis across the subcontinent. It was both province- and purpose-dependent. Legislative practices around land acquisition started taking shape in Bengal in 1824 for the acquisition of railways, followed by further legislation in 1850, expanding the scope of acquisition. Debjani Bhattacharya demonstrates that this legislation progressively constituted a stronger colonial claim to eminent domain, with an expanding definition of ‘public purpose’ for which private property could be acquired, and expanded the scope of applicability to the entire colony.Footnote 36
The 1894 Act was a key tool within the colonial legislature, systematizing the expansion of state control over land exchanges. It established the colonial state’s sovereignty in its claim to eminent domain via land acquisition. Property owners could contest and negotiate the amount of compensation but not land acquisition itself. This act was used to acquire land for railways, architectural conservation, the Ridge, and to construct the new capital.Footnote 37 An increasingly intrusive state mediated and controlled property relations and land exchanges. The mode of acquisition, eviction, and compensation became more consistent, though no less extractive. The Land Acquisition Act became the basis of monument conservation, landscaping, urban construction, and Ridge afforestation in the twentieth century. In many ways, this legislation has formed the backbone of modern Delhi, produced through mass land acquisitions to create the new capital and reformulate the old.
While the Land Acquisition Act facilitated acquisition for conservation, the 1904 Ancient Monuments Preservation Act (henceforth AMPA) defined the rules of conservation, placing historical sites within the exclusive domain of the state. Conservation was defined as the ‘authentic’ preservation of the historical site to maintain its given form with minimal changes. Conservation covered adjoining land that may be ‘required for fencing or covering in or otherwise preserving’ the monument, along with access routes, thus allowing for the acquisition of land around the site.Footnote 38 Monuments came under the sole maintenance of the commissioner appointed by the Central Government. Carrying into the post-Independence period, this legislation continues to be the basis of conservation practices, placing monuments within the domain of the ASI as an ‘exclusive preserve of the old state institution of colonial origins’.Footnote 39 This dual legislative shift was an essential feature in defining monuments, acquiring land for conservation, and laying out the process of compensation for residents. Additionally, this process can be characterized within larger topographical and economic shifts in Delhi that changed the urban economy and political landscape significantly, as explored below.
Producing urban Delhi as the capital city
Facilitated by these new legislative frameworks, Delhi’s urban expansion and emergent aesthetics towards a modern capital, complete with green zones and conserved monuments, went hand in hand with the economic shift towards greater commerce, mechanized production, and administrative centrality in the early twentieth century. The city’s economic shift can be seen clearly in the cotton industry. Narayani Gupta records that the number of employees in the cotton industry more than doubled from 1891 (5,000) to 1901 (11,000), reaching 23,000 by 1911. By 1900, there were 20 mills employing around 2,500 workers. Cotton mills, trading companies, and the banking sector were the top three spheres of investment in Delhi at the time.
From the early 1900s, the emerging class of Indian industrialists and bankers began to build northward and construct houses in the Civil Lines area. The integration of ‘suburbs’ with Shahjahanabad, due to the expansion of housing and commercial/manufacturing activity, led to an increasingly connected and expanding road network, which drew rural Delhi closer to the circuits of the urban centre and its political and economic life.Footnote 40 There was a steady growth in industrial production over the first three decades, with a temporary slump in the 1930s.Footnote 41 The 1912 Punjab Gazetteer stated that Delhi ‘takes first place as a commercial town perhaps in all Upper India …’ and that it was a ‘great distribution centre’ with an greater role in finance, commerce, and banking than before.Footnote 42
Construction activity also expanded rapidly from the 1900s due to the durbars of 1903 and 1911, and the declaration of Delhi as the new imperial capital in 1911. With the two durbars, the colonial government allocated increased funding for landscaping gardens and repairing historical sites as part of portraying imperial power and legitimacy. Gardeners were brought in from Britain to supervise the landscaping of gardens such as Roshanara Bagh, Begum ka Bagh, and Qudsia Bagh, in order to create public leisure sites following British aesthetics. Gardens at Humayun’s tomb and Safdarjung’s tomb were also renovated, as were the Hayat Baksh gardens in the Red Fort.Footnote 43 With each durbar, Delhi became a spectacular site of empire, with new landscaping, exhibits, art, the congregation of royalty, and the influx of visitors into the city.Footnote 44
If the durbars are a crucial factor to understand the shifting nature of historical sites in Delhi, the declaration of the city as the new capital is equally so. The construction of the new capital, after its announcement in 1911, led to an overwhelming shift in the landscape of the city. Land was acquired from nearly 200 villages for the new capital by utilizing the 1894 Land Acquisition Act.Footnote 45 This urban shift was also characterized by the construction of new road and transport networks that connected monuments with each other for the convenience of visitors. Rajagopalan argues that the rearticulation of the city broke through existing networks and geographies to form new ones, in which the historical site ceased to function within a broader commemorative network, but rather stood as an isolated ‘monument’.Footnote 46 The urban process involved the production of the monument, afforestation, and landscaping, and the construction of the new capital, all of which were situated in mass land acquisition.
The emptied monument: Landscapes of dispossession
Within this broader context and alongside urban shifts in Delhi, the primary evaluative basis of the historical site became its potential as a conserved monument from the 1900s. Monumentality defined the use of the site within the city. Decisions about conservation depended on whether the historical site was deemed worth conserving based on its physical characteristics, age value, and state of repair.Footnote 47 One prominent example of this shift to monumentality can be seen in Maulvi Zafar Hasan’s List of Muhammaden and Hindu Monuments.Footnote 48 The work lists monuments in Delhi, classified by their history, condition, ownership status, and their ‘class’—referring to four classes into which the ruin was placed depending on its worthiness for preservation. While a list-based approach held a longer history in colonial knowledge production, whether through guidebooks, investigatory journals, or surveys, this 1914 handbook was written primarily to assess the scope and possibility of conservation. It essentially formed a government policy handbook for administrators, surveyors, and conservation officials.
Until the early twentieth century many of the now conserved monuments that had villagers residing within them had avoided any serious material repercussions of British colonial policy. In addition, some historical sites were patronized and used by Indian nobility (often from the princely states) as well as European travellers and officials in the nineteenth century. Until the late nineteenth century, occupancy of historical sites such as palaces, sarais (rest stops), and tombs financed by nobility was not necessarily interfered with. In some cases, Company officials also asked rajas and nawabs for money to repair historical sites based on a recognition of their ancestral ownership.Footnote 49 For example, the Delhi Archaeological Society asked for and received a grant of Rs 600 from the Raja of Jaipur to repair Jantar Mantar in 1852.Footnote 50 Jantar Mantar was constructed as an observatory in 1724 by Raja Jai Singh of Amber, who founded the city of Jaipur. The observatory lay within the site of Jaisinghpura, a few miles south of Shahjahanabad, which the raja owned. During visits to the capital, the raja and his entourage used Jaisinghpura as their residential area.Footnote 51
The Safdarjung tomb, built by Shuja-ud-Daula between 1753–1754, is another case of long-standing non-European maintenance and mixed-use. The tomb held the remains of Nawab Safdarjung of Awadh. In the nineteenth century, rooms in the complex were used by the tomb’s caretakers. The dalan or the upper platform surrounded by enclosure walls were utilized as rest houses by visitors as late as the 1870s.Footnote 52 The rooms in the tomb were also used by European and native visitors as rest houses during stops to the site. Beresford described the sociological division of residences in the Safdarjung tomb for his European audience: ‘Those on the south … are fitted up with the most indispensable articles of European furniture; the others, on the west and north, are seldom occupied except by natives …’, going on to provide more details about the conditions and size of these rooms.Footnote 53
Across the board, European travellers who wrote about the tomb did not contest the right of native ownership, financial management, or property inhabitation. The civil servant George Addison termed the structure as one of the ‘handsomest edifices’ in the city with several ‘neat apartments’, suggesting that visitors reside in it during their visit.Footnote 54 Bishop Reginald Heber also observed that the nawab had maintained the site, including the garden, in ‘good repair’, with no note of censure at its mixed use.Footnote 55
Another interesting example which displays mixed financial upkeep, and its changing dynamics over the years, is the case of the Shahi Mahal. In 1890, the colonial government wanted to repair the palace, which was entered as nazul property.Footnote 56 The property was in possession of Nawab Nizamuddin Khan. The government wrote to Khan, asking him to repair it at his personal cost. Khan wrote back to the government, saying that he did not have the means to conduct appropriate maintenance and repair of the site and asked that the government take over these functions since it was already in the nazul register. He asked that a separate area be demarcated for his stays. Thus, over the nineteenth century, it was not the case that all historical properties would necessarily be acquired and repaired by the state, nor that those in possession of such property would protest against relinquishing it entirely.Footnote 57
However, these mixed forms of patronage became significantly constrained over time. Safdarjung tomb was notified as protected in 1913, and since then has been maintained as a conserved and landscaped site by state bodies.Footnote 58 Shahi Mahal was also wholly acquired in the 1890s. Jantar Mantar, on the other hand, is a rare example of a prominent historical site that escaped conservation until 1956.Footnote 59
Despite these exceptions, the overall trajectory from the twentieth century reveals that historical sites were quite expansively subsumed within the paradigm of public good as conserved spaces, which required that their management by the state be intensified. With the consideration of historical sites through the prism of monumentality, conservation drives steadily broadened to include a large range of historical sites. After the declaration of Delhi as the new capital in 1911, the state made widespread attempts at conservation, moving beyond erstwhile core tourist and imperial centres. Out of the 175 centrally protected monuments in Delhi, 150 were declared as protected between 1905 and 1936, and the rest between 1958 and 2002. Out of these, five monuments were declared as protected between 1904 and 1909, followed by a sharp acceleration in the 1910s, when 80 monuments were declared protected, followed by 63 protection notifications in the 1920s and two in the 1930s.
This radically different form of large-scale conservation indicates the extent to which the monument had become central to the city. These sites included the Khirki embankment (1924), Hauz-i-Shamsi (1918), Shams-i-Talab (1908), and Hauz-i-Khas (1914), all embankments or water bodies. They also included Kashmiri Gate (1927), Ajmeri Gate (1927), portions of the Shahjahanabad wall (1920–27), and sites in Qudsia Bagh (1913) and Roshanara Bagh (1922), among other Mughal-era infrastructure.Footnote 60 Sites that were earlier incommensurable in their meaning and use in the Mughal period became more commensurable as conserved or landscaped ‘monuments’. Alongside conservation and landscaping, these monuments were also made more visitor-friendly in several ways (after, of course, evicting any villagers living inside them). Approach roads were improved, boundary walls were constructed, railings were added to staircases to ensure safety, and guards were installed in newly constructed huts at various newly conserved sites.
In the case of most monuments in Delhi, the government had to contend with widespread socio-economic use and residential occupation by villagers. Conservation efforts were based on acquiring land from residents in and around the historical site. For example, conserving the Lodi group of tombs necessitated acquiring the entire village of Khairpur.Footnote 61 The conservation of Begumpur mosque dispossessed more than a hundred people.Footnote 62 Conservation at Arab ki Sarai and Isa Khan’s tomb involved evicting villagers in and around both sites.Footnote 63 Using the AMPA and Land Acquisition Act, there was a near formulaic process of conservation: identifying a site, surveying its property ownership type, declaring it protected via the AMPA, and negotiating a settlement with the use of the Land Acquisition Act if necessary.
Villagers would often use the Land Acquisition Act to contest evictions and to negotiate higher rates of compensation. As the Land Acquisition Act’s imposition required an overhead payment of 15 per cent in addition to the cost of compensation, the state preferred private negotiations for evictions and compensation, extending the timeline of acquisition. In the case of Isa Khan’s tomb, land acquisition lasted from 1902–1905.Footnote 64 In another example, the Begumpur mosque was declared protected in 1918, with acquisition efforts only finishing in 1932.Footnote 65
While many residents accepted the compensation offered, others demanded higher rates and threatened to approach civil courts. Residents would often simply return to conserved sites and to lands acquired for Mutiny memorials and cemeteries, using the area for livestock grazing or to take up residence once again.Footnote 66 One resident involved in negotiations at Isa Khan’s tomb took up residence in the already cleared Arab ki Sarai and had to be evicted yet again.Footnote 67 Compensation was owed to villagers for the acquisition of their fields and the village commons. It is important to note that compensation for demolished houses was often given as a placatory measure. Unless residents could provide papers proving legal possession, they were considered ‘squatters’ on public land and were not due compensation for their housing plots. For example, the evicted villagers of the Begumpur mosque requested that they be allowed to take their demolished housing materials for free. This request was denied on the grounds that the villagers were illegal ‘squatters’ who were already receiving some compensation, and that the materials would be sold at an auction.Footnote 68 The same logic applied to Isa Khan’s tomb, where officials claimed that most villagers were ‘squatters’ without legitimate legal claims to their houses, even if they did have legitimate claims over agricultural land.Footnote 69 Even as the acquisition process functioned within new legal codes that set compensation and civil litigation terms, these new definitions delegitimized existing property rights.
The heritage city and world-class dreams
Delhi after Independence: Partition, UNESCO, and monumentality
While most of Delhi’s conserved monuments had already been declared protected by 1950, the Indian state and Delhi government has had to focus on constantly reproducing the monument qua monument through forced evictions, slum demolitions, and increased police presence around these sites to maintain their ‘pristine’ state. In post-Independence Delhi, the logic of the urban process in terms of exclusionary monumentality and aesthetics remained consistent with the colonial period. However, the contours of its implementation via land acquisition and compensation have shifted with the logic of state-led planned development and then with the subsequent neoliberal shift.
Urban planning and conservation policies also unfolded within shifting terrains of developmentalist politics, nationalist imaginaries, and global heritage projects. The form of archaeological conservation and the logic of the ‘world-class’ city both emerged within this broader paradigm. As with the discussion of colonial conservation politics, that of Delhi’s post-Independence heritage building also functioned through multiple and mutually constituted scalar levels of the international, the national, and the city. While I focus on monument conservation and displacement at the city level, a brief discussion of its larger global and national context provides an important background to these processes.
Just as professional archaeology had shaped late colonial and imperial politics of conservation, a new international network defining the landscape of heritage building in the second half of the twentieth century emerged in UNESCO. UNESCO World Heritage projects and the globally elevated value of heritage shaped India’s approach, as a newly independent nation, to conservation projects. Officially established in 1945 and coming out from the shadows of the world wars, which had played their own part in destroying archaeological artefacts and sites, UNESCO became a leading example of a unified international organization promoting cultural heritage protection.
Over time, the focus of the organization shifted to the production and maintenance of the ‘monument’ away from archaeological processes. That is, ‘archaeology was subsumed under either museums or monuments, and heritage [was] more likely to be considered architecture than archaeology’.Footnote 70 At the UNESCO 1972 General Conference, the body formulated its World Heritage project to search for, classify, protect, and promote sites that could be classified as ‘world heritage’. Thus, the system of monument making, itself an emptying and abstraction of discrete historical sites under one universal ideal, came to be circumscribed within yet another system of universalization, which categorized very different forms of heritage and historical sites across different spatial contexts into a singular category of ‘world heritage’. This bureaucratic project, as Lynn Meskell has argued, ‘transformed the miraculous into the mundane’ and ‘inadvertently created a system for the routinization of charisma’.Footnote 71
National participation in the UNESCO mission to have the cultural and historical sites of the country classified as World Heritage sites has not always had a positive impact. Various scholars have argued that the urge to create a sanitized monument (or heritage zone) has often been antithetical to the interests of surrounding populations, in India, Egypt, Brazil, and elsewhere.Footnote 72 The UNESCO project itself, and national participation within it, has exacerbated the issues of displacement associated with archaeological conservation in Delhi and beyond.
As noted in prior sections, Delhi’s articulation as a ‘historic’ city, or tourism within its urban spaces on that basis, was not a post-Independence phenomenon. Policies of conservation and monument-making in Delhi were tied to a broader logic of refashioning Delhi as a capital that told of a rich historical past governed and controlled by the colonial state. As the following sections show, this identity of Delhi’s historical nature transformed in the post-Independence context to reflect a modern, ‘world-class’ city with monuments that reflected both Delhi’s own ‘heritage’ identity and that of the nation. Given this wider identification of the city with monumentality, the scope of conservation policies went beyond chosen World Heritage sites. Given India’s desire to assert its nationalism via cultural symbols through UNESCO projects, heritage-making in the city has dovetailed with the larger production of Delhi as a modern and planned heritage city. Now, competitive nationalism took a new form, with India participating in a race with other decolonized countries to assert its own pride, dominance, and economic viability as a ‘world-class’ city on the global stage. Mitu Sengupta has argued that this form of nationalism quite often has been reflected in the desire to hold mega-events that make cities and countries visible on the world map.Footnote 73 Delhi, lying at the intersection of all these modernizing and heritage projects, has been subject to a particularly vicious state-led ‘improvement’ project in the city to better reflect its modernity and its past for a global audience and ‘world-class’ aesthetic.
Alongside these larger international trajectories, Partition also provides an important context to future conservation policies and the broader urbanization policies of Delhi. The entry of around half a million refugees who had to be housed and rehabilitated in Delhi had a formative impact on the urbanization policies in the following decade, as well as on the conditions of the monuments in the city. Monuments in Delhi and elsewhere became shelter sites for riot victims, refugee camps for those migrating from Pakistan, and targets of communal violence as symbols of an Islamic past.Footnote 74 In terms of the actual use and treatment of monuments, as well as in institutional responses, Partition was an exceptional moment. In a sense, the ongoing tension between the monument as a public conserved site, and as a space of everyday use by socio-economically precarious people, reached a boiling point. The sheer numbers of refugees residing within these monuments without any alternative rehabilitative measures meant that the ASI completely lost control over their maintenance and conservation.Footnote 75 What was, for a large populace, simply a question of holding onto some semblance of daily life by making their own shelters, lighting fires to cook their own food, making latrines for their daily use, and in some cases setting up temporary religious structures, for the ASI was a complete desecration of these sites and in violation of their basic principles of existence as ‘monuments’.Footnote 76
Even as the crisis subsided, Partition left a mark on the ASI’s attitude towards monument conservation and sharpened the mutual exclusivity of the conserved site from life around it. For the ASI, the monument was a site that had to be pristine and maintained for visitors. In post-Independence India, the monument also became a nationalist symbol. Thus, not the monument, but the conserved monument—clean, landscaped, visitor-friendly—became associated with the nation’s growth, progress, and identity. As Deborah Sutton puts it, faced with this heightened desecration of monuments, the ASI ‘sought a more robust and exclusive jurisdiction over the monuments … The refugee crisis was an exponential increase in, but continuation of, both the pressures exerted by Delhi’s publics on its monuments and the irritation of archaeological officers.’Footnote 77 And just as it was a continuation of existing logics of conservation, the crisis of Partition exacerbated the rhetoric of protecting the monument from outside forces.
Realignments: Conservation and the planned city
Formed in the aftermath of Partition, the 1962 Master Plan of Delhi (MPD) set the tone for Delhi’s urban growth.Footnote 78 While this article focuses on the place of conservation politics in Delhi’s Master Plans, it is important to note that Partition also impacted the larger urbanization trajectory in Delhi, including providing one basis for Plan-based urbanization. The question of ordering the city as a site of planned and ‘modern’ progress held within it the urgency to ‘to sanitize the city from the messiness of Partition, and all that it brought forth for the nation. Simultaneously, the Master Plan of 1962 was prototypical, for large cities of all newly developing nations, just as India was seen as a laboratory for testing western planning theory in a developing nation.’Footnote 79 It articulated some key points: creating urban villages to reinforce rural areas’ shift to urban economic activities; securing the Ridge as an ‘inviolable green belt;’ dividing the city into several economically and socially cohesive units; and separating large industries from inhabited urban areas. This Plan was premised on creating an ‘orderly’ unit against an existing ‘chaotic’ city.Footnote 80 Culturally and aesthetically, it imagined an integrated urban space where ‘places of historical interest, natural beauty spots, existing orchard and fruit gardens have to be developed and interconnected by green linkages and smaller local parks penetrating through residential and work areas’.Footnote 81 The city was to hold within it a planned and orderly network of leisure, housing, and workspaces, with monuments and green zones providing an aesthetic basis.
The MPD 2001 was published in 1990, conceived in the decade following the Asian Games and 15 years after the Emergency, both of which significantly reshaped Delhi’s urban landscape through the vision of a modern, planned, ‘beautified’ city. It also came on the cusp of India’s neo-liberalization in 1991. As per this Plan, historical conservation was integral to the urban process by showcasing Delhi’s history. It articulated the intertwined historic character of Delhi, its modern development, and its prominence on the world stage, stating in its preamble that the city was ‘a symbol of ancient values and aspirations and capital of the largest democracy … assuming increasing eminence among the great cities of the world … Delhi has a distinct personality. Imbibed in it, is the history of centuries.’Footnote 82 The Plan followed the criteria set out in 1914 to select sites for conservation: their age value, architectural value, and historical associations with grand events/people. It added the criteria for assessing ‘its value as part of a group of buildings’, reflecting the emphasis on monument complexes. The ‘urban heritage’ that the Plan wished to conserve included urban villages through a mixed approach of increasing commercial activity while also preserving their ‘rural’ character.Footnote 83 With urban expansion, the rural itself became associated with historic preservation. The Plan emphasized the development of green zones, a discourse that demands the reconciliation of the conservation of historical sites, the Ridge, and the ‘rural’ to create an ordered, contained whole.
The costs of implementing Delhi’s planning vision can be seen clearly through the Emergency (1975–1977) and the Asian Games (1982). After the colonial foundations of Delhi as the imperial capital, based on the integration of the historical landscape, modern architecture, and landscaped green zones into a unified city, the Emergency was the first moment of mass evictions to beautify the city through nationalist visions of development and modernity. If the 1962 Master Plan had articulated this nationalist planning rhetoric, which sought to build Delhi on par with metropolitans globally, the Emergency sought to bring this to fruition. As Sushmita Pati put it, ‘the Master Plan’s role as a regional plan was central for the expropriation of land in the name of national development. It was not till the Emergency that the violence of this process of expropriation and that of rehabilitation and resettlement were first realised, and second, acknowledged.’Footnote 84
Under Sanjay Gandhi’s leadership and with the supervision of Jagmohan, the vice-chairman of the DDA and one of the main architects of Delhi’s 1962 Master Plan, Delhi witnessed its first large-scale ‘beautification’ drive during the Emergency. Shahjahanabad and its surrounding areas became focal points for demolition drives to rejuvenate the old city and clear it of ‘unwanted’ elements—slums and workers—that would detract from the beauty of the area. Jama Masjid, Turkman Gate, and Chandni Chowk became prominent targets for demolitions and clearances.Footnote 85 Residents were forcibly relocated away from their long-standing homes and places of work into half-constructed resettlement camps on Delhi’s outskirts, with partial amenities and rampant illnesses. Justifying the need for such clearances, Jagmohan argued that the monument only held worth if all distracting elements around it (that is, slums) were removed from sight, setting the tone of his urban governance policies from the 1950s to the neoliberal period.Footnote 86 In a recent interview, he stated that his primary regret was that historical landscaping was never fully realized, indicating its centrality to Delhi’s urban project.Footnote 87
This blueprint for a ‘beautified’ integrated city was reinforced with the 1982 Asian Games. While the Emergency had laid the groundwork for reshaping the aesthetics of the existing city via evictions, the Asian Games facilitated the construction of new urban infrastructure for a global city. The most prominent construction projects were to build new roads and flyovers, the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium, the Asiad Village near Siri Fort, and various new hotels with around 125,000 workers employed at construction sites.Footnote 88 A substantial number of these workers remained in the city, in temporary and slum housing, after the Games. The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court to contest violations of several labour laws. An inquiry revealed that workers were paid less than the minimum wage and sometimes no wage at all. State officials argued that the Games were crucial for the country’s ‘prestige’ and that workers’ exploitation was not too high a cost. Strikes were banned at construction sites, and supervisors ‘turned the work camp into a concentration camp, complete with barbed wire and armed guards’ after one attempted strike.Footnote 89 Workers’ movements within the city were curtailed to discipline labour and segregate zones of visible poverty. While skilled workers and officials were allowed to enter the newly landscaped areas within building complexes, construction workers were forbidden to do so ‘lest they disfigure the landscape’.Footnote 90 With a progressive decline in workers’ housing conditions and as the Games drew closer, workers were relocated further from construction sites. The state rounded up homeless people and expelled them from the city. Even as construction projects brought in migrant workers who lived in slums and temporary shelters, the state demolished existing slums to acquire ground for these projects.
The expulsion of workers and their entry into Delhi have been simultaneous and defining features of Delhi, with a shifting geography of working-class colonies due to repeated dislocations. For example, despite mass eviction drives, Delhi’s slum population increased from 9 per cent to 27 per cent between 1971–1998, growing exponentially faster than the total population.Footnote 91 This growing population in slums, JJCs,Footnote 92 and urban villages had a significant impact on monuments. Analysing monumentality from 1912–1970, Sutton argues that there was a growing tension between urban expansion and the desire to maintain monuments as pristine sites in post-Independence Delhi. The government tried to create monuments as distinct and isolated units while struggling with the realities of population growth and urban expansion.Footnote 93 Gupta has also pointed out the crisis of expanding urbanism and a strengthening conservationist rhetoric from the 1980s. With a steady decrease in open spaces and rural land by the 1980s, villagers in high-density urban zones with little breathing space turned to the monument for their requirements.Footnote 94
Post-Independence beautification drives functioned within new terrains of land acquisition. Unlike colonial-era evictions, residents did not receive notice prior to demolition during the Emergency and had no time or warning to contest demolitions or negotiate compensation.Footnote 95 However, the state provided some compensation to evicted people through reallocated housing, even as it forced them to the city’s margins.Footnote 96 This ad hoc form of demolition and compensation was challenged in High Courts and the Supreme Court. For example, the 1985 Olga Tellis vs the Bombay Municipal Corporation case set an important precedent. The court declared that slum-dwellers should be provided with in situ rehabilitation to avoid loss of their livelihood.Footnote 97 Thus, even as housing precarity increased in Delhi for workers and the urban poor, challenges to demolition drives, ad hoc resettlements, and demands for compensation continued to be raised in the courts.
Monument-making in the neoliberal era
The neoliberal period saw critical shifts in the politics of conservation, compensation, and private investments for urban projects. Over time, the identity of the monument has been entrenched by mega-events, the planning process, and the urge to be recognized as a global and modern city, as Delhi’s urban aesthetic is identified with its heritage. This process has devoted itself to spectacle forms of displaying integrated modernity by maintaining a disjunction between those who labour to produce the city’s spaces and the aesthetics of its production.Footnote 98 The Commonwealth Games of 2010 and the 2021 Master Plan are important indicators of the relationship between city, land, and monuments in the neoliberal period. The 2021 Plan was published in 2007, as Delhi was preparing for the Commonwealth Games. Conceived after the shift to neoliberal policies, it was the first to articulate Delhi as a ‘world-class’ city, with further emphasis on heritage and environmental conservation as part of producing an integrated modern city.Footnote 99 It shifted from earlier plans, which had focused on state-led planning, to encouraging private sector participation and public-private partnerships. As part of this process, private investment in heritage projects increased.
Private investments in monument conservation and renovation began in 1996 with the state-instituted National Culture Fund, which facilitated public-private partnerships to conserve and restore monuments. Private entities included NGOs, not-for-profit trusts, or corporate groups, most prominently the Aga Khan Foundation and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH). For example, the ASI signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Apeejay Surendra Hotels to conserve Jantar Mantar in 2000.Footnote 100 By 2003, restoration works had been completed at Humayun’s tomb through a partnership between the ASI and the Aga Khan Foundation, a private non-profit trust. This public-private model became the basis for conservation/restoration preceding the Commonwealth Games. In 2005, the ASI signed an MoU with the Aga Khan Foundation and the Oberoi Group of Hotels to jointly restore and landscape the tomb’s gardens, and to add new lighting in time for the Commonwealth Games. In the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, the ASI handed over the Lodi Garden tombs to INTACH for conservation, as well as buildings in the Nizamuddin area to the Aga Khan Foundation. Notably, disputes over the pace, quality, and form of conservation led to the ASI reacquiring control over the projects underway at Lodi Garden.Footnote 101 In 2004, the Delhi government also passed the Delhi Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains (AMASR) Act, widening the scope of conservation by notifying new sites as state-protected.Footnote 102 The state identified 92 new monuments for protection, with INTACH and the ASI signing an MoU that handed over responsibility to the former for the conservation of these 92 monuments in Delhi.Footnote 103
The dreams of making a ‘world-class’ Delhi for the Commonwealth Games had a severe human cost. Around 200,000 people were forcibly evicted, often with little to no warning, resulting in serious injuries and deaths. Around three million people were rendered homeless. Kalyani Menon-Sen points out that despite the massive outrage over corruption during the Games, there was a far more muted response regarding demolition drives, revealing a middle-class disdain for the city’s largely informal working class.Footnote 104 As part of the ‘beautification’ process, the city’s monuments were ‘spruced up’ with repairs, tourist facilities, and clearance drives.Footnote 105 These drives extended beyond the ASI’s efforts to include newly notified sites by the Delhi government. Evading the state’s gaze to some extent, these un-conserved sites were extensively used by nearby populations for shelter. However, there has been little news coverage on the displacement underlying conservation efforts beyond stating that these monuments were infested with ‘encroachers’ prior to being ‘beautified’.Footnote 106
Even as conservation accelerated through state and private players, the scope for compensation declined from the 2000s. A Supreme Court judgment in 2000 stated that the government had no obligation to provide rehabilitation to slum dwellers. Another 2002 judgment ruled that the government was not obliged to provide alternative settlements.Footnote 107 The 2004 Delhi AMASR Act limited compensation provisions for persons evicted for conservation. It specified that no compensation would be provided to individuals who were affected by any restrictions or actions taken after the notification was issued, particularly if those actions (such as construction or business activities) took place after the site was designated as a protected area. A 2010 amendment to the Central AMASR Act placed harsher penalties for any construction activity around protected monuments, ranging from three months to a two-year prison sentence and potential fines up to Rs one lakh.Footnote 108 Overall, compensation policies for eviction have become increasingly tenuous over the last three decades with the intensified and continuous urge to produce a ‘modern’ city, whether defined by imperialism, state-led nationalism, or the neoliberal world-class dream.
The monument as a national symbol: Aesthetics of repair
Nationalist ideologies and the public-private partnership model have played an important part in shaping the mode of repair vis-a-vis Delhi’s monuments. Delhi’s Mughal and Sultanate monuments in particular have been the sites for tension between following the international standard of protecting monuments and of elevating the nation’s status (and tourism revenue) globally through its heritage, and of reviling these spaces as symbolic of Muslim oppressive rule against a Hindu population. Such tensions have only accelerated following the demolition of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya by right-wing Hindu mobs in 1993.Footnote 109 This event laid the foundation for Hindutva nationalist assertions by destroying symbols of a supposedly Muslim past. On the other hand, monuments such as the Red Fort and the Qutub Minar are defining symbols of Delhi and of India on the global stage.Footnote 110 As such, they lie on an uneasy terrain between two currents of nationalism, both crucial to the economy and ideology of the current state while being antithetical to each other.Footnote 111 Within this contested terrain, Hindutva ideology has been used by the state (both during and prior to Modi’s regime) to justify forced evictions around monuments during the Commonwealth Games by asserting that migrant workers living around these sites are ‘illegal’ Muslim ‘terrorists’ from Bangladesh in particular.Footnote 112
In terms of policy, India has continued to follow a conservation rather than a restoration model, since the colonial period. Restoration here refers to repairing monuments to emulate their supposedly original form and conservation to maintaining them as currently in time—in their ‘authentic’ form. However, the boundaries between the two have become increasingly blurred over the post-Independence period. While on paper, the two categories appear to be mutually exclusive, repair projects at monuments have increasingly followed a mixed model, both financially and aesthetically. As Saleema Waraich has argued, authenticity is an unstable category, particularly given that its meanings with respect to a monument are defined by the international standards of the Venice charter, along with multiple national and religious identities that lay claim to the monument.Footnote 113
The contradictory demands of ‘authenticity’ are based on the need to conserve the monument by the standards of international authenticity, while also fulfilling the demands of restoring the declining ruin to its full glory in order to fulfil the demands of the nation.Footnote 114 The growing private participation in ‘conservation’ projects has led to a less uniform approach, with different organizations and trusts following different mixed models to build complexes that appear financially more lucrative and aesthetically more enticing to tourists. Conservation projects have slipped into a more restorative model, as in the case of Humayun’s tomb and Sundar Nursery, for example. This shift is not without its own controversies, as evidenced by a probe committee set up to investigate flawed conservation approaches by the Agha Khan Trust at Humayun’s tomb.Footnote 115
The rhetoric of heritage activists has also placed conservation and monument protection within the rhetoric of nationalism, albeit a ‘secular’ nationalism. As a prominent participant in public-private conservation projects, INTACH is a prime example of this trend. Its official website articulates the need for conservation as a ‘war’, framing heritage as a nationalist fight, to be generalized beyond prominent monuments: ‘You as a citizen of India have the right to put an end to this senseless destruction. You have the right to voice your concern and a responsibility to protect your environment—and your heritage—whether it is preserving the character, beauty and greenery of your locality or conserving the glory of the Taj Mahal.’Footnote 116 This need to protect monuments, couched within the interests of secular ‘nationalism’ and of Delhi as a national symbol has been a tool to further justify modalities of conservation via dispossession. For example, the 2015 INTACH Delhi Newsletter stated, on the question of the Mehrauli Archaeological Park: ‘It has been our dream that this beautiful park should be a showcase of Delhi’s rich heritage … Official apathy over the years has led to rampant encroachment, vandalism and defacement of heritage …’.Footnote 117 Based on an INTACH court petition in 2015, which called for 124 monuments to be cleared out, hundreds were evicted from Mehrauli in 2023 with no resettlement.Footnote 118 Following colonial logics of conservation, the ASI-INTACH methodology and the predominant framing of heritage have continued to prioritize the physical characteristics of the buildings and their objective histories rather than their relations with the lived surroundings. Those using such sites for contemporary and everyday uses only emerged in these works as encroachers, defacers, and impediments to heritage management, to be removed as far away as possible.
Conclusion
Since early British efforts at conservation, population pressures have increased, as have the numbers of slums and informal housing. Meanwhile, conservation policies formed by the state, heritage organizations, and private actors have all emphasized the need to expand the scope of conservation, as well as the intensity of its implementation. Partition emerged as one exceptional moment within which the ASI was forced to accept that precarious and homeless refugee populations had no recourse but to use the monuments, even as the lack of proper maintenance at this time spurred the ASI into tighter control over monuments post-Partition. We can see hints of this in Lahiri’s argument, wherein she emphasizes the need for new legislative frameworks to protect monuments during exceptional conditions of violence, war, and displacement, while also acknowledging that ‘(e)xceptional times evidently required such exceptional measures’,Footnote 119 and that ‘(b)ecause the scale of displacement and the communal tension accompanying partition were as unexpected as they were unprecedented, the overriding need to protect people above monuments is both understandable and moral’.Footnote 120
However, in these arguments, the ‘encroachment’ of monuments is justified solely due to the fact that Partition was a historical rupture from everyday policies and life, while an exclusive conservationist politics in ‘normal’ times remains the ideal. The fact that most of Delhi’s working-class population has extremely inadequate recourse to civic amenities, housing, or recreational spaces has not been seen as a crisis in and of itself that has led to the ‘encroachment’ of monuments.
It may be useful to remember that the conserved monument as a category entered the collective consciousness very recently. Until the emergence of a global professionalized archaeology and new large-scale conservation projects, the idea of the historical site did not lie quite so starkly in contradiction with an inhabited site, nor was it within the exclusive public domain of the state. From the twentieth century, while rapid circulation and exchange of property characterized urban land use, the monument stands apart as the one site that had a fixed value as a static anchor around a shifting city. While the project of conservation has always been a fraught process, never fully realized despite regular enforcements and reinforcements, the attempt has been to create a monument devoid of other forms of use and identity. In a sense, the monument becomes both exchangeable and unexchangeable to define and be defined by the emerging city. Unlike other land in rapid circulation as an abstract commodity, the monument’s use value is defined in the urban process by its very form, incommensurable with all other forms of use. Emptied of other forms of use, each monument is recognized universally and solely through that identity.
This production of the monument in Delhi required, in the first instance, evicting agricultural populations who lived within the site and used it for their own social and economic purposes. The state has maintained and reproduced the monument through this model of conservation by repeated similar forms of displacements, now against migrant workers and slum dwellers. Displacement is not necessarily a one-time affair—families have undergone multiple rounds of evictions given that the state provides little in terms of rehabilitation and resettlement, and workers are forced to resettle in unauthorized housing clusters. Within this cycle, uncertain livelihoods, poor housing, and economic precarity are endemic crises in Delhi that are reproduced by the current conservation policies. Not only does conservation via displacement worsen workers’ living conditions and housing stability, but it is also entirely unsustainable in that displaced people inevitably return to the vicinity of monuments and other cleared sites simply due to a lack of alternatives. This colonial model of conservation continues to operate through a vicious logic of forced evictions within new nationalist and neoliberal imaginaries of the modern, ‘world-class’ city on the global stage.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Swati Birla, Jason Moralee, Ankit Sharma, Asheesh Siddique, Priyanka Srivastava, and the reviewers of this journal for their insightful comments and feedback.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
Open access
