Book review: Mrinalini Rajagopalan,Building Histories: The Archival and Affective Lives of Five Monuments in Modern

The introduction of the book under review clearly defines its subject and scope of the five chapters, each chapter is arranged around a single monument in Delhi and traces a diachronic history of the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth century. The five monuments and chapters deals in the book are The Red Fort (built 1639–1648 ce), a Sufi shrine by the name of Rasui Numa Dargah (built 1691–1692 ce), The Jama Masjid (built 1650 ce), The Purana Qila (built 1533–1542 ce), and the Qutub complex (built 1192–1316 ce). Instead of providing a chronologically linear history, each chapter begins with a paradigmatic ‘moment’ in the life of the monument and moves backward as well as forward in time to chart its historical permutations. This method of historical arrangement significantly offers the symbolic multiplicity of the monument over a period of time, created as it were within the shifting modalities of state-controlled archives as well as affective appropriation by proletariat actors.

The first chapter, ‘1857: Red Fort’, deals with muting, memory and monument, and begins with its visual publicity in the metropolitan press during and after the Rebellion of 1857, when Delhi came into high relief in the minds of British audience outside India. After the Rebellion was suppressed, The Red Fort underwent a radical transformation and became a British military camp. Later still, those parts not under military control were turned into a heritage site. Indians were encouraged to visit the monument and engage with it as an object of history. But in 1918, the colonial government made the decision to erase mention of 1857 humiliation losses due to the British troops from the public histories advertised on the site. In sum, the chapter reveals the colonial anxieties that shaped the Red Fort’s archival history.

The second chapter, ‘1918: Rasui Numa Dargah (Interrupting the Archive: Indigenous Voices and Colonial Hegemony), deals with the community’s efforts to protect the Dargah and vividly illustrates the polyphonous histories of space and monuments generated at the Zenith of the preservation movement in Delhi. The chapter highlights the colonial archive had to accommodate local indigenous articulations of preservation despite the former’s strenuous denial that such articulations existed at all.

The third chapter on the Jama masjid, deals with its use as a site of anti-colonial demonstrations by Hindus and Muslims from 1932 ce. The Jama Masjid was outside British surveillance and offered a space for nationalist groups, where Indian sovereignty was articulated. The use of mosque as a politically charged space created an affective aura of sovereignty and autonomy around it. The Jama Masjid became vitally charged with the politics of the present and future promise of a sovereign nation.

The fourth chapter deals with Purana Qila, which was built in the sixteenth century by Mughal Emperor Humayun and expanded by Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri. The site has been protected by the Archaeological Survey of India since the nineteenth century. It was used as a refugee camp during the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. It was enmeshed within various origin narratives of Delhi as well as India at large.

The fifth chapter begins with protests outside the Qutub complex in 2000 ce by Hindutva supporters who wished to conduct a purification ceremony for Hindu idols that they claimed were ‘trapped’ in the Quwwat-Ul-Islam mosque. It was constructed, from reused Hindu and Jain temple fragments, during the twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The colonial insistence on reading the appearance of Hindu elements in a mosque as a sign of religions violence and Islamic iconoclasm rather than syncretism has been echoed by Hindu nationalists who seek to redeem the imagined trauma of the medieval past within the current moment mean, while the Qutub complex has also been a sturdy symbol of independent and secular India’s heritage and since its nomination as a world Heritage monument in 1993 has been recognised as ‘universal’ patrimony. The modern history of Qutub complex has been contoured by its state determined archival framings as well as various religious affects.

The author, with these five case studies, tries to present a role model for the study of Building Histories that seeks to redefine the architectural monument as not simply a static repository of the post but also as a site from which multiple histories were and continued to be generated, as well as the book recognises the fictions of the archive alongside the immediacy of affect for a more capacious history of the Indian monument. The qualitative illustrations significantly make the text.