This Richly-Illustrated Book Is An Architectural Biography Of A Fascinating Palace And City. Using The Extant Monuments Of The Red Fort, In Conjunction With Maps. Photographs, Court Chronicles, Travelogues, And Other Historical Material, The Author Takes Us On A Journey Through Time.

Today, we associate the Red Fort with the view of the Prime Minister proudly unfurling the national flag every year on 15 August on the massive red wall curtain. To children and even most of us, the Red Fort is only this view that is broadcast on television. It is the ubiquitous image often used in marketing as well. Many of us haven’t even bothered to go inside the Fort, and many, including me, satisfied ourselves with our photos taken in front of this wall. This actually is a later addition erected by Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb. The Red Fort is much more than this red wall and the platform where the prime minister delivers his speech. In the book, the author attempts to swipe aside the wall and take a deep dive inside the Fort – not just the physical structures but how exactly the planning was done to create a truly complex and artistic palace fortress, to explore the Mughal way of life with their festivals, ceremonies, food and clothing amongst other themes. The beauty of the fort can only be understood and best appreciated from the string of apartments that once lined the river Yamuna on its opposite side. It must have been beautiful indeed to glide down the Yamuna on a boat and appreciate all the buildings that housed the emperor’s private quarters. Now the river has receded afar, but in olden times the various private apartments such as the Rang mahal, Khwabgah (‘abode of dreams’) or the emperor’s bed-chamber as well as the famous Diwan-e-Khas where the Mughal Emperor sat on the Peacock Throne were lined along the river front. There is a reason why the pioneering British historian-explorer James Fergusson termed the Red Fort ‘the most magnificent palace in the East.’ It was a creative venture well integrated to a new city and was truly unrivalled with respect to its design as well as functioning. The book also highlights that, though separated in time by more than three centuries from today, we can still visualize how the unsure footsteps which Babur took in Hindustan took shape in the reign of Shah Jahan, a connoisseur of art and culture. Descending on one side from Genghis Khan and the brutal Tamerlane on the other, Babur gained an irreversible entry to India in the plains of Panipat almost unexpectedly, by defeating a mammoth army of Ibrahim Lodi in 1526. The Mughals, which was the Persian word for ‘Mongols’, set up an incredible empire in Agra and Delhi, to which were born great emperors like Akbar and Shah Jahan. Apart from magnificent monuments they also built a truly syncretic culture of shared values, encouraged free exchange of knowledge and established rituals, customs and festivals that assimilated age-old traditions from east and west. Even the Taj Mahal, described by Rabindranath Tagore as a ‘teardrop on the face of Time’, was built as a symbol of love of a king to his departed queen, like an re-incarnation of Majnun for his Laila, so different from the obvious imagery that a barbaric king may evoke in one’s mind. Similarly, the Red Fort of Delhi was the culmination of Mughal soft power. With profusely laid flower and fruit-bearing char-bagh gardens criss-crossed with streams of water canals, it was layered in symbolism that art historians find interesting even after many centuries to discuss elements that give it a sense of freshness even with the mere empty shell of buildings left behind after 1857. As the author says, “Delhi however lived up to its reputation of slipping through the very fingers of those who attempted to raise a new city here: starting with Prithvi Raj Chauhan’s Lal Kot; Allauddin Khilji’s Siri; the Tughluq trio’s troika of Tughluqabad, Jahanpanah & Kotla Firuz Shah; Humayun’s Dinpanah and later Lutyen’s Delhi of the British; Shah Jahan’s majestic offering to the city of his choice was soon to be destroyed by fate.” The narrative follows the incidents of 1857 till the British Durbars and highlights that the Fort was not the home of the Mughals only in their prime, but also in their decline and till their very extinction. The book seeks to present the lived culture of Mughals in all its multiple facets. The book is divided in four parts. In Part 1 the focus is on the Imperial court and the court etiquette, cultivation of Persian and its enrichment with translations from Sanskrit, patronage of Hindu and Jain scholars. Part 2 contains detailed accounts of the Red Fort and the symbolism of its architecture, the philosophy of jharokha darshan, ceremonies, games and pastimes, the material culture of costumes and jewellery, food, drink and perfumery. The remaining two parts deal with the decline and fall of the Mughal rule and the British Colonial Durbars at the Red Fort. The broadly historical narrative is enlivened by various anecdotes.

What is today the overcrowded, neglected city of Old Delhi was once the magnificent capital of the Mughal Empire. At its heart was the spectacular Qila-e-Mubarak, now known as the Red Fort. Commissioned by Emperor Shah Jahan in 1639, the beautiful city of Shahjahanabad was built around the spectacular Qila-e-Mubarak (Red Fort), on the banks of the Yamuna. Almost a decade later, in 1648, Shah Jahan entered through the river gate and celebrated the completion of this 'paradise on earth' filled with gardens, palaces, water bodies, mosques and temples. About two hundred years later, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, left the fort by the same gate after the failed Mutiny against the British in 1857. Subsequently, both the fort and the city fared badly, as they faced the wrath of the British.The final instalment in Rana Safvi's informative, illustrated series of books on Delhi, Shahjahanabad: The Living City of Old Delhi describes the magnificence of the fort and the city through its buildings that are a living monument to the grandeur and strife of the past.

Delhi: Red Fort to Raisina traces the journey of Shahjahan's new capital of the Mughal Empire, Shahjahanabad to New Delhi the new capital of British-ruled India.

Building Histories offers innovative accounts of five medieval monuments in Delhi—the Red Fort, Rasul Numa Dargah, Jama Masjid, Purana Qila, and the Qutb complex—tracing their modern lives from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Mrinalini Rajagopalan argues that the modern construction of the history of these monuments entailed the careful selection, manipulation, and regulation of the past by both the colonial and later postcolonial states. Although framed as objective “archival” truths, these histories were meant to erase or marginalize the powerful and persistent affective appropriations of the monuments by groups who often existed outside the center of power. By analyzing these archival and affective histories together, Rajagopalan works to redefine the historic monument—far from a symbol of a specific past, the monument is shown in Building Histories to be a culturally mutable object with multiple stories to tell.

WINNER OF THE DUFF COOPER MEMORIAL PRIZE | LONGLISTED FOR THE SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Indispensable reading on both India and the Empire' Daily Telegraph 'Brims with life, colour and complexity . . . outstanding' Evening Standard 'A compulsively readable masterpiece' Brian Urquhart, The New York Review of Books A stunning and bloody history of nineteenth-century India and the reign of the Last Mughal. In May 1857 India's flourishing capital became the centre of the bloodiest rebellion the British Empire had ever faced. Once a city of cultural brilliance and learning, Delhi was reduced to a battered, empty ruin, and its ruler – Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Great Mughals – was thrown into exile. The Siege of Delhi was the Raj's Stalingrad: a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. The Last Mughal tells the story of the doomed Mughal capital, its tragic destruction, and the individuals caught up in one of the most terrible upheavals in history, as an army mutiny was transformed into the largest anti-colonial uprising to take place anywhere in the world in the entire course of the nineteenth century.

This volume joins together in English for the first time the two editions of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan's classic account of the monuments and environs of precolonial Delhi. Translator Rana Safvi's annotations and appendices trace the historical development of the text between 1847 and 1854, before the cataclysmic events of 1857 changed Delhi forever. The volume includes sketches from the original Urdu edition. It is a valuable resource for urban historians and scholars of Delhi's monumental history.