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Aditi Chandra, "Unruly Monuments: Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Professor Aditi Chandra
so good, so good, so good.
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Shohini, Podcast Host
welcome to the New Books Network hello everyone. Welcome to New Books Network. I'm your host Shohini, and it is my distinct pleasure to invite our guest today, Professor Aditi Chandra, to discuss her book Unruly Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Professor Chandra teaches at UC Merced. She received a PhD in Islamic Art and Architectural with a focus on South Asia from University of Minnesota in 2011. She has a Master's in History from Delhi University and a Master's in Art History with a minor in Modern South Asian Literature from the University of Minnesota. Her teaching and research attempt to push disciplinary boundaries of artistry by engaging with a wide range of popular visualties and spatial experiences. Her book Unruly Monuments that We Will Discuss Today examines how colonial, archaeological and travel related processes such as landscaping, site museums, the dissemination of postcards and the eviction of refugees transformed Delhi's Sultanate and Mughal architecture into modern monuments for touristic consumption in the 19th and 20th centuries. She has been a Scholar in Residence at Doris Duke foundation for Islamic Art in 2013 and a recipient of the UC President's Faculty research fellowship in 2019 2020. She has curated exhibition titled Imperial Views of Colonial Delhi and Waterscapes and Wet Bodies through the Colonial Eye, West Africa, Hawaii and India, which showcased late 19th and early 20th century prints, newspaper photographs and travel ephemera. Her publications include essays in International Journal of Islamic Architecture, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture, Shangri La, Working papers in Islamic art and art history, pedagogy and practice. She has also co edited a volume of essays called the Nation and Its rethinking community in 2019. So welcome, Professor Chandra. We are so excited that you are joining us today. Thank you so much for giving us your time and I'm sure the listeners will have a good time listening to this conversation. So I will start by asking you the conventional and the traditional, but the very important question, which is what motivated you to write the book?
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Professor Aditi Chandra
Firstly, thank you, Sohini, so much for having me and for making time in your busy semester to speak with me about unruly monuments. So why did I write this book and what motivated me to write this book? You know, when you're actually writing the book or when you're thinking about it, you don't know what's motivating you. But as I finished writing it or as I was writing it, I realized that as a child I was fascinated by historical sites, monuments if you will. And I remember during school trips I would sometimes sit very quietly in like, you know, Buddhist monk cells or like a temple, like, you know, a Jantha Ellora or a mosque or a fort. I remember a trip to Daulatabad. And I would touch the stone surfaces and I would wonder who'd been here in the centuries before. And I always got this sense that, you know, of on those stone surfaces that there was a passing of time that was time that was collecting on the surface. So I've always been fascinated by layers of time accumulating over surfaces. And years later, as I began to research this project, I found that there were several other elements that also constituted the built architectural form. So, for example, the landscape is as much a part of the building as, you know, because often it's seen as two separate things or the on site museums that are found and monuments are as much as part of that monument's history or the people who visit the site and the different types of people who visit the site or use it or representations of that monument in postcards or film. I never, like I said before, I never thought of this while I was doing the research at the time. But it's only, you know, at that time you think it's just, I need to complete my PhD, I need to complete this work. But as I started writing, I found that these childhood encounters really at some point of being fascinated by how time accumulates over surfaces and realizing that the surface of the architecture is not just the building, but something else was something that I was probably thinking about even as a kid. And then the other, more academic motivation relates to the existing scholarship. So for example, the existing scholarship on the afterlives of Monuments tends to be about the history of institutions, like about the ASI or more institutional histories or overarching narratives, and not so much about small micro histories at specific sites. So for example, one text and all of the previous scholarship actually I really do appreciate and I have greatly learned from. But one of the text states defines the monument as less by what it looks like and more by what it does. So the scholarship was already showing that monuments are culturally mutable spaces, but they were doing that by moving away from the study of form. So for example, they were like, not by what it looks like, but more by what it does. And that is true. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to show what a monument does, but also not lose the focus on what it looks like. And what it looks like to me was not just the built form, but also the landscape, also the museums, also the postcards, also film. And sometimes the looking like was also the fact that they were not there, like they were absent. Like looking at what is present, but also what is absent. Like I was. And I was also looking at the form of the travel encounter itself. Like what is happening in that encounter. So the definition of form was changing, the definition of what is architectural monument was changing and so on.
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Shohini, Podcast Host
So yeah, wonderful. It's so fascinating to know about this and we'll talk more about this in course of this conversation. And one of the things that I really found very interesting is the title of the book Unruly Monuments, which is really very fascinating. So I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about why you chose this particular title and how do you conceptualize this very idea of unruly monuments?
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Professor Aditi Chandra
Yeah, thank you for that question. So firstly, I just want to make a slight detour because the whole title is Unruly Monuments Disrupting the State at Delhi's Islamic Architecture. And I want to say something about the word Islamic because it's a little bit complicated and contentious. Because the point is that when you hear the word Islamic, people tend to think that it only relates to something religious. And so there is a deeper, longer history of how Islamic art history came to be. And the roots of it of course lie in Europe and the whole colonialist, orientalist approaches towards studying non western parts of the world. And so European art history just kind of termed all of the world, all of the arts of the Middle East, South Asia, whatever, from a particular period as Islamic. And of course they didn't do that with their own arts and they didn't call it Christian art.
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New Books Network Announcer
Right.
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Professor Aditi Chandra
And so there Is that problematic history? But in the case. And so of course there's also an historian called Marshall Hodgson who's written really well known scholarship, and he uses the word Islamicate to imply, to talk about an aesthetic that is religious. Not necessarily religious, but broadly cultural. But also these were aesthetic forms that could be used by non Muslims.
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New Books Network Announcer
So.
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Professor Aditi Chandra
But as far as this book's title is concerned, the word Islamic simply just refers to the buildings that were constructed under Mughal and Sultanate patronage. So I know that there can be a question about that, so I wanted to clarify that first. But about unruly monuments. So, you know, one is always trying to brainstorm something, you know, interesting and catchy and so on. And this title came up when I was writing the book proposal. And the way that it came up was because I realized that this book is about monuments. How they are shaped, how do they become, how do they come to be in the shape that we see them today. And I felt that how they came to be was through creating order. So how the state, whether it's colonial or post colonial, was shaping order at the site through landscaping or museum building, or creating postcards. So they were creating order in particular ways through particular knowledge producing endeavors. But I was noticing that there were moments of disorder and disruption as the order was being, trying to be created in this process of becoming monument. And hence the monument was going to be unruly. So that was one. The second way that this phrase is conceptualized is that is just with reference to the nation state. You know, generally any nation state will use its historical monuments as a way to shape their united identity, that cohesive, glorious identity that we are one and so on, and we'll try to flatten its histories. Right. But what I was trying to show was that the monument was also a place from where the nation states identity in particular ways was being contested and hence unruly. And in certain time periods, particularly in the last two chapters, when I talk about the post colonial, there is a way in which the very monument that is being shown up as, oh, this is a great site of the new India, and so on and so forth, was also the place that could not be completely included within the narrative of the nation state. And we can get to that when we talk about those chapters. But the idea is that nation state is trying to grasp them, but they are not being able to be grasped. If you look at different micro histories and so on.
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Shohini, Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, it is really very interesting how you frame unruly as a way to read the disruption in the hegemony. That the nation state was trying to impose. So, on that note, so the book explores the social history of monuments during the colonial and the post colonial periods. And it looks at the monuments, materiality, the spatial transformation, the physical landscaping, human interaction, the photographic representation that you were just saying. Can you tell us a little bit about your methodology and the theoretical framework that he used to write this book?
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Professor Aditi Chandra
Okay, so there are actually a couple of different ideas. And I remember, as I was writing it, I remember being that there were so many different moving parts in the book in terms of the methodology that I at one point had to have a flowchart and how to see how things were fitting in. So the first thing that I would say would be a real attention to micro histories, to the smallest of encounters. You know, the things that I found in the archives. So, for example, like a complaint by a tourist at a particular site or, you know, travel journals by people who went to sites and they wrote about their, you know, the smallest experiences that they had. So a real attention to the. To the. To the micro history of daily events, of an actual touristic encounter, of the smallest change that may happen at a landscape. So micro history would be one. The second was this attention to presence and absence, of presence and absence actually coexisting. So I'll just say a little bit about what I mean by presence and absence. So the. Through an example. So, for example, in the first chapter is about landscaping at the Qutb complex, which started, you know, as early as 1828, and then 1828 to 1840s, and then there was a break, and then it started again in 1910, 1911. And so when we go to the Qutb complex today, we don't, you know, we are surrounded by these lush trees and green lawns and everything, but we don't really pay attention to those. They're present. They're kind of hyper present, but they're absent in the way we access the site. They're absent in the ASI signage that's there, which just talks about the building. And that's fine. There's nothing wrong with it because that's just how the ASI has been, right? Like, they only talk about the built form. And so. And there's also an absence in the tour guide narratives and so on. Right? So that don't really talk about the landscape. The landscape just is there. It's naturally there. But it's actually such an important way in which we access and experience the site in terms of, like, making it comfortable for us, in terms of having a little picnic on the lawns. I know some lawns are like cordoned off and you can't do that. But you know, other places you could sit down and of course you could do that in the colonial period. You could have a picnic on the lawns. So this was. So I'm always trying to balance, trying to see what is hyper present or what is really present at the site, but what is also absent. And then sometimes, for example, the absences are things that make things unruly. So the absence of not talking about the landscape or the absence of the voices of people in the colonial era who could not access the site as like a daily space of worship or as a space where they were just crossing through to go to their villages because that was closed off and so on. So the absence was seen as unruly. But in other chapters, for example, in later chapters where I talk about the Puranakila as a partition refugee camp, there it was the hyper presence of the refugees that made it unruly. So sometimes it's the presence that makes things unruly, sometimes it's the absence. So I think that it was really important to think about how presence and absence work at these sites. And this also relates to two other concepts that I was dealing with. One is the public and the hidden. The concept of the public and hidden transcript, which I borrow from James Scott, the very well known anthropologist, political scientist James Scott. So for him, hidden transcripts are those kinds of forms of behavior that challenge the state but are not necessarily visible on the surface. So then, for example, the, you know, and then that's juxtaposed with the public transcript transcript, which is the way that the state would like to see the narrative of the particular monument. So, for example, if you take the example of the Qutb, again, the public transcript is that it is this beautiful leisure space and it is a place for, you know, kind of picnicking and so on in the colonial era. But the hidden transcript is all of those people that were kind of disrupting the tourist experience, right? Whether it was for the state or whether it was for the elite travelers and so on. So the public and hidden transcript is another concept. The other idea that I work with, and it's a bit contentious, is iconoclasm. So when we hear about the word iconoclasm, we immediately think that it is something negative and that destroys a site. But what I do is that I use scholar. There's a scholar, Natalie Kant, and she's actually from religious studies, but she's Talking about the kind of. The kind of contradictory aspects of iconoclasm, where when you destroy something, you also create something new in its place. So iconoclasm and iconophilia actually go together is what she argues. And so what I am trying to think about is that what are the different ways that iconoclastic acts work within monument spaces? So is the colonial state being iconoclastic in destroying the landscape around and creating a new landscape? And are the people who are disrupting the site, are they also kind of because they are questioning the state, are they also kind of being iconoclastic in particular ways? And because they're not following the norm? They're not following the norm that has been set up of the behavior inside these spaces. So, yes, I'm not sure if I've covered everything, but these are the main
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Shohini, Podcast Host
highlights that was so wonderfully explained because you really adapt a very critical lens. And I think that you see space and sight not as this given ontological reality, but how they really embodies meaning through these absences and these presences. Right? Because I think one of the main argument of the book that spoke to me was this juxtaposition of the public transcript, which is this official meta narrative of power and authority of the state, and then this hidden transcript, which is this suppressed, marginalized histories of the lived experiences of ordinary people. I mean, that is such a critically and thought provoking argument. And so I was thinking, like, I mean, I know you partly kind of answered this question already, but like, how do you read these unruly histories, as you know, of these monuments as resistance to the hegemony of the nation state?
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Professor Aditi Chandra
It's hard to really point out and say that the marginalized people or the people who were non tourists were actually resisting or challenging. Like, intention is very hard to locate. But the way that I read resistance is almost like if the process is not happening the way that the state would like it to happen, which is either the colonial state or the post colonial state? If the behavior or the processes that the state would like to happen at particular monuments is not happening, then I would just read that as resistance, regardless of the intention of those people. Because firstly, the archive doesn't really give voice to the marginalized anyway, right? The archive is the official archive of the state, at least the ones that one tries to locate first. And so the question of resistance is really about when the state's order is being broken. So, for example, the fourth chapter, right, about the Purana Killer, when it is the Partition refugee camp at that time it is the state that agrees to make the Puranakila, amongst other monuments in Delhi, also refugee camps, because they really need big spaces, big open spaces. So, for example, Humayun's Tomb was also a refugee camp. These were official refugee camps. Humayun's Tomb and Puranakila, some others became unofficial camps because people just kind of refugees just occupied these spaces. So it is a state that allows it to happen, but then what happens is that it continues for longer than they want it to continue. And then there is this challenge of what do you do with the most marginalized people, the refugees in 1947, 48? What do you do with them? How do you protect them while at the same time also protecting the monument? So there's this conundrum that happens, and it's very clear that the government of Delhi at the time and the ASI are much more. Much more on the side of, like, protecting the monument, whereas the Relief and Rehabilitation Ministry, of course, wants to think about the refugees and so on. So it's not like the state is one monolith. They're also different elements. So I guess at that time, the very. So it's not that the refugees were thinking to themselves and thinking that I'm going to resist or I'm challenging the state, but they were just doing what was important for them, for their livelihood, right, for their life. They were just saying, we need to live here because we don't have any other places. I mean, the ones who had more like wealth or family support probably moved out, but the ones that did not have that wealth or that were the most destitute just continued to stay there. And they continued to say that unless you give us proper housing, we won't move out. And so it was not that they were thinking that they're trying to resist the state, but it's how we read it or how I read it, because for me it was like, oh, the state wants order. Because for the state at that time was, oh, India is just independent. We want to have clean monuments for tourists and so on. And there's nothing wrong with that. You want to have that. But the conundrum shows us that there is an unruly history to how the monument became, you know, ordered and that resistance was happening, but not necessarily to, like, not necessarily the way that, oh, the refugees were thinking, oh, this is how what I'm resisting. But. But that they were simply asking for their livelihood. And they're asking for livelihood for me, reads like resistance to the monster, right?
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Shohini, Podcast Host
That's. That's really a very interesting day because you are reading into daily actions and daily lives in a way that disrupted the order that the state was trying to impose. Right. Very, very interesting and a very critical lens to look at the process. And actually I am getting a lot of ideas to think about my own work by talking to you. And so the book kind of starts with Qutb and then you broaden your analysis by looking into other sites. So this was one question that I had in my mind is like, why do you choose this one particular site as your starting point? And then after that, if you would like to explain a little bit about the other sites you explored in your book such as the Red Fort, the Purana Killa, what stoked your interest in looking at these sites?
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Professor Aditi Chandra
To be honest? One, I began with the Qutb because it was the first bits of information that I found. So sometimes it's literally the practical thing that happens. And it was the first, as I was gathering the information from the archives, it was the first ideas that first tried to like became coalesced in my mind about landscaping. And also because it was the oldest piece of information I found that the first efforts to clean up that area and to buy the colonial government was happening around 1828 although the Mughals had made certain efforts there in terms of preservation and so on. But my work was starting at the colonial intervention. So because it was also like chronologically speaking, it was 1828. So I just began with that and I started thinking about this. So sometimes it's just practical and logistical of why I began with the Kutob. And also I found that as I was writing I was realizing that I was writing about very well known sites. Right. It's Qutub, Red Fort, Delhi, Puranakila. And then in chapter three, I write a little bit about Jama Masjid. So they are all very well known monuments on which there's a lot of scholarship already. So I knew that I had to bring in or think about these spaces from a different, like different perspective. And the perspective that I found was the perspective of the marginalized in the archives or actually thinking about aspects that had not been studied. So for example, it was landscaping for Red Fort, it was the on site museums which actually there's been quite a bit of study on the Red Fort but there's no discussion of the on site museums. And the on site museums in the Red Fort have, have a very interesting history because they've changed a lot. So there was a whole set of museums in the colonial era after 1857, when they just broke down a lot of the buildings inside. But they created these museums and they were about arms and weaponry. One was about the, you know, it purported to be about the Mughals, but it actually started collecting, they started collecting different artifacts about, you know, from princely houses across India. So it was. So what I argue about in chapter two is that the, the museums became everything that like everything aside from about the Red Fort's history. And actually even in the post colonial era it became about like the freedom movement. For example, there was one museum about the national army and there was a trial of the Indian national army there of three soldiers there. So that was related to the Red Fort. But generally the museums of the Red Fort have nothing much to do with the Red Fort. And if we go today, again, a whole new set of museums have been built there. And you know, again, there's nothing wrong with it, but it's just interesting that this is a site where there are so many museums and not one actually directly relates to the history of the Red Fort itself. There'll be little sprinklings of here is Bahadusha Zafar's clothing or something, little bit, but not very. The deeper history of the space. And so here in chapter two, I think it's important for me to mention that it was not so much about the people, marginalized people, but it was more about the marginalized history itself that was not being able to become part of this narrative of the Red Fort, whether it was in colonial or post colonial period. And then with the Purana killer, I was just fascinated when I found that there is this long history of it being a refugee camp and the kind of contentious discussions that happened between the Delhi government, ASI and the Relief and Rehabilitation Ministry about how to take care of these, of the refugees in the site inside these monuments. And when you go to the site, there's absolutely nothing on the signage that tells you that this used to be a refugee camp. It's almost as if that history is completely erased. And so again, when I saw something that was so present at one period but is completely absent now, again, that piqued my interest. So that's how I ended up writing about these kind of well known monuments. And a quick note about chapter three because I mentioned the Jama Masjid and I think in terms of postcard representations, and I think what also happens is that sometimes your analysis and your choice of monuments also depends on what you find in the archive. So what I found in the archive was this long complaint of this one particular Colonel, you know, English military officer visiting the Jama Masjid and him having an altercation at that site. And so it could have been any other site, really. Right. So it's just what I found. And then I ended up writing about the Jama Masjid and then I had to be more careful about, okay, this is a living space of worship. So what does it mean for having this, like, difficult touristic encounter? Because it's, you know, place of worship, plus it's a tourist monument and, you know, trying to, you know, kind of understand that history. So some of the choice is also about what one stumbles upon in the archive. Effy.
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Home Depot Announcer
Right.
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Shohini, Podcast Host
Because it's ultimately the sources that guide us to the questions that, you know, eventually end up exploring. And I really like the way you frame that, you know, you were trying not just to uncover the history of marginalized people, but the history of marginalized histories itself, which is, I think, is the very fundamental core of this book. And because we are talking about the, you know, the colonial state. So the book kind of talks about how the colonial states, creation of the modern monument catered to the elite, aesthetics, consumption and that operated through the acquisition of land, the closure of public access roads, the planting of trees that you were talking about, the construction of guest houses and the development of the circular approach roads. Right. But the book kind of, and this kind of goes back to what he was saying earlier, it also uncovers the voices of those disenfranchised by this process. Right. The native residents, the farmers, the Muslim clerics who disrupted the state narrative. So the way you conceptualize unruly histories is there. So I was wondering if you could expand a bit on this question and mention how you read agency or voices in the archives.
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Professor Aditi Chandra
Right, right. I hinted on this before, but I think this is a very, very good question because when we think about agency, we think that that particular person is actually, like, we hope to find something written in the voice of that person itself. We hope to find, like, if it's a modern thing, then we hope to find some recording or we hope to find like, some painting by that person, like, or something that the person has done. We want to find the mark of that person. And so as I was writing about, like, say, voices of farmers or refugees or clerics or, you know, just. Just people who were non tourists at these sites. And I. So I wondered, how does one locate agency?
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Shohini, Podcast Host
Right.
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Professor Aditi Chandra
Like, and how does one, you know, how does one think about their voice? And so I think one will have to go back into how one reads an archival Document, actually. So suppose I found, you know, an archival document by. Written by some ASI official to a Delhi government official, right? And they are writing amongst themselves, but they're writing about these people, right? So it's in their voice. It's in the voice of the state, whether it's colonial or post colonial. But they are describing them and they're describing them as being irritating or annoying, or they're saying, oh, they this so and so destroyed X, Y and Z, or so and so. Or suppose I'm reading a travel journal by the wife of a, you know, colonial bureaucrat. And so they would be the elites of the time in the early 20th century. And, you know, so they. So she's writing about, you know, how, you know, they're having this picnic. But she's really nervous about the fact that her husband has gone up all the way to the top of the Qutub minar and, like, 20 or 30 natives have gone behind him. And so she's really worried about what's happening to her husband. And she's after, like, sometime she's quite relieved that he's come back safe. So the point is, those 20 or 30 quote unquote natives are not writing this. But I'm thinking about how she's conceptualizing them. And I'm thinking, like, what if they were just people, like, also wanting to go up to the Qutub Minar? Do they not have that, you know, at that time you could go up. So do they not have that. That right to go up to the Qutub Minar? And so I'm thinking, so. So their voice or their agency is really about how me, I, as a scholar, I'm reading the lines, right? And so it's really about. Even though the voices of the state, you try to think about what would be their perspective or the perspective of the people that are being written about the people that are being disparaged to the people that are being, you know, kind of put aside or seen as an irritant or an annoyance. So the question is, and again, I'm not trying to say that I am giving voice to the marginalized because it's a perspective, it's an analysis that I'm giving. And one has to really look through and read between the lines, Read between the lines carefully when you access the archive. So that's how one would locate agency, I think.
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Shohini, Podcast Host
Yeah, that's a very useful methodology. When we read against the grain, like the archive is telling something about XYZ people while the XYZ people is not telling directly to us. But we kind of know about their history through those documents, right?
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Professor Aditi Chandra
Yeah, yeah. There's also one more thing actually that I quickly want to add is again, going back to James Scott and how he conceives of protests. So he writes about, you know, peasants in Southeast Asia. And his one book is called Hidden Transcripts with the. There's another one that's called Weapons of the Weak. And in those books, his method is really about what are the different ways that the most oppressed can protest without it actually being protest without it actually being legible as protest, the way we read protests. So protest is not just marches on the street or not just holding up a placard or something, or what could a protest be? So. So one quick example that comes to me is again in chapter one, when I write about these farmers in a village called Adschini. It's still a location in Delhi. It's very near Kotob Complex. And there was a village there. And they needed to. The colonial state needed to take that land in order to broaden the road because they wanted tourists to have easy access to the Qutb. And so the farmers there refused to give up their land. And so I read that as a sort of resistance or protest. They were not like marching on the streets saying, don't take our land, but they were refusing to give up their land. And of course, there's a longer history of what happens and so on and so forth in the book. So again. So again, agencies about like trying to redefine what protest means. And I do that through James Scott's work.
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Shohini, Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. That's very interesting because the way these farmers were trying to not hold onto their land and not give it to the sid that we can greed autonomy in moments. Right. That is kind of questioning or in some way resisting the state's power. Maybe not directly, but that's through their actions, Right through their everyday life. So I just want to take the conversation a little bit about the Travelers archive. You mentioned it at the beginning of this discussions, and I think that is one of the most fascinating part of the book is how you explore the Travelers archive. I had so much fun reading that part. So the book kind of compares. And I found this, you know, this argument so fascinating that the book compares these idyllic images of the postcards with the lived experiences, such as the hostile encounters that you talk about in the book. So how do you see these travel materials construct a very specific version of public memory, one that is favoring tourism, intellectual brainstorming, consumerism over the messy lived experiences of the local population or the local communities who live in those areas.
- [36:45]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Firstly, thanks so much. And also I'd like to talk to you later about what you found fascinating about it more. But so as I was writing this, this is chapter three about the postcards. And as I was writing about it I realized, okay, what are the different things that the traveler accumulates as they travel? So there's postcards, there's guidebooks, there's souvenirs. But then I said, but what about the intangible experiences that one has that's also part of the archive of experience? And then do they, are they reflected in the postcards? And of course, because I was specifically looking at Delhi, I looked at the postcards and architecture of Delhi. So I looked at particularly just postcards of Delhi sites. And, and so I was looking at Jama Masjid in particular and I was finding that generally architectural postcards tend to be, you know, just the grand building itself or a very kind of focused view of a small portion of the building. And people would be like, you know, like tiny little people in the distance, you know, just as a kind of, you know, you have people in these pictures as to reference space or scale. Scale, right. And so people would be tiny and so on. And so, but then I said, but, but people are really present when you have the travel experience. And then like I told you before, I found this, this long discussion, this complaint that this particular military official had, he wanted to go into the Jama Masjid with his shoes on. And you know, there was, there was a, there was a rule that you couldn't go in with your shoes on and you had to put in, you had to put, to put on some foot coverings before going in. And he was asked to do that and he refused. And there was an altercation with the khadims at the masjid. And so there's a lot of back and forth, a complaint and so on and so forth that happens. And then I looked at, okay, this happened in 1903. So what were the postcards like? And the postcards were very idyllic. They had like diffused edges and you know, and so on and so forth. So yes, the travel, the process of travel definitely favors the postcards being idyllic, right? Because that's what they want you to remember. But actually there are a lot of messy, like you say, messy or anxious experiences that don't show up in the visual postcard. But what is interesting is that in the postcards that I was collecting and of course Again, that's my own sample size. Right. Like that's whatever postcards I collected. I found that in the written part those, a few that had letters actually had those messy experiences in the text. So for example, one wrote about, you know, kind of the, some of the, like kind of the dirty or the congested exteriors. One wrote about the fact that this is the same place where a bomb was thrown at Lord Hardinge. I think there was, at one point there was an attempt on one of the viceroy's lives. And so I found that the messy experience sometimes showed up in text, but not on the visual form itself. So there was that kind of oppositional kind of juxtaposition that was happening. So yes, they do construct a particular version of public memory which is like this was a. That touristic experience is always leisurely and always comfortable. But definitely there are difficult, not there are the difficult anxious sides of experience again, which shows us how presence and absence works. Right. Like you're making present this monument in this very beautiful idyllic way, but you're making absent the kinds of encounters that happen. Now obviously one is not saying that like postcards should become messy. That's not the point of this analysis. The point of analysis is simply to show that there is a disjuncture.
- [40:58]
Shohini, Podcast Host
Yeah, that's really very interesting how you say that. You know, the pictures is projecting the reality in some certain ways. And then you have this text and I think it goes back to the question, who is the author? Right. Who are those who are printing these pictures and who are these people who are writing the text? Which kind of, to understand this disjunction that you are talking about.
- [41:19]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Yeah, yeah. And actually that's a really good point. I want to just do a quick follow up, is that the, the interesting thing about these postcards is they were being post printed by European companies, but also by Indian companies, right. So for example, H.A. mirza Sons. And they were like Indian postcard companies that were also presenting the same views because for them they really just wanted to sell the postcards, right. And then certain conventions became established as norm in postcard views. So you see actually a lot of repetition in postcard views in terms of the way a monument is presented. What changed of course was that certain postcards were the printing technology changed or there were some that they were trying to mimic oil paintings like Raphael Tuck and postcards. So those are considered more high end postcards. And so the nature of printing changed, the use of color changed and so on. And sometimes, you know, you in the early days, you actually couldn't write a letter at the back of postcards because people. Yeah, people were worried that it's too personal. So they were just like. It would be just the address and like a line and it would be center. And later on you have the divided back postcard where you have address on one side and a bit to write on the other side. So, yeah, that's different though, but that's super interesting.
- [42:46]
Shohini, Podcast Host
So I have another question kind of a little bit different from what we are discussing so far, which is the question of the film, because you have a chapter on the film. So I wanted to ask you, why did you include the film in the book and how does it relate to the broad story that you are telling in this?
- [43:06]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Right. So chapter five is about the. About two films.
- [43:14]
Podcast Producer/Host Assistant
And
- [43:16]
Professor Aditi Chandra
it's about a film called Jagrathi which released in 1955 in India. And interestingly, it was made in Pakistan again, and it was called Bedari. I think the Pakistan version is 1957. So there are some minor changes, of course, in the narrative of these two films, but for the most part they remain the same. And the reason that, again, I started even thinking about these films is because there's a song in the Jagriti film, I don't know if you know it. It's called Ao Bachoto Mehende Khaen Jaaki Hindustan Ki.
- [43:54]
Shohini, Podcast Host
You know, I caught this song when I was a kid.
- [43:57]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. And it's a film about school kids, right? It's about school kids and they're really naughty. And it's about you, school teacher, that is trying to make education fun for them. And one way he makes it fun for them is to take them to these different historical sites. So for me, it was that song that I. That I got that got me interested because I was like, okay, they're going to these different historical sites, but what are they seeing in these different historical sites? And again, as I was searching up this film, I saw that there is this, you know, version that was made in Pakistan.
- [44:32]
Shohini, Podcast Host
And I.
- [44:33]
Professor Aditi Chandra
And I thought, okay, this is. So this is 1955 and 57, around eight to ten years after partition. And I wanted to see if they're making a similar narrative. How differently or how similarly are they making this narrative? And so that song, since it was about going to different monuments, and since I was writing about monuments, I just looked at that song and I found that the places that these students were going to in the Indian version, in Jagrathi, they went to all places except anything to do with the Sultanate or Mughal history of India. And at that time, I'm quite certain that Taj Mahal, Qutub, they would have been really well known on the tourist circuit, Right? And in fact, in chapter four, I had just talked about how they wanted to throw the refugees out of Vernakila in order to make it beautiful, right? So it was important for the state. These sites were important. And yet in the same film, which is. It was a very popular film, it won some sort of awards also, and the songs were very popular. So it did well at the time. And, and, and I was like, okay, so then why isn't it including, you know, the Mughal and Sultanate sites? And then I looked at the Pakistani version, the song itself, and I found interestingly that they. What was the Islamic past for them was, you know, like they referenced Umayyad Syria or they referenced like some Umayyad general coming to Sindh and defeating a Hindu ruler and so on. They weren't really talking about their Islamic past. The conception of Islamic past was not one that was shared with India, you see, because they wanted to separate themselves. So again, that was really fast. But what was also fascinating in the Pakistani version was that they had a few visuals of the Lahore Fort, like it would come, like they were flashed, but there was nothing in the lyrics about the Lahore Ford, right? So. And I found that there is actually some literature by historians who have, and art historians as well, Salima Varaik and also Tamia Zaman, who have written about the complicated relationship that Pakistan has with its Sultanate and Mughal past. Like the complicated relationship of how they relate with it. So there were these flashes of the Mughal fort, Lahore Mughal fort, but they couldn't vocalize it in the lyrics. It just wasn't there. And instead, what was seen as Pakistan Islamic past was seen as outside of South Asia. Right. And so the way I thought about this chapter was more as how there's something powerful being said through the monuments actually being absent. Right? So the Mughal monuments are absent in the Jagrati, and in the other one, they're absent in complicated ways. So there is a way in which the absence of the monument tells us that at a time when these two nations were trying to form themselves, they had to make this complicated history. Absent, Right. And so again, here, like, the absence and presence things comes on, there's a presence of, like, using monuments to educate kids, right? Making them better citizens and so on. And yet you have to absent a particular part of your history because you cannot otherwise make your cohesive national identity the way you want to shape it at that time, ten years after partition.
- [48:00]
Shohini, Podcast Host
Right. Precisely. Because it's about ultimately this competing state narratives and how they are using and appropriating these histories or satellite.
- [48:08]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Right. And so even though this chapter wasn't about Delhi, and I thought a lot about how do I include this, but I felt theoretically it related broadly to this, questions of absence and presence and how the monument works with, you know, how the monument escapes the nation. Yeah, yeah.
- [48:27]
Shohini, Podcast Host
So that was wonderful to, you know, to listen to this, to your response. So I have, like, one last question that I want to ask you before we wrap up this discussion. And this is more about our graduate and undergraduate listeners. So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about your journey of writing the book, because some of the questions that our student listeners have is, how is the experience in working in the archives? How does the research process look like when you are writing a book, especially? And then did you find any obstacle when you were in the archive? If so, what? And how did you deal with it? And did you have any eureka moment in the archive life? Right.
- [49:14]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Thank you again for this question. I love being in the archives because it's just such, you know, you can spend so many hours just being quiet and, like, you know, delving into people's stories and so on. So it's a amazing time for me at least. So when we. When I go to the archive or anyone goes to the archive, you have a sense of, like, the things that you're looking for. Right. Some people might have a very specific question, and some people might have a very broad topic. But the point is that your experience in the archive or the way you even look for materials will lead you to different things, and you just have to be open to it. So, for example, in some archives, which are more organized, you might be just able to type into a keyword search and find information. But the point is, again, because of the kinds of keywords you're putting in, you might find different kinds of information. So I'll give you a recent example. My new project is about the diverse relationships that women have had with garden spaces in British India and late Mughal India. And if I go to an archive and I just type in women and garden and India, you. You might get information on gardens and India, but you will not get anything on women. Okay? And so then I later realized you had to know the names of women and then put those into the search, and then it would show up something, but then that creates a different problem for you, which is that then you're already going with people that are known, then you're putting that into the archive. How do you find a marginalized history then? Right, so then. So those are the complications that you have to deal with when you're doing archival research. But my experience was. So, firstly, I was very, very fortunate when I was doing research for this book, because at that time, I was able to get a full year and a half. You know, funding was more available then, and I had a full year and a half to spend in the archives. And so. So I had a lot of time. There are. You have to be. You know, there's a lot of logistics you have to be aware of before going. You have to make sure that different archives will have different rules. Sometimes you need letters of introduction. Sometimes you need different types of identification. Sometimes you need to make appointments. Other times you can just walk in. So you have to make sure that you have the information before you go. And then you also have to know what kind of time you are spending. So the information could be, for example, will the archive permit you to do photocopies? Nowadays, they mostly allow you to take digital photographs or. So you have to know what is their way of collecting material, what are their permissions and everything. So in terms of obstacles, I didn't face major obstacles, but there were people who were very, very helpful. So, for example, at the Delhi Archives, in fact, the Delhi State Archives are all digitized now, but they weren't earlier. And there, the archivist that I found at that time. They're different people now, but at that time was very, very helpful in terms of bringing out materials, in terms of allowing me to digitize materials. And also the ASI archive at that time, right now, the ASI materials are all in the National Archives, but earlier they were just in one room in the Archaeological Survey of India building. And they were like, you know, it was a small room, and there was one small table, and the rest of it was full of shelves and shelves of dusty files. And what was amazing was that they gave me permission to just go in and pull the file out and, you know, pull the files out and, like, make my notes and everything. And so they were extremely helpful. So I would say that whatever obstacles that could have been encountered were smoothed over because the people were so helpful. I did have to spend, like, sometimes you have to be like, okay, one day, you just have to spend talking to people and telling them who you are and telling them about your research. So you have to, like, build in some Buffer time. But now things I, you know, like in the National Archives, early Archives, things are more organized now. So you just have to go there and give yourself some time to understand the rules and the process and how things work, because things always take longer than you think that they do. In terms of Eureka moment in the Archives, I didn't really have any one Eureka moment. But I remember the moment when I found information about. So there is this colonial British military engineer called Robert Smith, and he, you know, he's known to have designed that cupola which is on the side of the Qutb lawn now, but he had put it on top of the Qutub Minar. There's a long history of how it went up and down. So all of that is quite known. But the landscaping work that he did around the Qutb, when I found the actually East India Company, like, correspondence about him asking for money and getting money about doing all of that landscaping work and all the rules he was setting up, rules about how people must behave around these sites and cattle and farmers are not allowed to go through and all of that. When I found all of that, that was my first actually glimpse into, you know, how the space changed for the locals. So that was one interesting moment. And of course, the other moment was when I found that these sites were used as refugee camps. Of course, now it's fairly well known, but I'm talking about, like, I did this research ages ago, in 2007, 2008. So at that time, when I found the information about. About these spaces being used as refugee camps, I mean, kind of new, because Margaret Bourke White had taken those photographs of the people in the Puranakila. But actually finding the documentation about it and the history around it was fascinating. Oh, and of course, another fun moment was when I found that Jagruti had been remade in Pakistan as Bidari. And the fact that it was the same child actor and the fact that it was remade because the child actor had migrated with his family and so they remade it in Pakistan. So all of these were interesting moments. Yeah.
- [55:58]
Shohini, Podcast Host
And I think in the archives, like, when you are looking through the files and not finding anything and then you get that file, that kind of tells you something about the questions that you're looking for. I mean, that is the moment. So I completely agree with you that we really don't have that one moment, but we have several small moments which.
- [56:15]
Professor Aditi Chandra
Right. And also sometimes what happens is that, you know, one piece of information you might find and you may think that, oh, oh, it's not really that, you know, related, but you might find a second piece of information, and then suddenly that first piece of information becomes important. It's really about how you also read the archive. And actually, one last thing that I want to say before I end is that you may have noticed that I start each of the chapters with a little kind of prologue. Yeah. And I just wanted to say that in terms of my method, that I wanted to make sure that I wanted to bring in myself as a human being, as a person, not just as an academic, into the writing. Because even as, like, I go back to chapter one, even as I critique the picture as landscaping and all the exclusions that happen and so on, I also know that I enjoy it. I also know that I myself love these picturesque environs and so on. And I remember that that's because of my childhood growing up in the tea estates in Assam and my family taking me for picnics when we went to Delhi, to the Qutb when I was very little and so enjoying it, but only realizing the kind of the exclusions of the picturesque landscape later on. So I feel that it was very important for me to bring in myself as just a regular person, as a traveler, as, you know, a film watcher, as. As a collector of postcards into this narrative as well, not just as this kind of, you know, academic looking in. That was important for me.
- [58:01]
Shohini, Podcast Host
Effy. Yeah, you. So you bring this multiple perspectives as an academician, as a traveler, as a tourist, you know. You know, to read into this material and, you know, build up this narrative.
- [58:12]
Podcast Producer/Host Assistant
Yeah.
- [58:13]
Shohini, Podcast Host
It was fascinating to talk to you and I had so much fun reading this book and talking to you. So thank you so much for giving us your time, and I'm sure our listeners are going to have a wonderful time listening to our podcast and they will have as much fun as I had. So thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, I really enjoyed our conversation.
- [58:34]
Professor Aditi Chandra
You're most welcome. And thank you so much for taking the time to read the book and for talking to me in a busy semester. So I appreciate it. Thank you.
- [58:42]
Podcast Producer/Host Assistant
You.
- [58:42]
New Books Network Announcer
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Ryan Reynolds
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