Book: Anisha Shekhar Mukherji Brings An Archival Exploration Of Red Fort

The Red Fort and the city of Shahjahanabad, commissioned by Emperor Shah Jahan in the seventeenth century, have been subjected to the inexorable march of time as well as radical transformations enforced by violent change. Yet, the Red Fort continues to hold a seminal place in the history of the Indian subcontinent. Contained within the walls of the Fort are secrets of a unique system of sophisticated architecture along with the many stories of the various occupants and the lives they had led.

Through this book, releasing 20 years after it was first published, Anisha documents a detailed research and analysis of the Fort through a series of archival images, architectural maps, travelogues, court chronicles, and other historical material. The author, an architect with a specialisation in conservation, also offers valuable suggestions for the future well-being of the Red Fort and other historical sites where built and open spaces are inseparably integrated. 

Here's an excerpt from Anisha Shekhar Mukherji's The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad

Even if there is no deliberate attempt at dramatising a space, any account or representation is inevitably an individual perception which can never be completely objective. The selective nature of perception and memory is illustrated in many of the numerous drawings of the Red Fort and Shahjahanabad by both Indian and European artists in which the inner features of the Fort and sometimes even its outer profile are completely transformed. Since the Fort was a complex construction—of a vast size with many facades, and comprising many pavilions, gateways, colonnades and courtyards—it is not surprising that its depictions vary considerably between one representation and another. Thus, in some of the maps of the city, the complex profile and functions of the Red Fort have been simplified into more geometrical subdivisions or with only the external elements inserted. One such example dates from the early nineteenth century titled ‘Plan of Dehly from a Hindustani map’, in the National Archives of India. Another is a map from the eighteenth century in the OIOC collection.

Most sketches by European artists choose a different method of simplification. They reduce the Fort’s sequence of numerous single-storey pavilions connected by colonnades and courts, to just a couple of towering and isolated buildings. Two representative examples of such sketches clarify this assertion. Situated at the end of a wide-open space or a driveway flanked by trees and shrubbery in the manner of a stately English mansion, and capped by many bulbous domes, these do not tally with photographs of the area taken during the same time period or with later depictions by the ASI based on consolidated evidence from old maps, drawings and archaeological investigations.  Even the extant Mughal monuments within the Fort today are either omitted altogether or are almost unrecognisable in these sketches.

The proliferation of the onion domes in these sketches may have been due to their reassuring charm as exotic cousins of the more prosaic domes used extensively in formal religious, institutional and residential Western architecture. While the reasons for such depictions of the Fort are not relevant within the scope of the present discussion, it seems apparent that no single version of its recorded images can be relied upon as an accurate rendition of its parts.

Therefore, all the above sources—including the writing and research of other scholars on Mughal history who work under similar constraints of information—have been used to derive an integrated analysis of the geometrical form, the functional use as well as the symbolism of individual and combined spaces of the Red Fort. And in doing so, to extend the understanding of Mughal architecture through one of its pre-eminent examples. The analysis in the following sections leads back through time into the spaces of the Fort as they may have appeared when Shah Jahan inhabited them. But the peculiar freedom invested by the passage of time also makes it possible to view these spaces simultaneously ‘as they are’, contrasted with ‘as they were’ in order to communicate the transformation in the Fort and to generate a picture of it as created for Shah Jahan.

Such a study also allows back-and-forth movement through macro and micro views. Thus, while the overall planning principles are investigated before examining individual spaces, some indication of these spaces is included right at the outset, with the imperial parts of the Fort discussed at length. Portions of these are still extant, and they have also been recorded more extensively than other parts of the Fort. They are unique in that they represent the culmination of the experiments in space, form and decoration by the Mughal emperors, of whom Count H.A. Keyserling, the nineteenth-century German philosopher and traveller, wrote:

It goes hard to judge rightly here, but today it seems to me as if the great ones among the Grand Moghuls, were as types, the greatest rulers which mankind has produced. They were men of vehement temperament ... refined diplomats, experienced connoisseurs of men, and simultaneously sages, architects and dreamers. Such a constellation has never occurred in the West, at any rate to no good purpose.

The Red Fort was the outcome of the combined vision of a skilled team of artists and their patron, Emperor Shah Jahan, arguably the most imaginatively gifted of the Mughal emperors. The construction and the design of this Fort, though not as universally recognised as the Taj Mahal—another of Shah Jahan’s incomparable acts of patronage— represents an architectural feat that is unrivalled in scale and imagination perhaps anywhere in the world. The resolution of built and open space in the design of the Fort, while being appropriate to its own era, transcends time and continues to be valid even today. This enduring quality can perhaps best be communicated by a general observation of Rabindranath Tagore, whose own prodigiously creative output eminently qualifies him as a sage, architect and dreamer. 

All organic beings live like a flame, a long way beyond themselves. They have thus a smaller and a larger body. The former is visible to the eye; it can be touched, captured and bound. The latter is indefinite; it has no fixed boundaries, but is widespread both in space and time.

Excerpted with permission from The Red Fort of Shahjahanabad – An Architectural History by Anisha Shekhar Mukherji, published by Westland Non-Fiction