From a Mughal Bagh to a Colonial Archaeological Garden to a UNESCO World Heritage Property and everything else in between: the many lives of Badshah Shahjahan’s Hayat Baksh Bagh

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article explores the transformation of the Indian subcontinent’s historic gardens as power changed hands from the Mughals to the British, first as the East India Company (henceforth EIC) and subsequently as the Crown, thus altering not only the political scenario but also the subcontinent’s cultural landscape. In the aftermath of the 1857 Indian uprising against colonial rule, the victorious colonial state undertook an urban remodelling programme across the subcontinent’s cities in a bid to stamp its authority. This resulted in the introduction of metropole-inspired forms of urbanity that included leisure. As a cultural import, leisure was spatialised in the subcontinent, like its British counterpart, via the public park. Colonial institutions notably the municipality and Archaeological Survey of India (henceforth ASI) laid out public parks that were referred to as municipal gardens and archaeological gardens respectively. These were either laid out as new ventures or by remodelling Mughal gardens based on metropolitan, notably English garden design ideas. The article argues that colonial interventions transformed Mughal gardens to produce a multi-layered landscape that evoked several but fragmented meanings. Further, it urges an unravelling of the layers of Mughal gardens to appreciate their complexity for charting a holistic approach for their conservation and management. One such venture is examined in detail i.e. the transformation of the seventeenth-century imperial Mughal leisure garden, Hayat Baksh Bagh, in Delhi’s Red Fort, first as a Mughal leisure garden, then as a colonial military space and archaeological garden and finally as a contemporary tourist site. The need to unravel the garden’s many culturally diverse layers is underscored for a more nuanced site interpretation to facilitate its conservation in keeping with contemporary global and national conservation discourses. 1