Delhi Rewind: How a mosque in Khirki village survived, with help from local Hindus

Nathu Singh Kaushik was about 15 at that time. His family had, for generations, been living in the village of Khirki. His home was in the vicinity of a historic mosque that gave the village its name. The Khirki Masjid is known to have been built in the 14th Century by Khan-i-Jahan Junan Shah, the prime minister of Firoz Shah Tughlaq. For residents of Khirki though, the identity of the mosque was rather vague, given that no religious rituals were held on its premises. For those like Kaushik it was a ‘qila’ or a grand historic structure that was characteristic of their village, and where they played and rested as children.

As the government started marking out monuments of the city to make space for refugees, the structure at Khirki too was considered. Kaushik recalled how anxious the residents of his village were about the possibility of their beloved ‘qila’ becoming a refugee camp. “This structure was a very special part of the village. We did not want it to be ruined in any way or crowded by the refugees,” said Kaushik.

Khirki village consisted of a mixed population of Rajput Chauhans, Muslims, Brahmins and Dalits. In the wake of the Partition and the communal disturbances that followed, almost all Muslims of the village had fled. The Hindu residents, however, came together to appeal to the government, arguing that a mosque must not be disrupted or converted into a refugee camp.

Kaushik remembered how the government had appointed Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, the first minister of education in the Indian government, to visit the village and examine if indeed the structure concerned was a mosque. “My grandfather happened to meet Azad during his visit,” said Kaushik. “He explained to Azad that this has been a masjid for centuries, even though no prayers are held here.” Consequently, the government decided to drop the plan of resettling refugees in the mosque.

The villagers’ steadfast desire to protect the mosque was a product of the role the structure played in their lives. “Before Independence, the structure was used to store grains,” said Ekta Chauhan, who has been carrying out an oral history project in Khirki in collaboration with the Citizens Archive of India. “A lot of village elders have also told me that children would go to play and study there in the afternoon. The structure of the mosque is such that it remains cool even on really hot days,” said Chauhan. She mentioned that through her growing up years in the village, till about the early 2000s, the mosque would be frequented by children for kite flying or playing hide and seek. Much has changed over the years in the way the residents interact with the mosque. Chauhan recollected how they stopped visiting the monument since it became a haven for vagrants and drug addicts. When the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) decided to restore the monument before the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the problem of squatting and encroachment was resolved to a large extent, although the frequent visits of the villagers to the structure had stopped by then.

History enthusiast and Delhi heritage expert Sohail Hashmi said it is because of the residents of Khirki that the monument has survived all these years. He compared the fate of the mosque to that of three Lodi period mausoleums inside the village of Zamrudpur near Kailash Colony. “In the period after the Partition, the area around the village came to be inhabited by refugees from West Punjab. In the subsequent years the three mausoleums are no longer recognisable,” said Hashmi.  “Whether the residents of Khirki were motivated to protect the mosque or whether they did not want outsiders living there is hard to tell,” said Hashmi. “However, these were people who had lived together peacefully in mixed populations for centuries. They had experienced communalism during Partition, but its impact had not percolated down to a large extent.”