Why PMs deliver Independence Day address from Red Fort

Delhi: the seat of power

“…Over and over again and for so long and so repeatedly, Delhi has been the centre or ‘seat’ of empire… Delhi has been the site for a succession of cities, each of which served as the capital or citadel or centre of a vast domain. This has been so for a thousand years…,” historian Richard Eric Frykenberg wrote in his introduction to the book Delhi through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society (1986).

As to why Delhi became a seat of power has been debated ad nauseum by historians. What is perhaps more interesting is that in the course of it assuming political significance, Delhi became more than just a physical location — it became an idea, a name associated with political power.

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In the 16th century, Babur, the first Mughal emperor, had referred to Delhi as the ‘capital of all Hindustan’. More than a century later, Shah Jahan in 1648 would inaugurate Shahjahanabad, comprising a fortified citadel (the Red Fort) and a walled city surrounding it (Old Delhi), on the banks of the Yamuna. Shahjahanabad remained the Mughal capital till 1857 amid a rapid decline in the dynasty’s authority over the 18th and 19th centuries.

“Yet, such was his (the Mughal emperor’s) symbolic significance as the source of legitimate sovereign authority that many new states, including the East India Company, continued to rule in his name, and to issue coins in his name until well into the 19th century,” historian Swapna Liddle had written for The Indian Express in 2021.

This would change after the rebellion of 1857.

1857 & stamping of British authority

In 1857, the East India Company was ruling India from Calcutta. As such, there were only a few Europeans in Delhi, which was pretty unimportant for the grand scheme of the Company’s economic and political interests designs in the subcontinent.

For the natives, however, Delhi and the Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar remained the foremost symbols of indigenous authorities. After mutinying against their British superiors, the sepoys triumphantly marched to Delhi and declared the ailing emperor as their leader.

The fall of Delhi to Company forces effectively sealed the fate of the rebellion of 1857. It also sealed the fate of the Mughal emperor, who was exiled to Rangoon, and the city itself. “Delhi suffered severe devastation, ‘both physically and psychologically’. Military destruction was followed by punitive damage, vindictive demolition, radical reconstruction, railway and industrial development in disregard of historic dwellings, and the mixed blessing of modem municipal government,” Frykenberg wrote.

Initially, the British planned to raze all of Shahjahanabad to the ground and thus wipe out the memory of the Mughal Empire from the city. While they stopped short of doing that, Shahjahanabad, and specifically the Red Fort, was very deliberately stamped with British authority.

“About 80 per cent of the interior of the fort was destroyed (an area of about 120 acres). This had been densely covered with elaborate royal pavilions, gardens, store-rooms, barracks, and quarters of artisans and other court functionaries. Displacing a substantial residential population, the British converted the fort into a military garrison,” Samuel V Noe wrote in ‘What happened to Mughal Delhi: A morphological study’, a chapter in the aforementioned Frykenberg-edited book.

In the decades after the rebellion, the British systematically harnessed Delhi’s symbolic associations with power, most notably with the Delhi Durbars of 1877, 1903, and 1911, before deciding to shift the capital to Delhi from Calcutta in 1911.

“Besides its centrality and connectivity within the Great Indian Empire, Delhi carried in the minds of the colonial rulers a symbolic value — as the age old saying goes: ‘he who rules Delhi rules India’…,” Suoro D Joardar, professor at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi, wrote in his article ‘New Delhi: Imperial Capital to Capital of World’s Largest Democracy’ (2006).

Reclaiming Red Fort, reclaiming India

It is this history of Delhi, and by extension the Red Fort, as a seat of empire that made it the venue of choice to celebrate India’s independence. This is more so given that in 1946, the fort was the venue of the highly public trials of senior officers of Subhas Chandra Bose’s Indian National Army. These trials, which led to an outpouring of nationalist sentiments, had firmly established the Red Fort as a symbol of power and resistance in the minds of the Indian public.

As Swapna Liddle wrote in 2021: “With the coming of Independence, it was necessary that the site of the Red Fort, over which the British colonial government had sought to inscribe its power and might, be symbolically reclaimed for the Indian people.”

This is an edited version of an article which first appeared in 2023