Opinion Mehrauli demolitions: How have we allowed historical sites to become more important than human lives?

But the story of Delhi’s first city did not stop in some distant past. It continues today because history is a living entity.

The so-called encroachments were removed in order to develop the Mehrauli Archaeological Park. (Express photo by Tashi Tobgyal)

Arjun Sengupta

New DelhiFebruary 18, 2023 02:17 PM IST First published on: Feb 18, 2023 at 02:16 PM IST

Earlier this week, authorities demolished multiple buildings in Mehrauli that were encroaching on the land belonging to the Archaeological Survey of India. These so-called encroachments were removed in order to develop the Mehrauli Archaeological Park, an area of “historical importance”, containing hundreds of monuments and the remains of Delhi’s first city, dating as far back as the 11th century CE. Residents, many of whose families had inhabited the land for generations, stood helplessly as bulldozers turned their homes into rubble.

One often hears about the need to “preserve the past” — to conserve our heritage so that future generations can learn from history. But what is history? Surely a place where generations of a family have lived has its own history. But for the demolishers in Mehrauli, that was not worthy of being preserved — that was not history. So when does something gain historical value, worthy of being conserved, even at the cost of someone’s home?

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The consideration behind deeming something worthy is itself riddled with politics. For one, there can never be a clean break between the past and the present. Even the method of dividing history into periods is inadequate to capture the complexity of the human experience. For instance, the Millsian periodisation of Indian history into (Hindu) ancient, (Islamic) medieval, and (British) modern is not just arbitrary, but also a product of the colonial politics of the early 19th century. This is because the past does not present itself in neat periodised silos. Historians create these for their own convenience and crucially, on the basis of their own politics. Consequently, even the act of preserving the past is fundamentally political.

Framing the understanding of history as dynamic — wherein the past is shaped by the present as much as the present is shaped by the past — allows us to recognise our misguided attempts to “museumise” the past, preserving it as something pristine. Mehrauli’s importance does not get diminished because some people continue to live there.

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The “museumification” of things of purported historical value is a political act, informed by the exigencies of the present. It is also a relatively recent phenomenon – born out of the tyranny of empiricism in the post-Enlightenment age. If all knowledge comes from sensory experience, preserving things “as they were” becomes crucial to knowing the past.

The flaw in this line of reasoning is the belief that it is indeed possible to freeze things in time. For instance, consider the Qutub Minar. When it was built, it was at the heart of a bustling township, with strong fortifications, crowded bazaars, and venerated shrines. While it is still surrounded by the metropolis that is Delhi, it hardly resides in the “same” city. Qutubuddin Aibak could not have imagined the intolerable traffic at Andheria Mor now or the urban sprawl of Vasant Kunj. Objects cannot remain the same at two different moments in time. While it is possible to prevent the material decay of individual artefacts, the “preserved” artefact at a later date is not the same as it was.

If one recognises that the past was never static and that any act of engaging with the past is always imbued with the politics of the present, the fallaciousness behind what happened in Mehrauli becomes apparent. Actual human lives were left in precarity for the purpose of developing an archaeological park — a destination to attract tourists and tell them the story of Delhi’s oldest city.

But the story of Mehrauli did not stop in some distant past. It continues today because history is a living entity. It exists as much in the stories of today as in the stories of the past. “Protecting” history at the cost of human suffering is illogical.

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This is not to say that there is no reason to preserve history. There is value in it simply because of what historical sites can tell us about the past — from the architecture, construction capabilities and techniques, to the cultural sensibilities, and way of living then. But we must recognise that the context in which we find these things is radically different from how they “used to be”.

Furthermore, there have to be new ways to understand the past that acknowledge how the past lives in more than material objects. And know that history is not just comprised of isolated events from a distant past but is a living, breathing entity.

arjun.sengupta@expressindia.com