Where is the Barakhamba Cemetery in Delhi? Even those who are intimately familiar with Delhi will find it difficult to answer this question. Etymologically, the word monument means a burial place or tomb, erected in memoriam. Therefore, the Barakhamba Cemetery should be a monument, as it indeed is. Not only is it a monument, it is a national monument. The responsibility for protecting it vests with the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI). Unfortunately, however, the ASI has lost the monument. Reminds one of what Oscar Wilde wrote in The Importance of Being Earnest: “To lose one parent, Mr Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” Lady Bracknell would have shuddered. ASI’s monumental performance transcends both misfortune and carelessness. The agency has lost 24 monuments. They are untraceable.
Let me backtrack a bit and quote from the 324th report, submitted to Parliament on June 15, 2022. This is the report of Rajya Sabha’s Standing Committee on transport, tourism and culture. The report focused on untraceable monuments. “The primary mandate of the Ministry of Culture is preservation and conservation of ancient cultural heritage and promotion of tangible and intangible art and culture. The Ministry manages all the Centrally Protected Monuments (CPMs) of national importance, through the Archaeological Survey of India. The Ministry, in its written reply furnished to the Committee, informed that there are 3,693 Centrally Protected Monuments and 4,508 State Protected Monuments in the country,” it notes.
Given India’s geographical expanse, this figure for protected monuments is a small number, even more so if we focus only on the centrally protected ones. But despite this small number of centrally-protected ones, we lost monuments. At another point, the 324th report notes, “The Ministry, in its background note on the subject, stated that the CAG in its 2013 Report on ‘Performance Audit of Preservation and Conservation of Monuments and Antiquities’, submitted to Parliament on 23.8.2013, had reported that 92 monuments are missing. However, vigorous efforts to locate/identify the reportedly untraceable monuments based on verification of old records, revenue maps and referring published reports were carried out by the respective field offices of Archaeological Survey of India. The exercise gave fruitful results and many monuments were traced out.” A monument vanishes and is rediscovered.
But, there are 24 that have still not been rediscovered. (There may be more that are untraceable, but this is the official figure.) One of these is Barakhamba Cemetery in Delhi. Barakhamba simply means 12 pillars and we will promptly think of Barakhamba Road. Barakhamba Road is evidently named after a house with 12 pillars of a 14th-century nobleman from the Tughlaq era. If this identification is correct, those antecedents of Barakhamba Road have long disappeared. Barakhamba Cemetery is different. It seems to have been in the Nizamuddin area. In the first decade of the 20th century, Maulvi Zafar Hasan told us, in his report on Delhi’s monuments, that this cemetery, also from the Afghan era, had become the executive engineer’s office. Subsequently, it became part of Ghalib Park or the nearby Lal Mahal. Hence, we will probably never be able to find it, despite ASI’s hopes of rediscovering it by using modern scientific tools. Some monuments are lost to urbanisation, and others are submerged. If they are completely destroyed, what hope is there?
The ASI was set up in 1861. Post-Independence, how do we decide what is a national monument? Do we simply carry forward historical and arbitrary decisions? Shouldn’t we de-notify those for which there is no hope? Is the ASI equipped to protect national monuments, or does it hinder the process?
Among such missing monuments are the Kos Minars in Mujesar (Faridabad) and Shahabad (Kurukshetra). Kos Minars marked out the distance of one krosha (roughly 2 miles) and proliferated along the Grand Trunk Road, thanks to Sher Shah Suri. Some of them — in UP, Rajasthan, Haryana and Punjab, and even in Pakistan — are in excellent condition. But not those in Mujesar and Shahabad. Indeed, out of the 49 Kos Minars in Haryana, only eight remain. Others have been swallowed up by development, including those in Mujesar and Shahabad. The land on which Mujesar stood was acquired by the Haryana government in 1983, and handed over to a company that demolished the Kos Minar.
The last time the minar in Shahabad was seen was in 1955. The Haryana Urban Development Authority (HUDA) acquired the land and developed it, the Kos Minar vanished in the process. If Kos Minars are along GT Road and if national highways expand and develop along GT Road, won’t they inevitably disappear?
Other than the rhetorical questions above, what exactly is a monument? The word tends to suggest a large structure. In the list of the 24 untraceable ones, why have a “tablet on treasury building” in Varanasi? Modern tablets have limited life. But traditional tablets can’t last for an inordinately long time either. That 324th report gives us a lot to think about and I have skipped the recommendations, several of which are about the ASI’s style of functioning and its human and financial resources. To quote one sentence, “If even monuments in the Capital city cannot be maintained properly, it does not bode well for monuments in remote places in the country.”
The writer is chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the PM. Views are personal
