When the World Grew Old: Scientific Mythologies and the Nineteenth Century Making of Delhi’s History

In 1847, Syed Ahmad Khan, an intellectual of Delhi, published a history of his beloved city titled Asar-us-Sanadid. Part imperial geneaology and part architectural survey, it claimed to be the first modern and scientific history of Delhi. Although the book was written in his native Urdu, Syed Ahmad Khan’s audience was primarily the members of the Royal Asiatic Society in London, who were eager to sponsor “native” histories of India. The success of the book prompted a second edition to be published in 1854, which simplified the ornate Urdu of the original and included citations and footnotes, once again stressing the scientific nature of the history at hand.

In 1861, shortly after India became a colony of the British Empire, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was established at the urging of colonial officers such as Alexander Cunningham. Cunningham pressed the colonial duty to preserve the colony’s antiquities on the grounds that India’s written and oral histories were often unreliable and hardly distinguishable from myths, and argued that architectural monuments were the only stable texts from which factual accounts of the past could be extracted. The ASI began producing its first reports in 1862 and Cunningham worked closely with “native” scholars like Syed Ahmad Khan to collate epigraphic, archaeological and architectural evidence to construct modern histories of India.

This paper juxtaposes Syed Ahmad Khan’s 1854 edition of the Asar-us-Sanadid with the first archaeological reports of Delhi produced by the ASI. Rather than reading the former as “traditional” history and the latter as “scientific” production, I explore the myths of urban tradition as well as urban science that both sets of knowledge shared. I argue that the modern making of Delhi’s history was produced at the intersection of various mythologies—mythologies of place; mythologies of power as well as mythologies of science.