Delhi's Jama Masjid Was Returned on 28 November 1862 and the Fatehpuri Mosque Was Bought Back in the 1870s, but the Akbarabadi Mosque and Five City Gates Were Gone by 1902 and a 300-Yard Belt Around the Red Fort Had Been Cleared

Cavalry rode in by the Delhi Gate and took the Jama Masjid on 20 September 1857, according to H. C. Fanshawe’s history of the city. The mosque went back to Delhi’s Muslims on 28 November 1862, under a written agreement with ten managers. The Fatehpuri Mosque, at the western end of Chandni Chowk, was restored by order of the Viceroy in the late 1870s, after the government paid off its owner. The Akbarabadi Mosque, which stood near the fort and the Jama Masjid, was removed after 1857, and the Punjab Government’s Gazetteer of 1883-84 records that a strip of ground 300 yards wide around the fort had been cleared of buildings.

Each case below rests on a document or a dated report that was opened for this article. Cases that could be traced to no such source were dropped. The fort’s own palaces are covered in the article on the Red Fort and its UNESCO listing, and the executions and looting of that autumn in the article on the British revenge for 1857.

What the walled city had in 1876

Carr Stephen, a barrister and former judge of the Small Cause Court in Delhi, published a survey of the city’s monuments in 1876. He dated the founding of Shah Jahan’s walled city to 1648 and listed fourteen gates in order round the wall, starting from the Kashmir Gate in the north. One of them, the Calcutta Gate on the river side, had been built only in 1852. By 1876 it no longer existed.

The Gazetteer of the Delhi District for 1883-84 says that after the capture “every Muhammadan was expelled for a time from the city” and that it filled up again only by degrees. Sadia Aziz of the University of Delhi writes from the Delhi State Archives and the National Archives of India that every mosque of any significance was confiscated and prayers in them stopped.

Orders for the walls, and who stopped them

William Dalrymple writes in The Last Mughal that Canning, the Governor General, had already given orders to destroy the Delhi walls and defences. John Lawrence, the Chief Commissioner of the Punjab, got the orders rescinded by arguing that Delhi held too little gunpowder to blow up several miles of wall. By the end of 1859, in Dalrymple’s account, Canning had agreed to demolish only what was needed to make the fort and city more defensible. By 1863 a plan to take down the eastern half of Chandni Chowk as far as the Dariba, a lane of ivory carvers, had also been stopped.

Aziz, citing Narayani Gupta’s study of Delhi, adds that Canning was willing to let small temples inside the area marked for clearance stand.

The Jama Masjid: barracks, rival plans and an agreement of November 1862

Aziz lists the plans that moved through the bureaucracy: demolition, conversion into a church, conversion into a secular college. The one adopted was to use the mosque as barracks. A letter in the Delhi State Archives, which Aziz cites, shows the 13th Punjab Infantry drilling in the courtyard, and an engineer asking for the ablution tank at its centre to be removed. The Chief Commissioner of the Punjab replied on 11 November 1858 that he could not authorise it, since the government did not mean to keep the mosque permanently.

The positions were not uniform. In another 1858 letter the Financial Commissioner for the Punjab argued that neither the Jama Masjid nor the Eidgah should ever be restored to Muslims and that the mosque should become the Delhi College once the troops left. Aziz reports that petitions handed in during the Viceroy’s visit in 1860 were turned down on the ground that the signatures were forged. The officials added that a request from respectable Muhammadans able to keep the mosque in repair might be granted.

An agreement was signed in November 1862 between ten managers, who formed the Jama Masjid Managing Committee, and the British administration. The managers took responsibility for order and for repairs and the accounts of shop rents and endowed property. Under one clause, if anything was done against the government’s wishes, it could close the mosque or change its management. Aziz gives the date in her text as 26 November and in a figure caption as 24 November, and says the mosque was returned on 28 November 1862.

The first rules allowed European officers and gentlemen to enter without a pass and without taking off their shoes. Revised rules posted at the gate later required Europeans to wear coverings over their shoes, and European soldiers to hold a pass.

The ground around it changed as well. Carr Stephen writes that on the south side of the mosque stood a madrasa and a large bazaar “which was pulled down after the mutiny”. Dalrymple writes that the letters of Ghalib mourned, among other losses, a cleared open space 70 yards wide around the Jama Masjid. By 1902 Fanshawe could write that the mosque was run by a committee appointed by the government under the Deputy Commissioner, and that it had been restored with a gift of Rs 100,000 from the Nawab of Rampur.

The Fatehpuri Mosque: auctioned, then bought back by the government

Fatehpuri Begam, a wife of Shah Jahan, built the mosque at the western end of Chandni Chowk. Carr Stephen describes shops with double rooms built into the inner walls of its enclosure.

Accounts of its sale differ in what they say was sold. Delhi Heritage Walks says the merchant Lala Chunna Mal bought it when the British auctioned it in 1857, and that the rent from the shops paid for its upkeep. Open magazine says it was sold to Hindu traders such as Chunna Mal. Madhulika Liddle, a Delhi writer, says it was confiscated with its shops and that the shops were sold. The mosque’s own history page says only that it is believed the British sold some part of it. None of these pages cites a document.

For the return there is an official record. The Gazetteer of 1883-84 says four villages were auctioned in 1878 “to pay Rai Bahadur Umrao Singh for the Fattehpuri Mosque property”, which by the Viceroy Lord Lytton’s orders “was restored to the Muhammadan community of Delhi”. The sum required was Rs 1,17,833. The villages fetched Rs 64,500, Rs 30,000, Rs 10,100 and Rs 8,000, and Rs 6,000 held on deposit from the rent of the shops round the mosque met the difference. The surplus went to the trustees of the building.

The Islamic Heritage website says the government acquired the mosque in 1877 in exchange for four villages. The Gazetteer records villages being sold at auction to raise cash, and names Umrao Singh as the person paid. The mosque’s history page gives 1877 for the restoration, the year of the Delhi Durbar, while the Gazetteer dates only the village auctions, to 1878.

A bakery, a barrack and a vanished mosque

Zinat-ul-Masajid stands on the road above the Khairati Gate, near the river. Carr Stephen says Zinat-un-nisa Begam, a daughter of Aurangzeb, built it in 1700 and was buried in a tomb in its enclosure. He writes that the tomb was destroyed immediately after 1857, with the marble monument removed, and that the marble pulpit must have gone after the mosque became an artillery barrack. Fanshawe says it was used for military purposes for many years after 1857 and that the foundress’s tomb was removed in that time. Liddle says it became a bakery for British troops and was returned to Muslims in 1875. That date rests on her page alone, and Fanshawe’s 1902 text gives no year.

The Akbarabadi Mosque is a harder case. Fanshawe places it between the Fort Gate and the Sonahri Mosque of Javed Khan and says it was built with the Faiz Bazar by Shah Jahan’s wife Akbarabadi Begam. In his words it “was removed after 1857”, together with all the buildings on the south and west sides of the palace. Dalrymple lists it among the mosques Ghalib mourned. No source opened here gives the date of its demolition or the officer who ordered it.

In July 2012 remains were reported at a Delhi Metro site near Subhash Park. A superintending archaeologist of the Archaeological Survey of India told the Times of India that the structures were Mughal-period, and another Survey official said they could belong to the mosque or to another structure demolished by the British in 1857. The Hindu reported that the Delhi High Court then ordered the municipal corporation to cordon off the site and hand it to the Survey to establish what the ruins were.

Gates that went and the gap for the railway

Carr Stephen records the Mori Gate and the Kabul Gate as demolished in 1867, with the ground behind them opened out. He does not say who ordered it. By 1902 Fanshawe lists the Mori, Kabul, Lahore, Calcutta and Nigambodh gates as removed and the Kela and Badar Rao gates as closed. The Gazetteer of 1883-84 still names the Kabul and Lahori gates among the city’s ten gates, so the printed record is not consistent for those two.

The railway explains part of it. The Gazetteer says the Rajputana line left the city by the Kabul Gate, and Fanshawe describes a gap in the wall where that gate once stood. He also writes that a quarter of the old city inside the Kashmir Gate was removed after 1860 “to make room for the railway premises”, and the 1912 Gazetteer notes that the railway had cut a corner of the city off from the main block. Fanshawe adds that the surviving gates were a “serious obstruction to traffic” and that side openings were about to be cut through the walls, with the Kashmir Gate to be kept untouched.

On the river side, Dalrymple quotes a letter of Ghalib’s saying the Raj Ghat Gate had been filled in and a wide open ground made between the Calcutta and Kabul gates for a metalled road. Ghalib wrote that the area between Raj Ghat and the Jama Masjid “is without exaggeration a great mound of bricks”.

The 300-yard belt around the Red Fort

The Gazetteer of 1883-84 describes the fort’s interior as “almost entirely cleared of buildings”, with barracks for European troops in their place. Outside, “a space of 300 yards in width has, since the Mutiny, been completely cleared” of the buildings that used to stand under the walls. Enroute Indian History, a heritage-walk company, gives a limit of 450 yards without naming a source.

Inside, Carr Stephen writes that the walls of the court of the Diwan-i-Am were levelled after the Mutiny. Fanshawe questions the removal of the arcades and fountain in front of the Diwan-i-Khas, writing that the area “was not needed for any military purpose”. Dalrymple, quoting the Delhi Gazette’s report of March 1859, says “a good deal of blowing up” was still going on in the palace, and estimates that about one-fifth of the fort’s original fabric survived the year.

The 1912 Gazetteer says the open spaces east of the Jama Masjid, loosely called the glacis of the fort, were used for parades.

What stands now

The Shahjahanabad eHeritage project, a documentation site whose footer names UNESCO, DEF India and the Indian Heritage City Network, says the Kashmiri Gate survives in its battle-damaged state and the Delhi Gate stands, though cordoned off. It describes the Kabuli Gate as gone, the Lahori Gate as having no physical gate, and the Mori Gate as a surviving stretch of wall, and it notes a piece of old wall on Nicholson Road. At the time of the 2012 Times of India report the Jama Masjid was not a protected monument of the Archaeological Survey of India and, as Aziz and Fanshawe describe, it had been run by a managing committee since 1862.