After 1857 the Army Replaced the Red Fort's Moonlight Garden and Royal Kitchens With Barracks and a Parade Ground, and From 1903 the Archaeological Survey Marked Out Where the Lost Courts Stood

In Delhi’s Red Fort, the lawns and shrubberies between the Naubat Khana (the drum house) and the Diwan-i-Khas (the hall of private audience) mark places where buildings once stood. The Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) says in its own guide to the fort that the lawns stand for courtyards the army removed after 1857 and the shrubberies for the buildings between them, laid out from old plans and from foundations found in the ground.

The guide was compiled in 1914 by the ASI’s Gordon Sanderson and reissued in 1919 by J. A. Page. It is read here with the Survey’s annual reports, India’s 2006 nomination file for UNESCO, Lord Curzon’s speeches and the British Library’s photographs of 1858. The fort’s building, its UNESCO listing and the surviving halls are in our article on the Red Fort.

What the ASI’s guide says disappeared

Sanderson wrote that without the courts and corridors that connected them, the surviving buildings “lose much of their meaning and beauty”. His list of what went is specific. The harem courts and gardens west of the Rang Mahal and the Mumtaz Mahal have all disappeared, together with a building called the Silver Palace. The royal store-rooms, kitchens and regalia chambers north of the Diwan-i-Amm court (the hall of public audience) gave place, with the Mahtab Bagh (the Moonlight Garden) and the western half of the Hayat Bakhsh garden, to military barracks and the parade ground.

North of the Hayat Bakhsh garden, he adds, stood the houses, harems and gardens of the royal princes, and these are gone too. So are the arcades that surrounded the Diwan-i-Amm court, the two forecourts in front of the Diwan-i-Khas and the buildings that flanked the Naubat Khana.

India’s nomination file for UNESCO puts the loss in wider terms. It says the paved streets with their arcades, the central canals, the seraglio (the women’s quarters) with its gardens, the baths, the colonnades and the royal kitchens were completely destroyed after the British military took the fort. It adds that the dense streets, gardens, houses and mosques north of the Chatta Chowk, the vaulted palace market, were removed entirely and replaced by married officers’ quarters, barracks and wash houses. The Diwan-i-Am, the Diwan-i-Khas, the Naubat Khana and the Mumtaz Mahal were left standing, the file says, but the structures next to them were demolished.

What the army put there

The fort was captured in September 1857, a campaign told in our article on the British revenge for 1857. ICOMOS, the body that advised UNESCO on the listing, says it became the headquarters of the British Indian Army. The guide records a thanksgiving service in the Diwan-i-Khas on 27 September 1857 and says Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was tried in the same hall the following January.

The barracks came later. ICOMOS counts four three-storey, seven two-storey and thirteen single-storey barracks, built from 1867 and 1868 in the north-east and south-east of the fort. India’s nomination file places two of the three-storey blocks inside the Hayat Bakhsh garden, towards its western edge. It counts about 236 British-period buildings in all, including additions by the Indian Army after 1947.

The old halls were put to military use. The guide says the Naubat Khana housed officers until 1907, the Mumtaz Mahal served as a military prison and then as a sergeants’ mess, and the marble pavilion at the Shah Burj was an officer’s residence. The nomination file adds that the Diwan-i-Am became a canteen and open lounge, the Rang Mahal a mess, and the Zafar Mahal in the garden tank a swimming pool.

The only dated demolition the guide mentions is from 1863, when, during the pulling down of old buildings “for military purposes”, about 125 fragments of the Delhi Gate’s stone elephants were found buried in the fort. Aurangzeb had ordered the statues taken down two centuries earlier. None of the sources opened for this article reproduces an order or names the officer or committee behind the clearance. They credit “the British military”, “the military authorities” and “the British administration”. A gun battery stood on the east terrace until 1913, the guide says.

Curzon, as Viceroy, spoke about the damage to the Asiatic Society of Bengal on 7 February 1900. He said the Delhi guide-books recorded “horrors” committed for regimental barracks, messes and canteens in Shah Jahan’s pavilions, courts and gardens, and called the barrack-builder and the military engineer “inveterate sinners” against monuments. He added that fewer than thirty years earlier army doctors had asked the government to cut off the fort’s battlements to improve the troops’ health, and that the idea was dropped when other doctors argued the battlements kept malaria out.

What left the fort: domes, panels and jewels

The fittings went first. The guide says the original copper-covered dome of the Muthamman Burj, and the copper coverings of the corner pavilions on the Diwan-i-Khas roof, were removed after the Mutiny and sold by the Prize Agent, the army official who disposed of captured property. The nomination file says the Diwan-i-Khas lost its inlaid stones. ICOMOS says the fort had already been shorn of its jewels by the emperor himself, to pay for resistance, so the sources differ on who took what.

The best documented case is the pietra dura (inlaid stone) panels behind the throne in the Diwan-i-Amm. John Marshall, the ASI’s Director-General, wrote in his report for 1902 to 1903 that many of the small black-marble panels were picked out and mutilated in 1857. He said twelve, including the Orpheus panel, were taken by Captain John Jones and sold to the British Government for £500, which placed them in the South Kensington Museum. The nomination file tells it differently, saying the government bought the panels from Bahadur Shah.

A first repair came in 1882, when Major H. H. Cole, the Curator of Ancient Monuments, restored the lower half of the back wall. Marshall wrote that some of the Indian marble he used matched badly, and that Cole left the upper half alone in the hope of recovering the originals. In 1902 the Government of India asked for them, and the trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum agreed to return them. They reached India in the last days of December 1902, too late for the Durbar of 1 January 1903, and were set back behind the throne afterwards. The guide credits Curzon with their return, and says an Italian craftsman was brought to India to restore the rest of the decoration, which was completed in 1909.

The plans and photographs the restorers used

The Survey worked from old plans, drawings and photographs. Sanderson says his sketch plan is taken from one reproduced in James Fergusson’s history of architecture and has several rather prominent inaccuracies. He cites photographs taken before the Mutiny that showed buildings between the Mumtaz Mahal and the Rang Mahal, and he says that when the gardeners trenched for shrubberies they found the foundations of the old buildings, as expected, in almost every case.

The British Library holds an 1858 view of the Diwan-i-Khas by Robert and Harriet Tytler, an albumen print (a photograph on egg-white paper) from a paper negative, showing the hall from the west with its arcade of five cusped arches. A second Tytler print looks west from the Diwan-i-Am towards the Naqqar Khana. The Victoria and Albert Museum has Felice Beato’s 1858 print of the Lahori Gate, and its catalogue says he reached India in February 1858 to photograph the aftermath of the rising.

Curzon, the 1904 Act and the Survey’s work from 1903

On 18 March 1904 Curzon moved the passage of the Ancient Monuments Preservation Bill in the Legislative Council at Calcutta. In the same speech he said: “The military authorities have agreed to evacuate all the principal Moghul buildings in the Delhi Fort.” The Act, numbered VII of 1904, is the law under which the fort was first notified for protection, according to India’s nomination file. The historian Durba Ghosh writes that Curzon’s protection focused on monuments built before the British occupation, and that the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort and Humayun’s tomb gained protected status under it. The same report describes clearing the garden of Humayun’s tomb in Delhi from the wilderness that had overspread it, and Curzon’s wider record as Viceroy has its own article.

The guide says the plan began with Marshall’s suggestions of 1902. The Survey was to acquire from the military as much of the old palace area as it could, lower the ground to its old levels, remove modern buildings and roads, and mark the lost courtyards and buildings with lawns and shrubberies. The Hayat Bakhsh garden needed more reconstruction, because a royal garden party was planned for it at the Coronation Durbar.

The ASI’s annual report for 1903 to 1904, in a review signed by Marshall, records the first results. The Naqqar Khana, the Rang Mahal and the Shah Burj had been reclaimed from the military. Marble tanks were found under the floor of a Shah Burj pavilion and of the Sawan pavilion. The report says the Hayat Bakhsh garden, a square about 200 yards each way, lost its connection between buildings when it was turned into a barrack-yard, and that on the west all traces of the Mahtab Bagh had been swept away and “hideous barracks” put up. Trial digging found the old water channels and the central tank about three feet below the surface.

The rest followed in stages, according to the guide. Large excavations in the Hayat Bakhsh garden began in the official year 1904 to 1905, the tank parapet was finished in 1906 to 1907 and the four main causeways in 1907 to 1908. The Naubat Khana was restored in 1907. At a conference at Simla in 1908 it was decided that servants’ quarters inside the protected area would be demolished and that the Naubat Khana, the Shah Burj and the Mumtaz Mahal would join it. The garden was lowered to its old level in 1909 to 1910, grassed and planted in 1910 to 1911, and watered from two old wells by electric pumps. The military objected to water standing in the channels because of mosquitoes, the guide says, so the fountains ran mainly for ceremonies. Removing the gun battery in 1913 revealed traces of the Moti Mahal pavilion on the east terrace.

Constance Villiers-Stuart, whose 1913 book describes the Durbar festivities at the fort, wrote that a range of barracks still formed the garden’s background and that only half of the Hayat Bakhsh garden remained. A notification of 1912 under the 1904 Act listed the Naubat Khana, Diwan-i-Amm, Mumtaz Mahal, Rang Mahal, Baithak, Muthamman Burj, Diwan-i-Khas, Moti Masjid, Sawan and Bhadon pavilions, Shah Burj and Hammam, with their gardens, paths, terraces and water courses.

What stands now

A second notification of May 2002 covered the whole complex inside the wall, and the Indian Army handed the fort to the ASI in December 2003. ICOMOS reported in 2007 that the barracks stood empty and that the Hayat Bakhsh water channels had been recently reconstructed. The 1919 guide had hoped the barracks west of the garden would one day go so that its western half and the Mahtab Bagh could be completed. India’s file shows two of the three-storey blocks still on the garden’s western edge in 2006. The museums in the former barracks are described in the article on the fort’s UNESCO listing.

How faithful the replanted garden is remains an open question. Sharma, writing in Landscape History in 2021, argues that colonial interventions gave Mughal gardens several layers of meaning, with the ASI’s “archaeological gardens” among the examples. ICOMOS noted in 2007 that the gardens inside the fort had been recreated in Mughal style from their English form, that it was not known whether they reflect the original Mughal layout, and that the ASI and its consultants were researching the question.