BEGINNINGS

In 1846, Sayyid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898), a young munsif in Delhi, took on the ambitious task of documenting all of the city's monuments. The result of his labour was a 600-page encyclopaedic survey of Delhi's monuments and biographical excerpts of the city's major personalities titled Āṣār-us Ṣanādīd (Traces of Noblemen; hereafter Āṣār). Nothing as comprehensive had been attempted before and it took another seventy years for the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) to produce a comparable list of Delhi's historic structures. By bearing witness to Delhi's urban heritage, Sayyid Ahmad Khan struggled with reconciling past and present, tradition and modernity, science and myth, materiality and poetics, observation and belief. The importance of Āṣār as a thorough survey of Delhi's built environment cannot be overstated, especially given that many of the structures discussed in the book were destroyed by the British military during and after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Yet Āṣār occupies an ambivalent position in Sayyid Ahmad's larger oeuvre. His work on the built environment and material culture of Delhi appears as an outlier to his later rich philosophical and political contributions and his social reform programmes following the events of 1857.

Keeping with the mandate of this volume, I offer an interpretation of Āṣār as an early example of Sayyid Ahmad's experimentations with key motifs of modernity and modernization. I define modernity as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phenomena where individuals struggled to articulate their singular place within a long arc of history. Modernity was seldom a neatly defined project that delivered resolution, but rather a messy and incomplete process with unexpected outcomes. It also did not travel linearly from a European core to the global South. Modernization, I define, as the material changes to built environments and social organization that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. In the words of Marshall Berman: