Altered identity of Moti Bagh

In the last piece carried on June 9, we had talked about names of places in and around Shahjahanabad. We had also talked about the histories of those names and about the constructed histories of some new names. In the next few pieces, we will talk about some places that we think we know well.

We will begin with a well-known place in South Delhi. 

The area is populated principally by senior government officers, senior railway officers and fairly senior officers of the armed forces. The area has wide tree-lined roads and has as its neighbours, several, what are popularly known as, “posh colonies”. 

The present name of the locality is a minor modification of its mediaeval original name. 

The minor change, however, represents a sea-change in how people who had lived in this area and in Delhi from the 17th century to the 1960s saw and knew this place and how the movers and shakers of Delhi, the johnnies arrived lately, who have lived in the area for merely 60 years wish to remember this area.

We are talking of Moti Bagh. The identity of the place has been so totally altered in the last 60 years and all references to half its name so totally erased, and to borrow a phrase from Milan Kundera, so ‘totally airbrushed out of history’ that it would be very difficult to find someone living in the area who knows what the locality was known as, barely half a century ago. 

The name of the place, before the ever-expanding, New Delhi, gobbled up a whole lot of agricultural land in the area to ‘Develop’ Moti Bagh was ‘Arakpur Bagh Mochi’, which had been shortened to Mochi Bagh.

We get this detail from volume 2, entry numbers 202 and 203 pp 21-216 of the monumental listing of the ‘Monuments of Delhi’— Lasting Splendour of the Great Mughals and Others, compiled by Maulvi Zafar Hasan and edited by J A Page and others, for the Archaeological Survey of India in 1919.

The three-volume report, filled with gems of historical details, that we seem to have almost entirely forgotten, was republished in 2008 by Aryan Books International and lovers of old books and of the history of Delhi can acquire it for Rs 4,500, less a decent commission if they go to the office of the Publishers in Ansari Road — the haven for publishers and book lovers in Old Delhi.

The information we can glean from the entry is that Bagh Mochi, located inside a village was a large enclosure, surrounded by a masonry wall with a bastion at each corner and a large gateway to the east. In the middle of the garden, there was a tank. On the northern edge of the tank, there was a circular bastion with a 12 arched pavilion with three compartments.

 At the rear of the 12 arched pavilion, on the northern bank of the tank, there was a well with a diameter of 7’6” and there was a small stone inscription in Persian fixed on the well. The inscription, translated by Maulvi Zafar Hasan, stated that the well (and one assumes the entire complex) was built by ‘one Ramdas, entitled Mochi’ in the reign of Jahangir (1605-1627). Ramdas was the son of Malukchand ‘Rohtaki’ (of Rohtak).

 The entry records state that the protected structure was in a dilapidated state, though the well was in good condition. In 1919, Maulvi Zafar Hasan noted that the Garden enclosure had been taken over by the villagers, who had built mud houses inside the enclosure.  

The garden built by Ramdas Mochi, son of Malukchand ‘Rohtaki’, finds no mention in the current list of 174 monuments of Delhi protected by the ASI. 

One does not even know if even a trace of the Arakpur Bagh Mochi exists at all. What had survived until the 1960s was just the name of the garden.

Those who planned the expansion of New Delhi, in the open spaces between the diplomatic enclave and the cantonment, built houses, each with its own little patch of green and a few trees, for the higher echelons of the bureaucracy, obviously had no interest in the heritage of this city. 

Diligently they went about erasing all memories of a man who had built a garden, a water tank and a well, probably to provide cool drinking water for the thirsty, a shaded pavilion for the tired and exhausted traveller and a pond to please the eye and to cool the environs, an escape, even if momentary from the searing heat of the Delhi summer.

All traces of these memories were erased because the new occupants, with their own sense of inherited entitlement, did not want to live in an area, associated with a cobbler (for that is how they would have seen the title,).
 Should those who run the administration in a country that claims to take great pride in her ancient culture, be permitted to erase our heritage in such a wanton manner?   

The author is a historian, and organises the Delhi Heritage Walk for children and adults