ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 examines Delhi in its pre-colonial avatar as the seventeenth-century Mughal Badshahi Shahar called Shahjahanabad. The Badshahi Shahar construct was the manifestation of a compendium of rituals, beliefs and practices that defined the Mughal notion of kingship, i.e., Badshah-i-yat. The resultant architectural entity was dominated by the Mughal spatial ensemble of the Qila-Masjid-Haveli-Bagh-Bazaar combine that represented significant urban institutions that shaped the city's cosmopolitan image. Badshah Shahjahan, the patron of Shahjahanabad, envisaged his role to be a custodian of the Mughal dynastic lineage and that of Islam, thus positioning Shahjahanabad as Dar-ul Mulk (seat of the empire) and Dar-ul Khilafat (seat of the Islamic Caliphate). The city's spatial planning underscored its dual identity while also exhibiting the Shahjahani repertoire of metaphors signifying Badshah-i-yat. A cosmopolitan seventeenth-century city, Shahjahanabad's fortunes fell in the eighteenth century owing to a highly attenuated Mughal polity that caused the notion of Badshah-i-yat itself to be severely compromised and the built-environment to deteriorate. Despite this, the Badshahi Shahar endured in Dilliwallahs’ perception as the epitome of power and Adab and it was this impulse that the EIC encountered at the turn of the century when they took control of Delhi.
