ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 focusses on Delhi's first nineteenth-century construct, Marhoom Dilli. This emerges from Dilliwallahs’ perception of EIC-ruled Delhi in the pre-uprising era that signalled both the end of the Mughal era and Delhi's essence as a quintessential Badshahi Shahar. The construct operates against the backdrop of the power struggle between the declining Mughals and the ascending EIC. It laments the death of the Badshahi Shahar that is gradually being replaced by a Dilli-Delhi combine, a culturally entangled, east-west, traditional-modern hybrid. Novel architectural interventions began to claim city space as the EIC territorialized the city. Representing British political and cultural institutions, they underscored Mughal Delhi's Marhoom-i-yat while being a product of the traditionalism-modernity binary. The construct is spatialized as the Residency-Church-Bungalow-Kothi combine. The Delhi Residency was the locus of power that posed a challenge to the centuries-old power centre of the Mughals, the Qila. Even as it epitomized the construct, the Residency was itself a product of the east-west cultural entanglement that defined the Dilli-Delhi combine. Meanwhile, the Shahar also transformed with Dilliwallahs responding to the prevailing cultural hybridity in numerous ways. As the city was lulled into an era of ‘English Peace’, there was a strong undercurrent of opposition to the British that surfaced as the uprising.
