ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 focusses on Delhi's third nineteenth-century construct, Baaghi Dilli. This construct emerges when Marhoom Dilli springs back to life from the dead as an insurgent city, aspiring to reclaim its Mughal glory as a Badshahi Shahar, and becomes the epicenter of the uprising. Perched on the cusp of the pre-uprising and post-uprising eras, it operates as the Mughals, supported by Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’-II, and the EIC, led by Brigadier John Nicholson, battle for political one-upmanship from May to September 1857. In the course of battle, Delhi's two traditional and mutually dependent spatial entities that architecturalize the construct, the Shahar and the Ridge, were also pitched across the battle line as bastions of the Baaghis and the British respectively. Equipped with batteries and pickets, they attacked each other relentlessly. The battle resulted in a British victory that propelled an orgy of retribution to punish the vanquished city. It also led to the construction of the Mutiny narrative, centered on the hero-villain binary, with Nicholson venerated as the Mutiny hero and Bahadur Shah ‘Zafar’-II vilified as its villain. Once the message of the British win was decisively imprinted in Dilliwallahs’ collective consciousness and also inscribed in the city's landscape, Delhi was ready to be tamed.
