Sites to sights: The construction of the ‘monument’ in modern Delhi

This article studies the changing political economy around monuments in Delhi from 1857–2010, with a focus on the history of land acquisition and forms of compensation in and around the monument. Contextualizing conservation policies within international, national, and legal frameworks as well as Delhi’s changing economy, it traces the rise of the ‘monument’ in Delhi through an en masse conservation process. Monument-making in Delhi over the twentieth century entailed a long and large-scale process of forced evictions. With this production of the conserved monument, the use and meaning of historical sites came to be universalized and generalized purely via their ‘historic’ identity. Changing forms of land acquisition, displacement, and inadequate compensation have been foundational to the rise of Delhi as a heritage city. Contemporary policies and rhetoric of heritage conservation are situated within the politics of dispossession. These policies have formed an inherently inequitable conservation process within Delhi that has consistently dislocated peasant and working populations from the city.