In Delhi, a colonial era prison lost to time

THe echoes of new delhi’s compound past times feature grown louder in recent months, centred on the remembering of a prison where rebels, freedom fighters and conspirators were once locked away — and executed.On a patch of land beside the mortuary of Maulana Azad Medical College (MAMC) in central Delhi, an unmarked rectangle of tangled undergrowth hides what may be the last physical traces of the Old Central Jail. In 2019, construction workers digging on the campus stumbled upon an underground wall. Suspecting it to be part of the jail’s foundations, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) was alerted and the Public Works Department (PWD) told to halt work.But since then — silence. Today, the ground appears untouched by spade or story. The thickets conceal any sign of masonry, and administrators insist no formal report on the findings ever reached their desks.Off the record, one official admitted the discovery stalled construction for months and disputes among agencies ended with the site being quietly covered. “It’s land we can neither build on nor acknowledge,” the official said, pointing to the abandoned plot.While that memory lies buried, the politics in the city have been drawn to another supposed gallows room — this one inside the Delhi Assembly. In 2022, the Aam Aadmi Party unveiled a section of the building as a “British-era execution chamber,” allegedly linked by tunnel to the Red Fort. The Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, now in power, dismissed it as political theatre, citing 1912 plans that listed it merely as a service room. The dispute prompted inquiries, plaque removals and privilege notices, turning a contested relic into a political battlefield.Nandini Bhattacharya Sahu, joint director general of ASI, confirmed to HT that “illegal digging had been started in the area by PWD. However, when a heritage structure was exposed, ASI issued them a stop notice. The National Monument Authority asked the Delhi mini-circle to prepare a report, and that was done.”When asked why the site lies sealed and silent, she said, adding, “Our role did not go beyond that.” NMA has not responded to queries from HT.The erasure is startling given how much history lived there. The jail — originally a serai, or travellers’ inn, built in the late 16th or early 17th century by the Mughal noble Farid Khan — stood outside Shahjahanabad’s walls. In 1847, scholar Syed Ahmad Khan noted its sturdy construction in Asar-us-Sanadid.“Farid Khan’s serai offered shelter to those who reached Shahjahanabad after the gates had closed for the night,” said author and city chronicler Sohail Hashmi. “It was turned into a jail in the 19th century, and the conspirators of the 1912 assassination attempt on Viceroy Lord Hardinge were kept there before their executions. Today, almost nothing remains.”The Old Central Jail appears even in British records: an 1858 engraving in The Illustrated London News, drawn just after the 1857 uprising, shows Shahjahanabad hemmed within its walls. Boats drift on the Yamuna, the Red Fort dominates the left foreground, and beyond the eastern wall a tiny “23” marks the “Gaol” — a small but telling presence in Delhi. That map, drawn for readers thousands of miles away, now serves as a clear visual clue to the jail’s place.Historian Swapna Liddle notes that such transformations — inn to prison, serai to symbol of colonial control — can be traced through texts like Syed Ahmad Khan’s Asar-us-Sanadid and Shama Mitra Chenoy’s translation of Sair-ul-Manazil. “The East India Company turned it into the jail in the early 19th century,” Liddle said.“After the jail came up, there are accounts of the British being worried about how to feed all the prisoners. But before that, it was a serai, but one that was strong enough to be converted into a jail,” said Chenoy, a history professor who retired last year from Shivaji College.“During the Quit India movement in 1942, my father was imprisoned in the jail for about two years,” Hashmi said.“After he went on a hunger strike demanding proper treatment for political prisoners, he and one of his companions were placed in solitary confinement. Later, the prison was shifted from there to Tihar.”The prison closed in the mid-20th century when inmates were shifted to Tihar. But its echoes persist.Ashraf Khan, 45, who lives near MAMC, said, “I grew up hearing stories about the old jail from my grandfather. A few years ago, we heard the college had uncovered some of its remains, but just as quickly, the site was covered up again. No one here knows why or what really happened.”Today, on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, the memory survives in fragments: a broken Hindi board outside MAMC Gate No. 1 and a fenced park around the Shaheed Smarak Phansi Ghar — the gallows room whose fading inscription claims “thousands of patriots… were imprisoned here and tortured… several patriots were executed here”.Walk the campus today and it is easy to forget that beneath the weeds and lecture halls, Delhi once chained its rebels and hanged its martyrs. On the 1858 engraving, the Yamuna curls past Shahjahanabad’s walls; on the streets now, traffic roars past, crossing a nondescript building which transformed from a serai to a “gaol”, which was then reduced to a number on an old map, before fading from memory altogether.