Asar-us-Sanadid cannot tell you what contemporary India is like. A survey of Delhi’s monuments completed in 1847 describes the city as its author recorded it then. It is not evidence about present-day policy, public opinion, or the condition of any building. What it does offer is a systematic architectural history written by an Indian author in the mid-nineteenth century. That matters for three questions that still shape conservation and public memory: who is entitled to record the past, how a building becomes a monument in the first place, and what changes when a written record survives a building.
What Asar-us-Sanadid is
Asar-us-Sanadid (also written Asar-ul-Sanadid or Aṣar-us-Ṣanādīd) is an Urdu work by Syed Ahmad Khan, also known as Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, describing Delhi’s monuments and history. The first edition was published in 1847. A second edition followed in 1854, and it is substantially distinct from the first. The two should be treated as separate texts. Attributing a passage to “the 1847 book” when it appears only in the 1854 edition, or the reverse, is an easy error to make and a hard one to notice.
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A 2017 article in Intellect, “A Nineteenth-Century Architectural Archive: Syed Ahmad Khan’s Aṣar-us-Ṣanādīd,” describes the first edition as a 600-page survey. It examines the book’s visual, chronological, and comparative methods and argues that Khan built a modern archive of Delhi’s historic architecture. The article also holds that the work helped shape the concept of an architectural monument and influenced later European accounts of the city.
The two editions compared
| Feature | First edition | Second edition |
|---|---|---|
| Publication year | 1847 | 1854 |
| Original language | Urdu | Not stated separately; the work as a whole is Urdu |
| Length | About 600 pages, per a 2017 Intellect article | Not stated |
| Survey methods | Visual, chronological, and comparative description, per the 2017 Intellect article | Not stated |
| English text | Included in the combined English edition published by Columbia University Press | Included in the same combined English edition |
The two editions differ in aim and audience, but the sources available here do not set those differences out in detail. C. M. Naim’s study, “Syed Ahmad and His Two Books Called ‘Asar-al-Sanadid’” (Cambridge University Press, online 3 September 2010; journal issue May 2011), is the place to start. Naim asks what the two books’ different ambitions, intended audiences, and reception reveal, and how Khan’s thinking changed between them. Anyone making a claim about the purpose of the 1854 text should work from that comparison rather than from the 1847 text alone.
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Two page counts appear in the available material, and they do not describe one book. The 600-page figure refers to the first edition as the 2017 Intellect article characterizes it. The 412-page figure is the length listed for the English edition: Columbia University Press’s 2018 listing, and Tulika Books’ listing for its March 2025 third edition. The 412-page figure should not be used as the length of the 1847 Urdu text.
How the book recorded Delhi
The 2017 Intellect article identifies three methods: visual, chronological, and comparative description. Each is still a working technique for anyone recording an old building, so they are worth reading as practice as well as historiography.
Visual description
The Columbia University Press English edition includes sketches from the original Urdu edition, along with annotations and appendices. A drawing fixes form and proportion in a way prose rarely does. This is why surveyors and conservators still pair images with written notes.
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Chronological description
Chronological description places a monument within a sequence of periods rather than treating it as a single undifferentiated object. On a site, the same logic separates original fabric from later repair, extension, or replacement. A dated description does not settle that question by itself. It sets the sequence against which the physical evidence has to be read.
Comparative description
Comparison sets one structure against others and against its surroundings. The 2017 article treats this as central to the book’s standing as an archive: a list of buildings becomes usable knowledge when a reader can see how they relate. On a construction job, the parallel is a survey that connects one element to similar works or to the wider building stock, so that an anomaly can be recognized as an anomaly.
Why a building has to be a monument to be recorded
The category decides which buildings are surveyed, drawn, and dated at all, so it sets the limits of what later work can compare against. A building the 1847 text never treated as a monument has not disappeared from Delhi. It is absent from that record. Reading the book well means asking what the author chose to include, and why that selection shaped the later idea of what a historic building was.
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Indian authorship and the record of who knew
A University of Victoria thesis by Fatima Quraishi, “Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s Asar-ul-Sanadid: the construction of history in nineteenth-century India” (dated 27 May 2009), places the work among nineteenth-century Indian architectural and archaeological histories. The thesis notes that local scholars’ contributions were marginalized in later accounts. The 2017 Intellect article makes a related point from a different angle: Indian and European actors both took part in producing architectural knowledge in this period.
The lesson for contemporary readers is not that Khan’s book stood apart from European work. It is that a standard history of Indian architecture can forget the Indian authors who helped create it. When a team cites a historic description, the author’s identity and the language of the text are part of that evidence, not a footnote to it.
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What the book can and cannot say about contemporary India
A Scroll.in essay by Fahad Zuberi, dated 30 October 2025, asks the same question as this article’s title. A summary of the essay available online says the work “came in the context of major colonial erasures.” This article does not rely on the essay’s argument beyond that framing.
On the evidence available, the book supports three claims about the present. Indian authors were producing systematic architectural history in the nineteenth century. Decisions about what counts as a monument have a history and are open to question. Whose knowledge is recognized is a question the book’s own reception illustrates. It cannot support claims about the current state of any monument, what Indian citizens think of their heritage, or present-day government policy. Those need separate, dated sources.
The book also says something about loss, but only in a limited way. A dated description can preserve the recorded form of a structure that no longer stands, or of an element since altered. It cannot show what remains, and it cannot show whether a given loss came from colonial policy, neglect, or later decisions. Treating the 1847 text as proof of any one of those causes would go beyond the evidence.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Using the record on a conservation or construction job
If you cite Asar-us-Sanadid in a heritage report, condition survey, or design brief, check the following:
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- Name the edition. Write “1847” or “1854” rather than the title alone, so the reader knows which text is meant.
- Name the text you read. State whether you used the Urdu original or an English translation, and identify the edition. A page reference means little without the edition attached.
- Separate the record from the site. A description dated 1847 or 1854 records a building as it was then. Any statement about its present form needs a current inspection, measured drawings, or a dated photograph.
- Do not read absence as absence. A structure missing from the book was outside the author’s selection, not necessarily outside the city.
- Attribute the author’s words precisely. Do not place your own paraphrase of Khan in quotation marks unless it matches a translation you have checked.
Where to read the text
Columbia University Press describes its English edition this way: “This volume joins together in English for the first time the two editions of Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan’s classic account of the monuments and environs of precolonial Delhi.” (Publisher description, Columbia University Press, accessed 8 October 2026.) The volume includes annotations, appendices, and sketches from the original Urdu edition.
The translation and edition by Rana Safvi is listed as Sayyid Ahmad Khan: Asar-us-Sanadid, ISBN 9789382381877. Tulika Books lists a third edition dated March 2025, but at the time of writing it was marked out of stock. Check the publisher’s current listing before ordering, and confirm which edition it is.
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