Documented Just in Time (leans on the pre-1857 timing point)

Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan's Asar-us-Sanadid works as a survey as much as a history. The 1847 volume is largely narrative, but the 1854 volume treats the monuments the way a documentation team would: dimensions, elevations, inscriptions, historical references and drawn plates. He copied inscriptions himself, even hanging from the Qutub Minar in a basket to reach them. For anyone working in heritage, that insistence on recording the building before interpreting it is the lesson.

The book's real value is timing. It was compiled before 1857, before the demolitions around the Red Fort, before Lutyens' Delhi, before Partition and before modern encroachment. Many of these structures now survive only in his measurements and sketches.

Mehrauli as a landscape system

Mehrauli's gardens and pavilions were not isolated buildings but one designed landscape, organised around water.

The hydraulic logic.

Hauz-e-Shamsi, the great reservoir attributed to Iltutmish, was the source. Firoz Shah Tughluq's dam controlled its overflow, once carrying surplus water toward the moats of Tughlaqabad. When that fort was abandoned, the water was left with nowhere useful to go. Later, Ghazi-ud-Din Khan Firoz Jung built a tank, channels and chutes, turning a drainage problem into the Jharna, a waterfall used for pleasure. Infrastructure was reused as architecture.

The western pavilion.

This is the most closely measured building in the account. It stands on a plinth about 11'5" high and has three arches, with the waterfall passing over it. Thirteen small pipes under the roof feed water down through the structure, and a 3.2-foot-wide chute drops about 4.3 feet into a 25-foot-square tank, 7.6 feet deep. Niches behind the falling water held lit lamps, so the water, light and masonry worked as one composition. The tank also served as a diving pool, and its depth explains why the roof was used as a launch point.

The other pavilions. Each edge of the water garden had a different building:

• North: a double pavilion, built under Akbar II.

• South: a three-arched pavilion flanked by two smaller ones, which reads as five arches, with two doors beside it making seven.

• East: no building, only the hillside, with a stone slide about 18'3" by 7'7" cut into it.

The edges were composed deliberately: built frontage on three sides, natural rock on the fourth, mango orchard beyond.

Bagh-e-Nazir

This was a walled garden with red sandstone buildings set along the inside of the boundary and one central pavilion, the largest and finest. That is a classic char-bagh-influenced arrangement: a perimeter wall, edge buildings and a dominant centre. Sayyid Ahmad chose that central pavilion for illustration.

What remains

Today the garden is the Ashoka Mission, and the Jharna pavilions are desolate. Hauz-e-Shamsi is stagnant, its orchard replaced by housing. Sayyid Ahmad's account is now the main evidence for how this landscape worked.