At Qudsia Bagh, echoes of Delhi’s past frame a new open air art festival

Today, only fragments of Qudsia Bagh’s original splendour remain: one gateway, a baradari (pavilion), and a mosque. With free entry, the “City as a Museum’ festival seeks to reframe how art is experienced, moving it out of gallery walls and into public spaces

In 1903, tens of thousands of Delhi residents streamed into the leafy grounds of Qudsia Bagh to view an art exhibition staged as part of the Delhi Durbar, hosted by Viceroy George Curzon. Arts and crafts from across India were laid out on the park’s sprawling lawns, presented through the colonial lens of the time. “The idea was to pick what the British saw as the best examples of Indian art and craft and display them there. It was done in a very colonial way, but it was also something new, and a lot of people showed up,” says historian Swapna Liddle, standing in the same park more than a century later, leading a heritage walk on the morning of September 6.

During the heritage walk conducted by historian Swapna Liddle at Qudsia Bagh as part of Delhi Art Gallery (DAG)’s maiden edition ‘The City as a Museum festival’, a citywide programme that runs from September 6 to 21. (HT Photo)

The walk marked the opening of Delhi Art Gallery (DAG)’s maiden edition of “The City as a Museum festival”, a citywide programme that runs from September 6 to 21. With free entry, the festival seeks to reframe how art is experienced, moving it out of gallery walls and into public spaces.

“DAG is an art gallery and usually displays its work indoors. But a festival like this tries to contextualise art in a wider setting, to show that you can talk about art anywhere,” says Liddle. Her words draw a neat parallel between the festival and the 1903 exhibition.

But Qudsia Bagh itself has changed beyond recognition. Commissioned in 1748 by Udham Bai, a Mughal queen who became Qudsia Begum after being widowed, the garden was once a walled, formal space with water channels and shaded by trees. “The Mughals had a very specific notion of a garden,” Liddle tells the early morning crowd -- which included Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair -- holding up an old painting. “It was a formal, walled space with water channels running through it and shaded by trees. What we think of today as gardens, with flat lawns, is a much more recent concept,” she said.

The park has also borne witness to moments of crisis. In 1852, when the Yamuna flooded, much as it did over the past week, Bahadur Shah Zafar’s palace diaries narrate how those who lost their homes came to him, seeking refuge. “He told them that all he could do was ask them to come and stay in Qudsia Bagh,” says Liddle, connecting the Mughal era’s flood relief to the city’s current struggles with inundation.

Today, only fragments of Qudsia Bagh’s original splendour remain: one gateway, a baradari (pavilion), and a mosque. The palace complex at its heart has vanished. Yet, as Liddle guides the group past joggers, gardeners, and children at play, she pauses to point out the details that endure — bricks bound with mortar made of organic materials like lentils and cow dung — traces of a different time layered into the present.

Amid the trees and ruins, it is easy to imagine the scene in 1903: crowds strolling through the greenery to see art on display under the open sky. That same spirit animates DAG’s new festival. “A lot of people feel that art is elite, something only for intellectuals,” Liddle reflects. “I hope this event dispels that. The real question is: how does one relate art to the life of the city around us?”