Diwan-i-Khas

The story of Diwan-i-Khas

Just inside the Red Fort, this is the Hall of Private Audiences, built in 1648 as a place for receptions. It was where the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan received courtiers and state guests, so this was not an everyday hall: it was the room for the most formal kind of meeting, and it was also known as the Shah Mahal.

What you are looking at now is only a shell of what it used to be. The hall was stripped and plundered after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, and the throne, the carpets, and other items went missing. Two enclosures that once stood on the west side, one for nobles and one for people of lower rank, were destroyed after 1857 too. Even the ceiling has a history of loss: it was originally inlaid with silver and gold, then stripped bare by successive financial crises of the empire at the hands of the Jats or Marathas, and the current ceiling was installed in 1911.

The room itself is a rectangular central chamber, 90 × 67 feet, surrounded by a series of arches rising from marble piers. Look closely at the piers: the lower parts are inlaid with floral designs, while the upper portions are painted and gilded. At the four corners of the roof are pillared chhatri. That combination of marble, inlay, paint, gilding, and open arcade is what still gives the hall its structure, even after so much was lost.

One of the most important things to imagine here is what used to stand in the middle. The later Peacock Throne from after Nader Shah's invasion once stood in this hall, towards the east side. The French traveller François Bernier described seeing the Peacock Throne here. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier described seeing the throne in the Diwan-i-Am, where it was probably moved, and also described five smaller thrones with four on each corner and one in the middle of the hall. Either way, the throne room was meant to project imperial power at the very center of the palace.

Another detail worth noticing is the line of the Stream of Paradise, the Nahr-i-Bihisht, which flowed through the centre of the hall. The building used to have red awnings, or shamianas. Above the corner-arches on the northern and southern walls, below the cornice, is a verse by Amir Khusrow: “If there be a paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” That inscription is still one of the hall’s most quoted features, and it tells you how the space was meant to feel in Mughal terms.

The hall’s history after the Mughal period is one of damage, then repair. Recent restoration work has redone the panels of inlay and reproduced the gilded pattern on one of the pillars fronting the hall. In 2014, the Archaeological Survey of India began conservation work after a portion of the roof sagged, and described the exercise as routine rather than alarming. Today that means you are seeing a monument that survives, but in a damaged state.

If you want the best sense of the building, stand back and take in the open frontage, then look for the marble plinth where the Peacock Throne once stood, and the arches around it. This is the part of the Red Fort where power was staged most directly, and the emptiness is itself the strongest surviving feature.