Half Lakhori Series (Set of 36) by Syed Ali Sarvat Jafri

I come from the city once known as Faizabad, now renamed Ayodhya—a renaming that itself is a political act, an erasure of memory, and a rewriting of history. Founded by the Nawabs in the 17th century, Faizabad once flourished with a rich Islamic visual culture, grand monuments, and palatial houses that stood as living witnesses of its cosmopolitan past.

I am also bound to this history by blood. My mother inherited a house from our ancestors, descendants of the Nawabs—a home that felt like a palace to me in childhood. Its grandeur, its scale, its lived history shaped my earliest experiences of space, art, and memory. But the city that nurtured me is no longer the same.

Today, the monuments of Faizabad stand like abandoned bodies, slowly crumbling, neglected by design. The grandeur is deliberately left to decay, as the ruling regime thrives on selective memory, promoting one history while silencing and demolishing another. The BJP government’s politics of cultural erasure does not simply forget Muslim architecture—it actively discriminates against it, allowing it to fall into ruin, or worse, tearing it down under the guise of “development” and “heritage cleansing.”

When I walk through the city now, I see fragments of once-glorious monuments scattered like waste. Lakhori bricks, the very bones of our architectural past, lie strewn across alleys, sometimes carried by donkey cart hawkers, sold cheaply as rubble, dumped as garbage. I often collect them, sometimes even purchase them—each brick to me a fragment of memory, a silent witness, a heartbeat of a forgotten time.

When I visit my maternal home in Faizabad and Lucknow, I recall the days when walls were alive with intricate calligraphy, adorned with words that carried both faith and beauty. Today those inscriptions are buried under white lime, layered over for festivals, as if celebration requires forgetting. In our attempt to “renew,” we erase. In our attempt to “modernize,” we destroy.

As an artist, witnessing this violence—this slow, systematic erasure of memory before my own eyes—is profoundly painful. My practice is an act of resistance. By collecting these discarded bricks, I try to reassemble fragments of a disappearing world, to remember what we are being forced to forget, and to hold space for grief, memory, and truth in the face of erasure.

My work is not simply about ruins; it is about the politics of ruins. Each brick is a reminder of what is being deliberately lost, of a culture being silenced, of a history rewritten. In reclaiming them, I try to breathe back time, to give voice to what has been buried, and to resist the violence of forgetting.

This artwork was exhibited at Method in the group exhibition "The Parliament is Now in Session" (August 2025)