WILLIAM FRASER’S BUNGALOW

“India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.” - William Dalrymple from The White Mughals William Fraser (1785-1835) was a British India civil servant and commissioner of the Delhi Territory. He was commissioned as an ambassador to the Mughal court of Bahadur Shah Jafar, where he advised the emperor and lived in India for three decades. He was a Persian scholar, fluent in Urdu and an admirer of Mirza Ghalib (a poet whose home is in Od Delhi). Fraser, like several his ilk, adapted to the Mughal way of living – he used to dress like a Mughal, smoke hookahs, gave up eating pork, kept a harem of six or seven wives and grew a long beard. The wife of the then new British commander-in-chief in India visited Delhi in 1810 and wrote about William Fraser, who had reportedly “gone native,” ….“[both] wear immense whiskers, and neither will eat beef or pork, being as much Hindoos as Christians.” Fraser commissioned what is known as the Fraser Album, an acclaimed art collection with portraits of soldiers, noblemen and villagers, capturing vignettes of local life in the village of Rania, home to Fraser’s mistress, Amiban with whom who had three children.

When Fraser was commissioned to India, he was assigned a bungalow. The bungalow, built in the year 1803, sits atop a tykhana i.e., dungeons or rooms below street level where prisoners were held after being marched down a tunnel from the Red Fort, located about 2 kilometres from the bungalow. Down another flight of steps are three entrances - leading to the Yamuna, one leading to St. James Church and the third to the Red Fort. The building is an amalgam of British and Indian style architecture. It is an off-white-coloured large domed building situated behind St James Church. The building comprises of two separate blocks. The first block is a low rectangular building that leads to the dome chamber that was added later. This block, attached to the portico, has four octagonal corner turrets. Long corridors lead to different apartments, embellished with coloured walls, and other decorations. The interior has six rectangular rooms and another square-shaped room slightly lower beneath, in addition to various other tunnels and rooms now bricked up. One room includes a coved bangla ceiling and a deep diwan (seat).

The second block, positioned on the far side of the first block, is unique as it has a bow-fronted veranda which once faced the Yamuna River. The central section is flanked by octagonal towers with an arcaded gothic filled in loggia, resembling aspects of Mughal architecture.

During the first war of independence in 1857, the building suffered a lot of damage though it was repaired later and even received the Heritage Award in 1997. Fraser was killed outside his bungalow and he lies buried in St. James’ Church located next door to the bungalow. Today, the Bungalow is home to a government railway office.