Every Thursday, hundreds of devotees enter Delhi’s Kotla Firoz Shah not primarily to see a 14th-Century citadel, but to submit petitions to the djinns believed to inhabit its Hawa Mahal. The practice turns an Archaeological Survey of India monument into something more than a heritage site: a place where personal distress, religious belief and the search for justice meet.
The contrast is central to understanding Kotla Firoz Shah. Built by Sultan Firoz Shah Tughlaq as part of Firozabad, the fifth city of Delhi, the complex was designed as a royal and administrative centre on the banks of the Yamuna. Its original landscape included audience halls, residential quarters, a mosque, a baoli, a vineyard, women’s quarters and the Hawa Mahal, a three-tiered pyramid of cells topped by an Ashokan pillar. The river has since shifted eastward, much of the complex has deteriorated, and stone from the fort was quarried for later construction in Delhi, including Shahjahanabad.
Yet the monument’s most active contemporary life is not architectural. On Thursdays, when entry is free from 2 p.m., visitors arrive with handwritten letters, incense, sugar candies, rose petals and milk. The Hawa Mahal’s dark chambers are treated by devotees as the residence of djinns, or unseen beings who, in Islamic belief and popular imagination, live alongside humans and possess moral agency. The letters are often written like formal petitions, sometimes accompanied by a passport-sized photograph and an address.
The complaints described in The Hindu’s account range from relationship disputes and family conflict to financial and health problems. For some women, the Hawa Mahal is known as a babul or mayika, a parental home where they can seek refuge. The djinns are imagined as protective brothers who listen without judgement; children may refer to them as djinn mamu, or maternal uncle. The language of kinship gives the monument a social role that is different from its official description as a protected historical structure.
This is not simply a story about superstition occupying an old building. It is also about how urban residents assign meaning to places that formal institutions have preserved but not necessarily integrated into everyday civic life. The fort is a state-protected monument, but on Thursdays it functions as a site of petition, ritual and collective recognition. The official heritage framework and the public’s lived use of the site therefore overlap without being identical.
The historical timing of the practice is significant, even though its exact origins remain unclear. Anthropologist Anand Vivek Taneja, cited in the report through his book Jinneology, traces the growth of the practice to 1975-1977, during the Emergency and a period of political unrest and hardship in Delhi. The forced sterilisation campaign caused distress among the city’s poor, including residents of Muslim neighbourhoods. People from areas such as Turkman Gate, Paharganj and Seelampur began visiting Kotla Firoz Shah, and the citadel gradually acquired a reputation as the house of djinns.
That account places the monument within a larger history of displacement and institutional failure. The belief system did not emerge in an empty urban space. It took shape amid experiences in which residents felt that official systems offered limited relief or protection. The court of the djinns became an alternative imaginative institution: a place where a grievance could be written down, presented and heard, even when no formal resolution was guaranteed.
The idea of a court is particularly revealing. Devotees are said to believe that Iblees, described in the report as the king of the djinns, holds a nightly kacheri and decides which complaints require immediate action. The site is regarded as insaaf ki jagah, or a place of justice. This does not make the practice equivalent to a legal process. It does show, however, how the vocabulary of courts, petitions and decisions can be transferred into a religious setting when people are seeking an authority that will acknowledge their problems.
The practice also has an internal rhythm. Devotees may return every Thursday, week after week, to have their complaint heard. When a wish is believed to have been fulfilled, gratitude may take the form of prayer at the Jama Masjid within the complex and the distribution of biryani. These repeated visits create a recurring public life around a monument whose formal architectural functions have largely disappeared.
Kotla Firoz Shah’s condition adds another layer to the story. Its broken bastion, damaged guard rooms and deteriorated structures are reminders that Delhi’s heritage is not preserved as a single, stable landscape. Parts of the fort were lost or dismantled over time, while the Hawa Mahal continues to draw visitors for reasons that have little to do with conventional tourism. The monument survives simultaneously as archaeological evidence, a religious destination and a neighbourhood-scale social institution.
This raises a practical question for heritage administration: what exactly is being managed when a protected monument is also a living site of belief? A conventional visitor model may prioritise architecture, interpretation and controlled circulation. The Thursday congregation introduces other considerations, including offerings, incense, handwritten petitions, repeated visits and the expectations of devotees. The supplied report does not establish how the ASI formally regulates or responds to these practices. That institutional gap is important because the site’s public meaning cannot be understood through its masonry alone.
The story also complicates the familiar division between a monument and its users. Heritage sites are often presented as remnants of a finished past, with contemporary activity treated as an addition or disturbance. At Kotla Firoz Shah, present-day belief has become one of the main ways the monument is encountered. The medieval structure is not merely being consumed as a visual object; it is being used as a setting for communication, ritual and emotional support.
The urban geography matters too. The fort stands opposite Maulana Azad Hospital on Bahadur Shah Zafar Road, within a dense and historically layered part of Delhi. Its location places a medieval citadel beside modern institutions and traffic infrastructure, while its Thursday congregation brings people from different parts of the city into the complex. The fort’s identity is therefore produced by movement across the city as much as by the original plan of Firozabad.
The account of Kotla Firoz Shah offers no evidence that the petitions receive verifiable supernatural intervention, nor does it claim that the practice replaces formal public services for all devotees. What it does document is the persistence of a belief-based institution that helps people articulate problems, return to a shared place and imagine that their grievances have entered a process of judgement. That distinction matters: the social function of a belief can be studied without validating or dismissing its supernatural claims.
For Delhi’s heritage system, the broader lesson is that monuments acquire urban lives that outlast their builders and exceed official categories. The Hawa Mahal was part of a royal complex, but it is now understood by devotees as a domestic and judicial space. The fort’s significance is consequently divided between historical architecture and contemporary use, between conservation and access, and between the state’s authority over a monument and the public’s authority to attach meaning to it.
Kotla Firoz Shah shows how Delhi’s ruins continue to absorb the city’s unresolved concerns. Its weekly court is not a formal court, and its petitions are not government applications. But the ritual gives form to a need that cities repeatedly produce: the need for places where people can bring private troubles into a shared public setting and feel that they have been heard. The future of the site will therefore be shaped not only by the conservation of its stones, but also by how institutions understand the living communities that give those stones meaning.
