What does it mean for a nation to monumentalise its past while struggling to find space for the books that preserve it? In September 2026, the 135-year-old Central Secretariat Library (CSL), housing more than 8.5 lakh books and documents, found itself facing displacement from Shastri Bhavan under the Narendra Modi government’s contentious Central Vista Redevelopment Project. Established in 1891 as the Imperial Secretariat Library, the institution has survived the transfer of the colonial capital from Calcutta to Delhi, Independence and successive changes in the Indian government.Its next transformation has proved less straightforward. According to this report by The Indian Express, the library currently occupies nearly 5,500 square metres across four floors. An initial offer of two rooms in Kartavya Bhavan-2 was made to house these books. This offer was rejected by the Union culture ministry, which said that the space was inadequate to house all of the books, according to the report. The housing and urban affairs ministry subsequently clarified that a purpose-built facility for the library was part of the Kartavya Path redevelopment plan and that its construction was underway. This assurance however has not ended questions about what exactly is being planned. Taking suo motu cognisance of the matter, on October 5, the Supreme Court sought a detailed affidavit specifying the area and layout of the proposed facility and asking whether it could accommodate both the Shastri Bhavan collection and approximately two lakh books currently stored in cartons at R.K. Puram. Senior Advocate Haripriya Padmanabhan was appointed amicus curiae.The question that emerges from this is one about the future of the books certainly, but also about what kind of historical institution will survive this planned relocation and what this episode reveals to us about the distinction between preserving the past and controlling how it is publicly encountered in the present moment. The Central Vista in New Delhi occupies an unusual place in India’s political imagination because it has never had a single historical meaning. Planned by Edward Lutyens and built as the ceremonial centre of the imperial capital, its architecture was appropriated after Independence by the republic that replaced the Raj. Kingsway was renamed ‘Rajpath’, the imperial government buildings became the administrative centre of a democratic state, and the space designed to project colonial sovereignty became the setting for the Republic Day functions. Architecture has always been central to the production of political authority, and the Central Vista was thus, from the very inception of the new nation in 1947, a landscape of inheritance and reinterpretation. File image. Construction underway for the Central Vista project. Photo: Seraj Ali/The WireThe current redevelopment project is yet another such attempt to remake its meaning. The new Parliament building, the transformation of Rajpath into Kartavya Path and the construction of new government complexes do more than just modernize the administrative infrastructure. As before, it establishes a new vocabulary through which the nation represents itself. This time around, rather than renaming and rearranging, there is demolition and rebuilding, presenting a revised visual grammar for the nation as well. The government’s language surrounding this redevelopment has made this ambition quite explicit as well. In February 2026, the Modi Cabinet described the transition from North and South Blocks to new government offices as a symbolic movement away from the “past of slavery” towards a developed India. Also read: A Window into Narendra Modi’s Symbolic PoliticsAs part of this redevelopment and refashioning, the North and South Blocks themselves are to acquire another meaning. Once vacated, they are intended to become the Yuge Yugeen Bharat National Museum, which, according to the culture ministry, will be a mega museum that presents India’s “thousands-year-old civilisational and cultural heritage.” The adaptive reuse of the two buildings is an ambitious undertaking no doubt, turning spaces once associated with imperial and then postcolonial administration into a vast repository of national history. There is, however, a tension one must contend with here: considerable architectural and curatorial attention is being devoted to creating a new space through which India’s past will be narrated. At the same time, an existing institution containing materials through which India’s political and administrative history can be investigated has required judicial scrutiny over its future accommodation. The contrast that emerges is one between a curated history that the nation will be invited to admire and an intellectual history that must remain accessible for citizens to freely interrogate the nation’s past. Put simply, it is the difference between presenting the nation as a monument and viewing it as an archive of the lived histories of its people. File image. Workers load air-conditioning units onto a truck outside Shastri Bhawan as the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) initiates the process to vacate the building ahead of its planned demolition to make way for new ‘Kartavya Bhawan’ blocks under the Central Vista redevelopment project, in New Delhi, Tuesday, Sept. 22, 2026. Photo: PTI/Salman Ali.This is not an argument against museums, nor a claim that libraries and archives somehow stand outside the ambit of a politics of selection. Nor is this a question whether the state values its history as it is, or as it must be memorialised or curated. I also write this from the awareness that museums can complicate national narratives and are an archive in their own right and libraries too have their own histories of exclusion. My argument is more about the distinction between the curation of a historical narrative versus a matter of access to materials that allow historical narratives to be constructed. The Central Secretariat Library contains government publications, gazetteers, administrative reports, rare books and historical documents accumulated across changing political regimes. Such materials are invaluable precisely because their meanings cannot be determined in advance. They can confirm an official account of the past or expose its omissions. They allow researchers to trace the distance between policy and practice, between what governments said and what they did. Whilst the museum can offer an interpretation of the history to its visitors, the library in most cases (and certainly in this one) operates as a site that makes possible interpretations its custodians do not anticipate. Whenever the state is invested in a large-scale reconstruction of its historical landscape, that distinction becomes even more critical than it is usually. The Central Secretariat Library is not the first institution to have raised such concerns under the Central Vista Project. In 2021, more than a hundred historians sought clarity about plans affecting the National Archives of India. Their concerns included the movement of archival materials, preservation standards and continued scholarly access. And indeed it is rare for national archives to be relocated unless there is imminent threat of destruction or damage because the objects, artifacts or cultural texts which deserve immunity from precocity in as much as possible, and the relocation processes, even when handled with utmost care, does not always offer a guarantee of that. In response to the concerns raised, the government maintained that the heritage building would remain and the institution would be modernized. The dispute nevertheless revealed a simple problem: preserving a building is not the same thing as preserving access to all that it contains.There is an even closer precedent within the Central Secretariat Library itself.In 2011, its Tulsi Sadan regional-language collection was displaced from its premises near the National School of Drama to accommodate the Delhi Metro’s construction. More than two lakh books across fourteen Indian languages were moved. Fifteen years later, The Indian Express found that, despite some sections having reopened, most of the collection remained packed in cartons in R.K. Puram. From what I can gather from the report, it looks like the books were not destroyed or accidentally damaged in any way. They survived. The same cannot be said about access to the books. A book in a carton survives as an object in a room, but it might as well have disappeared from the landscape of a person who would have found it as a resource at the library. File image. Construction workers near Krishi Bhawan after the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) initiated the process to vacate the building ahead of its planned demolition to make way for new ‘Kartavya Bhawan’ blocks under the Central Vista redevelopment project, in New Delhi, Wednesday, Sept. 23, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.The Supreme Court’s decision to ask whether the new Central Secretariat Library facility can accommodate the R.K. Puram books makes Tulsi Sadan more than just a historical analogy. The consequences of an earlier “temporary” displacement have become part of the question confronting the library’s present and future as well.None of this brings us to the conclusion that Shastri Bhavan itself must be preserved as it is, or that government buildings should never be redeveloped, or that modernisation is in any way incompatible with conservation. The more important question is why the institutional continuity of a 135-year-old library was not demonstrably secured before its existing home was scheduled to be vacated. Libraries are, after all, not warehouses. Their collections become usable through catalogues, classification systems, conservation practices, knowledgeable staff and places in which readers can consult them. And this is why the danger presented by the current moment is subtler than the deliberate destruction of historical materials would have been, for what this creates is an architecture of forgetting where the documentary complexity of the past becomes increasingly precarious. A library closed indefinitely, an archive that has been rendered inaccessible, or a collection dispersed across temporary storage facilities for any amount of time may technically be considered “preserved” but are in effect, disappeared from public intellectual life, which produces a cultural forgetting within the political and administrative order of the nation.The Central Vista project makes the problem unusually visible because it is so explicitly concerned with history. The project itself is concerned with transforming inherited buildings, symbols and spaces in order to say something about how contemporary India understands itself. That makes the less spectacular infrastructure of historical knowledge (as opposed to monuments) even more important. If, as the government says, a purpose-built facility for the Central Secretariat Library is underway, its construction presents an opportunity to design it with care keeping in mind concerns of adequacy, conservation infrastructure, professional staffing, coherent accommodation and meaningful public accessibility. The obvious questions that emerge to my mind as a researcher are the following: will this facility accommodate the entire collection? What conservation facilities will it contain? How long will the collection be inaccessible during relocation? When will readers be able to consult its collections again? Any relocation plan and timeline should be transparent, with safeguards against prolonged closures. The history of Tulsi Sadan makes me wary and to my mind, makes those questions even more urgent since a “temporary” displacement can very well lead to another decade of inaccessible books.The larger issue here concerns the relationship between history and democratic citizenship. A nation cannot preserve its past solely through monuments and sites where history can be displayed. Such spaces are necessary, of course. But it also needs institutions in which that history can be investigated and scrutinised. These two are not interchangeable sites for preservation of the nation’s history but are rather complementary axes. The measure of India’s investment in its past will therefore not lie only in the museums and monuments it builds but rather, will also lie in something ostensibly much less spectacular: whether a reader can still find the book that allows them to question the story those monuments tell.Rudrani Gangopadhyay is a scholar, writer, editor, and public humanities practitioner whose work spans South Asian literature, cinema, visual culture, and community engagement around democracy, dissent, and social justice.