A Place Within (13 page)

The first several emperors of the dynasty are called the “great Mughals,” their list of begats known to all Indian school children, at least in the past. I remember reading about them in the history books in Africa, their names associated with what now seem rather inane titles: Babur the Brave, Humayun the Kind, Akbar the Great. Babur, the first of them, went on to Agra after a stop in Delhi to pay his respects at the tombs of the sultans and the Sufis. He died in Agra and was buried in Kabul, according to his instructions. His son Humayun moved the court back to Delhi in 1530, and his capital was in the region of the Humayun tomb and Purana Qila (the Old Fort) in today’s central Delhi. Humayun was chased out of the country by a Pathan rival called Sher Shah, whose brief dynasty ruled in Delhi between 1540 and 1555. Sher Shah is responsible for
the Purana Qila and the grand buildings inside it, including the mosque. Humayun, however, returned triumphant, and the Mughal dynasty resumed. Following Humayun, Akbar (1556–1605) ruled briefly from Delhi before moving his capital to Agra and later to his new city a short distance away, called Fatehpur Sikri. Shah Jahan (1628–1658), Akbar’s grandson, took the court back to Delhi. His new Delhi was called Shahjahanabad, which continues to this day as the present-day Old Delhi. The last of the great Mughals was the stern and bigoted Aurangzeb, who died in 1707 at the age of ninety-nine. After him began the slow disintegration of the Mughal empire, though the dynasty lasted until 1857.

Babur, whom paintings depict as an austere-looking man with high cheekbones and a flowing, light, pointed beard, wrote a memoir, the
Baburnama
, in which we get a glimpse of the man behind the conqueror’s mask. Unlike his ancestors, of whom he was quite proud, he comes across as quite a charmer. He describes his father as fat, with a round beard and wearing a tight tunic, so that when he released his breath the ties would fall off. He makes a bawdy joke, quotes poems written by himself and others; characterizes people and observes nature’s beauties; he reveals a conscience, as when he repents writing bawdy verse. We get a picture of a sensitive man. And yet, casually and without revealing inner conflict, he writes of a massacre. As soon as he arrived in Delhi, he went and paid respects to the tomb of the Sufi Nizamuddin, then to that of Alauddin Khilji, and finally he visited Tughlaqabad. But he did not like India, found the people and landscape alien; he describes two ways of eating the mango, and he disliked the jack-fruit intensely. And so one is thankful for his
Baburnama
, for its candidness, its confidences.

There are Mughal legends, of course, sweetened versions of history that live on in the imagination, aided in modern times by the movie industry: the justice of Akbar; the love of Shah Jahan for his wife; the love of Akbar’s son Salim for a common girl, Anarkali.
The great Akbar would not tolerate the match for reasons of state and had the girl walled in for defying him, but he had promised a boon to her mother and so he had the prison left open at the back so she could walk away, a tragic heroine, singing, “The world belongs to one who’s loved.” Two films have been made of this love story; the songs are legend. Then there is the story of Babur the father walking in despair around the sickbed of his son Humayun, when there seemed no hope. Babur said to God, “Take me instead,” and the Almighty complied. Babur died and Humayun lived.

Monuments tell a story, reflect a mindset: Aibak’s tower of victory and his great mosque built over a Hindu temple; Alauddin’s vain attempt at a bigger tower, his more practical Hauz Khas water reservoir for the people of Delhi, his fair-trade regulations; Akbar’s new capital Fatehpur Sikri for his ideal of a unified India; Shah Jahan’s incomparable Taj Mahal for his beloved dead queen, and his new city, Shahjahanabad. Each visitor must surely have a favourite among the monuments that transports him or her to a mood, a vision.

I have never been struck more by any monument than the relatively plain Safdarjung tomb, lying unobtrusively behind a drab wall along the bustling north-south Aurobindo Marg, roughly halfway between the old Delhis of the Qutb area and the more recent Delhis of the north. Hardly on the tourist trail, but a walking distance from the Lodi Gardens. Buses stop outside, and rickshaws; fruit and drink stands ply a steady trade; the ticket booth very occasionally collects a five-rupee entrance fee. The first-time visitor already in doubt if the trip will be worth the effort.

But as soon as I entered through the gates, I had stepped into another world. Not that the place, a central tomb surrounded by a walled garden, had been perfectly kept or reconstructed; the fountains were dry, the walls dirty, the tomb not preserved, though not a ruin either. And according to experts it is but a poor architectural cousin to Humayun’s grand tomb, not far away. Yet one slowed
one’s pace, drew one’s breath. Perhaps the stunning impact was due to the absence of tourists and cameras, and the quietude that suddenly met the eye and the ear. The old tomb was all there was to contemplate.

To this untrained eye there seemed such a perfection in balance, composure, to the place: the grounds not so large, with generous paths between fountains and gardens to walk on; the tomb construction neither overbearing nor insignificant; the fern, palm, mango, and other trees liberally planted and well spaced, offering shade to seek shelter in. And in these shades a few young lovers had got away from the clutter of public life of India to find the privacy in which to embrace, put a head against a shoulder.

The domed and arched building, its smooth lines, its red-brown and white were subdued, yet had a quietly imposing presence. The tomb itself invited one to go around it first, walk the verandah, take in the whole scene, the courting couples and the rows of trees and the defunct fountains from a height: it didn’t draw one in vulgarly to look at the burial site and go away; for after all, who was Safdarjung? There was a spaciousness to the monument, a dignity, a presence, the predominance of an abstract that inspired awe and suggested mystery; what design or artifice there was—and there was much—was unobtrusive, as was everything else here, and symmetry and balance were paramount.

Throwing a glance from this raised tomb to the bustling, screeching street outside over the wall, I was forced to acknowledge that, yes, a truly different mind, an alien being, had contemplated this space.

Safdarjung was a Mughal minister at a time when the dynasty lay tottering and Delhi had seen its worst devastation in a long time, under Nadir Shah of Persia.

In March 1739 Nadir Shah entered triumphantly into Delhi, and following a riot of the citizenry against the Persian troops, a massacre
ensued, continuing for five hours as the Persian ruler watched from the roof of the Sunehri Masjid (the Golden Mosque) in Chandni Chowk. Some 20,000 to 150,000 people are believed to have been killed in that bloody episode. Nadir Shah left behind a plundered Delhi beaten into a stupor. Wrote the poet Sauda, an inhabitant of the city, “How can I describe the desolation of Delhi? There is no house from where the jackal’s cry cannot be heard. The mosques at evening are unlit and deserted, and only in one house in a hundred will you see a light burning.” Another poet, Mir Taqi Mir, said it all in the words, “Alas! Alas!”

Nadir Shah took with him the “Peacock Throne” (as the jewel-studded Mughal throne was called), bullion, jewels, works of art, and arms. In the following decades Delhi saw years of peace, occupation, plunder, internal strife, assassinations of its emperors, and gradually it whittled away into a small kingdom. In 1785 the Marathas, a class of warrior people who had given much trouble to the Mughals, had been called to protect the emperor, and after 1788 the general Scindia ruled under the name of the emperor, until in 1803 the British defeated the Marathas at a point across the Jumna from Humayun’s tomb and occupied the city. The old emperor Shah Alam received the British at the Red Fort and recognized British protection and authority.

A dizzying history, of which I try to make some order with the aid of a table:

The City of the Poets: Old Delhi

O limpid waters of the Ganga

remember you the day

when our caravan stopped by your banks

and forever came to stay?

ALLAMA IQBAL

AT THE AGE OF FORTY-SEVEN
, the fifth Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan, having built the Taj Mahal in memory of his beloved wife, Mumtaz, moved his capital from Agra to Delhi, where he built a new city far to the north of all the previous ones. In between lay scattered villages and settlements, including the buried ruins of ancient Indraprastha. Delhiites should perhaps be grateful to Shah Jahan, for without his city, India’s capital might be elsewhere. Thousands of labourers and skilled craftsmen brought in from all parts of the kingdom worked on the project, which took nine years to complete. The result, in 1649, was a grand city of palaces, gardens, parks, and mosques. This was the newest Delhi, the Mughal Delhi, named Shahjahanabad after its founder, and now known simply as Old Delhi. It was laid out like a polygonal fortress, a wall running around it, the Red Fort at its base, and fourteen gates to leave or enter it. Only five of the original gates remain, the prominent one on the south side being Delhi Gate. The Red Fort lay on the eastern side, on the bank of the Jumna river, which has receded in the intervening centuries. It was at the Red Fort where the last Mughal emperor surrendered to the British, where the British lowered
their flag at India’s independence, and where the prime minister of India raises the national tricolour every Independence Day.

To get to Old Delhi you can take an auto-rickshaw or a tempo (a similar vehicle, fitted for seating eight and squeezing in more) from Connaught Place, proceed through Delhi Gate and on to the market area of Darya Ganj, and get off at the corner of Chandni Chowk, the most exciting, throbbing street in the entire modern metropolis, for this visitor, at least. (Nowadays you can also take the subway, pride of modern Delhi, where it’s forbidden to eat or drink, and get off at Chawri Bazar and walk or catch a bicycle rickshaw to Chandni Chowk.) Across the road from the Chowk is a vast ground, at the head of which stands the Lal Qila, the Red Fort. Chandni Chowk is a wide avenue that was once a promenade but today is so clogged with people and traffic you have to practically push your way through. On either side, shops and restaurants spill over into the sidewalk and street, hawkers thrust their wares and shout their prices, which are negotiable, fresh jelebis fry in woks, carts of stuff are pulled away along the road through the throngs. A man bounds across the road by quickly stepping upon a succession of rickshaws.

The Delhi companion of my recent visits is Mahesh, former Marxist, a writer and translator, who has also tried his hand at a couple of businesses, book publishing and an eco-friendly gift shop. He was born in today’s Pakistan and grew up in Nehru’s Delhi, a city of refugees then, and recalls it when it was a much smaller city and much of South Delhi was farmland and small settlements. He himself is intimate with it, possessive, more its gregarious storyteller than guide.

We reach the jewellery market, a cross street lit up with neon and gold and shimmering saris, crowded with middle-class women out to shop here from the suburbs, cell phones to the ear. This famous street is called Dariba Kalan, the word “dariba” derived from the Persian and meaning “incomparable.” A man hails us from one of the shops. Mahesh replies and then explains to me that
Satish is a Hindi teacher at a local college who comes to the shop every afternoon to ply the family trade in costume jewellery. We go over and exchange greetings. The store is more of a stall, with an open window at which Satish sits cross-legged amidst the glitter of bangles and anklets, elaborate necklaces, rings and hairpins, all displayed in the showcase before him and on the wall behind. His eyes all the time dart upon the busy street. I am told that both Mahesh and Satish taught at the same college as young graduates, before Mahesh left for a doctorate and a university post. They banter about their youth. Satish, post-Partition, supported right-wing parties, and Mahesh of course was the Marxist. That was a long time ago, the politics now are less intense, the old antagonists more mellow. Satish’s family has had the business since 1917, renting the site originally from a Muslim who departed on the eve of Partition. The landlord now is the city. Relations in the neighbourhood were cordial once upon a time, Satish explains, and you could go from roof to roof from one end of the city to another, irrespective of whether the house you trod on belonged to a Hindu or a Muslim. The Muslims are mostly the craftspeople, the Hindus the traders. Tea is brought for us as we stand outside, and samosas, in spite of our demurrals (we know we have no choice), the tumult of Old Delhi brushing at our backs. It is acknowledged with a smile that business is booming, property values have multiplied, what with the new subway stop close by. But a neighbour has now laid a claim to the site where the stall is located and the case is in court. Two of Satish’s children are in the United States. So many people I meet in Delhi have relations, especially children, overseas that I wonder if this phenomenon is the undying resonance of Partition, the restless refugees never completely at home. We depart, and Mahesh explains to me how time has whittled away the old joint families, in many cases a single branch remaining to run the business or simply to hold on to the family property. Disputes are legendary, ruthless, and Dickensian.

From Dariba Kalan we turn into Kinari (Border) Bazar, dedicated to all sorts of multicoloured decorations for festivals and borders for clothing.

Pre-modern Delhi was a grand place once; here, the aristocracy lived and mingled and came to shop; splendid parades were held. Travellers from Europe, and ambassadors and agents of its kings and queens, drawn by curiosity, business, or intrigue to the grand Mughal’s capital, strolled its avenues. A waterway ran along the main avenue to provide the residents with water; the beauty of the moon’s reflection upon it, so goes one story, confirmed by Satish, gave the area its name,
chand
, meaning “moon.” Much blood was also shed here, when Nadir Shah the Persian swooped down upon Delhi and oversaw the massacre of its citizens and the plundering of Dariba Kalan, and during the “Mutiny” of 1857, when the last Mughal emperor was drawn into it and his forces lost against the British. Nowadays there is no distinction between the business and residential areas. Many of the wealthy houses used to be havelis, compounds entered through large gates on the street which opened into square courtyards, all around which were the quarters of an extended family. Some of these old havelis are in ruins, others have been converted into godowns, or warehouses, or divided into individual shops and residences.

Let’s go find Ghalib’s house, says Mahesh.

Ghalib’s name is a household word in northern India; he occupies a place in Urdu letters somewhat akin to Pushkin in Russia. (The two were born within three years of each other.) Enthusiasts often compare Ghalib to Shakespeare, which is perhaps reasonable in terms of his exalted status, but he wrote only poetry and letters, and Urdu does not have the status of English. Ghalib tugs at men’s hearts, he sings to the romantic in every Indian male. After
all, the song part of the song-and-dance Bollywood until recently was nothing but pure Urdu poetry (many of the original song-writers were poets in that language), of which Ghalib is the acknowledged god.

He was born Mirza Asadullah Baig Khan in 1796 in Agra, to parents of Turkish ancestry. Ghalib was his pen name. He did not have family income, his father having died when he was young, and therefore he depended on a pension from the British and on other patronage. Money problems seem to have dogged him all his adult life. His career coincided with the tenure of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah, a great lover of poetry and no mean poet himself; therefore he was witness to the violence against the British during the so-called Mutiny, and the devastation of Delhi and its population at their hands when it was quelled. Ghalib loved mangoes, wine, and gambling, for the last of which sins he was once sent to prison. His sense of humour is legend, and there are many affectionate stories told about him, in the vein of the irreverence of genius. And so: When one night during the Mutiny he was confronted by British soldiers who asked him if he was a Muslim, Ghalib is said to have replied, Half a Muslim; I drink wine, but don’t eat pork. He was married to a pious woman of his class, but in his younger days had had an affair with a courtesan called Chaudvin, who died quite young. Despite his sense of humour, his ghazals and his quite beautiful letters carry an undoubtedly distinctive tone of sadness. A picture of him, almost emblematic for its familiarity, shows a white-bearded elderly man in a tall black hat, an embroidered robe over a kurta.

Of his love affair he wrote late in his life, in a remarkably frank and moving letter, “It is forty years or more since it happened, and although I long ago abandoned such things and left the field once and for all, there are times even now when the memory of her charming ways comes back to me and I shall not forget her death as long as I live…. Fate poured into my cup too the poison of this
pain, and as the bier of my beloved was borne along the road, the dust rose from the road of that fortitude which was my essence. In the brightness of broad day I sat on sack cloth and clad myself in black in mourning for my mistress, and in the black nights, in the solitude of sorrow, I was the moth that flew to the flame of her burnt-out candle. She was the partner of my bed, whom at the time of parting my jealous heart could not consign even to God’s keeping.”

What moviemaker could resist this scene of Old Delhi, the old poet recalling his love and its loss, against the backdrop of the Mughal court in its final days, where rival great poets still gathered to recite their poetry and the doomed emperor, too, joined in? Two Indian films have been made about him, in which the poetry is sung by the country’s finest singers of ghazals. The sparse and clean streets in the films and the large almost empty houses couldn’t provide more contrast to the reality of Old Delhi today.

Mahesh and I walk through a maze of gulleys—small narrow streets—in pursuit of Ghalib in this his neighbourhood. Mahesh knows it like his backyard, which it is, in a manner, for the former Marxist Party offices were here. As the evening hour approaches, congeals, the crowds around us thicken. In places, the old architecture still lingers, visible in the latticework balconies and screens, many now in tatters, and arched doorways, their original massive doors repainted; precarious and ugly vertical extensions rise up like scabs upon old single-storey structures. One alley contains a slaughterhouse, a few cows awaiting their fate patiently outside. There is a street where books are saddle-stitched, another has the paper market, shops selling fax and copying paper, old-style account books, cover stock, notebooks; a street of formerly copper, now mixed, ware. Here my companion stops abruptly and points to the backroom of a hardware store, to what looks like a medieval scene framed by the doorway: a man seated cross-legged on a floor covered in white linen, doing accounts on a book placed on a low
table. He is the munim, leaning forward as he writes with painstaking care. Millions of rupees of business is conducted every day here, where walking carelessly, unaware of your wallet, can be a hazard. Once more the veiled women, then boys in handsome kurta-pyjamas and white caps walking to prayer.

But it’s difficult to find Ghalib’s house. People don’t know it, we sound foolish simply asking about it: What kind of worthless layabouts on a busy day would go looking for the house of a poet long dead? Finally at some kind of educational stall with Urdu signs above the entrance, we are told to take a rickshaw to some street. Here, after a few more questions, we are directed to a perfumer’s stall. The man sends a boy with us, past an entrance, then through a room, a courtyard, then another room, on one wall of which is a boarded-up window. Through broken slats we see brick and rubble outside. On the other side of the room is an arched doorway or window, it is difficult to determine which, that leads, we are told, to the room where Ghalib wrote his poetry. As we come out, the perfumer dabs us with a fragrant oil, tells us that the hotel down the road—a modern two-storey boxlike concrete structure—is where Ghalib’s house once stood.

This, of the greatest and most revered poet in the Urdu language, and one of the great literary figures of the subcontinent. We walk back slowly with a strange feeling of emptiness.

Some years later I find out that the government of Delhi has purchased a site where Ghalib had lived, and put up a museum to him. I decide to pay it a visit. The place is indicated on a map as situated near a street called Balli Maran (Dead Cat) intersecting upper Chandni Chowk. Even with this information, it is not easy to find; my rickshaw driver has to stop twice to ask for Ghalib’s haveli, the second time when we’ve just passed it. And now that I am here, it’s impossible to tell which of the two places I previously saw, the rubble or the hotel, has become the museum. It is
not very impressive. A narrow corridor leads to a medium-sized room divided into sections by mocked-up arched doorways. This apparently is a reconstructed portion of the haveli where Ghalib spent the latter years of his life. Built into two walls are showcases exhibiting a dummy of the poet sitting, some artifacts from his period, a few quotations from his poetry. A young couple have brought their boy to see the great poet’s house, and as the father instructs him how to operate the camera, the mother sings from the poetry. A Pakistani woman has come with a porter bearing a large camera.