A Place Within (8 page)

Krishan Chander teaches English at one of the colleges that make up the massive University of Delhi system, though speaking to him one might not quite guess his specialty, and watching him operate reminds one more of a broker. Krishan Chander is an organizer, a doer, conferences are his métier, and although he complains that they take away from his scholarship, one is hard put to believe that. This occupation gives him privilege and status. His specialty is Canada, and to prove his loyalty he wears a maple-leaf pin in the manner of many Ontario civil servants, identical to the ones I saw the two Canadian girls giving away on the train to Shimla. He goes about from city to city all over the country, a latter-day evangelist for a little-known faith, offering as ultimate prize a trip to that paradise in the north. Many a hapless scholar has been caught in his honey trap.

Every evening after nine the telephone will start ringing in Krishan Chander’s cluttered living room, and picking it up he is connected to the world. I have often imagined him as a minor Indian god, sitting cross-legged like Gandhi, cheerful as a Ganesh, well-worn address book on his lap, telephone to his ear. Calls will come from other “centres” all across the country; from stranded foreign visitors; from would-be conference participants; from his typist or travel agent; even from the Canadian High Commission. You can call him at any hour of the day or night, certain of his attention. He will settle quarrels, budgets, itineraries. Every morning before he leaves the house he will again pick up his phone and his tattered book and begin dialing. He will not be rushed, attending to every item on his agenda one at a time. It is the only way, with his harried schedule. Finally he will come out of the house, looking distracted, his clothes already crumpled, his oiled hair curling up at the ears. A man with a passion, and a smile on his face.
He will get out his Maruti, close the iron gate of the house (with its special “Canadian” guest room), and, toot-tooting, speed away past cows and pedestrians to the day’s appointments.

He goes by a simple principle, driving the Maruti around on the clogged streets of Delhi. He uses this system, as every other driver seems to do, in place of a rear-view mirror, right and left turn signals, stop lights: oblivious to any danger, he will scoot through a turn as I hold my breath, or through a crossroads, his horn happily blaring; this happy-fierce toot-toot gives him licence, a right, and he uses it effectively, though I wonder for how long. The car already has several dents, blamed on his family learning to drive. There is a simple method, apparently, to negotiating Delhi traffic, and it involves pushing through, struggling ahead as best as you can. Every space of likely advantage, however small, is contended for. At every instant a victor emerges, goes forward, the loser relents, is at it again. The horn is a welcome sign, warning others and announcing yourself, deafening to the visitor. Trucks cheerfully tell you on their backs, “Blow Horn,” in addition to a prayer to the Mother Goddess, and a pithy proverb: “O you with the dirty look, your face be black.”

“Whom do the cows belong to?” I asked Krishan Chander on my first visit. A great smile came over his face. The question had been put to him before. One of his foreign visitors had written a poem to the cows of Delhi, he said. I had guessed that perhaps they belonged to homes in the neighbourhood. They belonged to no one, Krishan told me. They are simply tolerated. One finds them plodding along in the thick of traffic, getting the blare of horns like everything else on the road, very much of the place and belonging. One finds them sitting right in the middle of a street, cars going past on either side, in both directions. One finds them scavenging the garbage dumps. At times they are angrily pushed aside, shouted at, as when one of them picks up an onion outside a store and ambles innocently away. They are a part of street life,
as much as a beggar, a stray dog, a rickshaw, a man or woman crossing the road at a construction site bearing a load of bricks, traffic patiently waiting. And one sees cow droppings all over the residential streets, seemingly unnoticed and prudently avoided, like a rock or stump on the road.

In recent times, though, a globalized Krishan has moved on to consultancy and world travelling. He’s recently been to Pakistan, seen the place of his birth. A grownup child is already “there,” in the U.S. But while in Delhi he is still always available to assist, now on his cell phone, at home and on the road.

History is addictive, is an obsession, I’ve discovered. There’s so much around, layers to peel back, enigmas to uncover. I’ve seen the monuments, the Qutb complex, Humayun’s tomb, Red Fort; been driven past the odd mound or dome, remnants of a lost age; read bits of description and history. All dutifully accomplished. Registered in passing. But the urge persists, and grows, to step into the past, look behind the ruin, the beauty, the enigma—and find coherence, impute meaning and relevance. It’s risky, I know, a little like walking into a dream.

Why this obsession with the past? I can only conclude that it reflects the deep dissatisfaction of unfinished, incomplete migrations, a perpetual homelessness in my life. My colonial existence—in which memory and the past were trampled upon in a rush to better our lot—and the insecurities of an unorthodox communal culture, in the process of extinction and reinvention by the exigencies of globalized living and modern politics, have both created an uncontrollable and perhaps vain desire to know and record who I am. There are the ways of the mystic and the scientist, to answer this question; and there is the way of history and fiction, which I find more compelling. In how I connect to the history I learn about myself.

The axis of Delhi is oriented north-south. The legendary many cities of Delhi were often simply extensions one of another, in proximity to the Jumna river, each new Delhi generally to the north of the previous one, so as to benefit first from the cooling winds during the torrid dry summer. And so some of the oldest surviving monuments, the earliest Delhis, can be found among the suburbs in the south. The British, however, after much debate reversed this trend and built their Imperial Indian capital, New Delhi, in 1912, adjacent to what was then the current Delhi (called Shahjahanabad) and to its south. Since then the southwards trend has continued.

The noted English surgeon Frederick Treves, famous for his friendship with Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, and also imperial traveller, happened to visit Delhi in 1906 and gave a fine panoramic description of the landscape, looking out from the then Delhi, southwards from Delhi Gate:

There lies, to the south of Delhi…a desolate plain covered with the ruin and wreckage of many cities. For miles it wanders, telling ever the one woeful story of the hand of the destroyer. This country of things-that-were has been swept by a hundred armies, has heard the roar of a thousand battles, and none can tell the number of the dead who have lain stark among its stones….

From the Delhi Gate a road starts across this desert and reaches to a kindly and wholesome land beyond. The road is straight, and it leads through a country of stones and dust….

Those who follow this melancholy track will pass by miles of ruins, by walls with breaches, shreds of turrets and relics of gates, by crumbling domes rent with cracks…, by tottering pillars and half-seen vaults, and by prostrate blocks of matted stone which were bastions or buttresses.

Only six years later, on this landscape of broken old cities and a few straggling villages, was built New Delhi, covering incidentally much of the site of the ancient capital Indraprastha. After Independence, the growth of the city has continued southwards, on and around the ruins, and people will tell you that the newest Delhi is far south of the oldest Delhi, in the burgeoning modern satellite towns of Gurgaon and Noida, beneficiaries of India’s new globalized economy, with their spanking-new air-conditioned industrial parks, shopping malls, and housing developments, where the nouveau riche professionals can live in (Western) style.

But it is not the modern glass, steel, and concrete—which could be transplants from anywhere—but those silent ancient stone structures and their haunting echoes of tumultuous times past that draw the breath, at least of this visitor. Are they relevant? Of course they are; history is always relevant. An awareness of the past runs like lava beneath the surface of life here. The prompt for the outbreak of communal violence that took place in 1993 in Bombay and parts of Gujarat, and its follow-up, the one in Gujarat in 2002, was the
destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babur, allegedly upon the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. During communal conflicts Muslims are to this day anachronistically and erroneously jeered with cries of “Babur’s progeny” and “Turk.” In a happier, secular vein, modern India needs a capital worthy of its status and ambitions, and where else to look for the requisite imperial grandeur and gravity than in the abundant evidence of its rich history. No wonder, then, that restorers can be seen toiling away at the monuments as never before. “Heritage building” is a term gaining currency, and not only in Delhi.

In 1192, Delhi, then a city in a Rajput kingdom of the north, fell to the armies of Muhammad of Ghur, a region in the western part of the area we now know as Afghanistan, and the era of so-called Muslim rule began in Delhi, from whence it proceeded to the rest of India. There were, to be sure, Muslims living in various parts of India before 1192: Arab traders and settlers in the cities all along the western coast, having arrived by sea; ambassadors at various courts; Sufis from Persia and Central Asia. There had been other incursions by Muslim rulers from the north. But this particular conflict changed everything, for the conquerors had come to stay. The remains of the medieval Rajput city can be found in a few fragments of a rubble wall in southern Delhi; those of the conquerors’ city are at the Qutb complex, at which the red sandstone tower called Qutb Minar rises resplendently.

It is always instructive to remind oneself of this obvious fact: The boundaries and names of many places are only recent in origin and often hide richer, more complex truths than one might imagine; the past then becomes inconvenient and slippery, far less easy to generalize.

In this respect it is useful to know that southeastern Afghanistan was culturally and politically closer to South Asia than to the Near East, a fact evident to this day in its chaotic porous mountain border with Pakistan; Kabul is less than a hundred miles from Peshawar. Before the partition of India it was not unusual to see Afghans plying their trades in northern India. Kipling’s famous spy on the road, Mahbub Ali, was an Afghan horse trader. At the same time, many of India’s peoples have originated in the north. And in ancient times, the Maurya empire, based in present-day north India, had embraced parts of Afghanistan, where it brought Buddhism, which survived many centuries. The great Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as un-Islamic, were from the fifth century
AD
.

Islam arrived in the region of Afghanistan in the seventh century, but it took a slow hold on the land, as people still clung to their pre-Islamic traditions. Politically the region consisted of changing frontiers and fortunes under rival Turkish dynasties often at war. Descended from the nomadic tribes of the lands north of the Oxus river, the Turks had been brought into the Islamic domains as slaves and converted, and rose among the ranks in the armies. From Baghdad in the west to Bukhara (in central Asia) in the east, they were the warrior class of the Islamic world, just as the Kshatriyas were the warrior caste among the Indians. From the tenth century onwards, most of the ruling dynasties of the Muslim world were Turkish in origin, just as the ruling dynasties of northern India were Rajput Kshatriya. The battles for Delhi (1191–92) were therefore fought by these two warrior peoples, the Turks and the Rajputs.