The
modern tourist arriving in Delhi can hardly be blamed if his first
reaction is to want to get out as quickly as possible, overwhelmed by
a densely crowded and confusing metropolis of something like
seventeen million people. But Delhi has only been as it is seen now
for the last three decades or so. One hundred years ago, when New
Delhi had just been thought of, the population was less than 500,000.
For centuries before that and under multiple transformations and
different names it was reputed as one of the most fabulous and
wondrous cities in all Asia. Some of that legacy, an enormous book of
history where only some of the pages open, still exists for anyone
who wishes to discover it, and the discovery is worth the effort..
Delhi,
or Dili, if not the oldest, is one of the oldest continuously
surviving cities in the world. Of the original inhabitants little is
known, since the Indian sub-continent, from the north, has been for
as long as recorded time a magnet for almost all the wandering tribes
of Central Asia. But there is a legend as to how it came to be sited
where it is - in an otherwise flat and harsh landscape with a
discouraging climate - in the first place. “Soon after the
creation of the world, Brahma the Creator suffered a fit of divine
amnesia and forgot all the Vedas and sacred scriptures. In
order to remember them, the God performed a series of yogic exercises
and austerities before diving into the Yamuna. Soon after, during the
monsoon, when the waters were in full spate, the flooded river
miraculously threw up the sacred texts on the right bank of the
river” (1) at a place named the Nigambodh Ghat, just above the
present Lal Qil or Red Fort and still used as a Hindu
cremation ground. It was here therefore that the half-mythical city
of Indraprastha was sited, described in the Mahabharata, that
enormous epic poem of India built up from tales collected and
embroidered over millennia, as the celestial abode of gods and
heroes. There is no doubt that Indraprastha existed and for a very
long time - the present 'old fort' or Purana Qila was largely
built from and over it in the 16th century, and the last
remnants were only obliterated in the construction of New Delhi after
1911 – but archaeological researches, as well as common sense, have
established that the crystal halls, the lavishly painted palaces, the
gorgeous gardens of the poem, were entirely mythical, and that
originally it was just a primitive settlement of immense antiquity
and rudimentary construction of which nothing remains other than a
collection of characteristic grey-painted clay pottery. Indeed, the
visible history of Delhi only starts reliably after the Hindu
kingdoms were vanquished by Islamic invasions from about the 12th
century, and the thousands of years before that remain a matter for
entirely academic study and controversy except for half-remembered
traditions that continue to flourish. There's a saying that any
attempt to build a new version of Delhi is to lose it, and subsequent
history has borne that out: to use Mr Dalrymple's eloquent
expression, the present city is “a groaning necropolis”, “a
graveyard of dynasties”, and that is what makes it so fascinating.
It's popularly said to be made up of the remains of seven cities –
or some would say nine or more – but that is best regarded as only
approximately accurate too, depending on individual conjecture or
just enthusiasm for the subject, because some of them overlapped or
were incorporated into each over time or were simply pillaged and
destroyed and the stones carried elsewhere. Nonetheless, the 'seven
cities' provide a convenient chronological background as a beginning
to comprehending what Delhi is and means.
The
First City: Mehrauli
Somewhere
around the year 800 AD a city called Lal Kot was being founded, 25 km
or so south of Indraprastha, just as with phenomenal rapidity the new
faith of Muhammad was spreading west across North Africa and then up
into most of Iberia, and east across Asia Minor and Syria and Persia
to the northern borders of India. There the surge halted, held back
it is said because the Islamic warriors encountered for the first
time not just a physical resistance but an intellectual one: they'd
come up against a religious power far older, more subtle and
complicated than their own. From the few remaining accounts and a few
actual remnants, and because Oriental civilization had already by
then reached a high level when Europe was still in the depths of the
dark ages, Lal Kot must have been for its time, and greatly extended
after 1060, a magnificent and resplendent Rajput city, glittering
with gold and a prize worth the taking. Since its inception Afghans
had been leading raiding parties into India, but no determined
campaign to take Lal Kot was undertaken before Muhammad Ghuri at the
end of the 12th century set on extending his kingdom, and
succeeded - at the period, incidentally, that the Reconquista
was gathering strength to drive the 'Moors' from Portugal and
eventually from Spain. He left his slave general the Turk
Qutb-ud-din Aibak in control as viceroy before being assassinated
himself. In 1206 Aiback declared himself Sultan of Delhi, so
initiating the so-called short-lived Slave Dynasty, the
longer-lasting Delhi Sultanate and Muslim dominance of Delhi for the
next nine centuries.
Aibak's
first accomplishment was to start the construction of a great Victory
Tower on and over the Hindu City, casting the shadow of God over the
easternmost extremes of Islam. The mighty minaret was completed by
his successor, Iltutmish, and another story added in 1369 by a
subsequent sultan. At the same time India's first mosque was going
up, using for the courtyard the columns and pillars of twenty-seven
temples of vanquished Lal Kot to strangely incongruous effect; only
much later did the styles merge into the aesthetic triumph of
Fatuphur-Sikri and the Taj Mahal. The incongruous pillars do give a
clear indication, however, that the Hindu city was already an
architectural masterpiece akin to the 'classical' temples elsewhere
in the country. Iltutmish's own tomb, of 1235, has a
beautifully-crafted Seljuk interior and is allegedly the first
Islamic mausoleum in India, a novelty in a country which
traditionally cremated rather than buried its dead, and setting the
example for the many others that have subsequently dotted the Delhi
landscape. The site today is known as the Qutab Minar complex.
The ingenuity and artfulness of the great tower, fluted in tapering
red and ornamented with projecting corbels and balconies,
inscriptions from the Koran and complicated geometrical designs, is
emphasized by the beginning of another matching one nearby, the Alai
Minar. Barely more than the base was ever finished, from rough
lumps of mortared stone vaguely suggesting the ribs of its
predecessor and leaving the viewer awe-struck at the craftsmanship
necessary to face such a structure with such meticulously-chiselled
sandstone. The soaring broken arches of the prayer hall and assorted
other mosques and tombs ensure that the site warrants its reputation
as one of the great show-pieces of Delhi. Of whatever city, Mehruali,
surrounded it, virtually all is lost within an encroaching forest or
suburban development; the nearby and rather desolate tombs of Khans
Adam and Azim, the later arising on what might be the rubble of the
walls of Lal Kot on the other side of a frantically-busy main road,
are later additions. One account has it that Mehrauli, rather than
Shahjahanabad, was known to the British as Old Delhi before the
erection of New Delhi.
The
Second City: Siri
Their
tenuous control and repeated attacks from Mongol invasions lost the
Slave Dynasty to the Afghan Khalijis, who continued to inhabit
Mehrauli but consolidated their power by building a new city enclosed
within a great fortress a short distance to the west. Siri fort was
started in 1291 on a grand scale with seven gates, using the skills
of Seljuk craftsmen and according to legend resting as the foundation
on the skulls of 8,000 dead Mongols. The reservoir of Haus Khaz,
however, is all that remains of this the most elusive and mysterious
of the seven cities; the rest was supplanted by yet another and even
greater one further on to the west and then vacated for other later
ones. Today the badly-ruined walls of the fort exist only in isolated
segments hemmed in by a sports complex and an entertainment centre,
perhaps hardly worth the attention of any but the most dedicated
amateur archaeologist.
The
Third City: Tughluqabad
In
1321 after a bloody coup a former feudatory of the Khalijis seized
power as Ghias-ud-din
Tughluq and started the Tughlag dynasty. Ambitious and
forward-looking, Ghias had already visualised another impregnable
city, which almost incredibly
– considering that it was fortified by six kilometres of immensely
thick bastioned walls - was completed in six years, though at even
greater cost than its builder had counted on. Enforcing all available
labour to complete his dream, he aroused the indignation of the sufi
mystic and subsequent saint, Nizam-ud-Din, who pronounced a grim and
deadly curse: Tughluqabad would never be inhabited except by
wandering herdsmen. Even before it was completed Ghias was dead,
murdered it was said by his own son Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq. The city
was abandoned almost immediately and, true to the curse, never
populated again except by the afore-said 'gypsies'. So it has
remained since, until recently almost completely unknown, in a large
area of thorny scrub at the extreme south-eastern edge of modern
Delhi. Sometime within the last ten years the Indian Archaeological
Survey has got around to noticing it and now charges a small fee to
enter, but few visitors ever see it or know of its existence..
Seen
or not, Tughluqabad is one of the most remarkable sites in all Delhi.
A main road parallels the colossal walls, separating the city from
the tomb of its founder, reached by a causeway and the only building
that has received any restoration. The city was said to have been
entered by fifty-two gates. The residential part was constructed as a
grid around a citadel and a palace complex, but no structure is
completely standing and most have been reduced to nothing much more
than heaps of great stones. Half-concealed pits of either collapsed
buildings or underground chambers and passages present a certain
hazard to the unwary. The atmosphere is eerie, or even sinister if
one is over-imaginative; Tughluq architecture was always more
powerful and solid than beautiful. Gazing across a desolate area of
rock-strewn scrub the new sky-scrapers of Connaught Place are visible
in the far distance. Half a kilometre or so in the other direction
the Adilabad fort – ordered later by Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq as the
first defence in a line of constructions stretching all the way to
the Qutab Minar - rears up from the sandy terrain like a
mysterious vision, even more unknown and unvisited.
The Fourth City: Jahanpanah
The Fourth City: Jahanpanah
Possessed
of certain refinements and abilities and an extraordinary and
ambitious energy, Muhammad-bin-Tughlaq's reputation was principally
that of a ferocious madman and tyrant “too free in shedding blood”.
The fullest account of him and of Delhi generally under his rule
comes from the intrepid Moroccan traveller, gossip and chronicler of
the entire Islamic world Ibn Battuta (2), who after many years of
wandering arrived in India in 1333 and managed immediately to enlist
himself lucratively though warily in the Sultan's service. Expecting
a sort of garrison town, Battuta was greatly impressed by the size
and magnificence of Delhi. At the centre of a multitude of mosques,
monasteries, baths and pleasure gardens, the most favoured visitors
finally entered the innermost sanctuary, the many-pillared hall of
the sultan's palace. Such is the lasting fascination of Battuta's
travel diary that various people – most notably Tim Macintosh-Smith
in his recreation of the Tangerine's long meanderings (3) – have
tried to locate this fantastic hall. But where exactly to look? It
seems unlikely that Muhammad, scared off by the curse, ever used
Tughluqabad. Already by the start of his reign he had started
another city, Jahanapah (“Refuge of the World”), the exact
precincts of which are not discernible but somewhere between the
Qutab Minar and Tughlukabad, probably incorporating Siri and
encompassing an area now scattered all over with isolated and mostly
unidentifiable ruins increasingly submerged by suburban sprawl. One
identifiable site, however, exists, the ruins at Begumpur, for
centuries an isolated and forgotten village which even now few
Delhi-ites have heard of. Down a small lane, becoming lined with the
residences of the new bourgeoisie, one arrives at a field of weeds
and rubble and hillocks suggesting much buried subterranean building
and topped with a squat structure of undeniably Tughluq style –
blunt and unadorned – culminating in a sort of penthouse, and this,
the Bijay Mandal, is reckoned to be the famous palace (4).
There are perhaps eight pillars, of massive blocks of granite, but
the building, or what remains of it, is disappointingly small and
hardly all that magnificent. It might as reasonably be surmised that
the original palace has disappeared, and that imagination more than
archaeological fact has invested this structure and the unknown domed
one alongside it with more romance than it ever warranted. There are
some historical uncertainties here: the year after he commenced
Jahanapah the Sultan on a crazy whim obliged – not too gently -
all his subjects in Delhi temporarily to move to Dalautabad 700 km to
the south, and according to some accounts had the city burned behind
him, but that can hardly be true when six years later Battuta arrived
and things had evidently been re-instated. There can be no question,
anyway, that here was Jahanpanah, whatever it was, and if further
evidence be needed a narrow passage through the village arrives at
something a good deal more impressive.
The
Begumpur Mosque is not mentioned by Battuta (who was in Delhi until
1341) and that and its austerely-elegant Persian style suggests a
later date, probably during the reign of Muhammad's successor after
1351. An enormous courtyard, with one side of multiple-rowed pillared
cloisters and the lot topped with miniature egg-shell domes, make
this a gem of medieval Islamic architecture in no need of imagined
romance; its dignified elegiac solemnity, not unlike that of the
great European abbeys of the same period, speaks for itself. A few
respectively-playful boys and some meditative card-players are almost
its only visitors.
The
saintly curse-caster, incidentally, has remained entombed at
Nizamuddin since his death in 1325. The tomb, enclosed within a
dargah or shrine after 1562, has been a place of pilgrimage
for all religions ever since and the village – far from Tughluqabad
near the river to the north - is another of the tangible living
relics of the medieval world hidden within Delhi.
The
Fifth City: Firozabad
Upon
the death of Muhammad-bin-Tughluq in 1351 - an event not un-welcomed
by most of his subjects – the Sultanate was assumed by his cousin
Firoz Shah Tughluq, the son of a Hindu princess and a more benevolent
ruler whose troubles arose largely from inheriting his predecessor's
mistakes so that many possessions were lost and the Tughluq empire
diminished and weakened. Apart from a wealth of public works and
additions to existing monuments, Firoz embarked on yet another city,
this one – now known as Feroz Shah Kotla – well to the
north by the Yamuna river. His death in 1388 led to a war of
succession and a further weakening of the ineffectual rule of his
successor Ghias-ud-din Tughluq II so that ten years later a
catastrophe befell Delhi. The dreaded Tamerlane, self-styled Sword
of Islam and one of the Mongols the Tughluqs had been warding off for
decades, invaded India and in a great battle seized and sacked Delhi
and massacred thousands of the inhabitants, partly as a reprisal
against its leniency towards the Hindus whose kings had continuously
resisted Islamic domination. The destruction was on an enormous scale
and much of ancient Delhi was left in ruins thereafter. Firozabad was
clearly a main target, but whether the collapse of Tughlukabad and
the virtual disappearance of Siri and Jahanapah can be accredited
principally to the activity of barbarian vandals remains an
unanswered question; from the appearance of the remains it would have
taken a prodigious effort to knock down such powerfully mortared
edifices of great blocks and lumps of stones. For some reason, but
probably because they were entirely Islamic, the Qutab Minar
and the Begumpur Mosque escaped intact except for the ravages of
time.
Feroz
Shar Kotla today receives scant official and tourist attention,
yet during the 18th and 19th centuries it was a
famous landmark and the subject of a very fine aquatint by Thomas
Daniell during a tour of India in 1795. But of the crumbling towers
depicted there no sign remains. Some of it was dismantled for the
construction of New Delhi. The gaunt broken arches of an original
mosque and the base of a pyramidal structure supporting the narrow
polished stone Ashokan column – dating from 300 BC and evidence of
Firoz's interest in pre-Muslim India – stand within a large walled
enclosure, almost deserted and a mute reminder of the ephemerality of
human endeavour and ambition.
Firoz
Shah's legacy is more clearly visible in Haus Khaz, the great
water reservoir of Siri and a sort of theological or intellectual
extension of Tughluqabad and Jahanapah. The reservoir was excavated
at the beginning of his reign and around it built a collection of
notable structures, principally a madrasa or seminary, in its
time considered one of the most important in the Islamic world. It
was here that Tamerlane established his camp, sufficiently impressed
apparently to leave it alone; or at least if the madrasa has
been partly knocked or fallen down, the tomb of Firoz himself, a
small mosque and a number of pavilions in characteristic Tughluq
style have not. The madrasa constitutes a placidly splendid
and picturesque ruin. Haus Khaz used to be a picnic spot under
the British Raj; today its surrounded by an urban 'village' of
desirable residences, fashionable boutiques, pretentious art
galleries and over-priced restaurants.
*
* * * * *
With
the departure of Tamerlane and his hordes and after carnage and
destruction on that scale – accounts are almost too horrible to
dwell on and it took a whole century to recover from the devastation
- the Tughluq Dynasty struggled on a little longer until 1413 when
control was seized by Khizr Khan, a general left in charge by
Tamerlane. The short-lived Sayyid Dynasty was marked by political
disturbance and further loss of territories and in 1451 they acceded
what was left of their kingdom to the Afghan Bahlul Khan Lodi. The
Lodis – of whom the only remarkable one was Sikander, son of Bahlul
- tenuously held on to Delhi, continuously beset by internal
factions and rights over succession, until defeated by Babur in 1526,
instigating the Mughal Empire.
The
Lodis had neither the circumstances nor perhaps the will to build
another city, making use presumably of what they could find. They
are, however, noteworthy for the tombs they left behind in the Lodi
Gardens in a prosperous part of present-day south Delhi. The park
under the British was called Lady Helen Willingdon Gardens, a name
which describes it more aptly since it has a great air of tidiness
and respectability, like an imitation of Hyde Park displaced to
India; it's also an extremely attractive and beautifully maintained
place, with luxuriant vegetation complete with miniature Serpentine
and makes for a very pleasant two or three hour stroll. The same
characteristically Islamic domes top arched boxes, but these
monuments, quite distinctive from the Tughluq ones, have a much
lighter feel and display what Dalrymple (1) calls “the frivolity of
the late Middle Ages”. The first mausoleum, of Sikander Lodi
himself, is plain enough, but in the lofty interior blue-glazed tiles
in the form of pointed arches add to the architectural appeal. In the
centre of the gardens the four-square Bara Gumbad and the
Shish Gumbad face each other over the paved courtyard of a
mosque to maximum aesthetic effect; both buildings have inlaid
coloured stone decoration and bear traces of ornamental tile-work.
The earliest and also most strikingly-original tomb – octagonal
with an arched veranda supporting chattris and stumps of
potential minarets around the central dome - some 300 metres further
on is that of Muhammad Shah of the former Sayyid Dynasty.
The Sixth City: Shergah
Bordered
by the major Mathura Road and not far from Firozabad, the walls of an
immense fortress rear up from a jungle swooped over by birds of prey,
a dramatically unexpected sight in a vast modern city. Though not so
long ago the 'jungle' extended far further and this - the Purana
Qila or Old Fort - remained in isolation at the eastern-most
extreme of Delhi, superseded in its defensive function by the Lal
Qila or Red Fort somewhat to the north.
The
decline of the Lodis marked the beginning of one of the greatest
periods in the history of Delhi under the Mughals. Barbur, claiming
descent from both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, aspired to extend an
already enormous Central Asian Empire over India, facing not just his
Muslim predecessors in Delhi but the might of the Rajputs. His son
Humayun inherited the fledging empire in1530 and within ten years had
lost most of it, being defeated first by a Hindu army and then an
Afghan one under Sher Shah. The latter then took control of Delhi,
but only temporarily; Humayun returned in glory in 1555 and the next
year died from falling down the stairs of his own library in his zeal
to answer the muezzin's call. Effective emperor for just over ten
years, his successor was his thirteen year old son Akbar who reigned
for the next forty-nine years..
Before
his exile from India, Humayun had already had constructed the great
walls pierced with magnificent gateways of a new citadel over the
site of the legendary Indrapastha, surrounded by a moat supplied from
the river (remaining now as a highly ornamental lake). Most of the
interior was completed by Sher Shah and his successors. The principal
edifice is the splendid Qila-i-Kuhna Masjid, a red stone
mosque; the Sher Mandal, the octagonal red observatory and
library from the steps of which Humayun met his untimely death stands
some distance away, and beyond that the semi-ruined southern gateway
with its twin chattris. These few remaining structures are
isolated in a large expanse of lawns and walkways which descend into
a wild and over-grown area bordered by crumbling ramparts and
bastions with precipitous drops scampered over by reckless
youngsters. In its abandonment, infrequently visited other than by
locals for a quiet afternoon away from the ceaseless hub-bub of
Delhi, the Purana Qila has a magical atmosphere. Even less
visited and across from the majestic West Gate of the fort, the
pleasing Khair-ul-Manzil – a mosque and madrasa said
to have been commissioned by the wet-nurse of Humayun's son –
presents an even more vivid impression of piety and benign neglect,
watched over only by a couple of elderly caretakers.
Not
unvisited at all, separated from the Purana Qila by an
extensive parkland enclosing the Delhi Zoo, another of the great
Delhi show-pieces – the tomb of Humayan himself - fully warrants
its fame. The second Mughal Emperor's son Akbar moved his capital
from Delhi to Agra and this memorial was erected from 1564 by a
Persian architect – it took longer to finish than the entire city
of Tughlukabad - under the command and close supervision of his
widowed mother; she is supposed to have lived on the site during the
duration. Forgotten almost as soon as it was completed, the
magnificent mausoleum remained desolate until 1860 and the capture of
the last Mughal who had sought refuge there during the so-called
Indian Mutiny, when the British quite wrongly re-planted the formal
gardens in the English style with privet hedges and flower beds of
dahlias to replace the cabbages and tobacco plants cultivated amongst
the ruins by the descendent's of Humayun. In 1903 the sympathetic
British viceroy Lord Curzon began a work of restoration to the
original intent. After the disastrous Partition in 1947 it was used
as a refugee camp, with considerable damage. More recently the Indian
Archaeological Survey made several unsuccessful attempts to
re-instate the original water channels. In 1993 it was listed as a
World Heritage site and restoration has been continuing since.
However
stagey the mausoleum may look - and it's presented with fine
theatrical flourish - this is no plaster-and-paint job; faced with
intricately-cut patterning of red and white stone, supporting a
perfectly formed dome surrounded by chattris, it bears
witness to the highest level of traditional craftsmanship and marks
the beginning of the great period of Mughal architecture and the
development of the Arabian Nights fantasies of the Islamic-Indian
style. The marble sarcophagus rests chastely within the resonating
hollow of the interior with lace-like carved screens and reaching
right up into the dome itself: if this be death, it seems to say,
it's something detached, infinitely peaceful, reaching a perfect
harmony and balance that life can never provide. A popular
destination for fleets of tour buses, the walled enclosure with pools
and trees and flowering white shrubs nonetheless is large enough
peacefully to accommodate more contemplative visitors. The site was
not chosen randomly, apparently: some mysterious ruins within the
compound suggest it had been used before. The minor tomb facing the
main one is conjectured to be that of Barbur, the first Mughal
Emperor. Just beyond is that of Isa Khan, a nobleman of Sher Shah and
strikingly alike in its octagonal form to that of Mohammad Shah in
the Lodi Garden. All around plainer but distinctively Persian tombs,
mostly anonymous, crop up like mushrooms as Dalrymple says in the
middle of freeways and golf courses, a veritable necropolis indeed
(1).
Under
Akbar and Jahangir Delhi went mostly unregarded in favour of Agra.
But with the accession in 1627 of Jahan – Humayun's great-grandson
– Delhi was re-instated as the capital of the Mughal Empire and
transformed into the wonder of Asia and the object to all the known
world of distant but eager curiosity and envy.
The
Seventh City: Shahjahanabad
Work commenced in 1639 on a grandiose scheme, an entirely new city just above ruined Firozabad (at the base of an existing fort already there since Sher Shah's brief reign) to excite the awe and admiration of all who saw it: “Its towers are the resting place of the sun”; “Its avenues are so full of pleasure that its lanes are like the roads of paradise”; “It is like a Garden of Eden that is populated”; and so on and so forth, according to the fulsome but uninformative Arabic descriptions of the time. Dominated by the massive Lal Qila and around the great ceremonial avenue Chandni Chowk with a central water channel lined with flowering trees were palaces, havelis, pleasure gardens, bazaars and all the imagined paraphernalia of the Mystic East – all conceived, laid out and arranged according to the specifications of the most accomplished architects, craftsmen and builders (5). Barely known to Europeans except by repute, at least one account is available from a source of somewhat dubious personal character who makes it out – perhaps not unexpectedly - to be also a nest of exaggerated court ceremonial, oriental intrigue and licentiousness (6). Like his grandfather, Shah Jehan was an intelligent, shrewed and liberal ruler; equally he was a sensualist with unlimited power, a dangerous combination. Preoccupied with ceremonial, gorgeous clothes, banquets and pleasure, the Moghul court resembled in an exotic way that of Versailles a little later; like Louis XIV, Shah Jahan could be ruthless when necessary. His elder daughter at the orders of her father was obliged to take a bath heated by the furnace in which an illicit paramour had taken refuge. On the death of his beloved wife, he undertook the ultimate Indian icon, “the tear on the face of eternity” in Agra. Infuriated by these excesses and extravagances – because the cost of all this is unimaginable - an unfavoured younger son defeated his favoured elder brother in a great battle, had him murdered and at the suggestion of an unfavoured and embittered sister had the severed head delivered to their father already imprisoned in the Agra fort to end his days gazing at his own exquisite memorial. Aurangzeb, reactionary and a puritanical Muslim, made himself Emperor in 1658 for the next forty-nine years; he extended the empire over India but Shahjahanabad's great days started a slow decline. Under the later Mughals it became a city of hollow ritual and moral and physical decay. In 1739 it was invaded and plundered by a victorious Persian army, 150,000 of the inhabitants slaughtered and some of its greatest treasures – like the famous Peacock Thone and the precious stones adorning the palace inside the Red Fort – looted. More complicated political battles were fought until 1803, when the army of the British East India company overthrew Muslims and Hindus alike. A shadow of its former glory, Shahjanabad nonetheless retained a poignantly nostalgic romance for the next century, partly due to the literary skills and bitter-sweet reminiscences of some of its remaining inhabitants still residing in the ghosts of their mansions (7, 8). In 1947 the catastrophic repercussions of the birth pangs of the new Republic of India made it into a labyrinthine closed sanctuary, as it remains. Old Delhi, as it is now called, is still invisibly enclosed within its former walls, a separate world, desperately packed with the humanity mostly descended from its former inhabitants and whose skills are no longer needed, frantic with activity, the relics of its former palaces only occasionally visible above the ugly warehouses and trappings of commerce themselves apparently on the verge of collapse, fascinating only in fairly short doses for those who are still be able to sense a shadow of the magic behind the squalor.
The
Lal Qila, or Red Fort, might rate as the second great Indian
icon, a breathtaking vista of kilometres of glowing terra-cotta walls
in the middle of the chaos of the old city. It can be peaceably
walked around so far as the former river side, where the water has
changed course so that unprotected projecting white marble opera
boxes are only visible from a highway cutting brutally through the
former idyllic view. Still entered through the tunnel-like bazaar in
which merchants used to supply the royal household with valuable
commodities, the interior is beautiful but surprisingly sparse in
view of the contemporary descriptions; the few pavilions in acres of
gardens interspersed with complicated decorative irrigation channels
could hardly have accommodated the hundreds, or possibly thousands,
who inhabited them so lavishly. But the once-centre of Mughal power
and splendour has, alas, like the city itself suffered badly from
subsequent depredations, starting with Jahan's successors who left it
uninhabited and already prey to plunderers. Looted in the 1737
onslaught and then repeatedly again and again, finally after 1857 the
British gave official sanction to strip and sell the remaining
valuables, destroyed altogether many of the buildings, filled in the
gardens and erected a hideous military barracks – about the only
building intact (9). The wonder is that anything else remains at all, yet
even in a sadly reduced condition the few gorgeous Mughal pavilions –
a Drum House for concerts, public and private audience halls, some of
the private apartments, the Pearl Mosque, the Hammam or bath house –
convey an impression of what this unsurpassed and hidden palace once
was, or according to an inscription of the time:
If
there be Paradise on the face of this earth
It
is this, Oh it is this, Oh it is this
No-one, though, dared to
touch Shahjahanabad's other famous sight, the Jami Masjid, the
mosque said to have been designed by the emperor himself: “huge
from a distance, (it) feels nothing short of immense once you've
climbed the wide staircase to the arched gateways and entered the
open courtyard, large enough to accommodate the bending bodies of
25,000 worshippers” (10). The largest in all India and perhaps the
ultimate Islamic religious structure, the mosque, started in 1650,
bears three marble domes and four slender minarets striped in red and
white, representing Mughal architecture and sensibility at its
grandest and finest. In contrast, the aesthetic decadence and moral
decline of the Empire is summed up by the tomb of Safdarjung, an
upstart Persian who managed in all but name to seize the position of
Emperor after the destruction of 1739 and when Delhi had already
entered into its long Twilight. Driven out in the ensuing power
struggles, only his body returned at the request of his son, to be
interred in 1754 in what was then outlying wasteland. Its critics are
perhaps a little severe: “its lines look somehow faulty, naggingly
incorrect”; “blowzy Mughal rococco”; “Like some elderly
courtesan, the tomb tries to mask its imperfections beneath thick
layers of make-up”; and so on (1). All the same, Dalrymple might
be excused a certain amount of poetic licence when he says: “The
building tells a story of drunken laughter as the pillars of empire
collapsed in a cloud of dust and masonry; and afterwards, of dancing
in the ruins”.
For the dedicated
explorer, a minor relic lies five or so kilometres away to the east,
Roshnara's 'paradise garden'. Roshanara was a younger daughter of
Shah Jahan and her reputation is not a commendable one: she plotted
with her brother Aurangzeb to overthrow their father and take a nasty
revenge; she was also spitefully jealous of her older sister
Jahanara, who'd been responsible for Chandri Chwok itself.
Roshanara determined to have her own retreat, described by
contemporaries in rather over-ecstatic terms, and here it remains
untouched except by time. There's only a rather squat, once
gorgeously-decorated pavilion with a wide water channel now dry and
rubbishy within a much larger municipal park. Mr Balrymple (1) again
withholds his approval: sad, tatty and approaching seediness is his
verdict. It might be more accurate to say that it was never a very
imposing structure to start with, in comparison with so many others
that were.
In
short, too close an investigation of present day Old Delhi can be a
dispiriting experience what with the physical decay and the mournful
lessons of history. Its densely crowded alleys can only be supported
for a couple of hours by any except the most resolutely determined
and fit. On the other hand, an authentic flavour persists in
at least one or two places. The oddly-named Anglo-Islamic School
(though Anglo here means not English but NRI or non-resident Indian)
stands just by the remnants of the Ajmeri Gate at a fearful
intersection of many main roads and is actually the Ghazi-ud-din
madrasa, a college for Islamic studies in a seventeenth-century
mansion. If admittance can be gained - and here a guide is
indispensable - the interior courtyard offers a toned-down
impression of what would have been a characteristic grand private
dwelling during the great days of Shahjanabad. On the fringe of the
old city, at the other end from the Red Fort of Chandri Chowk,
the maniacally-active spice market still operates, with stupendous
heaps of every conceivable variety of the flavourings so eagerly
sought by the first European discovers and merchants reclining in
semi-caves amidst the bustle; apart from the occasional motorised
vehicles and the lorries that come in the night to carry this stuff
all over India and the rest of the gourmet-conscious world, nothing
much has changed since the days of Vasco da Gama. The college and the
market are connected by the notorious G B - or as is more
respectably known Naya Bazar – Road, Delhi's 'red-light' district,
the subject of many righteous diatribes and not for the faint-hearted
though also not ostensibly dangerous or threatening, just depressingly
ugly. Finally, on a lighter note, the original Karim's restaurant,
Delhi's favourite eating-place since 1913 and close by the Jami
Masjid, provides searingly-hot and mouth-wateringly delicious
dishes in an atmosphere reminiscent of pre-War European cafés
before everything was covered with plastic.
The
Eighth City: New Delhi
Though
the ambassadors of Louis XIV and even Elizabeth I had been
condescendingly received by the Mughal Emperors, and for hundred or
even thousands of years a truly multi-cultural city, Delhi was
largely unknown to Europeans until the very end of the eighteenth
century. Too far away from the coast for the Portuguese and too
unproductive, aristocratic and tumultuous for the East India Company,
it maintained a haughty Asiatic aloofness. The first couple of
surveyors and emissaries for the latter, arriving after a long and
difficult journey up almost the full length of the Ganges, were
astonished at the magnificence and grandeur even in decay, took to
its oriental exoticism like ducks to water and managed – not to the
approval of their former colleagues and brother officers - to install
themselves pasha-style in a couple of the palaces left over from the
last terrible sacking in 1739 (11). After the Anglo-Maratha war in
1803 – which took place in or near Delhi though was actually
another effort on the part of the army of the East India Company to
stem the resistance of the Hindu rulers and sow the seeds of discord
between the princely states - British forces were installed in the
city. But apart from the arrival of a military contingent, the
initially cautious establishment of a 'residency' and a few
fascinating rumours, nothing much more was heard of Delhi before the
so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857 when it proved to be a focus for
ever-increasing insurrection and so a serious threat to the
encroaching British Raj. With Queen Victoria taking the liberty of
proclaiming herself Empress of all India, the private armies of the
East India company passed to the Crown and Delhi became a sort of
Northern Indian military headquarters, facing the forbidding and
perilous approaches from Central Asia and from where more opposition
was likely to come. Thereafter the British as rulers took full
possession, impervious to the former glories, scandalised by the
habits of the population and disgusted at the by-then squalid ruins.
In 1911 it was decided for strategic reasons to move the Indian
capital to Delhi from Calcutta.
A
highly ambitious, and in a way mad or anyway over-reaching, scheme to
build a completely new city was envisaged on more or less vacant and
scrubby land a few kilometres south of the former one. What
population existed was shunted off to nearby Paharganj, alongside the
proposed New Delhi Railway Station, a market over-spill of
Shajahanabad and today a mecca for 'economical' tourists though not
without traces of a picturesque past; in fact more interesting
domestic architecture survives there than in Old Delhi. The terrain
is drab and flat, but a single slight elevation, Raisina Hill, was
chosen for a monumental construction intended symbolically but
deliberately to impress and subdue. Edward Lutyens, previously a
highly original but somewhat eccentric architect who hadn't quite
found his niche in his native surroundings, was initially given the
job, to which he rose with remarkable imagination until his grandiose
plans were hindered by his colleague and rival, Herbert Baker.
Lutyens wanted a great ceremonial avenue – at least twice as long
and wide as the Champs
Elysées
- leading from India Gate to a Vice-regal palace approached by a
'ramp' to crown Raisina Hill, but he was persuaded, or obliged, to
re-design it simply to lead over the horizon so that the enormous
palace, one of the great achievements of modern architecture and
re-named after 1947 as the Rashtrapati
Bhavan, remains
invisible until a much closer approach. Its final British resident,
Lady Edwina Mountbatten, is said to have complained that it wasn't
big enough; the first President
of India was so embarrassed at the ostentation that he used only one
wing, as his successors have done. Behind, the Mughal Garden, the
creation of Gertrude Jekyll, combines an English profusion of
manicured flowers with a formal symmetrical lay-out, to be seen only
from the air except during February when opened in perfection to the
public What is visible, all the way along the magnificent Rajpath,
are the also enormous so-called Secretariat Buildings according to
the designs of Baker and symmetrically lining the final stages of the
avenue, less original and less successfully mixing Classical
columning, Baroque domes, municipal clock towers, Napoleonic
fountains and so on, all transported willy-nilly to an incongruous
setting, but still very imposing and impressive and on a Pharaonic
scale although their function was always, as now, entirely
administrative. The echoing marbled interiors emulate cathedrals,
rather like St Paul's in London stripped of the trappings of Anglican
Christianity. The colossal labour required utilised only the most
traditional methods, flimsy scaffolding of little more than sticks
and string, thousands of blocks of stone cut, chiselled and fitted by
hand and all the material carried on human backs, as it always had
been, except that perhaps the most amazing thing is that all this was
going on less than a hundred years ago. The buildings remain as great
monuments regardless of their intentions, ingenious and beautiful in
design and just about as solid as the pyramids. Should anything at
all last for a few more centuries, this aspect of New Delhi will be
revered as an historical and architectural show-piece amongst
whatever takes its place.
At
the same time, the equally prodigious labour of constructing the
double circus of Connaught Place – the commercial and public domain
of New Delhi - was in progress, a continuous circular sequence of
identical white colonnaded terraces with broad radiating avenues of
many miles of gleaming white 'bungalows' evoking the elegancies of
Nash's proposed Regency London and similarly doomed to run out of
money. During the First War the subjects of George V were not happy
at forking out for the extravagances of a distant city few of them
would ever see while their own were being reduced by the terrible
cost of a conflict they hadn't asked for. By the time New Delhi was
more or less completed in 1931 the British were running out of steam
as well as cash and their end in India was already foretold. They
occupied their city for hardly longer, and at no less cost, than the
medieval Tughluqs, and for nothing so long as the Mughals. If the
truth be told, Connaught Place, which fell half into ruin and is now
being intermittently restored, is somewhat jerry-built, the hundreds
of columns just made of cement and plaster, but it represents an
unparalleled example of systematic and highly successful urban
planning of a conception and design that was never accomplished in
the island of its originators. While it lasted it would have been a
beautiful, spacious and supremely comfortable city and those of the
'bungalows' that remain are amongst the most desirable and costly of
urban premises anywhere.
What
can hardly escape the observant visitor are the striking similarities
in conception between Old and New Delhi, separated by several
centuries and ostensibly expressing completely different 'cultural
values' and religious and philosophical viewpoints The common
ingredient is sheer overwhelming force disguised behind a very fine
aesthetic eye, the urge for empire building concealed as benevolence.
Perhaps it would be exaggerated to call the red stone, common to
both, somewhat bloodthirsty, but nor would anyone describe it as
gentle, and the effect is certainly to imply the hint of a threat as
well as to give elemental substance to the more fastidious white
detailing it supports or encloses, rather in the manner of the great
fortresses of Rajasthan concealing exquisite pleasure palaces atop
impregnable bastions . But whatever the concessions to decorative
details, neither city is 'Indian'. It's a difference not just of bulk
but grace; rigid symmetrical order in place of the meandering
impulsive line enhanced by rich and exuberant ornamentation, and a
refusal to budge for momentary diversion.
The
Ninth City: Delhi since Independence
The
departure of the British in 1947 was followed immediately by a
catastrophic civil war between Muslims and Hindus forcibly evacuated
and displaced from their ancestral homes and lands on either side of
the Partition; it might not be too cynical to say an event stirred up
as a partly-deliberate revenge for losing their Jewel in the Crown,
the source of untold riches for generations. Delhi changed its
character almost overnight as many of the predominantly Muslim
inhabitants were killed or ejected and their place taken by
increasing numbers of fleeing Punjabis and Sikhs from the new
Pakistan. From being only a fairly small placid city spaciously laid
out between its picturesque ruins, its turbulent history forgotten, a
tolerant and harmonious blend of religions and traditions, it started
on its progress of development as one of the world's greatest
metropolises, with all the attendant ills that implies. That
progress, or decline according to taste, goes on with such vigour and
force that anyone who saw Delhi twenty, or perhaps even ten, years
ago would now scarcely recognize it. Towering new edifices rise
inappropriately and with little glory over the low-level white
structures of Connaught Place; the avenues are choked with traffic
and reaching out through miles of bland urban monotony to the
once-outlying villages of Rohini and Noida, already immense satellite
cities in their own right. As in the United States and Europe, the
emergent middle classes forsake the centre for commuter belts, even
as far as Gurgaon on the way to Jaipur or Meerut on the way to the
north, where multi-storied apartment blocks with swimming pools and
gymnasia blot the landscape like excrescences from the underworld;
the most affluent, of whom there are many, retire to the South
Colonies, protecting their splendid houses with armed security guards
on the street and making use of malls with boutiques, beauty parlours
and pet shops. The remaining teeming millions – the majority, the
un-affuent, India's great unwashed, the old and just those who resist
innovation - fill in the greater space, anonymous, desperately
overcrowded but vibrant, highly-coloured and still in a way timeless,
so that to walk about in Delhi – not always a relaxing exercise –
is to cross frequent and sometimes bewildering zones of wildly
varying character. The much publicised new metro soars above it all
on concrete pylons, a life saver to some, another ugly blight to
others. As its capital, Delhi epitomizes the dilemmas of modern
India, torn between a desire to emulate the mistakes of the West with
the aid of technological innovation (12) and a reliance for its real
life-blood on the ancient customs and innate wisdom of its people;
the future is exciting or fearful as one wishes to see it ....
With grateful thanks to
Dheeraj Lal at Delhi Tours and Transport Dot Com and Indulge Tours, whose invaluable
knowledge and help made many hours of exploring Delhi so easy,
interesting and enjoyable .
1.
William Dalrymple, City
of Djinns
2.
Ibn Battuta, Travels
in Asia and Africa 1325-1354
3.
Tim Macintosh-Smith, The
Hall of a Thousand Columns
4.
Though Mr Macintosh-Smith, in a private communication,
now describes it as a pavilion that “overlooked the site of the hall”.
5.
Stephen Blake, Shahjanahabad:The
Sovereign City
in Mughal India
6.
François Bernier, Travels
in the Mogul Empire 1656-68
7.
Pavan Varma, Mansions
at Dusk
8.
Ahmed Ali, Twilight
in Delhi
9. George Michell, The Royal Palaces
of India
10
The Rough Guide to India
11 William Dalrymple,
White Mughals
12 Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India
