Category Archives: Britain

by Joel | 8 February 2024 · 3:04 pm

New Wealth in Britain, 1700s

From In For The Long Haul: First Fleet Voyage & Colonial Australia: The Convicts’ Perspective, by Annegret Hall (ESH Publication, 2018), Kindle pp. 13-15:

The 18th century in England was a time of enormous social, economic and political change. There were a multitude of reasons for these upheavals, but the principal ones were the all-embracing industrial and agrarian revolutions. These dramatically altered the lives of both urban and rural working classes by eroding traditional employment opportunities, and, ultimately, decimating the cottage-based industries. These changes took place when Britain’s colonial empire, along with its African slave trade, was burgeoning, but they also occurred in a period of major military conflicts with France, Spain and the American colonies. The burgeoning growth in international trade and commodity markets at the time contributed significantly to the overall wealth of the mercantile classes but, in most respects, it reduced the opportunities and living standards of unskilled and illiterate workers.

The advent of new industrial and transportation technologies proved a major factor in Britain’s increasing mercantile success. John Kay’s invention of the flying shuttle in 1733 and the carding machine in 1754 accelerated cloth weaving and were the forerunners of innovations that ultimately led to the complete automation of textile manufacturing. James Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny in 1765; Matthew Boulton and James Watt began producing steam engines for factories in 1774. By 1780, the combination of Hargreaves’ inventions, Richard Arkwright’s water frame, and the increased access to canals linking major population centres, made Britain a world leader in the manufacture of high quality textiles.

These industrial advances increased the prosperity, sophistication and leisure pursuits of the British upper and middle classes of society and provided the intellectual environment for the appreciation of progressive social concepts, including the abolition of slavery. The mid 18th century in Britain was a time of far-reaching intellectual advances in scientific knowledge, politics and philosophy and is commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment and Science. The outspoken views of William Wilberforce, Thomas Paine, Voltaire, Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo, Benjamin Franklin and many others, were discussed within literate and political circles and became catalysts for significant shifts in the social attitudes of the educated. The tolerant views of King George III cultivated a relatively liberal approach to social mobility and political change. George III suffered from bouts of porphyria during his 50-year reign but for most of this time he remained politically astute and active.

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by Joel | 6 February 2024 · 7:02 am

Rooting Out Nazis in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 236-238:

The Spruchkammer tribunals were mocked for a good reason. They served mainly to whitewash suspect characters who needed certificates of good character, notoriously labelled Persilschein – after the washing powder Persil – to show they were ‘whiter than white, with all brown [Nazi] stains removed.’ The initial problem was to find anyone in the legal profession who was not themselves compromised – 90 per cent of German lawyers had been Nazi Party members. In Hamburg at the end of the war, every judge was a member of either the Party or an affiliated organisation. It was a dilemma that would never be resolved. So Nazi judges tried cases of Nazi crimes – including those jurists who had sent people to the gallows for ‘crimes’ that, until Hitler came to power, had not been offences, such as sexual relations between Jews and Christians. In the American zone not a single judge was removed from the bench after the war.

The majority of the police were Nazis, too, which ought to have prevented their involvement in such cases, but did not. Kurt Schumacher, the leader of the SDP, had been assigned a five-man police guard by the British Occupation forces, who had assured him that the police force had been ‘cleared of Nazis’. But on 15 May 1946 he angrily wrote to British officials to say that, after overhearing his bodyguards chatting, he found that four out of the five had been in the SS. He was also profoundly shocked to learn that the British had just appointed a notorious SS man, Lieutenant-Colonel Adolf Shult, as head of the police in the British zone. An Allied Control Commission report to the British Foreign Office explained: ‘It is fairly clear that if the denazification of the police is carried to extremes there would be no police force left. With conditions…[in Germany] as they are it would perhaps seem that the essential thing is to have a reliable police force and this cannot be achieved without some sense of security…The need is…[to] terminate the process of denazification at some stage for these reasons…We will surely still need the police as an instrument of military government.’ In an apparently seamless transition, many senior officers kept their jobs, among them Wilhelm Hauser, Chief of Police in the Rhineland-Palatinate, who, when he was an SS officer in Byelorussia, had been responsible for countless wartime atrocities.

No German institution was entirely ‘cleansed’. Brown stains remained everywhere. More than three-quarters of university professors had been Party members, and even those who briefly lost their jobs were reinstated. Dr Hans Preuss, Dean of the Theology Department at one of Germany’s foremost universities, Erlangen, in Nuremberg, was a fervent Nazi who, in the 1930s had organised the burning of books in the university’s library written by Jews or Marxists. Preuss was sacked in the summer of 1945 but got his job back the following year. Around two-thirds of Germany’s teachers had been Nazis, and at the gymnasia, the best secondary schools, the figure was higher. Thousands had been fired in the three or four months after the end of the war. In 1946, 90 per cent of them were reinstated. The British poet Stephen Spender, then a civil servant, who had been despatched early in the year to report on education in the British Occupation zone, could see why. Visiting a school in Hamburg, he asked the children what they were studying. ‘Latin and biology,’ they said. ‘Nothing else?’ I asked. ‘No, sir. You see the history, geography, English and mathematics teachers have all been fired.’

Many of the clergy, regardless of denomination, had also been Party members. After the sacking of numerous German civil servants, the Lutheran Bishop of Württemberg, Theophil Wurm, preached that they had suffered too much and were the victims ‘of extremely skilful propaganda…[most] had joined the Party thinking of the public welfare. They did not identify themselves with the regime.’ He was perhaps also thinking of himself. He had joined the Nazi Party in 1933, arguing that he had done so ‘in good faith…believing it could produce a religious revival,’ though he later began to oppose the regime and was removed from his bishopric. The American Religious Affairs Division of the Occupation reported to Clay that it knew of 351 active clergy in the American sector. Of these, only three were defrocked. In the summer of 1946 the Catholic Archbishop of Freiburg, Conrad Gröber, nicknamed ‘Brown Conrad’ because of his fervent support for the Nazis, issued a pastoral letter to his flock in which he blamed the rise of Hitler on ‘secularism’, neatly absolving the Church and the people from responsibility for what had happened over the last dozen years.

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by Joel | 5 February 2024 · 6:13 am

Dilemma of Imperial India in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 212-214:

For [Viceroy] Wavell, a respected general with a reflective mind – his collection Other Men’s Flowers is one of the most entertaining of all English verse anthologies – Britain ‘made an entirely wrong turn in India twenty-five years ago.’ He thought that if the Indians had been seriously offered the kind of Dominion status within the Commonwealth that ‘white’ territories such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa had obtained around the time of the First World War, there would have been a good chance of keeping India united. In the early 1930s Gandhi and other Congress leaders went to London for talks and were assured that soon India would gain a kind of self-government – but not yet. No date was given, and all goodwill with the nationalists was lost when in 1939 Wavell’s predecessor, Lord Linlithgow, declared war on Germany ‘on behalf of India’ without consulting any Indians at all. The Australian and Canadian governments, for example, were asked beforehand and made the decision for themselves. The British expected a million Indians to fight against the Germans.

Nehru, who loathed fascism and the Nazis rather more than some of Britain’s ruling elite did, said that it was hard for the people of India to fight for the freedom of Poland when they themselves were under foreign occupation. ‘If Britain fought for democracy she should…end imperialism in her own possessions and establish full democracy in India. A free and independent India would gladly co-operate…with other free nations for mutual defence against aggression.’

The British establishment tended to believe the dictum of the most magnificent of all the imperial grandees sent to oversee the smooth running of the empire: Lord Curzon. As Viceroy at the turn of the century, Curzon had declared, ‘As long as we rule in India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third rate power…The rest is redundant.’ Few believed this as instinctively as did Winston Churchill, the most romantic of imperialists, who had battled all his political life to maintain British rule in India. Yet Churchill probably did as much as anyone to hasten its end.

When he was Prime Minister he had no intention of ever giving up the Jewel in the Crown. He told the War Cabinet that even if he was forced by the Indian nationalists into making some concessions, ‘I would feel under no obligation to honour promises made at a time of difficulty.’

Churchill regarded any notion of Britain leaving India, or even India being granted Dominion status, as ‘criminally mischievous’. He retained the sentimental attachment to the idea of the Raj that he had held as a junior cavalry officer on the North-West frontier in the 1890s. Leo Amery, Secretary of State for India during the war, said, ‘Winston knew as much about India as George III did of the American colonies…He reacts instinctively and passionately against any government for India other than the one he knew forty years ago.’

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by Joel | 26 January 2024 · 6:29 am

Fraternization in 1946 Germany

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 49-52:

The Occupation armies had been promised swift demobilisation. But while they waited to go home, many were determined to make the best of their lot. At first, Allied generals issued strict edicts against fraternisation of any kind with Germans. Relations between victors and vanquished were to be strictly official and formal. The Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ordered American soldiers not to have any contact with locals. They could not visit German homes; no drinking with Germans in bars was allowed, nor shaking hands; no playing games with German children or sports with adults; no inviting them to Allied concerts, cinemas or parties. GIs faced a sixty-five-dollar fine for breaking the rules. Similar orders were issued by British commanders, mainly, as they admitted, as a sop to public opinion at home. Most crucially, there was to be no contact between soldiers and German women. It was hardly surprising that the rules proved impractical, almost impossible to enforce and so frequently disobeyed, they had to be dropped – first by Montgomery and then by the Americans.

…

For German women, friendships – or more – with Allied soldiers – were often the difference between life and death for them and their families; the GIs and Tommies gave them food, milk, medicines, and even luxuries, such as cigarettes and stockings, that they had been without for so long.

…

The conquerors had other attractions, too. There was an acute shortage of men. Two German men out of three born in 1918 did not survive World War Two, and a third of all children in Germany had lost their fathers. In the Berlin suburb of Treptow in February 1946 there were just 181 men for 1,105 women aged between eighteen and twenty-one. Major Arthur Moon, a Guards officer, was struck by what he saw: ‘In our thousands of miles that we travelled Germany, the most outstanding fact of all was the total absence of men aged between seventeen and forty. It was a land of women, children and old men.’ The Lucky Strike cigarettes, fresh coffee, nylon stockings and chocolate bars were appealing, but for the most part the relationships were not just transactional. American and even British men seemed far more attractive than the crippled veterans, returned prisoners of war, with the weariness of defeat about them, and the old men who were left in Germany. The occupiers seemed glamorous and desirable – not least since so many foreign films, books and music had been banned in the culturally oppressive Third Reich.

…

Social liberals were as shocked as moralists by illegitimacy levels. Nearly a hundred thousand babies were born to unmarried women in Germany in 1946, around a third of all births and three times the 1945 rate. Officially recorded abortions were more than twice that number, but the real, hidden, figure was assumed to be many times higher, though nobody knows for certain the exact figure. The cost of an abortion in 1946, illegally and dangerously obtained in back streets, was high, around a thousand marks – or, in the currency used far more widely, two cartons of Lucky Strikes and a half pound of coffee. A perhaps happier outcome was the number of GI brides: around twenty-five thousand in 1946/1947.

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by Joel | 25 January 2024 · 7:38 am

Perils of De-Nazification in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 36-37:

Early in the afternoon of 20 February a massive gas and coal dust explosion ripped through the Monopol-Grimberg mine at Unna, around twenty kilometres east of Dortmund. Nearly five hundred men were trapped underground. Just weeks earlier most of the mine’s inspectors and managers had been fired because of their Nazi affiliations. They had been replaced, as a temporary measure, by long-retired inspectors who were no longer up to the job, or young men who had been press-ganged to work in the mines but had very little experience. The rescue crew sent to free the trapped miners had no training and was totally incompetent to handle a disaster of this scale. There was only one manager left at the Unna colliery with any expertise or knowledge of the mine. But as Street told Montgomery in his second report on a Ruhr mining disaster in weeks, this man, a chief inspector, was unfit for work.

‘Towards midnight on the day of the explosion it became clear that operations were not proceeding to any set plan, although ample material and sufficient appliances had been provided,’ said Street, and the inspector in charge was suffering from a serious breakdown. ‘He was unable to concentrate on his work and…[was] extremely nervous.’ A week earlier he had been denounced by workers at the mine as an enthusiastic National Socialist and arrested by occupation investigators, whose job was to cleanse Germany of fascism. He was released pending further enquiries and was, for the time being, allowed to return to work. But he was a broken and terrified man – ‘not suitable to be in charge of rescue work,’ Street stated. In the early hours of the morning the former director of the mine – a well-known Nazi Party member from the early 1930s, much loathed in the neighbourhood – was released from jail to manage the crisis. With some quick and effective action he was able to save 57 of the trapped miners, but 417 men died. It was the worst coal-mining disaster in German history.

The two accidents might well have happened anyway. It is unlikely that the absence of senior mining officials in Germany at the time was the only, or perhaps the principal, cause of the disasters. But many Germans believed that it was and saw their occupiers’ efforts to seek out and condemn ‘ordinary’ Nazis as unjust, futile and counterproductive. More to the point, the Allies, at least the British, Americans and French in the Western zones, soon came to see things the same way. The accidents at Unna and Peine starkly highlighted the dilemma the Allies faced – and marked the turning point of the Occupation, transforming it from an act of retribution into an experiment in paternalism; from reforming zeal into crowd control. The Germans were starving, and millions of desperate refugees were streaming into the occupied zones. The most pressing need was to revive the country’s failing economy and rebuild its ruined social structure. Without the mines to fuel the engine of German industry, it couldn’t be done.

And it couldn’t be done without the Nazis. A month after the explosion at the Monopol-Grimberg mine, Arthur Street wrote to his superiors in London. ‘We are very much alive to the dangers inherent in too drastic a policy of de-Nazification in industry. These…[mining] disasters may well be an indication that we have already gone dangerously fast in pressing our present policy.’ In the first six months after the war 333 mining officials in the British zone had been fired, jailed, or suspended while they were investigated for Nazi Party affiliations. Within weeks of the Unna disaster 313 of them had got their jobs back.

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by Joel | 23 January 2024 · 5:47 am

U.S. Status in 1946

From 1946: The Making of the Modern World, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2015), Kindle pp. 12-14:

The US experience of World War Two was entirely different from that of every other combatant nation. There was much hardship, to be sure, and loss of lives. But America was the only country to emerge from the conflict better off than when it entered it in 1941. No attempt had been made to invade and occupy the country; no cities were destroyed by bombs. There were no refugees roaming the American countryside, desperately searching for food and shelter as in much of Europe and Asia. There were no direct war casualties from military action in mainland America. Around 420,000 Americans from the services died in combat or went missing in action, which, given the scale of the fighting on three continents, is a modest number. British losses, at around 330,000 service personnel, were lower, but from a population about a quarter of America’s size. And combined American and British losses were fewer than Russian deaths in the Siege of Leningrad alone.

America’s economy boomed as never before. Its annual GNP doubled between 1940 and 1945 from $102 billion to $214 billion. Unemployment fell from 14.6 per cent to a historic low of 1.2 per cent. The war dragged the US out of the Depression. There had been rationing on a range of products such as milk, sugar, gasoline, rubber for tyres, some meats and vegetable oils, and even typewriter ribbon. But for most people, living standards improved dramatically as incomes rose by more than 50 per cent. The war was a leveller economically, unusually so in American history. The share of income of the top 5 per cent of the population fell by almost a fifth and remained that way until the gap began widening again in the 1970s.

America was the granary of the world, and its industrial workshop. At the beginning of 1946 more goods were manufactured in the US than in the rest of the world put together. During the war, America had created a new financial system that ensured the US dollar would become the world’s chief trading currency, which it continued to be well into the twenty-first century. Most Americans believed not only that US soldiers had done most of the fighting to win the war but, justifiably, that American money had bankrolled the Allies to help with the rest.

Immediately post-war, Americans wanted a brief period to celebrate victory. After that, the demands were equally uncomplicated. Dean Acheson, an advisor to the President who would become US Secretary of State three years later, put it in straightforward fashion. ‘I can state in three sentences what the popular foreign policies are among the people of the United States. 1. Bring the boys home. 2. No playing Santa Claus. 3. Don’t be pushed around.’ They also wanted the security that wealth could provide.

Before the war the only substantial US military base outside homeland America was in the Philippines. But Pearl Harbor marked the beginning of America’s development as a military superpower. In 1946/47 the defence budget was $13 billion, 36 per cent of national spending and thirteen times more than it had been for each of the nine pre-war years. It was to remain at similar levels for the next three decades. By the end of the war, new naval and air bases had been leased in the Americas, in Iceland, Greece and Turkey, in Korea and the Middle East. More than half a million US troops were stationed in Europe. As it turned out, many thousands would remain for the next forty years – and America would be the strongest military power in Europe. But however counter-intuitive it might seem in retrospect, at the time it was assumed on both sides of the Atlantic that the GIs would soon return home. When the final details of D-Day were being planned in spring 1944, the US military’s top brass asked President Roosevelt how long he expected occupation troops to stay in Germany and elsewhere after the war was won. The Commander-in-Chief was explicit: ‘At least a year, maybe two,’ he replied. But not more. That was still America’s clear intention throughout 1946. It changed only when the Big Three alliance began falling apart and perceptions in Washington hardened about the USSR’s objectives in Europe. Meanwhile, America’s allies – including the Soviets – believed the same. Winston Churchill wrote a note to the British cabinet before VE Day emphasising the point: ‘We must not expect that the United States will keep large armies in Europe for long after the war,’ he said. ‘I doubt there will be any American troops in Europe four years after the cease-firing.’

There was to be no return to isolationism. US soldiers, engineers and an army of idealistic bureaucrats would remake Japan as a modern democracy in the American image, but disarmed so it could never again pose a threat to its neighbours or to the United States. And though the plan was to bring the troops home, it was never the intention to withdraw from European peace-making and diplomacy.

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by Joel | 13 January 2024 · 7:22 am

Mughal India’s Half-Caste War Hero

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 126-129:

Facing the entrance gates of William Fraser’s bungalow, directly across what was then an open park, stood the haveli of Colonel James Skinner, the legendary founder of Skinner’s Horse. Like Ochterlony, Skinner had received a title from the Mogul Emperor: Nasir-ud-Dowlah Colonel James Skinner Bahadur Ghalib Jang. Nevertheless, Skinner was always known to Delhi-wallahs simply as Sikander Sahib: to the people of the capital he was a reincarnation of Alexander the Great.

Skinner’s irregular cavalry – into which William’s personal army was eventually absorbed – enabled the East India Company to secure great chunks of North India for the Union Jack. With their scarlet turbans, silver-edged girdles, black shields and bright yellow tunics, Skinner’s cavalrymen were, according to Bishop Heber, ‘the most showy and picturesque cavaliers I have seen’. Moreover, another contemporary wrote that they were ‘reckoned, by all the English in this part of the country, [to be] the most useful and trusty, as well as the boldest body of men in India.’

But Skinner was more than some starchy military caricature: he was also an engaging companion, an entertaining conversationalist, a builder of churches, temples and mosques, and the host of some of the most magnificent nautches ever held in the Indian capital. ‘I have seldom met a man who on so short an acquaintance gained so much on the heart and goodwill as this man,’ wrote James Fraser soon after their first meeting in 1815. ‘He has seen a great deal and run many risks and consequently has much anecdote and many adventures to relate … yet there is the most total absence of all affectation, pretention, pride or vanity.’

Skinner and William Fraser were best friends, business partners and brothers-in-arms. Fraser became the second-in-command of Skinner’s Horse while Skinner joined Fraser and another Mughal nobleman, Ahmed Baksh Khan, in a partnership which imported stallions from Afghanistan and TransOxiana for sale in the Delhi bazaars.

…

Skinner’s father, the Scottish mercenary Hercules Skinner, was the son of a former Provost of Montrose. When James Skinner raised his cavalry regiment he had the Skinner clan emblem – the bloody hand – tattooed on the bellies of his Hindu recruits. But Skinner had Indian as well as Scottish blood in his veins; his mother was a Rajput princess (known to her Scottish in-laws as Jeannie), and according to Fraser, in his looks Skinner was ‘quite a Moor, not a negro, but a Desdemona Moor, a Moor of Venice’. It was this mixed racial inheritance that determined Skinner’s career.

By 1792 it had already become impossible for anyone with even one Indian parent to receive a commission in the East India Company army. So, although he had been brought up in an English school in British Calcutta, the eighteen-year-old James Skinner was forced to leave westernized Bengal and accept service in the army of the Company’s principal rivals in India.

During the course of the eighteenth century, the Hindu Mahratta confederacy had extended its power over much of the subcontinent, from the fastness of the Deccan to the borders of the fertile Punjab. One reason for the Mahrattas’ success had been their skilful use of European and Eurasian mercenaries. Skinner was quickly welcomed into their ranks and before long was even permitted to raise his own irregular cavalry force.

…

Skinner’s spectacular career in the ranks of the Mahrattas was, however, brought to an abrupt close. In 1803 the great Confederacy prepared to take on the British. Despite their proven loyalty, Skinner and the other Anglo-Indians in the Mahrattas’ service were summarily dismissed and given only twenty-four hours to quit Mahratta territory. Just as Skinner’s mixed blood had barred him from the Company army, so the same disability came to block his career in the ranks of their rivals; his birth acted, as James Fraser put it, ‘like a two-edged blade, made to cut both ways against him’. Although Skinner’s Horse was still ineligible to join the British army, Lord Lake, the British Commander in North India, eventually permitted the troop to fight as an irregular unit under the Company flag. Their job was to act as mounted guerrillas: to scout ahead of the main force; to harass a retreating enemy; to cut supply lines and to perform covert operations behind Mahratta lines.

In the years that followed there were several humiliating rebuffs by the British establishment: Skinner’s estates, given to him by the Mahrattas, were revoked; his pay and rank were limited; the size of his regiment cut by a third. It was only much later, after a series of astonishing victories over the Sikhs and the Gurkhas, that Skinner’s Horse was officially absorbed into the Company army and Skinner made a Lieutenant Colonel and a Companion of the Bath.

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by Joel | 12 January 2024 · 5:31 am

Twilight of Delhi, 1739-1857

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 95-96:

The Twilight is bounded by two of the greatest disasters in Delhi’s history: the Persian massacres of 1739 and the equally vicious hangings and killings which followed the British recapture of Delhi after the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

The first massacre took place in the wake of an unexpected invasion of India by the Persian ruler, Nadir Shah. At Karnal in the Punjab the newly-crowned Shah defeated the Mughal army and advanced rapidly on Delhi. He encamped at the Shalimar Gardens, five miles north of the city. Having been invited into Delhi by the nervous populace, Nadir Shah ordered the massacre after a group of Delhi-wallahs attacked and killed 900 of his soldiers in a bazaar brawl. At the end of a single day’s slaughter 150,000 of the city’s citizens lay dead.

Nadir Shah’s massacre exacerbated the decline of the Mughal Empire which had been steadily contracting since the death of Aurangzeb, the last Great Mogul, in 1707. By the end of the eighteenth century Delhi, shorn of the empire which gave it life, had sunk into a state of impotent dotage. The aristocracy tried to maintain the life-style and civilization of the empire, but in a ruined and impoverished city raped and violated by a succession of invaders. The destruction created a mood conducive to elegy, and the great Urdu writers made the most of the opportunity. ‘There is no house from where the jackal’s cry cannot be heard,’ wrote Sauda. ‘The mosques at evening are unlit and deserted. In the once beautiful gardens, the grass grows waist-high around fallen pillars and the ruined arches. Not even a lamp of clay now burns where once the chandeliers blazed with light…’

On the throne in the Hall of Audience in the Qila-i-Mualla, the Exalted Fort, sat the Emperor Shah Alam. He was a brave, cultured and intelligent old man, still tall and commanding, his dark complexion offset by a short white beard. He spoke four languages and maintained a harem of five hundred women; but for all this, he was sightless – years before, his eyes had been gouged out by Ghulam Qadir, an Afghan marauder whom he had once kept as his catamite. Like some symbol of the city over which he presided, Shah Alam was a blind emperor ruling from a ruined palace.

At his court, the elaborate etiquette of Mughal society was scrupulously maintained; poetry, music and the arts flourished. But beneath the surface lustre, all was rotten. Servants prised precious stones from the pietra dura inlay on the walls to sell in Chandni Chowk. The old court costumes were threadbare; the plaster was peeling. Mountains of rubbish accumulated in the city streets and amid the delicate pavilions of the Exalted Palace.

Unable to see the decay around him, Shah Alam still could not escape its stench.

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by Joel | 11 January 2024 · 2:56 am

Old Delhi Exiles in Karachi

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 60-62:

In Delhi I had been given an introduction to Shanulhaq Haqqee, a pipe-smoking Urdu poet and the direct descendant of Abdul Haq, a famous literary figure at the court of Shah Jehan. Shanulhaq fled from Delhi in 1947. He left to escape the rioting and meant to return as soon as order was re-established. He was never allowed to except much later, for a week, as a tourist from a foreign country. It was almost exactly seven hundred years since the first of his line arrived in Delhi from Turkestan to fight in the Deccani wars of the thirteenth-century Sultan, Ala-ud-Din Khalji.

Shanulhaq was the only person I had been able to find who was actually a friend of Ahmed Ali. ‘Ali doesn’t mix much,’ a Pakistani friend had told me. ‘He never really fitted in in Karachi.’ ‘He’s a bit abrupt,’ said someone else. ‘You know … rather bitter.’

Shanulhaq Haqqee offered to drive me over to see Ahmed Ali the evening of my arrival. But first, he said, I should come and meet some other Delhi exiles. He would expect me at his house in time for tea.

The exiles – now elderly and respectable figures – sat sipping jasmine tea from porcelain cups while they nibbled pakoras and cucumber sandwiches. On the wall hung a faded sepia photograph of Shanulhaq’s family in their haveli near the Ajmeri Gate around 1912; beside it hung another of a very small boy dressed in late Mughal court dress: a brocaded sherwani, baggy white pyjamas, and on his head, a tiny red fez. It was Shanulhaq as an infant.

‘Of course Karachi Urdu is really pure Delhi Urdu,’ explained a judge, biting a pakora. ‘Now that they have Sanskritized all the dialects in India, this is the last place you can hear it spoken.’

Outside, you could hear the dull drone of the Karachi traffic. The city kept reminding me of the Gulf: the new motorways, the glossy high-rise buildings, the Japanese cars. But when you talked to the exiles it was the Palestinians who came to mind. Each one treasured his childhood memories like a title-deed. Each one knew by heart the stories of the catastrophe, the massacres and the exodus; the forty-year-old tales of exile flowed from everyone’s lips like new gossip. Each one talked about the old city as if it remained unchanged since the day they had departed.

‘Have you ever been to Gulli Churiwallan?’ asked the judge, referring to a dirty ghetto now full of decaying warehouses. ‘The havelis there are the most magnificent in all Delhi. The stonework, the fountains …’

…

‘Do they still teach Ghalib in the schools?’ asked the newsreader, referring to the great Urdu poet. ‘Or is it just Kalidasa and the Ramayana?’

‘I bet no one even knows who Ghalib is in Delhi these days,’ said the judge. ‘They probably think he’s a cricketer.’

Later, Shanulhaq drove me slowly through the streets of Karachi. As we went, he pointed out the shops which had once filled the streets of Delhi: the English Boot House, once of Connaught Place; Abdul Khaliq, the famous sweet-seller of Chandni Chowk; Nihari‘s, the kebab-wallah from the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid. He pointed out how such and such an area still preserved the distinctive idiom or the distinctive cut of kurta pyjamas unique to such and such an area of Delhi.

Even the streets were like a Delhi Dictionary of Biography. While the roads of modern Delhi are named after a dubious collection of twentieth-century politicians – Archbishop Makarios Marg, Tito Marg and so on – the streets of Karachi are named after the great Delhi-wallahs of history: to get to Ahmed Ali we passed through a litany of Delhi sufis and sultans, poets and philosophers, before turning left into Amir Khusroe Drive.

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by Joel | 10 January 2024 · 3:09 pm

Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 58-60:

The best impression of the Shahjehanabad of Hamida Sultan — of the city that was destroyed in 1947 – can be found not in photographs or pictures, nor even in the jaded memories of the survivors, but in a slim first novel published to some critical acclaim in 1940.

Although the brilliance of Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali was immediately recognized by both E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, most copies of the book were lost when the warehouse of the Hogarth Press was destroyed during the Blitz. There was no reprint, and the book was overlooked first during the trauma of the Second World War, then in the holocaust of Partition. Only now with the recent publication of a paperback has the book begun to receive the recognition it deserved. For although (until recently) forgotten even in the city it immortalized, Twilight in Delhi is not only a very fine novel, it is also an irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi. Written only seven years before the catastrophe of 1947, its gloomy tone and pessimistic title were more visionary than Ahmed Ali could ever have imagined.

The novel follows the fortunes of a traditional Muslim family living in a haveli very like Ali Manzil. At the opening of the book a cloud is looming over the house: the patriarch, an old Mughal named Mir Nihal, disapproves of his son courting a low-born girl named Bilqeece. As the love of Ashgar and Bilqeece first grows, blossoms, then decays, the whole dying world of Shahjehanabad is evoked: the pigeon-fliers and the poets, the alchemists and the Sufis, the beggars and the tradesmen.

Beyond Kashmiri Gate the British usurp the mantle of the Mughal emperors, enforcing their authority but rarely deigning to mix with the ordinary Delhi-wallahs. The First World War and the influenza epidemic strike down the young; vultures circle ominously overhead. Yet inside the walls of the havelis and the lattice screens of the zenana, life goes on as it always did. Births follow upon marriages, love affairs decay, middle age gives way to crumbling senility – but all the time the stories and traditions are passed on.

…

Twilight in Delhi survived Partition to represent the life of Old Delhi to a new readership today, but what, I wondered, had happened to its author? My edition of the book gave no clue; and I scanned the bookshops in vain to find other, later works by the same hand. It was a Delhi publisher friend who told me that Ali was in fact still alive, now an old man living in obscurity in Karachi. This only made it more intriguing: why would anyone who so obviously loved Delhi with a passion opt to leave it? And why had he not gone on to write other even better books? Karachi seemed to hold the key to many of the unanswered questions of 1947. Not only did the city contain some 200,000 refugees who had fled from Delhi to Pakistan in the upheavals of that year, it also contained their most distinguished chronicler. The moment had come for me to visit Karachi for myself.