Category Archives: nationalism

by | 16 January 2024 · 6:32 am

Aurangzeb’s Effect on Delhi

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 238-240:

The unnatural act of Dara’s murder and the treacherous overthrow of Shah Jehan [his father] acted like a curse upon Delhi. Never again did it match that apex of prosperity that it reached during the brief nine years that Shah Jehan ruled from the Red Fort.

Aurangzeb spent as little time as possible in the city, preferring to continue his campaigns from Aurangabad, his own foundation in the Deccan. Delhi had lived by the court and when the court disappeared, the city emptied like a basin of water whose plug had been removed. Travellers began to describe the city as being like a ghost town: ‘The city appears to be a desert when the King is absent,’ wrote the French traveller Jean de Thévenot. ‘If there have been four hundred thousand Men in it when the King was there, there hardly remains the sixth part in his absence.’

But it was not just the absence of the Emperor. Aurangzeb’s rule proved harsh and repressive. Spies were everywhere; men never knew whom they could trust. All the things that had made Delhi an amusing and lively city were one by one forbidden. Dancing women and courtesans were forced to marry. Prostitution was banned, as was wine-drinking, hashish-smoking and the playing of music.

More serious were Aurangzeb’s actions against non-Muslims. His fundamentalist outlook led him to destroy Hindu temples across the empire. He imposed a special tax on all Hindus and executed Guru Teg Bahadur, the ninth of the great teachers of the Sikhs. The religious wounds he opened up have never again entirely healed; but at the time they literally tore the country in two. From the fissures between the two religions, there emerged whispers of sorcery, of strange succubuses, of unrest among the city’s djinns. In the wilds of Rajasthan a naked army of shaven-headed Hindu sadhus was rumoured to be marching on Delhi, led by an old sorceress. Early reports had the sadhus sweeping the Mughal army in front of them — until, so it was said, Aurangzeb deployed strange magic against them.

It was the golden age of the fakirs. Their activity amazed and baffled even the sceptical Bernier: ‘They tell any person his thoughts, cause the branch of a tree to blossom and to bear fruit within an hour, hatch an egg in their bosom within fifteen minutes, producing what ever bird may be demanded, and make it fly around the room.’

Later, when Aurangzeb ordered the decapitation of the naked fakir Sarmad, an Armenian Jew who had converted to Islam, the sage allegedly picked up his head and walked up the steps of the Jama Masjid. There he said a final set of prayers before departing to the heavens.

Meanwhile in the court, the dam-burst of treachery unleashed by Aurangzeb left the principal players wading deeper and deeper into the darkness. Roshanara Begum, the Lady Macbeth of Delhi, had taken over the position vacated by Jahanara Begum: chief of the Imperial Harem. She gathered about her a vast retinue and used to enjoy making pompous processions through the streets of Delhi. But then, during the monsoon of 1661, she made her fatal mistake.

Aurangzeb had been struck down with a fever, and it was believed that he was beyond recovery. Believing this to be the case, Roshanara stole the Imperial seal and used it to forge an order that proclaimed Aurangzeb’s nine-year-old youngest son to be the next Emperor in preference to the rightful heir. This switch was intended to enable Roshanara to retain her influence by stepping in as the child’s regent. But at this awkward moment, Aurangzeb suddenly recovered. He discovered from his eunuchs what Roshanara had been up to, and, despite her support for him over many years, he disgraced her. Later, after she was caught red-handed in an orgy with nine lovers in her Red Fort harem apartments, Aurangzeb arranged for his sister to be discreetly poisoned. She died in great pain, ‘swollen out like a hogshead, leaving behind her the name of great lasciviousness’. She was buried under the pavilion she had built in the Roshanara Gardens.

With his sister poisoned, Aurangzeb was now able to trust no one. In his old age he marched to and fro, viciously putting down rebellions, trying to impose his harsh regime on his unwilling subjects. On his death in 1707 the empire fragmented. Yet the Mughal line never quite died out.

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by | 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 | 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 | 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 | 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.

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by | 9 January 2024 · 5:14 pm

Kádár’s Early Years

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 359-360:

János Czermanik was born, illegitimate, in the port of Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia), the son of a Slovak servant girl. His soldier father abandoned them both when he was born and he was brought up in abject poverty. At fourteen he was apprenticed to a toolmaker and was trained in repairing typewriters. He became a Communist at nineteen, when under the Horthy regime it was a banned organization. He was arrested in 1937 and spent three years in jail. During the war, under the codename Kádár (meaning ‘cooper’ or ‘barrel maker’), he ran the underground Communist Party and the pseudonym stuck. He narrowly avoided death when he was arrested again in 1944 and sent to Mauthausen concentration camp, but managed to escape and return to Budapest. A tall, handsome, brown-haired man, he affected a cheerful disposition and an easy manner but was famously reserved. ‘Nobody ever knew what he was thinking,’ a long-time comrade said many years later. He was formally uneducated – he admitted once that he had ‘never read Marx’s Das Kapital and not much of Lenin’. But he had a naturally intuitive intelligence, was deeply perceptive about people and an extremely fast learner. He rose through the ranks as an apparatchik under Rákosi and succeeded Rajk, his great friend, as Interior Minister. It was his behaviour after Rajk was arrested that earned him a reputation for untrustworthiness and cynicism.

Godfather to Rajk’s baby son, Kádár betrayed his friend in a chilling manner, visiting him in a police cell to extract a false confession out of him. He knew Rajk was innocent yet made many speeches accusing him of a series of crimes. He was forced to watch Rajk’s execution, which left a deep impression on him. He told people that he felt sick at the sight and had to vomit – but he also noted, impressed, that the last words Rajk spoke were in praise of Stalin. Inevitably, it was soon his turn to be a victim of the purges. Arrested on bogus charges of treason, he was tortured until he ‘confessed’ and spent three years in jail; he was released during Nagy’s premiership when thousands of prisoners were freed. Soon afterwards he met Nagy and thanked him for his help in getting him released. ‘I hope that when my turn comes you would do the same for me,’ Nagy replied.

Kádár was no Stalinist and at the start of the Revolution he appeared enthusiastic about Nagy and his reforms. He voted within the leadership to press the Russians to withdraw their troops and for Hungary to leave the Warsaw Pact. But when the time came he could withstand neither the temptations nor the threats from Moscow. When he returned at the head of the new government he was loathed as a Judas. He could not leave the Parliament building in safety, so he would not have seen the placards which immediately went up around Budapest abusing him. A famous one that the Soviets destroyed several times but was immediately replaced somewhere else in the city declared: ‘Lost: the confidence of the People. Honest finder is asked to return to János Kádár, at 10,000 tanks Street’. He was so hated that when Khrushchev visited Budapest five months after the Uprising was crushed, even the Soviet leader seemed less unpopular than ‘the collaborator in chief’, as he was called for many years in Budapest. The Soviets did not entirely trust him either. Kádár was under probation by them for some time. Two KGB officers followed him wherever he went, ostensibly for his security, but also to keep an eye on him.

During my postdoc year in Romania in 1983-84, I attended an advanced Romanian language curs de perfecționare with classmates from the U.S., China, and East Germany. My favorite professor assigned us to do oral presentations for our final exams, on topics of our own choosing. My Chinese classmates, who were Romanian language broadcasters for Radio Beijing, had taken a tour of neighboring countries during our winter break, and they were impressed by Hungary’s relative prosperity during the 1980s. One of them talked about Kádár’s personal modesty and lack of a personality cult. She had experienced Mao’s personality cult, and gave her talk under the portrait of Ceaușescu that adorned every Romanian classroom at that time. I had no idea then about Kádár’s earlier perfidious rise to power. (My own talk was on the Hawaiian Great Mahele [Rom. Marea împărțire] in that revolutionary year 1848, which didn’t turn out so well for commoners.)

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by | 4 January 2024 · 4:07 am

Fall of Budapest, 1945

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 309, 315-316:

We have had three great tragedies in our country: the Tatar invasion in the thirteenth century, the Turkish occupation lasting 150 years – and the Soviet liberation. György Faludy (1910–2006)

…

If women were scared of rape, the fear among men was to be picked up off the streets and used as slave labour by the Soviets for public works like clearing rubble, shoring up buildings and repairing the city’s bridges. General Malinovsky reported back to Moscow that 110,000 men had been taken as ‘prisoners’ in this way. According to one well-informed journalist, ‘Count Géza Teleki [who would later himself become briefly Minister for Public Works] and a former Mayor of Budapest were seized without any warning and found two days later when an officer to whom they could talk finally released them. Prince Pál Esterházy was discovered in a cemetery burying dead horses.’ Around half of these detainees were returned home within weeks of the end of the siege. But the rest, including men from all walks of life and essential workers like firefighters, ambulance drivers, train and bus drivers – people who would be needed to rebuild Hungary – were transported east to the Soviet Union for forced labour on building projects in the Urals and Siberia. Some returned to Hungary decades later, but most never did – one of the Soviet war crimes rarely mentioned amid all the other horrors of the Second World War. Forty thousand of these men – abducted from their homes and from the streets – were corralled into a concentration camp near Gödöllő, 30 kilometres north-east of Budapest, in appalling conditions before being taken to the USSR.

…

Budapest in the spring of 1945 ‘was nothing short of hell on earth’, said the high-ranking prelate Bishop József Grősz at the end of the year. ‘Thousands of women from girls of twelve to women in the ninth month of pregnancy raped; men deported for slave labour. Almost every home looted; the city and its churches in ruins; the restaurants and stores empty, dead horses in the streets along with unburied bodies; in the cellars people half-demented with hunger, cutting pieces of flesh from animals dead for days.

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by | 3 January 2024 · 7:18 am

Hungary’s First Anti-Jewish Laws

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 272-273:

Horthy introduced anti-Jewish laws in Hungary while Hitler was still speaking to tiny groups of disaffected Germans in Munich beer halls. The first legislation specifically to target Hungarian Jews for discrimination was passed on 22 September 1920, barely six months after the admiral was elected regent. It was the Numerus Clausus Act, which restricted the number of Jews admitted to universities to 7 per cent of the total population, effectively ending the legal equality for Hungarian Jews that had been established under the Ausgleich in 1867. This had a profound effect in Budapest, where more than a quarter of the inhabitants at the end of the First World War were Jews – and on the universities. Many young people who could afford to leave went to study abroad, never to return. So did some of the ablest professors – a drain of talent that was never replaced. Horthy was not interested when a few academics, even among his own supporters, objected. ‘Concerning the Jewish question, for all my life, I have been an anti-Semite,’ he wrote to a friend, the future Prime Minister Pál Teleki. ‘I have never made any contact with Jews. I have found it intolerable that here, in Hungary, every single factory, bank, asset, shop, theatre, newspaper, trade, etc., is in Jewish hands.’

The passage of the law was accompanied by a wave of pogroms throughout Hungary. In Budapest a dozen Jews were killed and more than 150 injured during a vicious riot by the far-Right Turul organization, led by the highly ambitious ultra-nationalist politician Gyula Gömbös, who a decade later would become Prime Minister.

In 1925 the League of Nations threatened to impose sanctions and other retaliatory measures against Hungary unless it removed anti-Semitic legislation. Budapest’s Jews begged them not to. The National Jewish Congress of Hungary asked the League not to interfere, for fear of a further backlash against Jews.

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by | 2 January 2024 · 3:15 am

A City of Partition Refugees

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 41-44:

I had been living in Delhi for some months before I began to realize quite how many of the people I met every day were Partition refugees. Even the most well-established Delhi figures – newspaper editors, successful businessmen, powerful politicians – had tales to tell of childhoods broken in two, of long journeys on foot over the Punjab plains, of houses left behind, of sisters kidnapped or raped: the ghastly but familiar litany of Partition horrors.

The Puris’ story was fairly typical. Before Partition they had a large town house in Lahore. When the riots came they packed a couple of suitcases, bought their bullock cart and headed off towards Delhi. Their possessions they left locked up in the haveli, guarded by Muslim servants. Like the Palestinians a year later, they expected to come back within a few months when peace had been restored. Like the Palestinians, they never returned.

On arrival in Delhi they found a gutted house in Subzi Mandi, the vegetable bazaar of the Old City. It had belonged to a Muslim family that had fled weeks before. The Puris simply installed a new door and moved in. There were still killings, and occasionally stray bullets ricocheted around the bazaar, but gradually the Puris began to find their feet.

‘We acquired slowly by slowly,’ Mrs Puri remembers. ‘My husband started a business making and selling small houses. I knitted woollens. At first it was very hard.’

After a year of carrying water in leaky buckets, the house was connected to the water mains; later the Puris got electricity installed. By 1949 they had a fan; by 1956 a fridge. In the late 1960s the Puris moved to a smart new house in South Extension. They had arrived.

We heard the same story repeated over and over again. Even the most innocuous of our neighbours, we discovered, had extraordinary tales of 1947: chartered accountants could tell tales of single-handedly fighting off baying mobs; men from grey government ministries would emerge as the heroes of bloody street battles. Everything these people now possessed was built up by their own hard labour over the last few years.

…

The violence totally gutted many of the poorer parts of Delhi, but even the very richest districts were affected. While shoppers looked on, Hindu mobs looted the smart Muslim tailors and boutiques in Connaught Place; passers-by then stepped over the murdered shopkeepers and helped themselves to the unguarded stocks of lipstick, handbags and bottles of face cream. In Lodhi Colony, Sikh bands burst into the white Lutyens bungalows belonging to senior Muslim civil servants and slaughtered anyone they found at home.

In some areas of the Old City, particularly around Turkman Gate and the Jama Masjid, the Muslims armed themselves with mortars and heavy machine guns. From their strongpoints in the narrow alleyways they defied not only the rioters but also the Indian Army. Many of the Muslim families who remain in Delhi today survived by barricading themselves into these heavily defended warrens.

…

The more I read, the more it became clear that the events of 1947 were the key to understanding modern Delhi. The reports highlighted the city’s central paradox: that Delhi, one of the oldest towns in the world, was inhabited by a population most of whose roots in the ancient city soil stretched back only forty years. This explained why Delhi, the grandest of grand old aristocratic dowagers, tended to behave today like a nouveau-riche heiress: all show and vulgarity and conspicuous consumption. It was a style most unbecoming for a lady of her age and lineage; moreover it jarred with everything one knew about her sophistication and culture.

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by | 1 January 2024 · 8:12 am

Delhi’s Extreme Mood-Swings

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 35-38:

Delhi had many failings, but I had never felt it was a violent city. In all the time I had spent in the dark mohallas (quarters) of the old walled city I had never once felt threatened. There were no areas that I felt uneasy to visit after sunset. Instead I had always found Delhi-wallahs, particularly the poor, remarkable for their gentleness and elaborate courtesy. Wherever we went, complete strangers would invite Olivia and me to sit and talk and share a glass of tea with them. To one brought up on a diet of starchy English reserve this habitual kindness of the Delhi-wallah was as touching as it was strange.

Yet as Balvinder and Sandhu could witness, when provoked the inhabitants of this mild town could rise up and commit acts of extreme brutality. Men would avert their eyes as next door neighbours were burned alive or disembowelled. The same people who would invite you to share their last plate of food could, with equal spontaneity, lose control and run amok. Then, with equal ease they could return to their bazaars and shops, factories and offices and carry on as if nothing had happened. It was difficult to understand.

Moreover, despite Delhi’s historic reputation as the most cultured town in India, the city’s history was punctuated with many such flashes of terrible, orgiastic violence. It was not just invaders who put the people of Delhi to the sword. During the Middle Ages and throughout the long Mughal twilight the town was continually rent with bloody riots, even small civil wars. Out of the first twelve Sultans, only two died peacefully in their beds; the rest were killed, usually in a horrible manner and almost always by their courtiers or subjects. Invaders like Timur the Lame were able to storm the high walls of the city only because the inhabitants were already busy cutting each others’ throats. The death toll from bazaar disputes such as the eighteenth-century Shoe Sellers’ Riot could run into tens of thousands.

The last great conflagration was Partition. In the dying days of the British Raj, when the subcontinent was split into Muslim-only Pakistan and Hindu-majority India, twelve million people were made refugees. Hordes of non-Muslims – Sikhs and Hindus – fled their ancestral villages in Pakistan; India’s displaced Muslims struck out in the opposite direction. It was the greatest migration the modern world had ever seen. Yet again Delhi was consigned to the flames. Following some of the worst rioting in its history, nearly half of its ancient Muslim population – the descendants of the people who had erected the Qutab Minar and lined the streets to cheer the Great Mogul – packed their bags and headed off to a new country. Their place was taken by refugees from the Western Punjab, among them Mr and Mrs Puri and Punjab Singh. Delhi was transformed from a small administrative capital of 900,000 people to a Punjabi-speaking metropolis half the size of London.

Of the two peoples who had ruled Delhi during the previous thousand years, the British disappeared completely while the Indian Muslims were reduced to an impoverished minority. In the space of a few months, the face of the city was probably changed more radically than at any other time since the Muslims first came to India, a millennium before.

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