Category Archives: religion

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 | 19 January 2024 · 7:10 am

Dalrymple on the Mahabharata

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 321-323:

While its equivalents in the west – the Odyssey, Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied — have died out and are only remembered now by the most bookish of scholars, the story of the Mahabharata is still the common property of every Hindu in the subcontinent, from the highly educated Brahmin scientist down to the untouchable roadside shoe-black. Recently, when a 93-episode adaptation was shown on Indian television, viewing figures never sank beneath 75 per cent and rose to a peak of 95 per cent, an audience of some 600 million people. In villages across India, simple Hindu peasants prostrated themselves in front of their village television screens for two hours every Sunday morning. In the towns the streets were deserted; even the beggars seemed to disappear. In Delhi, government meetings had to be rescheduled after one memorable Sunday morning when almost the entire cabinet failed to turn up to an urgent briefing.

The Mahabharata is more than worthy of its fame. Even in translation it retains the narrative and moral power of a Shakespearian tragedy, but with the action grafted on to the Indian equivalent of the world of Homer. The epic occupies roughly the same place in the Indian national myth as that held in Britain by tales of King Arthur, but for Hindus the Mahabharata also retains the religious significance of the New Testament: included within it is the Bhagavad Gita, the most subtle, wise and sacred of all Hindu religious texts.

The Mahabharata opens in a hermitage on the edge of the Naimisa Forest. There a group of rishis [sages] are preparing for the night when the bard Ugrasravas arrives on the threshold. The sadhus [ascetics] invite the bard to join them on the condition that he amuses them with tales of his travels. Ugrasravas tells them that he has just returned from the great battlefield of Kurukshetra and agrees to tell the story of the apocalyptic war which reached its climax on those plains. He introduces the epic by emphasizing its sacred power.

‘A Brahmin who knows all the four Vedas [the Hindu Old Testament] but does not know this epic, has no learning at all,’ he says. ‘Once one has heard this story no other composition will ever again seem pleasing: it will sound as harsh as the crow sounds to one who has heard the song of the cuckoo. From this supreme epic comes the inspiration of all poets: no story is found on earth that does not rest on this base. If a man learns the Bharata as it is recited, as it once fell from the lips of Vyasa — what need has that man of ablutions in the sacred waters of Pushkar?’

In sheer length, the epic is still unrivalled. It consists of some 100,000 Sanskrit slokas (stanzas), eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, four times the length of the Bible; quite simply it is the longest composition in the world. Yet miraculously, even a generation ago, it was common to find wandering storytellers who knew the whole vast epic by heart: they would sit in the coffee houses or on the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid and recite the entire poem without a break over the course of seven days and seven nights.

Even today, when the wandering bard has followed the Indian lion into near-extinction – killed off, in the case of the epic, by Hindi movies and national television – it is just possible, in very remote places, to find men who still know the epic. A friend of mine, an anthropologist, met one such wandering story-teller in a little village of Andhra Pradesh. My friend asked him how he could remember so huge a poem. The bard replied that in his mind each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was to remember the order in which they were arranged and to read the text from one pebble after another.

In the form in which it survives today, the Mahabharata is a colossal miscellany of Hindu religious discourses, folk tales and legends. But all these diversions are built up around a central story of almost minimalist simplicity.

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 15 January 2024 · 6:02 am

Taj Mahal’s Husband and Son

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 195-196:

‘After the death of his beloved Queen Taj Mahal,’ wrote Manucci, ‘Shah Jehan selected in Hindustan the city of Dihli in order to build there a new city as his capital. He gave it the name Shahjehanabad — that is to say, “Built by Shah Jehan”. He expended large sums in the construction of this city, and in the foundations he ordered several decapitated criminals to be placed as a sign of sacrifice.’

Shah Jehan was forty-seven when he decided to move his court from Agra to Delhi. He had just lost his wife; his children were now grown up. The building of a new city was the middle-aged Emperor’s bid for immortality.

Shah Jehan had himself come to power twelve years earlier after a bloody civil war. He had been the able but ruthless third son; to seize the throne he had had to rebel against his father and murder his two elder brothers, their two children, and two male cousins. Yet while Shah Jehan was capable of bouts of cold-blooded brutality, he was still the most aesthetically sensitive of all the Mughals. As a boy of fifteen he had impressed his father, the Emperor Jehangir, with the taste he demonstrated in redesigning the Imperial apartments in Kabul. As the young Emperor he had rebuilt the Red Fort in Agra in a new architectural style that he had himself helped to develop. Then, on his wife’s death, he had built the Taj Mahal, arguably the most perfect building in all Islam.

Before her death Mumtaz Mahal had borne Shah Jehan fourteen children; of these, four sons and three daughters survived to adult-hood. The eldest was Dara Shukoh – the Glory of Darius. Contemporary miniatures show that Dara bore a striking resemblance to his father; he had the same deep-set almond eyes, the same straight, narrow nose and long, full beard, although in some pictures he appears to have been slightly darker and more petite than Shah Jehan. Like the Emperor he was luxurious in his tastes and refined in his sensibilities. He preferred life at court to the hardships of campaigning; he liked to deck himself in strings of precious stones and belts studded with priceless gems; he wore clothes of the finest silk and from each ear lobe he hung a single pearl of remarkable size.

Nevertheless Dara was no indolent voluptuary: he had an enquiring mind and enjoyed the company of sages, Sufis and sannyasin (wandering ascetics). He had the Hindu Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga-Vashishta translated into Persian and himself composed religious and mystical treatises. The most remarkable was the Majmua-ul-Baharain (‘The Mingling of the Two Oceans’), a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasized the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations. In an age when even the most liberal of Mughal Emperors used to demolish Hindu temples, this was both a brave and novel work; but some considered Dara’s views not just unusual but actually heretical. In private, many of the more orthodox Muslim nobles furrowed their brows and wondered how the crown prince could possibly declare, as one noble put it, ‘infidelity and Islam to be twin brothers’.

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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.

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by Joel | 6 January 2024 · 7:14 am

Decline of Delhi’s Urdu Elite

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 50-51:

Just as Partition resulted in prosperity and growth for the new Delhi, it led to impoverishment and stagnation for the old. The fabulous city which hypnotized the world travellers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the home of the great poets Mir, Zauq and Ghalib; the city of nautch girls and courtesans; the seat of the Emperor, the Shadow of God, the Refuge of the World, became a ghetto, a poor relation embarrassingly tacked on to the metropolis to its south. Since 1947 the Old City has survived only by becoming one enormous storehouse for North India’s wholesale goods; one by one the old palaces and mansions have been converted into godowns (warehouses) and stores. It has become more remarkable for its junk markets and car parts bazaars than for any fraying beauty or last lingering hints of sophistication. The crafts and skills developed over the centuries for the tastes of the old Urdu-speaking Delhi elite either adjusted to the less sophisticated Punjabi market, or simply died out.

Near the Ajmeri Gate lies the old Cobblers’ Bazaar. Most of the Muslim shoemakers who worked here fled to Karachi in 1947, and today the Punjabis who replaced them sell mostly locks and chains and hardware. But a few of the old shopkeepers remain, and among them is the shop of Shamim and Ali Akbar Khan. Despite the position of their workshop, the father of Shamim and Ali was no cobbler; he was one of the most famous calligraphers in Delhi. Shamim continues his father’s trade and still lives by producing beautifully inscribed title deeds, wills and marriage documents.

I met Shamim in a chai shop outside the Ajmeri Gate mosque. He was a tall and elegant man in his early fifties, dressed in an immaculate sherwani frock coat and a tall lambskin cap. He had high cheekbones, fair skin, and narrow, almond-shaped eyes that hinted at a Central Asian ancestry. On his chin he sported a neat goatee beard. He sat down beside me at a table in the rear of the shop and over a glass of masala tea we began to talk.

‘My forebears were writers at the Mughal court,’ said Shamim. ‘And before that we were calligraphers in Samarkand. My family have always been in this business.’

‘And you illuminate your documents in exactly the way your father taught you?’

‘My father was a very accomplished man. He knew the shikastah [cursive] script as well as the nastaliq; he could write both Persian and Urdu. I learned only the nastaliq. Slowly the skills are dying. Today there are only two other calligraphers in Delhi and they are of inferior quality.’

Shamim called the chai-boy over and asked for the bill. When it finally came he totted it up, checking all the figures in a slightly pedantic manner.

‘Today most of the work is in Hindi,’ he said. ‘Because of this there is little demand for our skills.’

‘Can you not learn the Hindi script?’ I asked.

‘I know it. But with the change from Urdu has come a loss of prestige. Earlier it was a highly respected job that few people were qualified to perform: you had to be familiar with Islamic law, had to know the old Delhi customs, and most of all you had to be a talented calligrapher. Now I am just a clerk; most of the work is done quickly on typewriters.’

He downed the rest of the tea in a single swallow and swirled the dregs around in his glass: ‘It is because of the newcomers. They have a very different culture; they have no interest in fine calligraphy.’

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by Joel | 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 Joel | 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.

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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.

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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.