Category Archives: South Asia

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 | 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 | 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 | 7 January 2024 · 5:13 am

Hinglish and Hobson-Jobson

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 73-75:

Perhaps it is language, the spoken word, which is the greatest indication of the distance travelled since 1947.

The English spoken by Indians – Hinglish – has of course followed its own idiosyncratic journey since the guardians of its purity returned home. Like American English, likewise emancipated by Britain’s colonial retreat, it has developed its own grammatical rules, its own syntax and its own vocabulary.

One of the great pleasures of our life in India has always been being woken on the dot of 7.30 every morning by Ladoo bearing ‘bed tea’ and the Times of India. The news is inevitably depressing stuff (’400 Killed in Tamil Train Crash‘, ’150 Garrotted by Assam Separatists’ and so on), yet somehow the jaunty Times of India prose always manages to raise the tone from one of grim tragedy. There may have been a train crash, but at least the Chief Minister has air-dashed to the scene. Ten convented (convent-educated) girls may have been gang-raped in the Punjab, but thousands of students have staged a bandh (strike) and a dharna (protest) against such eve-teasing (much nicer than the bland Americanese ‘sexual harassment’). And so what if the protesters were then lathi (truncheon) charged by police jawans (constables)? In the Times of India such miscreants are always charge-sheeted in the end.

…

Perhaps the most striking testament to the sea-change in Indian English in the forty years since Independence lies not in what has survived – and been strangely, wonderfully mutated – but in what has died and completely disappeared. The best guide to such linguistic dodos is Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, originally published by John Murray in 1903. The book was written as a guide to those words which had passed from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic into English, and the list is certainly extraordinary: every time you wear pyjamas or a cummerbund; if ever you sit on the veranda of your bungalow reading the pundits in the newspapers or eat a stick of candy; indeed even if you are haunted by ghouls or have your cash stolen by thugs – then you are using a branch of English that could never have developed but for the trading and colonizing activities of the East India Company.

Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hobson Jobson is how many of its words and phrases are stone cold dead, now utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader. In 1903 an Englishman could praise a cheroot as ‘being the real cheese’ (from the Hindi chiz, meaning thing) or claim his horse was the ’best goont in Tibet’ (from the Hindi gunth, meaning a pony); and whether he was in the middle of some shikar (sport) relaxing with his friends in their chummery (bachelor quarters) or whoring with his rum-johny (mistress, from the Hindi ramjani, a dancing girl) he might reasonably expect to be understood.

Half of Hobson Jobson is filled with these dead phrases: linguistic relics of a world so distant and strange that it is difficult to believe that these words were still current in our own century. Yet clearly, in 1903, if a Jack (sepoy) did anything wrong he could expect to receive some pretty foul galee (abuse); if he were unlucky his chopper (thatched hut) might fall down in the mangoes (April showers); and if he forgot his goglet (water bottle) on parade he might well have been thrown out of the regiment for good.

To us, the vocabulary of the Raj now seems absurd, distant and comical…. Yet many who actually spoke this language [were] still alive in England [in 2003]. For them, the world of Hobson Jobson is less linguistic archaeology than the stuff of fraying memory.

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by | 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 | 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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