City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

by William Dalrymple

Although during my first year in Delhi I remember thinking that the traffic had seemed both anarchic and alarming, by my second visit I had come to realize that it was in fact governed by very strict rules. Right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle. Buses give way to heavy trucks, Ambassadors give way to buses, and bicyclists give way to everything except pedestrians. On the road, as in many other aspects of Indian life, Might is Right.

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 …’ It reminded me of a conversation I had had two years before in a camp near Ramallah on the West Bank. Did I know the orange groves at Biddya near Jaffa, Usamah had asked me. They grew the best oranges in Palestine at Biddya, he said. As a boy he could remember creeping in and shinning up the trees and the juice running down his face afterwards … How could I tell him that his orange groves now lay under one of the ugliest suburbs of Tel Aviv? ‘Have you been to Burns Road?’ asked a civil servant’s wife, breaking into my thoughts. ‘It’s just around the corner from your hotel. All the sweetmeat vendors from the Delhi Jama Masjid set up their stalls there. Sometimes I just go there to listen. I sit in a dhaba an...

Moreover they always felt that the prophecy—whoever builds a new city in Delhi will lose it—would come true. If ever anybody raised the subject of New Delhi my father would always quote the Persian couplet in a most gloomy voice. And of course it did come true. Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan … They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.’

‘In retrospect,’ I said. ‘Do you think British rule was justified?’ Iris mulled over the question before answering. ‘Well, at the time we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as wicked imperialists,’ she said, answering slowly. ‘Of course not. But you see, although people of my generation were very keen on Gandhi and Indian Independence, we were still very careless. We didn’t give much thought to the question of what on earth we were doing to that country and its people. ‘That said, I can’t forget the sacrifices made by the "wicked" imperialists over the centuries—the graves, so many very young, the friends I have had, and what good people many of them were. ‘But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.’

This was Rajpath—once the Kingsway—one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysées—complete with India Gate, its own butter-coloured Arc de Triomphe. But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe. On either side ran wide lawns giving on to fountains and straight avenues of eucalyptus and casuarina. Beyond, canals running parallel to the road reflected the surroundings with mirror-like fidelity.

Other travellers were equally amazed by the size of these palaces. Another Englishman, James Forbes, arrived in Shahjehanabad a few months later to find that the Emperor had arranged for him to be quartered in the crumbling palace of Safdar Jung, once the most magnificent private palace in the city. Having explored the enormous edifice in which he and his companions had spent their first night, Forbes suddenly realized that their lodgings represented only a fraction of the whole palace. ‘In the evening, on taking a more complete view of this Mogul mansion, [we] were surprised to find the apartments just mentioned formed only a very small part of this immense pile, which occupied six squares corresponding with that in which we immediately resided. Its magnitude,’ he concluded, ‘exceeded [that of] any of the palaces belonging to the nobility in Europe.’ There

Even in the home of his closest friend, Skinner was unable to escape the growing colour prejudice of the British. In the Spanish Americas it was military heroes of mixed Indian and colonial parentage—men like Bolivar—who came to dominate and rule the colonies. But India was different. As Skinner’s career demonstrated, Hindus and British were both too proud of their blood for ‘half-castes’ ever to be really successful. As the nineteenth century progressed, such horrible prejudice only increased. Any hint of ‘black blood’ brought out the worst of Victorian bigotry, and in Delhi, Skinner’s children became the butt of snide British jokes. ‘The whole [Skinner] family was a marvellous revelation to anyone fresh from England,’ wrote Emily Bayley sometime in the 1870s. ‘[They] were very dark in complexion and spoke English with an extraordinary accent … although they looked upon themselves as English people and held a prominent position in Delhi society, they had very little education and were more native than English in their ways … ‘[Joe Skinner] was a marvellous creation … his visiting dress consisted of a green coat with gilt buttons, claret coloured trousers, patent leather boots, white waistcoat and necktie. He always carried a gold-mounted Malacca cane and talked of the time when he was in the Guards, though he has never been out of India … [His] children are named after the Royal Family, but are all black.’ The Skinners remained in Delhi, filling first the pews, then the g...

Twenty-two years later the period was brought to a bloody close by the uprising of 1857. The hopes of a happy fusion of British and Indian culture, promised during the Twilight, were forgotten in the massacres which initiated and the hangings which followed the Indian Mutiny. The recapture of Delhi by the British on 14 September 1857 led to the wholesale destruction of great areas of the city. The Red Fort was plundered and much of it razed to the ground; what remained of one of the world’s most beautiful palaces became a grey British barracks. It was only by a hair’s-breadth that the great Mughal Jama Masjid was saved from similar destruction and the city spared the planned replacement, a hideous Victorian Gothic cathedral. Three thousand Delhi-wallahs were tried and executed—either hanged, shot or blown from the mouths of cannon—on the flimsiest evidence. British soldiers bribed the hangmen to keep the condemned men ‘a long time hanging, as they like to see the criminal’s dance a "Pandy’s hornpipe" as they termed the dying struggles of the accused’. The last Emperor was sent off to exile in Rangoon in a bullock cart; the princes, his children, were all shot. The inhabitants of the city were turned out of the gates to starve in the countryside outside; and even after the city’s Hindus were allowed to return, Muslims remained banned for two whole years. The finest mosques were sold off to Hindu bankers for use as bakeries and stables. The behaviour of the British in the we...

Safdarjung interested me because his life seemed to encapsulate perfectly the intriguing but cataclysmic half-century that linked the Mughal high noon at the close of the seventeenth century with the decay and disintegration of the Twilight fifty years later. When Safdarjung arrived from Persia, Aurangzeb was still Emperor and Delhi was still the richest, most magnificent and most populous city between Istanbul and Edo (Tokyo); with its two million inhabitants it was far larger than either London or Paris. Its army was invincible; its palaces unparalleled; the domes of its many mosques quite literally glittered with gold. By the time of Safdarjung’s death, the Persian Nadir Shah had been and gone, carrying with him the accumulated riches of eight generations of Empire. Three Emperors had been murdered (one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle); the mother of one ruler was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. Delhi, the great capital, was left a city of gutted ruins. To be Emperor during this period was a highly dangerous undertaking. The longest surviving sovereign of the age, the Emperor Muhammed Shah (called Rangila, or the Colourful), survived by the simple ruse of giving up any pretence of ruling: in the morning he watched partridge and elephant fights; in the afternoon he was entertained by jugglers, ventriloquists, mime artists and conjurers. Politics he wisely left to his scheming advisers. While the empire was bei...