City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

by William Dalrymple

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...