City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi

by William Dalrymple

There were other changes, too. The damburst of western goods and ideas that were now pouring into India had brought with them an undertow of western morality. Adulterous couples now filled the public gardens; condom advertisements dominated the Delhi skyline. The Indian capital, once the last bastion of the chaperoned virgin, the double-locked bedroom and the arranged marriage, was slowly filling with lovers: whispering, blushing, occasionally holding hands, they loitered beneath flowering trees like figures from a miniature. Delhi was starting to unbutton. After the long Victorian twilight, the sari was beginning to slip.

Here for the first time you got an impression of a fact which Delhi seemed almost purpose-built to hide: that the city is the capital not just of a resurgent regional power, formerly the jewel in Britain’s Imperial crown, but that it is also the chief metropolis of a desperately poor Third World country; a country whose affluent middle class is still outnumbered four or five to one by the impoverished rural masses.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

To do so they used the same architectural vocabulary: great expanses of marble, a stripped-down classicism, a fondness for long colonnades and a love of Imperial heraldic devices: elephants’ heads, lions couchant, massive eagles with outstretched wings.

LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE; A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY; IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.

Later, on seeing the hideous government buildings of Simla, Lutyens writes that they are ‘a piece of pure folly such as only Englishmen can achieve: if one were told the monkeys had built them one would have said what wonderful monkeys, they must be shot in case they do it again.’

Even by the standards of the time, the letters reveal him to be a bigot, though the impression is one of bumbling insularity rather than jack-booted malevolence. Indians are invariably referred to as ‘blacks’, ‘blackamoors’, ‘natives’ or even ’niggers‘. They are ’dark and ill-smelling‘, their food is ’very strange and frightening’ and they ‘do not improve with acquaintance’.

when the Emperor gave the British the ruins of the library of Dara Shukoh, Shah Jehan’s eldest son, they saw no need to knock down the existing work and start afresh; instead they merely erected a classical façade over a Mughal substructure. It was just like Ochterlony : in public establishing the British presence; but inside, in private, living the life of a Nawab.

Brigadier General John Nicholson, ‘the Lion of the Punjab’, who was killed in the storming of Delhi in 1857 but who was still worshipped long afterwards as a hero by the British and as a god by a Punjabi sect called the Nikalsini.

As a notice at the gate prominently announced, the bungalow was now the Office of the Chief Engineer of the Northern Railways Board (Construction Department), Government of India. Presumably suspecting me of being a Pakistani agent intent on sabotage - the famous Foreign Hand invoked by Indian politicians to explain all manner of Indian disasters from train crashes and burst water mains to late monsoons and lost test matches - the heavily armed guards at the gate refused even to let me set foot within the gates.

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.

The ruins of the stud farm which Skinner built for the business, complete with its wonderful baroque gatehouse - all fluted columns and Corinthian capitals - still survive two miles to the south of Skinner’s country estate at Hansi, north-west of Delhi.

As Independence approached, an idea was mooted for an Eurasian homeland - a kind of Anglo-Indian Israel - in the Chote Nagpur hills in southern Bihar; but the scheme never came to anything and MacLuskie Ganj, the putative Tel Aviv of the homeland, today lies desolate and impoverished, little more than a rundown and outsize old folks’ home.

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.

‘As the great Sa’di once put it: “The Arab horse speeds fast, but although the camel plods slowly, it goes both by day and night.”‘

The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.’

As Sa’di said: “If a diamond falls in the dirt it is still a diamond, yet even if dust ascends all the way to heaven it remains without value.”‘

‘In this city,’ he said, ‘culture and civilization have always been very thin dresses. It does not take much for that dress to be torn off and for what lies beneath to be revealed.’

Bazaar rumour had it that her closeness to Shah Jehan went beyond merely normal filial affection; after all, as Bernier put it: ‘it would have been unjust to deny the King the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he himself had planted.’

most superstitious countries in the world. The educated Indian businessman will consult an astrologer as readily as the illiterate villager; and no occasion, except perhaps the birth of a child, necessitates the consulting of astrologers quite so urgently as a marriage.

Nor should a gentlemen ever discuss that most unfashionable subject religion, lest some fanatic ‘cause him bodily injury’ (still good advice in Delhi today).

Among flowers and trees he should admire the narcissus, the violet and the orange. He should eat his fill of watermelon (‘the best of all fruits’) and ‘rice boiled with spices should be preferred by him to all other eatables.’ A gentleman ‘should not make too much use of tobacco’ but ’should recognize the Fort in Agra as unequalled in the whole world [and] ... must think of Isfahan as the best town in Persia‘; if he insists on travelling he should visit ’Egypt because it is worth seeing‘.

It represents the climax of more than six hundred years of experimentation in palace building by Indo-Islamic architects, and is by far the most substantial monument - and in its day was also by far the most magnificent — that the Mughals left behind them in Delhi.

the English word ‘paradise’ was borrowed from the ancient Persian words pairi (around) and daeza (a wall). The word was brought west by Xenophon, who introduced it into Greek when describing the fabulous garden built by the Persian Emperor Cyrus at Sardis; from the Greek paradeisoi it passed into Latin as paradisum; and hence into Middle English as paradis.

‘The warrior was carrying a bow but no arrows. On the road he met a friend who asked why he had not brought any ammunition. “How will you fight?” asked his friend. “I will use the arrows sent by the enemy,” he replied. “But what if no arrow comes?” “Then,” replied the bowman, “there will be no war.” In the same way, if there is no call from me there will be no Id prayers.’

I have always thought that Hinduism is at its most sympathetic and comprehensible in the countryside: a simple roadside shrine, a sacred river, a holy spring - these things are the life-blood of that great religion. In the same way, Islam has always been an urban faith, ill at ease with the wilderness; its civilization has always flourished most successfully in the labyrinths of the ancient bazaar towns of the East. Certainly there can be no doubt that Islam looks at its most impressive in a great urban cathedral mosque, especially on an occasion like Id.

The whole spreading fortress was surrounded not just by a moat, but by a deep artificial lake. Dams were built linked by causeways to a series of smaller outpost forts. The flood waters were controlled by a succession of carefully engineered sluice-gates and locks.

Nothing could be further removed from the graceful garden-tombs of the Great Moguls than this warrior’s memorial, as narrowly militaristic as theirs were elegant and sophisticated. One breathes silky refinement; the other still rings with the clank of rusty chain-mail.

essentially militaristic nature of their Sultanate. The Damascene geographer al-Umari confirms what is implied by the tomb: that Delhi, for all its bazaars and shrines and fine architecture, was above all a barracks:

Fake Sufis are like any other kind of counterfeit. Forgeries only exist because real gold is so incredibly valuable ...’

Everyone agreed — as they did every year — that it had to be the hottest summer in living memory.

In the Delhi National Museum there is a pair of fine idols of the two goddesses brought from Ahichchhatra, one of the Mahabharata sites. Ganga stands on a crocodile and looks like a lovely long Punjabi girl: she is tall and thin and her long tresses are tied into a plait. Jumna, who stands on a tortoise, is unmistakably a Tamil - she has huge, sensuous lips, tight, curly locks and a diaphanous bodice which barely succeeds in enclosing her enormous breasts; of the two sisters she is by far the most attractive.