Babur’s victory at Panipat decisively ejected the Lodis from Delhi, but his position was still precarious. He next had to subdue the even more considerable resistance of the Rajputs gathered under the central command of Rana Sanga of Mewar, whom Babur reckoned as one of the two most powerful of India’s ‘pagan’ rulers. Only after he met and defeated this second force, at the Battle of Khanua in March 1527, could he consider the conquest accomplished.
Only then, too, could the new landlord pause to examine the property he had acquired. As he made his survey, his initial reaction was rather one of disappointment than of pleasure. Remembering his bewitching, ancestral Samarkand, he famously lamented in his diary that:
Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits, there is none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality; there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked foods in the bazaars, no hot baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.
There were some consolations, of course: ‘Pleasant things in Hindustan are that it is a large country and has masses of gold and silver.’
Despite this brief, bitter outburst against India, Babur’s writing more generally indicates a sensitive and inquiring mind. He was as much a poet and scholar as a soldier and statesman. His diary is one of the most engaging documents to survive from Mughal India, because it was written not by a professional stylist or flattering court historian, but by the emperor himself, for his own purposes. His aim was not to convey a sense of his majesty but to record his perceptions from day to day, and this he did with taste, humour, enthusiasm and occasionally with endearing artlessness. One of his chief interests was natural history. After giving an account of his conquest of India, he devoted a long passage to the country’s flora and fauna. His description of the peacock is typically spontaneous, as if composed from notes made in the field:
It is a beautifully coloured and splendid animal. Its form is not equal to its colouring. Its body may be as large as the crane’s but it is not so tall. On the head of both cock and hen are 20 to 30 feathers rising some 2 or 3 inches high. The hen has neither colour nor beauty. The head of the cock has an iridescent collar; its neck is of a beautiful blue; below the neck, its back is painted in yellow, parrot-green, blue and violet colours. Below the back, as far as the tail tips, are flowers painted in the same colours. The tail of some peacocks grows to the length of a man’s extended arms . . . Its flight is feebler [than] the pheasant’s; it cannot do more than make one or two short flights.
Babur noted that, in Islamic law, it was permissible to eat peacock, but he felt an ‘instinctive aversion’ to the idea. His successors learnt that Hindus considered killing peacocks to be sacrilegious, so eating peacock was banned in Mughal India.
Despite his early dismissive comments on Indian handicraft, he soon came to rely on local workmen in his building projects. ‘There are numberless artisans and workmen of every sort in Hindustan,’ he remarked, noting that, ‘1,491 stone-cutters worked daily on my buildings in Agra, Sikri, Bayana, Dholpur, Gwalior and Kuil.’ Some fragments of his work survive at these and other locations in his empire. But one place where he left no mark was Delhi. He had made a quick tour of inspection of the city in the days following the Battle of Panipat, visiting, as already noted, some of the tombs of earlier Delhi sultans. But then he hurried on to Agra and never returned. He died in 1530 and is buried, in accordance with his stated wish, at his earlier capital, Kabul.
The reign of his son and successor Humayun (r. 1530–40 and 1555–56) left greater physical traces on the city. The mosque and tomb of Jamali-Kamali, built on the outskirts of Mehrauli between 1528 and 1536, are among the earliest examples of Mughal architecture anywhere, and already show a surprising amount of refinement by comparison with the buildings of earlier dynasties. The façade of the prayer hall employs a restrained and clever use of colour coordination to articulate the parts and is elegantly proportioned. The small tomb in an adjacent enclosure looks nondescript from the outside, but the interior—the walls and the flat ceiling—is decorated with brilliant glazed tile work and cut and painted plaster. This exquisite gem is very little visited. Jamali was the pen-name of Shaikh Fazlu’llah, a poet and saint who flourished early in the reign of Humayun. Some of the verses inscribed on the walls are his. There are two graves (leaving very little spare space on the floor). Typically, neither is labelled and the second is traditionally said to be that of the poet’s companion Kamali; but it is not known who this person was, and the name was obviously made up to rhyme with Jamali.
If poetry and architectural ornament were in safe hands in the 1530s, the empire was not. Even by comparison with his father’s turbulent life, Humayun’s career was unsatisfactory. A congenial but irresolute character, he temporarily lost control of the empire and nearly ended the Mughal dynasty as soon as it had begun. Aesthetic, nervous and clever, Humayun could on occasion exert himself with some success, but as often destroyed his own achievements through indecision or loss of interest. In 1540, he was dislodged from the throne by Sher Khan, a noble of Afghan descent who had established a power base in Bihar and Bengal, in eastern India. The usurper ruled from Delhi with the title Sher Shah, and was succeeded by his son Islam Shah. Having been forced to flee from India through the deserts of western Rajasthan, Humayun sought sanctuary in Persia. His road to recovery was long and arduous, but by 1555 (fifteen years after his eviction), the Sur interregnum was riddled with internal dissent, and Babur had gathered sufficient followers to enable him to return and recover his inheritance. And then within a year, he died.
Before the Sur revolt, Humayun had begun the construction of a new city of Delhi, its sixth. Situated to the south of number five, the Tughluq-era Firuz Shah Kotla, the new addition to the tally was named Din-panah (‘the sanctuary of the faith’) by Humayun. It included the handsome fort overlooking the Yamuna river, now known as the Purana Qila. The fort and a few buildings within it, completed by Sher Shah, are almost all that survives, though originally there was much more. The sixteenth-century Jesuit, Father Antonio Monserrate, notes the mansions and gardens that clustered around the fort in his time; which in turn were protected by a city wall that has now disappeared, leaving only the northern and western gates as isolated structures.
The northern gate—which stands in the middle of the modern main road just outside the Kotla—was originally called the Kabuli Gate, following the normal practice of naming gates after a distant city towards which it faces. But it is popularly known as the Khuni Darwaza (or ‘bloody gate’) because, according to one version of events, it was here that two sons and a grandson of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, were shot dead in cold blood in 1857. Having been arrested at Humayun’s tomb (to the south), they were being escorted back to Shahjahanabad (to the north); but fearing they might try and escape, their escort, Captain Hodson, changed his plan and executed them summarily in the middle of their journey.
By that date little remained of the early Mughal city that once stood here. The view of the area made by Thomas and William Daniell in 1789 and later published in their series Oriental Scenery may be exaggerated in respect of the uneven torn-up terrain, but it shows hardly anything outside the fort walls. A little later, the Purana Qila became a favourite haunt of Robert Smith, the engineer who put a cupola on the Qutb Minar.
Part of the moat survives and has been turned into a boating lake. The dilapidated northern entrance gate of the fort, towering above this, still presents a decidedly picturesque image, but it is the sturdier western gate that now serves as the main entrance. Inside the fort is the exquisitely detailed Qila-i-Kuhna Masjid, a mosque built by Sher Shah Sur in 1541, which is decorated with elaborate carving and panels of inlaid stones. The five arched entrances into the prayer hall are of different sizes, the central one being
the highest. Each is contained within a larger arched recess, which again are assorted in size, creating an agitated formal rhythm across the façade that is enlivened by the carved ornament.
The two men who built this fort could not have been more different in temperament. The intellectual Humayun was fascinated by astrology and employed it to organize his administration. For example, he attended to matters of a given kind only on days that were governed by a suitably symbolic planet. The system was no doubt elegant but it was not always efficient or responsive to emergencies. Central authority began to drift. Sher Shah was the grandson of an Afghan adventurer who had come to India and taken service under the sultans; but not content with such a position, the grandson established an independent power base in eastern India. When he detected that the centre was weakened by Humayun’s eccentricity (and by the disloyalty of his brothers, it should be added), he seized his chance and usurped the throne. A pragmatist, he swept aside Humayun’s astrological conceits and implemented sound systems of government. His reform of the tax revenue and his programme of road building were measures that anticipated and facilitated the more extensive reforms later undertaken by Akbar. In hindsight, because of the return to Mughal rule, the Sur interregnum looks like a blip and historians generally give the credit for building the empire to Akbar. But the biographers of Sher Shah make a good case for allotting at least part of the credit to him. Readers of Kipling might have noticed that the tiger in The Jungle Book shares the earlier form of his name, Sher Khan, and this is only in part because his name does actually mean ‘tiger’; it is also because of his reputation for ruthless cunning.
It is not clear whether Humayun or Sher Shah were aware that the land they were building on was identified by some as Indraprastha, the ancient city of the Mahabharata. One of them (it is not clear which) dug a stepwell in the fort, but not being archaeologists they did not preserve any painted greyware that they might have found in the process. The potsherds and other ancient artefacts that were excavated in modern times are displayed in a small museum at the site.
Close to the mosque stands a large octagonal pavilion known as the Sher Mandal. The name implies that this too was the work of Sher Shah, but some experts date it later on stylistic grounds, without explaining who would have built here at a later date and why. Humayun would scarcely have had time, between his return from exile and his death, to erect even this relatively modest structure. But if it was already there, as is commonly believed, he would have certainly appreciated it. During his enforced exile in Persia, Humayun had developed a great liking for Persian painting, and on his return to India he brought with him two master artists to help establish the Mughal atelier. The two-storeyed octagonal Sher Mandal resembles the pleasure pavilions so often depicted in Persian art, at least in form though not in materials since it is made not of painted wood but of blocks of sandstone. If the traditional but unconfirmed story is to be believed, Humayun discovered the difference the hard way. It is said that he used the building as his library and accidentally fell down its stone staircase, sustaining the injuries from which he died.
The tomb in which Humayun lies buried took fifteen years to construct (1556–71) and marks the true beginning of Mughal architecture on the grand scale. Traditional scholarship attributes the commissioning of the building to the emperor’s grieving widow, Hajji Begam, but this is a pious fiction that disguises its true meaning and purpose. Such a magnificent building was clearly meant as a statement of power and of permanence, and as such could only have been commissioned by the new emperor, the young Akbar (r. 1556–1605). It addressed the people of Delhi and assured them that, despite appearances to the contrary, the Mughals were here to stay. At the time, some people in Delhi might have been anxious on this score. Anyone born just before the conquest had seen such change that it must have left them reeling in dizziness. First the Mughals come and knock out the Lodis; then the Surs come and knock out the Mughals; then the Mughals come back and knock out the Surs; and now the emperor falls downstairs and is succeeded by a teenager. Perhaps the Surs will stage a comeback. The lofty dome of Humayun’s tomb lays all such fears to rest along with the late emperor. Pushovers don’t build like this.
If it was indeed intended as a monument not just to Humayun but to the Mughal dynasty, then it is fitting that so many other members of the imperial family—princes and princesses of later generations—lie buried here too. Their graves are scattered in the rooms that surround the central hall, on the terrace, and in the alcoves of the basement. Humayun’s tomb was also the scene where the last chapter of the Mughal era was played out nearly 300 years after its completion. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar (r. 1837–57), the reluctant figurehead of the rebellion against British rule in 1857, sought sanctuary here after the fall of Delhi, and was here arrested by the ruthless Captain Hodson.
The design of the tomb is usually attributed to a Persian architect named Mirak Mirza Ghiyas. His nationality might mislead us. Some of the design’s more obvious Persian features, such as the plan of the garden and the disposal of halls around the central chamber, are things that had already been introduced into India earlier. In the scale and form of the main arches and domes, the architect appears to have drawn inspiration more particularly from the buildings of Samarkand, the city (in modern-day Uzbekistan) that had served as Timur’s capital. And this no doubt reflects the wishes of the patron, for the Mughals identified themselves as Timurids: that was the lineage they were most proud of.
Humayun’s tomb, by an unknown photographer, c. 1870
But if, while erecting a monument that would declare the power and permanent presence of their dynasty, they chose to advertise their foreign origins, the building no less emphatically declares its Indian location and identity. For one thing, it is faced with finely finished sandstone, quarried in the region to the west of Agra, and detailed with carved ornament that reveals the Indian mason’s hand. Central Asian buildings are often built of rubble and faced with glazed tiles. In the Indian adaptation of that method, the tiles were often replaced by dressed stone, as both the material and the skills to work it were abundantly available. Not everyone was impressed. This technique caused Edwin Lutyens to describe Mughal architecture as ‘veneered joinery in stone’.
Humayun’s tomb, built in the 1560s, was the first in a sequence of magnificent Mughal mausolea that place the tomb structure in a char bagh or Persian paradise garden. The restoration of the garden and its waterworks was carried out in the opening years of this century as a gift to India from the Aga Khan, in celebration of fifty years of India’s independence. Work on the main structure is also now underway.
The interior is grand but solemn, and disappointing to some, after the colours of the stonework and the garden. Having mounted the podium, one enters from the south portal. This is the usual arrangement with all such tombs. Also as usual, the body is interred on a north-south axis, with the head in the north, and the visitor approaches at the feet. As previously observed, the western side of many tombs is enclosed to accommodate a mihrab or niche that indicates the qibla (the direction of Mecca). But here the architect was seemingly reluctant to disrupt the building’s symmetry and has left the west side open, at least to light and air, for the arch is filled by a jali or perforated screen, like the corresponding arches to the north and east. But then, in an ingenious innovation, the outline of a mihrab is superimposed over the western jali, so the convention is respected after all.
The central hall is octagonal. On the three sides that face west, north and east, as noted, there is a large arch with a jali. On each of the four sides that do not face a cardinal direction, a door leads through to a further hall, which houses further graves. So, four large octagonal blocks surround a central one, attached to its ‘odd’ corners, and are sufficiently fused together to make the overall plan almost a square. In the spaces between them on the ‘even’ sides there is a huge scooped-out arch, or iwan, that penetrates from the outer façade to the edge of the in
ner hall. Except on the south side, where the corresponding space is enclosed by a flat wall, to make an entrance hall. Stepping back out, you will notice that the southern façade differs from all the others. Where the entrance.
The southern entrance in this case is a little disorientating because one enters the garden from its western gate. Originally the main garden gate must have been the one on the southern side, which is now crowded round by a modern housing estate. The western gate serves as the present entrance because of its proximity to the Mathura Road. On that side too lie the remains of an older enclosure, known as Bu Halima’s garden, though it’s not known who that noblewoman was. She is not the only neighbour. There are numerous other tombs in the vicinity, with occupants known or unknown. The so-called barber’s tomb stands inside the garden, in the south-eastern corner; the Nila Gumbad (‘blue dome’) is just outside to the east, near the modern railway line; and the Sabz Burj (‘green tower’) occupies the roundabout on the Mathura Road.
Adjoining Bu Halima’s garden to the south is a large octagonal enclosure containing a tomb and a mosque built in 1547 for Isa Khan, a noble at the court of Sher Shah Sur. The tomb is also octagonal and almost identical to those built in that form during the Sayyid and Lodi periods. Adjacent to the east and extending up to the wall around Humayun’s tomb is another spacious enclosure known as the Arab Sarai. This was originally intended as a caravanserai, a resting place for travelling merchants and pilgrims, but was partly taken over by yet another mosque and tomb complex, known as Afsarwala and built for another sixteenth-century noble. The sturdy Archaeological Survey notice informs us that the incumbent is an unidentified commander and that the name is derived from the English word ‘officer’. So it is the ‘officer-wala’s tomb’. They do not explain why anybody at the Delhi court would adopt and corrupt an English word as early as the sixteenth century, a time when most military vocabulary was derived from Turkish. But some painstaking research by the historian Subhash Parihar reveals that Afsar was a Persian tribal name, and that there were several Afsars employed at the early Mughal court, including one who assisted Humayun during his victorious return and recapture of India in 1555. So he is a likely candidate for the patronage of these two elegant structures, placed near the tomb of his former master. So yes, fair enough, he was an officer. But Afsar was his name.
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