Delhi Darshan

by Giles Tillotson

  Even Humayun is not the lead character in this neighbourhood of the dead. The area developed into a necropolis (with many subsidiary burials within the established tomb gardens) because of its proximity to the dargah of the Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya. The idea was that, when the dead are raised on the Day of Judgment, those who have lain so long in the earth close to a saint, whose ticket is guaranteed, might benefit as he will speak up for his close companions.

  These days the busy Mathura Road separates Humayun’s and the other garden tombs from the grave of the saint, embedded in the dense urban village named after him as Nizamuddin. But having toured the carefully preserved monuments and manicured lawns on one side of the road, it is worth stepping across to visit a tomb that is still a living sacred site, a place of continuous pilgrimage, of avid worship and haunting music. Some of the qawwalis you might hear there were composed by the poet Amir Khusrau, a friend and contemporary of the saint, who is also buried near his mentor in the precincts. A much later follower of the saint’s teachings, the seventeenth-century Mughal princess Jahanara, is also to be found here. The loyal daughter of Shah Jahan and his queen Mumtaz Mahal, who is buried in the Taj Mahal, Jahanara has a touchingly simple grave in a modest if elegant enclosure. The scooped-out top of the sarcophagus is designed to facilitate the planting of grass or flowers, in compliance with the orthodox notion that nothing but earth should cover the grave of the faithful.

  Having set his mark on the city of the sultans, in the form of his father’s tomb, Akbar moved on to Agra and rarely revisited the old capital. Throughout his long reign, which spans the second half of the sixteenth century, Akbar was always on the move, commanding campaigns, suppressing revolts and forging alliances. The empire that had been formed by the Khaljis and the Tughluqs in the fourteenth century lay fragmented after Timur’s invasion. Akbar’s outstanding military achievement was that he reunited the whole of north India (down to a line running from Mumbai to Puri) under Mughal rule. Independent sultanates like Malwa and Gujarat that had broken away were brought back under central control. The Rajput states were subdued, sometimes by force (as in the siege of Chittor in 1567) but more often by carefully balanced strategic alliances. Many members of the ruling Rajput families—maharajas and their sons—were encouraged to join the imperial service as commanders and regional governors. By this means, and by marrying Rajput princesses, Akbar succeeded in converting the greatest potential internal threat to his empire into its strongest support.

  Akbar frequently shifted his base according to the pressing needs of the moment. He rebuilt the forts of Agra, Allahabad and Lahore, well placed for dealing, respectively, with central and eastern India and the northern frontier. The one phase of his reign when he seemed more settled—in the 1570s—was when he built the palace complex at Fatehpur Sikri. Delhi was not his home.

  It remained home, though, for some people who were close to him. One such was Maham Anga, his former wet-nurse. More than a mother figure, Maham Anga was a shrewd political fixer in the early years of Akbar’s reign, who used her influence over the young emperor to frustrate the ambitions of her rivals. Her most conspicuous victim was Bairam Khan, the loyal general who led all of Akbar’s major campaigns in the opening years of the reign but was dismissed from service, on Maham Anga’s advice, in 1560. With Bairam Khan out of the way, Maham Anga was able to advance her son, Adham Khan, who had been Akbar’s childhood playmate. This impetuous youth was not up to the roles assigned to him. In a fit of jealousy, he murdered a senior official, Ataga Khan (the husband of another former wet-nurse). Akbar ran into Adham Khan as he was returning from the deed, and disarmed the fleeing assassin by punching him in the face. He then ordered the unconscious Adham to be thrown from the parapet. Surprisingly the fall did not kill him. So Akbar ordered him to be carried up and thrown again, until he was dead. He is buried in a large and handsome tomb close to the walls of the Lal Kot in Mehrauli, next to a stinking garbage tip. It is built on an octagonal plan, a throwback to a design that had been adopted for some tombs of the Sayyid, Lodi and Sur eras. It is popularly known as the ‘Bhul-bhulaiyon’ or maze, on account of the complicated internal corridors in its upper level. Adham Khan’s victim, Ataga Khan, is buried in a gem of a tomb close to the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya. Smaller, and built on a square plan, it is more compact and has exquisite inlay work over its external surfaces.

  Another octagonal tomb of this period, also in Mehrauli but closer to the Qutb Minar, is that of Adham Khan’s brother, Quli Khan. This building is exceptional because in the early nineteenth century the governor general’s agent in Delhi, Thomas Metcalfe, bought it from Quli Khan’s descendants and converted it into his summer house. He named it ‘Dilkusha’ or ‘heart delighting’. Metcalfe’s main residence, like those of other British officials of his time, lay to the north of Shahjahanabad, as far away as one could get from this spot. He came here either for the peace and quiet or to stay close to the emperor of his day, Bahadur Shah Zafar, who also had a house in Mehrauli. Metcalfe lived in Delhi for forty years (1813–53) and was one of the ‘White Mughals’—those early British residents who readily adopted Indian customs. And Dilkusha is a cultural hybrid: a Muslim tomb converted into an Englishman’s house set amid picturesque gardens and scattered purpose-built follies. There is even a little lake and a boathouse, and the local village boys come to play cricket on the lawn. You can easily imagine yourself in the English Home Counties, but for the ruined Akbar-period arches overhead.

  The reign of Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605–27), considered from a Delhi perspective, is similarly marked by the absence of the emperor from the city and the construction of a couple of notable tombs. One of them is a white marble pavilion, enclosed by pierced screens, with a flat roof supported by sixty-four columns (from which it takes its popular name, Chaunsath Khamba). The form is unusual but in one sense more orthodox than the domed tombs, because Islamic law prescribes simple enclosures rather than grand sepulchres for burial. It is situated not far from Ataga Khan’s tomb and the principal occupant is his son, Mirza Aziz Kokaltash. When his father was murdered, he was appointed in his place and flourished under Akbar’s patronage. His relations with Jahangir were less stable (he spent a period out of favour and in jail), but he lived to the age of eighty-five.

  Further south, on the other side of the busy Mathura Road, stands the tomb of another famous son: Abdur Rahim Khan, usually referred to by his title, Khan-i-Khanan. His father, Bairam Khan, was assassinated when he was a small child, but he grew up in court circles and eventually more or less took his father’s former place as a devoted and reliable servant of Akbar. He continued in service under Jahangir but had a more difficult time with him. At one point, suspected of disloyalty, he was sent his son’s severed head, which was served to him like a melon. The Khan-i-Khanan was a man of considerable learning who patronized poets and wrote himself, in Arabic, Persian and Hindi, under the pen-name Rahim. His once grand tomb follows the pattern of Humayun’s in style: it is smaller and more compact, and squarer in overall form. According to his latest biographer, he built it originally for his wife, Mah Banu; certainly, both she and he are buried in it. It is much diminished by the loss of the marble cladding on the dome—allegedly stolen in the eighteenth century by a prime minister who wanted it for his own tomb.

  During the years of his reign, Jahangir divided his time between various centres. These included Agra, from where he supervised the building of Akbar’s tomb in the suburb called Sikandra; Ajmer, where he was met by Sir Thomas Roe, the first ambassador sent by Britain to the Mughal court; Kashmir, where he exercised his passion for garden design; and Mandu, the sprawling fort at the heart of Malwa. Delhi, by contrast, began to show signs of neglect. Two early British visitors, passing through in 1615, noted that ‘the inhabitants are poor and beggarly, by reason of the king’s long absence’.

  Matters did not immediately improve under his successor, Shah Jahan (r. 1627–58). Initially preoccupied with the wars in the
Deccan, Shah Jahan established his base at Burhanpur. He also spent much time in Agra. In the course of the 1630s he replaced many of Akbar’s sandstone palaces within the Agra fort with a suite of white marble apartments for his own use. At the same time he also supervised the building of the Taj Mahal on the riverbank at Agra, the tomb of his favourite wife, Arjumand Banu Begam, known as Mumtaz Mahal.

  Then in 1638 Shah Jahan took the bold decision to re-establish Delhi as the capital of the empire. Bold because, rather than occupying or developing any of the numerous existing citadels, his plan involved starting again from scratch, building an entirely new city (counted the last on the traditional list of Delhi’s ‘seven cities’) on a site to the north of the previous ones, on an unprecedented scale. It even had a new name. Though often referred to as Delhi in both historical and modern sources, it is officially called Shahjahanabad, after its founder.

  The principal buildings and streets were laid out over the course of ten years and were ready for occupation by 1648. First came the fort, called the Lal Qila or Red Fort, containing the imperial palace and the headquarters of the army. This was located to the east, on the bank of the Yamuna river, thus replicating the arrangement in Agra, though on a more orderly plan and a much larger scale. This position also abuts the Salimgarh, a fortified enclosure that had been built during the Sur interregnum and was one of the few previously existing buildings on the site. Though surrounded by a moat, the fort was connected to the city that grew up on the designated space to its west and south by two great arterial roads. One of these roads, now known as Chandni Chowk, ran east-west, from the main gate of the fort, right across the whole breadth of the city. The second, Faiz Bazaar, ran from the fort’s southern gate to the city’s southern perimeter. On an elevated rock situated on the angle between these two perpendicular roads, Shah Jahan built the Jami Masjid, the new city’s congregational mosque, the largest in India.

  Finally, the whole city, covering a space of two and a half square miles, was surrounded by a wall. Unlike the handsome, dressed sandstone walls of the Red Fort, the city wall was originally made of a mixture of rubble and mud, held together by cement. Only the gates were built of stone. Much later, in the early nineteenth century, parts of the wall were reinforced and rebuilt in stone by the British, though the only people kept out by this work were the British themselves, in 1857. Nowadays, most of the city wall has disappeared, though one portion survives on the eastern side, to the south of the Red Fort. As modern roads now run immediately outside where the wall once stood, the original shape of the city is preserved on the map. And the gates on the southern side still stand, so that while approaching the city one has at least the illusion of entering a walled city, and it is still commonly described as such, though in fact it has ceased to be one.

  Much has changed inside the non-existent walls too. Old Delhi—as it is now called—certainly has a vitality of its own. Its narrow lanes and congested markets are effervescent with commerce and life. But the grandeur of an imperial city has largely evaporated. Even the space immediately around the fort, though more open and uncluttered, is not maintained with any sense of history. The police barricades, the symbolic and tedious security system (increased in response to a terrorist attack in 2000), and the great swathe of grey tarmac, do little to enhance the fort’s splendour.

  To get a picture of how it once was, we may turn to a description written in 1663 by François Bernier, a French physician who lived in Delhi. Bernier tells us first that the broad strip of sandy ground between the Red Fort’s eastern wall and the river was used for staging elephant fights and for military reviews for the benefit of the emperor, ‘who witnesses the spectacle from the windows of the palace’. Today a rather feeble formal garden occupies this space, but many Delhiites will recall the days when it was the site of the Chor Bazaar (or ‘thieves’ market’)—a lively place that specialized in goods of dubious provenance and authenticity. The river moved away long ago: broad but shallow, it was always liable to change and has shifted its course to a more easterly line.

  On the western side of the fort, facing towards the city, Bernier tells us there was ‘a deep ditch faced with hewn stone, filled with water, and stocked with fish’. The ditch was connected to the river, the likely source of the fish. It is hard to imagine anything living in the polluted waters of the Yamuna today. Bernier next describes the area that is now smothered in asphalt:

  Adjoining the ditch is a large garden, filled at all times with flowers and green shrubs, which, contrasted with the stupendous red walls, produce a beautiful effect. Next to the garden is the great royal square, faced on one side by the gates of the fortress, and on the opposite side of which terminate the two most considerable streets of the city. The tents of such Rajas as are in the king’s pay, and whose weekly turn it is to mount guard, are pitched in this square . . . In this place also at break of day they exercise the royal horses, which are kept in a spacious stable not far distant; and here the Kobat-khan, or grand Muster-master of the cavalry, examines carefully the horses of those who have been received into the service . . . Here too is held a bazaar or market for an endless variety of things; which like the Pont-neuf at Paris, is the rendezvous for all sorts of mountebanks and jugglers.

  Perhaps the old Chor Bazaar was not so inauthentic after all. But in complaining of ‘mountebanks’, Bernier had his sights on the astrologers, whom he regarded as peddlers of superstition:

  These wise doctors remain seated in the sun, on a dusty piece of carpet, handling some old mathematical instruments, and having open before them a large book which represents the signs of the zodiac . . . They tell a poor person his fortune for a paysa (which is worth about one sol); and after examining the hand and face of the applicant, turning over the leaves of the large book, and pretending to make certain calculations, these impostors decide upon the Sahet or propitious moment of commencing the business he may have in hand. Silly women . . . flock to the astrologers, whisper to them all the transactions of their lives, and disclose every secret with no more reserve than is practised by a scrupulous penitent in the presence of her confessor.

  No less a piece of theatre—though vastly grander and more architectural—is the fort itself and the imperial palace complex within. Though no doubt meant to house and to protect, it is also designed to awe, to make us cower in submission. Its grand west entrance, the Lahore Gate, is visible from the entire length of Chandni Chowk, the city’s main arterial road even today, despite the traffic and accretions, and must have been even more imposing when the view was less impeded.

  Chandni Chowk; photograph by Samuel Bourne, 1865

  The barbican that curls in front of Lahore Gate, somewhat diminishing its impact as we approach, was added by Aurangzeb. It is traditionally believed that Shah Jahan, who lived to see it (or at least hear about it), was dismayed and complained that his son had added a superfluous veil. And if the story is true, it is evidence that the fort’s creator was thinking more in visual than in military terms. Entering the gate, we are immediately plunged into the dimness of the Chatta Chowk, a tunnel of market stalls, originally stocked with provisions for the palace’s residents, now piled high with the usual tourist curios.

  We emerge into a sunlit space that was once an enclosed square and a crossroads. Level with this point a broad street ran from left to right across the whole width of the fort, down to the Delhi Gate on the southern side. Looming on our left are the British barracks that saddened the heart of the architectural historian James Fergusson, but which are now restored and cherished as relics of one period of the fort’s history. Straight ahead stands a stately red sandstone pavilion known as the Naqqar Khana, after the drummers’ chamber that was housed in its upper storey. A common feature in Indian palaces, a naqqar khana was where musicians assembled to help proclaim arrivals and departures and to signal the passing phases of the day. François Bernier found the sound hard to get used to:

  To the ears of an European recently arrived, this music
sounds very strangely for there are ten or twelve hautboys, and as many cymbals, which play together . . . On my first arrival it stunned me so as to be insupportable: but such is the power of habit that this same noise is now heard by me with pleasure; in the night, particularly, when in bed and afar, on my terrace this music sounds as solemn, grand, and melodious.

  The Naqqar Khana is also a gateway that gives access to a much larger space, originally lined by arcades, terminating in the grandest room of the palace, the Diwan-i-Am or the hall of public audience. Open on three sides, it is composed of columns and arches of red sandstone with an elevated marble throne balcony against the back wall. Inlaid in the wall behind are panels of Italian pietra dura, which were removed to the South Kensington Museum after the 1857 Rebellion but restored in 1903 on the insistence of Lord Curzon, in time for the Delhi Durbar of that year. Despite the high finish of the dressed red stone and the delicacy of the carved ornament, Bernier tells us that the columns were originally painted; and depictions of the hall dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seem to indicate that it was plastered and white. Bernier also tells us how the room was used:

  The Monarch every day, about noon, sits upon his throne, with some of his sons at his right and left; while eunuchs standing about the royal person flap away the flies with peacocks’ tails, agitate the air with large fans, or wait with undivided attention and profound humility to perform the different services allotted to each. Immediately under the throne is an enclosure, surrounded by silver rails, in which are assembled the whole body of Omrahs [nobility], the Rajas [regional rulers], and the Ambassadors, all standing, their eyes bent downward, and their hands crossed. At a greater distance from the throne are the Mansebdars [officials] or inferior Omrahs, also standing in the same posture of profound reverence. The remainder of the spacious room, and indeed the whole courtyard, is filled with persons of all ranks, high and low, rich and poor, because it is in this hall that the King gives audience indiscriminately to all his subjects.