Delhi

by R V Smith

  On the Northern Vista of the Rajpath is a grave enclosure with ornamental tombs but the main tomb is missing. It belonged to the late Mughal period. At Kaka Nagar is the shrine of Hazrat Bibi Fatima, considered an elder sister of Hazrat Nizamuddin. She is revered as a woman saint who helps girls get good husbands. Besides her grave, there are graves of her admirers and followers. The main grave dates back to AD 1245.

  Near Humayun’s Tomb in the area known as Bhartiyam is a late-Mughal-period grave platform to which access is through the basement gate. A well nearby was constructed to provide drinking water to visitors and a garden around the enclosure. Mehrauli’s Hijron-ka-khanqa and the Panchkuin Road graves are two other notable kabrasthans.

  The enclosure of the graves of Nawab Iradatmand Khan and Nawab Musa Yar Khan at Lal Kuan, Old Delhi dates back to 1774. Iradat Khan was a general of Mohammad Shah’s while Musa Yar Khan was his kinsman, some say son, who was a nobleman of the court of Shah Alam. The graves are made of marble but are deteriorating. There are Muslim tombs in enclosures in Nizamuddin Basti and also in the Karbala at Jor Bagh where, among other notables, lie Maha Khanum and the famous Mughal general Mahabat Khan of Jahangir and Shah Jahan’s times. The graveyards at Idgah and the one behind Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg are the most widely used ones now.

  Delhi also has a Parsi cemetery and some samadhis at Nigambodh Ghat, which is believed to date back to 1000 BC. However, the samadhi of Mitra Sen at Mitraon village, Najafgarh is unique. It dates back to the late Mughal period and commemorates the founder of Miraon village. The Pets’ Corner at the Tis Hazari is a graveyard of its own kind.

  The Christian cemeteries are at Lothian Road (1806) and Rajpur Road (1850). The Skinner family graveyard rests at Kashmiri Gate, and the Nicholson cemetery is where the British hero of the 1857 Revolt lies buried. The Prithviraj Road cemetery of the early twentieth century and the late nineteenth-century Paharganj cemetery along with the Brar Square War Cemetery are more Christian cemeteries. Then there are the new graveyards of Burari and Dwarka. A hoary cemetery near Ajmeri Gate was demolished for the extension of Delhi Main Station and the one in Kishanganj faces extinction. In keeping with the times, most of the old Christian graveyards are already filled up and there is no more space in Delhi for God’s Acre.

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  Guns and roses

  fter the ban on hunting, it is surprising that gun shops still exist in the capital. The oldest is believed to be the Delhi Gun House, Kashmiri Gate, perhaps older than the Singh Brothers and Garg arms dealers’ shops. There is a shop opposite the Fire Brigade office in Connaught Place too. An old colleague remembers more shops in the mart, near which the late Cyril Flory, fond of fishing and shikar, used to work at the Statesman.

  Prof Sydney Rebeiro, ex-dean of Student Welfare, Delhi University, recalls that his father used to buy guns and cartridges from a shop in Fatehpuri even though he lived in Kashmiri Gate, as he found it to be cheaper. There is another shop in the Link Road-Jhandewalan area, bordering Paharganj. Asaf Ali Road also had a shop and there was one at Scindia House too, owned by a German company, which had German and English guns which were exported to India in the pre-world war years.

  Among the buyers from this shop was late Frank Anthony. His guns would be maintained by the Menton company and taken out by the Anglo-Indian leader during hunting season. Like his mentor, Sir Henry Gidney, Anthony too was fond of hunting big game. Among the Kashmiri Gate regular gun buyers was George Heatherley who later migrated to Perth.

  Pre-Christmas and pre-New Year hunting were popular but shikaris also went out to shoot before birthdays of near and dear ones. Besides choice pieces of venison, they also presented them with roses as a sign of affection. But now fishing is the only substitute left and guns are bought for self-defence rather than shikar, whenever or wherever it is permitted by state governments, like culling of rampaging blue-bull herds, threatening standing crops and harassing farmers. Incidentally, blue-bull roast used to be an X-mas delicacy. But now those days are long gone, though guns and roses still remain.

  George Heatherley used to reminisce about how he and some Anglo-Indian friends, like Melville De Mellow and Manuel Aaron, the lawyer, used to go hunting on freezing winter nights. Game was plentiful in Gurgaon and even hunters from places like Mathura, Agra and Panipat used to come there looking for game. The noted shikari Cyril Thomas however preferred to shoot alone with his old muzzle-loader. He would sometimes borrow a rifle from the nawabzadas of Ghattia, whose father and grandfather were the nawabs of Datoli, in Aligarh district, before Partition and owned a gun shop too.

  Cyril once shot a blackbuck and while he was taking it with him, he was attacked by a wild boar. Though he managed to kill the marauder, the attack left him with three broken ribs, a fractured hand, twisted ankle and a strained neck. The buck was supposed to be served as venison to Christmas guests but was coupled with the extra delicacy of ham (as the fierce boar could not escape the injured hunter’s gun).

  Harrison was another keen shikari who used to come from Farah, where British officers enjoyed their favourite game of pig-sticking. The magistrate was the enthusiast who bought guns at Agra and Delhi. The latter naturally being a bigger and better arms market, from which Paliwal and Sons also bought suppliers for their shop located on the road to the Taj. The Rao Sahib of Dhirpura and his son patronized the shop, sometimes coming all the way to the outskirts of Delhi for a shoot in their army-discarded weapon-carrier.

  Mathura then boasted of a Masonic lodge, which attracted the British bureaucracy as much as the Qudsia Garden in Delhi. The missionaries of Clency School were also known to be great shikar enthusiasts and where do you think they bought their guns? At the German Menton shop at Scindia House. However it was from Kashmiri Gate that an American doctor attached to a US missionary organization hospital in Vrindavan, got his arms and ammunition. Once he fired a shot at a blue-bull in a field that was still to be harvested and hit a villager instead. Full of remorse, he carried the injured man on his shoulders right up to the hospital, where he operated on him.

  There was no AIIMS then in the capital though the irate villagers of Vrindavan wanted to take their man to Delhi for treatment, but when the doctor told them that he would not survive the journey, they took his word for it as they regarded him a sort of messiah who had cured village folk of all sorts of ailments.

  All these stories come to mind when one sees the gun shops at Delhi, for which hunters used to make a beeline towards, to buy the best imported arms before and after the Second World War. There were instances when the guns were misused for criminal activities. The revolver used by Godse to shoot Gandhiji was actually stolen from a gun shop in Gwalior, where it had been given for repairs by Sir Augustine Filose, last of the (Col.) Sirdars of Maharaja Scindia. Some of the Delhi shops closed long ago, but the ones that have survived have as their proprietors, grandsons or great grandsons of the original owners, who can narrate a thrilling yarn or two while selling a gun, provided you have an arms license – something not easily obtainable these days.

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  Halim at a Dawakhana

  ating hot, spicy halim from a cart vendor outside the Hindustani Dawakhana’s old building in Ballimaran one evening fifty years ago was a most educative experience. The Dawakhana opened in 1910 by Raja Kishan Kumar, is a memorial to Hakim Ajmal Khan, whose father, Hakim Mahmud Khan, was one of the sons of Hakim Sharif Ali, who died in 1790. There were other noted hakims also in Delhi then like Baqauliah, Talib Ahmad and Ghulam Najf Khan, but Mahmud Khan enjoyed a special reputation attached as he was to the Mughal Court. His expertise was inherited by his three sons, the eldest of whom died in 1901, a year after his father. The second, Hakim Abdul Majid passed away three year later, but Ajmal Khan, the youngest, born in 1863, a few months after the death of Bahadur Shah Zafar and more than six years before Mahatma Gandhi, lived on till 1927. Like his father, he too was credited with almost miraculous cures, so much so that he came to be known as the messiah of the sick in
the pre-Second World War years.

  The family of Hakim Ajmal Khan, said an octogenarian, who was insistent that the halim seller give him a slice of tongue as a preferred piece of meat, considered soft and delicious, remembered seeing Ajmal Khan walking down to his haveli in Ballimaran or escorting him to a house where somebody was very ill and needed his expert attention. The old man was just a boy then and in between spoonfuls of halim he let his memory wander to the 1920s when Hakim Sahib’s popularity was at its zenith, both as a healer and nationalist leader. Among his close friends, besides the Mahatma were the Reverend C.F. Andrews and the Nawab of Rampur, who regarded the hakim as more than a Pir and guide. There were times when Ajmal Khan charged a 1,000 rupees a day when he was called upon to treat members of the princely families. Those days, a thousand rupees was equivalent to more than 1 lakh these days. He was regarded as the ‘Rais of Delhi’ and was also honoured by the poet Shahid Dihlavi.

  His family is said to have come to India at the time of Babar and established itself in the vacuum left by the old hakims of the Sultanate period, which ended with the Lodis. Hospitals in those days were known as Bimaristans (place of the sick). The name Bimaristans, according to Prof Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, historian and teacher at Aligarh University, was replaced with Darul-Shifa (place of healing). As early as 1391, seven years before the sacking of Delhi by Amir Taimur, the second book of medicine (after Tib-e-Shabbi), Tib-i-Shifa-al-Khani contained a list of tested prescriptions of Indian medicine then available in the country. In Sikandar Lodi’s time (1488-1517), in an attempt to synthesize Ilm-ul-Tib and Ayurveda, appeared Madan-ul-Shifa-i-Sikandar Shahi. In that period skilled physicians were held in high esteem, observes Prof Siddiqui in his book, Composite Culture Under the Sultanate of Delhi. He says, ‘A sultan once decided to test the knowledge of his physician and sent three bottles, each containing the urine of a sick man, a monkey and a buffalo respectively. When the bottles (whose contents were kept secret) were brought to the chief physician of Malwa, Malik-ul-Hukama, the hakim smiled and said that one of the patients (the sick man) should be given medicine with warm water, the buffalo was to be given boiled cotton seeds, while the monkey should be set free. All of them would be cured.’ According to the historian Ziauddin Barani, Maulana Badruddin Damshqi (of Damascus) ‘to whom the physicians of Delhi turned for guidance,’ was such a competent physician that he could diagnose the disease and its cause by merely glancing at the patient. He did not even need to check a pulse. Mohammed bin Tughlaq had the art of treating patients while his nephew, Feroze Shah Tughlaq, built many hospitals for them. Much before him Alauddin Khilji also devoted much time and resources in the propagation of the science of medicine. Besides the Arabic, Greek and Central Asian classics, a whole lot of Sanskrit works were also translated into Persian to enrich medical knowledge.

  With such a heritage before it, the Sharifi family of Hakim Ajmal Khan continued to pursue and develop the art of healing. The Hakim Sahib was once tested by a nawab, who called him ‘to attend to a sick purdah woman’ without seeing ‘the face of the patient’ which was behind a curtain. The hakim felt the pulse and opined that the patient be given some luxurious grass to feed on. Ajmal Khan had seen through the bluff for the patient was not a woman but a goat. Another time he was given a bottle containing the urine of a baboon as that of a diabetic man. The hakim smelt the bottle and said that the patient should be fed bananas and left on a tree. These tales were related by the old mian while eating halim that evening in 1963, and when one read Prof Siddiqui’s book, one was immediately reminded of these latter-day incidents. Yet another one was of a woman with an incurable carbuncle which was cured by the bark of a tree and special grass from Kasganj in an age when medical science had not made the tremendous progress of our times.

  A lasting memorial to this great hakim is the Tibbia College in Karol Bagh, where both Unani and Ayurvedic medicine are taught to aspiring hakims. Its foundation stone was laid by Lord Hardinge in 1916 and was opened by Mahatma Gandhi in 1921. Ballimaran is far from it but the link with the college continues, as does the link with the park, market, and road nearby named after Ajmal Khan. But one doesn’t get to taste halim there. To eat it one has to come all the way to Ballimaran, where tales of Hakim Ajmal Khan’s legendary cures are on the lips of old timers residing near his hereditary home, Sharif Manzil.

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  Heritage of the Gumbads

  he gumbads (domes) of Delhi are also repositories of history which, however, are not given the attention they deserve. Domes came into prominence during the Muslim period, though there certainly were domed buildings before, but Hindu temples and other edifices by and large, lacked the finesse and excellence of the domes that came up later. The dome was essentially linked to the Islamic conception of heavenly structures (of which the Taj and Humayun’s Tomb are the best examples), though the one built by Kubla Khan was a different entity altogether since, despite the name, he believed in ancestral spirits that prophesied war and peace.

  The Shish Gumbad in Lodhi gardens dates back to pre-Mughal days. Maulvi Zafar Hasan says that it is the tomb of a Lodhi grandee, ‘a 10 square-metre chamber roofed by a dome whose ceiling is ornamented with floral motives and verses from the Quran’. The Gol Gumbad near Lal Bahadur Shastri Marg also belongs to the Lodhi era and measures 8.5 square metres. The dome springs from an octagonal neck. This gumbad, however, is not so prominent than the one on the tomb of an unknown nobleman, situated west of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. According to INTACH, the dome seems to answer the description of the ‘Phuta Gumbad’ mentioned by Maulvi Zafar Hasan. Since the dome is not cracked but in pretty good condition it is conjectured that it was repaired subsequent to the Maulvi’s observation in the pre-Partition days when claimants to such buildings were still around. The monument is not big but small and compact though the dome ill-suits its size. It dates back to the Tughlaq period and the person whose last resting place it was supposed to be was probably a courtier of Ferozshah Tughlaq who was a great builder himself and a lover of architecture. He not only built new palaces, fortifications and hunting lodges but also repaired edifices of earlier ages, including the Qutub Minar and some of the constructions of Alauddin Khilji and the rulers who preceded him.

  Dosirihya Gumbad in Nizamuddin village is of the Lodhi period and, though a tomb, is now a residence. The name suggests that its dome was double-headed but that cannot be ascertained, since the building is badly deteriorated. The Bara Khamba nearby has, besides a central dome, four domed apartments at each of the top corners of the structure. The encroachments on it have been cleared of late. Yet another domed tomb in the vicinity is of the late Mughal period. The dome has ‘an octagonal neck and Kangura motifs at parapet level’. Chini Ka Burj, west of the Nizamuddin Baoli, was built between 1550 and 1560. It is an oblong mosque with a domed chamber and tile work that gave its name (Chini) to the building, says INTACH.

  Atgah Khan’s tomb in the Nizamuddin Basti has a very prominent dome and commemorates the husband of Ji Ji Angah, one of the two wet-nurses of Akbar, who was slain by Adham Khan, son of the other wet-nurse, Maham Angah out of jealousy. Bari-Ka-Gumbad, east of this tomb, is of the Lodhi period and, according to Zafar Hasan, was probably a gateway to a building that no longer exists. Sabz Burj on Mathura Road stands like a sentinel to the architectural wealth of Nizamuddin area, the tiles on the dome (an excellent one) gave it the name but they were blue and not green as ‘Sahz’ suggests. The ASI has renovated this structure, a tomb, with blue, green, and yellow tiles on the neck of the dome that rises in majesty against the skyline.

  The tomb and mosque of Afsarwala towards the western gate of Humayun’s Tomb are also domed structures of the early Mughal period. The Laskar or court official of probably Humayun’s time was the one whom the two monuments commemorate – a nameless official who must have been a very influential person in his lifetime.

  Nila Gumbad, north of Nizammuddin station, is the tomb of Fahim Khan, Abdul Rahim Khan-e-Khanan’s close
attendant. ‘The building is an unequal octagon from outside and square from within,’ according to INTACH. It was constructed by the Khan-e-Khanan whose own disfigured tomb is close by. Blue tiles gave the mausoleum its name. Kale Khan Ka Gumbad in South Extension is supposed to be the tomb of Mubarak Khan Lohani, father of Darya Khan Lohani who is buried nearby. They were Lodhi period’s famous personages. Bare Khan Ka Gumbad too is in South Extension but the man buried in it remains anonymous. Chhote Khan Ka Gumbad and Bhure Khan Ka Gumbad in the same locality also honour Lodhi noblemen. But the domed building in Kilokhari village is the gateway of the tomb of Sayyid Mahmud, a contemporary of Hazrat Nizamuddin. So gumbads remain the hallmark of 700 years of rule by Muslim kings in Delhi.

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  History Enshrined in Mosques

  here are, according to INTACH, officially 213 listed mosques in Delhi, some with colourful names and a history of myth and legend behind them. Take the Hari Masjid in Chuna Mandi, Paharganj, built in the nineteenth Century, which got its name from the colour of the building. Lal Masjid (there are two at least) is red coloured, the more well-known one in Faiz Road, Karol Bagh constructed in 1930. Kali Masjid near Turkman Gate dates back to the time of Feroze Shah Tughlaq. Its real name is Kalan Masjid but it has come to be known as Kali Masjid, where the best nahari is sold. Another Kali Masjid is not so famous. Sarhandi Masjid near the Lahori Gate was built by Sarhindi Begum, one of the wives of Shah Jahan in 1650. Gularwali Masjid (constructed in 1940) is at S.P. Mukherji Marg, Old Delhi and is so known because at one time there were gular trees there. Gular is a small, reddish fruit which is quite sweet but now few people relish it. The Dervesh Masjid honours a dervish and the mosque near India Gate marks the site where Ghulam Qadir Rohilla was executed. However, the Jama Masjid of Shah Jahan is the crowning glory, surpassing even the Quwwat-ul-Islam mosque.