by R V Smith
After he ascended the throne, Zafar did not stop his visits to Mehrauli. As a matter of fact, he went there with his court for long periods especially during the rainy season. It was in the gardens of Mehrauli that his youthful queen Zinat Mahal played hide-and-seek with her maids and Zafar composed his soulful ghazals. Most of the buildings in the tehsil were built by him after the death of Akbar Shah. The baradari was the result of his distaste for the structure earlier erected by him in the Sawan Bhadon pleasure pavilion in the Red Fort, and which is now in a sorry state of disrepair, threatening to collapse any day.
The new baradari was a far better architectural achievement and more in keeping with Mughal heritage. Its imposing gateway and some other buildings are still there and in urgent need of being saved from colonizers. The Conservation Society of Delhi has approached the Lieutenant-Governor and other authorities on this issue and it is in the fitness of things that Bahadur Shah’s constructions are preserved for posterity.
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Lady Willingdon’s Hindsight
t was the hindsight of Lady Willingdon, the viceroy’s wife that actually gave birth to what are now known as the Lodhi Gardens and whose 75th anniversary was recently observed in 2011. Being fond of morning walks, the Vicereine found no better spot than the area dotted with the tombs of the Sayyid and Lodhi dynasties. Her sharp eye noticed that each of these tombs was originally enclosed by a garden. This was in keeping with the Islamic belief in paradise gardens. Since Behesht is a bagh, much like the garden of Eden where Adam and Eve dwelt, Muslim rulers were either buried in gardens where they spent their leisure hours or their successors laid gardens around their tombs.
It was later that the Mughals developed their four-fold field plan, such as the one followed for Humayun’s Tomb, Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra (named after Sikandar Lodhi Nizam Khan, believed to be the first Muslim ruler to colonise Agra) and even the Taj Mahal – the best example of a garden tomb. After that, Roshanara’s tomb in Roshanara Gardens became a good successor garden. Her elder sister, Jahanara, was even more fond of gardens. She was the one who built Begum Bagh in Chandni Chowk, following a grand design, that included a sarai or inn par excellence on which was inscribed the famous quotation ‘Agar Firdaus barua zamin ast / haminasto, hamisasto, hamisasto’ (if there be a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here). That the same words were inscribed in the Red Fort’s Dewan-e-Khas, where the Peacock Throne of Shah Jahan was installed, does not take away from the emperor’s comment on his elder daughter’s exquisite construction.
Jahanara Begum also laid a large garden near the place now known as Tees Hazari, where she had planted 30,000 plants-shrubs, trees and bushes that extended right up to what became Qudsia Garden in the reign of Mohammad Shah Rangila. The irony is that Jahanara was as per her wishes, not buried in a garden tomb but in a half katcha (mud) grave near the shrine of Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia.
Coming back to the Lodhi monuments, Sikandar Lodhi’s octagonal tomb was surrounded by a square garden, ‘enclosed within high walls, with a wall mosque on the west and a gateway on the south,’ according to a historian.
The tomb on the north of the Shish Gumbad, decorated with Persian tiles, that occupies a spot on the north-west corner of the Lodhi Gardens, is believed to have been built on the orders of Sikandar Lodhi, probably for an influential officer of his court, though his identity is not known. There are signs that a garden existed there too. So also at the Bara Gumbad close by which, however, doesn’t have any grave. Some 300 metres from it is the tomb of Mohammad Shah Sayyid, which is an improvement on the mausoleum of his predecessor, Mubarak Shah Sayyid, in Kotla Mubarakpur. This one too had a garden and so did that of his successor.
One would not be too wrong in saying that Lady Willingdon surveyed these tombs with great interest and came to the conclusion that a large garden enclosing them would be a real contribution to Delhi’s gardening heritage.
How well her plan worked is there not only for all to see but also to enjoy during daily outings there. Ask people like Khushwant Singh and they will swear that it’s true. Kudos to the Vicereine whose name and fame lingers on in this fresh air lung of New Delhi.
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Redeeming Sher Shah’s legacy
he spotlight recently was on Sher Shah Suri, whose mausoleum in Sasaram, Bihar, was found dirty, defaced, and utterly neglected by Union Minister Jairam Ramesh. The minister is a man of varied interests, as is apparent from his visit to an out-of-the way monument last week, where local hoi polloi, particularly young lovers looking for privacy, are to be found day in and day out. The last resting place of Sher Shah’s father nearby is also a picture of desolation. Quite a contrast to his arch-rival Humayun’s tomb, now very spruced up under the Aga Khan Foundation restoration plan. Sher Shah died during the siege of Kalanger in May 1545 during an explosion. He was mortally wounded and did not survive for long at a time when he was at the zenith of his power, after ousting the Mughals, temporarily though. Had he lived on, Humayun might not have been able to win back his kingdom even with Persian help.
Sher Shah, acclaimed by most historians, particularly Dr Kanungo, rebuilt Humayun’s Dinpanah (Purana Qila), one of whose prominent buildings is the Sher Mandal. It was there that Humayun eventually met his end after an accidental fall on the stairs, which he was descending in a hurry to answer the evening call for prayer. The step on which his foot got caught in his robes still exists and one can see that it is crooked and accident-prone. Was it a deliberate act by the masons or Sher Shah to teach a lesson to hasty enemies or a quirk of destiny that the stair should have been there in the first place? Secondly, the call for prayer was given at the wrong time by a man seemingly deputizing for the regular muezzin while Humayun was scanning the skies for a constellation that ‘had swung into his ken’ (to quote from Keats, as much an opium eater as the King). No doubt he was surprised by the early azan and his impulse to get down and rush to the masjid proved fatal. Was it kismet’s way of retribution for the sudden end of the Sur dynasty? One cannot help thinking thus, though it is not true.
In the case of Sher Shah, it is not known whether the gunpowder explosion at Kalangar was an accident or a deliberate act by an envious soldier of his, perhaps harbouring ill-will on behalf of the ousted Mughals. Some do not rule out this possibility at a time when victory was within easy grasp of the Afghan forces. Be that as it may, another surprising thing is why did Sher Shah wish to be buried in distant Sasaram and not Delhi, which he had embellished with many buildings and even built a new city of Siri. The walls of his township still stand at places along with at least two gates – Lal Darwaza and Kabuli Darwaza. The simple answer is that the Afghan ruler was deeply attached to Sasaram, where he and his family had lived for long and where his father had died and was buried.
Giving concrete shape to his sentiments, Sher Shah built his mausoleum in his lifetime and that of his father too. And what a beautiful monument it is, situated in a mini-lake, with a baoli or step-well attached to it. Jairam Ramesh, in a letter to the Union Minister for Culture, Kumari Selja, quoted by a news agency, has drawn attention to the deplorable state of the monument and dirty water in the lake and the baoli, made filthier by human and animal excreta and dumping of other rubbish by visitors or vandals. And yet this magnificent building, according to reports, was included in 1998 in UNESCO’s tentative list for World Heritage Monuments, which included the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, and Qutub Minar.
That Sher Shah’s creation should be at par with such world famous sites is all the more reason to preserve it for posterity. It is a tribute to a far-sighted monarch who not only built the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar, lining it up with trees, wells and sarais or inns for the convenience of travelers but also suppressed highwaymen. It’s certainly a long way from Bengal to Peshawar and that the ill-fated ruler could complete the project during the course of five years of his brief reign is a example of his sagacity and administrative skills. Even the British made use of the Grand Trunk Road to establ
ish an integrated countrywide link.
It was on Sher Shah’s policies that Akbar based his principles of governance to achieve tremendous success and gain the title of ‘The Great Mogol’ the world over. In that sense Sher Shah could be said to be his precursor, albeit unknowingly. Even the rupee was his coinage – and how smoothly it fits into our modern-day financial dealings is evident. As homage to this wise ruler, the Archaeological Survey of India should take immediate steps to protect and preserve his mausoleum.
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Rehabilitating the Dead
fter Burari, Sector 24 of Dwarka has become the site for two new cemeteries and a crematorium to facilitate burials and cremation of departed citizens of an overpopulated city bursting at its seams. But there is one drawback: no memorial slabs would be allowed on the graves which would be made of mud so that they would not last long and make way for future burials. How then to placate the sentiments of the bereaved families which would like the memory of their dear departed to be enshrined for posterity? Maybe Falak the two-year-old battered girl also needs a memorial at Ferozshah Kotla Cemetery to commemorate her as a much-abused departed child. Students of history will agree that the graveyards of Delhi are repositories of events that took place in different ages. Visit the Lothian Road cemetery and you will get an insight into happenings as far back as the early nineteenth century, when the burial of Britishers began there. Though many of the tombstones are missing or broken because of utter neglect, there are still some which provide interesting information about those days. One tombstone tells us about a merchant who buried three wives but the fourth survived and was able to bury him. Another (now untraceable) commemorated Beresford, manager of the Delhi and Lahore Bank, who was killed along with his wife and daughters on 11 May 1857 when the Mutiny broke out in Chandni Chowk and the bank-cum-residence was looted and destroyed. Others who died could not claim even a little space to bury a handful of dust, so eloquently sought by old King Lear in Shakespeare’s play.
In Nicholson Cemetery, near Kashmiri Gate, besides Brig-Gen. Nicholson’s renovated tomb, with a slab narrating the manner of his death in the Sepoy Uprising, there is a small marble stone telling one about the child whose mother (Harriet) buried the infant in great sorrow there. Not far from it is the grave of a woman whose son had this epitaph engraved on it:
Passing stranger call this not a place of dreary gloom.
I love to linger near this spot. It is my beloved mother’s tomb.
The Christian cemetery in Dwarka will be bereft of such tombstones and the adjacent Muslim ones too. There have been Urdu poets who have written some of the best epitaphs and elegies on their near and dear ones. Maikash Akbarbadi wrote an epitaph on behalf of a young friend who had lost his wife:
Na aye raas chaman ko
Woh naubahar hoon main
Kise ke aish-do roza ki yaadgar hoon main.
The woman had died in childbirth at the age of twenty-one. Hence her comparison to the blossoms that did not bloom in the garden. If memory serves right, the poet Fani, commenting on the death of his daughter, wrote:
Mal-e-soz-e-gham
Nihani dekte jao
Bharak uthe hai shama
Zindagani dekhte jao.
Which means how one sees life passing by after the lamp has emitted a high glow and then splutters out.
Talking of epitaphs, the one on the grave of a bugle master, where regimental buglers of the British Army started coming for bugle practice every day is most poignant. When a lovely British girl, Rose Aylmer, died during the pre-Mutiny days of the East India Company, the poet Walter Savage Landor was so deeply moved in faraway England that he sent the following lines to her family:
Ah what avails the sceptred race
Ah what the form divine
What every virtue, every grace
Rose Aylmer were thine.
The War Cemetery at Brar Sqaure should have an epitaph written by T.S. Eliot on the British solders who died in Africa during German Field Marshal Ronmel’s Desert campaign.
Epitaphs are footnotes of history and convey much more than just sorrow for the departed whom they commemorate. Ghalib did not write an epitaph but an elegy on his pupil and deeply-beloved nephew Arif, who died as young as the poet Thomas Chatterton ‘that wonderous boy’. He is piqued with him for dying so soon and leaving the vague solace of meeting again on Qayamat, the Last Judgment Day. He ends up wondering whether he couldn’t have died some other day. Incidentally, Ghalib had lost his own children in infancy that left him and his wife Umrao Begum heartbroken for the rest of their lives. Their sorrow was so deep that Ghalib did not even try to express it in elegiac form. Josh Malihabadi also did not mourn his daughter in verse. Something, which he might have regretted later.
It would be advisable if the MCD, which has built the graveyards and crematorium in Dwarka, reviews its decision and allows epitaphs on graves of both Muslims and Christians, one of which is of a 101-year-old man, and allows erection of memorial benches for those cremated. Another favour would be the planting of trees at the site to shield the graves from rain and shine and also provide shelter to the bereaved from the heat on blistering summer days.
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Mirza Ghalib’s legacy
irza Ghalib’s death anniversary on 15 February, passed without the enthusiasm witnessed on his birthday, 27 December. When one visited Gali Mir Qasim Jan in the morning, there was nothing unusual about his haveli, part of which has been turned into a memorial. An old man was standing outside with his grandson, waiting for a rickshaw to take the boy to the madrasa. When asked about Ghalib, he knitted his brows and said, ‘You are talking about someone who did not set a good example all his life. He passed his days in romantic reveries and the evenings at mushairas or in drinking and courting dancing girls. Such a Mussulman hardly needs to be remembered. Even though he lived next to a masjid, he hardly ever visited it and, to show off his scholarship, made a wisecrack of a couplet, ‘Masjid ke zer sai ek ghar bana liya hai / Ek banda-i-qamina hamsai khuda hai’, which means that if the man thought of himself as such a wretched neighbour of God how can the world think of him otherwise? Mark me, he lost all his children at birth because of divine displeasure with his ways. The old mian might have gone senile, but a shopkeeper of Lal Kuan thought no better. ‘Sharifzade nahin the woh varna is elake ki har masjid mein unke naam ki goonj hoti’, which translated means that he was not such a gentleman after all, otherwise every mosque in the locality would have resounded with his name. Another old man waiting for breakfast at a nahari shop, probably his daughter-in-law had played truant, hit his walking stick hard on the ground, and pushed up the bifocals from his nose angrily when one mentioned Ghalib to him. He was of the opinion that the present-day English educated society had started making too much of him when Delhi had produced better poets and role models. Such sentiments, by and large, prevail in Ballimaran and its environs among people who are shopkeepers, vendors, artisans, or retired men, and whose time is passed by offering namaz five times a day. In between they count the days when they would be able to keep the Ramzan fast and celebrate Id-ul-Fitr, after which the countdown for Id-uz-Zuha and the Haj associated with it would begin. Then Muharrum’s ten days and the tazias would occupy their minds. Prayers, eating, and religious discussions make up their days as they do not ‘measure life in coffee spoons’ but with more spiritual things. So can you blame them for not having a high opinion of Ghalib, who had described himself as half-Mussulman when accosted by a British Officer in the aftermath of the revolt of 1857? ‘You Muslim,’ queried the Gora Sahib. ‘Half,’ replied Ghalib. Asked to explain, the poet said, ‘Though I drink wine, I don’t eat pork’. The officer laughed heartily at the tongue-in-cheek reply of the light-complexioned, raw-boned, bearded witty man of medium height, wearing a conical cap above his inordinately long ears and a worn-out medieval choga. He let him off with a toss of his head as though dismissing one of nature’s quirks who believed in ‘making up in the tavern for the time lost
in the mosque’.
Be that as it may, one can still retrace Ghalib’s walk from his haveli to the Jama Masjid, past haveli Azam Khan and the mandir, after which the mohalla becomes predominantly Hindu, with shops of wedding card printers and in between those selling chole-bhature, also a kachoriwalah doing brisk business with half-famished boys and girls coming home from school crowding around his cart. One must confess that the kachoris are even better than the those sold at Chawri Bazaar. Passing this gali in other years Ghalib used to make his way to the shop of Masita, where he ate kebabs, either before or after having three pegs of Old Tom whisky. He then visited the kotha of the ‘dark dancing girl’ who had stolen his heart in old age. While relaxing there Ghalib sometimes heard a beggar or two sing his verses to seek alms. That might have made him think that he had gained respect in the eyes of his beloved. But the kotha visit was not an everyday affair. There were problems too because of his straitened circumstances, which once made him long to seek shelter in the mahal of the emperor’s relative Mirza Elahi Bux after the roof of his own house had collapsed in heavy rain. Also, there were mushairas to be attended to in the Red Fort before Mirza Fatehullah Beg’s 1910 masterpiece, Dilli ki Akhri Shama. The reputed French scholar and linguist Garcin de Tassy kept track of them in his annual lectures on the state of Urdu literature in the nineteenth century. Besides the formal ones, there were improvised mushairas in places like Haveli Sadr Sadur at Matia Mahal. Up to a few years ago one could see the elevated stone lampstand on which the shama was kept to light up the faces of the Shairs and those assembled to hear them.
Back to Gali Qasim Jan. One met a girl, tall, fair, and very good-looking returning from Rabia Girls’ School nearby. She was shy but when asked about Ghalib thought better of him than the other residents. ‘Bahut lajawab the Ghalib Mian. Unke sher tau subhan Allah the. Ji chahata hai bas sunhe jaian’ (Ghalib was nonpareil. One never gets tired of listening to his verses).