Delhi

by R V Smith

  Dinner over, it’s time to stroll into Azad park and after that some devotion at the shrines of Hare Bhare and Hazrat Kalimullah. Those with a Sufi bent of mind spend long hours at these places and include Sarmad Shahid’s red-coloured tomb in their list of dargahs to be visited at night. After that they go home for some rest and then get up in time for sehri, the last meal before the roza. They can go back to sleep again and by the time they awake, it is late morning. But few shops are open. This will continue till late afternoon, when the market will come back to life with food sales before the breaking of the fast.

  The contrast between the Jama Masjid and Inder Lok is still great but remember the older area too faced similar problems when Shah Jahan decided to move his capital from Agra to Delhi. When Shahjahanabad was coming up, the emperor camped at Kala Mahal, now an almost forgotten monument in Daryaganj. Being a man who never missed a namaz or a roza, he was acutely conscious of the needs of the people who had begun to settle down in his new city. Would you believe that more than a few kinds of food had to be brought from Nizamuddin, Mehrauli, and sometimes even from Agra, for them to observe Ramzan the way it should be.

  51

  Recollection on the Mutiny

  elhi annually recollects the momentous events of 1857 when, on 11 May, the troops who had ‘rebelled’ at Meerut the previous day crossed the Jamuna and sought admission to the Red Fort. Finding the Calcutta Gate (which was later demolished to make room for the Railway) closed, they marched south and entered Daryaganj through the Raj Ghat Gate (also no more). Having entered the Walled City, the freedom fighters took possession of the fort. They then fanned out into the lanes and by-lanes of the city and were joined by the infantry from Meerut and were virtual masters of the city by 8 p.m. Only within the Kashmiri Gate, where the magazine was situated, did the British still hold out. But by the next afternoon Delhi was free of the Company Sarkar.

  It was a quick, albeit, bloody operation but that perhaps could not be helped under the circumstances, for wars of freedom are not fought with tin soldiers. But despite the unfortunate massacre, it was a unique event in the annals of Indian history, which restored the seat of the Mughals to whom it belonged.

  Except for traces of the cannonading of the walls of the Kashmiri Gate by the British, however, little remains to remind the Delhiwalah of the ‘Mutiny’. But outside the GPO, two small buildings with mounted cannon-heads proclaim the site of the magazine. There is a marble tablet atop one of them, which commemorates the deed of ‘Nine brave Englishmen’ who under the command of Lt. Willoughby, blew up the magazine to prevent it from falling into the hands of the ‘Mutineers’. Five of the defenders perished in the attempt. Another tablet below clarifies that those described, as ‘Mutineers’ were members of the freedom force fighting to throw off the yoke of a foreign government.

  One wonders if a better memorial to these gallant troopers of Bahadur Shah Zafar could be built, converting the two buildings into a museum which could house the weapons of 1857 preserved in the Red Fort. This memorial could then become the focus of the annual celebrations of the Great Sepoy Uprising which embodied the exploits of Queen Zeenat Mahal and Hakim Ahsanullah Jhan aka Gangaram Yahudi.

  The story of the magazine is well known. The men led by Lt. Willoughby panicked when they saw the rebels from Meerut entering Delhi. They thought that the so-called mutineers would capture the magazine which was in fact a big ammunition dump.

  Had those British soldiers known that most of the capital had already been taken over by the mobs which had risen in support of the Meerut sepoys, they would have probably not acted as they did. But that realization is only in hindsight.

  Lt. Willoughby believed that he was helping the British cause by preventing the ‘mutineers’ from capturing the magazine. Since it was not possible for such a small group to defend itself against overwhelming odds, the young lieutenant decided to blow up the magazine. In this he was helped by a civilian clerk named Scully. Soon after Scully lighted the fuse, the magazine blew up, killing him and at least four others. The sound of the explosion was such as had perhaps never before been heard in Delhi and its surrounding areas. As a matter of fact, it was heard as far as Meerut.

  Believe it or not, many thought Judgement Day had arrived because they equated the sound of the explosion with the blowing up of the bowels of the earth by the Angel of Death. It was of course, crass ignorance, superstition, and what not. But then who could blame them for they hardly knew what had happened. It was much later that they learnt the magazine had been blown up.

  It was widely believed that the time had come for the British to leave India. In keeping with this belief, chappatis and lotus flowers were distributed.

  The chappatis travelled 120 miles a night (the distance between Delhi and Agra). Four chappatis had to be made and left at a selected place from where four identical chappatis were sent out in relay. Runners raced in the night on this errand and covered almost all of north and parts of eastern and central India. Boatmen waited on riverbanks to ferry the chappatis, while domestic servants, mess orderlies, sepoys, noblemen, shopkeepers and hawkers, sadhus, and fakirs were all in the know. The latter distributed amulets too for the safety of those who espoused the cause. The Night Runners of Bengal by John Masters gives a vivid account of this grand relay.

  52

  Remembering Two patriarchs

  emory brings to mind many an old face, which are now hidden in the mists of time. Ninety-nine year old Pandit Ram Chand was perhaps the only resident of Kashmiri Gate in the 1960s who remembered the days when the Jamuna used to flow near where Delhi Polytechnic now stands. That was during the last span of the nineteenth century. Panditji was at that time only twelve years old and had come from his village, Kotla Jhabbu, to study in M.B. High School, which was also situated close to where Delhi Polytechnic is now.

  The Jhabbu pandits were petty rajas who ruled over a number of villages about 12 miles from Delhi in the area then known as Jhabbu ka Raj. But towards the beginning of the nineteenth century, the family fell on bad days and Pandit Ram Chand’s father had just eight bighas left as his portion.

  ‘But,’ used to say Panditji, ‘my father knew that times had changed and we could no longer hope to recover our raj. So he sent me and my two uncles, who were a little older than me, to study English and mathematics at M.B. High School, Kashmiri Gate. We took a room on rent at four annas a month though one could get a sufficiently big one with eight or nine rooms for `2 or `3. We had no cots and just one quilt between us. In the summer we slept on the roof and had a jolly good time drinking thandai.’ After finishing class on Saturday, he and his uncles used to set out on foot for the village, 12 miles away, to spend Sunday at home.

  His favourite exercise was a swim in the Jamuna. ‘We used to jump in near Qudsia Garden and get out near the Red Fort. An old woman who had lost her all in the Mutiny used to sit there on the river bank and apply chandan on our foreheads.’

  Kashmiri Gate had few big buildings then and most of the houses were kuchha, seldom more than one-storey high, and were occupied mainly by petty craftsmen, weavers, carpenters, and some gypsy girls who danced and sang and entertained the soldiers of the British infantry stationed in the Fort. People used to shut themselves in after 8 pm for fear of wild animals. ‘I have seen jackals and hyenas roaming about the place myself,’ Panditji used to recall.

  He began his working career in Calcutta but fled the city when it was struck by plague. He then joined a firm in Chandni Chowk on 15 rupees a month and left it after twenty years when he had started getting 100 rupees. During the days of the First World War he opened a school for orphans and also joined a furniture firm in Kashmiri Gate. ‘One fine day after the War, I was surprised to read in the morning papers that I had been awarded the Member of British Empire award for running the orphanage and contributing liberally to the War fund.’ From then on there was no looking back for him.

  One of the oldest residents of Chandni Chowk in 1967 was Lala Hanu
want Sahai, a veteran revolutionary bent almost double with the weight of eighty-two eventful years. He came from a well-known Kayastha family, which had direct access to Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar. His father’s elder brother was the kotwal of Mehrauli and his other relatives occupied equally influential positions at the Mughal court. But Lalaji became a revolutionary during the Raj days.

  In his boyhood Lalaji spent many a hot summer day under the shady neem and peepul trees which grew on both sides of the raised aqueduct, Nehar Saadat Khan, which flowed through Chandni Chowk and supplied water to the Red Fort till the beginning of the last century. ‘There was little else to do at home after lunch,’ he would say ‘and I was back at the Chowk in the evening to see the sakkas or the water-carriers filling up their mashaks from the canal and sprinkling water on the gravel roads on both sides.’ He remembered that when coal-tar replaced the gravel there was a hue and cry because the hooves of the tonga and ekka horses would get stuck in it.

  Lalaji recalled that Chandni Chowk was quite different 100 years ago. In those days the main landmarks, the Jain temple, Gurdwara Sis Ganj and the Kotwali were not the huge structures they later became. Every year he and Master Amir Chand, Master Awadh Bihari, Bhai Bal Mukund, and Baswant Biswas are remembered on the anniversary of the Hardinge Bomb case.

  53

  Reverie on Zafar

  he death anniversary of Bahadur Shah Zafar had a nostalgic ring about it. The last Mughal emperor died in Rangoon (Yangon) on 7 November 1862 with only his youngest wife, some other begums, two younger sons, and a few servants to mourn him. The burial was held by lantern light under the supervision of the British officer assigned to monitor the deposed emperor’s last years in exile. A grave was hurriedly dug late in the evening and the body bundled into it, sans ceremony and fanfare. Mud was spread over the spot and no mark left as to its identity. It was much later that the grave was discovered and made into a regular monument with photos of the king and his queen (who survived him twenty-four years, though her only son, the beloved Jawan Bakht, died before her). Now Zafar is venerated as a Pir in Myanmar and people visit his mazar to ask for favours, which were denied to him all his life; and his descendants find solace in an alien land.

  It was incongruous to hold a memorial march this year in Delhi on 7 November from the Red Fort to the Khooni Darwaza. Actually it should have been from the Darwaza to the fort, as that was the route taken by Lt. Hodson and his fellow murderers who shot the two elder sons and a grandson of the emperor at the medieval gateway before dumping the bodies at the place now known as the Fountain. Here they rotted for several days before their final undignified disposal.

  Zafar was a reluctant hero of 1857. He did not welcome the honour of leading the rebels as he was quite aware of the repercussions that were to follow. The rebels too just took him for a figurehead for whom they had scant respect and taunted as budha. The poor, ailing old man had to bear the insults heaped on him. His wife Zeenat Mahal, who was the age of his granddaughter, played a more prominent role, from the time she opened the gates of the fort to the sepoys from Meerut. Zafar just sat with his hands on his ears with the only comment, ‘Ye kya napak awazain hain (what unholy voices are these)?’

  He was a feeble octogenarian who could not even hold a sword and coughed all night, but he did not expect his last days to be so miserable. Whatever he did was under compulsion. Yes, if the upheaval had taken place thirty years earlier, he might have been able to lead it with firmness and discretion. But as fate would have it, he was well past his prime when Akbar Shah Sani died and he ascended the throne in 1837, though not as per the wishes of his father, and stepmother who unjustly regarded him as gay.

  Whatever little energy he had had been dissipated (much like Shah Jahan) in dalliance with maids in the fort. His wife had to use a peacock feather at night to arouse desire in him and, not satisfied with the response, was happier in the intimate company of her female and male friends of Lal Kuan, where she had her parental home. To expect such a man to lead a full-fledged rebellion against the might of the British was little short of a suicidal venture. Zafar was a man of delicate sensibility who was glad in the circle of shairs like Zauq, Ghalib, and Tishna. So much so that most of his time was spent in writing and revising his kalaam with the help of his ustads visiting his favourite garden across the Jamuna, where poetic symposiums-cum-picnics were held or attending the mushairas in the fort. If not busy thus and in lopsided amours, he spent his afternoons in river excursions, where he heard the boatmen sing as they netted their catch of fish or steered past menacing crocodiles. Once Zafar’s boat overturned but he escaped unhurt.

  Instead of sending him to Rangoon, the British should have allowed him to pass his remaining life in Fatehpur Sikri (as advised by Sir Charles Napier), or sent him to Mecca (as per his own wishes). Even in not-so distant Sikri he would have hardly been a threat to the Company Sarkar. As a matter of fact, he would have found it an ideal location where he could wander in the ruins of the deserted city, reciting his verses of longing and despair. It was the place where his father wanted to be crowned king, like his forbear Mohammad Shah Rangila, though Akbar Shah’s request was not granted by the British Resident on the advice of the governor general.

  In Rangoon what irked the Last Emperor, besides the restrictions on him, was the environment that lacked the charm of the climes of Hindustan and the vibrancy of Delhi. The rice was not the kind he liked for biryani, the water was insipid, the mutton tough, and there were no choicest mangoes, venison kebabs, and moong ki dal, that came to be known as Badshah Pasand or the king’s favourite. The few Burmese he saw spoke a different language and there was no mosque within sight to offer namaz. The people of India wanted him to be a virtual Mahdi of deliverance from foreign yoke. They expected too much, for he was neither the Mahdi nor the Maulvi of Faizabad nor the Fakir of Shahjahanpur, chanting Maar, maar salon ko maar (meaning beat the damn British) but just a dil bhuja shahir (lovelorn poet). He who actually posed as the Mahdi in distant Africa got another Burma misfit – Gen. Gordon was assassinated eleven years later in Sudan. But our exiled recluse was someone like Shakespeare’s tragic character lamenting ‘An old man broken with the storms of State / Has come to lay his weary bones among ye / Give him a little earth for charity’. However that too was denied.

  This formed the stuff of one’s reverie on the poet-king who had no parallel in history, though Babar and Jahangir too wrote poetry. But Zafar, like the unfortunate king of Corinth Sisyphus (in Hades), continued to roll his poetic burden up and down the steep mountain of life (as a heaven designated millstone) even when the will to live had deserted him.

  54

  Saga of wells

  ike Khari Baoli, Ugrasen’s Baoli, Nizamuddin Baoli, and the baolis of Mehrauli, the wells of Delhi are also repositories of history. Take Lal Kuan, in the heart of the Walled City, which predates Shahjahanabad, and was probably constructed in the Lodhi or Tughlaq periods (most probably by Firoz Shah). The well still exists and is a famous address like the fountain or phawara of Chandni Chowk. But it has been closed, with a tin shed above it and a small temple at the side. It was named Lal Kuan because of the red sandstone used for building it. The most famous resident of Lal Kuan was Zeenat Mahal, the youngest wife of Bahadur Shah Zafar, whose dilapidated palace (named after her) is now a rabbit warren.

  The building dates back to the mid-nineteenth century and was one of the places where Mubarak Begum, who married Wilayat Khan, a Mughal nobleman after the death of her first husband, Gen. Ochterlony, took counsel with the queen before the outbreak of the Mutiny of 1857. After bidding adieu to her allegiance to the British, the former dancing girl came over to the side of the nationalists. The mosque she built nearby in Hauz Qazi is sometimes called Randi ki Masjid. Lal Kuan boasts of a host of eating joints, and book and periodical publishing houses. A lane from it leads to Gali Qasim Jan and the haveli of Mirza Ghalib. On the way is the office of Aljamiat, a popular Urdu paper at one time.

  Just
as famous as Lal Kuan is Jungli Kuan, which got its name from the fact that it was once situated in a wilderness, where travellers passing by drank water and rested under the nearby trees. Now a part of Old Delhi, this kuan, near Jubilee Cinema, has also fallen into disuse, like the ones in Tis Hazari and Begum ka Bagh whose water irrigated the gardens of Jahanara, Roshanara, and Qudsia begums.

  Daurani Jithani ka Kuan was once a well-known watering place in what is now Ramlila Grounds at the side of Shahji ka Talab (later filled up). However, there is no trace of the well which commemorated two sisters-in-law. The younger one (Daurani) committed suicide first and the elder one (Jitahani) followed suit. Both were believed to be victims of domestic abuse. Maybe demands for dowry and backbreaking household chores, along with beatings, were behind the tragedy at the well where the two women came every day to draw water and then carry it back on their heads to their homes.

  Dhaula Kuan, in the locality of that name, is regarded as a popular address for people travelling from West to South Delhi. Part of the Delhi Cantonment, the area is named after a well which still exists. In olden days it was situated on the Old Delhi-Gurgaon Road, and was much in use up to the time of Shah Alam, who had it widened so that more water could be drawn from it. Among those who tasted of its bounty were the troops of Maharaja Scindia, encamped close by, along with their European officers, one of whom gifted a large piece of land for building of the Delhi Cathedral. But before that could be done the land was acquired by the East India Company for a military cantonment and another plot given for the Cathedral near the Gol Dakhana. Dhaula Kuan was so named because of the dhauli or white sand that was found under its water. Tughlaqabad Fort and the nearby area also has old wells – some discarded and some still used to draw water by rural folk and gypsies.