City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  My favourite item is, however, the daily condoling. If the Times is to be believed, Indian politicians like nothing better than a quick condole; and certainly barely a day passes without a picture of, say, the Chief Minister of Haryana condoling Mrs Parvati Chaudhuri over the death of Mr Devi Chaudhuri, the director-general of All-India Widgets. Indeed, condoling shows every sign of becoming a growth industry. If a businessman has died but is not considered important enough to be condoled by the Chief Minister, it is becoming fashionable for his business colleagues to take out an illustrated advertisement and condole him themselves. The language of these advertisements tends to be even more inspired than that of the Times news columns. In my diary, I copied down this example from a November 1989 issue:SAD DEMISE

  With profound grief we have to condole the untimely passing of our beloved general manager MISTER DEEPAK MEHTA, thirty four years, who left us for heavenly abode in tragic circumstances (beaten to death with bedpost). Condole presented by bereft of Mehta Agencies (Private) Limited.

  Perhaps the most striking testament to the sea-change in Indian English in the forty years since Independence lies not in what has survived - and been strangely, wonderfully mutated - but in what has died and completely disappeared.

  The best guide to such linguistic dodos is Hobson Jobson: A Glossary of Anglo-Indian Colloquial Words and Phrases, originally published by John Murray in 1903. The book was written as a guide to those words which had passed from Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian and Arabic into English, and the list is certainly extraordinary: every time you wear pyjamas or a cummerbund; if ever you sit on the veranda of your bungalow reading the pundits in the newspapers or eat a stick of candy; indeed even if you are haunted by ghouls or have your cash stolen by thugs - then you are using a branch of English that could never have developed but for the trading and colonizing activities of the East India Company.

  Yet perhaps the most interesting aspect of Hobson Jobson is how many of its words and phrases are stone cold dead, now utterly incomprehensible to a modern reader. In 1903 an Englishman could praise a cheroot as ‘being the real cheese’ (from the Hindi chiz, meaning thing) or claim his horse was the ’best goont in Tibet’ (from the Hindi gunth, meaning a pony); and whether he was in the middle of some shikar (sport) relaxing with his friends in their chummery (bachelor quarters) or whoring with his rum-johny (mistress, from the Hindi ramjani, a dancing girl) he might reasonably expect to be understood.

  Half of Hobson Jobson is filled with these dead phrases: linguistic relics of a world so distant and strange that it is difficult to believe that these words were still current in our own century. Yet clearly, in 1903, if a Jack (sepoy) did anything wrong he could expect to receive some pretty foul galee (abuse); if he were unlucky his chopper (thatched hut) might fall down in the mangoes (April showers); and if he forgot his goglet (water bottle) on parade he might well have been thrown out of the regiment for good.

  To us, the vocabulary of the Raj now seems absurd, distant and comical, like the pretensions of the rotting statues in Coronation Park. Yet many who actually spoke this language are still alive in England. For them, the world of Hobson Jobson is less linguistic archaeology than the stuff of fraying memory.

  Before I went to India I went to Cambridge to see a friend of my grandmother. Between the twenties and the forties, Iris Portal’s youth had been spent in that colonial Delhi that now seemed so impossibly dated. I wanted to hear what she remembered.

  It was the last weekend of summer. Over the flat steppe of East Anglia tractors were beginning to plough the great wide plains of fenland stubble. A sharp wind gusted in from the coast; cloud-shadows drifted fast over the fields. On the Backs, the trees were just beginning to turn.

  ‘Welcome to my rabbit hutch,’ said Iris. ‘It’s not very big, but I flatter myself that it’s quite colourful.’

  She was an alert and well-preserved old lady: owlish and intelligent. Her grey hair was fashionably cut and her voice was attractively dry and husky. Iris’s family had been Cambridge dons and although she had broken out and married into the army, there was still something residually academic in her measured gaze.

  She sat deep in an armchair in her over-heated flat in a sheltered housing complex off the M11. Outside, beyond the car park, you could see the pavements and housing estates of suburban Girton. But inside, a small fragment of another world had been faithfully recreated. All around, the bookshelves were full of the great Imperial classics — Todd, Kipling, Fanny Parkes and Emily Eden — some riddled with the boreholes of bookish white ants. On one wall hung a small oil of houseboats on the Dal Lake; on another, a print of the Mughal Emperor Muhammed Shah Rangilla in the Red Fort. Beside it was an old map of 1930s Delhi.

  Somehow the pictures and the books - and especially the dusty, old-buckram, yellow-paged library-scent of the books — succeeded in giving the thoroughly modern flat a faint whiff of the Edwardian, a distant hint of the hill-station bungalow.

  ‘You must give my love to dear old Delhi,’ said Iris. ‘Ah! Even now when I close my eyes I see ...’ For a minute she left the sentence incomplete, then: ‘Pots of chrysanthemums!’ she said quite suddenly. ‘Rows and rows of chrysanthemums in little red potsl That’s what I remember best. Those and the ruins: riding out through the bazaars and out into the country. The Qutab Minar and moonlight picnics in Hauz Khas - a place we all thought was madly romantic. The tombs everywhere all tumbling down and black buck and peacocks and monkeys ... Is it still like that?’

  ‘Up to a point,’ I said.

  ‘Dear, dear, dear old Delhi,’ she said. ‘How I envy you living there.’

  She smiled a contented smile and rearranged herself in the armchair.

  ‘So,’ I ventured. ‘You were born in Delhi?’

  ‘No, no, no.’ Iris closed her eyes and drew a deep breath. ‘Certainly not. I was born in Simla in 1905 in a house called Newstead. It was immediately behind Snowdon, the Commander-in-Chief’s house. Curzon was then the Viceroy and Kitchener the Commander-in-Chief.’

  Now she had mentioned Simla, I remembered that in the biography of Iris’s brother, the great Rab Butler, I had seen a sepia photograph of the two of them at a children’s party in the Simla Viceregal Lodge. In the image you could clearly see Iris’s plump little face peeping out from a Victorian cocoon of taffeta and white silk.

  ‘So you spent your childhood in Simla?’

  ‘No. I only spent the first five summers of my life in Simla,’ she said, correcting me again. ‘Then I was brought back to England. I went to school in a madhouse on the beach of Sandgate under the Folkestone cliffs. It was a sort of avant-garde Bedales-type place. Perfectly horrible. We were supposed to be a Greek Republic. We made our own rules, wore aesthetic uniforms and I don’t know what else.’

  ‘Did you miss India?’

  ‘I thought of nothing else. India was home.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘All I wanted was India, a horse of my own and a dashing cavalry escort. When my mother and I arrived back in Bombay we immediately caught the train up to Delhi. I remember vividly the joy of coming in the driveway and seeing all those rows and rows of chrysanthemums in their pots and thinking: “Ah! I’m back!”

  ‘Everything was as I remembered it. My father’s bearer, Gokhul, was a little fatter than before. He had been with my father since he was a boy and was now a rather grand figure: he used to walk around with a great brass badge on his front. Otherwise everything was unchanged.’

  Iris spoke slowly and precisely as if making a mental effort to relay her memories with absolute accuracy.

  ‘It was ... 1922, I suppose. The Government of India was in Delhi by that time, waiting for New Delhi to be completed. We were all living in the Civil Lines [of Old Delhi]. There was no Secretariat and all the Government offices were in Nissen huts. But the officials’ bungalows were all in beautiful gardens. You know how things grow in Delhi. The jacarandas ...’

  ‘Had you come out to work?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no. My
life was extremely frivolous. I had been very high-brow at school. No one ever talked about anything except Browning. But in Delhi people would have been horrified if they discovered you read poetry. The English in India were not a very cultured lot. The atmosphere was too giddy: it was all riding, picnics, clubs, dances, dashing young men and beautiful polo players ...’ She smiled. ‘Looking back of course, the whole set-up was very odd. There was such snobbery. Everyone was graded off into sections. One would never have dreamt of going anywhere with someone from the Public Works Department ...’ She blinked with mock horror.

  ‘The most snobbish event of all was the polo, though the Delhi Hunt was rather wonderful in its own way. All the Viceregal staff - who were usually rather interesting and attractive - came out in their Ratcatcher - black coats and so on: in Ooty everyone wore pink, but in Delhi it was only the whippers-in and the master who were allowed to. It was taken very seriously. The hounds - rather dapper ones - were imported from England. I used to get up before dawn and motor down to the Qutab Minar in my father’s T-model Ford. A syce would have been sent down the night before with the pony. Then, as soon as the sun rose, we would gallop about this dry countryside chasing after the jackals.

  ‘But much more worthwhile than hunting the poor old jackal was going hawking with Umer Hyat Khan of the Tiwana clan. I expect you know all about him. He was a big landowner from the Northern Punjab: rather like a Highland laird. Umer Hyat was a member of the first legislative assembly and whenever the Assembly was in session he would come down to Delhi with his horses, his hawks and his hounds ... Before dawn we would canter over the Jumna by the Bridge of Boats. The horses were sent ahead. There were all these splendid tribesmen with hawks on their wrists and greyhounds straining on the leash. We rode out like a mediaeval company. When the hounds had stirred up the hares, the hawks were let fly.

  ‘After I had been in Delhi for a while I began to sober up a little. My father set me down at a table to learn Urdu with a bearded Munshi. Soon afterwards I met Sir John Thompson at a big dinner at Viceregal Lodge. He was Commissioner for Delhi and an old friend of my father. A very intelligent man: he could speak several Indian languages, understood Sanskrit and so on. He said to me: “What do you do with yourself all day?” and I replied: “I sleep late because I’ve been to a party then I go for a ride and ...” He said, a little severely: “Has it never occurred to you to study Indian history?” I said “No” and he replied: “I’ll lend you a book on the history of Delhi. You read that and see if it doesn’t inspire you to look around” - which indeed it did.

  ‘From that moment onwards, wherever I went, I was poking my nose about, looking at the ruins. Most afternoons I used to ride down to the Purana Qila - I loved the Purana Qila - and sit at the top of the Sher Mandal thinking of poor old Humayun tripping down those stairs and killing himself. I always used to come down very carefully. Of course it was all so lonely then. Humayun’s Tomb was absolutely out in the blue. It was open land, strewn with tumbledown tombs and the rubble of ages. Beyond the plains were dotted with black buck and peacocks. You could ride anywhere ...’

  ‘So this was all before Lutyens’s Delhi went up?’ I interrupted.

  ‘Well, I suppose the building was just about beginning.’

  ‘Did you ever meet the man himself?’

  ‘Who? Lutyens? Oh yes. He was a great friend of my parents.’

  ‘What was he like?’

  The Viceroy’s House

  ‘Well, he was very taken with my mother. Because my father’s name was Monty, he used to call her Carlo. That was typical Lutyens. Always making these rather childish jokes.

  ‘He took me around Viceroy’s House when it was only two to three feet high. What I will always remember was going to one of the staff bungalows. He said: “Look - I planned this with a central space in the middle and eight doors leading off.” Some of these doors just led into housemaid’s cupboards. “I thought it would be terribly funny,” said old Lutyens - he was absolutely thrilled with this, “that if people had had too much to drink at a big party, they’d come home and they wouldn’t know which was their door. They’d all end up in the cupboards.”’

  Iris frowned. ‘He was such a silly man. But of course I greatly admire his work. I love New Delhi. I always thought it was so much better than Washington. And you know, people forget that that magnificent city of Delhi was built on such a flimsy basis - both human and material. There was no proper scaffolding or any of the equipment that they have now: no cranes or mechanical things to help with the lifting of weights ... I can remember seeing them, these little wizened people carrying great hods of bricks and vast bags of cement. There were myriads of them: climbing up rickety bamboo ladders tied together with string, and all of it getting more precarious as it got higher ...

  ‘Of course, people of my father’s generation hated the whole thing. He and my uncle Harcourt thought it was frightfully extravagant, and that those lakhs of money could have been far better used elsewhere. Moreover they always felt that the prophecy — whoever builds a new city in Delhi will lose it - would come true. If ever anybody raised the subject of New Delhi my father would always quote the Persian couplet in a most gloomy voice. And of course it did come true. Whoever has built a new city in Delhi has always lost it: the Pandava brethren, Prithviraj Chauhan, Feroz Shah Tughluk, Shah Jehan ... They all built new cities and they all lost them. We were no exception.’

  I could see Iris was tiring. It was now dark outside and I knew I was soon going to have to leave her. But before I went I wanted to ask one last question.

  ‘In retrospect,’ I said. ‘Do you think British rule was justified?’

  Iris mulled over the question before answering.

  ‘Well, at the time we certainly didn’t think of ourselves as wicked imperialists,’ she said, answering slowly. ‘Of course not. But you see, although people of my generation were very keen on Gandhi and Indian Independence, we were still very careless. We didn’t give much thought to the question of what on earth we were doing to that country and its people.

  ‘That said, I can’t forget the sacrifices made by the “wicked” imperialists over the centuries - the graves, so many very young, the friends I have had, and what good people many of them were.

  ‘But on balance I think you must never take land away from a people. A people’s land has a mystique. You can go and possibly order them about for a bit, perhaps introduce some new ideas, build a few good buildings, but then in the end you must go away and die in Cheltenham.’ Iris sighed. ‘And that, of course, is exactly what we did.’

  I walked around Lutyens’s Delhi that November, thinking of Iris. It seemed incredible that someone who had been taken around the foundations of the Viceroy’s House - now the President’s Palace - by Lutyens himself could still be alive and well. The buildings appeared so solid, so timeless, so ancient. It was like meeting someone who had been taken around the Parthenon by Pericles.

  To best appreciate New Delhi I used to walk to it from the Old City. Leaving behind the press and confusion of Shahjehanabad - the noise and the heat, the rickshaws and the barrow-boys, the incense and the sewer-stink - I would find myself suddenly in a gridiron of wide avenues and open boulevards, a scheme as ordered and inevitable as a Bach fugue. Suddenly the roads would be empty and the air clean. There was no dust, no heat: all was shaded, green and cool. Ahead, at the end of the avenue, rose the great chattri which once held the statue of George V. Arriving there at the end of the green tunnel, I would turn a right angle and see the cinnamon sky stretching out ahead, no longer veiled by a burqa of buildings or trees. It was like coming up for air.

  This was Rajpath - once the Kingsway - one of the great ceremonial ways of the world. It was planned as an Imperial Champs Elysées - complete with India Gate, its own butter-coloured Arc de Triomphe. But it was far wider, far greener, far more magnificent than anything comparable in Europe. On either side ran wide lawns giving on to fountains and straight avenues of eucalypt
us and casuarina. Beyond, canals running parallel to the road reflected the surroundings with mirror-like fidelity.

  Ahead, high on Raisina Hill, crowning an almost infinite perspective, rose a silhouette of domes, towers and cupolas. As I drew near, Herbert Baker’s two Secretariats would rise precipitously out of the plain, their projecting porticoes flanking the hemispheric dome of the Viceroy’s House. East fused with West. Round arches and classical Greek colonnades were balanced by latticework stone screens and a ripple of helmet-like chattris. At the very centre of the complex, the resolution of every perspective in New Delhi, stood Lutyens’s staggering neo-Buddhist dome.

  However many times I revisited the complex, I would always be amazed by the brilliantly orchestrated flirtation of light and shade - the dim colonnades offset by massive walls of sun-blasted masonry. Yet the most startling conceit of all lay in the use of colour: the play of the two different shades of pink Agra sandstone; one pale and creamy; the other a much darker burnt crimson. The two different colours were carefully arranged, the darker at the bottom as if it was somehow heavier, yet with the two contrasting tones blending as effortlessly into one another as they once did in the quarry.

  It was superb. In the dusk, as the sun sank behind the great dome of the Viceroy’s House, the whole vista would turn the colour of attar of roses. I would realize then, without hesitation, that I was looking at one of the greatest marriages of architecture and urban planning ever to have left the drawing board.

  Nevertheless, the more often I came and looked, the more I felt a nagging reservation. This had less to do with aesthetics than with comparisons with other massive schemes of roughly similar date that the complex brought to mind. Then one evening, as I proceeded up the cutting and emerged to find Baker’s Secretariats terminating in the wide portico of the Viceroy’s House, with this great imperial mass of masonry towering all around me I suddenly realized where I had seen something similar, something equally vast, equally dwarfing, before: Nuremberg.