City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  In its monstrous, almost megalomaniac scale, in its perfect symmetry and arrogant presumption, there was a distant but distinct echo of something Fascist or even Nazi about the great acropolis of Imperial Delhi. Certainly it is far more beautiful than anything Hitler and Mussolini ever raised: Lutyens, after all, was a far, far greater architect than Albert Speer. Yet the comparison still seemed reasonable. For, despite their very many, very great differences, Imperial India, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all belonged to comparable worlds. All were to different extents authoritarian; all made much of magnificent display; all were built on a myth of racial superiority and buttressed in the last resort by force. In the ceremonial buildings of all three, it was an impression of the might and power of the Imperial State that the architects aimed above all to convey.

  To do so they used the same architectural vocabulary: great expanses of marble, a stripped-down classicism, a fondness for long colonnades and a love of Imperial heraldic devices: elephants’ heads, lions couchant, massive eagles with outstretched wings. Of course, much of the similarity is due to the fact that Speer and Lutyens were commissioned to build monuments of state at roughly the same time. Moreover, Speer appears to have drawn on Lutyens’s experience and style. Yet there can be no doubt that New Delhi was very deliberately built as an expression of the unconquerable might of the Raj. As Lord Stamfordham, Private Secretary to George V, wrote in a letter articulating the King Emperor’s views on his new capital: ‘We must let [the Indian] see for the first time the power of Western civilization ...’

  In New Delhi, as in Fascist Milan or Nazi Berlin, the individual is lost; the scale is not human, but super-human; not national, but super-national: it is, in a word, Imperial. The impression of the architect as bully receives confirmation in the inscription that Lutyens ordered to be raised above the great recessed ivan gateway of the Secretariats.

  For those who like to believe in the essential benevolence of the British Empire it is a depressing discovery, for it must be one of the most patronizing inscriptions ever raised in a public place:LIBERTY WILL NOT DESCEND TO A PEOPLE;

  A PEOPLE MUST RAISE THEMSELVES TO LIBERTY;

  IT IS A BLESSING WHICH MUST BE EARNED

  BEFORE IT CAN BE ENJOYED.

  I had brought out to Delhi with me a copy of the collected letters of Lutyens. One evening in November I sat in the shade of the chattris beside the two Secretariats, facing down the Rajpath towards India Gate and reading through them. As I did so, I tried to bring the creator of Imperial Delhi into focus in my own mind.

  The picture that the letters give of their author is a mixed one. There are certainly elements of the joker and buffoon that Iris had described: Lutyens incessantly doodles on the writing paper, turning the P & O crests on successive letterheads into a tiger, a man with a turban and an elephant. His first action after arriving in India is to play a game of musical chairs (‘Mrs Brodie who weighs 20 stone or more was the most energetic of the party and broke two chairs entirely [amid] many a scrimmage and wild shriek ...’). Later, on seeing the hideous government buildings of Simla, Lutyens writes that they are ‘a piece of pure folly such as only Englishmen can achieve: if one were told the monkeys had built them one would have said what wonderful monkeys, they must be shot in case they do it again.’

  This playfulness is balanced by ample evidence of Lutyens’s tenacity and stubbornness; a stubbornness which in the end saved New Delhi from both the aesthetic whims of successive philistine Viceroys - Lord Hardinge was determined to build the entire scheme in the Indian version of Victorian mock-Gothic, the horrible Indo-Saracenic style - and from the cost-cutting penny-pinching interference of the civil servants.

  But the letters also confirmed my hunch concerning Lutyens’s autocratic tendencies. Like some other of his English contemporaries, he was clearly disillusioned with Parliamentary democracy and found in the Raj what he regarded as an ideal - an enlightened despotism: ‘I am awfully impressed by the Civil Service,’ he wrote to his wife, early on in his Indian travels. ‘I wish they would abolish the House of Commons and all representative government and start the system in England.’ Later, in a moment of fury with a negligent workman, he expressed his opinion that the Empire’s subjects ‘ought to be reduced to slavery and not given the rights of man at all...’

  Yet perhaps the overwhelming surprise of the letters is Lutyens’s extraordinary intolerance and dislike of all things Indian. Even by the standards of the time, the letters reveal him to be a bigot, though the impression is one of bumbling insularity rather than jack-booted malevolence. Indians are invariably referred to as ‘blacks’, ‘blackamoors’, ‘natives’ or even ’niggers‘. They are ’dark and ill-smelling‘, their food is ’very strange and frightening’ and they ‘do not improve with acquaintance’. The helpers in his architect’s office he describes as ‘odd people with odd names who do those things that bore the white man’. On another occasion he writes of the ‘sly slime of the Eastern mind’ and ’the very low intelligence of the natives‘. ’I do not think it possible for the Indians and whites to mix freely‘, he concludes. ’They are very, very different and I cannot admit them on the same plane as myself.‘

  Considering that Lutyens managed to fuse Eastern and Western aesthetics more successfully than any other artist since the anonymous sculptors of Gandhara (who produced their Indo-Hellenic Buddhas in the wake of Alexander the Great), his dislike of Indian art and architecture is particularly surprising: ‘Moghul architecture is cumbrous ill-constructed building,’ he writes in one letter. ‘It is essentially the building style of children [and] very tiresome to the Western intelligence.’ At one stage, after visiting Agra, he is grudgingly forced to admit that ‘some of the work is lovely’, but he attributes these qualities to an (imaginary) Italian influence.

  In the end one is left with the same paradox confronted by lovers of Wagner: how could someone with such objectionable views and so insular a vision have managed to produce such breathtaking works of art? Here was a man capable of building some of the most beautiful structures created in the modern world, but whose prejudices blinded him to the beauty of the Taj Mahal; a man who could fuse the best of East and West while denying that the Eastern elements in his own buildings were beautiful.

  Authoritarian regimes tend to leave the most solid souvenirs; art has a strange way of thriving under autocracy. Only the vanity of an Empire - an Empire emancipated from democratic constraints, totally self-confident in its own judgement and still, despite everything, assured of its own superiority - could have produced Lutyens’s Delhi.

  Pandit Nehru wrote: ‘New Delhi is the visible symbol of British power, with all its ostentation and wasteful extravagance.’ He was right, of course, but that is only half the story. It is also the finest architectural artefact created by the British Empire, and preferable in every way to Nehru’s disastrous commission of a hideous new city by Le Corbusier at Chandigarh. Chandigarh is now an urban disaster, a monument to stained concrete and discredited modernism; but Imperial Delhi is now more admired and loved than perhaps ever before. Nevertheless, in its patronizing and authoritarian after-taste, Lutyens’s New Delhi remains as much a monument to the British Empire’s failings as to its genius.

  That month I began to make enquiries to try and track down British stayers-on from Imperial Delhi. For a while I failed to come up with anything: those few who had chosen to remain after 1947 seemed to have either died or recently emigrated. But for the transitory diplomatic community, the British had totally disappeared from Delhi.

  Then, in mid-November, I was told about two old English ladies who now lived in the mountains above Simla. They had moved to the hills in the sixties, I was told, but before then they had spent their working lives in Delhi. If I wanted reminiscences of Imperial Delhi, said my informer, then Phyllis and Edith Haxby were exactly what I was looking for. In the event, when I flew up to see them, the two old ladies produced few Delhi memories. But their attitudes gave a sad insight into t
he fate of those Britons who not so long ago had dominated Raj Delhi, and who had opted to stay on in India after the Empire which created them had dissolved.

  Their house had once been quite grand — a rambling half-timbered affair with a wide veranda and cusped Swiss gables. But the Haxbys’ estate had clearly fallen on hard times. A lint of withered spiders’ webs hung from the beams of the veranda. Only thin, peeling strips of burnt sienna indicated that the house had ever been painted. A tangle of thorns had overcome the near-side of the building and docks and ragwort grew from between the paving stones of the path.

  At first I thought no one was at home. But after ten minutes of knocking on doors and peering through windows, I was rewarded with the sight of one of the sisters hobbling across her sitting-room. She undid the multiple bolts of the door and slumped down in one of the wickerwork chairs of the veranda.

  ‘And who are you?’ she asked.

  I explained, and to make conversation complimented her on the view from her front door.

  ‘It may be beautiful to you,’ she said abruptly. ‘But it’s not beautiful to us. We want to go back home.’

  Phyllis Haxby was a frail old woman with mottled brown skin and thin, toothpick legs. Her tweed skirt was extravagantly darned and her thick brown stockings were shredded with a jigsaw of tears and ladders.

  ‘We want to sell up,’ she continued. ‘We’ve been through a very bad time. There are prostitutes living all over the place, making life hell for us. They say we’re English and shouldn’t be here. After seventy-eight years!’

  Phyllis grunted angrily and began rapping on the front door with her stick: ‘Edith! Edith! There’s a boy here to see us. Says he’s British. He wants to know about Delhi.’

  Then she turned around and began talking to me in a stage whisper: ‘She had a fall today. The prostitutes put dope down the chimney. It makes her want to sleep. She fell on the fender — bleeding from eight a.m. until after lunch. They’re trying to drive us out, you see.’

  ‘It’s not just dope down the chimney,’ said Edith, who had at this point appeared at the door. ‘They come through the floorboards at night.’

  ‘Through the floorboards? Are you sure?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. When we’re asleep they put stuff in our eyes to make us go blind. Every day my sight gets a little worse. You’ve no idea what we’ve gone through.’

  ‘You know something,’ said Phyllis, leaning forward towards me and continuing to speak in her conspiratorial stage whisper. ‘They’re all Jews. All of ’em. They’re as fair as lilies but they wear these brown masks to pass off as natives. They’ve been persecuting us for twenty years.‘

  ‘Thirty years, Phyllis.’

  ‘Since Partition, in fact.’

  ‘But we’re not going to give in, are we, darling? We’re not going to cut and run.’

  At this point the drizzle which had followed me to the bungalow turned into a downpour. The water dripped through the roof of the veranda and we decided to move inside. From the sitting-room I could see the half-lit bedroom. To one side of the bed was an upturned chest of drawers, on the other an inverted ironing board.

  ‘That’s to stop the Jewish prostitutes from coming in through the floorboards,’ said Phyllis, seeing where I was looking.

  ‘But they still come down the chimney,’ said Edith.

  ‘Oh - they’ll do anything to drive us out. They’ve even started to watch us bathe. They peer through the window as if we were some sort of ha’penny peep show.‘

  We arranged ourselves around a table and Phyllis poured the tea.

  ‘Just look at my hands shake,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the prostitutes’ dope,’ said Edith.

  ‘Makes me shake like a Quaker and dribble like a dog. I used to be hale and hearty, too.’

  ‘Very hale and hearty, my sister. Those prostitutes should be shot on sight.’

  The two sisters fussed around with their teacups, trying to spoon in the sugar and the powdered milk before their shakes sprinkled the stuff over the table. At length, when this was achieved and they had relaxed, I turned the conversation towards their memories of Delhi in the old days.

  ‘Oh it was such fun. We were young and blond and had admirers. The Delhi season lasted from October until March. At night we went to dances and drank champagne — real champagne — and by day we would sit outside and watch the soldiers riding past, four abreast. Those were the days.’

  ‘But my God have things changed. Imagine - I now do my own sweeping ...’

  ‘... and the cooking and the cleaning and the laundry. Us — Colonel’s daughters.’

  ‘Our father was the Colonel of the 23rd Punjabis. I told the grocery boy last week. The Twenty-Thirds! He couldn’t believe such people lived in such ... in such ...’

  ‘Simplicity,’ said Edith.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Phyllis. ‘Simplicity. You know, Mr Dalrymple, you people today can have no idea what India was like before. It was ... just like England.’

  ‘Shut up, darling! The prostitutes - they’ll report us. They’ve got microphones. Speak softly.’

  ‘I will not. The wickedness! Tell them to go to the devil.’

  The two sisters sipped angrily at their tea. They were silent for a second, and I again tried to turn the conversation back towards Delhi.

  ‘Did you ever meet Lutyens?’ I asked.

  Phyllis wasn’t listening: ‘And you know the worst thing. Those Jewish prostitutes. They tried to ...’

  ‘Don’t Phyllis.’

  ‘I will. You can’t gag a Haxby of Haxby. They tried to put us in a madhouse. We went out for a walk and they started to drag us down the road. And I said: “This isn’t the way home.”’

  ‘Damn cheek. A colonel’s daughter.’

  ‘The warders were very nice to us. We stayed there for two weeks. Then a young police officer came and said: “Who put you here?” He went to the LG. - the Inspector General - and by four o’clock we were back here. The I.G. ordered us to be brought home. All the other inmates were very jealous.‘

  ‘I’ll say.’

  ‘Imagine putting two elderly people in a madhouse. Those prostitutes - they’re from Baghdad, you see. They were able to do it because they have a money-minting machine and were able to bribe the inspectors.’

  ‘They use us as a respectable cover for their operations. That’s why we’re going to leave this place — as soon as we can sell the house. We’ve had enough of Simla.’

  ‘More than enough. We’ve had an offer for one lakh rupees [about £2000] from this man. If we can find someone to give us two lakhs we’ll be off home.’

  ‘We thought we’d try Ooty first. Get a taxi to Delhi ...’

  ‘Dear old Delhi.’

  ‘... then a flight to Coimbatore, then a car up to the Nilgiris.’

  ‘It used to be lovely in Ooty. Just like England.’

  ‘But if we have no luck there we thought we’d try Wales. With two lakhs you could get a nice house in Wales I’d have thought.’

  Looking at my watch I saw it was time to leave: my train back was leaving in less than an hour. I got up, said my goodbyes, and promised to send them the English brassieres and stockings they had asked for - they seemed to have trouble with domestic Indian brands: ‘Indian women have the strangest shaped breasts,’ explained Edith.

  Both of the sisters heaved themselves up and saw me to the door. But just as I was setting off down the garden path, Phyllis called me back. I thought that maybe she had finally remembered some forgotten snippet of Delhi gossip.

  ‘One last thing,’ she said, clenching my hand in her claw-like grip. ‘Just watch out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Look after yourself,’ she said earnestly. ‘Don’t drink anything strange — or anything bitter. Watch out for the smell of bitter almonds. The Jews will all be after you now — after you’ve tried to help the Haxbys. You won’t be safe anywhere.’

 
I thanked her again and opened the wicket gate. As I closed it, I heard her shouting behind me.

  ‘Take it,’ she called, ‘from a colonel’s daughter.’

  FIVE

  IN NOVEMBER, on the first night of the new moon of Kartika, Delhi celebrates Diwali, the Hindu Festival of Lights.

  In the markets trestles go up selling little clay lamps and mountains of honey-soaked Bengali sweets. Postmen, telephone engineers and chowkidars tour the streets, knocking on doors and asking politely for their Diwali baksheesh. (Balvinder Singh, it must be said, opted for a more confrontational approach: ‘Mr William, tomorrow is holiday. Today you give me 200 rupees extra.’)

  Every night during the week leading up to the festival the sky reverberates with a crescendo of thunderflash and fireworks. The pyrotechnics culminate in an ear-splitting, blitz-like barrage the night of Diwali itself. That evening every Hindu and Sikh house in Delhi is lit up with a blaze of candles; even the jhuggi-dwellers place one small nightlight outside their corrugated-iron doors. You can smell the thick cordite-smoke of the fireworks billowing in over the kitchen spices and the scent of dung fires.

  Although it is a Hindu festival, many Muslims join in too; over centuries of co-existence the holidays of the two faiths have long become confused and mingled. On my way back from the Lodhi Gardens at dusk I saw two heavily-bearded men bowed in prayer on a small masonry dais by the roadside. Though it lay beside a path I walked along every day I had never previously noticed the tomb, hidden as it was by a thick covering of weeds and thorns.

  The two men had cleared the undergrowth, covered their heads with pocket handkerchiefs, and were now busy placing a series of little oil lamps over its breadth; on the raised grave marker they hung a garland of marigolds. I asked the men whom the tomb commemorated. They replied that it belonged to Khwaja Nazir-ud-Din, a great Sufi from the time of the Emperor Akbar.