City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  ‘Are you imams?’ I asked.

  ‘No, no,’ replied one of the men, lighting another low, wide oil lamp of prehistoric design. ‘We are working for Electricity Board.’

  More comprehensible celebrations were being conducted around the square outside our house. Mrs Puri’s numberless grandchildren were scattered outside her gate throwing sparklers and Catherine wheels at each other. Next door, Mr Seth was letting off a volley of roman candles for the benefit of a gathering of portly-looking retired railway officials.

  My landlady, however, refused to have anything to do with such extravagance. ‘Actually these fireworks are too costly,’ she explained when I met her on the stairs. ‘Money is not for burning.’

  Mrs Puri, it emerged, adhered to a characteristically monetary interpretation of the Diwali festival. Most Hindus agree that Diwali marks the triumphant return of Ram and Sita to their north Indian capital, Ayodhya, following their successful war against Ravanna in Lanka; hence the festival’s date, some three weeks after the victory commemorated at Dusshera. But Mrs Puri would have none of it.

  ‘Mr William,’ she said. ‘You must understand that Diwali is a very important night for us.’

  ‘Why is that, Mrs Puri?’

  ‘Diwali is not about burning money,’ said my landlady, her eyes glinting. ‘It is about accumulating it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Diwali is the festival of Laxmi, the Goddess of Wealth,’ explained Mrs Puri. ‘If we light candles and leave our front door open, on this night Laxmi will come into our house and count all our moneys.’

  ‘Why does she do that?’ I asked, intrigued by the idea of Laxmi parking her lotus outside the gate and paying a visit in her avatar as divine auditor.

  ‘Actually Laxmi likes too much hard work,’ replied Mrs Puri. ‘If we have said our prayers to Laxmi - performed the money puja - we believe Laxmi will reward us by doubling all our savings.’

  ‘But I thought the festival celebrated the return of Ram and Sita ...’

  ‘No, no,’ said Mrs Puri very firmly. ‘That is for poor people only.’

  Diwali saw the last great burst of the autumnal exuberance unleashed a month earlier at Dusshera. Within a month of the last Diwali rocket vanishing into the Delhi skies, the city seemed to curl its tail between its legs and disappear into a state of semi-hibernation for the duration of the cold season.

  The brief but bitter Delhi winter came as suddenly as an undertaker: dark-clad, soft-footed, unannounced and unwelcomed. There is no snow in Delhi — the winters are too dry — but white winds from the snow peaks still sweep down the slopes, freezing the plains of the Punjab and shattering the brittle buds, before raking through the streets of the capital and brushing the narrow Delhi alleyways clear of people. The Delhi-wallahs withdraw into themselves. They lift up their knees to their chins and pull their heavy Kashmiri blankets tightly around. Over their heads they wind thick woollen mufflers. If you look into the dark of the roadside restaurant-shacks you see only the whites of their eyes peering out into the cold.

  The sky is grey, the air is grey, and the dull, cold greyness seeps into the ground, the stones and the buildings. The only colours are the red and yellow silk flags flying over the new Muslim graves in Nizamuddin. The trees in the gardens stand shrouded in a thin wrap of mist. In Old Delhi, the goats fattening for slaughter huddle together under sackcloth coats; some are given old cardigans to wear, with their front legs fitted through the sleeves. Winter smoke winds slowly out of the chimneys; bonfires crackle outside the jhuggi clusters. As you look through the window panes you can see winter lying curled like a cobra across the land.

  Olivia now spent her mornings in the warmth of our flat; it was too cold and misty to paint until the sun had reached its zenith at midday. If she ventured out she would return early, before a sudden dusk brought to a close the brief winter afternoon. Brisk evenings were followed by cold nights. We muffled ourselves in our new shawls - we had not considered packing jerseys or overcoats when we set off to India - and sat warming ourselves in front of the heaters. My reading was mostly historical. I had become fascinated with that period of Delhi’s history known as the Twilight. It was an epoch whose dark melancholy perfectly reflected the cold, misty scenes outside our own windows.

  The Twilight is bounded by two of the greatest disasters in Delhi’s history: the Persian massacres of 1739 and the equally vicious hangings and killings which followed the British recapture of Delhi after the 1857 Indian Mutiny.

  The first massacre took place in the wake of an unexpected invasion of India by the Persian ruler, Nadir Shah. At Karnal in the Punjab the newly-crowned Shah defeated the Mughal army and advanced rapidly on Delhi. He encamped at the Shalimar Gardens, five miles north of the city. Having been invited into Delhi by the nervous populace, Nadir Shah ordered the massacre after a group of Delhi-wallahs attacked and killed 900 of his soldiers in a bazaar brawl. At the end of a single day’s slaughter 150,000 of the city’s citizens lay dead.

  Nadir Shah’s massacre exacerbated the decline of the Mughal Empire which had been steadily contracting since the death of Aurangzeb, the last Great Mogul, in 1707. By the end of the eighteenth century Delhi, shorn of the empire which gave it life, had sunk into a state of impotent dotage. The aristocracy tried to maintain the life-style and civilization of the empire, but in a ruined and impoverished city raped and violated by a succession of invaders. The destruction created a mood conducive to elegy, and the great Urdu writers made the most of the opportunity. ‘There is no house from where the jackal’s cry cannot be heard,’ wrote Sauda. ‘The mosques at evening are unlit and deserted. In the once beautiful gardens, the grass grows waist-high around fallen pillars and the ruined arches. Not even a lamp of clay now burns where once the chandeliers blazed with light...’

  On the throne in the Hall of Audience in the Qila-i-Mualla, the Exalted Fort, sat the Emperor Shah Alam. He was a brave, cultured and intelligent old man, still tall and commanding, his dark complexion offset by a short white beard. He spoke four languages and maintained a harem of five hundred women; but for all this, he was sightless - years before, his eyes had been gouged out by Ghulam Qadir, an Afghan marauder whom he had once kept as his catamite. Like some symbol of the city over which he presided, Shah Alam was a blind emperor ruling from a ruined palace.

  At his court, the elaborate etiquette of Mughal society was scrupulously maintained; poetry, music and the arts flourished. But beneath the surface lustre, all was rotten. Servants prised precious stones from the pietra dura inlay on the walls to sell in Chandni Chowk. The old court costumes were threadbare; the plaster was peeling. Mountains of rubbish accumulated in the city streets and amid the delicate pavilions of the Exalted Palace.

  Unable to see the decay around him, Shah Alam still could not escape its stench.

  With Iris Portal and the Haxby sisters I had heard the testimonies of the last British in Delhi. Now, in the cold of early December I visited the chilly Delhi libraries searching for the accounts of the first English to penetrate the city’s walls in the late eighteenth century.

  The most detailed of the early descriptions was that written by Lieutenant William Franklin. Franklin had been sent to Delhi by the directors of the East India Company to survey the then unknown heartlands of the empire of the Great Mogul. Franklin’s account of his discoveries, published in Calcutta in the 1795 Asiatick Researches (the journal of the newly founded Royal Asiatic Society) painted a melancholy picture of the once-great capital.

  Franklin had approached the city on horseback from the north-west. His first glimpse was of a landscape littered with crumbling ruins: ‘The environs are crowded with the remains of spacious gardens and the country-houses of the nobility,’ he wrote in his report. ‘The prospect towards Delhi, as far as the eye can reach, is covered with the remains of gardens, pavilions, mosques and burying places. The environs of this once magnificent and celebrated city appear now nothing more than a shapeless heap of ruins ...’ Insid
e the city walls, the decay was equally apparent. Shacks had been erected in the middle of the grandest streets of Delhi ‘so that it is only with difficulty [that] a person can discover their former situation’. The bazaars were ‘indifferently furnished’ and their commerce ’very trifling‘.

  Most dramatic of all were the crumbling remains of the vast palaces of the omrahs (great nobles) of the empire. Though now in ruins and often occupied by squatters, it was still possible to see their extraordinary size and grandeur; that of Qamar-al-Din Khan ‘occupied the whole length of one side of a considerable street’. Franklin was impressed:All these palaces are surrounded with high walls and take up a considerable space of ground. Their entrances are through lofty arched gateways, at the top of which are the galleries for music; before each is a spacious court for the elephants, horses and attendants ... All of the palaces [once] had gardens with stone reservoirs and fountains in the centre ... Each palace was likewise provided with a handsome set of baths and a teh khana [a set of domed marble cool-rooms] underground ...

  Other travellers were equally amazed by the size of these palaces. Another Englishman, James Forbes, arrived in Shahjehanabad a few months later to find that the Emperor had arranged for him to be quartered in the crumbling palace of Safdar Jung, once the most magnificent private palace in the city. Having explored the enormous edifice in which he and his companions had spent their first night, Forbes suddenly realized that their lodgings represented only a fraction of the whole palace.

  ‘In the evening, on taking a more complete view of this Mogul mansion, [we] were surprised to find the apartments just mentioned formed only a very small part of this immense pile, which occupied six squares corresponding with that in which we immediately resided. Its magnitude,’ he concluded, ‘exceeded [that of] any of the palaces belonging to the nobility in Europe.’

  There was stabling and accommodation for five thousand mounted troops; beyond stretched extensive gardens and large bathing tanks paved with white marble. All the ceilings were constructed from carved wood and were magnificently painted, giving the whole a ‘peculiar light and airy appearance’. The harem apartments were lined with looking-glass, while in the marble expanse of the teh khana, three fountains were set within arches to ‘cool the atmosphere when the ladies were there assembled, such places being generally appropriated to the pleasures of the voluptuous Mogul and his favourites in the harem.’

  Franklin published his account of the Mughal capital in 1795. Eight years later, following a British victory at the Battle of Delhi, a permanent British Resident was installed within the ruins of another palace, a little to the north of the Red Fort. Just as Delhi was no longer the focal point of India — like the rest of India, it now looked nervously over its shoulder to British Calcutta — so within the city the focus shifted from the Red Fort to the British Residency. As the first half of the nineteenth century progressed and the power and arrogance of the British grew, so the Resident came to act less and less like ambassador to the Great Mogul, and more and more like the Mogul’s paymaster and overlord.

  Nevertheless the Emperor continued to hold court as he had always done, and at first the charade of Mughal power was maintained with the express approval of the British residents. These early residents were a series of sympathetic and slightly eccentric Scotsmen, whose love and respect for India was reflected by their adoption of Indian modes of dress and Indian ways of living.

  The first, Sir David Ochterlony, set the tone. With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony was decidedly different from the normal run of starch-shirted, stiff-lipped burra sahibs. Although known to the common peoples as ‘Loony Akhtar’ (or Crazy Star), when in the capital he liked to be addressed by his proper Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (Defender of the State), and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman. Every evening all thirteen of his Indian wives used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant.

  Yet perhaps the most fascinating of all the British in Delhi was not Ochterlony but another Scot, William Fraser, a young Persian scholar from Inverness. In 1805, Fraser was sent up to Delhi from Calcutta where he had just won a gold medal at the Company’s Fort William College. He was to be the Resident’s Assistant; it was his first job.

  Within a few years, Fraser had changed beyond all recognition from the callow youth who left Calcutta on a steam boat heading nervously upstream along the jungly banks of the Ganges. Given responsibility for subjugating the unruly brigand-country around Delhi — living continually on the move and under canvas, isolated from his compatriots, commanding his own private force of Indian auxiliaries - Fraser gradually turned into a great bear of a man. Like Mr Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, he saw himself as a European potentate ruling in a pagan wilderness; like Kurtz, he would brook no challenge to his authority. Like Kurtz, many considered him insane.

  He pruned his moustaches in the Rajput manner and fathered ‘as many children as the King of Persia’ from his harem of Indian wives. His favourite relaxation was hunting the Asian lion, often on foot with a spear. He had ’a perfect monomania for fighting’ and would always throw up his usual duties as an East India Company servant whenever a war broke out in the subcontinent. While he slept, his bodyguard of Indian tribals would unroll their mattresses and sleep around his couch.

  Fraser’s enemies, like the Resident Charles Metcalfe, had serious reservations about him. ‘He is masterly and self-willed to so great a degree that no power can be entrusted to him without some risk of it being abused,’ Metcalfe wrote in a confidential report to the Governor General in Calcutta. Yet Fraser was no brute. A more brilliant scholar than Metcalfe, he was a metaphysician and a philosopher. He loved to discuss ancient Sanskrit texts and he composed Persian couplets as a form of relaxation. He was the first European to take a serious interest in the ruins of Delhi. He befriended and helped Ghalib, the greatest of all Urdu poets; along with his brother James he commissioned the Fraser Album, the finest collection of Company paintings ever executed.

  Fraser remains a strange and enigmatic figure - misanthropic, antisocial and difficult to fathom - part severe Highland warrior, part Brahminized philosopher, part Conradian madman. He was also, as chance would have it, a forebear and kinsman of my wife, Olivia. Moreover, Moniack House, his remote Highland home, was still in the hands of her Fraser cousins; and every year for a fortnight, Olivia’s family hired it from them for their summer holidays.

  The house was like a memory of childhood, or a dream. There were long, dimly lit passages ending in locked doors. On the walls hung dark family portraits and old, early nineteenth-century prints of the Himalayas. Outside, the long, formal Georgian façade was framed by shallow pilasters and overhung with Virginia creeper. Inside it was dark, with the grey Scottish light filtering in through the weathered skylights or partially obscured windows. In the evenings, when the temperature dropped, everyone gathered around the blazing log fire in the kitchen.

  It was the end of August, the best season: that high, clear, sharp early Highland autumn which suddenly sweeps in while the rest of the country is still enjoying late summer. The harvest is collected; the fields are empty. The landscape appears deserted: there are no people and no sounds, but for the occasional cackle of a cock-pheasant breaking cover in the woods.

  In the month before we first went out to Delhi, Olivia and I spent ten days relaxing at Moniack. As we were preparing to leave the house for Inverness station, I went to say goodbye to our landlord, Malcolm Fraser. I found him practising his reels in the basement. I thanked him, and happened to mention that I was soon planning to visit Register House in Edinburgh to see if any of William Fraser’s Indian letters had survived there.

  ‘There are some letters,’ he said. ‘But you won’t find them in Edinburgh.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘Because,’ said Malcolm, ‘they’re all upstairs in the library.’

  Leaving Malcolm to his piano, I ran st
raight upstairs. The library lay at the top of the house, immediately beside the room where I had been sleeping. I had passed it several times every day, but the door was always locked and I had never thought to look inside. Now a quick search revealed the key to be hidden in the dust above the doorframe. The wards creaked, and at a slight press the door swung open.

  Inside it was pitch dark. The windows were shuttered. It seemed as if the thick, musty smell of buckram and old leather had hung undisturbed in the library air for centuries. When my eyes had begun to adjust to the light, 1 saw that the walls were covered with mahogany cabinets full of old leather-bound books; the remaining space was filled with woodcuts of eighteenth-century Highland lairds, including one without a head which was labeled Lord Lovat’s Ghost. Around the room, among piles of lumber, stood a great mountain of shoes boxes. I walked in and lifted the lid of the topmost box.

  There were piles of letters, bound up in separate groups of ten or fifteen. The epistles were written on thick parchment in a wild early nineteenth-century scrawl. The writer had used his old quill pen the way a conductor uses his baton. There were frequent underlinings and a jungle of exclamation marks. The elaborate downstroke curlicues kept getting caught in mid-flourish and scratching the parchment. Taking a letter directly under the lamp and looking more closely, I was just able to decipher the erratic copperplate:Dehlee 20 March 1806.

  My dear father and mother,

  Yesterday the memory of the gallant and victorious Nelson was drunk with enthusiasm in the capital of Hindustan ...

  The other boxes and the chests revealed the complete correspondence of Fraser and his four brothers: several volumes of diaries and more than a thousand letters, all written from in or around Delhi. Alongside the Fraser letters lay a whole archive of other material about Twilight Delhi: letters from the various British Residents and other Delhi characters such as Colonel James Skinner, the founder of the legendary Skinner’s Horse. There was also a series of notes from some of the great travellers of the period: Victor Jacquemont, the pioneering French botanist, and William Moorcroft, the self-appointed British spy who penetrated Central Asia to play some of the opening moves in the Great Game.