City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  Over at International Backside, Balvinder Singh decided it was now too cold to shave in the mornings, and began to grow back the beard he had shaved off in 1984. Punjab, his father, was delighted. But because of the cold, we now saw rather less of our friends than usual. In fact by mid-December, we began to consider it rather a triumph if ever we succeeded in summoning a taxi from International Backside, especially after sunset. In the hot season, the night shift at the stand would always lie out under the stars on their charpoys. Unable to sleep, they would appear at our door within minutes of us ringing for them. But in winter Balvinder and his brothers retreated into their taxis, under mountains of old blankets, and greatly disliked answering the telephone which lay outside, six freezing feet away in the taxi-stand tent. On the rare occasions we did manage to rouse one of the brothers that winter, we were treated to a ride in a taxi sweetly scented with sleeping Sikh.

  On those winter nights, Delhi took on an eerily deserted aspect. Occasionally there would be a chowkidar outside some rich man’s house, wrapped and muffled as if on the Retreat from Moscow. Otherwise, as the milky-white fog swirled through the avenues of the city, you would see only ghostly herds of cows patrolling the broad boulevards. Turning a corner, the coils of mist would suddenly part to reveal forty or fifty head of cattle, their eyes shining red in the taxi headlights, plodding resolutely north in a long line.

  During his first winter in Delhi, Aleck Fraser was also surprised by the temperature. ‘It is now the cold weather,’ he wrote home on 3 January 1811. ‘So cold that I am glad to be in my bed until 8 a.m. in the morning...’ (this from a man who usually rose at five-thirty).

  Aleck had moved in with his elder brother William, and was now living surrounded by William’s vast household, supplemented at any moment by crowds of petitioners and favour-seekers. Aleck’s letters frequently express his impatience with the number of people milling around his house: ‘[I am writing this letter] in a room like a thoroughfare; a dozen people and half a dozen languages resounding in my ear all the time ... Willie has not since my arrival been for one hour free from the interruptions of natives ... From morning until night he is troubled by these tiresome visits and forced to keep up a conversation ... the weather, personal and mutual flattery, perhaps horses and cattle make up the common subjects.’

  Not only was the house packed with William’s curious retinue; it was also unconventionally furnished.

  ‘William’s room was a curiosity,’ wrote James Fraser when he visited the house in 1815, ‘tygres skins, caps of tygres heads, saddle cloths of ditto, quantities of saddlery, matchlocks, bows and arrows, quivers, belts, armours, guncases ... Persian books and Indian curiosities of all sorts filled up the place. I shall certainly seize hold of some of these things and convey them from India to Inverness.’

  Much of the clutter did make it back to Moniack, including William’s extraordinary collection of Mughal weaponry. But as I read James’s description, I realized that I had no idea where the strange bungalow had stood and whether, like the Residency, anything of it had survived. Searching again through my copies of the Fraser correspondence, I eventually found the answer to the first question in a letter of Aleck’s in which he quite accurately sketches the whereabouts of the house:

  ‘It is now nine o’clock evening, and I am sitting by a fine fire in our house, on the bank of a branch of the Jumna. The main branch is within sight of the windows; and beyond it stretch the plains of the Doab. A little down the river, or rather this little branch of it, lies the grand palace of Shah Jehan, and across the stream, connected by a bridge (a very fine one) the frowning Bastille of Dehli, called Selim Gurh.‘

  Piecing together details from several different letters, it was possible to pinpoint pretty accurately where the house must have stood. Marking the area on a map of Old Delhi, I got Balvinder Singh to drive me slowly up along the Ring Road, which today follows the old course of the river. We passed the salmon-coloured curtain wall of the Red Fort and curved around the great bastions of Selim Gurh. We crossed under the British railway bridge which replaced the earlier Mughal structure described by Aleck. The road led on, past the remains of the British Residency and continued along the line of the ramparts for another three or four minutes. Then, quite suddenly, I saw what I knew immediately must be the building.

  It stood high above the city walls, now partially obscured by a recent flyover, a single-storey bungalow of exactly the right period. The building now supported a curious melon-shaped dome which even from a distance looked like a later addition. Far below, on the wall beneath the ramparts, you could see the blocked-up arch of the old water gate. Through this the occupants would once have been able to reach their own jetty on the Jumna, and from there take a barge downstream to the Red Fort or beyond to Agra and the Taj. Turning left through the old city walls we soon found the bungalow down a lane near St James’s Church. So far everything had proved deliciously easy. This being Delhi, I knew the state of affairs could not continue. It didn’t.

  As a notice at the gate prominently announced, the bungalow was now the Office of the Chief Engineer of the Northern Railways Board (Construction Department), Government of India. Presumably suspecting me of being a Pakistani agent intent on sabotage - the famous Foreign Hand invoked by Indian politicians to explain all manner of Indian disasters from train crashes and burst water mains to late monsoons and lost test matches - the heavily armed guards at the gate refused even to let me set foot within the gates. It took an entirely separate visit the following evening as the Chief Engineer was leaving his office before I was able to ambush Mr Raj Prashad and arrange a third visit when Olivia and I were (finally) to be allowed to see inside the premises.

  At the time arranged, we turned up at the now familiar gates. In our hands we held our written invitation from Mr Prashad. The guards grudgingly escorted us - at gunpoint - down the drive. As we drew near, we were able to take in the house properly for the first time. Two entirely separate structures seemed to have been joined together to form the building as it stood today.

  In the first block, a porte-cochère gave on to a low rectangular building flanked by four octagonal corner turrets. Although much altered in a late Victorian Indo-Saracenic style - perhaps after damage in the Indian Mutiny - the building seemed originally to have been a gatehouse. Then came the later dome chamber. Beyond that stood the second and larger of the two original structures, the Fraser bungalow, with its bow-fronted veranda facing back on to the Jumna waterfront. It was here that Aleck must have sat looking down the river, smoking his hookah while he scribbled the letters I had read in Moniack.

  After we had toured the building, we sat in Mr Prashad’s office sipping sweet Indian tea and discussing the merits of the ‘famous Railway Engineering Institute of Watford’, where Mr Prashad had once attended a course. During our conversation, it emerged that Mr Prashad had actually been responsible for saving the house from destruction ten years previously. After some bad subsidence, the department had been ordered to destroy Fraser’s house and build a modern office block on the site. Mr Prashad had persuaded his superiors to keep the existing building, but the most difficult part of the whole business, he maintained, had been getting the authorities to spend money to save and restore the old basement which was causing the subsidence in the first place.

  Several ideas clicked into place. When I had first read through the Fraser correspondence, I had noticed that the letters - generally full of observations about the passage of the seasons - were curiously mute about the terrible heat inside Delhi houses during the summer. From my own experience of the hot season, I knew this to be an extraordinary omission. Even with the use of an electric ceiling fan, the Delhi summer is pure torture; it is inevitably the first thing every letter writer mentions when he puts pen to paper. How could William and Aleck have written as they did, I had wondered, unless like the Mughals, they had built themselves a tykhana (underground cool room) to keep themselves sane? In one letter Aleck ambiguously rema
rks how in the hot season it is best to spend as much time as possible inside ‘a cool house’. By this did he mean a tykhana? And was it possible that the basement described by Mr Prashad was the remains of such a structure?

  Mr Prashad pressed a bell on his old mahogany desk and a few minutes later an old moustachioed janitor appeared, furiously clanking a ringful of keys. He led us outside to a small wooden shed with a corrugated iron roof, like a sentry box or an outdoor lavatory. The janitor turned the key in the lock; the door swung open to reveal a steep flight of steps disappearing deep down into the ground. He turned on his flashlight and led the way into the darkness. The steps were narrow, damp and slippery. Water dripped from the ceiling, generating soft growths of strange yellow lichens on the steps and on the walls. The temperature sank lower, and I began to regret that I had not wrapped up more warmly.

  The plaster on the walls had long since flaked off, and as we descended you could see that the brickwork was changing. The large and solid British bricks which indicated Residency-period work gave way to the smaller and more delicate bricks favoured by Mughal builders. Within a few seconds of reaching the bottom the janitor’s flashlight fell on a moulding that was unmistakably of Shah Jehan’s period.

  The underground passage reached a T-junction. Bowing our heads under a low, cusped Mughal arch, we entered an anteroom which in turn led into a large, echoing underground chamber. The air was old and used and smelt of damp rot. Roots spiralled down from the roof like curvilinear stalactites. It was pitch dark, but as the flashlight passed over the walls you could see that its surface was decorated with beautiful ogee-shaped arched niches. Although it was difficult to see clearly, in some of the arches you could faintly make out traces of Mughal murals, perhaps originally of flowers inside filigree vases.

  We picked our way through the puddles to the far end of the room, stepping carefully to avoid any lurking snakes. Here a passage led off to two further shallow-domed chambers of identical size and shape. The only sound in the whole underground complex was our own breathing and the echoing drip-drip-drip of falling water. When we spoke, we found ourselves whispering as if in a church, or a graveyard.

  We retraced our way back to the steps and took a left turn. The vaulted passageway led on ten feet, then split in three directions. One route headed off east in the direction of the Jumna waterfront, presumably to the blocked-up water gate we had seen from the road. Another headed off west as if to run under St James’s Church. The third headed south, in the direction of the Red Fort. All three underground passages had been walled up during the recent ‘restoration’, a precaution, Mr Prasad later explained, against ‘the ever-present terrorist threat’.

  It took little research to work out what we had stumbled across. The ‘basement’ Mr Prasad had saved from destruction seems in fact to have been the largest and best preserved Mughal tykhana to have survived in Delhi up to the present day; it is also perhaps the most important piece of domestic architecture from Shah Jehan’s Delhi to have survived anywhere outside the Red Fort. Yet, as my enquiries soon made clear, no one apart from the Railway Engineering Department seemed to be aware of its existence.

  But what was a seventeenth-century Mughal tykhana doing under Fraser’s house in the first place? According to the records, the Jumna waterfront near the Kashmiri Gate was known in the 1650s to have been the site of the palace of Ali Mardan Khan, Shah Jehan’s senior general and one of the most important omrahs in the Mughal Empire at the peak of its power. In 1803, when the British first came to Delhi, just as the Resident was given the remains of the Palace of Dara Shukoh, so - although it is not recorded in any of the sources - the Deputy Resident must have been given the palace of Ali Mardan Khan, the crumbling remains of the next most important property in Shahjehanabad. But rather than building his house around the shell of the old Mughal structure as Ochterlony had done, Fraser seems to have made a clean break with the past and razed the ruins of Ali Mardan Khan’s palace, preserving only the vast tykhana which ran underneath it. In the course of Mr Prashad’s restoration, much of the marble was covered with concrete while steel girders were raised to prop up some of the arches. Yet it is still easy to see how the subterranean chambers must once have been cool and inviting, especially during the terrible heat of midsummer.

  Yet perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the whole affair is the matter of the three vaulted passages leading away from the tykhana. Delhi is alive with legends of secret passages - there are old wives’ tales of underground ways linking Feroz Shah Kotla with the Ridge and of others passing from under the Qutab Minar to Tughlukabad - but the passages underneath Fraser’s House are, as far as I know, the first substantial remains of anything of this sort to have come to light.

  Was the passage heading towards the Red Fort some sort of Imperial Mughal escape route linking the royal apartments in the Fort, the library of Dara Shukoh and the palace of Ali Mardan Khan? Did the branch heading off underneath St James’s Church pass outside the city walls to safety? Or did the passages merely lead to other now lost suites of rooms in the tykhana? This last option seems the least likely explanation because, according to Mr Prashad, the narrow vaulted passages extended on underground as far as any of his workmen had dared to follow them.

  Today the passages are only blocked with a small plug of concrete; it should not be difficult to remove that plug and investigate what lies beyond. The problem would be to motivate India’s impoverished and bureaucratic Archaeological Survey to take an interest in the matter. As Mr Prashad explained when we were leaving: ‘You see actually in India today no one is thinking too much about these old historical places. India is a developing country. Our people are looking to the future only.’

  Facing the entrance gates of William Fraser’s bungalow, directly across what was then an open park, stood the haveli of Colonel James Skinner, the legendary founder of Skinner’s Horse. Like Ochterlony, Skinner had received a title from the Mogul Emperor: Nasir-ud-Dowlah Colonel James Skinner Bahadur Ghalib Jang. Nevertheless, Skinner was always known to Delhi-wallahs simply as Sikander Sahib: to the people of the capital he was a reincarnation of Alexander the Great.

  Skinner’s irregular cavalry - into which William’s personal army was eventually absorbed - enabled the East India Company to secure great chunks of North India for the Union Jack. With their scarlet turbans, silver-edged girdles, black shields and bright yellow tunics, Skinner’s cavalrymen were, according to Bishop Heber, ‘the most showy and picturesque cavaliers I have seen’. Moreover, another contemporary wrote that they were ‘reckoned, by all the English in this part of the country, [to be] the most useful and trusty, as well as the boldest body of men in India.’

  But Skinner was more than some starchy military caricature: he was also an engaging companion, an entertaining conversationalist, a builder of churches, temples and mosques, and the host of some of the most magnificent nautches ever held in the Indian capital. ‘I have seldom met a man who on so short an acquaintance gained so much on the heart and goodwill as this man,’ wrote James Fraser soon after their first meeting in 1815. ‘He has seen a great deal and run many risks and consequently has much anecdote and many adventures to relate ... yet there is the most total absence of all affectation, pretention, pride or vanity.’

  Skinner and William Fraser were best friends, business partners and brothers-in-arms. Fraser became the second-in-command of Skinner’s Horse while Skinner joined Fraser and another Mughal nobleman, Ahmed Baksh Khan, in a partnership which imported stallions from Afghanistan and TransOxiana for sale in the Delhi bazaars. The ruins of the stud farm which Skinner built for the business, complete with its wonderful baroque gatehouse - all fluted columns and Corinthian capitals - still survive two miles to the south of Skinner’s country estate at Hansi, north-west of Delhi.

  In the National Army Museum in London there is a picture of Skinner and Fraser, the latter heavily bearded, sitting side by side on their favourite chargers. They are dressed in full regimental dou
blet and busby; behind them Skinner’s Horse can be seen performing complicated training exercises in the Hansi plains. These same exercises greatly impressed James Fraser when he saw them being performed on the outskirts of Delhi in 1815.

  This morning we went out to see Skinner’s Horse practice their matchlocks at full speed - and as no bottle was forthcoming I put down my hat to be fired at and consequently got several shot holes in it, which has made it worse than it was ... The practice was really wonderful ... these men have been known not uncommonly to shoot a hare coming at them at speed ... [They have] galloped along with her [the hare] and loaded their guns [on horseback] and killed her. This really is having command of seat, hand and eye.

  But even more entertaining than watching Skinner’s Horse was chatting with Skinner himself. As James recorded in his diary later the same week:Skinner arrived and afterwards we had a dish of the usual conversation relating battles and sieges and accidents ... Skinner is really an enchanting fellow, and the number of anecdotes he has, and the knowledge which may be obtained of native manners and character, is very great ... Skinner, Ferguson and I practised with the Bow and Arrow - at which the former excels; afterwards we all dined together.

  Skinner’s father, the Scottish mercenary Hercules Skinner, was the son of a former Provost of Montrose. When James Skinner raised his cavalry regiment he had the Skinner clan emblem - the bloody hand - tattooed on the bellies of his Hindu recruits. But Skinner had Indian as well as Scottish blood in his veins; his mother was a Rajput princess (known to her Scottish in-laws as Jeannie), and according to Fraser, in his looks Skinner was ‘quite a Moor, not a negro, but a Desdemona Moor, a Moor of Venice’. It was this mixed racial inheritance that determined Skinner’s career.