City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  Having described the main shrines and Sufi festivals and mystics, Khan goes on to list the city’s secular personalities: the nobles, the musicians and the great femmes fatales. These figures range from Azam Khan, ‘one of the chief nobles of the Empire’ whose principal claim to fame is his vast harem and his insatiable appetites (’a pederast, he is also fond of beautiful girls ... whenever he is informed of the availability of a lad or a fine wench he endeavours to be the buyer‘); through Taqi, ’one of the famous eunuchs and the ringleader of the conjurors of Hindustan’ (‘his house is the abode of delicate beauties, some as fair as the dawn while others are as dark as volatile passion’); to great musicians such as the blind drummer Shah Nawaz who played his own stomach as if it was a tabla drum; or the disgusting Surkhi, a glutton who ‘snored and expectorated loudly’ but whose horrible habits were overlooked by his hosts because of the unique beauty of his voice (’as melodious as a nightingale‘), his brilliant mimicry and his ready wit.

  Best of all were the dancers and courtesans - beautiful women like Ad Begum whose speciality was to appear naked at parties, but so cleverly painted that no one noticed: ‘she decorates her legs with beautiful drawings in the style of pyjamas instead of actually wearing them; in place of the cuffs she draws flowers and petals in ink exactly as found in the finest cloth of Rum.’

  The most famous of the courtesans was Nur Bai, whose popularity was such that every night the elephants of the great amirs completely blocked the narrow lanes outside her house. Even the greatest nobles could only gain admittance by sending in presents of large sums of money: ‘whosoever gets enamoured of her gets sucked into the whirlpool of her demands,’ writes Dargah Quli Khan, ‘and brings ruin upon himself and his house. Many people have become paupers after their association with her but the pleasure of her company can only be had as long as one is in possession of riches to bestow on her.’ Meeting Nur Bai was clearly one of the highlights of Khan’s visit to Delhi and at the end of his description he quietly drops in the fact that he ‘had the good fortune of spending some time in her company ...’

  But if it was the courtesans that captured Dargah Quli Khan’s imagination, his real admiration was reserved for the Delhi poets. One of the most interesting descriptions in the Muraqqa’ is of the famous mehfils, the literary or musical evenings for which the city was then renowned. ‘Although Hazeen [a Persian Sufi] leads a life of purity and charm, there is always a large crowd gathered in his house,’ wrote Khan. ‘In the evening, the courtyard of his house is swept and sprinkled with rosewater and colourful carpets are spread out on a raised platform. The great poets then start the recitation of their work. Hazeen’s verses make the audience ecstatic and inspire them to polish their own skills.’

  Other mehfils, however, attracted crowds for non-literary reasons:[The poet Miran] is humble, well-mannered and hospitable. [But] he is also a connoisseur in the art of attracting charming new faces ... As a result Miran’s mehfils always attract the beautiful and their lovers. Dancers begin to assemble from morning onwards ... A large number of pretty young lads are lured to the show including both Hindu and Muslim catamites. Good looking women gather in such large numbers that the mere sight of them appeases the appetite, although [of course] for the lecherous this does not suffice.

  Khan was in Delhi in 1739, during the Persian invasion, and he witnessed the bloody massacre when Nadir Shah’s soldiers went berserk and massacred 150,000 Delhi-wallahs. In most histories the massacre is said to mark the end of Mughal Delhi’s greatness, yet Khan clearly sees the invasion as only a temporary setback for the city. Certainly it dimmed the brightness of some of the mehfils - one noble was forced to ‘lay his capital at the feet of the Emperor’ during the invasion and afterwards his mehfils are described as ’subdued’ — but there is no indication that Khan regarded the invasion as the end of an era; only with hindsight would that become clear. Instead, despite writing soon after Nadir Shah had returned to Persia, the overwhelming impression that Khan tries to convey is still of a bawdy city of joy, a place remarkable for its wild parties, its lively celebrations and orgiastic festivals.

  It is, of course, an image of the city very far removed from the way most Delhi people conceive of their home today. Modern Delhi is thought of either as a city of grey bureaucracy, or as the metropolis of hard-working, nouveau-riche Punjabis. It is rarely spoken of as a lively city, and never as a promiscuous one. Yet, as I discovered that December, the bawdiness of Safdar Jung’s Delhi does survive, kept alive by one particular group of Delhi-wallahs.

  You can still find them in the dark gullies of the Old City - if you know where to look.

  Turkman Gate lies on the southern edge of Old Delhi. Most of the ancient city walls were pulled down twenty years ago and the gate now stands alone on a traffic island like a great beached whale washed up on the edge of the city.

  One morning in mid-January I jumped over the railings and climbed up to the parapet of the gate. It was a little before dawn; the Old City was just getting up. Sweepers raked the dirt and dung away from the front of stalls; a muezzin called from the minaret of a nearby mosque; chai wallahs pulled their blankets closer around them and lit their burners to boil the first tea saucepan of the day. It was still very cold.

  I waited for a full hour before I caught a glimpse of the sight that I had come to see. Just as the sun was rising, a solitary bicycle rickshaw jolted out of the labyrinth of the Old City and trundled underneath the gate. Inside were three figures. They were clad in brightly coloured silks and muslins, flowing saris edged in glittering gold brocade. They were heavily made up, with painted cheeks and scarlet lipstick; each of their noses was pierced with a single diamond stud. They were dressed for the nautch, dressed as women, yet they were not women. Even at a distance of twenty yards I could see that their physiognomy was very different from the delicate features of Indian girls. Their faces were too strong, their arms were too thick, their shoulders were wrong. They smoked. Physically, they resembled painted men, yet they were not men. Like Dargah Quli Khan’s friend Taqi, the figures in the rickshaw were all eunuchs.

  Eunuchs were once common over the width of Eurasia. They are fleetingly referred to in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian stelae and became popular as servants — and as passive sexual playthings — in the degenerate days of the later Roman Empire. In the Muslim world their impotence made them perfect harem guards and they rose to power as chamberlains, governors and even generals. They were slaves in Anglo-Saxon England and survived in Italy well into the nineteenth century, singing castrato roles in opera as well as in the Vatican Sistine choir.

  Yet today eunuchs have apparently died out everywhere except in the subcontinent. Here they are still not uncommon figures in the poorer parts of the larger cities. In all there are thought to be some three-quarters of a million of them surviving. Modern Indian eunuchs dress as women and arrive uninvited at weddings and birth celebrations. They dance and sing and make bawdy jokes. From the poor they extract money in payment for the good luck and fecundity that their blessings are supposed to impart. From the rich they take larger sums by threatening to strip naked unless paid to leave; terrified middle-class party-givers will give them anything as long as they go quickly. They are volatile, vulgar and can sometimes be violent.

  Yet despite their frequent appearances in public, very little is actually known about the Indian eunuchs. They are fiercely secretive and of their own choice inhabit a dim world of ambiguity and half-truths. They trust no one, and hate being questioned about their lives; if they are pressed, at best they will slam their doors in your face. Only occasionally does a scandal — a stabbing during a territorial dispute or rumours of a forcible castration — throw them into the headlines and into the clear light of day.

  For ten days after that first sighting from the top of the Turkman Gate, I trawled the teeming alleys of Old Delhi, trying to identify the houses of the eunuchs and attempting to persuade one of them to talk to me. Sometimes I would receive a m
onosyllabic answer to a question, but generally my enquiries were met with either blank silences or, more often, with graphic expletives.

  One fruitless morning, after an unusually rude dismissal from a eunuch’s house, I retired dispirited to a nearby dhaba for a cup of chai. There I finally decided to throw in my efforts at making contact with the Delhi eunuchs; it was taking up a lot of time and there was still no hint of a breakthrough: after ten days I still knew as little about them as I had when I had begun. While I was sitting there, sipping my glass of hot, sweet Indian tea, I was approached by a shifty-looking man who asked me whether I could help him; he had seen me with my camera; could I help him mend his? I had nothing better to do, so I agreed to try. He led me to his house and in a few minutes I had diagnosed the trouble — a flat battery. Zakir thanked me and then quietly revealed that he had been watching me for several days. He knew what I was looking for; and he indicated that he might be able to help.

  He was, he said, a jeweller. His family had always been Delhi jewellers - his ancestors had served the Mughal emperors and before them the Delhi Sultans. At the court they had made the jewellery for the Imperial eunuchs. When the British evicted the Mughals from the Red Fort in 1857, some of the court eunuchs had come to live nearby, a few minutes’ walk from the Turkman Gate. There his family had continued to serve them. He said that he had known all the local eunuchs since his childhood, and that he still made all their jewellery. I had helped him, he said, now it was his obligation to help me. He instructed me to meet him the next day at the Turkman Gate, soon after dawn. He would see what he could do.

  I was there on time, and Zakir was true to his word. He led me through the narrow alleys of the Old City until we came to a lane barely two feet wide. At the end of the lane, round a chicken-leg turn lay a large haveli of the late Mughal period. He knocked three times, and the door swung open.

  Like most things in Delhi, the curious position of the eunuchs in Indian society can be explained by the head-on collision of two very different traditions, one Muslim, one Hindu.

  Hijras (eunuchs) are referred to in the very earliest of Hindu texts, the Vedas, written in the second millennium BC. Here castration was seen as a degrading punishment meted out only to the very lowest in society. An Untouchable who was caught urinating near a Brahmin could be castrated, as could any lower-caste Hindu who had sex with a Brahmin woman. The act of castration brought the criminal to a level even lower than the Untouchables. By the time of the Mahabharata, one thousand years later, the position of eunuchs had improved very little. To be a eunuch was a curse; even the sight of them was defiling to a Brahmin. No one was allowed to accept alms from them, no one was allowed to consume food prepared by them, they were excluded from all sacrifices. As a solitary concession, non-Brahmins were permitted to watch them dance.

  The position of eunuchs in Islam was always very different. Although the Prophet Muhammad forbade castration, eunuchs were always common in Muslim society and because of their sterility were considered free of the taint of sexuality. They were thus especially suitable to guard sacred relics and great sanctuaries. The shirt of Muhammad in Cairo was guarded by eunuchs, as was the Great Mosque in Mecca. Pilgrims — hajjis — would kiss the eunuchs’ hands on their way to the see the Ka‘ba, the most holy shrine in all Islam.

  Dedicated courtiers, undistracted by families, they soon rose to powerful positions, first in Mameluk Egypt, then in Ottoman Turkey, but most prominently of all in Mughal India. ‘The kings, princes, queens and princesses place great confidence in these people,’ wrote the Italian traveller Niccolao Manucchi. ‘All people of quality have eunuchs in their service and all the other officials, servants and slaves are bound to account to the eunuchs for all they do.’ As officials and as singers, dancers and conjurors they were still prominent figures in Safdar Jung’s Delhi; according to Dargah Quli Khan, Taqi was a favourite of the Emperor and had ‘access to His Majesty’s private apartments’.

  When the Mughal court was disbanded, Muslim hijras were exposed for the first time to the other, Hindu, tradition of eunuchry. In typical Delhi fashion the two traditions merged, and the hijras became subject to a very Indian compromise.

  To give birth to a hermaphrodite is still considered by simple Indians to be one of the most terrible curses that can befall a woman. At the same time the blessing of a hijra is considered to be unusually potent. It can make a barren woman fertile. It can scare off malevolent djinns. It can nullify the evil eye. In the streets hijras are jeered at, sometimes even pelted with rubbish. Yet at a poor family’s most crucial and most public celebrations, at a marriage or at the birth of a male child, the absence of a hijra would almost invalidate the whole ceremony. The eunuchs themselves have aided the merging of the two traditions. They no longer guard harems; instead, as in the Mahabharata, they dance for a living. They no longer dress like men as they did in the Mughal court; instead they deck themselves in jewellery and cosmetics and wear saris. Nevertheless, they retain many of the characteristics of their courtly forebears.

  Manucchi gives a rather patronizing description of characteristics and temperaments of the eunuchs of Mughal times. ‘Among the qualities of this sort of animal is their extreme covetousness in collecting gold, silver, diamonds and pearls,’ he writes. ‘They are afraid to spend money even when it is necessary, fond of receiving, niggardly in giving. Nevertheless they are anxious to appear well dressed. They are foul in speech and fond of silly stories. Yet among Mohammedans they are the strictest observers of the faith.’

  Manucchi obviously disliked the Delhi eunuchs: ‘They are baboons,’ he wrote, ‘insolent, licentious baboons.’ Anyone who comes across them casually today can easily see why he was so rude. Yet you do not have to spend very long with them to appreciate how India, then as now, has turned them into what they are, how it has brutalized them and forced them to anaesthetize their own sensibilities.

  Thrown out of their homes, rejected by their families, they come together for protection. In the streets they affect the manners of a pantomime dame to gain attention: they pinch men’s buttocks, purposely make buffoons of themselves, but are quick to take offence. With little possibility of much fulfilment in this world, they look to the next; they are for ever visiting temples and mosques (for this they are required to revert to their male clothes) and going on pilgrimage to Hindu and Muslim shrines over the subcontinent. In this strange mix of piety and bawdiness, they directly recall the world of Dargah Quli Khan and the Muraqqa‘-e-Dehli.

  The house was a late Mughal haveli off Gulli Mr Shiv Prasad. A pretty young eunuch in a canary-yellow silk sari led Zakir and me through a vaulted passageway and out into a small courtyard.

  Under a wooden veranda lay a spread of carpets and divans. Sprawled over them were two more eunuchs; one was staring at herself in a mirror, applying lipstick, the other was combing her hair. Nearby sat two effeminate-looking men; there was also a baby in a cradle. Despite the early hour, the eunuchs were all dressed and painted as if they were about to go out to a late-night nautch. They greeted Zakir warmly, but frowned at me.

  ‘Who’s the gora [white]?’ asked one.

  ‘This is my friend Mr William,’ said Zakir. ‘He’s a writer.’

  ‘Why have you brought him here?’

  ‘He would like to meet you all.’

  ‘You know we can’t talk to any outsiders,’ replied the hijra, ‘unless Chaman Guruji gives us permission.’

  ‘And she won’t,‘ said the other hijra, pouting defiantly at me. ’She doesn’t like goras.‘

  ‘Where is Chaman?’ asked Zakir.

  ‘Upstairs. She’s sick.’

  We climbed the rickety wooden stairs that led up to a balcony; as we did so, one of the eunuchs blew a kiss at me and the others burst out laughing. At the top of the stairs, Zakir knocked at the door. A gruff voice commanded us to enter.

  As we stepped through the portal, we left the late Mughal haveli behind and entered a very different world: inside we were con
fronted by a gleaming pink boudoir that could have been the dressing-room of a 1950s Hollywood film star. Mirror-glass tiles covered the end walls and the ceiling; pink plastic carnations peeped out of brass vases; cut-out pictures of actors and actresses were pasted into a frieze over a glass bookcase filled with Hindi videos. The pink chintz curtains matched the pink chintz bedspread; underneath it, prostrate yet fully dressed in a woman’s blouse and man’s dhoti, sprawled the figure of Chaman, the guru of the household.

  Chaman’s fingernails were brightly painted and her hair was long and straggly; she had huge sagging breasts. Yet her face with its heavy jowls, hangover eyes and early-morning stubble was entirely that of a man. As we entered the bloated face nodded us a silent greeting.

  ‘Chamanji,’ said Zakir. ‘You are unwell?’

  ‘I’m dying,’ said Chaman. Then, groaning: ‘Oh! The pain!’

  ‘What is wrong with you Chamanji?’ asked Zakir.

  Chaman Guru

  ‘Nothing works any more. This body ...’

  ‘Is it your knees again?’

  ‘My knees. And my teeth. And my breathing.’

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’

  ‘I had an injection yesterday. For the asthma. It’s like trying to breathe through a thick chador.’