Balvinder Singh dropped me outside during a brief pause in the rain. A low Mughal gateway led on into a wet and glistening flag-stone courtyard; it was deserted but for a solitary pupil running late towards his class. The flagstones were slippery and so hollowed-out by three centuries of passing feet that along some of the walkways the puddles had coalesced into shallow canals. The courtyard was bounded by a range of cloisters two storeys high. Classrooms filled the ground-floor rooms. On the first floor, leading off a covered balcony, were the chambers of the fellows and scholars. The arcades were broken on three sides by vaulted gateways, and on the fourth, the principal axis, by a red sandstone mosque. Before the mosque, filling both sides of the cloister garth, was a garden of healing herbs and shrubs.
I climbed a narrow staircase leading to the first floor balcony. Outside the scholars’ rooms sat a line of bearded old men busily correcting specimens of Arabic calligraphy. Dr Jaffery’s room was the last on the corridor.
The door opened to reveal a gaunt, clean-shaven man. He wore white Mughal pyjamas whose trouser-bottoms, wide and slightly flared, were cut in the style once favoured by eighteenth-century Delhi gallants. On his head he sported a thin white mosque-cap. Heavy black glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, but the effect was not severe. Something in Dr Jaffery’s big bare feet and the awkward way he held himself gave the impression of a slightly shambolic, absent-minded individual: ‘Asalam alekum,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’ Then, looking behind me, he added: ‘Ah! The rains ... Spring has arrived.’
Dr Jaffery’s domed room was small and square and dark. Lightning from the storm had cut off the electricity and the cell was illuminated by a bronze dish filled with flickering candles. The shadows from the candlelight darted back and forth across the shallow whitewashed dome. Persian books were stacked in disordered piles; in the corner glistened a big brass samovar incised with Islamic decoration. The scene of the Sufi scholar in his room was straight out of a detail from the Anvar-i Suhayli - or indeed any of the illuminated Mughal manuscript books-and I said this to Dr Jaffery. ‘My nieces also tell me I live in the Mughal age,’ he replied. ‘But they - I think - mean it as a criticism. You would like tea?’
Dr Jaffery blew on the coals at the bottom of his samovar, then placed two cupfuls of buffalo milk in the top of the urn. Soon the milk was bubbling above the flame. While he fiddled with his samovar, Dr Jaffery told me about his work.
For the previous three years he had been busy transcribing the forgotten and unpublished portions of the Shah Jehan Nama, the court chronicle of Shah Jehan. He had converted the often illegible manuscript into clear Persian typescript; this had then been translated into English by a team of Persian scholars in America. The manuscript, originally compiled by Shah Jehan’s fawning court historian Inayat Khan, told the story of the apex of Mughal power, the golden age when most of India, all of Pakistan and great chunks of Afghanistan were ruled from the Red Fort in Delhi. It was an age of unparalleled prosperity: the empire was at peace and trade was flourishing. The reconquest of the Mughals’ original homeland - trans-Oxianan Central Asia - seemed imminent. In the ateliers of the palace the artists Govardhan, Bichitr and Abul Hasan were illuminating the finest of the great Mughal manuscript books; in Agra, the gleaming white dome of the Taj Mahal was being raised on its plinth above the River Jumna.
The book which contained the fruits of Dr Jaffery’s labours was about to be published. Now Dr Jaffery was beginning to transcribe a forgotten text about Shah Jehan’s childhood. The manuscript had just been discovered in the uncatalogued recesses of the British Museum; it was exciting work, said the doctor, but difficult: the manuscript was badly damaged and as he had not the money to go to London he was having to work from a smudged xerox copy. The new transcription absorbed his waking hours; but, despite the difficulties, he said he was making slow progress.
‘As the great Sa’di once put it: “The Arab horse speeds fast, but although the camel plods slowly, it goes both by day and night.”‘
As we chatted about Shah Jehan, Dr Jaffery brought out a plate of rich Iranian sweets from an arched recess; he handed them to me and asked: ‘Would you not like to learn classical Persian?’
‘I would love to,’ I answered. ‘But at the moment I’m having enough difficulty trying to master Hindustani.’
‘You are sure?’ asked Dr Jaffery, breaking one of the sweets in two. ‘Learning Persian would give you access to some great treasures. I would not charge you for lessons. I am half a dervish: money means nothing to me. All I ask is that you work hard.’
Dr Jaffery said that very few people in Delhi now wanted to study classical Persian, the language which, like French in Imperial Russia, had for centuries been the first tongue of every educated Delhi-wallah. ‘No one has any interest in the classics today,’ he said. ‘If they read at all, they read trash from America. They have no idea what they are missing. The jackal thinks he has feasted on the buffalo when in fact he has just eaten the eyes, entrails and testicles rejected by the lion.’
I said: ‘That must upset you.’
‘It makes no difference,’ replied Dr Jaffery. ‘This generation does not have the soul to appreciate the wisdom of Ferdowsi or Jalaludin Rumi. As Sa’di said: “If a diamond falls in the dirt it is still a diamond, yet even if dust ascends all the way to heaven it remains without value.”‘
I loved the way Dr Jaffery spoke in parables; for all his eccentricities, like some ancient sage his conversation was dotted with pearls of real wisdom. After the banalities of life with Balvinder Singh and Mrs Puri, Dr Jaffery’s words were profound and reassuring. As he told little aphorisms from Rumi or the anecdotes of Ferdowsi’s Shah Nama - the Mughal Emperors’ favourite story-book - his gentle voice soothed away the irritations of modern Delhi. But overlaying the gentle wisdom there always lay a thin patina of bitterness.
‘Today Old Delhi is nothing but a dustbin,’ he said, sipping at his tea. ‘Those who can, have houses outside the walled city. Only the poor man who has no shelter comes to live here. Today there are no longer any educated men in the old city. I am a stranger in my own home.’ He shook his head. ‘All the learning, all the manners have gone. Everything is so crude now. I have told you I am half a dervish. My own ways are not polished. But compared to most people in this city ...’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Here everyone has forgotten the old courtesies. For example ... in the old days a man of my standing would never have gone to the shops; everything would be sent to his house: grain, chillies, cotton, cloth. Once every six months the shopkeeper would come and pay his regards. He would not dare ask for money; instead it would be up to the gentleman to raise the matter and to give payment when he deemed suitable. If ever he did go to the bazaar he would expect the shopkeepers to stand up when he entered ...
‘All these things have gone now. People see the educated man living in poverty and realize that learning is useless; they decide it is better to remain ignorant. To the sick man sweet water tastes bitter in the mouth.’
‘But don’t your pupils get good jobs? And doesn’t their success encourage others?’
‘No. They are all Muslims. There is no future for them in modern India. Most become gundas or smugglers.’
‘Is learning Persian a good training for smuggling?’
‘No, although some of them become very successful at this business. One of my pupils was Nazir. Now he is a big gambler, the Chief of the Prostitutes. But before he was one of my best pupils ...’
At that moment, the cry of the muezzin outside broke the evening calm. Dr Jaffery rustled around the room, picking up books and looking behind cushions for his mosque cap before remembering that he was already wearing it. Muttering apologies he slipped on his sandals and stumbled out. ‘Can you wait for five minutes?’ he asked. ‘I must go and say my evening prayers.’
From the balcony I watched the stream of figures in white pyjamas rushing through the pelting rain to the shelter of the mosque. Thro
ugh the cloudburst I could see the old men laying out their prayer carpets under the arches, then, on a signal from the mullah, a line of bottoms rose and fell in time to the distant cries of ‘Allah hu-Akbar!’
Five minutes later, when Dr Jaffery returned, he again put a cupful of milk on the samovar and we talked a little about his home life.
‘The death of my eldest brother in 1978 was the most important event in my life,’ he said. ‘From my boyhood, I always wanted to live in a secluded place, to live like a Sufi. But since my brother’s death it has been my duty to care for my two nieces. I cannot now become a full dervish; or at least not until my nieces are educated and married. Until then their well-being must be my first concern.’
‘And after that?’
‘Afterwards I want to go on haj, to visit Mecca. Then I will retire to some ruined mosque, repair it, and busy myself with my studies.’
‘But if you wish to retire can’t you find some other member of your family to look after your nieces for you?’
‘My elder brothers were killed at Partition,’ said Jaffery. ‘My elder sister is also a victim of those times. To this day she still hears the voices of guns. You may be sitting with her one evening, quite peacefully, when suddenly she will stand up and say: “Listen! Guns! They are coming from that side!”
‘In fact it was only by a miracle that my sister and I survived at all: we took shelter with our youngest brother in the Jama Masjid area. Had we been at the house of my parents we would have shared the fate of the rest of the family ...’ Dr Jaffery broke off.
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘My parents lived in an area that had always been traditionally Hindu. During Partition they went into hiding, and for a fortnight their good Hindu friends brought them food and water. But one day they were betrayed; a mob came in the night and burned the house down. We learned later that the traitor was a neighbour of my father’s. My father had helped him financially. This was how the man repaid him ...’ Dr Jaffery shook his head. ‘In this city,’ he said, ‘culture and civilization have always been very thin dresses. It does not take much for that dress to be torn off and for what lies beneath to be revealed.’
In all of Delhi’s history, at no period was that thin dress of civilization more beautiful - or more deceptively woven - than during the first half of the seventeenth century, during the Golden Age of Shah Jehan.
In public the actions of the Emperor and his court were governed by a rigid code of courtliness, as subtle and elaborate as the interlaced borders the Mughal artists painted around their miniatures. But for all this fine façade, in private the ambitions of the Mughal Emperors knew no moral limitations: without scruple they would murder their brothers, poison their sisters or starve their fathers. The courtly ceremonial acted as a veil around the naked reality of Mughal politics; it was a mask which deliberately disguised the brutality and coarseness that lay hidden beneath.
Despite the great volume of material that existed on the Mughals, I had always found them difficult to visualize. Their architecture, their courtliness, their ceremony were famous - but, like a profile miniature portrait, the result was one-dimensional: the jewels, the fineness of the turbans, the swirling details of the drapery - all were more lovingly and clearly drawn than the man inside; the sitter’s thoughts and feelings, his character and emotions remain relatively opaque: unfathomed and incomprehensible.
It was Dr Jaffery who told me about two contemporary travel books which rescued the Mughals from being suffocated beneath landslides of silk, diamonds and lapis lazuli - Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire and Manucci’s Mogul India. Unlike the sycophantic official court chronicles - the Shah Jehan Nama that Dr Jaffery had spent so long transcribing - the accounts of the two European travellers were packed with reams of malicious bazaar gossip. The two books may thus have been peppered with little fictions, but no sharper or livelier pictures of Mughal Delhi, with all its scandals, dramas and intrigues, have come down to us. In the mornings I used to sit out in the warm sun of our terrace and read the travellers’ descriptions of the Delhi they knew from their visits at the very apex of the Mughal Empire.
The two authors were very different men. François Bernier was an aristocratic and highly educated French doctor who came to Delhi in 1658; he soon became sought-after as a physician by the Imperial family and the Mughal nobility. In his writings he comes across as wonderfully French - proud and arrogant, a gourmand and an aesthete, an admirer of female beauty; he was also a terrific scandalmonger. Bernier constantly contrasts Mughal India and seventeenth-century France: the Jumna compares favourably with the Loire, he thinks; adultery is easier in Paris than it is in Delhi: ‘in France it only excites merriment, but in this part of the world there are few instances where it is not followed by some dreadful and tragical catastrophe.’ But Indian naan, he regrets, can never ever be compared to a good Parisian baguette: Bakers are numerous, but their ovens are unlike our own and very defective. The bread, therefore, is neither well made nor properly baked, [although] that sold in the Fort is tolerably good. In its composition the bakers are not sparing of fresh butter, milk and eggs; but though it be raised it has a burned taste, and is too much like cake. It is never to be compared to the Pain de Gonesse, and other delicious varieties to be met with in Paris.
For all his fopperies, Bernier was very much the educated European of the early Enlightenment: he knew his classics, was a firm believer in Reason, and had no patience with ‘ridiculous errors and strange superstitions’. In particular, like Macaulay two centuries later, he had little time for the Brahmins and their Sanskrit learning:They believe that the world is flat and triangular; that it is composed of seven distinct habitations ... and that each is surrounded by its own peculiar sea; that one sea is of milk; another of sugar; a third of butter; a fourth of wine; and so on ... [also that] the whole of this world is supported on the heads of a number of elephants whose occasional motion is the cause of earthquakes. If the renowned sciences of the ancient Indian sages consisted of all these extravagant follies, mankind has indeed been deceived in the exalted opinion it has long entertained of their wisdom.
Nevertheless Bernier was cautiously appreciative of most aspects of India and was one of the very first apologists for Mughal culture against the growing arrogance of its European visitors. ‘I have sometimes been astonished to hear the contemptuous manner in which Europeans in the Indies speak of [Mughal architecture],’ he writes, adding of the Delhi Jama Masjid: ‘I grant that this building is not constructed according to those rules of architecture which we seem to think ought to be implicitly followed; yet I can see no fault that offends taste. I am satisfied that even in Paris a church erected after the model of this temple would be admired, were it only for its singular style of architecture, and its extraordinary appearance.’
What most terrified Bernier was the notion that his long stay in India would rob him of his cultivated Parisian sensibilities. This fear reached its climax when he saw the Taj Mahal: ‘The last time I saw Tage Mehale’s mausoleum I was in the company of a French merchant who, like myself, thought that this extraordinary fabric could not be sufficiently admired. I did not venture to express my opinion, fearing that my taste might have become corrupted by my long residence in the Indies; but since my companion had recently come from France, it was quite a relief to hear him say that he had seen nothing in Europe quite so bold and majestic.‘
Jama Masjid
Niccolao Manucci, Bernier’s slightly younger Italian contemporary, had no such aesthetic qualms. Manucci was the son of a Venetian trader who, aged fourteen, had run away from home as a stowaway on a merchant ship. After crossing the Middle East, he came to India to seek employment as an artilleryman in the Mughal army. A self-confessed con-artist and charlatan, he used his ‘nimbleness of wit’ to set himself up as a quack doctor and an exorcist. In his memoirs he revels in the audacity of the fraud he pulled off: Not only was I famed as a doctor, but it was rumoured I had the power of expelling de
mons from the bodies of the possessed. Once some Mahommedans were at my house, consulting me about their complaints when night came on ... In the middle of our talk I began to speak as if to some demon, telling him to hold his tongue and not interrupt my talk, and let me serve these gentlemen for it was already late. Then I resumed my conversation with the Mahommedans. But they now had only half their souls left in their bodies, and spoke in trembling tones. I made use of their terror for my own amusement, and raising my voice still more, I shouted at him whom I assumed to be present, lying invisible in some corner ... They were unable to speak a word out of fright ...
Being credulous in matters of sorcery, they began to put it about that the Frank doctor not only had the power of expelling demons but had dominion over them. This was enough to make many come, and among them they brought before me many women who pretended to be possessed (as is their habit when they want to leave their houses to meet with their lovers) and it was hoped that I could deal with them. The usual treatment was bullying, tricks, emetics and evil-smelling fumigation with filthy things. Nor did I desist until the patients were worn out, and said that now the devil had fled. In this manner I restored many to their senses, with great increase in reputation, and still greater diversion for myself.
Manucci’s account of Mughal India is as full of gossip as Bernier‘s, but the precarious manner in which he chose to live his life meant that his book has rather more action in it: rather than fussing about the relative merits of Parisian and Mughal architecture, he fights as an artilleryman in the Mughal civil war, has his caravan ambushed by bandits, battles with a pressgang and is finally besieged in a fort on an island in the Indus.
With their two very different viewpoints - one the angst-struck French intellectual, the. other the ex-con and hard-nosed Venetian man of action — Bernier and Manucci colour in the gilded outlines provided by the Mughals’ own court chronicles and their miniature paintings. The picture that thus emerges of the tensions and jealousies in the Imperial family has a grand, almost Shakespearean feel to it: the Emperor Shah Jehan governs the Mughal Empire through its period of greatest magnificence. He moves the court from Agra to Delhi and builds the Red Fort in the centre of the new Shahjehanabad. But then, despite the gloss given by the court flatterers, the unspoken tensions in the palace eventually build up into a civil war which topples the old order. The characters in the drama — some good, but flawed and naive, others utterly evil and ruthless - are classic Renaissance types. Like King Lear, Shah Jehan in his old age misplays his hand and is defeated by his ungrateful children. Yet his collapse is partly his own fault: it is the flaws in Shah Jehan’s own character - his pride, his sexual gluttony and the unjust way in which he handles his children — that lead to his downfall.
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