City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  ‘After the death of his beloved Queen Taj Mahal,’ wrote Manucci, ‘Shah Jehan selected in Hindustan the city of Dihli in order to build there a new city as his capital. He gave it the name Shahjehanabad — that is to say, “Built by Shah Jehan”. He expended large sums in the construction of this city, and in the foundations he ordered several decapitated criminals to be placed as a sign of sacrifice.’

  Shah Jehan was forty-seven when he decided to move his court from Agra to Delhi. He had just lost his wife; his children were now grown up. The building of a new city was the middle-aged Emperor’s bid for immortality.

  Shah Jehan had himself come to power twelve years earlier after a bloody civil war. He had been the able but ruthless third son; to seize the throne he had had to rebel against his father and murder his two elder brothers, their two children, and two male cousins. Yet while Shah Jehan was capable of bouts of cold-blooded brutality, he was still the most aesthetically sensitive of all the Mughals. As a boy of fifteen he had impressed his father, the Emperor Jehangir, with the taste he demonstrated in redesigning the Imperial apartments in Kabul. As the young Emperor he had rebuilt the Red Fort in Agra in a new architectural style that he had himself helped to develop. Then, on his wife’s death, he had built the Taj Mahal, arguably the most perfect building in all Islam.

  Before her death Mumtaz Mahal had borne Shah Jehan fourteen children; of these, four sons and three daughters survived to adult-hood. The eldest was Dara Shukoh - the Glory of Darius. Contemporary miniatures show that Dara bore a striking resemblance to his father; he had the same deep-set almond eyes, the same straight, narrow nose and long, full beard, although in some pictures he appears to have been slightly darker and more petite than Shah Jehan. Like the Emperor he was luxurious in his tastes and refined in his sensibilities. He preferred life at court to the hardships of campaigning; he liked to deck himself in strings of precious stones and belts studded with priceless gems; he wore clothes of the finest silk and from each ear lobe he hung a single pearl of remarkable size.

  Nevertheless Dara was no indolent voluptuary: he had an enquiring mind and enjoyed the company of sages, Sufis and sannyasin (wandering ascetics). He had the Hindu Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga-Vashishta translated into Persian and himself composed religious and mystical treatises. The most remarkable was the Majmua-ul-Baharain (‘The Mingling of the Two Oceans’), a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasized the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations. In an age when even the most liberal of Mughal Emperors used to demolish Hindu temples, this was both a brave and novel work; but some considered Dara’s views not just unusual but actually heretical. In private, many of the more orthodox Muslim nobles furrowed their brows and wondered how the crown prince could possibly declare, as one noble put it, ‘infidelity and Islam to be twin brothers’.

  Manucci, who was employed in Dara Shukoh’s artillery, portrays his patron as a flawed hero, brave and generous but constantly in danger of being outwitted by his wily opponents:Prince Dara was a man of dignified manners, of a comely countenance, polite in conversation, ready and gracious of speech, of extraordinary liberality, kindly and compassionate, but over-confident in his opinion of himself, considering himself competent in all things and having no need of advisers. Indeed, he despised those who gave him counsel.

  Prince Aurangzeb, Shah Jehan’s third son, was a very different character from his elder brother. As tough and warlike as Dara was civilized and courtly, he cloaked his ambition in a robe of holy simplicity, affecting the ways of a Muslim dervish. A master of deceit, he learned how to sow distrust and dissent within the ranks of his enemies. He controlled an efficient network of spies: nothing could be said in Delhi without Aurangzeb coming to hear of it. Moreover, he knew the art of poisoning with subtle toxins. Manucci was wary of him, fearing and disliking him in equal proportions:Although Aurangzeb was held to be bold and valiant, he was capable of great dissimulation and hypocrisy. Pretending to be an ascetic, he slept while in the field on a mat of straw that he had himself woven ... He ate food that cost little and let it be known that he underwent severe penances and fasting. All the same, under cover of these pretences he led in secret a jolly life of it. His intercourse was with certain holy men addicted to sorcery, who instructed him how to bring over to his side as many friends as he could with witchcraft and soft speeches. He was so subtle as to deceive even the quickest witted people.

  One person whom Aurangzeb never deceived was his father. From an early age, Shah Jehan made it clear that he did not care for his third son, and instead increasingly lavished attention on the more amiable Dara Shukoh. Dara he kept at court, showered with favours and titles, while Aurangzeb was sent to the empire’s southernmost border, the unruly Deccan.

  All the cards seemed to be stacked against Aurangzeb, but he had one key advantage: the support of his sister Roshanara. Just as Aurangzeb was angered by Shah Jehan’s obvious preference for Dara, so Roshanara was alienated by the affection lavished on her more attractive sister Jahanara Begum. After the death of Mumtaz Mahal, Jahanara had been given charge of the Imperial harem. Bazaar rumour had it that her closeness to Shah Jehan went beyond merely normal filial affection; after all, as Bernier put it: ‘it would have been unjust to deny the King the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he himself had planted.’

  As Jahanara’s influence increased, so did the jealousy and resentment of her younger sister. Like Aurangzeb, Roshanara grew bitter and vengeful, a Regan or a Goneril to Jahanara’s Cordelia. She became a tireless champion of Aurangzeb’s interests, making little secret of her hatred for Dara and Jahanara. Like Aurangzeb, she controlled a network of spies which she used to keep her brother well in touch with developments in the court. Like Aurangzeb she grew bitter and heartless. It was rumoured that she was also a poisoner and a witch. Yet she remains for the modern reader perhaps the most intriguing member of the entire family.

  When Shah Jehan moved the court from Agra to the new city of Shahjehanabad in 1648, it was Jahanara Begum who built the Chandni Chowk, the principal avenue of the Old City. Half-way down the boulevard she built a vast caravanserai which, before it was destroyed in 1857, was regularly described by visitors to Delhi as the most magnificent building outside the fort. Manucci, not normally responsive to architecture, dwells at length on its paintings, gardens and lakes, while Bernier pays it his ultimate tribute of recommending the construction of something similar in France.

  Roshanara Begum, with her less magnificent resources, was unable to contribute anything quite so ambitious. Nevertheless, she did put up the money for the construction of Roshanara Bagh, a pleasure garden on the far outskirts of Shahjehanabad. Today the garden is still there, although it has long since been absorbed into the sprawling outskirts of the town. It lies a little beyond Sabzi Mandi (the Old Delhi vegetable market), immediately beside a huge lorry park. It is not a beautiful part of the town, and the lush green of the tropical gardens - long lawns, flower beds and eucalyptus and casuarina avenues - comes as a welcome surprise in the midst of all the dirt and poverty.

  The lawns are filled with the usual odd-ball cast of characters who like to congregate in Indian parks: little boys playing cricket in the dry water channels; a lost-looking village goatherd with his flock; picnicking Punjabi families with their tiffin-tins; loving couples reclining against trees; a saffron-robed Hindu ascetic sitting cross-legged on the grass; a pair of elderly bent-backed colonels with identical walking sticks. In the middle of all these people stands a single Mughal pavilion, low and rectangular and finely proportioned, of similar design to those in the Red Fort. The pavilion stands three arches broad; four domed chattris punctuate the corners. Inside, a rectangle of delicately latticed jali screens gives on to the brick-built central chamber.

  It was once a beautiful building, but in decay now looks both tatty and sad. It is often the way with Mughal ruins: while the more primitive forts which preceded them still ha
ve an aura of power as they rise solid and impregnable from the burning plains, the silky refinement expressed in Mughal architecture turns, in decay, to something approaching seediness.

  It is difficult to visualize now, but it must have been within this pavilion that the young Roshanara consulted her spies as she reclined on carpets beside the gently bubbling irrigation runnels. Sadly there is no description of the Princess at this period; the only proper account of Roshanara to survive dates from very late on in her life; it was written by Bernier, who saw the Princess’s marvellous train on its way from Delhi - perhaps from this garden - to Kashmir to escape the summer heat:Stretch imagination to its utmost limits and you can conceive no exhibition more grand and imposing than Roshanara Begum, mounted on a stupendous Pegu elephant and seated in a large latticed howdah covered with a silken tent, blazing with gold and azure, followed by other elephants with howdahs nearly as resplendent as her own, all filled with ladies attached to her household ...

  In front of Roshanara’s litter, which was open, sat a young, well-dressed female slave, with a peacock’s tail in her hand, brushing away the dust and keeping off the flies from the Princess ... Close to the Princess’s elephant are the chief eunuchs, richly adorned and finely mounted, each with a wand of office in his hand. Besides these are several [more] eunuchs on horseback, accompanied by a multitude of lackeys on foot, who advance a great way before the Princess, for the purpose of clearing the road before them...

  There is something very impressive of state and royalty in the march of these sixty or more elephants; and if I had not regarded this display of magnificence with a sort of philosophical indifference, I should have been apt to be carried away by such flights of imagination as inspire most Indian poets.

  Once the winter rains have passed, Delhi experiences two months of weather so perfect and blissful that they almost compensate for the climatic extremes of the other ten months of the year. The skies are blue, the days are warm, and all is right with the world.

  That February, Delhi seemed like a paradise. Olivia and I filled the garden on our roof terraces with palms and lilies and hollyhocks and we wove bougainvillaea through the trellising. The plants which seemed to have died during the winter’s cold — the snap-dragon, the hibiscus and the frangipani — miraculously sprang back to life and back into bloom. The smells began to change: the woodsmoke and the sweet smell of the dung fires gave way to the heady scent of Indian champa and the first bittersweet whiffs of China orange blossom.

  From the old Mughal bird market in front of the Jama Masjid, Shah Jehan’s great Friday Mosque, we bought three pairs of small lorikeets and two large white cockateels. We got a bamboo-wallah to build them two cages and hung them from hooks on the veranda. We fixed red clay pots to the sides to encourage the birds to breed.

  Certainly, the other birds in Delhi seemed to be thinking of little else. In the top of a drainpipe next to our sitting-room, two sparrows were frantically building a nest. More springtime activity took place on the tin top of the defunct air conditioning unit that Mrs Puri had left attached to our bedroom wall. There, every morning soon after dawn, two pigeons performed an elaborate and very noisy mating dance. Though the unit had long since given up any pretence of cooling the room, it did turn out to have a curious talent for magnifying the pigeons’ footfalls so that their tap dance rang out like a drum-roll at six every morning. Olivia, who likes her sleep, soon developed a great loathing for our morning visitors, but all her efforts to drive them away and apart had little success, and spectacularly failed to calm the passions of the energetically copulating birds.

  Mrs Puri celebrated the coming of spring in an uncharacteristi cally spendthrift manner: she threw a small thanksgiving party. Her eldest son had caught pneumonia on a business trip to America and had been extremely ill. His recovery, Mrs Puri believed, was due to the personal intervention of Guru Nanak, the sixteenth-century founder of the Sikhs. To thank her guru for this kind gesture, she invited a group of four Sikh priests from her gurdwara to come and say some prayers in her garden.

  A tent of dyed homespun was erected out in front, while some caterers got busy preparing Punjabi specialities over a clay oven at the back of the house. At nine o‘clock four thickly-bearded priests appeared holding an enormous bound copy of the Sikh scriptures, the Guru Granth Sahib. They reverently built a small shrine for the book in one of Mrs Puri’s flowerbeds. Soon the garden was filled with the sound of sacred hymns and odes in praise of Guru Nanak.

  Guests - all Sikhs - began to appear from around the nearby houses and, after greeting Mrs Puri, quietly took their place cross-legged in ranks on the ground. Mr Puri was wheeled out and trussed up on a chair near the shrine. On condition that we both covered our heads, Olivia and I were invited to watch the proceedings from the rear of the crowd. For an hour the guests sat patiently listening; then everybody got up and, with the air of people who have been thinking of little else for some time, demolished the langoor (free food) which was waiting for them at the rear of the house.

  That evening Mrs Puri remarked to me that none of the considerable expense of the party would have been necessary if members of her family did not insist on leaving the Punjab and pursuing business ventures Abroad. Mrs Puri has always made it clear that she does not like Abroad. Once you leave the bosom of Mother India, she points out, you always find a disturbing ignorance as to the proper preparation of dal and rice as well as an infuriating lack of gurdwaras in which to say your morning prayers. She makes a point of reading out loud items from her newspaper, the Hindustan Times, which demonstrate to her satisfaction the old Indian view that Wogs begin at Kabul and that civilization stops on the banks of the Indus.

  This is very inconvenient for Mrs Puri, as a great number of her close relations have emigrated. She seems resigned to her brother, Teg Bahadur, becoming a Mountie in Canada, but is very worried by her daughter Rupinder, who emigrated to America while still unmarried. ‘Rupinder may be working in America,’ Mrs Puri would tell her friends at their monthly kitty parties, ‘but she is loving only our Punjab. When she comes back, we will find her a wealthy Sikh husband from a good family.’

  ‘I’m sure there are lots of nice Sikh boys out there,’ I once remarked. This went down very badly.

  ‘These American Sikhs we do not want,’ said Mrs Puri emphatically. ‘Like the Sikhs in your Southall, they are jungli Sikhs. They are not educated peoples.’

  ‘Some of them must be educated.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Mrs Puri, coming to the point, ‘but they are not from good families. They are villagers.’

  ‘Not any more. The Southall Sikhs are often very successful businessmen.’

  ‘Mr William,’ said Mrs Puri drawing a deep breath. ‘We are Puris. Outside India there are not Sikhs of our caste.’

  With Rupinder’s modesty threatened by hordes of lower-caste villagers, Mrs Puri had eventually realized where her duty lay. Painful though it was, she declared that the time would soon come when she would feel it necessary to inspect America for herself. She would hire a Buick and a Sikh driver from a good family, and see the States in the style to which she was accustomed. But she was not looking forward to the trip.

  ‘America is not a traditional country like India,’ she said. ‘There is no morality there. But I have heard it said that parts of the Rocky Mountains are quite like our Simla.’

  Then, just as we had begun to enjoy the blissful peace and calm of spring, the wedding season reached its climax. Overnight, everything changed.

  India remains, even in the cities, one of the most superstitious countries in the world. The educated Indian businessman will consult an astrologer as readily as the illiterate villager; and no occasion, except perhaps the birth of a child, necessitates the consulting of astrologers quite so urgently as a marriage. Not only do horoscopes determine the suitability of a partner for an arranged marriage, even the date that the couple should be joined is left to the astrologer’s discretion. There is no tradition of
marrying on a Saturday in India; a marriage takes place only when the heavens revolve into the most auspicious configuration.

  In Delhi, marriages take place over the entire length of the cold season. Nevertheless, since many astrologers seem to agree that a single phase of the spring moon is the most auspicious of the year, it is quite a normal occurrence for half the year’s weddings to take place within the space of a single fortnight around Holi, the spring festival. In the fight for tents and caterers that follows, the bride’s family is often forced to resort to blackmail and bribery; sometimes even to violence.

  Yet the inconvenience of this system is felt far beyond the immediate families involved. All Delhi is thrown out of gear by the chaos. One night the black spring sky may be quiet and peaceful, empty but for the cicadas. The next, the heavens are lit up with flashing neon lights, while from all sides come the bashings and screechings of Indian brass bands. The noise of heavily amplified Hindi movie music can be heard until well after two or three in the morning.