City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  In its clarity and purity of form, the mosque reminded me of the best early Cistercian architecture - that brief and precious half-century before the original ascetic urge began to give way to the worldly frivolity of the Later Middle Ages, the period that produced the great Chapter House at Fountains and the original dark-stone nave at Rievaulx.

  All around my rooftop pavilion could be seen other fragmentary remains of the Jahanpanah which Ibn Battuta would have known: a series of fragile mediaeval islands standing out amid the sea of modern sprawl.

  Turning a quarter circle away from the mosque towards the setting sun, through the early evening heat haze I could see the distant silhouette of the Qutab Minar, the tower of victory built by the first Sultan immediately after he had driven the Hindus from Delhi in 1192. The tower still stands above the walls of the old Hindu fortress, a tapering cylinder rising up 240 feet in four ever-diminishing storeys like a fully extended telescope placed lens-down on a plateau in the Aravalli hills. The tower is a statement of arrival, as boastful and triumphant as the Tughluk buildings around me were understated and austere.

  Turning to the north-east, I could just make out the lines of the walls of Siri, the first completely new city to be built by the Muslim conquerors in the Delhi plains. But the greatest of the ruins of mediaeval Delhi, the great fort of Tughlukabad, lay some six miles due east of my rooftop, virtually invisible now in the gathering darkness.

  As the sun began to set behind the Qutab Minar, I made up my mind to explore sometime soon what was once the most enormous complex of fortifications in all Islam. But with the growing ferocity of the Delhi heat it became increasingly easy to find excuses to put off ever leaving the house at all.

  The sky turned the colour of molten copper. The earth cracked like a shattered windscreen. April gave way to May and every day the heat grew worse.

  Hot sulphurous winds began to rake through the empty Delhi avenues. The walls of the houses exuded heat like enormous ovens. The rich fled to the hill stations and the beggars followed them. The activity of those Delhi-wallahs that remained in their city slowed to a snail’s pace.

  One Delhi-wallah of whom this was not true was our unfortunate mali. At the beginning of May, Mrs Puri’s businessman son decided to build a ‘Japanese’ garden facing on to his veranda. From the early hours of the morning the unfortunate mali could be seen labouring away, pouring with sweat - despite the heat he still insisted in wearing his thick serge uniform — as he constructed a sort of miniature Mount Fuji in the corner of the front lawn.

  Sadly, this exercise in horticultural Orientalism proved too much for the mali. After a heroic week of earth moving, he went down with heatstroke. He retired to his charpoy leaving Mrs Puri’s lawn resembling an open-cast coal mine; on one side a slag heap drifted on to the driveway, blocking access to or from the house. The inconvenience these excavations caused was second only to that created by the dust storms. In Delhi the high summer is enlivened by the advent of the Lu, the hot desert wind which in May begins to blow in from Rajasthan, bringing with it much of the Thar Desert. Burning grit rains down on the city then blows gusting through the grid of scorching streets. At the road junctions, spiralling dust-devils replace the absent beggars. Up in the sky, the sun hangs like a red disc behind the veil of sand.

  Inside our flat, small drifts of this sand began to blow in under the doors and through the cracks in the window frames. All this proved a formidable challenge to our sweeper, a delightful Rajasthani lady named Murti. Murti is beautiful, charming and intelligent. She has many talents. Sadly, sweeping is not one of them.

  Every morning she arrived at our door and spent five minutes flustering around with her hand-broom. Clouds of dust would fly up into the air, drift around the flat for a while, then settle on the beds and desk and chairs. There it remained. Dusting was a particular bugbear of Murti‘s, rarely attempted and never with any success. But Olivia, a model employer, believed it would be churlish to point this out. After Murti had completed her statutory five minutes of dust re-distribution, my wife waved her a cheery goodbye. ’Jolly good, Murti,‘ she would say. ’That’s enough for today.‘

  This pantomime went on happily until the first week of May, when Mrs Puri appeared one morning unannounced at our door, intent on doing a spot-check of her property. She took one look at the sand dunes drifting around our sitting-room and shook her head.

  ‘What is this?’ she said, drawing a circle in the sand with her stick.

  Olivia began to explain about not wanting to upset Murti, but Mrs Puri raised her hand.

  ‘Mrs William,’ she said firmly. ‘I am thinking you are not understanding the management of these people.’

  ‘But...’

  ‘If Murti is not doing her duty properly then you must be telling her to do it again.’

  ‘But Murti hates sweeping,’ said Olivia.

  ‘Then,’ said Mrs Puri, rapping her stick on the floor. ‘Then she must be made to enjoy it.’

  While all this was going on in our flat, something was clearly up at International Backside. Balvinder Singh was in high spirits. Despite the terrible heat, for a month now his conversation had gradually been becoming even more venal than normal.

  ‘You like this one, Mr William?’ he would ask as we passed some pretty Punjabi girl along Lodhi Road.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That young lady. Standing by traffic light. She with long hair.’

  ‘I’m a married man, Mr Singh.’

  ‘Me too. Same thing, no problem. You like?’

  ‘She’s okay. Bit young.’

  There would be a pause.

  ‘You know something, Mr William?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She going kissing Lodhi Garden.’

  ‘But the girl’s only about ten.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Mr Singh would whisper. ‘But Lodhi Garden is Love Garden.’

  I had learned by now that an upsurge in Mr Singh’s libido was usually brought on by some other outside circumstance. It was not until the middle of May that I discovered what it was that had so stimulated my friend. One morning I called International Backside and Balvinder said he would be around in five minutes. When he finally appeared, it was in a brand new Ambassador taxi. By the time I had come downstairs and made it over the mali’s trenchworks, Balvinder had polished the bonnet so bright he could curl his moustache in the reflection.

  ‘Balvinder,’ I said. ‘Congratulations!’

  Mr Singh beamed with pride.

  ‘Many months I have been saving,’ he said. ‘Now big loan has been granted by Bank of Punjab.’

  ‘Well done,’ I said.

  ‘Before every time you tell me: very old car, very smell, very dirt.’

  ‘Balvinder, I would never ...’

  ‘Now new car. You not complaining.’ Balvinder briskly opened the door and indicated that I should get in. ‘Yesterday Sikh temple going with family. First going God, puja doing. Afterwards whisky and German Beer drinking, taxi-stand party having. No smell, no dirt, no problem!’

  ‘I didn’t know you were religious, Balvinder,’ surprised by his admission that he had been to the gurdwara.

  ‘I going Sikh temple one time one year. Tip-top special occasion only,’ he muttered.

  ‘And what have you done with the old car?’

  ‘Brother Gurmack Singh giving.’

  ‘You really gave it away?’

  ‘Almost giving. Seventy thousand rupees only.’

  Balvinder inserted the gleaming new key into the ignition.

  ‘Look!’ he said, gesturing towards the instrument panel. ‘All new design.’

  This was perhaps stretching the point. The Ambassador was, without doubt, fresh from the factory. It had sparkling white antimacassars, new footmats and a splendid technicolour Guru Nanak pasted over its glove compartment. A garland of freshly picked marigolds hung from the mirror. But for all that, in its basics it was indisputably the same Indian-made version of the 1956 Morris
Oxford that had lorded it over the roads of India for some thirty-odd years now. I tentatively suggested as much to Balvinder.

  ‘No, no, Mr William,’ he replied. ‘All new computer design. Look — computer system.’

  Balvinder turned the key, then pressed a button. The dashboard lit up, miraculously illuminated from behind. There was a hushed silence before Balvinder whispered: ‘Mr William, this vehicle computer product of Indian Space Programme. It driving speed-of-light.’

  And so we set off towards Tughlukabad, Balvinder doing his best to prove his point.

  Rays from the rising sun were shining through the thick undergrowth of the jungle as we drove past. Keols, invisible in the forest canopy, were calling to each other in their incessant woody voices. Then, quite suddenly, we were out of the jungle and into the daylight and the walls of the great fortress, as solid and immobile as stone elephants, were rising up all around us.

  Tughlukabad is the most uncompromisingly militaristic ruin in Delhi, perhaps in all India. Ring after ring of rough-hewn stone walls thunder their way across the open plain on the deserted south-eastern edge of the city. As at Begampur there is a complete absence of decoration or of any aesthetic consideration. Instead, massive blocks of stone are simply piled high, block upon block, until the towers reach up, in some places to a height of nearly thirty metres.

  But with the Mongol hordes massing in the Hindu Kush, the Tughluks could take no chances. The whole spreading fortress was surrounded not just by a moat, but by a deep artificial lake. Dams were built linked by causeways to a series of smaller outpost forts. The flood waters were controlled by a succession of carefully engineered sluice-gates and locks. To take the complex, the Mongol hordes would have had to abandon their steppe ponies and turn aquatic before they could even reach the outer defences.

  Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughluk’s Tomb in Tughlukabad

  I climbed up through one of the thirteen gates and clambered over the piles of collapsed masonry blocking the way to the top of the citadel. Even today, seven hundred years after it was built, the vast walled enclosure is still an impressive sight. But at the time of the Tughluks, when the gridded lines of now-collapsed rubble were bustling streets and bazaars, armouries and elephant stables, all rising up from the glittering waters of the lake, then the sight must have been breathtaking. Ibn Battuta was lucky enough to see it in its prime:The walls which surround this city are simply unparalleled. There is room inside the wall for horsemen and infantry to march from one end of the town to the other ... Inside Tughlukabad is the great palace whose tiles the Sultan has gilded. When the sun rises they shine with a brilliant light that makes it impossible to keep one’s eyes fixed upon it. The Sultan deposited within this town a vast store of wealth. It is said that he constructed a tank and poured into it molten gold so that it became one vast molten block.

  From where I was standing, far below me I could see a separate miniature fort linked to the mother fortress by an umbilical causeway. Here, in the midst of the most defensible position in all Tughlukabad lies the tomb of Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughluk, the father of Sultan Muhammed and the creator of this impregnable complex.

  The tomb is an almost pyramidal cube of red sandstone whose almost absurdly thick inward-battering walls are topped by a dome of solid white marble. Like a miniature expression of the whole, the tomb is defended on all sides by its own set of machicolated walls, built as if to keep the Angel of Death at bay; they represent perhaps the most elaborate set of defences ever raised to protect a corpse. Nothing could be further removed from the graceful garden-tombs of the Great Moguls than this warrior’s memorial, as narrowly militaristic as theirs were elegant and sophisticated. One breathes silky refinement; the other still rings with the clank of rusty chain-mail.

  This enclosure is the key to the entire complex. It demonstrates the extent of the Tughluks’ obsession with defence, and highlights the essentially militaristic nature of their Sultanate. The Damascene geographer al-Umari confirms what is implied by the tomb: that Delhi, for all its bazaars and shrines and fine architecture, was above all a barracks: ‘The army [of Delhi] consists of 900,000 horsemen. These troops consist of Turks, the inhabitants of Khata, Persians and Indians. They have excellent horses, magnificent armour and fine costumes. The Sultan also has 3000 elephants and some 20,000 Turk mamluks (warrior slaves).’

  I tramped through the ruins of Tughlukabad trying in my mind to fill the deserted barracks with Turkish mameluks and Persian cavalry officers. I thought of them studying the Military Manual of Fakhr-i-Mudabbir, the Adab al-harb Wa‘l-Shaj’a, which was written at about the time Tughlukabad was being built. The manual is not only one of the most interesting documents to come out of the Sultanate, it is also one of the most precious keys we have to the concerns that meant most to the war-obsessed amirs of Tughluk Delhi.

  Climbing up on to a high bastion, I looked down over the shimmering interior of the fort and thought of the words that must once have been a set text for the cavalrymen stationed here: The sword was invented by Jamshed, the first of monarchs and its terror and majesty are greater than those of all other weapons. It is for this reason that when a Kingdom has been taken by force of arms, it is said to have been taken by the sword.

  As to the different kinds of swords there are many sorts: Chini, Rusi, Rumi, Firangi, Shahi, Hindi and Kashmiri. Of these the Hindi sword is the finest, and of all Hindi swords, that known as the mawj-i darya, the waves of the sea, is the most lustrous.

  The bow was the pre-eminent weapon given by Jibrail to Adam in Paradise. It will never be superseded in this world or the next and in Paradise the blessed will practise archery.

  When choosing a bow you should try to acquire above all others the mountain bow of Ghazna. It is made of horn and its aim is straight.

  The Indian bow — the kaman-i Hindavi - is made of cane. Its arrows do not travel very far but at a short distance it inflicts a very bad wound. The head of the arrow used with it is usually barbed and if lodged inside the flesh, the shaft is liable to break off. This leaves the head, which is usually poisoned, in the flesh. It is impossible to extract.

  The bows of Central Asia use horse hide as the bowstring. It is a poor material. Use instead a bowstring of rhinoceros hide, for it will snap asunder the bowstrings of all other bows to which the sound reaches whether these are made of the hide of wild ox, the horse, or even the flanks of a young nilgai.

  What Tughlukabad was to the military of fourteenth-century Delhi, the suburb of Hauz Khas was to the savants. For while Tughluk Delhi was first and foremost a barracks-town, it was not entirely without culture or civilization. Educated refugees fleeing the Mongol conquests of Samarkand and the Central Asian university towns had taken shelter in the city in their thousands and there they acted as an intellectual leaven to the warrior slaves who had dominated Delhi since its conquest.

  At Hauz Khas a beautiful tank had been excavated by the Sultan Iltutmish and the artists and intellectuals slowly collected around its banks. On one of its sides stood the most elegant set of buildings ever erected by the Tughluks.

  The Hauz Khas medresse was a college whose academic reputation was as wide as the Sultanate itself. Its principal hall, which still stands, is as long and as narrow as a ship, with delicately carved kiosks and balconies projecting out over the lake. Contemporary memoirs are as full of praise for the building’s beauty as they are for the work which took place within its walls: ‘Its magnificence, proportions and pleasant air makes it unique among the buildings of the world,’ wrote the chronicler Barni. ‘Indeed it could justifiably be compared to the palaces of ancient Babylon. People come from East and West in caravan after caravan just to look at it.’

  The excitable Delhi poet Mutahhar of Kara went even further: ‘The moment I entered this blessed building,’ he writes, ‘I saw a soul-animating courtyard as wide as the plain of the world. Its fragrance possessed the odour of amber, and hyacinths, basils, roses and tulips were blooming as far as the eye could reach. Nightingal
es were singing their melodious songs and ... [their voices blending] with the debates and discussions of the students.’

  More impressive still was the menu in the college dining-room, something which the salivating Mutahhar singles out for special praise: ‘Pheasants, partridges, herons, fish, roasted fowl, grilled kids, fried loaves, brightly-coloured sweets of different kinds and other good things were heaped everywhere in large quantities.’ Pomegranate syrup prepared with a mixture of sorrel was served as a drink and betel nuts were brought in on gold and silver dishes after the meal. As they ate, the students sat cross-legged on carpets brought from as far away as Shiraz, Damascus and the Yemen.

  The curriculum of the college centred on Muslim jurisprudence and Quranic studies, but Delhi had a reputation for astronomy and medicine and it is probable that these were also taught at the Hauz Khas. Medicine was a particular interest of the Tughluk Sultans, and Sultan Muhammed’s nephew Firoz Shah founded no fewer than seventy dispensaries and a Shifa Khana (or Central Hospital) where free food, drink and medicine were supplied to the sick at the expense of the treasury.

  The doctors of the college and the hospital practised a highly sophisticated offshoot of classical Greek medicine that would have been immediately recognizable to Hippocrates or Galen; it was known, after its Greek origins, as Unani (Ionian) Tibbia. The secrets of Unani medicine were originally passed from the Byzantine Empire to Sassanid Persia by heretic Nestorian Christians escaping the oppressive Orthodoxy of Constantinople. The exiles set up a medical school at Jundishapur, south of modern Teheran, where their arcane and esoteric formulae were stolen by the Arabs during the early conquests of Islam.