City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  Adapted in Baghdad and Cairo, cross-fertilized with the ancient medical practices of Pharaonic Egypt, Sumeria, Assyria and Babylon, Unani medicine was finally codified into a cohesive system by the great Arab scholar Ibn Sina (or Avicenna as he was known in the mediaeval west). Thus refined, the medicine passed to Central Asia and into the syllabuses of the universities of Samarkand and Tash kent. Thence it was finally brought to India in the thirteenth century by refugees fleeing Genghis Khan — at about the same time as Abelard was lecturing to his students at the new university of Paris.

  While western medicine has always tended to concentrate on the elimination of germs, the Unani doctors tried not to lose sight of the patient as a whole being; they conceived of therapy in the original Greek sense of healing, at once taking into account physical, mental and spiritual well-being. Unani medicine emphasized aiding the body’s inbuilt ability to heal itself and its ethics forbade any treatment which, while curing a specific ailment, harmed the soundness of the body as a whole. Treatment was not merely a matter of prescribing herbal medicines, but a whole regimen which controlled the diet and the life-style. For this reason Unani hospitals were equipped with the best cooks, and, in the case of the sixth-century Bait al-Hikmah in Baghdad, a whole troupe of singers and musicians as well.

  All these elaborations were built on the basic Hippocratic theory of the Four Humours. The theory postulates the presence in the human body of blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Each person’s unique mixture of these substances determines his temperament : a predominance of blood gives a sanguine temperament; a predominance of phlegm makes one phlegmatic; yellow bile, bilious (or choleric); and black bile, melancholic. As long as these humours are in balance, the human system is healthy; it is imbalance which can result in disease. A Unani. physician attempts to diagnose the imbalance and restore each individual to his proper equilibrium. As no two humours are identical, no two people are treated in exactly the same manner.

  While Unani medicine has completely died out in the area where it was born and developed, I had not been surprised to find that — like almost every other tradition which has ever come to Delhi - it still survived intact in the alleys of the Old City. There are now some 1500 hakims still practising their Byzantine medicine in Delhi, and they appear to do a thriving business. Unani medicine is regarded every bit as seriously as conventional western treatment and it is quite distinct from the dubious folk-medicine offered to passers-by by roadside fakirs, or Balvinder Singh’s freckle-destroying friends in the Meena Bazaar.

  The centre of the modern Unani hakims is still around Ballimaran, the Street of the Cat Killers, where the doctors moved when the area was first built in the late 1640s. Under the Mughals, Ballimaran was an aristocratic enclave full of large and airy havelis. But for centuries now - like the rest of Old Delhi - the area has been in slow decay. Boys with wicker baskets full of bricks and masonry hurry past; the streets stink and run with mud and excrement. Yet behind the grubby façades, if you know where to look, you can still find the Unani doctors, practising in exactly the way they always have.

  Their surgeries are wonderful. Inside dark, vaulted rooms whose mahogany shelves are heavy with jars, bottles and vials, elderly white-bearded men can be seen feeling the pulse of heavily-veiled women; behind, in the shadows, their assistants are busy decanting liquids like mediaeval alchemists: white powders are mixed with grey crystals then, slowly, crystal by crystal, dissolved in a vat of bubbling, frothing liquid.

  The air of the mediaeval is quite appropriate: the techniques these hakims practise are more or less identical to those once taught in the fourteenth-century Hauz Khas medresse.

  Then, in the second week of May, a friend of ours — a classical dancer named Navina - fell down a flight of stairs. When we went over a week later, she told us she was being treated for an inflamed tendon on her knee. Her doctor was a hakim near the Turkman Gate. If we were interested, she said, we would be welcome to come along and watch him treat her.

  In high summer the hakim’s surgery closed at 10.30 AM, so Olivia and I went over to our friend soon after breakfast. We all drove up to Old Delhi together. On the way Navina told us about a friend of hers, an American girl who for many years had suffered from excruciating headaches and backaches. She had consulted innumerable doctors in the west, but beyond prescribing pain-killers no one had been able to help her; as a result the girl had begun to resign herself to her condition. Then Navina had taken the girl to see her hakim. Abdul Jamil Khan had felt her pulse and examined the base of her spine. Straight away he asked whether she had had a serious accident when she was small. The girl nodded: when she was six she had been badly thrown by a horse. The hakim prescribed a strict diet and treated her with his own herbal massage oils. Within a month she was cured.

  Hakim Abdul Jamil’s surgery consisted of one very small room leading off a lane near the Old Delhi Kalan Masjid. The room was divided in two by a curtain. To one side a line of very ill and miserable looking Old Delhi-wallahs sat on low stools; from beyond the far side came the whistle of a boiling kettle and the occasional ring of metal on metal. We queued for half an hour before the hakim was able to see us. Bicycle rickshaws trundled past with a frantic ringing of bells. An old goat came up and nuzzled itself against my thigh. Finally the curtain was drawn back and the three of us - Olivia, Navina and myself - were ushered in.

  The hakim was a plump, middle-aged Muslim gentleman. He wore a white kurta top over a checked lungi; he was barefoot and he kept his beard close-clipped. He was leaning back against a bolster; beneath him a frayed reed mat acted as makeshift carpeting. All around the hakim - in trays, on top of cupboards, stretched out over long mahogany bookshelves - stood line upon line of cork-stoppered jars, phials and bottles. All these jars contained ground and powdered herbs of different colours and consistencies. In an enamel tray in front of the hakim lay a collection of surgical instruments which looked as if they might have escaped from the Roman artefact room in the British Museum.

  Without rising from his position, Abdul Jamil Khan greeted us and indicated that we should be seated. Navina sat on a bench in front of the hakim and extended her arm. The hakim took it, and shutting his eyes placed his three fingers on the arteries below her wrist.

  The taking of the pulse, I knew, was the principal form of Unani diagnosis. Every hakim is trained to recognize the slightest and most subtle variations not only in the speed but in the strength and movement of the pulse: by the fourteenth century, Delhi doctors had sub-classified many thousands of different pulse types which they named after the movements of different animals: the snake and leech pulse could be picked up by the pressure of the index finger; the crow, the lark and the frog could be sensed by the middle finger; the swan, the pigeon and the cock by the ring finger. For two minutes, Hakim Abdul Jamil concentrated on Navina’s right wrist; then, without speaking he took her left arm and, shutting his eyes again, concentrated on that. Finally he released her.

  ‘Navina,’ he said. ‘You have been eating cauliflower again.’

  Navina nodded guiltily.

  ‘If you are to get better you must do what I say. For two weeks please listen: eat nothing except cucumber and marrows.’

  As he spoke, he pulled out from one side an electric ring; from the other he took a fire-blackened cauldron. He switched the ring on and placed the cauldron on top.

  ‘This is the wonderful bit,’ said Navina, hitching up her skirt as far as her knee. ‘The cauldron contains the hakim’s special herbal concoction. He steams my knee with it.’

  The mixture was soon boiling. Placing a kind of cotton tent flap over both the cauldron and Navina’s leg, the hakim slowly lifted and lowered the lid of the cauldron releasing into the room whiffs of aromatic herbs. The noise of the opening and closing of the lid created the metallic ringing we had heard from beyond the curtain in the waiting-room.

  ‘It’s absolutely wonderful,’ said Navina. ‘Immediate relief.’

  ‘Wha
t is in the cauldron?’ I asked the hakim.

  ‘Dawa [medicine],’ replied the hakim evasively.

  ‘But what sort of medicine?’

  ‘Wild herbs. I collect them all myself.’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘Everywhere. The ridge. Over the Jumna. The hills ... Badrinath, Kedarnath.’

  ‘But what sorts of herbs ...’

  ‘He won’t tell you,’ said Navina. ‘It is his family’s great secret.’

  ‘All special herbs,’ said the hakim, smiling mischievously. ‘My father was telling me. His father told him ...’

  ‘Anyway it seems to do the trick,’ I said.

  ‘I am not the healer,’ said the hakim, piously raising both his palms. ‘I am only the instrument through which it comes.’

  We thanked Abdul Jamil and left the shop.

  Stepping outside, the blank white glare of the sun hit us like a cudgel on the back of our heads.

  The incessant heat, day after day, week after week, made everyone bad-tempered. After the euphoria of buying his new car had died down, Balvinder Singh, never one to hold back on an expletive at the best of times, increasingly began to splutter along in a state of semi-permanent fury. He swore at innocent passers-by, shouted graphic insults at rival drivers and hooted his horn as if his life depended on it: BEEP BEEP! Oh Bloody Fuck! BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! You Hindu Bloody Donkey Chap! BEEP! Dog! BEEP BEEP! Sister-Fucker! BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP! Bloody Fuck Nonsense!

  As the summer progressed, I was sometimes equally irritable and did not always take kindly to Mr Singh’s barbs.

  ‘Yeh! Mr William: why you no smelling?’

  ‘What did you say, Balvinder?’

  ‘Why you no smelling?’

  ‘That’s not very polite.’

  ‘Mr William. Please answer. Why you not smelling?’

  ‘Well, if you must know, I had a bath this morning. And I always make a point of applying a little under-arm deodorant.’

  ‘No, no, Mr William. Maybe you are uncomfortable in this here hot weather. Normally you smell a lot.’

  ‘Did you just say I normally smell a lot?’

  ‘Oh yes, Mr William,’ said Balvinder, shaking his head emphatically. ‘But these days your face is very sad.’

  Realizing at last what he had been getting at, my expression changed to a broad grin.

  ‘That’s better,’ said Mr Singh. ‘Now at last you are smiling.’

  One other change brought about by the hot weather was noticed by Mrs Puri.

  ‘Mr William,’ she said one morning in her customary forthright manner. ‘You are going bald.’

  ‘Only a little bit, Mrs Puri,’ I said defensively, knowing she was speaking the truth. The humiliating retreat of my hairline had been going on for five or six years now and was beginning to turn into a rout.

  ‘Mr William,’ said Mrs Puri, her brow furrowing. ‘You should not be going bald at your age.’

  ‘In my country it’s quite common,’ I said, searching for excuses. ‘I’m twenty-five now. It’s not unusual for the Scots to begin to thin out a bit at that age.’

  ‘Well,’ said my landlady. ‘Your people should be putting on turbans. Then this would not happen.’

  ‘I don’t think that would make much difference,’ I said. ‘At least in my case.’

  ‘Well, if you’re not going to wear a turban then you should at least go to Nizamuddin,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘The saint there is very good at solving all sorts of calamities. Mark my words. Your baldness will be reversed in a jiffy.’

  Nizamuddin is a Muslim village not very far from Mrs Puri’s house, on the edge of Lutyens’s city. In contrast to the broad, tree-lined avenues of Imperial Delhi around it, Nizamuddin is a warren of mediaeval shrines, mosques, mausoleums and dervish monasteries, all clustering around the tomb of Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din Auliya, the greatest of all Indian Sufis.

  Shaykh Nizam-ud-Din was a contemporary of Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughluk. He withdrew from the world and preached a simple message of prayer and renunciation. He promised his followers that by loosening their ties with the flesh and with the world they could purge their souls of evil and move towards direct experience of God. According to the Shaykh, the first step of Sufism was not related to Friday prayers or empty rituals, but with the mastery of the maxim: ‘Whatever you do not wish to be done to yourself, do not wish it to happen to others; wish for yourself what you wish for others also.’

  Nizam-ud-din ate little, saying he could not swallow food when so many starving people slept in the streets or in the corners of mosques around him. Anything he was given he distributed to the poor, irrespective of whether they were Hindu or Muslim. At a time when almost all Muslims - including Ibn Battuta - believed that non-Muslims were enemies of Allah and thus damned to an eternity in hell-fire, Nizam-ud-Din preached a gentler doctrine of reconciliation, maintaining that ‘every community has its own path and faith and way of worship.’ It was not just his tolerance of other religions that made Nizam-ud-Din popular with non-Muslims: Hindus, Buddhists and Christians all found echoes of their own faiths in his teachings.

  The Shaykh believed that following the mystical thread towards individual communion with God involved a long and hard struggle until the individual ego had been totally annihilated. He likened his own role among his disciples to that of a well-mannered host towards a group of simple guests. Some of the guests had never been in a house before and needed to be taught to use a chair and how to make simple conversation. Others worried continually about when and where they would be served food. The duty of the host was to calm them down after their journey and to demonstrate to them by his own patient example that there were other chambers where cooks were preparing a feast and where, in due time, they too would eat. Because they could not see the cooks, many were fearful that they did not exist. It was the duty of the host to persevere with these guests, to prepare them, and to teach them the rules of etiquette so that they would know how to tackle the feast when it was finally served.

  Nizam-ud-Din was never afraid to be controversial. He believed strongly in the power of music and poetry to move devotees towards spiritual ecstasy and hence towards greater love of God. In this he came into conflict with the orthodox mullahs of the Delhi mosques. Jealous of his following, they summoned him before the Sultan and charged him with heresy. The saint managed to preach his way out of the trap that was laid for him, but it was not the last time he would come into conflict with Sultan Ghiyas-ud-Din Tughluk.

  Nizam-ud-Din was in the middle of a project to provide his Sufi monastery with a tank to collect rainwater when the Sultan announced his plan to build Tughlukabad. All labourers working on private projects were to report immediately to the foreman at the designated site. According to tradition, Nizam-ud-Din was unable to stop his workmen going off to build the new fort, but calmly prophesied that before long the whole complex would be abandoned, providing shelter only to shepherds and nomadic Gujjars. So it is today. The Tughluks have gone; Tughlukabad is a ruin; only Nizamuddin remains.

  Every Thursday night, huge crowds still gather before the tomb of the Shaykh to pray for anything from baldness cures to a change of government, and to hear the qawwalis (sacred love hymns) being sung in honour of the saint. Traditionally, this is the time that dervishes whirl: overcome at hearing the hymns sung in praise of their saint, they fall into a trance, rise to their feet and spin like a child’s top. The whirling dervish is a phenomenon as old as Sufism itself: the same spectacle is shown in Persian miniatures dating from the tenth century - orange-robed monks, hands raised to heaven, faces uplifted in ecstasy. It was something I longed to see for myself: even more, in fact, than I longed for the return of my once-golden locks.

  I had often visited friends living in the modern suburb of Nizamuddin East, but had never had occasion to visit the crumbling old village which clustered around the shrine on the other side of the road. On my first visit one warm Thursday night in early May, I persuaded Dr Jaffery to accompany me.
r />   The Sufi enclave was a revelation. Surrounded by rings of shanty huts, the settlement led through a warren of ever-narrowing lanes and alleys, past crumbling tombs and collapsing mosques, deeper and deeper into the past. The further Dr Jaffery and I went into the vortex of vaulted passageways, the less and less sign there was first of the twentieth century, with all its noise and cars and auto-rickshaws, then of the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries with their blank-faced late Mughal town houses. By the time we ducked under a narrow arch and emerged into the daylight of the central enclosure, we were back in the Middle Ages; the legacy of the Tughluk period was lying all around us.

  On the veranda of the Shaykh’s tomb sat the surviving male members of Nizam-ud-Din’s family. Wearing frock coats and full beards, they sat nodding into their Qurans or noting down donations in their ledgers. All around milled the devotees: pilgrims, dervishes and sannyasin, labourers and merchants, scholars and soldiers, opium addicts, petty thieves ... Some sat cross-legged on the cool marble floor; others joined the queue to enter the tomb. As they stood waiting, a dervish in a light woollen tunic fanned them with a large shield-shaped pankah embroidered in gold with sacred kufic calligraphy. In one corner sat a qalander a holy fool - deep in animated conversation with an invisible djinn. He sat squatting on his calves, nodding and smiling, lifting his hands in protestation, twitching his head from side to side. To one side, sitting beside a brazier of billowing incense, another dervish was calmly sharpening a pair of skewers with a whetstone and making as if to run them through his cheeks. He was an amazing figure: barefoot, with naked legs, a saffron frock pulled over his torso and a beehive-shaped turban wrapped around a gold busby on his head.

  ‘Come,’ said Dr Jaffery, taking me gently by the shoulder. ‘We must pay our respects to the Shaykh.’

  We joined the queue of pilgrims, and soon passed under the cusped arch and into the velvety warmth of the shrine.