‘Some hide in the feet of big trees.’
‘But a great saint can capture and convert even the Rajas among the Hindu djinns,’ said the Gujarati. ‘They can make use of their power for their own ends.’
‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who can do this today?’
‘In Sindh there is one man,’ said the Pakistani. ‘His name is Sayyid Raiz Attar. He lives in the desert near Hyderabad. He has captured many djinns and used them to help him build his monastery.’
‘In Delhi there is also a great Sufi who has the knowledge of the secret of the djinns,’ said the Bengali..‘He performs wonders with the powers of his djinns. It is said that he is one of the greatest of all the dervishes in India.’
‘What’s he called?’ I asked.
‘His name,’ said the Bengali, ‘is Pir Sadr-ud-Din.’
‘It is a miracle,’ said Mr Ravi Bose, wiping the sweat off his brow. Since seven o‘clock Mr Bose and I had been waiting for Sadr-ud-Din. We were standing in the narrow shade of the dervish’s shrine near the Turkman Gate of the Old City. It was a boiling May morning and dry, gritty winds from the desert were raking through the narrow lanes. We were very hot, and Sadr-ud-Din was nearly three hours late.
‘Really I am telling you. It was nothing but a miracle,’ continued Mr Bose. ‘The dervish came to my house and within ten minutes he had found the djinns - the whole family of them.’
‘You could see these djinns?’ I asked.
‘No, but Pir Sadr-ud-Din was seeing them as plain as it was day. His Holiness says that the djinns were black colour, of most ugly complexion, and that some were gents and some were ladies. There were two hundred and eight in all.’
‘Two hundred and eight is rather a lot of djinns isn’t it?’ I said. ‘I mean: where were they all?’
‘Hiding in various parts of the house,’ replied Mr Bose. ‘Sadr-ud-Din was saying that fifty-two of them were under the stairs, fifty-two more were in the attic, and that the rest were in the kitchen.’
While we had been waiting, Mr Bose had treated me to his life history. He had revealed that he was a specialist in electro-plating. He was an educated man, so he said; he had a small car, a big house and two children. His life had been without problems - until, that is, the business with the sweeper-lady.
The previous month he had become sure that the sweeper was stealing from him, and he had been forced to throw her out. As she went, she had put a curse on his household - had filled his home with black magic and hordes of malignant djinns. Soon his children had begun to sicken, his business had gone into decline, and his wife had packed her bags and walked out. He was not a superstitious man, he said, but he had to do something. It was one of his Muslim employees who had put him in touch with Sadr-ud-Din.
‘So did Sadr-ud-Din manage to get rid of your djinns?’ I asked.
‘Why not?’ replied Mr Bose. ‘He did some rituals. We purchased a kilo of curds and Sadr-ud-Din boiled them in a frying pan. Suddenly there appeared a pungent smell. This indicated that the devils were expediting Mr Sadr-ud-Din’s requests and were vacating the premises as per instructions.’
His Holiness Sadr-ud-Din Mahboob Ali Shah Chisti finally appeared shortly before ten a.m. He was a large man, with big feet and a firm handshake; he had a saturnine face and he beamed a rotting-red betel-nut grin. He wore a high-necked Peshwari waistcoat and on his head he had placed a loose red and white keffiyeh. Without a word, he took a key out of his pocket, and opened the door of the shrine. A steep flight of steps disappeared down into the earth.
The Sufi plunged into the darkness. Like ferrets into a burrow, we followed. It was several minutes before our eyes adjusted to the darkness. We were in a cavern. The walls were covered in plaster, worked into the shape of domes and blind arches. In some of these arches, shallow niches had been excavated and in these Sadr-ud-Din had placed flickering candles and incense sticks. In the centre of the cavern was a tomb, and around the tomb a canopy. Sadr-ud-Din was sitting cross-legged underneath it with his eyes closed. Finally he indicated that I should speak.
‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘about the djinns.’
Sadr-ud-Din paused before answering. For two whole minutes the candles flickered in silence.
‘The djinns are composed of vapour or flame,’ said Sadr-ud-Din. ‘They were created by Allah at the time of Shaitan [Satan], many centuries before the birth of Adam. Every year their numbers increase. There are male and female djinns and the female ones are very beautiful.’
‘Do you have power over the djinns?’ I asked.
‘I do.’
‘Have you captured a djinn?’
‘Yes.’
I waited. He did not speak. The candles flickered.
‘How do you capture a djinn?’ I asked.
‘It is a great secret. The art was first discovered by Solomon and passed on to the dervishes of his time, long before the age of the Prophet Muhammad. Even today the great dervishes still keep this secret. They cannot pass it on to anyone but another master dervish.’
‘In that case,’ I said, ‘how do you become a great dervish?’
There was another long pause.
‘If you are to become a great dervish,’ he said eventually, ‘you must first learn to leave your body. Sometimes you must pray for many years before you master the technique. Only then can you ascend directly to God.’
‘You have done this?’ I asked.
‘I first left my body when I was sixteen,’ replied Sadr-ud-Din. ‘My Pir made me spend forty-one days fasting, up to my neck in the Jumna. Twice a day he took me out of the water, for an hour each time, and he would give me a glass of orange juice. After that my Pir led me to a graveyard. Again he made me fast for forty-one days. Then he took me to a mountain top. This time I fasted for twenty-one days.
‘On the last day of the fast I left my body and ascended towards a light in the sky. The light was God. It was a huge light, like many suns, but I could not see its centre for it was covered with a cloak. ... Now every time when I fast and leave my body I see a little more of this light. When people come to me with their problems I talk to the light, and I ask for the success of their petition.’
Again, Sadr-ud-din stopped. Shadows danced around the guttering candles.
‘God has given me power,’ said the dervish. ‘Now I can finish any problem. I can capture djinns and cast out devils. I can cure headaches, mend broken limbs, restore milk to the breasts of a dry woman.’ His eyes gleamed in the candlelight.
‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘nothing is beyond me.’
On his travels, Ibn Battuta always made a point of visiting the most famous Sufis and dervishes in every town that he passed through.
At Konya in Turkey he paid homage to the tomb of Jalal-ud-Din Rumi. In Hebron he saw the monumental wall of a mosque that the djinns had built at the command of Solomon. In Alexandria he stayed with the Sufi master Shaykh al-Murshidi. According to Battuta, al-Murshidi ‘bestowed gifts miraculously created at his word. Parties of men of all ranks used to come to see him. Each one of them would desire to eat some flesh or fruit or sweetmeat at his cell, and to each he would give what he suggested, though it was frequently out of season.’
Taking a siesta on the Shaykh’s roof, Battuta had a dream of being carried on the wings of a great bird which flew him east towards Mecca and then on past the Yemen to the furthest Orient. Coming down from the roof, he was amazed to find that the Shaykh already knew of his dream. The Shaykh then went on to interpret it, prophesying exactly the route Battuta was to take to the east. Later, another Egyptian Sufi named Burhan-ud-Din foretold for him the names of the dervish masters he would meet on the way. Although at that time he had had no plans to travel a step further than Mecca, wishing only to complete the hajj pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta did in due course travel on to China and quite accidently stumbled across each of the three Sufi masters that Burhan-ud-Din had named.
Nevertheless, despite Ibn Battuta’s fascination with the nether-world of the dervishes,
on his arrival in Delhi - at least at first — more worldly considerations seem to have dominated the Moroccan’s thoughts. He had, after all, done remarkably well for himself. At a time when the average Hindu family lived on about five dinars a month, Sultan Muhammed bin Tughluk had awarded Ibn Battuta a stipend of 12,000 dinars a year and appointed him to the important post of Delhi Qazi. Battuta, it seems, was not remotely qualified for the job. He had never before acted as a sitting judge and had not practised law in any capacity since he left Mecca several years previously.
But Battuta was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth. He appears to have shrugged off his lack of qualifications and settled down happily to a life which offered him some considerable comforts. During his first seven months in the Indian capital, he did not get around to hearing a single legal case. Instead he directed his energies into getting married yet again - this time to Hurnasab, the daughter of a prominent Sultanate nobleman — and spending some four thousand dinars doing up and enlarging his house near the Qutab Minar. He regularly attended the court and sometimes went hunting with the Sultan. He even managed to persuade the Sultan to pay off the debts that he had incurred on a spending binge in the Delhi bazaars. It was all very agreeable and must have made a nice change from the demanding, uncomfortable and often dangerous business of travelling around the mediaeval Middle East on camelback.
While Ibn Battuta had - at first — no reason to feel anything but gratitude to the Sultan, most of the people in Delhi felt very differently. On his succession, the Sultan had embarked on a series of ludicrously ill-considered reforms. These included an attempt to double the tax revenue from the villages around Delhi (which caused a devastating famine) and an attempt to introduce a token copper currency on the Chinese model (which ended with massive forgeries and the virtual bankruptcy of the exchequer). The humiliating failure of these schemes only made Tughluk more brutal. According to the chronicler Zia-ud-Din Barni, ‘when the Sultan found that his orders did not work so well as he desired, he became still more embittered against his people and began to cut them down like weeds.’
Like many other tyrants in similar situations, Tughluk’s first response was to increase the powers of the secret police. Ibn Battuta, who was not initially in the firing line (and anyway rather approved of ruthless government) was most impressed:It was the custom [of Tughluk] to set alongside every amir, great or small, a mamluk [slave] to spy upon him and keep him informed of all that amir did. He also placed slave girls in their houses [to act as spies]. These girls passed on their information to the sweepers, and the sweepers in turn passed it on to the head of the intelligencers who then informed the Sultan. [In Delhi] they tell a story of a certain amir who was in bed with his wife and wished to have intercourse with her. She begged him by the head of the Sultan not to do so, but he would not listen to her. The following morning the Sultan sent for him and had him executed.
It was only much later that Battuta made a wrong move and felt personally the darker side of Tughluk’s rule. In 1341, eight years after he had arrived in Delhi, Battuta made the mistake of visiting Shaykh Shihab ud-Din. The Shaykh was the most politically radical of the Sufis in Delhi. Earlier Tughluk had punished him for his insolence by plucking out his beard. After this Shihab-ud-Din had retired to a farm near the banks of the Jumna and there dug himself a large underground house complete with ‘chambers, storerooms, an oven and a bath’. Battuta’s association with the troglodyte clearly came to the ears of the secret police, for when the Shaykh was later arrested — for refusing to obey the Sultan’s orders that he should emerge from his subterranean shelter - Battuta was also put under guard:
‘[The Sultan] had thoughts of punishing me and gave orders that four of his slaves should remain constantly beside me in the audience hall. When this action is taken with anyone, it rarely happens that he escapes. I fasted five days on end, reading the Quran from cover to cover each day, and tasting nothing but water. After five days I broke my fast, and then continued to fast for another four days on end.’
Only after the Shaykh had been cruelly tortured and executed did the Sultan relent and release Ibn Battuta. Thanking Allah for sparing him, Battuta gave away everything he owned, swapped clothes with a beggar and for five months became a dervish himself, taking up quarters in a cave outside the gates of Lal Kot.
Ibn Battuta was not alone in his experience. All through Delhi innocent men were increasingly being picked up by Tughluk’s secret police. Things got worse and worse, and the Delhi-wallahs responded to the oppression in the only way they could. Every day they took to writing notes ‘reviling and insulting’ the Sultan and threw them anonymously into the audience hall of the Hazar Ustan. This proved the final straw. In a fit of fury, Tughluk decided to destroy Delhi. He gave orders that the capital was immediately to be moved to Daulatabad, seven hundred miles to the south. The city’s entire population of half a million was given just three days to pack up and leave.
‘The majority complied with the order, but some of [the populace] hid in their houses,’ wrote Ibn Battuta. ‘[After the deadline had run out] the Sultan ordered a search to be made, and his slaves found two men in the streets, one a cripple, the other blind. They were brought before him and he gave orders that the cripple should be flung from a mangonel and the blind man dragged from Delhi to Daulatabad, a distance of forty days’ journey. He fell to pieces on the road and all that reached Daulatabad was his leg.’
Among those who were expelled from Delhi was the grandfather of the great Delhi poet Isami: ‘My grandfather then lived in the secluded retirement of his house,’ wrote Isami in his Shah Nama-i Hind.
He had already distributed his ancestral estate among his sons and now hardly ever came out of his house except for Friday prayers.
My grandfather was ninety when the Emperor turned him out of Delhi. Sitting [fast asleep] in his litter, he reached Tilpat before some of those who enjoyed access to him removed the cover of his palanquin. The blessed old man looked out and when he beheld thickets of gorse and groves of trees on all sides, he enquired of the servants where he was. He was amazed to find himself in such a strange place, surrounded by thick woods and wild animals.
When the servants heard this, they heaved a sigh of grief and said: ‘O Sir! You were asleep when the Deportation Police arrived. They ordered us to leave this city for Daulatabad, along with all the common people. There is no possibility of going back to Delhi.‘
When the grand old man heard this he heaved a sigh and died on the spot. His death - which was really a deliverance from his sorrows - was mourned by all. Wailings and lamentations broke out in every direction and men and women fell to lacerating their faces and pulling out their hair.
On the third day, after burying the old man by the side of the road, the caravan set off. It was an irksome journey over very hot soil, under a burning sun. [Women in purdah] who had hardly ever walked around a garden were compelled to travel through strange parts. Many expired. Babies suckled on the breast died for want of milk and adults died of thirst. Some were walking barefoot and their bleeding feet painted the road like an idol-house. Out of that caravan only one in ten reached Daulatabad.
Delhi was left like a paradise without its houris and its houses were reduced to the abode of djinns. Later, it was all set on fire.
On either side of the road an avenue of ancient banyan trees extended off in a straight line into the distance. The trunks of the trees were thick and gnarled and the long aerial roots hung down over the road like the legs of giant wooden spiders. Sometimes they dropped so low that the root-ends brushed the roof of the car.
It was early in the morning but already there were crowds of villagers out on the roads: goatherds in loincloths, driving their flocks before them; a party of labourers in Congress hats and billowing white dhotis; three travelling musicians wearing crimson gowns, each holding a long, curving stringed instrument: either a veena or a sarangi. Beyond the trees, in the far distance, you could see the eerie shapes of the
Deccani hills: a line of grey ramparts rising and falling in a dragon‘s-back of wind-eroded outcrops. In Hindu legend, these great lumps of Jurassic granite were said to be the lumber discarded by the gods after the creation of the world.
I saw the crumbling tombs before I saw the ruined city. Quite suddenly there were hundreds of them, dotting the scrub on either side of the avenue: a wilderness of overgrown mausolea, some domed, some roofed with cones, others surmounted with neat brickwork pyramids. They were quite alone now, surrounded only by low bushes of silvery camel-thorn. This, I realized, is what the tombs of Delhi must have looked like a hundred years ago, before Lutyens spun them all into the web of his new city.
Then, round a corner, the black crag of Daulatabad came into view, rising up precipitously from the plains. The rock is probably the greatest natural fortress in India. It rises from a square base, three sides towering vertically upwards in sheer, unscalable cliff faces, while the fourth side rises less suddenly at a steep, though not perpendicular, angle. What nature left undone on that fourth face, man has completed. Four semi-circular rings of grim Tughluk ramparts swing outwards from the rock face like successive tiers of an amphitheatre. The walls are slightly smaller than those of Tughlukabad, but are built from an impervious jet-black granite that makes them look just as formidable.
Here, as in Delhi, the Tughluks could not afford to take any chances. While their Maratha enemies in this part of India did not possess the military might of the Mongols, they made up for their deficiencies by sheer ingenuity. Centuries earlier, one clan of Marathas had perfected a technique for scaling the cliff faces that protected the hill forts of Central India: they trained giant monitor lizards - which in the Deccan grow to over five feet long - to climb straight up sheer rock faces; and so firm and fast was the lizards’ grip on the cliff’s cracks and crevices, that the Maratha assault troops were able to tie ropes around the reptiles’ bodies and clamber up behind them.
City of Djinns Page 31