Perhaps to prevent their enemies using this technique, the Tughluks dug a deep moat around the rock’s central citadel; the one crossing point was bridged by a leather step-ladder which was drawn up at night. Further up the Tughluks maintained and renovated the old defences dug centuries before by the troglodyte Rajas of Deogir: a Rider Haggard-like maze of dark tunnels - the only possible way to the hilltop — all but one of which ended in a deep crevasse. This warren was barred by retractable stone slabs and an iron trapdoor that could be fired red hot; the whole complex could then be sealed and filled with smoke so as to asphyxiate anyone within.
This gaunt citadel was the end of the road for those Delhi-wallahs who succeeded in making the seven-hundred-mile forced march into Maharashtra. On their arrival they found an impregnable but unwelcoming fortress; by their own labour they built within the walls a home from home, a New Delhi in the Deccan.
Ibn Battuta’s memories of Daulatabad were dominated by the monstrous rats he saw in the dungeons of the citadel (‘they are bigger than cats - in fact cats run away and cannot defend themselves against them’), but Isami gives a more coherent account of the city.
Although only one tenth of the population of Delhi reached Daulatabad, they were still able to turn it into a fertile and prosperous land. Uneven places were levelled and made flat. The whole area around the city and suburbs was transformed into a series of interesting gardens and mansions. Plants grew to such an extent that the heavenly bodies looked down on it with pleasure. People of every sort and from all parts of India flocked there in order to reside.
Like the Punjabi refugees who transformed Delhi after 1947, the uprooted newcomers worked hard to rebuild their lives in their new home. Yet at Daulatabad little now remains to bear witness to their labours. The whole city is a ruin, uninhabited, deserted and quite forgotten. It does not even enjoy the dubious immortality of a place in the tourist brochures.
What moved me most as I walked around the empty ruins was the extent to which the homesick exiles had tried to rebuild here the Delhi that they lost. The whole project was one enormous exercise in nostalgia. The Daulatabad Jama Masjid was an almost exact copy of the Qu‘wwat-ul Islam mosque at the base of the Qutab Minar. The ramparts were scaled-down versions of the walls of Tughlukabad. The tombs around the city were exact replicas of those that ringed the outskirts of Delhi.
After circling the lower town I climbed up, through the dark labyrinth - lit for me by a guide with a burning splint — to the top of the citadel. It was there, looking out over the plain, that I noticed in the far distance, beyond the city walls, amid the grey stippling of the thorn scrub, a well-maintained walled garden still shaded by a bright green grove of fig and mulberry trees.
The enclosure proved to be a small Chisti khanqah — a dervish monastery — the only inhabited building in the whole echoing emptiness of old Daulatabad, once the largest and most powerful city in all India. As at Nizamuddin, the shrine of the penniless dervish had survived — maintained and venerated — while the palaces of his rich and powerful contemporaries had decayed into roofless ruins. The enclosure had originally been constructed by one of Nizam-ud-Din’s disciples, Shaykh Baha-ud-Din Chisti, and like its model in Delhi contained a tomb and a mosque, both sharing a shady courtyard and reached by way of a steep step well.
It was now a quiet and peaceful place. I sat in the whitewashed courtyard, beneath a fluttering flag, watching the old dervish who maintained the dargah going about his devotions and giving out ta‘wiz (amulets) to the occasional pilgrims. When not otherwise engaged, he held animated conversations with the white fan-tailed pigeons that he kept in a wooden coop behind the tomb. The shrine was completely silent but for the gentle cooing of the old man’s doves, the fluttering of the flags and the distant ringing of goat bells on the scorched mountainside beyond.
Before I left, I went into the tomb to pay my respects to the dead Shaykh. The old dervish blessed me, then placed a peacock feather on the tomb and touched it on first one, then the other of my shoulders. Afterwards we talked about Baha-ud-Din: how the saint had been expelled from Delhi by Sultan Muhammed bin Tughluk, how he had walked to Daulatabad and how he had built the dargah up from nothing, preaching to the Muslim exiles and converting the local Hindus.
It was from this dervish that I heard for the first time the name of Khwaja Khizr.
It was not human effort, said the dervish, but the supernatural agency of Khwaja Khizr that built the step well of Baha-ud-Din.
In accordance with the dictates of the Chisti tradition, Shaykh Baha-ud-Din chose to build his khanqah outside the walls of the city. Like Nizam-ud-Din he wanted to be near enough to the city for the people to come out and listen to him, but far enough away to be outside the wranglings of city politics. ‘My room has two doors,’ Nizam-ud-Din had said. ‘If the Sultan comes in through one, I will leave by the other.’
Remembering this, Baha-ud-Din chose a distant and barren corner of the Daulatabad plain for his retreat. He assembled the bricks and the mortar, but soon realized that there was no one willing to help him build his khanqah, nor any water nearby to drink once the retreat had been finished. Undaunted, he shut his eyes and prayed three times to Khwaja Khizr, the Green Sufi who guards the Waters of Life. When Baha-ud-Din awoke, the bricks and mortar had disappeared; in their place - fully built - stood the step well brim full of fresh, cool spring water. To this day, said the dervish, the well had never dried out, nor the water turned sour.
It was a story I did not really dwell upon until a few weeks later when I came across Khwaja Khizr’s name a second time, this time in Delhi. I was rereading the Muraqqa‘-e Dehli when Khizr’s name turned up in a passage on the Hauz-i-Shamsi, the artificial lake built by the Sultan Iltutmish outside Lal Kot. Not far from the Hauz, near the Mehrauli Idgah, maintained the Muraqqa, was the Makhan-i Khizr (House of Khizr). There, at any time, one could summon up Khwaja Khizr, the Green Sufi, and have an interview with him - if you knew the right invocations and performed the correct rites. Looking through the other books on my shelf I found that the Shah Jehan Nama also refers to a Khwaja Khizr Ghat on the Jumna near the Red Fort. Clearly the Green Sufi was once a well-known figure in Delhi myth and legend.
Intrigued, I disappeared for days into the Nehru Library to follow up all the references I could find to Khwaja Khizr. The Green One, it turned out, was once celebrated throughout Islam. He was said to be the unseen guide and protector of all Sufis, a mysterious figure who would rescue dervishes lost in the billowing sands of the Sinai or drowning in the Nile or the Oxus. He appeared in the wilderness and to those who deserved it, he imparted his God-given knowledge.
There was disagreement among Islamic scholars about when he lived. Sometimes he was called a contemporary of Abraham who left Babel alongside the Patriarch; at other times a friend of Moses who helped guide the tribes of Israel through the Red Sea. Some believed he was a cousin and contemporary of Alexander of Mace-don and that he commanded the Greek rearguard at Issus. Other authorities were more specific: they said that Khizr was the great-grandson of Shem son of Noah, that he was immortal and that his body was miraculously renewed every five hundred years. He wore a long white beard and one of his thumbs had no bone in it. He was always dressed in green and was called Khizr (Arabic for green) because wherever he knelt and prayed the soil instantly became covered with thick vegetation. He was still alive, maintained mediaeval Islamic writers, a wanderer over the earth. If three times appealed to he would protect the pure in heart against theft, drowning, burning, snakes and scorpions, kings and devils. He flew through the air, lived on a diet of water parsley and talked the languages of all peoples. Sometimes he travelled by river, balanced on a large fish. He lived on an island or a green carpet in the heart of the sea, but he had a house in Jerusalem and prayed once a week on the Mount of Olives. He could make himself invisible at will.
Khwaja Khizr’s fame spread from the Sufis of the Sultanate to the Hindus of North India who quickly realized
that Khizr was really an incarnation of Vishnu. In the Punjab the Green One used to be worshipped as a river god and in many temples he was depicted sailing down the Indus on the back of a large fish. In Sindh he was known as the Raja Khidar, God of Boatmen; any Sindhi who travelled by river or sea - and all those descending into a well - propitiated him by feeding Brahmins, distributing parched gram and lighting candles on well-heads in his honour. In the bazaars of Gujarat he was said to haunt the markets in the early morning and fix the rates of grain, which he also protected from the Evil Eye. In Baroda he was invoked to cure headaches.
When you try to begin to cut back through the jungle of myths that have sprung up wherever the feet of Khwaja Khizr have rested, you inevitably arrive back at the Quran. Jalal-ud-Din Rumi and most other commentators believed that Khizr was the unnamed teacher in Surah XVIII who acts as a guide to Moses and attempts to teach him patience. Yet if you look further, you find that the Quran was only a brief stopping point for the Green One.
For the story in Surah XVIII is in turn based on earlier legends collected in the Alexander Romances, the body of Middle Eastern myths that grew up around the memory of Sikander - Alexander the Great. In these stories Khizr appears as the sage who presided over the Waters of Life and the Well of Immortality. He guided the Macedonian through the darkness of the Wasteland in his vain search for the Blessed Waters, but although he took Alexander to the very brink of the well, the Macedonian hesitated and failed to drink, thus losing his chance for ever. The Romance bears an unmistakable resemblance to the later mediaeval legends of the Holy Grail and may well have been one of their principal inspirations.
The Syriac Alexander Romance dates from the early centuries of the Christian era, yet even this is not the origin of the Khizr myth. For the relevant parts of the Alexander Romance are in turn borrowed from one of the most ancient poems in the world: the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.
The Gilgamesh Epic survives today in a version discovered in the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh, but it was originally written down much earlier, probably around 2600 BC, soon after the invention of writing. In these stories, Khizr is known by the name Utnapishtim, the Survivor of the Flood. At the end of the poem, Gilgamesh goes on a quest through the Darkness and over the Waters of Death in search of the sage who alone knows the secret of immortality. Utnapishtim — Khizr - shows him where to find the plant which will enable him to escape death, but no sooner has Gilgamesh found it than it is seized and stolen by a serpent.
The story of Khizr in the Gilgamesh Epic may later have provided the anonymous writers of the Book of Genesis with the idea of another serpent who interfered with the eating of another plant and thus stole from Adam mankind’s last hope of immortality. Khizr is thus not only one of the very first characters in world literature, he is also one of the most central: he may have inspired the Fall. What interested me, however, was that the same character was still remembered by a dervish at Daulatabad, and that when the Muraqqa‘-e Dehli was written in the eighteenth century, Khizr was also remembered in Delhi. What I now wanted to know more than anything was whether the Khizr tradition — inconceivably ancient as it was - was still alive in Delhi today. To find out I knew exactly what to do.
I called Mr Singh and asked him to take me up to Old Delhi. Half an hour later we were parked outside Dr Jaffery’s rooms in the Ghazi-ud-Din Medresse.
‘Of course I know Khizr,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘He is the prophet who guides lost dervishes in the desert. He appears when you have no food and takes you to safety.’
‘And people still see him?’
‘There are stories,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘But then there are always stories in this city.’
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Tell me a story about Khizr.’
‘Well — I have a friend who is a dervish. He has a shrine near Okhla. One day he was walking along the banks of Jumna when he tripped. His foot slipped and he fell into the river. The Jumna is very fast flowing at that point and everyone who was watching thought he would drown. Then my friend called out three times the name of Khizr. Immediately, so he says, he felt someone pulling at his shirt, pulling him back towards the river bank. He could not see anything, but one of the people watching on the banks said they saw a green shape — solid like a log, but moving like a man — hanging on to his shirt, and pulling him in to land. To this today that dervish is certain that it was Khizr who saved him.’
I showed Dr Jaffery the reference to the Makhan-i Khizr in the Muraqqa‘-e Dehli and, putting on his glasses, he studied it carefully. Eventually Dr Jaffery put the book down.
‘I know this place,’ he said. ‘But I haven’t been there since I was a child. I was taken there by my grandfather long before Partition. I’ve no idea if it’s still there.’
‘What are you doing now?’ I asked.
‘Marking essays.’
‘Leave them for an hour,’ I begged. ‘Please.’
Dr Jaffery frowned. He hesitated, then relented. He put on his jacket and led the way out of the room.
We drove straight down to Mehrauli. It was the hottest part of the day and clouds of scorching dust were billowing in through the car windows; by the time we got to the Qutab Minar the backs of both our shirts were wet with sweat. At the Qutab, we left the main road and turned right towards the ancient village of Mehrauli. We passed under the great dome of Adham Khan’s tomb and veered round, following the lines of the walls of Lal Kot, the original Hindu fortress which fell to the Muslims in 1192.
Off the metalled road we entered a different world: a maze of narrow, dusty lanes clogged with pack donkeys and herds of goats; children washed under hand pumps by the roadside. Then, still following Dr Jaffery’s directions, we pulled out beyond the outskirts of Mehrauli and entered the scrub. Spiky thorn bushes and orange gulmohar trees lined our way. After a mile or so, out of the bush reared the whitewashed walls of a mosque: the Mehrauli Idgah.
‘It’s somewhere around here,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘An Afghan dervish was looking after the Khizr Khana when my grandfather brought me - but that was over fifty years ago.’
We left the car and followed a winding footpath leading downhill from the Idgah into the jungle. The undergrowth grew thicker. Ahead of us a pair of babblers hopped along the path. Through the trees, we could still see the walls of Lal Kot rising up in the distance and all around, under the trees and deep in the undergrowth, there were piles of masonry - temple pillars, brackets, grave platforms - overgrown with vines and flowering creepers.
Suddenly Dr Jaffery was pointing ahead: ‘Look! Lookl’
At the bottom of the valley, nestled into the crook of the hill, stood a small whitewashed dargah, surrounded by a wall. There were only two or three buildings: a cook-house, a courtyard, a prayer room, and, over the grave of the saint, a small Lodhi-period chattri. To one side, surrounded by a low balustrade, was an old round well.
‘This,’ said Dr Jaffery, ‘is where the dervish lived.’
We left our shoes at the gate and walked in. Sitting cross-legged on a reed mat was a small, dark-skinned Sufi with a goatee beard. He was young, lean, wiry and half-naked, wearing nothing but a lungi and an emerald green shawl. He had covered his torso with coconut oil and his skin glistened in the sunlight.
Dr Jaffery said ‘Asalaam alekum’ and, squatting down in front of the dervish, explained what we were looking for. Without a word the dervish got up and walked over to the chattri. From a nail on one of the uprights he took a single key, and indicated we should follow him. Then he darted straight up the steep rock face above the shrine, Dr Jaffery and myself following as best we could. We reached the top just in time to see the dervish dive down into a narrow crevice. I went over to where he had been standing. A flight of steps cut into the rock led downwards. At the bottom was the mouth of a cave. A metal grille covered the entrance and the dervish was turning his key in the lock. I tripped down the stairs and followed the dervish into the Makhan-i Khizr.
The interior was plain and whitewa
shed. A reed mat was placed in the centre of the cave, facing on to an arched mihrab cut into the far wall. In between the mat and the niche stood a plate of coals.
‘This is what the dervishes stare into when they meditate,’ said Dr Jaffery.
‘So the cave is still used?’
Dr Jaffery asked the dervish. The dervish muttered a reply in a language I did not understand.
‘Certainly,’ said the doctor. ‘This gentleman says that he is the guardian of the cave. Sufis who wish to enter a deep trance come here and spend forty-one days in prayer.’
‘And does Khizr appear to them?’ I asked.
Again Dr Jaffery translated my question to the man.
‘He says many dervishes have tried,’ replied Dr Jaffery, ‘but he knows no one who has succeeded in summoning Khizr for many years now. He says the dervishes of today are less powerful than in former times.’
‘Why is that?’ I asked.
‘This generation is not interested in spiritual attainment,’ said Dr Jaffery. ‘Too many dervishes like to fool simple villagers and take money from them. They pretend to fast but secretly they go off and eat naan and chicken tikka. It is a much easier path than that which leads to God. Some dervishes can still produce djinns but they are unable to call up Khizr. That takes a greater power. We live in an age of spiritual decay.’
‘What the Hindus call the Kali Yuga?’ I asked.
‘Exactly. The Hindus believe that in history there have been epochs of creation and epochs of destruction. An empire is built up and then, without warning, it quite suddenly falls apart. They say that now we are in a cycle of decay - that we are too sinful and that everything is cracking up.’
‘What do you think?’ I asked.
Dr Jaffery shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe the Hindus are right. Maybe this is the age of Kali. The dark age, the age of disintegration ... All the signs are there ...’
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