City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  The disintegration of the empire of Muhammed bin Tughluk came quite suddenly - almost, in fact, without warning.

  Following the débâcle of the shifting of the capital from Delhi to Daulatabad, one by one the various provincial governors rose up against the Sultan and declared themselves independent. In 1335 no less than fifteen separate rebellions broke out. Tughluk pursued the rebel governors, marching and counter-marching up and down the country, beheading one, flaying another alive, ordering a third to be cut to pieces by his war elephants. As he passed through the rebellious provinces he harried and burned great tracts of his own kingdom.

  ‘He laid the country to waste,’ wrote the chronicler Zia-ud-Din Barni, ‘and every person that fell into his hands he slew. Many inhabitants fled and took refuge in the jungles, but the Sultan had the jungles surrounded and every individual that was captured was killed.’

  In the middle of this terror, Tughluk decided to send an embassy to China. As his ambassador he chose Ibn Battuta, the man whom he had nearly executed only a few months before. Battuta was still living as a dervish when the Sultan’s emissaries arrived before his cave.

  The Sultan [had] sent me saddled horses, slave girls and boys, robes and a sum of money. I put on the robes and went to him. I had a [simple] tunic of blue cotton which I wore during my retreat, and as I took it off I upbraided myself [for leaving the religious life and succumbing to the lure of the world].

  I duly presented myself before the Sultan who showed me greater favour than ever before. He said to me: ‘I have sent for you to go as my ambassador to the Emperor of China, for I know your love of travel.’

  In due course a grand caravan set off from Delhi. At the head went the ambassador and his companions, followed by one thousand mounted bodyguards and a long train of camels carrying gifts for the Emperor of China: one hundred concubines, one hundred Hindu dancing girls, gold candelabras, brocades, swords and gloves embroidered with precious seed pearls. Behind the camels came the most valuable gifts of all: no less than one thousand thoroughbred Turkestani horses.

  The fate of Ibn Battuta’s embassy showed quite how bad things had become in Tughluk’s Sultanate. Less than a hundred miles south of Delhi, the caravan ran into an army of rebellious Hindus. In the skirmish that followed, Ibn Battuta, the new ambassador, was separated from his servants and captured: ‘Forty infidels carrying bows in their hands came upon me and surrounded me. I was afraid that they would shoot me if I fled from them, and I was wearing no armour. So I threw myself to the ground and surrendered, as they do not kill those who do that. They seized me and stripped me of everything that I was carrying except a tunic, shirt and trousers.’

  Battuta eventually managed to escape and rejoin his embassy, but it was as if the whole expedition was cursed. At Calicut on the Malabar Coast, Battuta loaded his treasures on to four large dhows, then lingered on the shore for Friday prayers. Suddenly a violent storm sprang up; the clumsy dhows grounded and broke up, drowning the slaves, the troops and the horses. Ibn Battuta found himself stranded on the shore with ten dinars in his pocket and a simple prayer rug on the ground before him. Everything else he owned was lost. Not daring to return to Delhi and face the wrath of the Sultan, he continued on to China as a private traveller. By the time he finally returned to Morocco and settled down in Fez to write his memoirs, he had been travelling for 29 years and covered some 75,000 miles, about three times the distance logged by Marco Polo.

  Sultan Muhammed bin Tughluk continued to march around his slowly shrinking kingdom for another nine years. Then during the monsoon of 1351, he contracted malaria on campaign against a confederacy of rebels. While still recovering from his fever, the Sultan ate a plate of bad fish.

  ‘The fish did not agree with him,’ wrote Barni. ‘His illness returned and the fever increased. His army was in great trouble for they were a thousand kos distant from Delhi, deep in the desert, and severely threatened by the enemy. On the 21 st of Muharram 1351, Muhammed bin Tughluk departed this life on the banks of the Indus, fourteen kos from Thatta.’

  During his lifetime, the Sultan had built himself a massive tomb of red sandstone. This he erected in the very centre of Jahanpanah, the new city of Delhi he had first built, then destroyed. The tomb stands today. It is a fine sight - a rectangular plinth of grey ashlar crowned by a prism of finely dressed Agra sandstone. The tomb is topped by a high, curving dome the shape of a Phrygian cap. Six hundred years after it was built the tomb hardly shows any sign of decay and ruination - only the gold finial on the tip of the dome has disappeared - but it does not contain the body of Sultan Muhammed bin Tughluk. On his death the hated monarch was brought back to Delhi and quietly secreted within the Tughluk mausoleum opposite the fortress of Tughlukabad. There he remains, in between his father and his father’s favourite pet dog. His tomb was instead given to an impoverished mendicant named Kabir-ud-Din Awliya.

  Of this wandering Sufi who, cuckoo-like, occupies the most sumptuous tomb to be built in Delhi before the coming of the Mughals, nothing is now known.

  Towards the end of May it became clear that the normal crowds of Sufis who came to listen to the qawwalis in Nizamuddin were being supplemented by hoards of mendicants, pilgrims and dervishes from outside Delhi. On making enquiries, I was told that pilgrims were on their way to the greatest dervish festival in all Islam — the annual Urs (or death memorial) of the Sufi saint Khwaja Moin-ud-Din Chisti in the Rajasthani town of Ajmer. The Urs took place on the nights leading up to the last full moon of May, and this year, despite the terrible heat, 500,000 pilgrims were expected.

  A heavy stink of spice and urine and dust and cooking hung over the transit camp in Old Delhi where the pilgrims were being lodged. From a canvas mosque came the cries of the camp muezzin; everywhere dervishes could be seen pottering about, praying, chatting, unrolling their bedding and cooking their breakfast - thousands of wild men with staring eyes, straggling beards and unkempt hair. The different Sufi orders were distinguished by different colours - the Chistis (in whose ecstatic trances may lie the origin of the English word jester) wore yellow, while the followers of Hussein wore red, the colour of martyrdom. Some of the pilgrims had narrow eastern eyes and wispy beards; others, Pathans, were big men with mutton-chop whiskers and sharp, hawk-like features. The transit camp was a wonderful sight and on impulse I bought a ticket for the night bus to Ajmer, determined to see more.

  We set off at nine. The rickety old bus juddered out of the camp with its cargo of dervishes screeching out their prayers as if the journey to Ajmer was to be their last. Squashed beside me was a shepherd, a nomad from Kashmir named Boob Khan. He had a henna-dyed beard and a turquoise turban; he was tall and lean and we conversed through an interpreter, a jeweller named Afzal Abdullah. Boob Khan said that he was going to Ajmer to pray for the welfare of his family; he had been three times before, and on each occasion his prayers had been answered: ‘On one occasion a sick person was healed. On another I came out of a financial crisis. I ask Moin-ud-Din [the Sufi saint] and he asks God and ultimately we get what we desire. The saint is the beloved of God and through him we get what God might refuse.’

  ‘Can’t you just ask the saint in Kashmir?’ I said. ‘Why go all the way to Ajmer?’

  ‘Moin-ud-Din knows I am coming from a far country,’ replied Boob Khan. ‘And because of this he pays more attention to my requests.’

  It was a boiling May night. The bus was hot and sticky and few of the pilgrims in the bus got much sleep. We were unloaded at the bus station in Ajmer just before noon, and had to walk the final kilometre to the shrine.

  The dargah was packed. Tens of thousands of devotees from all over India and beyond were milling around. Ecstatics and madmen were shrieking to themselves, beating their foreheads against the stone railings on the tomb. Blind beggars stumbled around with their alms bowls. Women discreetly suckled young babies under the folds of their saris.

  We bought punnets full of roses to throw on the saint’s grave, and gave an offe
ring to the man who looked after the pilgrims’ shoes while they prayed. After we had paid our respects at the tomb of the saint, the jeweller asked me if I had asked Moin-ud-Din for anything in particular.

  Qawwali singers

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  ‘There must be something you want,’ he said.

  ‘Only to see a dervish whirl.’

  ‘Then ask him for that.’

  I shrugged my shoulders, embarrassed.

  ‘Well, I will ask him if you will not.’

  I spent the rest of the afternoon touring the dargah with Boob Khan. We visited the white marble mosque built by Shah Jehan and the great cauldrons, twenty feet wide, in which the pirzadas were cooking food for the poor pilgrims. We saw a female qalander weeping before the tomb of a saint and another girl, barely twenty, rolling around the marble pavement, twitching and writhing.

  ‘She has an evil djinn,’ explained a pirzada who was leaning against a pillar nearby.

  ‘You will exorcize it?’ I asked.

  ‘No need,’ explained the pirzada. ‘Moin-ud-Din will do it automatically. If she spends one night in front of the tomb by morning the djinn will have fled.’

  By six o‘clock darkness had fallen and the musicians - two harmoniums, three drummers and a vocalist - had begun to strike up the qawwalis. A large crowd had gathered, sitting cross-legged under a canvas awning. Perhaps it was the numbers and the claustrophobia, but the atmosphere was completely different from the qawwalis I had watched week after week in Nizamuddin. The volume was louder, and the bass boom of the tabla drums echoed around the tent, hitting the listener almost physically in the chest. The crowd joined in the hymns, clapping and singing and shouting.

  Then quite suddenly a Sufi at the far side of the crowd was seized by a shaking fit, throwing his head from side to side, eyes wide and staring; but he remained anchored to the ground, and before long his fit had passed. The first batch of hymns finished and the crowd dispersed. Boob Khan went off in search of supper. I hung around the tomb, talking to the jeweller.

  At eight-thirty the band went back to work. This time the crowd was smaller, but the singing was just as spirited. The drums clattered and the voice of the singer rose to a falsetto. The hymn gathered momentum and the volume rose. Suddenly there was a crack, and I looked to my left. A few feet away there knelt a dervish in a yellow salwa kameez. Although still on his knees, he had fallen forward so that his forehead had slammed against the marble, and he lay there quivering and moaning, apparently in pain. I was about to get up and help, but was restrained by the jeweller: ‘He is in wajd [a trance],’ he told me. ‘Watch.’

  Almost as he spoke, the dervish rose to his feet and stood up. For a few seconds he stood transfixed, like a rabbit caught in the glare of headlights. He was shaking slightly, but appeared rooted to the spot. Then, slowly, he turned around so as to face the shrine. From where I was sitting I could see his eyes; his pupils had disappeared, up into the eyelids, and the eyeballs were pure white. He pointed to the shrine, then sunk to his knees in a position of namaz; after that he lay flat. Then, suddenly he rose again, jumping about, dancing madly, fantastically, and through the music you could hear him crying out: ‘Allah ... Allah ... Allah ...’

  He began bowing from the waist like a Chinese courtier; only then did he begin to turn. As the music rose to its climax and the crowd clapped, encouraging him on, he turned faster and faster, his skirts flying out, spinning round and around on a single axis screaming loudly: ‘Ha! Hat Ha!’ Finally, he fell down and curled up into an embryonic ball.

  ‘You see,’ said the jeweller. ‘You should not have been sceptical.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘That wajd was for you,’ said the jeweller. ‘Moin-ud-Din always answers the prayers of pilgrims.’

  NINE

  IT WAS JULY NOW, and the monsoon was late.

  Day after day the sun pulsed down through a beaten-bronze sky; the heat assaulted you like a mugger the second you stepped out of the shade. The nights, now almost as hot as the days, provided little relief. No one in Delhi was able to sleep. Conversations became abrupt; tempers were short. Rumours proliferated: in the bazaars people muttered that a drought was developing in Rajasthan; that water shortages were spreading throughout North India; that this year the rains would again prove inadequate for the needs of the parched and thirsty land. Everyone agreed — as they did every year — that it had to be the hottest summer in living memory.

  Delhi has always suffered the worst heat of any major Indian city. The Great Moguls, remembering their nomadic ancestors, overcame the problem by moving their entire court to the cool of Kashmir for the duration of the summer. The business of governing the empire could then be comfortably conducted lying on Persian rugs beside the rills of a pleasure garden, or in a canoe on a fishing expedition in the Dal Lake.

  At first the British resisted this tradition. With starched shirt-fronts and starch-stiff upper lips they stayed stubbornly in the Delhi Civil Lines, dressing every night for dinner in full evening dress as if the integrity of the Empire depended on it. Ingenious Heath Robinson methods of heat control were devised to make their stay less unpleasant. Sir Thomas Metcalfe, William Fraser’s successor as Delhi Resident, tunnelled a room under the Jumna; he found that the river kept the room several degrees cooler than anywhere else in the house.

  Later, a British inventor in Delhi patented the Thermantidote, a strange device in which a pankah-wallah turned a large fan, not unlike the propeller of a Sopwith Camel. This would suck air through a curtain of wet hay, hurl it into the house, and make the interior smell like a horse-box. But by the mid-nineteenth century the British seem to have agreed that, even with the aid of the Thermantidote, Delhi was best avoided in high summer. From then on, the majority of the British inhabitants of the city therefore decamped to Simla in April, and stayed there for the duration of the hot weather.

  Late that summer, as the plains of North India were transformed into one vast shimmering heat haze, Olivia and I bowed to tradition and followed the ghosts of the memsahibs - and much of the modern Delhi middle class - up into the cool of the old Imperial summer capital. Rejecting the aeroplane, we did what Delhi-wallahs have done now for a century: we took the Himalyan Queen as far as Kalka then changed on to the narrow-gauge miniature railway which winds its way up the steep slopes to Simla.

  The little train looked like something out of a child’s toy box: the old carriages were of wood, painted kingfisher blue; they seated only ten people each. The engine was newer — it dated from the time of the Second World War — and made a noise like a London taxi. Accompanied by a great deal of hooting, the train jarred into life and chugged uphill at a speed little faster than walking pace, turning corner after corner in an ever-widening ripple of uphill curves. We stopped at an Edwardian station with high Swiss gables overhung with flowering creepers; in the window-boxes there were primroses and sunflowers. The temperature dropped. Leaves widened, colours brightened. The relief was immediate. After three months of sledgehammer heat it was like coming up for air.

  A group of rowdies further down the train began to cheer; in my carriage, a pair of army officers and their wives chattered happily in the time-warped 1930s diction that still survives in the better Indian regiments:

  ‘Shalini, my dear, you’re sitting on my hat.’

  ‘Tiger said to me — “Old boy,” he said, “if you’re going to go Up the Country, you’ve got to do it in style ...”’

  ‘Good old Tiger! Trust a Tollygunge man.’

  As evening drew in, we turned a bend and caught a first glimpse of Simla’s bungalows and country houses rising up from among the deodars of the ridge. Crowning the top of Summer Hill stood Viceroy’s Lodge, a familiar silhouette of Edwardian towers and pinnacles, a Scotch Baronial stronghold looking strangely at home only a couple of hundred miles from Tibet. Through an open window I felt the first drops of rain blowing into the carriage. The sky darkened and the hillsides grew gre
y; a wave of nostalgia crept up on me: this was not the torrential tropical rain of the Indian plains, but the familiar, hesitant, half-hearted drizzle of home.

  To Kipling, Simla was a place of illicit romance. In story after story of Plain Tales from the Hills, the same plot repeats itself. After the sweltering boredom of the plains, the young officer goes up to Simla, where, bowled over by the sudden glut of young English beauties, he falls in love with a Mrs Hauksbee or a Mrs Reiver: ‘He rode with her and walked with her, and picknicked with her, and tiffined at Peliti’s with her, till people raised their eyebrows and said “Shocking!”’

  Today it takes a great leap of the imagination to see the old summer capital as it was seen by the Victorians: to feel the sexual frisson they must have felt when they set out on their first promenade to Scandal Point. But there is no mistaking the shadow of the departed English. It lies everywhere: in the shooting sticks and riding whips in the shop windows; in the net-curtained bungalows named ‘Pine Breezes’ and ’Fair View‘; in the crumbles and custards on the boarding-house menus.

  Yet it was all counterfeit. Simla was and has always been an idealized, picture-postcard memory of England, all teashops, village churches and cottage gardens - the romanticized creation of addled exiles driven half-mad by the Delhi heat. It looked as if it has been built from paintings on the tops of tins of shortbread. You kept asking yourself: what on earth was this strange half-timbered English village doing here in the middle of the Himalayas?

  The oddest place of all was the Gaiety Theatre. It was once the place for amateur theatricals and remains unaltered since the last British sailed for home. Olivia and I spent a happy morning studying the production photographs, images of plays which must have been outdated well before they were performed in 1937: men with false moustaches kneeling down to propose marriage to comely girls in flapper hats, while outside conspiratorial housemaids delayed the vicar in the front hall. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the names of the actors from those of the parts. Did names like Major Trail, Miss Mold and Miss Dunnett ever really exist outside the pages of Agatha Christie?