City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  Indeed so superb was the hall, that when Duryodhana, the chief of the Kauravas came to see it, he was seized with bitter jealousy: ‘I am burning,’ he told one of his brothers, ‘and drying up like a small pond in the hot season.’

  [Duryodhana] saw divine designs that he had never seen before, even in the City of the Elephant [Hastinapura] ...

  One time the prince came, in the middle of the hall, upon a crystal slab and thinking it was water he raised his robe; again, seeing a pond filled with crystalline water and adorned with crystalline lotuses, he thought it was land and fell with his clothes on. When they saw this, the servants laughed merrily and gave him clean robes ... Another time he tried a door which appeared to be open, and hurt his forehead [on the trompe l‘oeil] ...

  The more I read of the Mahabharata - especially those sections dealing with Indraprastha - the more I longed to know how far the descriptions were factual, or if they were simply the product of Vyasa’s imagination. After all, in the Aegean, Heinrich Schliemann and Sir Arthur Evans had managed to prove that both Mycenae and Minoan Knossos had a firm basis in fact; and there seemed no reason to assume that the Mahabharata was any less historical than the Iliad, or that Indian bards were any more inventive than their Greek counterparts.

  But it was not easy to discover the truth. Indian archaeological excavations receive little attention outside the studies of those scholars who participate in them, and for this reason it took some time to track down the archaeologist whose life work was dedicated to researching the historical truth behind the Mahabharata. Leafing through the annual reports of the Archaeological Survey of India, I found out that twenty years ago a small section of the site of Indraprastha had been dug by the distinguished Indian archaeologist Professor B.B. Lal. It turned out that Lal had also, a little earlier, dug the site of the Kauravas’ capital, Hastinapura.

  As luck would have it, the professor happened to be passing through Delhi. He was staying beside the site of his old excavation, at the Archaeological Rest House within the ruins of the Purana Qila. But, as I discovered when I rang him, Professor Lal was busy completing an excavation report. He had a publishing deadline and said he could not see me for some time. Finally, one hot, sticky afternoon, three days before we were due to fly back to London, the telephone rang. It was the professor. He said that he was able to fit me in for a few minutes if I could come round to the Purana Qila immediately. I jumped into a taxi and went straight over.

  Professor B.B. Lal was a small, neat, well-groomed man in a light safari suit. He sat at his desk under a slowly-turning fan. Behind him were ranks of bookshelves; on either side he was flanked by glass cabinets full of pottery shards and old bones.

  Time was short, so I got straight to the point: quite simply, how historical did he think the Mahabharata was?

  The professor smiled, took off his glasses and began polishing them. He said: ‘Let me tell you a story.

  ‘Nearly forty years ago, in 1955, I happened to take the Kalka Mail from Calcutta to Delhi. When the train stopped at Allahabad there was a great commotion on the platform: people were desperately trying to climb into the train, there were police everywhere, women were crying ... Anyway; the train pulled out and I didn’t discover what had happened until the following morning. The Kumbh Mela [the great gathering of sadhus held once every decade] was being celebrated near Allahabad. Hundreds of holy men had massed and were marching down to the water to bathe when suddenly the elephants carrying the Naga Sadhus had run amok; in the ensuing panic hundreds were killed.

  ‘Many years later I was directing an excavation near Allahabad and, as is the custom, towards the end of the dig we held a musical evening for the staff and labourers working on the site. In the middle of the concert, one of the labourers got up with his veena and sung a ballad he had composed about the 1955 Kumbh Mela. The basic story was recognizable but he had added a lot of masala [spice], and the numbers had all got exaggerated.

  ‘The idea intriged me so I investigated in the villages round about, and discovered two other versions of the same ballad circulating. Each singer had told the story in his own way, each one had added lots of masala - but the basic story was still recognizable in all the versions; there was a kernel of truth despite all the elaborations.’

  ‘And you think the same is true of the Mahabharata?’

  ‘Exactly - although if so many details had been altered in forty years in the Kumbh Mela story, think how much the Mahabharata must have been confused in its gestastion. The most ancient text that survives mentions the Parthians, Romans and Huns, so it cannot be earlier than about AD 400. But the Mahabharata describes events which must have taken place centuries previously, perhaps around 900 BC. That means there were 1300 years during which the story could have been inflated out of all proportion to the original events.’

  The professor picked up a pencil from his desk and twirled it in his fingers.

  ‘In the text of the Mahabharata it says that the epic started off as a poem called Jaya - Victory — with only 8800 verses. Then it became the Bharata, with 24,000 slokas, before being transformed into the Great Bharata - the Mahabharata - with 100,000 stanzas. For all we know, before the Jaya the poem might well have started off as an even smaller, simpler ballad such as the one the labourer sung at our musical evening.’

  ‘So are you saying you can’t believe anything that you read in the text of the epic?’

  ‘No, I’m not saying that,’ replied Profesor Lal. ‘But what is clear is that you can’t rely on the text alone. The only way to deal with the problem - speaking as an archaeologist - is to look at the Mahabharata sites themselves.’

  ‘And they have survived?’

  ‘Not only that: they have kept the same names. Look on the map. There is still only one Hastinapura and one Kurukshetra. That much is certain.’

  Professor Lal leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms.

  ‘Back in the early 1950s I began to carry out a survey of all the places mentioned in the Mahabharata as well as a few which local tradition strongly associated with the epic — in all about forty sites. What I discovered by excavation was that the lowest levels in all these sites shared an identical material culture, and that every single one of them was definately in existence at around about 1000 B C. Moreover, all the sites yielded quantities of one very distinctive type of pottery known as Painted Grey Ware.’

  By chance, I had seen some examples of Painted Grey Ware only a week previously while I was wandering around the National Museum in Janpath. In what was certainly the least interesting gallery in the whole museum - the one that contained the collection of broken shards, arrowheads and shattered terracotta fragments from Indian prehistoric sites - one case stood out.

  The Painted Grey Ware spotlit in that display case was extraordinary stuff: eggshell thin - almost translucent - and wonderfully delicate. In some of his writings, Professor Lal has compared it on stylistic grounds to a set of shards found at Thessaly in northern Greece. But to my non-specialist eye the pots seemed strikingly similar to the superb pottery found at neolithic sites in the Greek Cyclades. The Cycladic culture which produced this extraordinary pottery also produced the beautiful marble figurines whose simple lines, shield-shaped faces, strange, abstract postures and almost elemental simplicity inspired both Henry Moore and Brancusi when, entirely independently, they both saw Cycladic figurines in museums - Brancusi in the Louvre, Moore in the British Museum. The result was sculptures like Moore’s great Moon Head and Brancusi’s oval Beginning of the World.

  Partly because of their influence on twentieth-century art, the Cycladic figurines and their related pottery statuettes look to us today strangely modern. The same is true of Painted Grey Ware: the superb elliptical profiles of the bowls directly recall Brancusi’s Beginning of the World, while the abstract patterns that cover their surfaces would have appealed to Matisse. It was lovely to imagine the Pandavas eating off this simple yet superb pottery in the great hall of Indraprastha, but
I still did not see how the discovery of this pottery in all the Mahabharata sites could be taken to prove the historicity of the epic conclusively. I said this to Professor Lal.

  ‘You’re quite right,’ he said. ‘There is no direct and unimpeachable archaeological proof you can produce to establish the historical accuracy of the Mahabharata. But the fact that all those diverse sites were, unequivocally, in existence at the same time, sharing the same material culture, is circumstantial evidence of a kind. And when you combine it with other evidence, you do begin to build up a picture.’

  ‘What other evidence?’ I asked.

  ‘Well - when we were excavating at Hastinapura a very interesting thing happened. On the dry side of the mound a lot of Painted Grey Ware was turning up, but on the side facing the river there was nothing. I could not understand this and kept asking myself why.

  ‘Then on my camp bed one night I remembered what was written in the Mahabharata: that many generations after the Battle of Kurukshetra, when Nicaksu was King, Hastinapura had been abandoned after a Ganges flood swept it away. After that the people of Hastinapura had gone off to live at Kausambi. I realized that what must have happened was that the Ganges had swept away half the site; and that only on the dry side of the mound - that facing away from the river - had the Painted Grey Ware levels survived intact.

  ‘This idea came to me at about one o’clock in the morning. I woke up my colleagues and, together with four chowkidars each carrying petromex lights, we went back to the site there and then armed with pickaxes and shovels. We examined all the rain gullies and, thanks to some good luck, in one cutting we found the boundary : on one side there was a thick deposit of mud and slush; on the other, the undisturbed Painted Grey Ware layers. The same pattern turned up in our main trenches soon afterwards. After this we took borings in the ancient bed of the Ganges and sure enough we found a huge conglomerate of washed-out habitation material. The Painted Grey Ware site at Hastinapura was, unequivocally, destroyed by a flood, just as the Mahabharata had said.

  ‘Later we dug some trenches at Kausambi - the site near Allahabad that the people of Hastinapura are said to have moved to. Sure enough in the lowest levels there, we found the same late degenerate form of PGW that we had been digging up at the top of the pre-flood levels of Hastinapura. Short of uncovering an inscription, that is the clearest archaeological evidence that you could hope for to confirm the Mahabharata text. It is a very nice - and very rare — example of archaeology exactly corroborating literary texts.’

  ‘And what about Indraprastha?’ I asked. ‘Did you manage to confirm the Mahabharata text there as well?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Professor Lal, his face falling slightly. ‘Well, when we dug in Purana Qila we did find continuous deposits from the Mughal period, right down through the Sultanate and the Rajput levels to the Buddhist and pre-Buddhist period ...’ He broke off: ‘Rather than me trying to describe it all to you why don’t I just show you? Come on.’

  We got up and left the office. It was now late evening and the great red sun was setting over the ramparts and cupolas of Purana Qila. We walked briskly along a track towards the Humayun Gate of the Fort, passed the Sher Mandal, and then turned left off the track towards a steeply sloping gully. On one side, a wall of earth rose up thirty feet from the dry bed of what must once have been a small stream. The earth wall was as clearly stratified as the rings of a tree.

  ‘Look!’ said the professor. ‘The whole history of Delhi is there! That wall represents continuous occupation for three thousand years. At no time was this area ever deserted.’

  ‘People just carried on epoch after epoch? Despite all the burnings, killings and invasions?’

  ‘In most sites you would expect at least brief periods when people moved away from a place. But Delhi was always occupied. There was never, ever a break. At the top of the wall you have the twentieth century. There are the Mughal levels ... that is the Sultanate period ... and down there at the bottom: those are the Painted Grey Ware levels.’

  ‘Indraprastha?’ I said.

  The professor shrugged: ‘Yes and no. You see, all we found in the PGW layers was one small mud structure. I think the main part of the city must probably have been to the south — through the Humayun Gate towards Humayun’s Tomb.’

  ‘Where the Zoo and Sundernagar are now?’

  ‘Exactly: all around that area - particularly near the Jumna — we have picked up basketfuls of Painted Grey Ware.’

  ‘So the site is still there awaiting future archaeologists?’

  ‘If they ever manage to raise the money — yes. But these days who is going to give funds for a proper ten-year excavation?’

  ‘But the palaces and gates and towers ... wouldn’t every university in the world compete to donate money for a site of that importance?’

  ‘You won’t find many palaces in the PGW layers,’ said Professor Lal.

  ‘What do you mean? In the Mahabharata ...’

  ‘Poetic licence,’ said the professor. ‘The archaeological evidence shows that the Painted Grey Ware culture was really fairly primitive - basically it was a rural, pastoral economy. At Hastinapura they had iron and copper implements, a few tools made of bone. Some glass ornaments, good wheel-turned pottery ...’

  ‘But the buildings?’ I asked. ‘What would the great hall of Indraprastha have been like?’

  ‘If it ever existed it would have been wattle and daub.’

  ‘Wattle and daub?’

  ‘You get some mud-brick walls, earthern ramparts, the odd structure of kiln-fired bricks, but generally speaking PGW structures are almost always wattle and daub.’

  ‘Any use of marble?’

  The professor shook his head: ‘Stone is very rare in this area and they didn’t have the resources to move it very far. To date no PGW layer has come up with any stone buildings.’

  ‘What about paintings? The trompe l’oeil which fooled Duryodhana?‘

  ‘No - nothing like that. Just monochrome geometric and floral ornament on pottery. No human figures. The material culture described in the text is that of the fourth century A D, not the ninth century B C.’

  The professor turned and began walking back to the Rest House. ‘The Indraprastha of the Mahabharata,’ he said, ‘was basically created by the pen of a poet.’

  ‘And destroyed,’ I said, ‘by the trowel of an archaeologist.’

  Professor Lal smiled: ‘If you like,’ he said.

  So, I thought: the Kauravas and the Pandavas turned from demi-gods into cave men, the great war reduced to a tribal feud fought with sticks and stones. Indraprastha’s towers of amethyst had crumbled into dull palisades of mud brick and sharpened stakes; an apparently impregnable city of the imagination, built of couplets and rhymes and ingenious metres, had been breached by the archaeologist’s pickaxe and shovel. After nearly a year’s research into Delhi’s history it seemed that I had finally reached the end of the trail.

  Olivia and I packed up our flat in a gloom. Power cuts had now become increasingly frequent, and whenever the fans ground to a halt the heat forced us to give up piling our things into boxes, and sit, virtually immobile, until the power returned. True, it was certainly a little less hot than before — the sun was masked with cloud and the temperature had dropped several degrees from the peak of the heat at the end of June - but if anything the weather was now more unpleasant because of the humidity in the air. Everywhere you went, people were talking of nothing but the imminence of the monsoon.

  ‘Oh, the rains we used to get when I was a child in the Punjab!’ said Mrs Puri when we went downstairs to say goodbye. ‘But today you never know. If it’s a good monsoon all the common people go mad and dance around. And if it doesn’t break the servants become quite impossible.’

  On the day before our flight, I took our parakeets up to Old Delhi to Dr Jaffery; his nieces had kindly promised to look after them while we were away. After we had said goodbye, Balvinder Singh drove me to the travel agent to pick up our
tickets for the next day. When I returned from the shop clutching the folder, Balvinder asked what I was holding.

  ‘Air tickets,’ I said. ‘We’re going back to England tomorrow, Balvinder.’

  ‘Going Ing-land?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh Mr William.’

  ‘What Balvinder?’

  ‘You not coming back?’

  I was flattered — and somewhat surprised - to find that Balvinder seemed saddened by the prospect of our departure.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘We’ll be back in a couple of months.’

  ‘Oh Mr William,’ said Balvinder. ‘You must come back soon.’

  ‘We’ll be back at the very beginning of October.’

  ‘Oh Mr William. Sooner, sooner.’

  This really was very touching.

  ‘I can’t come sooner than October, Balvinder,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you come end September.’

  It did sound as if he genuinely was going to miss us.

  ‘Well I suppose ... yes ... there is no reason we couldn’t come at the end of September.’

  ‘Acha,’ said Balvinder Singh. ‘Then you do one thing.’

  Balvinder pulled the car into the side of the road, whipped out a notebook from his glove compartment and began scribbling into it.

  ‘You bring for me one ITT in-car hifi, one Sony Walkman, one Phillips Video Cassette, two bottles Johnny Walker Black Label, one crate Carlsberg Extra Tasty ...’

  Balvinder tore the sheet from the notebook and handed it to me. ‘Payment,’ he said, ‘on delivery, cash on nail, no problem.’

  Early the following morning, woken by the distant rumbling of thunder, I lay awake thinking over everything I had read about ancient Delhi. Then it dawned on me that of course Indraprastha wasn’t the beginning of Delhi’s history after all. There was one ancient myth connected with the city that claimed to predate even the legends of the Mahabharata.