by M G Vassanji
Within the area now called Delhi, many an old Delhi (the canonical number is seven) rose and fell into neglect and ruin, a monument to a ruler’s ambition, a lesson in the transience of empire and dynasty. The heroes of the great Indian epic the Mahabharata, the five Pandava brothers, are thought to have held court here, some three thousand years ago, in a city they had built called Indraprastha. The city is described in great detail in the Mahabharata, as grand and wonderful, with “well-planned streets, magnificent white buildings, pavilions, pleasure hillocks, ponds, lakes, and tanks [reservoirs]. It was surrounded by beautiful gardens where trees of many kinds blossomed and bore fruit and where the air resounded with the call of peacocks and cuckoos…. From here Yudhisthira [the eldest of the Pandavas] ruled over his realm, cultivating among his subjects dharma (righteousness), artha (material well-being), and kama (the satisfaction of sensual pleasure).” Among the magnificent buildings was a great hall which had golden pillars and was studded with precious stones. The details seem fantastical, but that might well be poetic licence. Did the descriptions have a basis in fact? Apparently not. A covered archaeological dig at Purana Qila, the Old Fort, is perhaps the site of ancient Indraprastha. Archaeologists who have dug at this site and at others connected with or mentioned in the epic have indeed found ancient artifacts—shards of fine pottery called Painted Grey Ware—dating to about 1000 BC, but nothing so exotically wonderful as to have belonged to the Indraprastha of the Mahabharata. But then, what inspired the poet who described Indraprastha so opulently, and when did he write?
Lying alongside the Jumna river, at the end of a corridor between the Himalayan range to the north and the Rajasthan desert to the south and west, Delhi became the prize of many an invader from the north and west. The rest of India lay before it, so to speak, inviting conquest and plunder. In Delhi, the Turks from Central Asia began the long era of Muslim rule over India, the great Mughal empire reached its zenith, declined, and fell, and the British ruled over the jewel of an empire over which the sun finally set. Here Mahatma Gandhi, still grieving the breakup of the country in the horror of Partition following the country’s independence from Britain, was assassinated; and from here the charismatic public-school and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru presided as India’s first prime minister during the heyday of Nonalignment and the Cold War.
A growing metropolis of increasing millions, streets packed with buses, auto-rickshaws, Marutis, and other, newer car models, the air heavily polluted, immense hoardings looming over the traffic, advertising the two competing colas, Bollywood films, computers, wireless providers, the focus here is on the now and the future. And so if one came expecting history to leap out from the sidewalks, as I did first, as one might in London or Paris—where history is organized and preserved and documented for the visitor not only in the public buildings but also in the grand museums—one is disappointed. I recall my visit to the Jantar Mantar observatory on my first day in Delhi and coming out feeling empty. Monuments there are in plenty, a thousand years’ worth of them, a few of them prized and showcased, but most decaying or lost or known only to a few, and all surrounded with an ironic sense of detachment from much of the populace.
Perhaps this is because Delhi has always been seen as a city invaded, in wave after wave of conquest, and built over and extended and moved over time; perhaps also because it is a city of recent refugees—and one could argue that the most recent invasion of Delhi was by the Punjabi refugees who bitterly left their ancestral homes in the land that became Pakistan and arrived in train-loads in this city and radically changed its nature. So Delhi’s past is not what everyone takes pride in, claims as his or her own. History is selective, discontinuous. If you see the city as having been invaded by foreign Muslim conquerors whose descendants are now Pakistanis, then its monuments, if they don’t bring up bile, mean nothing to you.
“We’re living off an inheritance,” a well-respected restoration architect tells me. “We’ve inherited many buildings but built few ourselves.” An unfair assessment, perhaps, and dated, in this rapidly changing city. But as if to illustrate that statement, during my first visit I was driven through the “New Delhi” built by the British, in an area of lush lawns and gardens and wide tree-lined avenues, past Rashtrapati Bhavan, the once viceregal now presidential palace, the parliament buildings (“gift of the Britishers,” a guidebook explained), Claridges Hotel, and residences of the ruling elite. “In this area Indians were not allowed once,” my host, Krishan Chander, smiled. I wondered if there was any method in his choice of only these sites for me to see. None of the Mughal monuments, nothing pre-British, apparently, excited him. This was his fixed itinerary for visitors from abroad, what he thought would impress them. He was, as I later learned, one of the refugees of Partition. For his pièce de résistance he took me to the Diplomatic Enclave, in the posh area called Chanakya Puri, containing broad leafy streets named after grand rulers of the past and grand philosophies, and showed me the Canadian High Commission. “Home!” he announced with a wide grin. It could be a touch of irony, cruel, but it wasn’t. He seemed sincere in his belief that the place would remind me of home. If only home were such a simple matter. During my second day in the country, as I recall, he had taken me for a returned Indian and left me to negotiate on my own the vast, bewildering New Delhi railway station.
On a train to Shimla, once, I sat across from two young women very diligently eating chappati and daal with their hands, from a package bought at a station. Something in their accent, something in their reserve, suggested they could only be Canadian. Yet they did not have that ubiquitous badge that many Canadian travellers carry, a Canadian flag, a red maple leaf sewn prominently on their luggage somewhere. A family of Gujarati tourists with two very indulged kids tried to convince one of the girls that it was all right to throw trash out the window, and she, after hesitating for some time, finally chucked her refuse out. I am not used to it, she explained, we are taught to throw garbage only in bins. The Gujarati woman smiled. We have a lot to learn from you, she said. The girl came from Canada, she said. Only then, I, who am usually reticent with strangers, felt I had a claim to them. I spoke to them about where they came from, where I lived. They were students in Kingston, in fact, which city I had to visit immediately after my return. But I was right in another respect also: very soon the girls produced Canadian pins, with the maple leaf at the head, and handed them out. They were eagerly accepted by all the passengers around.
But here in Delhi, excepting the monuments and the size of the city, so much actually reminds me of another home, in East Africa, across the Indian Ocean. The residential streets in many areas look exactly like those in the Indian areas of the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam of my childhood: the flower bushes in bungalow gardens, the mango trees giving wide shade; the two-storey apartment blocks of brick and cement, painted a simple white or light colour; the people outside them, vegetable sellers and their customers, the school kids. The pace of life, the background sounds. And inside the houses, the one-or two-bedroom cluttered interiors, the photo of a deceased family elder in prime place, objects displayed in glass cabinets, the essentially modest furniture and facilities. All this, so familiar as to take the breath away.
I recall a scene in suburban Delhi; this was later, during a family visit to India. We had taken a bus from our guest house in South Delhi to go to Connaught Circus, the heart of New Delhi. On the way we passed certain residential areas of the city, and glancing at my wife I saw a sudden emotion come over her face. She, who had not been back to Dar es Salaam in over twenty years, was reminded of it by the neighbourhoods we passed through. Such is the meaning of home. How could I possibly explain this to Krishan Chander, whose one ambition seems to be to send at least one of his children “there”? And if he succeeds, would he then go and stare nostalgically at the Canadian High Commission or the American Embassy?
Krishan Chander teaches English at one of the colleges that make up the massive University of Delhi system, thou
gh speaking to him one might not quite guess his specialty, and watching him operate reminds one more of a broker. Krishan Chander is an organizer, a doer, conferences are his métier, and although he complains that they take away from his scholarship, one is hard put to believe that. This occupation gives him privilege and status. His specialty is Canada, and to prove his loyalty he wears a maple-leaf pin in the manner of many Ontario civil servants, identical to the ones I saw the two Canadian girls giving away on the train to Shimla. He goes about from city to city all over the country, a latter-day evangelist for a little-known faith, offering as ultimate prize a trip to that paradise in the north. Many a hapless scholar has been caught in his honey trap.
Every evening after nine the telephone will start ringing in Krishan Chander’s cluttered living room, and picking it up he is connected to the world. I have often imagined him as a minor Indian god, sitting cross-legged like Gandhi, cheerful as a Ganesh, well-worn address book on his lap, telephone to his ear. Calls will come from other “centres” all across the country; from stranded foreign visitors; from would-be conference participants; from his typist or travel agent; even from the Canadian High Commission. You can call him at any hour of the day or night, certain of his attention. He will settle quarrels, budgets, itineraries. Every morning before he leaves the house he will again pick up his phone and his tattered book and begin dialing. He will not be rushed, attending to every item on his agenda one at a time. It is the only way, with his harried schedule. Finally he will come out of the house, looking distracted, his clothes already crumpled, his oiled hair curling up at the ears. A man with a passion, and a smile on his face. He will get out his Maruti, close the iron gate of the house (with its special “Canadian” guest room), and, toot-tooting, speed away past cows and pedestrians to the day’s appointments.
He goes by a simple principle, driving the Maruti around on the clogged streets of Delhi. He uses this system, as every other driver seems to do, in place of a rear-view mirror, right and left turn signals, stop lights: oblivious to any danger, he will scoot through a turn as I hold my breath, or through a crossroads, his horn happily blaring; this happy-fierce toot-toot gives him licence, a right, and he uses it effectively, though I wonder for how long. The car already has several dents, blamed on his family learning to drive. There is a simple method, apparently, to negotiating Delhi traffic, and it involves pushing through, struggling ahead as best as you can. Every space of likely advantage, however small, is contended for. At every instant a victor emerges, goes forward, the loser relents, is at it again. The horn is a welcome sign, warning others and announcing yourself, deafening to the visitor. Trucks cheerfully tell you on their backs, “Blow Horn,” in addition to a prayer to the Mother Goddess, and a pithy proverb: “O you with the dirty look, your face be black.”
“Whom do the cows belong to?” I asked Krishan Chander on my first visit. A great smile came over his face. The question had been put to him before. One of his foreign visitors had written a poem to the cows of Delhi, he said. I had guessed that perhaps they belonged to homes in the neighbourhood. They belonged to no one, Krishan told me. They are simply tolerated. One finds them plodding along in the thick of traffic, getting the blare of horns like everything else on the road, very much of the place and belonging. One finds them sitting right in the middle of a street, cars going past on either side, in both directions. One finds them scavenging the garbage dumps. At times they are angrily pushed aside, shouted at, as when one of them picks up an onion outside a store and ambles innocently away. They are a part of street life, as much as a beggar, a stray dog, a rickshaw, a man or woman crossing the road at a construction site bearing a load of bricks, traffic patiently waiting. And one sees cow droppings all over the residential streets, seemingly unnoticed and prudently avoided, like a rock or stump on the road.
In recent times, though, a globalized Krishan has moved on to consultancy and world travelling. He’s recently been to Pakistan, seen the place of his birth. A grownup child is already “there,” in the U.S. But while in Delhi he is still always available to assist, now on his cell phone, at home and on the road.
History is addictive, is an obsession, I’ve discovered. There’s so much around, layers to peel back, enigmas to uncover. I’ve seen the monuments, the Qutb complex, Humayun’s tomb, Red Fort; been driven past the odd mound or dome, remnants of a lost age; read bits of description and history. All dutifully accomplished. Registered in passing. But the urge persists, and grows, to step into the past, look behind the ruin, the beauty, the enigma—and find coherence, impute meaning and relevance. It’s risky, I know, a little like walking into a dream.
Why this obsession with the past? I can only conclude that it reflects the deep dissatisfaction of unfinished, incomplete migrations, a perpetual homelessness in my life. My colonial existence—in which memory and the past were trampled upon in a rush to better our lot—and the insecurities of an unorthodox communal culture, in the process of extinction and reinvention by the exigencies of globalized living and modern politics, have both created an uncontrollable and perhaps vain desire to know and record who I am. There are the ways of the mystic and the scientist, to answer this question; and there is the way of history and fiction, which I find more compelling. In how I connect to the history I learn about myself.
The axis of Delhi is oriented north-south. The legendary many cities of Delhi were often simply extensions one of another, in proximity to the Jumna river, each new Delhi generally to the north of the previous one, so as to benefit first from the cooling winds during the torrid dry summer. And so some of the oldest surviving monuments, the earliest Delhis, can be found among the suburbs in the south. The British, however, after much debate reversed this trend and built their Imperial Indian capital, New Delhi, in 1912, adjacent to what was then the current Delhi (called Shahjahanabad) and to its south. Since then the southwards trend has continued.
The noted English surgeon Frederick Treves, famous for his friendship with Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man, and also imperial traveller, happened to visit Delhi in 1906 and gave a fine panoramic description of the landscape, looking out from the then Delhi, southwards from Delhi Gate:
There lies, to the south of Delhi…a desolate plain covered with the ruin and wreckage of many cities. For miles it wanders, telling ever the one woeful story of the hand of the destroyer. This country of things-that-were has been swept by a hundred armies, has heard the roar of a thousand battles, and none can tell the number of the dead who have lain stark among its stones….
From the Delhi Gate a road starts across this desert and reaches to a kindly and wholesome land beyond. The road is straight, and it leads through a country of stones and dust….
Those who follow this melancholy track will pass by miles of ruins, by walls with breaches, shreds of turrets and relics of gates, by crumbling domes rent with cracks…, by tottering pillars and half-seen vaults, and by prostrate blocks of matted stone which were bastions or buttresses.
Only six years later, on this landscape of broken old cities and a few straggling villages, was built New Delhi, covering incidentally much of the site of the ancient capital Indraprastha. After Independence, the growth of the city has continued southwards, on and around the ruins, and people will tell you that the newest Delhi is far south of the oldest Delhi, in the burgeoning modern satellite towns of Gurgaon and Noida, beneficiaries of India’s new globalized economy, with their spanking-new air-conditioned industrial parks, shopping malls, and housing developments, where the nouveau riche professionals can live in (Western) style.
But it is not the modern glass, steel, and concrete—which could be transplants from anywhere—but those silent ancient stone structures and their haunting echoes of tumultuous times past that draw the breath, at least of this visitor. Are they relevant? Of course they are; history is always relevant. An awareness of the past runs like lava beneath the surface of life here. The prompt for the outbreak of communal violence that took place in
1993 in Bombay and parts of Gujarat, and its follow-up, the one in Gujarat in 2002, was the destruction of a sixteenth-century mosque built by the Mughal emperor Babur, allegedly upon the site of the birthplace of the Hindu god Rama. During communal conflicts Muslims are to this day anachronistically and erroneously jeered with cries of “Babur’s progeny” and “Turk.” In a happier, secular vein, modern India needs a capital worthy of its status and ambitions, and where else to look for the requisite imperial grandeur and gravity than in the abundant evidence of its rich history. No wonder, then, that restorers can be seen toiling away at the monuments as never before. “Heritage building” is a term gaining currency, and not only in Delhi.
In 1192, Delhi, then a city in a Rajput kingdom of the north, fell to the armies of Muhammad of Ghur, a region in the western part of the area we now know as Afghanistan, and the era of so-called Muslim rule began in Delhi, from whence it proceeded to the rest of India. There were, to be sure, Muslims living in various parts of India before 1192: Arab traders and settlers in the cities all along the western coast, having arrived by sea; ambassadors at various courts; Sufis from Persia and Central Asia. There had been other incursions by Muslim rulers from the north. But this particular conflict changed everything, for the conquerors had come to stay. The remains of the medieval Rajput city can be found in a few fragments of a rubble wall in southern Delhi; those of the conquerors’ city are at the Qutb complex, at which the red sandstone tower called Qutb Minar rises resplendently.