A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  Jalaluddin had a beloved nephew, his brother’s son, Alauddin, who was also his son-in-law, but his exact opposite in nature: ambitious, cruel, and unscrupulous. One day in the holy month of Ramadan, against all advice, the old sultan set off on his royal barge down the Ganges, which was swollen by the monsoon rains, to greet his nephew, who awaited at a place called Kara (present-day Allahabad) loaded with booty after a brilliant military victory in the south. Thereby Jalaluddin sailed into a trap, “his doom pulling him by the hair,” as Barni puts it. Alauddin had plotted meticulously. Through the ruse of a letter, the sultan had been led to believe he was going to meet and comfort a contrite nephew who had disobeyed him and, depressed, was on the verge of taking poison. To hasten his journey, Jalaluddin went with a small retinue. In the last stage of the journey, on a small boat, the sultan’s attendants were convinced to disarm. When the two met on the bank of the river at Kara, the nephew fell at his uncle’s feet, who raised him and kissed him on the eyes and cheeks, as he would a son, and stroked his beard. “I have brought you up from infancy, why are you afraid of me?” the old man said, at which moment the stone-hearted Alauddin gave the signal and the first of several blows from the hand of an assassin fell upon the sultan. Wounded, Jalaluddin ran towards the river, crying, “Oh, you villain Alauddin, what have you done?” Another of Alauddin’s men ran after the sultan, threw him to the ground, cut off his head, and presented it dripping to the nephew. Says Barni, “Villainy and treachery, and murderous feelings, covetousness and desire of riches, thus did their work.” It was the afternoon of Wednesday, July 19, 1296.

  Thus the accession of Alauddin Khilji, who went on to become one of the great rulers of India, in the manner the nobles had demanded of Jalaluddin the Good. But with Alauddin’s spies around, reportedly the nobles now found it necessary to speak in whispers or even in gestures. He was ruthless and ambitious, his rule was long and stable. Among his achievements was a strong central administration and an effective system of collecting revenue, which enabled him to establish a large standing army. This Second Alexander, as he styled himself, made numerous conquests, including that of Gujarat, and brought most of India under his dominion or vassalage. Delhi became one of the major Islamic centres, attracting scholars, teachers, artists, traders, and administrators from all over the Islamic world.

  But there prevailed a constant state of war with the Mongols, the descendants of Chinghiz Khan, “the accursed”—so-called because he had already laid waste the Islamic lands to the north and west, including Afghanistan, the ancestral homeland of Delhi’s rulers. The Mongols, considered uncouth, non-Muslim, and uncivilized, made regular raids in the northwest. In 1303 they almost conquered Delhi.

  A force of tens of thousands of Mongol horsemen proceeded towards the capital, raising dust and mayhem along the highway, and camped some six miles outside the city, which had overflowed meanwhile with terrified refugees from the countryside. From their positions the Mongols controlled the vital river crossings and the highways. Alauddin’s forces, after recent engagements, were weak in number. Water and supplies were short in the city. “Utmost terror prevailed,” says Barni. The sultan fixed his camp at a place called Siri outside the city gates and the two armies faced off. The Mongols, finding no way to breach the Hindustan line after a siege of two months, at last departed. And Delhi’s denizens shouted their thanks to their one and many gods for this miracle. “If Targhi [the Mongol commander] had remained another month upon the Jumna,” Barni writes, “the panic would have reached to such a height that a general flight would have taken place and Delhi would have been lost.”

  Following this siege, Alauddin moved his capital to Siri, where he built his “palace of a thousand columns.” It stood two miles to the north of the previous capital; its meagre ruins, now a grazing ground for bullocks, lie behind a market next to the well-heeled neighbourhood of Asian Games Village. Its recently restored walls form a backdrop to the Panchsheel Park in the same area. The Hauz Khas was built in its northern limits to provide water to the new city. Meanwhile in the old city the Quwwatul Islam mosque was extended, as well as the Qutb area around it; and a new brick tower, proposed to be double the size of the Qutb Minar, was begun to celebrate Alauddin’s reign. It was never finished.

  While the monuments of the sultans lie silent, some of them abject, neglected ruins, those of the poets and mystics live on and sing and perhaps mock to this day. Shrines are an important part of worship in India, and even the acknowledged agnostic in the currently “cool India,” of whatever faith, will not mind placing a basket of roses upon a grave, standing back, and joining hands to pay respects to a mystic of the past.

  The Nizamuddin area of Delhi is named after the great Sufi Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya (1238–1325), who lived and died and is buried here, at the outskirts of the once thriving old Delhis, now close to the heart of the modern city. The Sufi’s shrine is one of Delhi’s most visited sites. The railway station nearby also bears his name.

  Nizamuddin was born in a small town outside Delhi, his paternal grandfather having emigrated from Bukhara. When he was twenty years old he went to visit the famous Sufi Baba Fariduddin Ganj-e-Shakar in Pakpattan (now in Pakistan). Baba Farid belonged to the Chishti order, which was brought to India, it will be recalled, just prior to the conquest of Delhi. Baba Farid was so ascetic in his practices, he reputedly hung himself by the feet from a well to say his prayers. Impressed by the young visitor from Delhi, however, he installed Nizamuddin as the khalifa, the leader, of the order in that city. Here Nizamuddin established his khanqah, his centre, “in a corner apart from the men of the City,” where he lived and taught his disciples until his death.

  The Chishti order took a keen interest in music and poetry, and because it preached and practised a classless society and a simple devotion to God, it attracted many followers. Indeed, it appears that Sufism was primarily responsible for the conversions to Islam in northern India. In a typical khanqah, the master and his disciples lived in one large room, where time was spent on prayers and studying. All were welcome, and whatever food was there was shared out. Of course not everyone became a Sufi mystic; most would simply have paid homage to the holy man and come to listen to his teachings and participate in the devotional sessions. But such was the influence of Nizamuddin in Delhi, it has been said, that it became the fashion to buy and study devotional classics.

  Stories are, of course, oft repeated about this beloved character, and a good number of them involve the sultans of Delhi. In the Muslim world, the relationships of sultans with the Sufi masters in their domains were always precarious, for the Sufis were arrogant and defiant, and the kings no less arrogant but also wary about the influence of the mystics on the people and nervous about their spiritual powers. Many an eminent Sufi has been martyred by his earthly sultan.

  It is said that Delhi was saved from the Mongols, in that crucial encounter with Alauddin outside Siri, by the prayers of Nizamuddin, its beloved mystic. And yet, when the sultan wished to see Nizamuddin, the shaikh declined. Alauddin’s heir, Khizr, was however a disciple. One day the prince brought a letter from Alauddin, but the shaikh did not open it. If he wants me to leave the city, he retorted, I will do so. There is enough room in God’s world for the two of us.

  Surely Alauddin knew he was doomed?

  If there was ever a case of just retribution in the bloody annals of medieval Delhi, it was made manifest in the final days of Alauddin, who had so heinously murdered his uncle to usurp the throne. In our imagination, as the macabre denouement of his life unfolds, it is as if Fellini had collaborated with Shakespeare to write the script.

  At the centre of the tragic drama that was Alauddin’s miserable end stood the figure of an evil genius called Malik Kafur, a former eunuch slave who had been bought in a Baghdad market, brought to India, and captured by Alauddin’s generals in the port city of Khambat (Cambay) during the Gujarat campaigns. He went on to become the victor of several military campaigns on behalf of Alauddin
and, at the end, his close confidant. He was a handsome man, and suggestions of a homosexual relationship with his master add spice to their story. Because he had been bought for a thousand (“hazar” in Persian and Hindi) dinars at the market, Malik Kafur was also known as Malik Hazar-dinari.

  Alauddin lay in bed sick with dropsy, weak and only partly conscious, suffering unbearable bouts of pain and flashes of temper, and neglected by his family: the queen devoted to participating in celebrations, the sultan’s mother to her social functions, his beloved but spoilt heir Khizr Khan to his many amusements, including women, wine, and sports. “The locks of beautiful girls were constantly in his hands,” said his friend Amir Khusrau, the court poet, “as rosaries are in the hands of the pious.” Malik Kafur was recalled from the south to give comfort to the suffering sultan in his sick bed. When Khizr Khan, having sworn to go on foot to pray for his father at the graves of the saints, was reported to have gone on horseback instead, and moreover in the company of musicians and dancing girls, the deeply disappointed sultan, under Kafur’s malign influence, reluctantly divested him of his status as heir and agreed to send him to prison. But Alauddin nevertheless extracted a promise from the faithless Kafur not to harm the prince. This episode only worsened Alauddin’s condition, and he died a few days later, his end hastened, some said, by the attentions of Kafur. Subsequently the former thousand-dinar slave had Khizr Khan blinded in a dungeon. And he sent his barber to blind Shadi Khan, Khizr’s brother, which the barber accomplished by “cutting his eyes from their sockets with a razor, like slices of melon.” He proceeded to remove all the wives and children of the sultan who had claims upon the throne and set up his own favourite as the successor. It was January 1316. Malik Kafur’s intrigues ultimately caught up with him, and he died by the sword shortly afterwards, ungrieved.

  Alauddin’s incomplete tower, a gigantic brick stump, stands eighty feet high. His dynasty petered out shortly after his death, following a number of bloody disputes over the succession to the throne.

  Khizr Khan’s tomb supposedly lies at Nizamuddin, in the vicinity of that of his friend Amir Khusrau, who would devote an epic poem to his passion for a Gujarati princess. But that is another tale.

  Another stone testimony to the thwarted vanity of kings stands five miles to the east of Alauddin’s stump: the massive, severe, red and grey ruins of Tughlaqabad Fort, still immensely imposing and awesome, on the Badarpur Road at the edge of the modern city, overlooking the highway headed south to Mathura and Agra. Built by Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, who started his own dynasty in 1320, it was abandoned not long afterwards; reflecting the grim, austere personality of its designer, it stands in sharp contrast to the graceful buildings of his predecessors. Only the odd awestruck tourist or a band of goats taking a shortcut over the massive collapsed structure visits it today. It was once, one learns, a four-mile-perimeter city, octagonal in shape, its thirty-foot walls enclosing a citadel, some palaces, and streets laid out in a grid.

  Across the road, equally forlorn, lies the tomb of the sultan.

  Nizamuddin’s final resting place, on the other hand, is visited every year by thousands of people of all faiths, bearing baskets of roses as offerings and desires to be fulfilled.

  You enter an alley from the main Mathura Road where it meets Lodi Road, then walk into a long, slightly winding, narrow corridor lined by stalls all clamouring for custom, selling Muslim devotional music and videos, wall hangings, food, and roses by the heaps, chaddars (shawls to spread over a grave) and bags of prasad for you to take inside to the shrine as offerings; a dozen or more stalls offer to keep your shoes. You buy your rose tray and remove your shoes, but not the socks (as other places demand), and enter a paved courtyard fairly busy with a quiet sort of activity. Prominently in front is the grand mausoleum of Nizamuddin Auliya, a colourful, partly gilded square structure capped with a dome, and possessed with a low, arched entrance and latticed green and white walls. A steady stream of men, their heads covered with caps or kerchiefs, walk in and out. Women, who are not allowed inside, sit devoutly on the verandah. The interstices of the lattice walls are filled with strips of cloth, left by them as tokens to the saint for wishes to be fulfilled. The grave of the Sufi lies in the centre of a small inner room, a narrow aisle going around it so that if you do not wish to stand for long before it, as many do, their palms raised open before them in prayer, you have to squeeze your way past. The grave is covered with layers of chaddars and flowers, to which you add your offering. A chandelier hangs above the grave, its light dim, but unlike other shrines, there is no lamp burning to symbolize the nur, or spirit, of the saint. It is a brief experience, and as you emerge into the bright sunlight and feel the hot pavement under your feet you do not quite know how to respond. What moves is the sight of the people who believe so fervently, who need so desperately, the devotion so open on their faces; and an awareness of the different backgrounds and faiths they belong to. An attendant comes to take down your name and address, accepts a donation. He claims descent from Nizamuddin, hands you a card, shows you around. Adjoining the shrine compound is a mosque, where some people are at prayer, and a madrassa, not in session at this time. The kids who come here, my informant is quick to tell me, anticipating my question, also go to regular school.

  Behind Nizamuddin’s shrine, across the courtyard, lies the slightly less opulent mausoleum of his disciple Amir Khusrau, a prolific poet and one of the chief historians of his time. He wrote both in Persian, the literary and scholarly language of the time, and the local Hindustani, which he quite adored, and his poetry is loved and performed to this day. He was born in northern India in 1254, to a family of Turkish immigrants (or refugees) from central Asia, and died in 1325, six months after his master. So devoted was Khusrau to Nizamuddin that it is said he would lick the plate the master had eaten from. But Khusrau spent much of his time in court, where he was required to entertain the sultan with his clever compositions. A man surviving on a tightrope between the two worlds.

  Outside the poet’s mausoleum three singers have appeared, seated on the ground with their instruments, to give a performance of his work. You ask your informant about the prince Khizr Khan’s grave, which according to your reading is somewhere on this site, close to that of his friend. He doesn’t know, but across from Khusrau’s mausoleum he points out a modest unmarked grave that he says belongs to Ziauddin Barni. Like many such graves, it is raised a few inches above the ground and painted an olive green. History tells us this servant of Clio spent his last years in this area, a pauper. This naked grave could well be his. You go over and place a few flowers upon it.

  Finally you depart, pick up your shoes. The beggars are at your back now as you make your way out the long narrow corridor. The eating stalls hustle for money to feed the needy, five rupees a person. The video stalls show pious movies, in one of them uniformed young boys in formation singing praises to the Prophet, looking ominously militaristic. A beggar woman runs after you pleading. Another takes over from her and gives you a glimpse of the baby in her arms. Give me something to feed the child. Those eyes. You pay and you flee.

  Another time. It’s a warm Thursday night, holy Jumé-raat, when the devout and the needy visit the graves of the Sufis everywhere. Here at Nizamuddin, a mandap, a makeshift auditorium under a cloth canopy, has been set up between the mausoleums of the master and his disciple. The only light is at Khusrau’s shrine, to enter which the devotees silently line up, dressed up for this special occasion. In contrast to these silent—and perhaps desperate—devotions, on the ground outside, under the canopy, sit some hundred people rapt with attention, listening to four qawali singers belting out praises to the Prophet. The tabla beats, the harmonium wails. It is holy clamour in the perfumed smoky air of the shrine. Fill my beggar’s pouch, Ya Muhammad! shout the singers as fresh people come in, look for places to squeeze into. Occasionally someone from the audience stands up, goes and drops a bill or two before the singers.

  As you sit in the dark liste
ning to the music, and watch as one group of singers yields its place to another, and you notice how they toss up their frenzied lines into the air and catch them, the voices rising and falling, and as you let your gaze wander and take in the black caps and the green caps denoting status, the embroidered ones denoting regions, and the simple skull caps of the majority of those here and the freshly pressed kurta-pyjamas and the handful of tourists hovering at the edges, their heads also covered, you can’t help thinking, What a memorial to a poet.

  The story is told that when Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, the builder of Tughlaqabad, was returning once from a campaign in the east, he sent a message in advance to the Shaikh Nizamuddin telling him to leave the city before he arrived. Why he would do so is not clear, but certainly there was no love lost between sultan and Sufi. To the sultan’s message, the shaikh replied, “Hanouz Delhi dur ast,” meaning, Delhi is still far off. Ghiyasuddin did not make it to Delhi, dying in an accident on the way. This story, pitting a beloved mystic against a vain sultan, people love to tell. Historians discard it with disdain, but repeat it all the same. As I cannot help but do.