by Raza Rumi
I am overwhelmed by the feeling that the place is incredibly enchanting. It is a magical kingdom bereft of symbols of worldly power and one which weaves a spell of peace and forgetting.
The qawwali resumes after the maghreb prayers and the place echoes with the lyrics:
Colour me in your hue, my love,
You are my master, oh beloved of the Almighty;
Colour me in your hue.
My scarf and the beloved’s turban,
Both ought to be dyed in the hue of spring…
The evening turns into a ‘happening’ inside the dargah compound. The sheer number of people loitering about, sitting, praying and crying is mind-boggling. Shrines are metaphors of the complexity of human woes and desires. Here, the thronging multitudes wish to connect without conditions, free of orthodoxy’s linear worldview of conformity and suffering for penance, a psycho social arena reflecting joys and sorrows in a single space where strangers appear to be familiar and the solemn air subsumes inner agitations.
To me, Hazrat Nizamuddin’s compound is the ultimate metaphor of Delhi and its lost past. From the medieval tombs of the Mughals—Princess Jahanara, Atagah Khan, Emperor Akbar’s minister, and the unfortunate Emperor Mohammad Shah Rangeela—to contemporary concrete rooms and hideous taps, this was the essence of what I had imagined Delhi to be. Apart from the Sufi trappings, this place could offer a captivating look through the rusty windows of history, sociology and music.
At the end of the first day’s spiritual excursion, I discover that Sadia and I share the same gateway to Islam. Our respective ancestors were converted by the same wandering ‘shams’ of Multan. Apa, my grandmother’s amazing sister, would have loved to meet Sadia and hear her own version of her family history. Apa told me it was to Benares where our ancestors were heading before they were converted by a wandering Sufi. I too, like my ancestors, have to go to the shores of the Ganga to complete that truncated journey of my Hindu forefathers—a sojourn that was interrupted by a hiatus of six centuries.
But I am not in Benares, I am in Delhi or at least halfway there. Alas, these are not the ethereal shores of the Ganga but the banks of the dirty Jamuna. I am comforted that along its downstream course, the Jamuna merges with the Ganga somewhere near Allahabad.
Old Lahore’s Shah Alam was inhabited mostly by Hindus. Named after the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam, this neighbourhood was akin to Delhi’s walled city. Also known as ‘Shahalmi’ in Punjabi, this locality suffered colossal rioting, plunder and near annihilation during Partition as most of the houses and buildings were set ablaze. My paternal grandmother’s family lived there too. They left their house for a Muslim locality and by the time they returned after the bloodbath, most of the neighbours had left including the extended family of Sorayya, the legendary actor. The grey swirl of the ashes of burning houses mixed with dust made everything invisible. But buried in the thick air that traumatized the narrow alleys, there must have been some euphoria somewhere for now there was a new country for India’s Muslims.
Bibiji, my paternal grandmother, and her elder sister, Apa, were almost synonymous with Shahalmi during most of my childhood years. In the 1960s, Bibiji with her children had moved to an emerging posh suburb called Model Town that is now famous for its association with Pakistan’s former Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif, who built luxury bungalows and upgraded Model Town. But Bibiji could not get the sheher, which literally meant ‘city’ but in this case, the ‘old city’ out of her system, making feeble excuses each week to travel to the walled city. Sometimes it was to buy ‘better’ quality spices such as crisp cumin seeds and at other times it would be an ‘urgent’ need to see her doctor who lived there. The witty doctor, Abdullah, was more of a friend to my grandmother than a physician.
Bibiji would pack her little basket for an emotional picnic in Shahalmi and I would trail her on the street till she had no option but to take me along. We would ride a bus, sometimes to Rang Mahal and then take a tonga to Shahalmi. The entire journey was a fascinating series of stops, halts, haggling and finding your way into Old Lahore’s labyrinth. Tongas would not go beyond the entrance of the Shahalmi gate; one had to dismount and trundle along the time-frozen lanes to get to Apa’s house.
Apa was an Old Lahore agony aunt of sorts, seeking and furnishing advice, offering emotional succour or reciting folk stories, anecdotes and Urdu couplets in her thick Lahori accent. In this accent, the ‘r’s and the ‘d’s were pronounced in a peculiar way that made me laugh. So conversations with Apa, however serious, had this little humour tagged on like the loveable noise of old gramophones.
Apa was my gateway to the past. My parents were more interested in inculcating an urbane, post-colonial idiom in our lives—correct Urdu and English, contemporary table manners, westernized etiquette. But Apa, as I slept on her grand old bed, would narrate tales of the Shahalmi that was, and of her long lost neighbours.
It was on this bed that, at the age of eight, I learnt how our Hindu ancestors had been converted by a wandering dervish named Shams Sabzwari, erroneously confused with Rumi’s master Shams Tabrez; how he was the beacon of a new egalitarian faith and lifestyle that evidently attracted my surely caste-challenged ancestors. So we were Sheikhs and precisely, Shamsi Sheikhs.
The elusive Shah Shams Sabzwari is also claimed by the Ismailis as their celebrated dai. His life, like that of his namesake, the fabled Shams who changed Rumi’s life, remains a mystery. What is known for certain is that he arrived in Multan, in southern Punjab, and joined the other saints living there. The year of Shah Shams’s death, or in Sufi parlance, his re-union with the beloved creator, is recorded, courtesy his tomb in Multan, as 1276.
Shams’s collection of poetry tells us that he spent his early years in a medieval Persian town called Sabzwar and travelled widely. He is supposed to have roamed around India and converted many people in Kashmir, Sindh, Gujarat and Little Tibet before moving to Punjab, where Sufi mythology holds that he performed the miracle of restoring someone to life.
This is when Apa’s narrative would move into an intimate fictional mode. I remember that dark winter night when the old high ceiling turned into a canvas for my imagination. Apa had a longish rendition of how her forefathers had set out from Lahore on a pilgrimage to Benares. Halfway there, their caravan was looted and the poor families found shelter in the humble khanqah of Shah Shams. They stayed there for a few weeks until they resumed their journey. But during those lingering medieval days and nights, the miracles and conduct of the saint inspired the Lahore travellers to investigate the saint-master’s foreign, mysterious faith more closely. Some low-caste Hindus found the freedom to chant the name of Ram that they could not perhaps do near a Brahmin.
The Lahoris set out again for Benares. But the magnetism of Shams pulled them back to him. They never did reach Benares. A mass conversion took place and an expansive, invisible, loving and sometimes stern God filled their spiritual space. I remember how the dark emptiness of Apa’s room became my metaphor of an amorphous, fathomless God. Apa was perhaps unaware that in the nineteenth century, Ghalib, the Turk-Muslim poet who lived in Delhi, had stayed in Benares for a month and that he, in some ways, circled the narrative of religious identities.
From this discreet moment in the lives of my imagined distant family, began a generational devotion, like that of countless other families, to khanqahs and shrines. Over the centuries, the temporal powers of sultans and emperors were seen to be getting blurred by the lasting legacy of Sufi saints who came to India. This was also the time when Amir Khusrau was experimenting with a new language. He wrote, ‘Though Hindus do not believe in the religion in which we do, in many matters they and we believe in the same thing.’4 And his beloved master, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya was attracting the population of Delhi and beyond to the inclusive vision of the Chishti Sufis. Thus, my childhood visions of Delhi were that of mysterious environs with sultans and their lashkars moving about, shrines and tombs warming up to devotees and a grand cultural mingling.
Apa, however, had no respect for the linearity of historical annals. She would jump nimbly to the Partition telling me how her friends and neighbours fled Shahalmi and how, by the time she returned to a burnt mohallah, all the neighbours had left. She had never been so jolted in her life as when she saw those empty homes, some of them burnt and others looted. She had also lost her jewellery, mortgaged with the legendary moneylender, Bhulaki Mal Shah. She would remember with some sorrow, how her dowry had been gobbled up by Partition and bequeathed to the Hades of history and politics.
A faceless, nameless ghost thus lived in Apa’s house. She sort of nurtured it, and since no one was interested, locked it in her teakwood almirah to guard her empty ivory-inlayed jewellery box and a copy of the family tree that uncomfortably harked back to a Hindu name. Poor Apa, the brief spell of illness before she died, made her a trifle delusional. She would mutter the names of her childhood friends ending with ‘Kumari’ or ‘Devi’. These names sounded distant to my extended cousins who tended her during her last days; these were also stereotypical textbook names that were heard on TV, when an attempt at cultural amity was beamed via unregulated Doordarshan programmes, Doordarshan being the national Indian television channel.
When I was thirteen, I took Bibiji and Apa to have passport-sized pictures taken for Indian visas. There were no relatives, no split families. This was a yearning to re-visit the shrines of Delhi and Ajmer. Ironically, my father’s employment with a state institution ended up as a big hurdle in our visa quest.
Bibiji died, her longing unfulfilled.
The seven climes are in its every lane
Does Delhi have its equal anywhere?5
I was twenty years old when I visited India for the first time and arrived in Bombay. I was an excited backpacker and this my gateway to our enemy land, an enemy meticulously inserted into our mental landscape through school curricula and textbooks. Thanks to a spirited history teacher at school and direct interaction with Indian students in London, India and Indianness acquired a nuanced status in my consciousness that defied the textbook enemy-ness. However, this brief visit to Bombay, mostly spent hanging out with some upper middle-class kids, fun as it was, failed to quell my desire to visit Delhi.
Delhi was not just the capital of India or the repository of Mughal monuments. There was a deeper and more far-reaching symbolism in my journey towards it. This was to be a kind of inner voyage, a milestone that had to be achieved given that the road was proverbially long and potholed by upheavals of history.
Reclaiming one’s past is messy business. Whilst scores of milestones of pre-Pakistan history survive and live in my country, the sudden chopping off of an entity known as ‘British India’ and the creation of two new states based on ideology, power and politics, has led to half a story made invisible—a mythical ploy, such as the taking away of the vision of one eye or putting a little divider in the middle of the brain. It makes up a story that the other half can read but never comprehend fully.
In Punjabi folklore and Sufi poetry there is a river to be crossed—a fictionalized boundary of sorts. This crossing is the test of endurance, of love and life. This ancient mythical river rarely has a destination and holds mysterious dangers, but it is eternal. At the same time, the river’s inner boundary defines home. Life on the other side can be vaguely forbidding. However, it is the fascination with the unknown that prompts the crossing of this river. As a young civil servant I could never get a visa.
Standing on the other side of history, it wasn’t clear to me where I wanted to be. To reach Delhi, the threshold of twentytwo Sufis or to discover the ground where Indraprastha was built? Or was it an odyssey to the seat of the Islamicate that ruled India for no less than a thousand years? Was this crossing to end in Mir and Ghalib’s Delhi or Lutyens’s architectural feat for the new Empire? Indeed, the possibilities of Delhi were infinite and more so for those who may endeavour to unearth the layers of history. Where else in the world could a conurbation of mystics exist under the ground that still bears the marks of Indraprastha, the pre-historic mythical capital?
So it took fifteen years to get to Delhi.
Exhausted and exhilarated, I return to my hotel—just a single day and what a fabulously minute introduction to Delhi’s soul! As I look outside the glass window at the expanse of Lutyens’s Delhi and some other modern structures hidden by thick green foliage, I realize that Hazrat Nizamuddin is just a fraction of this vast metropolis that is trying hard to forget its past. It is tragic that most of Delhi has turned its back on Hazrat Nizamuddin. The peculiarity of Delhi’s evolution is that it is a tale of forgetting and moving on with the march of history.
Taking advantage of the Sunday and since my work-related meetings did not start before midday, I return to the Nizamuddin Basti. I am irritated with my posh and plush room; how could I be staying here when there are places far more enticing? This is what I resent most about luxury hotels in developing countries—the sense of disconnectedness and lack of character wilfully designed by highly paid designers who end up mocking what seems real.
My thoughts in a jumble, I catch a taxi to Hazrat Nizamuddin. It is early morning and the otherwise cluttered roads are free and I find myself simply merging with the glorious morning—the trees, the tombs and roads, everything looks serene. I manage to see some of the striking symbols of the ‘New’ Delhi—the India Gate, imposing, wide boulevards signifying the grandeur of the Raj and the distinctive hybrid architecture with its colonial bungalows.
My great grandfather, Dr Allah Bux, was in Delhi in December 1911. The occasion was the Third Royal Durbar to commemorate the coronation of King George V and Queen Mary as Emperor and Empress of India. A lone porcelain mug with an unflattering portrait of the King survives in the family silver. It has the words ‘Delhi Durbar’ inscribed on it and rests in complete disharmony with the other objects on the shelf.
Dr Bux, an employee of the Jammu and Kashmir state medical service, had emigrated from Lahore in the late nineteenth century. He only returned to Lahore after his retirement in the 1930s. Prior to this final relocation, he had travelled across India. His medical education was in Calcutta and his employment took him to splendid Kashmir where he served as a medical professional in Srinagar, Baramulla, Sopore, Shopian and so on—places that are now infamous for violence and blood-letting in the name of nationalism, liberation, secularism and, of course, ‘Islam’.
Nearly a century later, at a little gathering in Delhi, his great grandson was destined to find out how several empty spaces in Kashmir had turned into collective graveyards and there were few homes there that had not confronted the taste of death or at least its fearful imminence.
Dr Bux owed his attendance at the Durbar to being part of the entourage of the Maharaja of Kashmir. He was dressed in a special tailor-made suit, mingled with many a sahib and even carried a cigar. But cigar smoking was alien to him. He choked a little and hated the acrid aftertaste. However, the glory of the Durbar did enchant him. For several years, Dr Bux had been visiting Delhi mainly to pay his respect to the saints but this was a different kind of event. It had nothing of the dargah ambience or culture, and to him the Red Fort now glowed with the radiance of imperial power that represented both modernity and the echoes of the shrieks of hundreds and thousands who died or were dispossessed after the 1857 Mutiny or the mythologized ‘War of Independence’ at the same location. Ruling princes, nobles and the socially engineered gentry of India were present to offer obeisance to the sovereigns. In keeping with the pomp of their predecessors, the royals also made an appearance for public darshan at the marble jharoka of the Red Fort. Dr Bux was one of the half a million or more attendees of this event, though his employment enabled him to be in the exclusive part of the crowd.
The Delhi Durbar of 1911 bestowed on Delhi its due place by announcing the shifting of the capital from Calcutta. Thus, the seat of the Empire had once again shifted. Millions were spent on this occasion while famine ravaged the areas surroun
ding Delhi. Dr Bux had no idea perhaps; he was coming from Kashmir and he was no revolutionary.
After his return to Lahore, this connection with Kashmir came to an end and the family retreated into its Lahori world. But his visits to the Delhi and Sirhind6 shrines continued. My father, as a child, accompanied his father and grandfather and had faint memories when I would ask him questions. However, in the 1940s, what had been immediate and accessible now required passports and visas. This discontinuity was nothing compared to what millions experienced and struggled combined with the painful journey of forgetting.
But I hold no bitterness. My personal experience is not stained by blood-letting. I do not even remember the 1971 war and I condemned the Kargil adventure like several others in the subcontinent. I still feel that the connection can be restored and broken threads picked up where they were left off by my ancestors.
I notice the Sabz Burj (Green Dome) standing rather oddly in the middle of the road. Nobody really knows whose tomb it is. Also known as the Neela Gumbad, it stands awkwardly on a green patch at the intersection of Lodi Road and Mathura Road, very close to Nizamuddin Basti. I stop near the intersection, get rid of the taxi and walk up the few steps that culminate on a platform where the tomb rests.
Its structure is quite Central Asian, octagonal in shape much like the tombs in Multan, Pakistan. The eight sides are alternately wide and narrow and each has a recessed arch adorned with a pattern of chiselled plaster and glazed tiles. Its now ruined appearance fails to conceal what a beauty it must have been. Built in the earlier half of the sixteenth century, it was later used as a police post under British rule. The Archaeological Survey of India took control of the structure after Independence and undertook its conservation, giving the dome its current blue look as opposed to the original green I had read somewhere. I cannot help wondering why the Islamic green was made into blue. Conspiracy theories come to the surface but I have no time to waste. The wristwatch stares at me and I push myself away from the tower even though I want to go in. Despite the gate being locked, I do get a brief glimpse inside. The ceiling is ornamented with faded and typically Persian geometric designs in red and blue.