by Raza Rumi
Accounts suggest that maladministration was an ugly reality in Delhi. In 1757, the Delhi Police chief was known to protect burglars in the same way that it sometimes still does in the Delhi of today and, of course in many parts of India and Pakistan. So Bollywood plots wherein corrupt cops are in collusion with criminals exploiting the junta are not new in this region.
Sadat Khan, a nobleman of Oudh, was the precursor of Mir Jafar in Bengal, who goaded Nadir Shah to invade Delhi and plunder its riches. Thus, another invader found a local ally. This goes even further back. Apparently, both Prithviraj Chauhan and Ibrahim Lodhi’s downfall happened due to local collaboration with external invaders. But Khan’s tragic end was a moral metaphor as he committed suicide after he fell out with Nadir Shah over money. His greed not only destroyed Delhi, but also his life. One wonders if things have changed at all.
Prior to Nadir Shah’s invasion of Delhi, Karnal (in modern Haryana) was captured and Dilli-walas waited in anxiety. The local uprising of the proletariat was crushed by Nadir Shah and a general massacre commenced at Chandni Chowk. Some accounts report that about twenty thousand or even more were killed and thousands of women were captured.
At this time, many killed their women using wells as graves of honour. A century and a half later, this was to haunt Delhi and Punjab again when female honour could only be salvaged by unsung deaths. Amrita Pritam knew her history well when she wrote of the tragedies that Punjabi women had to face during the violence of Partition.
The stench of corpses was everywhere. Famine followed in Delhi as granaries were sealed. The Emperor’s jewels, the Peacock Throne and the Kohinoor Diamond were taken away and over 150 million rupees worth of property was amassed.
Nadir Shah, after his return to Persia, waived the taxes of the local population; such was the extent of the loot from Delhi and its adjoining districts. Mir had already moved to Agra a year before Nadir Shah’s plunder. Sauda too experienced these seismic changes; his personal fortunes dwindled as the patronage of Nawab Samsam-ud-Daula, who was the Imperial Paymaster until he was killed in 1739, stopped after the invasion.
However, Nadir Shah was not the last of the invaders. His invasion of Delhi prompted others. Encouraged by the anarchy in India and the shaky seat of Delhi’s royalty, Ahmed Shah Abdali, emperor of Afghanistan between 1747 and 1772 of the Durrani Empire that stretched from Persia and modern-day Afghanistan to Central Asia, also tried his luck. However, he was driven out of India after his first incursion in 1748. But in 1757, he was successful in invading and re-enacting the tragedy in Delhi. In 1760, he came to India again and Delhi suffered another blow.
Before Abdali could succeed, a civil war, from 1753 to 1757, led by Safdarjung of Oudh and his allies, the Jats, plundered Shajhananabad. As always, the poor were the immediate targets of such violence. ‘Jat gardi’ or hooliganism of the Jats became a menacing term and a living scare in the city. During this time, a young minister, Imadul Mulk, brought peace to Delhi. However, he also was a power seeker who, after winning the confidence of the gullible Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam II, reneged on his oath of loyalty taken on the Quran, and betrayed and blinded him. Mir wrote:
I live to see the needle drawn across the eyes of kings
The dust beneath his two feet was like collyrium ground
with pearls.
Shah Alam II was made irrelevant. He could not even afford food and salaries for his troops. Soldiers’ riots within the fort were the natural consequence. Imadul faced public opposition as he turned into a power freak and tinpot dictator. The seeds of public resistance, in a modern sense, were sown in this dark age of Delhi. Imadul had to retreat. Imperial officials encouraged riots.
When Abdali finally arrived in Delhi, the unpopular Imadul and his troops were no match for Abdali’s well-organized troops. Abdali’s invasions led to massive extortion and large-scale violence. There were so many corpses floating in the canals and other water reservoirs that there was an outbreak of cholera. His collection of riches from the palaces and havelis of Shahjahanabad required Abdali to arrange for 28,000 animals including horses and camels to transport the wealth from Delhi to Kandahar.
In such times, what could poets do other than compose sad verses? Mir’s world had been undone. In 1760, Abdali struck again. Mir’s lament from his autobiographical account is touching:
Fires were started in the city and houses were burned down and looted. The following morning was all uproar and confusion… Najib’s soldiers started the plunder… breaking the doors… three days and three nights, the savagery continued. The Afghan would leave no article of food and clothing untouched. They broke down walls and roofs of the houses and ill treated and tormented the inhabitants. The city was swarming with them. Men who had been the pillars of the state were left as nothing… family ones bereft of all loved ones… the new city of Shahj Jahanabad was ransacked.
Mir then adds:
I who was already poor became poorer. My house which stood on the main road was levelled with the ground… I have suffered many hardships in this city… perhaps I may find peace and comfort elsewhere. I did not know where I was going, trusting in God to lead me.21
A Hindu noble provided him shelter outside the city. Mir wrote,
Delhi in those days was little better than wilderness which every six months was laid desolate afresh. Besides, a man cannot wander from place to place forever.22
When Mir returned to Delhi after taking refuge outside the city, he could not recognize the place:
The scene of desolation filled my eyes with tears and my mind with the most solemn thoughts and every step my distress and agitation increased. I could not recognise the houses and often lost my bearings. Of the former inhabitants there was no trace and no matter whom I inquired about I was told that he was not there and nobody knew where he might be found. Cloisters and wine shops alike were deserted. Whole bazaars had vanished… everywhere there was a terrible emptiness.
In verse:
Here where the thorn grows, spreading over mounds of
dust and ruins
These eyes of mine once saw the gardens blooming in the
spring.
And again:
I recall the life I used to live, foregathering with my friends in the evenings, reciting poetry and living the life of a lover—weeping at nights for the love of beautiful women, writing verse to them and passing my days in the company of those whose long tresses held me their captive and knowing no peace when I could not be with them… in those days I had really lived.
What days were those! Days that are no more
The days when people loved their fellow men
And what was there now? Not a soul whom I even recognised and with whom I could pass a pleasant few minutes in conversation. I came away from the lane… and there and then I made a vow that as long as l live I will never come this way again.
Nearly ten years were spent outside Delhi but the decline was pervasive. He returned in 1782, only to see further destruction:
Live out your life away from men’s society,
For men no longer feel that you are one of them.
Thousands and thousands were laid low in the dust
And no one even asked what had become of them.
At the end of the day, Mir knew that his grief was not personal. It was in a sense civilizational, shared and… perhaps continuing. He wrote:
My verses are all liked by high society
But it is to the people I like to speak.
Looking for Mir’s house was an arduous task. Mir probably lived in Kucha Chalan (named after Chehel Amiran—Forty Nobles—of the Sultanate times. Kucha Chalan was probably beside the present-day Golcha Cinema). The forty nobles were a powerful group within the court of the Delhi Sultans. Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, the Muslim reformer, is also reported to have stayed there. While searching for the house, I stumble on the site of Kalan Mahal which served as a temporary residence for Shah Jahan and the royal household while the Red Fort was being c
ompleted. Today, a girls’ school exists at this site. Its peeling, thick walls speak of their age.
I was caught in a web of oral accounts while searching for Mir’s house. The residents of Kucha Chalan were unaware of the poet. Many did not know who he was and confused him with a Kashmiri resident. It was a bizarre experience trying to tell the Muslim underclass that they once had a great poet living near these streets. Some said that Mir also lived in Galli Qasim Jaan where Ghalib’s haveli is situated. Of course this is untrue. Ghalib would have mentioned that in the large corpus of letters he had left for posterity.
During the tumultuous events of the eighteenth century, Mir’s house was destroyed at least twice. But my meandering is not without some result. The affable local guide takes us to the grave of the only female Sultan, Razia. How could I have forgotten that she is buried in Old Delhi, near Turkman Gate instead of in Mehrauli?
Following the cloistered lanes from the Jama Masjid, we walk down the Matia Mahal, pass by Chitli Qabr, clamber up the Pahari Bhojla lanes, enter Bulbulkhana and reach a cul-de-sac. The signboard outside, placed by the Archaeological Survey of India states that one of the two graves lying beyond the gate is believed to be Razia’s. The other one is anonymous. It is surely not that of her Assyrian lover, whom she would have liked to be buried with as their love remained unfulfilled. Razia was killed in Haryana and brought here for burial. The place is run down and hardly befitting for the first and only female ruler of Delhi’s throne. Centuries would pass before another woman, Indira Gandhi, assumed power in Delhi.
Altamash (1211–1236), popularly known as Iltutmish, was the first and the only Muslim sultan to want to appoint a woman, his daughter, Razia, as his successor. But the Turkish nobility, influenced by the clergy who denied women the right to rule, resisted this development. Thus the nobility nominated Razia’s brother, Rukn-ud-din Feroze Shah as the Sultan. The incompetent and opium-addicted Feroze was unable to keep the central power intact, and within six months, he was killed. The nobility had no choice but to appoint Sultana Razia to the throne.
Razia lived up to her father’s expectations. Capable, shrewd and brave, she managed the ‘Forty Nobles’ with an iron hand. The people of Delhi supported her rule; in due course, she also handled the regional governors by pitting them against each other. But her relationship with Yakut, an Assyrian slave, was unacceptable and enraged the supremacist Turkish nobles. The governor of Lahore reacted to her objectionable love affair which was followed by the rebellion of Malik Ikhtiar-ud-din Altunia, Governor of Bhatinda. But Altunia was both a political foe and a jilted lover. According to legend, he had been in love with Razia since childhood.
As quintessential sub-continental love stories proceed, Razia was separated from Yakut when the latter was murdered by Altunia, who imprisoned her after winning a battle against her army. Razia had no choice but to marry Altunia to save her life and throne. But the Turkish nobles, in the meantime, crowned Razia’s other brother, Behram, as the ruler of the Delhi Sultanate. With Altunia’s help she waged a rebellion to reclaim the throne but things had changed. Behram defeated the advancing forces and the royal couple lost the battle, and were later executed.
This claustrophobic corner with the two graves, surrounded by decaying ugly buildings with air conditioners jutting out of them, was hauntingly sad. A little slice of sky overhead was a saving grace. Also used as a mosque, there was an odd namazee praying in a corner. An unlikely location for a queen’s grave, this was a mournful sight. I sat there for a half an hour until the accompanying guide became restive.
So I got up and walked out of the labyrinthine alleys to face the real twenty-first century Delhi.
7
The Chosen Spirits
A
fter days of waiting and negotiating with [the absence of] an itinerary, I finally go to Sarmad Shaheed’s tomb in Old Delhi. His dargah dominates the entryway to Delhi’s imposing Jama Masjid. The legendary Sarmad was Jewish by birth but in his own words, ‘a follower of the Furqan (Sufi), a (Catholic) priest, a (Buddhist) monk, a Jewish rabbi, an infidel, and a Muslim.’1 Surely, it is difficult to visualize a mystic with a more intricate confessional identity.
Sarmad’s brief but legendary presence in Old Delhi is a fascinating story of eclecticism and its acceptance by people and rejection by the establishment. Sarmad has become a metaphor for the defiance of identities and loyalties, for throwing conformity into the gutter and rejoicing in the ultimate rebellion of wandering the streets as a completely naked faqir.
He was a remarkable figure for his times. In the twentieth century, Maulana Abdul Kalam Azad, at the young age of twenty-three, would write a treatise on Sarmad and reflect on how much he was influenced by him. Was Azad, stifled by orthodoxy, yearning to break free of tradition? He was inspired by Sarmad’s insistence on not succumbing to the mullah. Sarmad declared that ‘a temple and mosque were symbols and expressions of the same Reality, God, in which notions of faith and unbelief are extinguished for ever’.
The story of Sarmad is one long progression from travel to love and from populism to execution. Layer by layer, year after year, Sarmad peeled off his identities and found India to be the place his soul was searching for. He arrived in India during Shah Jahan’s reign, ostensibly to sell art from Persia. An Armenian Jew by birth, Sarmad had mystic leanings reflecting the complex and layered culture of Persia. En route to mainland India, somewhere close to Thatha in Sindh, Sarmad met a young man who would transform his life forever. Sarmad had started a small business near the Indus and was making a fortune until his encounter with Abhay Chand. His intimate friendship with the Hindu youth transformed his concept of love. He gave up his business and assumed the mantle of a Hindu ascetic. His love for Abhay Chand caused him to renounce the world and shed all the trappings of existence including his clothing. In this nakedness he would sit outside his beloved’s door and sing these lines:
I know not if in this spherical old monastery (the world)
My God is Abhay Chand or some one else.
Abhay Chand’s family, impressed by the purity and intensity of Sarmad’s passion, relented and allowed him to associate with their young son. Soon, the two were so attached that they left together to wander the plains of India in order to find meaning and identify their inner vistas of spirituality.
Travels in medieval times were not fleeting journeys but long, arduous forays into unknown worlds and cultures. In this land of Sufis, Sarmad must have heard mystic songs and seen faqirs, leading him to embrace Islam to which he added Hindu tenets. However, by the time he became a faqir, his legendary miracles had entered public memory through popular lore.
The initial abode of Sarmad’s turbulent soul was Lahore. He lived for eleven years outside the Shahi Mosque where centuries later, the iconoclastic Ustad Daman was to find his home after the turbulence of Partition. Walking stark naked on the streets of Lahore, Sarmad would compose poetry in quatrains, the classical Persian format, but with unusual themes. He would sing of the Self and deride all conventional institutionalized religion. Sarmad soon began to attain a status equal to that of Persian poets such as Ferdosi, Nizami, Saadi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam. He sang:
Not only are these temples and sanctuaries
His house… this earth and this sky are entirely His abode.
The whole world is mad about His fiction.
He is truly mad who is mad about Him.
Equally eccentric, though clothed, Dara Shikoh (Shah Jahan’s son) became Sarmad’s disciple.2 This close association between Dara and Sarmad was an enriching one and strengthened Dara’s quest for spiritual synthesis. One of the letters that Dara wrote to Sarmad inquired:
My Pir and Preceptor, everyday I resolve to pay my respects to you. It remains unaccomplished. If I be I, wherefore is my intention of no account? If I be not I, what is my fault? Though the murder of Imam Hussein was the will of God, what was the agency of Yazid3 in murdering Hussein? If it is not the Divine will, then what is the meaning of
‘God does whatever He wills and commands whatever He intends?’
Sarmad’s reply was terse but emphasized that too much of theological exposition was irrelevant compared to attaining the experiential knowledge of God:
My dear Prince
What we have read, we have forgotten
Save the discourse of the Friend whom we remember again
and again.
Sarmad’s stories, especially his reverence towards the great saint Mian Mir4, are still popular in Lahore. Lahoris believed that the Mughal empire declined as a result of Sarmad’s curse after the execution of Lahore’s illustrious citizen, Dara Shikoh. Restless and wandering, Sarmad reached Delhi, where the local population, familiar with his poetry and mystical powers, accepted him with warmth and openness. In Delhi, Khwaja Syed Abu Qasim Sabzwari (known as Hare Bhare Shah), a well-known saint, welcomed and blessed Sarmad. The tragic execution of Dara Shikoh made him extremely sad and he was bold in his condemnation of Aurangzeb and his puritanical governance. Sarmad’s nakedness, poetry and views were a direct threat to the court Ulema and the emperor himself. When Aurangzeb inquired why he was naked, Sarmad is reported to have exclaimed:
He who gave you the sovereignty of the world gave me causes of anxiety. He covered with a garment those who had any fault (deformity); to the faultless he gave the robe of nudity.
Sarmad also reinterpreted Prophet Mohammad’s ascension to heaven, which became the ultimate excuse for the Mughal court and its clergy to declare him an apostate. His statement was radical:
The mullahs say that Mohammed entered the heavens, but Sarmad says that the heavens entered Mohammed.
Shahjahanabad’s old walls ring with stories about Sarmad. One famous anecdote concerns how Sarmad’s open smoking of a local variety of cannabis irked Aurangzeb as he had declared all intoxicants illegal. Hearing from his spies about constant violations, he paid a sudden visit to Sarmad who was sitting amid his disciples and discussing mysticism. The emperor saw the earthen pot with the drugs and inquired what the pot contained. Sarmad replied that it was milk and when Aurangzeb checked the vessel, indeed there was milk in it. His disciples and fellow smokers were astounded and spread the word thus adding to the rich stock of oral accounts of miracles associated with India’s saints and sadhus.