DELHI BY HEART

by Raza Rumi

  In the landmark judgment entitled ‘M.C. Mehta vs. Union of India’,11 the Indian Supreme Court held that air pollution in Delhi caused by vehicular emissions violated the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution, and thereby directed all commercial vehicles operating in Delhi to switch to the CNG fuel mode for protecting public health. Taking a cue from this, Pakistani civil society has also been struggling with the courts to save the environment. Though a recent judgment on rickshaws in Lahore has been issued, it calls for a phased shift to a less smoke-emitting variety of auto-rickshaw.

  However, judicial activism has grown in Pakistan. The Pakistani Supreme Court in 2007 came into high-profile conflict with the Executive and the President, General Musharraf, who used his definition of ‘public interest’ to get rid of defiant and proactive judges. The struggle continued as the major political parties, backed by activist lawyers and a nascent civil society resisted the military dictator, leading to his removal from office in 2008. Consequently, secular and democratic forces in Pakistan won a major victory when the elected government in March 2009, reinstated the deposed chief justice. Never has public pressure been so effective in the country’s history.

  Firoz Bakht Ahmed, associated with Friends for Education, is another individual who, as a citizen of Delhi, laments the importance given to politics rather than poetry and history. Known as a ‘monuments’ activist, his mission has been to save and protect the capital’s heritage using the modern instruments of justice, media and civil society networks to lobby for the protection of Delhi’s heritage. Over the last decade, he has initiated several PILs that have led to the removal of encroachments. The list is impressive—Ghalib’s haveli, the tomb of the Mughal poet Zauq, Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah, Maulana Azad’s tomb, the historic Anglo-Arabic School, Jama Masjid… and the list goes on.

  Bakht has been appalled to see that Old Delhiites are numb to the fact that the nefarious nexus between land-grabbing colonizers, police and politicians has turned this once beautiful residential city into a colossal bazaar. Many old havelis have metamorphosed into newer structures—petty shops, warehouses, factories and manufacturing units. Public lavatories had been erected on the grave of Sheikh Mohammed Ibrahim Zauq, Urdu master and guide of Bahadur Shah Zafar. The environmentalist lawyer, M.C. Mehta helped in filing a PIL, and a progressive judge issued a landmark judgment for the removal of these lavatories. Similarly, Ghalib’s haveli was rescued in 1997 through Bakht’s litigation. Despite his activism for Ghalib’s haveli, Bakht is unhappy that the place has not been conserved in the way it should have been. The available premises are limited to 130 yards as opposed to the original 400 yards. Bakht also involved himself in the Jama Masjid restoration case where he requested the court not to disturb the old culture of the walled city bazaar.

  I am back in Nizamuddin East.

  After I finish my official work, I move to Sadia’s apartment that overlooks one of the many parks in the sleepy little corner where she lives. On a clear day, the tombs walk towards the balconies. The vendors chant in the mornings with their odd business proposals. Sadia is cooking aloo gosht with her house help, Sabir, and we all sit to talk or deal with the stream of visitors. Sadia is quite popular among TV channels when they need a quote or two from Delhi’s educated Muslim women. The BBC correspondent walks in, followed by the crew, and Sadia hurriedly gets dressed and makes her articulate statements on Indian Muslims.

  I have seen her rant on the Muslim Personal Law, the Danish cartoons, Taslima Nasreen’s exile and plans to construct malls next to the Jama Masjid. She talks, writes, entertains and walks up and down, all in one go. I just love it. At last, I have someone who resonates my own eternal restlessness.

  There is a girl living at Sadia’s place. She’s a Muslim, not surprisingly, from Saharanpur, a small town in Uttar Pradesh. Farzana is what we call in Urdu, a ‘chanchal’—a boisterous sort born in a conventional religious household. Sadia indulges her and has turned her into a city girl. Farzana, like regular Delhi girls, wears western clothes, is not bothered about the timings of religious rituals, and is very mobile.

  Ahmed Ali wrote in his sad, subtle novel, Twilight in Delhi:

  In the world of an Indian home, where the woman is relegated to a subordinate place, love enters very rarely. An unmarried girl is not allowed to chew paan or wear flowers in her hair. She is not even allowed to wear fine and expensive clothes or to use attar. She lives under the threat of going away to strangers when she grows up, who may turn out to be rich or poor or nice or bad. In this atmosphere the idea of love does not take root in the heart. Even if the girl falls in love with a cousin, she cannot speak of it for fear of being punished and looked down upon as an evil thing.

  Farzana’s transformation in New Delhi was mind-boggling, even to herself ! She giggled as she spoke about her brazenness in the big city where she was learning the art of survival. She even managed to get a job at some small business establishment. When we met, there were no barriers. It is the Islam connection that works from Istanbul to Delhi via Islamabad. It is sort of seamless at one level. Farzana and I connected immediately.

  In a matter of a few days, a strange intimacy envelops the conversation. This is less to do with lust and more with the ability to understand. She accompanies Sadia and me everywhere—to dargahs, parties and monuments. I notice her vulnerability, especially when the internal hierarchies of Indian Muslims deem her a rural outsider despite the fact that she is a Dilli-wali now. She clings. Sometimes it is too much to handle, for it restricts my urge to communicate with the ‘exotic’ Indian Muslims. I mean the snooty, artsy, secular types, the ones who have consciously moved away from a fossilized, patriarchal clergy in India.

  Farzana was catching up though. Niceties and inanities laced with a few jokes were the social skills that she was not shy to hone. Her sense of humour was terrific. Cracking a joke came pretty naturally to her. So, in a short time, I was declared ‘Veer’ and she appointed herself as ‘Zaara’ a la the Bollywood film, Veer Zaara, that dealt with a superficial, exaggerated romance between a Pakistani and Indian.

  As I leave for Lahore, Farzana asks me to bring back a doll dressed as a bride since she is fond of collecting dolls. Like heroines in black and white Indian films who live in a time-warp. So there were goodbyes and tears. And they were real.

  A year later, I did not find Farzana at Sadia’s house. I sort of missed her since she had been such an integral part of Sadia’s open-house culture. What happened to Farzana’s life and ambitions? I learnt that Farzana eloped with a Muslim suitor whom she met at work, fell in love, and then ran away to marry him. However, the suitor did not come alone. He came with the baggage of convention and compromise that Farzana impetuously agreed to since she did not want to return to her parental home.

  When she came to see Sadia she was dressed in a burqa, the black clothing designed for invisibility in a ritualized retreat within the inner courtyards of Old Delhi’s havelis crumbling with time and fighting change. So Farzana ended up exactly where she did not want to be in the first place. Conventions refuse to die; they just come back.

  Sadia told me that the veiled Farzana now lives in a cramped space somewhere in the shade of the Jama Masjid. The place is small and dingy. She likes to sing her songs from her native UP but has to keep her voice low since Muslim women are not supposed to be heard loud and that too while singing. The neighbours are all Muslims too. Relegated to Ahmed Ali’s zenana or women’s quarters, Farzana has swapped centuries.

  Ali wrote:

  In the zenana, things went on with the monotonous sameness of Indian life. No one went out anywhere. Only now and then some cousin or aunt or some other relation came to see them. But that was once a month or so or during the festivals. Mostly life stayed like water in a pond with nothing to break the monotony of its static life. Walls stood surrounding them on all sides, shutting the women in from the prying eyes of men, guarding their beauty and virtue with millions of bricks. The world li
ved and died, things happened, events took place, but all this did not disturb the equanimity of the zenana, which had its world too where the pale and fragile beauties of the hothouse lived secluded from all outside harm, the storms that blow in the world of men. The day came, the evening came and life passed them by.

  Ghettos inside, outside, everywhere.

  9

  Centuries of Flavour

  I

  ndian Muslims are a strange breed. They may be integrated yet they remain distinctive, not unlike the other ethnic groups that constitute India. Delhi, the Muslim capital of yore, is now a home for many ‘pre-moderns’, namely, the ones who look towards Central Asia and Mecca instead of Kashi and Mathura. These are neither refugees at Purana Qila nor targets for the extremist Hindu right. They are patriots bearing the legacy of their fathers and grandfathers who consciously rejected the choice of Pakistan. However, they remain, in a sense, victims of their past. Of course, a blanket postulation would be ridiculous, but meeting a cross-section of the Muslim ‘community’ points to the stark uniqueness of this species. All over Delhi, mosques reverberate with azaans, a rather astounding phenomenon for a Pakistani visitor. This seems, after all, not the Hindu land that created its binary opposite, the Muslim. Perhaps the Muslims of Old Delhi are more ‘Muslim’ than many of their counterparts in Pakistan if one were to judge strictly in terms of the observance of rituals.

  After the more clearly marked spiritual imperatives, eating mutton is a major marker of identity. Not that the majority of Indians are vegetarians. However, vegetarianism is the standard ethos, a sign of purity as prescribed in the scriptures. However, there are baffling exceptions to the myth of vegetarian purity. The 2006 Hindu-CNN-IBN State of the Nation survey that I could lay my hands on to substantiate my casual observations, reveals that only 31 per cent of Indians are pure vegetarians and only 21 per cent of families are completely vegetarian as units.

  Women and older people are more likely to be vegetarian than men. Despite the Hindu tenets of vegetarianism, one sees defiant youth eating meat. The vegetarian identity is a construct at best and an inherited cultural rather than religious compulsion. Only 55 per cent of Brahmins termed themselves vegetarians. The adivasis (indigenous tribal groups) subvert the Hindu Brahmin code, as only 12 per cent are vegetarians. But of course, the stereotype, ‘the animal-killing Muslims’ are almost always non-vegetarians—at least that is what one hears on Delhi’s streets.

  The reality is that the Delhi cuisine or, as Sadia Dehlvi puts it, the dastarkhwan places mutton at the centre of this culinary world. Other meats, chicken, for instance, are popular, but mutton is the nucleus of classic Delhi Muslim cuisine. At Sadia’s, a meal is not complete if there is no mutton cooked in a classic Dilli style or mince meats such as reshmi, shammi and seekh kababs, and, of course, a meaty nihari. The more health-conscious are aware of the hazards of this culinary pattern. But the gastronomy handed down by centuries of court opulence is still prominent.

  Apart from the burqas worn by women in Pakistan and military dictatorship, the Pakistani visitor is also questioned on the meat-fest that defines the idea of eating in Pakistan. The truth is that meat obsession, especially mutton (for beef historically has been the less preferred option), is ever-reflected on Pakistani dining tables. But this is partial and incomplete. The classic Punjabi cuisine of saag and makke ki roti is common to most Punjabi villages. And meat has become out of reach for most Pakistanis, thanks to soaring prices. But what do we mean by ‘Pakistan’? The diverse regions of the north, south, the Sindhi hinterland or the deserts of Cholistan where a whole range of vegetables (including wild plant leaves) unfamiliar to urban Pakistan are grown and eaten, and where camel meat is stewed perhaps once a year?

  My sister is married into a Karachi-based family that had migrated from Delhi. None of the younger members of her inlaw’s family have ever seen Delhi. It is a city of their imaginations made up of anecdotes and tales but resurrected each day, almost with every meal. There are endless conversations about the way qeema, biryani and haleem were cooked in Delhi, and vehement distinctions are made between real [read Dilli] biryani and the one cooked in Lahori and other Punjabi kitchens.

  So each visit of mine to Delhi has also been a quest to dip into this huge culinary cauldron and taste its various flavours. To know how this gastronomic lineage lives in migrant kitchens and alien stoves, one has to know the city that no longer is immediate or accessible. It was again in Nizamuddin Basti, erstwhile Shahjahanabad and Mehrauli, that my culinary senses started discovering what this fuss over Delhi’s cuisine was all about.

  A city lives and survives within the intricacies and mosaics of its cuisine. Delhi’s culinary legacy is rich and complex. Delhi arguably is an ancient site but not much evidence of its human habitation exists prior to 1000 BCE.1 The Indraprastha of the Mahabharata was probably a small settlement where the Aryans lived. Like many other histories, there is a debate on who the Aryans were and where they came from. Some accounts imply that they were Central Asian or European nomads who invaded India around 1500 BCE. Subsequently, many ‘Aryan’ groups purportedly migrated to Iraq and Iran as the mythologized (yet to be proven) flooding of India forced them to leave the fertile plains and cross the mountains once again.

  When they invaded India, the Aryans confronted a decaying Indus valley civilization and adopted some of their ways at the same time influencing the local civilizations with their culinary traditions. Once they started to live in the areas surrounding the Indus, the Jamuna and Ganga rivers, the Aryans grew crops, produced oils from different seeds and cultivated diverse ways of cooking which can now be construed as the basis of the ‘North Indian’ cuisine of today.

  An ancient dish of Delhi was made of small split pea cakes, fried and then eaten with sweet and sour tamarind and mango chutney. Potatoes were to replace the split peas leading to the brilliant aloo tikki. It is said that the method of preparation was probably as old as the Aryan lifestyle in India, though potatoes came much later to India.2 Harappan vessels, the metallic flat pan, or the tawa, various pans and pots were readily adopted by the Aryans.

  Delhi’s street food is wondrous, a world unto itself, found everywhere and not necessarily in the most hygienic conditions despite court orders. While samosas and tikkis are no novelties for Pakistanis, the chutneys and flavours have subtle differences. The khatti-meethi imli chutney, the moong-dal savoury made with a batter of moong and chana dal and served with hot green chutney with a garnish of grated radish and its leaves are divine. Thelas sell singharas, Ram laddoos, shakarkandi and kulcha-chana. Some of them are familiar but Ram laddoos are surely no longer found on Pakistani streets. I remember eating them in Lahore during my childhood but they were called something else; and over time they have vanished not in the least for that obvious Hindu reference.

  Sheereen qand and gajak are also as old as Delhi. Their ancestral forms have existed in the uncertain narratives of history. The khichdi that one eats now has been there all along—over the centuries it may have been transmuted and adapted by different regions but it is supposed to have emerged during the Aryan era. Delhi-walas of today love khichdi, as did the residents of Indraprashtha, writes Charmaine O’Brien in her loving account of Delhi’s cuisine.3

  Puffed rice is an important ingredient in Delhi’s famous chaat which I ate in the lanes of Old Delhi. However, meat is not just a Muslim legacy. The Mahabharata, as I tell my Hindu friends, records that the residents of Indraprastha were eating meat dishes with yogurt and over time, roasted meat entered their dietary universe. However, around 500 BCE, changes began to be seen within the dietary kaleidoscope of Hindus. Charmaine O’Brien, my imaginary companion, says that the later versions of the Mahabharata recorded how grains were the only suitable offering to the gods, while earlier versions listed animal meat as appropriate for ritual sacrifice.

  What was it that caused this shift over these five centuries? I let the historians discover that as I muse and enjoy succulent seek
h kababs in Delhi. Perhaps the largely agrarian civilization must have discovered that animal slaughter was inimical to the ploughing of fields that were yielding food grains for a growing population. Economics may have dictated the spiritual and defined the religious—the kosher and the halal—as clerics love to declare identities and impose them for control. At the same time, modern-day animal activists are opposed to the cruelty involved in halal meat. Others say that halal meat has also been found to be healthier. Personally, I would like to see change in animal slaughter practice and urge for more humane ways to raise and use livestock. Abstinence from meat is another option but ask the Muslims of India and Pakistan how their lives would be without kababs and qeema!

  It should be remembered that both Islam and Christianity are desert religions where the land was unyielding for major cultivation. That probably explains the prominence given to meat in both these religions. That, and the Biblical injunction in the chapter called Genesis where God is said to give man ‘dominion over all the animals of the world’ explain the preponderance of meat in everyday diet in these two cultures.

  Around 500 BCE, the Buddha is supposed to have addressed Delhi’s population about how simple non-animal cuisine was in line with Buddhist principles.4 Non-violence did not mean pure vegetarianism. Buddhist practitioners have interpreted the Buddha’s injunction in a manner that allows them to eat meat provided that the animal was not slaughtered and that it had died accidentally. Mahavira, the Jain guru, had also stopped eating meat. Brahmins, thereon, encouraged vegetarianism. Asafoetida or heeng, a strong-smelling herb, like garlic, also considered as promoting sexual appetite and aggression, entered into the vegetarian diet despite the fact that it made die-hard vegetarians slightly nervous. Heeng had travelled to India from Afghanistan and also became a replacement for onions, garlic, leeks and other sharp-smelling ingredients.