DELHI BY HEART

by Raza Rumi

  In the decline of Dastangoi in Delhi and elsewhere in India, lies a saga of how a timeless yarn lost its appeal because of the circumstances of history, colonial interventions and changed literary conventions. Dastangois are as entertaining and intimate as say, Ramlilas. While each Dussehra, street corners all over north India are abuzz with Ramayana performances, the art of Dastangoi has vanished. Is it because we discard our shared heritage by marking them as exclusive properties of a certain religion? Is the politics of language powerful enough to break down great literature?

  After 1857, the reformist ethos of Urdu was contemptuous of the daastaan romances. Later, the progressive writers in the 1930s and ’40s also declared them as archaic and decadent. But at the popular level, the daastaans remained in vogue. Partition was to alter the destiny of Urdu and label it as the language of the Muslim-Pakistan.

  In Pakistan, a reassessment of daastaans took place from the 1950s onwards. Mohammad Hasan Askari, Urdu’s leading critic, selected portions of Tilism-i-Hoshruba saying that these fantastic fables had layers of meaning and social commentary within their subtexts and dramas. A decade later, a leading Urdu critic, Suhail Ahmad Khan, interpreted daastaans and unlocked their symbolism. Similarly, Frances Pritchett of Columbia University, while researching on daastaans, brought out a summarized version in English of a part of the Dastan-i-Amir Hamza with a detailed introduction for the benefit of her western readers. Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s The Adventures of Amir Hamza is only the latest. But can a few books resurrect the popularity of the daastaans? This is why Mahmood Farooqui and Danish Husain’s work is so important. They are reinventing the tradition albeit in an innovative, modern way.

  Driving or auto-ing back from Shahjahanabad to New Delhi, I always notice how the past is dead and yet so undead, floating like an old ghost between the living and dying. One such ghost floats above the Khooni Darwaza (Gateway of Blood) that stands testimony to history’s horrors. Falling right in the middle of Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg that connects New Delhi to Old, almost mid-way between the ITO crossing and Daryaganj, Khooni Darwaza is one of the thirteen surviving historical gates of Shahjanabad.

  Today when history-immune Delhi-walas drive past it, they can, at best, go back just a few years ago, when a medical student was raped inside its walls. But that was just the most recent terror to be added to the bloodied legend of Khooni Darwaza.

  I have heard people saying that blood drips from its ceilings during the monsoons. Some say that dead Mughal princes scurry around like Hamlet’s ghosts. Others say that decapitated heads hang there. The last is not merely a story. Built by Sher Shah Suri and originally named Kabuli Darwaza, since carvans coming from Kabul would pass through it, the gateway came to be known as Khooni Darwaza. The Mughals liked to display the heads of executed criminals there. Over time, unwanted princes and other nobles began to be disposed of within the Darwaza augmenting its notoriety. Khooni Darwaza was particularly convenient in Mughal India since there has hardly been a peaceful accession to the throne—courtiers were murdered, fathers imprisoned and princes exiled. When Jehangir’s succession was resisted by a few of Akbar’s ‘navaratnas’ or special courtiers, he promptly dispatched Abdul Rahim Khan-I-Khanan’s two sons to this hell’s gate. The bodies, left to rot, must have been thrown away after a few days of public viewing. Jehangir’s grandson, Aurangzeb proved his invincibility to the people of Delhi by displaying brother Dara’s head at the gate.

  Early British chroniclers may have scoffed at such barbarities of the Orientals, but their generals did not differ much in cruelty. Khooni Darwaza remained in use. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last great Mughal, more of a Sufi than a sultan, was spared a violent end, but his four sons and a grandson were killed at the Darwaza during the 1857 Mutiny. Legend has it that the spirits of Zafar’s sons scamper around in the grotesque ruins.

  However, I do not feel any ghostly presence of Zafar within the compound of Moti Masjid in Mehrauli, not too far away from the Khooni Darwaza. A grave was dug here as his final resting place, but the unlucky emperor was banished after being charged with ‘rebellion, treason and murder’ by the British, to faraway Rangoon. The defeated emperor, stripped of his kingdom, wealth, palace, sons and dignity, was denied even the spot where he wanted to be buried. An old doddering man, who was more devoted to music and poetry, was unwittingly forced into becoming an official guardian angel of a rebellion he had not started. He was like a Dara Shikoh at a time when what the Mughals needed was another Aurangzeb.

  During the riots of 1947, more bloodshed occurred near Khooni Darwaza when several refugees going to the camp established in Purana Qila were killed here. When Sadia and I went to a mosque near the Darwaza, the mullah there told us stories of djinns and ghosts. However, as I walked around the monument, I saw no invisible messengers from the other world. Neither did Sadia. There was just a cop quietly smoking a cigarette in a makeshift police post.

  Each time my friends in Lahore and Karachi get wind of my trips to Delhi, they start calling me. Requests pour in. Somebody wants Arundhati Roy’s latest book of essays, another wants such-and-such book which is not available in Pakistan. I happily oblige. So bookshop browsing is an integral part of trips. In Khan Market, where Delhi’s middle and upper classes buy little doses of happiness from up-market retail stores, a trip to Bahrisons Booksellers is a must. Bahri’s is also perhaps the only bookshop in the city where there is a great collection of Pakistani books. Each time I go there, besides buying scores of books, I also occasionally catch up with visiting Pakistani acquaintances who, ironically, I have not met back home in months.

  The cozy Bookshop in nearby and much-quieter Jor Bagh was earlier located in Khan Market but its lease ran out and the owner had to shift here. Now there is a showroom of a luxury watch brand where the old bookshop used to be. In fact, Khan Market is becoming the new mall—a shoe shop replaced a book studio a few years ago and many glitzy shops have sprung up. As I find out, Jor Bagh is a haven for book lovers. A peaceful stillness lurks here. There is no noise, no traffic and no crowds—something that the genteel Sikh owner of The Bookshop must surely not be happy about. But I’m not complaining.

  Unfortunately, Delhi’s charming bookshops are the victims of the bitter realities of globalization. I am told that smaller, independently owned bookshops are shutting down and being replaced by large corporate bookshop chains. A very popular bookstore in Connaught Place, The Bookworm, decided to close down because they could not compete with the high discounts offered by big retail chains. And yet, when I went to the wonderful Fact and Fiction shop in the trendy Vasant Vihar Market, it was hard to believe that small shops have no future. Here was the most singular collection of eccentric books in such a tiny space. I have always found it packed with people. Talking about small shops, I always keep some time aside for second-hand bookshops in Paharganj, the hotel district for western backpackers. In a shop called Jackson’s, I once found a book on Jerusalem that bore the seal of a Rawalpindi bookstore. The world is really round!

  But perhaps the best bookshop in Delhi, according to my book-obsessed friend Mayank, a Delhi journalist-blogger, is the Daryaganj book bazaar. Each Sunday, booksellers lay out their ware on the mile-long pavement. Browsing there is one of Delhi’s rituals. I never came here often enough, but when I did, I have stumbled upon antique copies of classics, as well as other books, which are simply not available, say, in up-market Bahrisons. For instance, I saw the first edition of Stanley Wolpert’s autobiography of Jinnah, a book which is tough to find in firsthand shops in India. But of course, I did not buy it since I have two copies back home. Needless to say, my Daryaganj excursions always culminate in the legendary Moti Mahal restaurant with its tandoori chicken, a speciality which its founder had invented in Peshawar during pre-partition days.

  And then there is the Urdu bazaar opposite Jama Masjid. Like many other landmarks in the walled city, it carries a depressing aura. But, as in the stories of many Delhi monuments, you just have to wade deep into th
e squalor to find the jewel. While there are many who mourn the demise of Urdu in India, browsing in the Maktaba Jamia bookshop does not give one that impression. This is a place where I have spent hours browsing and forgetting all the cares of the world. I discovered the shop during my second trip to Delhi and remember buying Kaf-i-Gul Farosh (Sleeve of a Flower Seller), a hefty two-volume photo journal by the late Qurratulain Hyder, a project she had completed just before I met her during my first trip to Delhi.

  Bahadur Shah Zafar’s tutor, Zauq wrote ‘Kaun jaaye Zauq, dilli ki galiyan chhodkar?’ (‘Who would leave the streets of Delhi, Zauq, and go elsewhere?’) A fleeting visitor like me had to perforce leave the streets of Delhi. But the books on Delhi that I collected rarely allow Delhi to make an exit from my inner landscape. Never have I read, or re-read as profusely about a city, as I have about Delhi. In a way, once you get to know Delhi, or imagine that to be the case, you cannot let go of it.

  Delhi‘s slippery, sprawling reality lies not only in its physical geography or its seasons but also in how it has been described by its various chroniclers. A large number of writers have focused on its history and its grand past though not in the quantum one would have wished for. A parallel city thus exists in the realm of books. In the face of the dying oral histories and culture of Shajhanabad and even Lutyens’ urbanity, how difficult it would be to understand Delhi’s history in all its dimensions without making a note of how the way it is chronicled has changed, or not changed, over centuries.

  Listing all those memorable books that I have read would take too much space and may not interest all my readers. However, I would like to touch upon a few that I have particularly enjoyed, without entering into too much descriptions or details about them. City Improbable, edited by Khushwant Singh was one of the early acquisitions and since then it has remained by my bedside. Ahmed Ali’s timeless novel Twilight in Delhi is an evocative compendium of social history. A translated version of Dipty Nazir Ahmad’s The Bride’s Mirror: A Tale of Life in Delhi a Hundred Years Ago, like Jane Austen’s miniature portraits, peeps into Shahjahanabad lives and havelis with a progressive message for Muslim women.

  Maheshwar Dayal’s clippings on Delhi in newspapers later led me to his book, Rediscovering Delhi, which is full of little nuggets about the city. Another brilliant book that I found in Bahrisons was Delhi: The Built Heritage—A Listing by Ratish Nanda, Narayani Gupta and O. P. Jain which gives us a spatial and aesthetic sense of Delhi covering nearly 1,200 buildings of archaeological and cultural significance. Percival Spear’s book, Delhi: Its Monuments and History, shows us his fascination with the city. A friend in Delhi gifted me the utterly irresistible Lucy Peck’s book, Delhi: A Thousand Years of Building, revealing the plans and architectural details of the known and not-so-known monuments.

  Going back in time a little, Shama Mitra Chenoy’s book, Shahjahanabad: The City of Delhi, 1638–1857, is a thoroughly researched account of Shahjahanabad over two centuries about the inner cohesion and cultural unity despite differences within the Walled City. I loved the accounts of havelis in Pavan Varma’s book Havelis of Old Delhi (1992). This formidable tale of Delhi’s lost mansions talks about the atomization of urbanity as opposed to the sharing of living spaces. Delhi: A Novel by Khushwant Singh (1990) is a tale with a larger-than-life canvas, erotic in parts, meandering between the modern and the ancient city. In Lahore, I found another delightful book, Nature Watch, by Singh on the trees and flowers of Delhi that my friends and I have read several times with awe because of its unmissable similarities with Lahore. Pradip Krishen’s Trees of Delhi goes beyond a textual exercise. It is a historical compendium and a marker of sorts in an age of the fast-degrading environment.

  My prized possession is the Delhi Omnibus which collates four classic works on the history of Delhi—Percival Spear’s Delhi: A Historical Sketch and Twilight of the Mughals: Studies in Late Mughal Delhi, Narayani Gupta’s Delhi between Two Empires 1803-1931 and the R.E. Frykenburg-edited anthology, Delhi Through the Ages: Selected Essays in Urban History, Culture and Society. It is the latter which always enchants me in the manner in which it deals with empires and the criss-crossing of eras and movements.

  William Dalrymple’s book, City of Djinns can be picked up at any time and hold the reader. Delhi itself emerges as a character, wounded and old, vibrant and fractured and the drama unfolds as a book within the book. Delhi is now his adopted home and his third book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, on the tragic life of Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, contains the much-talked-about discoveries of new archival materials that earlier Indian historians may have ignored.

  Another gem, Historic Delhi: An Anthology, published in 1997, and edited by H.K. Kaul has intimate accounts of Delhi from ancient eras to the twentieth century.

  I was lucky to find a reprint of the celebrated 1906 book called The Seven Cities of Delhi by a colonial official, Gordon Risley Hearn. And, in recent years, another young writer, Robert Grant Irving, wrote The Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker and Imperial Delhi, a very readable book about the myriad snippets and facets of the Delhi that Lutyens had built. However, R.V. Smith’s major contribution towards unearthing the invisible stories of Delhi’s past, The Delhi That No One Knows, has not received the attention it deserves. A compilation of Smith’s newspaper articles, circa 1905, it is a thin volume but lucid in its descriptions that detail the legends and myths connected with Delhi’s monuments. He writes, ‘I did not refer to any book, did not make notes from dusty volumes in old libraries–I just walked! This is how the book happened.’

  Charmaine O’Brien is the Dalrymple of culinary Delhi. She lived in the Nizamuddin Basti, and after observing and tasting the countless flavours of fine cooking, wrote Flavours of Delhi: A Food Lover’s Guide in 2003, followed by Recipes from an Urban Village. Interestingly, when I learnt to cook as a student in London, Madhur Jaffrey’s book Cuisines of Delhi became my guide. Her culinary odyssey is not just a journey into the past but contemporary too, a peek into Delhi’s street food as well as its home cooking.

  Nothing is more fascinating than the corpus of Delhi books in Urdu. These are authentic voices and grounded in real time and hearts as opposed to the stylized prose of a researcher or historian. Ghalib’s epic Diwan-i-Ghalib is arguably the best of all Delhi’s poetry. Gul Feroz Shah is a slice-of-life portrait of Delhi in Ghalib’s time and Ralph Russell’s books on Ghalib’s poetry and letters are my permanent companions. Delhi also introduced me to the excellent translation, Zikr-i-Mir: Autobiography of the Eighteenth Century Mughal Poet, Mir Muhammad Taqi ‘Mir’ by C.M. Naim. It contains picturesque details of the poet Mir’s sad life and even sadder times he lived in. Though expelled from Delhi he could not overcome his fondness for the city.

  Partition stories abound in various books. Anees Qidwai’s Azadi ki Chaon Mein, written immediately after Partition in 1948 is like a melancholic daastaan—stories of violence and the gutter-like refugee camps. Similarly, Shahid Ahmed Dehlvi’s Dilli ki Bipta (1948) is also a testament of loss and longing. He chooses to move back to his beloved city after a short stint in Pakistan.

  Mulla Wahidi’s book, Dilli Jo Aik Sheher Tha (1929) is a rich mosaic of Delhi life in the early part of the twentieth century. He writes as a train passenger, moving from station to station, packing and unpacking his luggage and conversing with others on the train. And then that fine book, Old Delhi: Ten Easy Walks by Gaynor Barton and Laurraine Malone. I have always wondered why a Delhi-wala could not have written it.

  In the years of my distant though distinct intimacy with Delhi, I have often wondered why there is a relative paucity of books and stories on Delhi since Delhi is no ordinary city. It is a long, winding tale of history, power, powerlessness and mysticism that needs more investigation and interpretation now that colonial power is no more driving the Indian destiny. Leaving history aside, there is much in contemporary Delhi that has not been documented. Delhi, for all purposes now, is a Punjabi city. The woes of Partition have
been well recorded but what happened to the new residents and their stories of adjustment and realignment? A notable exception to this trend has been Ranjana Sengupta’s Delhi Metropolitan: The Making of an Unlikely City but this excellent book raises the need for further inquiries into the hundreds of Delhis that now co-exist in twenty-first century India. For instance, ‘urban villages’ which are villages no more, ‘farmhouses’ with no farms, ‘community centres’ disconnected from the community and ‘colonies’ which continue to appropriate Delhi have been hardly addressed. The intellectual elite are contemptuous of the nouveau riche classes with the well-known architect Gautam Bhatia coining the term ‘Punjabi Baroque’. Going further, rarely does one find a book on the erstwhile India Coffee House or a detailed look at the Jamia Millia, and, lest I forget, the JNU that hugs the Aravalli ranges and its ever-changing ethos. There are empty crevices in the otherwise loveable bookshops of Delhi.

  Perhaps today’s Delhi displays the ascendancy of money, power and an all-pervasive greed that would rather have a huge mall than a problematic Jama Masjid and a cluster of commerce rather than a heritage enclave. This ambivalence towards ‘heritage’ is a South Asian curse seeking to wipe out its rather eclectic histories. Forgetting is a fantasy that could easily reincarnate into a haunting dream.

  Glossary

  Aam choor dried mango powder

  Aham Brahmasmi I am Brahma.

  Aloo gosht mutton curry with potatoes

  Ang style

  Badam ki lauz almond fudge

  Bakhar khani layered bread

  Barbat wooden topped lute

  Bedmi puri fried puffed bread with a mix of lentils and spices

  Beenkari playing of the been