by Raza Rumi
5. A chabutra is a feeding table for birds set up in homes and gardens. The practice of putting up these feeding tables is linked to the Jain faith.
6. Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739, Google Books, p. 66.
7. In their will, called ‘waseyya’, Muslims are allowed to give out a maximum of one-third of their property. (Quran, 2:180-182, 2:240, 4:33, 5:106-107).
8. Niccolao Manucci wrote, ‘it would seem as if the only thing Shahjahan cared for was the search for women to serve his pleasure’ and ‘for this end he established a fair at his court. No one was allowed to enter except women of all ranks that is to say, great and small, rich and poor, but all handsome.’ When he was detained in the Agra Fort, Aurangzeb permitted him to retain ‘the whole of his female establishment, including the singing and dancing women.’ Manucci notes that Shahjahan didn’t lose his ‘weakness for the flesh’ even when he had grown very old.
9. This is from the poem ‘I Bow Before the Image of My Love’ from the ‘Diwan-e-Makhfi’, or The Book of The Hidden One, a collection of Zebunissa’s writings published in 1724, thirty-five years after her death. Makhfi was also Zebunissa’s pen name. In this line she sees herself as an image of divine beauty and worships herself.
10. Translated by Willis Barnstone.
11. S.M. Latif, Lahore: Its History, Architectural Remains and Antiquities, 1892; reprinted in 1956, 1972 and 1981.
12. Chinna Katha II, p. 208.
13. Some of her poems have been rendered into English and published in the Wisdom of the East series, available at http:21persian.packhum. org/persian/
14. S.M. Latif, Lahore: Its History, Architectural Remains and Antiquities.
15. P. Spear, Twilight of the Mughals, Cambridge, 1951, reprinted Delhi 1969.
16. William Irwin, Later Mughals, Jadu Nath Sarkar (ed). This is a two-volume book published by Oriental Books Reprint Corporation in 1971.
17. ‘Shahr-ashob’ conventionally described a whole range of professions reflecting the milieu that influenced the lives and vocations of individuals living in a city and who were associated with such professions.
18. Poets such as Qa’im Chandpuri (1793) and Nazir Akbarabadi (1830) also composed such elegies to a city that was evaporating.
19. Ralph Russell, Three Mughal Poets, Harvard University Press, p. 233. Most translation in this section have been taken from this book.
20. J. Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar & Sons, 1964.
21. Ralph Russell, Three Mughal Poets, Harvard University Press, p. 32.
22. Ibid., p. 35.
NOTES: SEVEN
1. Nathan Katz, ‘The Identity of a Mystic: The Case of Sa’id Sarmad, A Jewish-Yogi-Sufi Courtier of the Mughals’, Numen, Vol. 47, No. 2, Florida International University, 2000, pp. 142-60 (brackets in the quotation are the author’s).
2. According to the eminent Persian scholar and historian, Henry George Keene.
3. Yazid was the ruler of Arabia who fought the famous battle of Karbala with Imam Hussein, Prophet Mohammad’s grandson. This epic tragedy is mourned by Shi’ites during Muharram (an Islamic month).
4. Baba Sain Mir Mohammad Sahib (1550-1635), popularly known as Mian Mir, was a Sufi saint who lived in Lahore. He belonged to the Qadri order of Sufism.
5. The first part of the Kalima, in Arabic, means: ‘There is no God but God’ (La Ila-ha-Ilallalah) and the second part, ‘And Mohammad is his messenger’ (Mohammad ur Rasool Allah). Sarmad refused to recite the second part of the Kalima, stating that he was still lost in understanding the first part—of recognizing that nothing but the Divine existed.
6. Mansur al-Hallaj (c. 858-922) was a Persian mystic, revolutionary writer and pious teacher of Sufism most famous for his apparent, but disputed, self-proclaimed divinity, his poetry and for his execution for heresy at the orders of the Abbasid Caliph, Al-Muqtadir, after a long, drawn-out investigation.
7. Storia do Mogor, as translated by William Irvine, Vol. 1, p. 223.
8. ‘Stuckism’ is a radical and controversial art group that was co-founded in 1999 by Charles Thomson and Billy Childish (who left it in 2001) along with eleven other artists. The name was derived by Thomson from an insult to ‘childish’ from his ex-girlfriend, Brit artist, Tracey Emin, who had told him that his art was ‘stuck’. Several Stuckist manifestos have been issued. One of them, ‘Re-modernism’, inaugurates a renewal of spiritual values for art, culture and society to replace the emptiness of current post-modernism. The website, www.stuckism.com, started by Ella Guru, has disseminated these ideas, and in five years Stuckism has grown to an international art movement with over 187 groups in forty-five countries. These groups are independent and self-directed (www.stuckism.com/info-html).
9. http:21pics.livejournal.com/indersalim/pic/000ca8cc/
10. http:21pics.livejournal.com/indersalim/pic/000dr81k/
11. Quoted in Abraham Eraly’s, The Mughal Throne—the Saga of India’s Great Emperors, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 535.
12. The Qadri order, one of the popular Sufi ‘silsilas’, traces its origins to the Prophet through the twelfth-century Sufi and Islamic scholar of great renown, Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani of Baghdad.
13. K.R. Qanungo, Dara Shikoh.
14. These include astral healing and concentration on the centres of meditation in the heart and brain. Further, he suggests that the four planes through which the Sufi seeker’s journey takes him—nasut, jabrut, malakut and lahut—correspond to the Hindu concept of the ‘avasthanam’ or the four ‘states’ of jagrat, swapna, shushpati and turiya.
15. A follower of the renowned Sufi-Bhakti saint, Kabir, and founder of a small order, the followers of which were known as ‘Baba Lalis’.
16. Translated by Yogindar Sikand.
17. The Holy Quran mentions that God sent 124,000 messengers or Prophets and only a few are named. Eclectic Sufis and scholars have interpreted the number in different ways.
18. Yogindar Sikand, Dara Shikoh.
19. Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656-1668, trans. by Archibald Constable on the basis of Irving Brock’s version, Ed. Vincent A. Smith, Low Price Publications. Slightly edited, and some spellings modernized, accessed through http:21www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/bernier/txt_bernier_dara.html. pp. 68 & 69.
20. Ibid., pp. 99-100.
21. D. Fairchild Ruggles, Humayun’s Tomb and Garden: Typologies and Visual Order. Also in ‘Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires: Theory and Design’, Attilio Petruccioli (ed), New York: Brill Academic Publishers, 2007.
NOTES: EIGHT
1. N.L. Batra, Jama Masjid: Call of the Soul, Lucknow: Eastern Book Company.
2. Translated from the Urdu by Firoz Bakht Ahmed.
3. Ablutions before Islamic prayer.
4. Margrit Pernau, The Delhi College: Traditional Elites, the Colonial State and Education Before 1857, New Delhi: OUP.
5. Nazir Ahmad, The Bride’s Mirror: A Tale of Life in Delhi a Hundred Years Ago, translated by G.E. Ward, Permanent Black.
6. The Rajinder Sachar Committee, appointed by the prime minister of India, was a high-level committee for the preparation of a report on the social, economic and educational status of the Muslim community in India.
7. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, New Delhi: OUP, 1984, p. 167.
8. Ibid., p. 169.
9. C.F. Andrews, Hakim Ajmal Khan, p. 298.
10. Jawaharlal Nehru, An Autobiography, New Delhi: OUP, 1984, p. 170.
11. AIR 2001 SC 1948.
NOTES: NINE
1. Charmaine O’Brien. Flavours of Delhi, Delhi: Penguin, p. 2.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Roomali roti, though not an authentic Delhi bread but a stylized version of tender chapatti, is where the chapatti can be so thin that it resembles a roomal or handkerchief.
NOTES: TEN
1. A.K. Jain, ‘Delhi—Pl
anning and Growth’, International Journal of Environmental Studies, Vol. 34, Nos 1 & 2, 1989, pp. 65-77.
2. ‘The Genius Who Told Bad Jokes.’ The Telegraph, 22 June 2002. Print.
3. Christopher Hussey, ‘The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens’, Country Life, London, 1953.
4. Ranjana Sengupta, Delhi Metropolitan: The Making Of An Unlikely City, New Delhi: Penguin, 2008.
5. http:21www.indiaonlinepages.com/population/delhi-population.html
6. Pawan Verma, ‘Imperilled Heritage’, Outlook, 7 May 1997.
7. Pawan Verma, ‘The Demise Of Delhi,’ Outlook, 5 January 1998.
8. Ibid.
NOTES: ELEVEN
1. Translation found in ‘The Vision of Qurratulain Hyder’ by Khalid Hasan, The Friday Times, Lahore: Vanguard Publications, 2008.
2. Translated by the author from Aag ka Darya, Lahore: Sang-i-Meel Publications, 2007, p. 128.
3. Kumkum Sangari, ‘Qurratulain Hyder’s “Aag ka Darya”,’ Muse India, No. 14, p. 2.
4. In my meeting with her, she elucidated how modern this novel was in terms of its characterization, mood and technique. There were traces in it of what was to be known, at least a century later, as the stream of consciousness technique.
5. Outlook India web version, translation by C.M. Naim.
6. Published by OUP.
7. Ayesha Jalal, Secularists, Subalterns and the Stigma of ‘Communalism. Accessed in January 2010 at http:21www.tufts.edu/~ajalal01/Articles/partition.ieshr.pdf
8. Translated from the Urdu by Khushwant Singh.
NOTES: TWELVE
1. Arabic word that encompasses the concept of civilization, culture and etiquette.
2. Ralph Russell, Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals, New Delhi: OUP, p. 164.
3. Natalia Prigarina, Mirza Ghalib: A Creative Biography, New York: OUP, 2000.
4. During the period—1800 to 1857—the population of Delhi was stable and smaller than Lucknow (350,000) and much smaller than the other urban centres such as Calcutta, Bombay and Madras.
5. Ralph Russell, Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals, New Delhi: OUP, p. 274.
6. Ibid.
7. Hindu rosaries have 108 beads.
8. Translated by Pavan Verma from Ghalib: The Man and the Times, New Delhi: Penguin, 2008.
9. Ibid.
10. Ralph Russell, Ghalib: Life, Letters and Ghazals, New Delhi: OUP, p, 165.
11. Ibid., p. 131.
12. Ibid.
13. Delhi College had kick-started the Muslim Renaissance in the middle of the nineteenth century. Munshi Zakaullah was one of the best-known representatives of that age as well as Sayyid Ahmad Khan. Munshi Zakaullah in his old age declared, ‘People speak of the “good old times,” but those times, as a whole, were not good, when compared with the days in which we are now living. They were full of corruption and decay. But the afterglow was extinguished by a thunderstorm of violence; the Mughal dream ended in nightmare.’
14. Gulzar has directed several off-beat films in Bollywood that remain distinct for their originality and rejection of stereotypes.
15. Gulzar, Mirza Ghalib, A Biographical Scenario, New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2003, Preface.
16. Ibid.
17. K.M. Ashraf, ‘Ghalib & The Revolt of 1857’, in Rebellion 1857, P.C. Joshi (ed).
18. Russell and Islam, Ghalib: Life and Letters, p. 149.
19. Ibid., p. 179.
NOTES: THIRTEEN
1. Excerpted from The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul.
2. ‘Forbes gives Delhi the “dirty” tag’; 4 March 2008, Times News Network.
3. The Indian Right to Information Law is also celebrated at JNU as a major step towards making citizens powerful. Delhi leads the country in terms of applications moved under the Right to Information Act. Over time, thousands of applications have been filed with various state authorities to seek information and transparency. The isolated Mughal courts and Raj durbars have finally given way to a more accessible environment.
4. According to the Directorate of Economics & Statistics.
5. Delhi-based think tank (www.niua.org)
6. In South Asia’s caste system, a Dalit, formerly known as ‘untouchable’ or ‘achhuta’ is a person outside of the four varnas and considered below of all and polluting. Dalits include people such as leather-workers, scavengers, tanners, flayers, cobblers, agricultural labourers, municipal cleaners, gymnasts, drum beaters, folk musicians and street handicraft persons. Like upper castes, Dalits are also divided into various subcastes—www.nacdor.org/TEXT FILES/Dalit.htm.
7. Dr B.R. Ambedkar, ‘Annihilation of Caste’ in writings and speeches, Vol. 1, p. 49.
8. Dalit Foundation
9. Translated from the Marathi by Priya Adarker.
NOTES: FOURTEEN
1. Syed Ahmed Khan was a modernist reformer in the mid-nineteenth century India and a founder of the Aligarh Muslim University. Jamaluddin Afghani was a peripatetic pan-Islamist and anti-imperialist who travelled all over the Islamic world in the late nineteenth century. He also spent three years in India during the 1880s. Mohammad Abduh was a disciple of Afghani and a late nineteenth-century modernist reformer of Egypt.
2. Seminar, Vol. 516, August 2002.
3. The word Dastangoi refers to the art of story-telling. It is a compound of two Persian words daastaan and goi, which means to tell a daastaan. Daastaans were epics, often oral in nature, which were recited or read aloud and in essence, were like medieval romances everywhere. Telling ales of adventure, magic and warfare, daastaans mapped new worlds and horizons, encountered the unseen and protected the hero through many travails and lovers as he moved on his quest. The Persian versions of the story narrated the life and adventures of Amir Hamza, supposedly an uncle of the Prophet Mohammad. By the sixteenth century, versions of the Hamza story had begun to circulate in India. http:21dastangoi.blogspot.in/p/dastangoi-lost-art-form-of-urdu.html
First published in India in 2013 by
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Copyright © Raza Rumi 2013
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