City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  Most dramatic of all were the crumbling remains of the vast palaces of the omrahs (great nobles) of the empire. Though now in ruins and often occupied by squatters, it was still possible to see their extraordinary size and grandeur; that of Qamar-al-Din Khan ‘occupied the whole length of one side of a considerable street’. Franklin was impressed:

  All these palaces are surrounded with high walls and take up a considerable space of ground. Their entrances are through lofty arched gateways, at the top of which are the galleries for music; before each is a spacious court for the elephants, horses and attendants … All of the palaces [once] had gardens with stone reservoirs and fountains in the centre … Each palace was likewise provided with a handsome set of baths and a teh khana [a set of domed marble cool-rooms] underground …

  Franklin published his account of the Mughal capital in 1795. Eight years later, following a British victory at the Battle of Delhi, a permanent British Resident was installed within the ruins of another palace, a little to the north of the Red Fort. Just as Delhi was no longer the focal point of India—like the rest of India, it now looked nervously over its shoulder to British Calcutta—so within the city the focus shifted from the Red Fort to the British Residency. As the first half of the nineteenth century progressed and the power and arrogance of the British grew, so the Resident came to act less and less like ambassador to the Great Mughal, and more and more like the Mughal’s paymaster and overlord.

  Nevertheless the Emperor continued to hold court as he had always done, and at first the charade of Mughal power was maintained with the express approval of the British residents. These early residents were a series of sympathetic and slightly eccentric Scotsmen, whose love and respect for India was reflected by their adoption of Indian modes of dress and Indian ways of living.

  The first, Sir David Ochterlony, set the tone. With his fondness for hookahs and nautch girls and Indian costumes, Ochterlony was decidedly different from the normal run of starch-shirted, stiff-lipped burra sahibs. Although known to the common people as ‘Loony Akhtar’ (or Crazy Star), when in the capital he liked to be addressed by his proper Mughal title, Nasir-ud-Daula (Defender of the State), and to live the life of a Mughal gentleman. Every evening all thirteen of his Indian wives used to process around Delhi behind their husband, each on the back of her own elephant.

  Yet perhaps the most fascinating of all the British in Delhi was not Ochterlony but another Scot, William Fraser, a young Persian scholar from Inverness. In 1805, Fraser was sent up to Delhi from Calcutta where he had just won a gold medal at the Company’s Fort William College. He was to be the Resident’s Assistant; it was his first job …

  William Fraser’s grandfather, James Fraser, had worked in India as a young man and on his return had sat in the library of his family home in Moniack, near Inverness, writing the first history in English of the Persian marauder, Nadir Shah. Forty years later, as the debts at Moniack mounted, Edward Satchwell Fraser was forced to revive his father’s Indian connections. One by one William and his four brothers all received postings in the subcontinent; one by one they caught a ship to Edinburgh, where they had their portraits painted by Raeburn, before continuing their journey on to London and the waiting ship in East India Dock. Of the five who left for the subcontinent, only one ever made it back to Moniack.

  After leaving Calcutta in June 1805, William’s steamer up the Ganges finally terminated at Allahabad, a last British outpost. The remaining stretch of the journey to Delhi was overland through some 400 miles of the most anarchic country in India. ‘On the road I passed several parties of armed men whom I knew to be plunderers,’ William later wrote to his father. ‘I always passed any who I met at a very quick pace … They generally keep about a hundred yards [away] and fire with their matchlocks and are so expert that your only chance is in moving about to avoid their fire or riding straight upon them with your pistol. I talk of them when mounted; footmen robbers never show themselves but fire from some ambush.’

  Nights were worse. The servants were kept constantly on the alert until dawn for fear of losing both horses and baggage to footpads and thugs. It was a ragged and exhausted party which, several weeks later, entered the Turkman Gate of Shahjahanabad and headed for the Residency. William rode into the compound, mounted the steps, and breakfasted with Ochterlony, ‘six months and a day since I left Calcutta’.

  Delhi cannot have been very different from the grand but crumbling slum described by Franklin; yet for all its decay the city soon cast its spell on William. Its remoteness must have been perfectly familiar to anyone brought up in eighteenth-century Inverness, while its literary and historical associations must have appealed to the prize-winning Orientalist. ‘My situation is as desirable as any one I could hold,’ William wrote in his first letter home, ‘nor should I care if I lived here during the whole period of my sojournment in India.’

  It was a prophetic letter. In the course of a career lasting thirty years, William refused all appointments which would take him away from the city. Like many other Britons after him, William had become completely hypnotized by the great capital.

  His early letters gave detailed descriptions of the court of Shah Alam and the palaces of the preceding dynasties which lay scattered among the ruins to the south of the city. William’s duties—attending the Mughal court, hearing petitions at the Residency, establishing the Delhi criminal courts—seem to have been flexible enough to allow him to pursue his growing interest in Delhi’s history.

  ‘The business of my situation generally takes up five hours [a day],’ he explained to his parents. ‘[Afterwards] I read and study with pleasure the [local] languages. They are the chief source of my amusement, [although] Delhi affords much [other] food besides. Learned natives there are a few, and in poverty, but those I have met with are real treasures. I am also making a collection of good oriental manuscripts.’

  The miniatures William gathered in Delhi are probably the group now known as the Emperor’s (or Kevorkian) Album which today forms the core of the oriental manuscript collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The bound book which contained these miniatures was discovered in a Scottish antique shop in 1929 by Jack Rolfe, an American tourist. He bought the book for less than £100 and resold it in Sotheby’s a few months later for £10,500. The album is now recognized as one of the finest collections of Imperial Mughal manuscripts in existence and today each leaf from its folios would be worth at least a six-figure sum.

  Whether or not the Emperor’s Album is his collection, William’s artistic interests went far beyond the stockpiling of manuscripts. ‘I wish to ascertain historically,’ he wrote, ‘the account of every remarkable place or monument of antiquity, or building erected in commemoration of singular acts of whatever nature. The traditional accounts I receive from natives are generally absurd or contradictory. I must first know how they obtained credence, and then search for the origins of the story …’

  In later years, few would deny that Fraser knew the people and country in and around Delhi better than any other Briton. According to the French botanist Victor Jacquemont, ‘his mode of life has made him more familiar, perhaps than any other European, with the customs and ideas of the native inhabitants. He has, I think, a real and profound understanding of their inner life.’ Even Fraser’s enemy, the resident Charles Metcalfe, admitted that William had no ‘difficulty dealing with the highest order of natives, with some of [whom] he has been more intimate than most Europeans.’

  Yet it was less his intellectual and linguistic gifts than his devil-may-care bravery which moulded William’s career. A few years after his arrival, Fraser was forced to abandon his sedentary pursuits in the city in favour of a nomadic lifestyle around its periphery. Since Mughal authority had collapsed, the hinterland of the capital had become the refuge of robbers and brigands who occupied the crumbling tombs to the south and the decaying Mughal gardens to the north. They made the city unsafe after dark and travel outside the walls impossible, even in br
oad daylight, without a large armed escort. Fraser had suffered from the brigands on his ride from Allahabad; now he was given the job of flushing them out from their nests and replacing their terror with his own.

  William raised and trained a force of irregular cavalry. There are several pictures of his men in the Fraser Album. They are shown both as recruits fresh from the villages with their naked torsos and homespun dhotis and later as fully equipped cavalrymen in Fraser’s service. He dressed them not in contemporary Company red coats, but in a theatrical uniform of old-fashioned Napoleonic inspiration, with gleaming cavalry boots, brocaded doublets, and cummerbunds striped gold and scarlet; the uniform was topped with a tall brown busby. Strapped across the chest of each man is a silver plate bearing a hart’s head, the Fraser crest.

  Fraser’s force often faced serious opposition—squadrons of Maratha cavalry were still at large in the Delhi plains—and soon William’s letters home had begun to assume a tone of chilling nonchalance. ‘I never saw a Mahratta yet whom I would dread to meet single-handed,’ he wrote in June 1806:

  The other day I had an opportunity of seeing how they would fight. Two or three rebellious villages within the district of Dehli we were obliged to cut up, and besides storming the villages, we had to disperse parties [of Maratha cavalry] who came to their assistance. They advance gradually, firing their matchlocks till within one hundred yards, when they sling them over their shoulder with a belt and take to the sword and spear. If you have a pistol the matter is easily settled, and you shoot them just when within the length of their spears.

  Although such skirmishing earned him ‘two fine sabre cuts on the arms, a wound in the back from a pike, and an arrow in the neck which almost killed him’ such warfare seems to have greatly excited William. According to his friend Jacquemont, ‘to him the most keenly pleasurable emotion is that aroused by danger: such is the explanation of what people call his madness.’ Certainly his letters of 1806-7 are full of remarks about his well-being and contentment: ‘My health is robust and uninterruptedly good, which I owe to constant exercise and stout temperance. I seldom have but one meal in the day and never exceed two glasses of Madeira. For occasional recreation I keep horses and hawks and borrow an elephant when I wish to shoot.’

  Fraser had taken on the customs and dress of the Indians from the very beginning of his residence in the subcontinent. An early picture shows him sitting in a long Indian robe, a sash around his waist, while on his head he sports a curious Scottish tam o’shanter. One of his first notes home thanks his parents for a letter, using a turn of phrase that could rarely have been heard before on the Beauly Firth—‘to use a Persian hyperbole,’ he wrote, ‘was [your letter] divided into a thousand parts, my double tongued pen could not obey my heart in expressing and writing one of them.’ But now, isolated in the wilds of Haryana, controlling an area the size of Wales with only his Mewatti bodyguards for company, Fraser began to ‘go native’ with a vengeance.

  In eighteenth-century India such behaviour was the norm among the more intelligent and open-minded of the Company’s servants. But by 1810, the days of the Brahminized Englishmen had long passed and in the more severe and self-righteous atmosphere of nineteenth-century Calcutta such eccentricities had become far from fashionable. When Lady Nugent, the wife of the British Commander-in-Chief, visited Delhi, she was genuinely shocked to discover that Fraser had given up eating pork and beef and had grown a thick Rajput beard. She thought Fraser was as much ‘Hindoo as Christian’ and felt it necessary to remind him sharply ‘of the religion [he] was brought up to’.

  According to Jacquemont, Fraser had ‘six or seven legitimate wives’ who all lived together ‘some fifty leagues from Delhi and do as they like’. His children were without number but were all ‘Hindus and Muslims according to the religion and caste of their mamas and are shepherds, peasants, mountaineers etc, according to the occupation of their mother’s families.’

  A picture of William’s chief wife survives in the Fraser Album. It shows a tall and exquisite Indian woman, dressed in a slight close-fitting bodice and a long pleated Rajasthani skirt. Her torso is swathed in a jamevar shawl, her hair is worn loose, and her arms are steeled with torcs and tribal bracelets. Her slippers have upcurled toes. Beside her stands a single boy, aged perhaps six years old. Although he is dressed in Mughal court pyjamas, there is a distinctly European look to his features. The inscription, in Persian, reads simply: ‘Amiban, a Jat woman of Rania, the chosen one of Fraser Sahib, whose delicate beauty was beyond compare …’

  The Governor-General’s Visit

  EMILY EDEN

  This extract is taken from Up the Country, an account of Emily Eden’s stay in India in the nineteenth century.

  Delhi is one of the few sights, indeed the only one except Lucknow, that has quite equalled my expectations. Four miles round it there is nothing to be seen but gigantic ruins of mosques and palaces, and the actual living city has the finest mosque we have seen yet. It is in such perfect perservation, built entirely of red stone and white marble, with immense flights of marble steps leading up to three sides of it; these, the day we went to it, were entirely covered with people dressed in very bright colours—Sikhs, and Mahrattas, and some of the fair Mogul race, all assembled to see the Governor-General’s suwarree, and I do not think I ever saw so striking a scene. They followed us into the court of the temple, which is surmounted by an open arched gallery, and through every arch there was a view of some fine ruins, or of some part of the King of Delhi’s palace, which is an immense structure two miles round, all built of deep red stone, with buttresses and battlements, and looks like an exaggerated scene of Timour and Tartar, and as if little Agib was to be thrown instantly from the highest tower, and Fatima to be constantly wringing her hands from the top of the battlements. There are hundreds of the Royal family of Delhi who have never been allowed to pass these walls, and never will be. Such a melancholy red stone notion of life as they must have! G [Auckland] went up to the top of one of the largest minarets of the mosque and has been stiff ever since.

  From there we went to the black mosque, one of the oldest buildings in India, and came home under the walls of the palace. We passed the building in which Nadir Shah sat for a whole day looking on while he allowed his troops to massacre and plunder the city. These eastern cities are so much more thickly inhabited than ours, and the people look so defenceless, that a massacre of that sort must be a horrible slaughter; but I own, I think a little simple plunder would be pleasant.

  Yesterday we went to the church built by Colonel Skinner. He is a native of this country, a half-caste, but very black, and talks broken English. He has … for the last forty years … done all sorts of gallant things, had seven horses killed under him, and been wounded in proportion; has made several fortunes and lost them; has built himself several fine houses, and has his zenana and heaps of black sons like any other native. He built this church, which is a very curious building, and very magnificent—in some respects; and within sight of it there is a mosque which he has also built, because he said that one way or the other he should be sure to go to heaven. In short, he is one of the people whose lives ought to be written for the particular amusement of succeeding generations. His Protestant church has a dome in the mosque fashion, and I was quite afraid that with the best dispositions to attend to Mr Y, little visions of Mahomet would be creeping in.

  G and I took a drive in the evening all round the cantonments, and there is really some pretty scenery about Delhi, and great masses of stone lying about, which looks well after those external sands.

  In the afternoon we all (except G, who could not go, from some point of etiquette) went to see the palace. It is a melancholy sight—so magnificent originally, and so poverty-stricken now. The marble hall where the king sits is still very beautiful, all inlaid with garlands and birds of precious stones, and the inscription on the cornice is what Moore would like to see in the original: ‘If there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this!�
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  The lattices look out on a garden which leads down to the Jumna, and the old king was sitting in the garden with a chowrybadar waving the flies from him; but the garden is all gone to decay too, and ‘the Light of the World’ had a forlorn and darkened look. All our servants were in a state of profound veneration; the natives all look upon the King of Delhi as their rightful lord, and so he is, I suppose. In some of the pavilions belonging to the princes there were such beautiful inlaid floors, any square of which would have made an enviable table for a palace in London, but the stones are constantly stolen; and in some of the finest baths there were dirty charpoys spread, with dirtier guards sleeping on them. In short, Delhi is a very suggestive and moralizing place—such stupendous remains of power and wealth passed and passing away—and somehow I feel that we horrid English have just ‘gone and done it’, merchandised it, revenued it, and spoiled it all. I am not very fond of Englishmen out of their own country. And Englishwomen did not look pretty at the ball in the evening, and it did not tell well for the beauty of Delhi that the painted ladies of one regiment, who are generally called ‘the little corpses’ (and very hard it is too upon most corpses) were much the prettiest people there, and were besieged with partners.

  Well, of all the things I ever saw, I think this is the finest. Did we know about it in England? I mean, did you and I, in our old ancient Briton state, know? Do you know now, without my telling you, what the Kootub is? Don’t be ashamed, there is no harm in not knowing, only I do say it is rather a pity we were so ill taught. I have had so many odd names dinned into me during the countless years I seem to have passed in this country, that I cannot remember the exact degree of purity of mind (which enemies may term ignorance) with which I left home; but after all that had been said, I expected the Kootub would have been rather inferior to the Monument. One has those little prejudices. It happens to be the Monument put at the top of the column in the Place Vendome, and that again placed on a still grander base. It is built of beautiful red granite, is 240 feet high and fifty feet in diameter, and carved all over with sentences from the Koran, each letter a yard high, and the letter again interlaced and ornamented with carved flowers and garlands; it is between six and seven hundred years old, and looks as if it were finished yesterday, and it stands in a wilderness of ruins, carved gateways, and marble tombs, one more beautiful than the other.