A Place Within (10 page)

Surely Alauddin knew he was doomed?

If there was ever a case of just retribution in the bloody annals of medieval Delhi, it was made manifest in the final days of Alauddin, who had so heinously murdered his uncle to usurp the throne. In our imagination, as the macabre denouement of his life unfolds, it is as if Fellini had collaborated with Shakespeare to write the script.

At the centre of the tragic drama that was Alauddin’s miserable end stood the figure of an evil genius called Malik Kafur, a former eunuch slave who had been bought in a Baghdad market, brought to India, and captured by Alauddin’s generals in the port city of Khambat (Cambay) during the Gujarat campaigns. He went on to become the victor of several military campaigns on behalf of Alauddin and, at the end, his close confidant. He was a handsome man, and suggestions of a homosexual relationship with his master add spice to their story. Because he had been bought for a thousand (“hazar” in Persian and Hindi) dinars at the market, Malik Kafur was also known as Malik Hazar-dinari.

Alauddin lay in bed sick with dropsy, weak and only partly conscious, suffering unbearable bouts of pain and flashes of temper, and neglected by his family: the queen devoted to participating in celebrations, the sultan’s mother to her social functions, his beloved but spoilt heir Khizr Khan to his many amusements, including women, wine, and sports. “The locks of beautiful girls were constantly in his hands,” said his friend Amir Khusrau, the court poet, “as rosaries are in the hands of the pious.” Malik Kafur was recalled from the south to give comfort to the suffering sul
tan in his sick bed. When Khizr Khan, having sworn to go on foot to pray for his father at the graves of the saints, was reported to have gone on horseback instead, and moreover in the company of musicians and dancing girls, the deeply disappointed sultan, under Kafur’s malign influence, reluctantly divested him of his status as heir and agreed to send him to prison. But Alauddin nevertheless extracted a promise from the faithless Kafur not to harm the prince. This episode only worsened Alauddin’s condition, and he died a few days later, his end hastened, some said, by the attentions of Kafur. Subsequently the former thousand-dinar slave had Khizr Khan blinded in a dungeon. And he sent his barber to blind Shadi Khan, Khizr’s brother, which the barber accomplished by “cutting his eyes from their sockets with a razor, like slices of melon.” He proceeded to remove all the wives and children of the sultan who had claims upon the throne and set up his own favourite as the successor. It was January 1316. Malik Kafur’s intrigues ultimately caught up with him, and he died by the sword shortly afterwards, ungrieved.

Alauddin’s incomplete tower, a gigantic brick stump, stands eighty feet high. His dynasty petered out shortly after his death, following a number of bloody disputes over the succession to the throne.

Khizr Khan’s tomb supposedly lies at Nizamuddin, in the vicinity of that of his friend Amir Khusrau, who would devote an epic poem to his passion for a Gujarati princess. But that is another tale.

Another stone testimony to the thwarted vanity of kings stands five miles to the east of Alauddin’s stump: the massive, severe, red and grey ruins of Tughlaqabad Fort, still immensely imposing and awesome, on the Badarpur Road at the edge of the modern city, overlooking the highway headed south to Mathura and Agra. Built by Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, who started his own dynasty in 1320, it was abandoned not long afterwards; reflecting the grim, austere
personality of its designer, it stands in sharp contrast to the graceful buildings of his predecessors. Only the odd awestruck tourist or a band of goats taking a shortcut over the massive collapsed structure visits it today. It was once, one learns, a four-mile-perimeter city, octagonal in shape, its thirty-foot walls enclosing a citadel, some palaces, and streets laid out in a grid.

Across the road, equally forlorn, lies the tomb of the sultan.

Nizamuddin’s final resting place, on the other hand, is visited every year by thousands of people of all faiths, bearing baskets of roses as offerings and desires to be fulfilled.

You enter an alley from the main Mathura Road where it meets Lodi Road, then walk into a long, slightly winding, narrow corridor lined by stalls all clamouring for custom, selling Muslim devotional music and videos, wall hangings, food, and roses by the heaps, chaddars (shawls to spread over a grave) and bags of prasad for you to take inside to the shrine as offerings; a dozen or more stalls offer to keep your shoes. You buy your rose tray and remove your shoes, but not the socks (as other places demand), and enter a paved courtyard fairly busy with a quiet sort of activity. Prominently in front is the grand mausoleum of Nizamuddin Auliya, a colourful, partly gilded square structure capped with a dome, and possessed with a low, arched entrance and latticed green and white walls. A steady stream of men, their heads covered with caps or kerchiefs, walk in and out. Women, who are not allowed inside, sit devoutly on the verandah. The interstices of the lattice walls are filled with strips of cloth, left by them as tokens to the saint for wishes to be fulfilled. The grave of the Sufi lies in the centre of a small inner room, a narrow aisle going around it so that if you do not wish to stand for long before it, as many do, their palms raised open before them in prayer, you have to squeeze your
way past. The grave is covered with layers of chaddars and flowers, to which you add your offering. A chandelier hangs above the grave, its light dim, but unlike other shrines, there is no lamp burning to symbolize the nur, or spirit, of the saint. It is a brief experience, and as you emerge into the bright sunlight and feel the hot pavement under your feet you do not quite know how to respond. What moves is the sight of the people who believe so fervently, who need so desperately, the devotion so open on their faces; and an awareness of the different backgrounds and faiths they belong to. An attendant comes to take down your name and address, accepts a donation. He claims descent from Nizamuddin, hands you a card, shows you around. Adjoining the shrine compound is a mosque, where some people are at prayer, and a madrassa, not in session at this time. The kids who come here, my informant is quick to tell me, anticipating my question, also go to regular school.

Behind Nizamuddin’s shrine, across the courtyard, lies the slightly less opulent mausoleum of his disciple Amir Khusrau, a prolific poet and one of the chief historians of his time. He wrote both in Persian, the literary and scholarly language of the time, and the local Hindustani, which he quite adored, and his poetry is loved and performed to this day. He was born in northern India in 1254, to a family of Turkish immigrants (or refugees) from central Asia, and died in 1325, six months after his master. So devoted was Khusrau to Nizamuddin that it is said he would lick the plate the master had eaten from. But Khusrau spent much of his time in court, where he was required to entertain the sultan with his clever compositions. A man surviving on a tightrope between the two worlds.

Outside the poet’s mausoleum three singers have appeared, seated on the ground with their instruments, to give a performance of his work. You ask your informant about the prince Khizr Khan’s grave, which according to your reading is somewhere on this site, close to that of his friend. He doesn’t know, but across from Khusrau’s mausoleum he points out a modest unmarked
grave that he says belongs to Ziauddin Barni. Like many such graves, it is raised a few inches above the ground and painted an olive green. History tells us this servant of Clio spent his last years in this area, a pauper. This naked grave could well be his. You go over and place a few flowers upon it.

Finally you depart, pick up your shoes. The beggars are at your back now as you make your way out the long narrow corridor. The eating stalls hustle for money to feed the needy, five rupees a person. The video stalls show pious movies, in one of them uniformed young boys in formation singing praises to the Prophet, looking ominously militaristic. A beggar woman runs after you pleading. Another takes over from her and gives you a glimpse of the baby in her arms. Give me something to feed the child. Those eyes. You pay and you flee.

Another time. It’s a warm Thursday night, holy Jumé-raat, when the devout and the needy visit the graves of the Sufis everywhere. Here at Nizamuddin, a mandap, a makeshift auditorium under a cloth
canopy, has been set up between the mausoleums of the master and his disciple. The only light is at Khusrau’s shrine, to enter which the devotees silently line up, dressed up for this special occasion. In contrast to these silent—and perhaps desperate—devotions, on the ground outside, under the canopy, sit some hundred people rapt with attention, listening to four qawali singers belting out praises to the Prophet. The tabla beats, the harmonium wails. It is holy clamour in the perfumed smoky air of the shrine. Fill my beggar’s pouch, Ya Muhammad! shout the singers as fresh people come in, look for places to squeeze into. Occasionally someone from the audience stands up, goes and drops a bill or two before the singers.

As you sit in the dark listening to the music, and watch as one group of singers yields its place to another, and you notice how they toss up their frenzied lines into the air and catch them, the voices rising and falling, and as you let your gaze wander and take in the black caps and the green caps denoting status, the embroidered ones denoting regions, and the simple skull caps of the majority of those here and the freshly pressed kurta-pyjamas and the handful of tourists hovering at the edges, their heads also covered, you can’t help thinking, What a memorial to a poet.

The story is told that when Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughlaq, the builder of Tughlaqabad, was returning once from a campaign in the east, he sent a message in advance to the Shaikh Nizamuddin telling him to leave the city before he arrived. Why he would do so is not clear, but certainly there was no love lost between sultan and Sufi. To the sultan’s message, the shaikh replied, “
Hanouz Delhi dur ast
,” meaning, Delhi is still far off. Ghiyasuddin did not make it to Delhi, dying in an accident on the way. This story, pitting a beloved mystic against a vain sultan, people love to tell. Historians discard it with disdain, but repeat it all the same. As I cannot help but do.