A Place Within (15 page)

But you don’t see this Muslim presence outside the fabled gates. It seems as if they have barricaded themselves into this old city of the poets and kings where once their glory lay. What was life like for them here, before Partition, before the mass influx of the Punjabis and all the others who extended and transformed the city?

One of the most pithy, achingly nostalgic accounts of upper-class Muslim life in Old Delhi—Shahjahanabad—is contained in the novel
Twilight in Delhi
, by Ahmed Ali. Written in English and published first by Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press in 1940, most copies were destroyed in the London Blitz, and the book remained long out of print and mostly forgotten, until a new edition came out in 1966 in Bombay. It is now a recognized classic.

It is 1910 as the novel opens. Day begins in Mir Nihal’s haveli with, as always, the sound of the dawn call to prayer from the great Jama mosque, the voice and identity of the muezzin, the caller, high in his tower, familiar to all in this Delhi community. Thence we witness in slow movements the final days and years of Mir Nihal, which coincide with the decline of the old Delhi as the British consolidate their hold over India. The tone of the novel is elegiac, its gaze ironic and tender upon this old lover, Delhi:

Destruction is in its foundations and blood is in its soil. It has seen the fall of many a glorious kingdom, and listened to the groans of
birth. It is the symbol of Life and Death, and revenge is its nature…. But still it is the jewel of the eye of the world, still it is the centre of attraction.

Mir Nihal is a member of the old elite, his ancestors having arrived centuries before (this we surmise) from the Muslim lands of the north and west. He has an interest in a lace dealership, where he goes to work every day, but he also has property in his village and in the city. He has a young mistress, whom he supports and visits in the evening, a male indulgence; for his other leisure he flies pigeons, and he maintains an interest in alchemy and medicine. This is the Delhi in which suddenly someone in the midst of a conversation may break off into a line or two of Ghalib, say, or Saadi, or any of the beloved poets, including the former emperor Bahadur Shah; where your beggar at the door may be a desperate soul or a well-known mystic; where, sitting on a terrace in the balmy night, suddenly you hear a qawali recital in progress at a neighbour’s house, the devotions addressed, the author informs us, to Allah, his Prophet, or an earthly lover; where in thanksgiving a family might go to pay respects at the grave of Shaikh Nizamuddin or some other saint. The women, behind the gates of the haveli, spend their time “eating, talking, cooking, sewing, or doing nothing” or arranging marriages. And the muezzin at the Jama Masjid continues to give his call to prayer at the regular intervals.

So life passes, at its own beat; a life that has, one feels, maintained a thread of continuity from the Middle Ages in Isphahan, say, or Bukhara, or Balkh, to the present. But in reality the world has changed, continues unpityingly to change. On Chandni Chowk, the main thoroughfare, preparations have been underway for the upcoming coronation of King George, the foreign emperor; those old enough to remember, and Mir Nihal is one of them, recall bitterly the bloody British takeover of Delhi just over fifty years previously. And when Coronation Day arrives, they swallow the bitter
pill and go and watch as the royal procession leaves the Red Fort and proceeds through their Chowk,

one long unending line of generals and governors, the Tommies and the native chiefs with their retinues and soldiery…. In the background were the guns booming, threatening the subdued people of Hindustan. Right on the road, lining it on either side, and in the procession, were English soldiers, to show, as it seemed to Mir Nihal, that India had been conquered with the force of arms, and at the point of guns will she be retained.

As he watches, Mir Nihal recalls the former glory of Delhi under the Muslim sultans, Shah Jahan, Humayun, Firoz Shah, and even the Delhi of the
Mahabharata
. As the procession passes the Jama Masjid, “whose facade had been vulgarly decorated with a garland of golden writing containing slavish greetings from the Indian Mussalmans to the English King,” he recalls how, in 1857, Delhi fell into the hands of the English, who contemplated the destruction of the mosque, or its conversion into a church; how the Muslims defended it, with swords against guns, and a bloodbath ensued.

To be fair, the sultans had also often retained Delhi by force of arms, though they were Indians now, their ancestors having arrived centuries ago and married locally, and there was no other land, no other flag, to which they owed allegiance. But Mir Nihal’s world had to end, its time was over.

Soon after the Coronation, cruel changes are in store for this occupied city. Its ancient walls are proposed to be demolished; the row of peepal trees that forms the central boulevard on Chandni Chowk, giving it beauty and character, will be cut down. The seventh Delhi has fallen, and an eighth new Delhi is under construction beyond the walls; “strange people had started coming into the city, people from other provinces of India, especially Punjab.” But,
people predict, this new Delhi and its rulers too will one day fall, as the others had done. Already calls for freedom have begun, and there is word of a “Terrorist Movement.”

Three years after the Coronation—Mir Nihal cannot know this—a bomb was thrown at the viceroy’s procession in Chandni Chowk. The viceroy was splashed with blood and the man behind him was killed.

A woman’s point of view, from a generation later, is presented in Attia Hosain’s tenderly evocative novel
Sunlight on a Broken Column
. The setting here is Lucknow, another northern city celebrated for its courtly culture, its romance, its poets, and its architecture. Hosain describes the inevitability of change in the fortunes of the traditional Muslim feudal elite as the independence of India draws near. The story is told by a young woman called Laila, a devourer of books and curious about the world outside, and her refusal to accept her circumscribed, protected place within the family system and the role of a consort to a husband who will be selected for her. Not only does she question the absolute authority of the male elders of the family, abetted by the women, she also questions the privilege of her class over those whom they rule in their domain. Independence arrives, and Partition. Whatever country these Muslims opt for, India or Pakistan, their world is now utterly lost, their way of life, their privileges, erased. Those who choose to go to Pakistan lose their homeland, their beloved city; and those who stay have to accept a new, insecure, and often second-class existence.

If the pronouncement of Satish, the Hindi professor-jeweller I met on Dariba Kalan, on how Hindus and Muslims lived together sounds a bit too practised, the celebrated novelist Krishna Sobti evokes, in her
Dil-o-Danish
(
The Heart Has Its Reasons
), a relationship between a married Hindu lawyer and his Muslim mistress that
is more textured. The time is the 1920s in Shahjahanabad, just about a decade after Ahmed Ali’s Mir Nihal watches his world pass away in the wake of the Coronation procession. Kripanarayan, Sobti’s character, is from the upper-class Punjabi Hindus who have benefited from the British takeover of the city. He is a romantic as well as a successful lawyer. At the end of the day he longs to spend his hours with Mehak, a passionate and beautiful woman “who ruled his heart” and by whom he has had two gifted children whom he wants to do well in life. But he is married to Kutumb, whom he has crowned “queen of hearth and home,” and there are family and traditional obligations to which he is bonded. And so we find him helplessly strung between two worlds, two households, two relationships. This modern novel of Old Delhi, told in several voices and quite aware of the women’s position in society, cannot help but also be elegiac as it reflects on the passage of time and the loss of poetry and romance, though in the fates of Mehak’s two children it also looks to a future that seems more positive.

Mastering this old city, getting to know its narrow streets and gulleys, can also become an obsession…it seems just about achievable, perhaps one more visit will do it. During my more recent visits, Delhi Gate, the southernmost entrance, has become my geometric origin or reference point. Straight ahead (northwards) comes the Red Fort by the Jumna river; westwards from it runs Chandni Chowk. West from Delhi Gate runs Asaf Ali Road, presumably along the old wall of the city, on which are also the Turkman Gate and the Ajmeri Gate. Within these bounds, Old Delhi is yours to explore.

From Delhi Gate, the Bazar Chitli Qabar Marg goes its crooked way to the great mosque, the Jama Masjid, offering along its length sweetmeats, a Jain temple, jewellers, scrap metal, restaurants, pots
and pans, clothes, money changers and Pakistan visa forms, flowers, peanuts, popcorn. If Mir Nihal’s world is gone, his Delhi, though transformed, still thrives, as one pushes through the bhid—the crowds—without the space before you even to lift up the map in your hand. A motorbike arrogantly speeds through the crowd without a pause as people jump aside to escape with their lives; thus a metaphor comes alive, representing power and wealth. Otherwise the bicycle rickshaws patiently ply their trade, these alleys are made for them. They are the speediest conveyance in this bustling place. There can actually be a rickshaw traffic jam here: three alleys meet near a drain that is being opened, each of them jammed with rickshaws full of dainty-looking uniformed girls returning home from school and women in niqab; and the pedestrian has to jump over a rickshaw wheel to get through the knot.

The Jama Masjid, built by Shah Jahan and completed in 1656, is a glorious and commanding sight, pride of this old city and once its very heart. It is the largest mosque in India. Built on a hill, it stands ten yards above the level of the city, flights of steps leading up to its gates. As I arrive, a Japanese camera crew is at work at the southern gate. The vast courtyard can hold up to twenty-five thousand people, five hundred to a row. An arcade runs all around it, from which is visible a panoramic view of the city. There are three gates, and on the fourth, western, side, as in all mosques east of Mecca, is the roofed section which is the prayer hall, with its many pillars and eleven arched entrances from the courtyard, the central one larger and surmounted by a dome. Two smaller tapered domes are on either side, and two tall minarets. Visible from the eastern gate, in the near distance at the end of a wide promenade that must have been beautiful once, is the Red Fort; it is along the promenade and through the imposing eastern entrance that the emperor arrived, so it was also known as the Shahi Gate. Outside the northern gate, when the Mutiny had been quelled, the defenders of the mosque faced off an English officer called Thomas Metcalfe as he
stood down on the street below with his men, ready to demolish the site. The imam of the mosque is a direct descendant of the man brought from Bukhara by the emperor Shah Jahan to inaugurate it and is an influential figure much courted by politicians and media, especially before elections.