Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 2

(Continued excerpts from The Last Mughal by William Dalrymple)

(Picture Courtesy: i.dailymail.co.uk)

As the cantonment memsahibs awaited the return of their menfolk from the parade ground, inside the city walls Padre Jennings would be conducting the early morning service in the hush of St. James Church. Soon the courts to one side of the graveyard would come to life too: the two chief magistrates, John Ross Hutchinson and Charles Le Bas, would already be in their offices, as would their assiduous assistant, Arthur Galloway, and the Sadr Amin Mufti Sadruddin, often known by his pen-name Azurda. At the same time, riding in through Kashmere Gate, Theo Metcalfe, the other joint magistrate, would be
heading late towards his day's work, regretting that he had not prepared his briefs as thoroughly as he might have, and that he had not been up as early as his father, who had already conducted half his day's business, besides taking a swim, organising the household and reading the papers. George Wagentrieber would be up too. Having kissed his wife Elizabeth goodbye, he would now, like Theo, be heading down from the Civil Lines to the Kashmiri Gate offices of the Delhi Gazette, to begin his day of writing and proofreading the latest issue.

Painting by Canadian artist and writer Michael Kluckner (michaelkluckner.com) 

Among the people of Delhi, the poor woke long before the rich. As the sun rose, and as the British were returning from their morning rides and preparing for breakfast, up near the shrine of Qadam Sharif, the first bird catchers were laying their nets and baiting them with millet, to catch the early birds out for their morning feed. Past them on the dusty road came the sellers of fruit and vegetables, some on bullock carts, most trudging on foot, streaming in from the villages of the Doab down the Alipore road, bringing their goods to the new suburb of Sabzi Mandi just outside the Kabul Gate, to the north-west of the city.

"Puja" painting by English artist Jon Duplock, 2009 (jonduplock.com/) 

At the Raj Ghat, the earlier-rising Hindu faithful - at this time of day women in their cotton saris far outnumbering the men - were streaming out to perform their pujas and have their morning bathe in the waters of the holy Yamuna before the crowds gathered and the dhobis appeared. Only the pandits kept them company this early in the morning: in small shrines lining the banks of the river up to Nigambodh Ghat, where according to Delhi legend the Vedas emerged from the waters, the bells were ringing now for the morning Brahm Yagya, celebrating the creating and re-creating of the world over and over again, morning after morning. As the differently pitched bells sounded against the Sanskrit chants, so in the dark of the inner sanctum the camphor lamps circled the images of Vishnu and the marigold-strewn black stone Shiva lingams.
From deep inside the city - from the Maszid Kashmiri Katra in the south to Fatehpuri Maszid in the west, to the great Jama Maszid itself and on through to the elegant riverside minarets of the Zinat-ul-Masajid - the last cries of the dawn Azan could now be heard, each call slightly out of time with the one before it, so that the successive cries of spiritual longing and assertion came to the listener on the riverbank in a series of rolling waves. In the silence that followed the end of the call to prayer, the songs of the first Delhi birds could suddenly be heard: the argumentative chuckle of the babblers, the sharp clatter of the mynahs, the alternating clucking and squealing of the rosy parakeets, the angry exclamation of the brain fever bird, and from deep inside the canopy of the fruit trees in Zafar's gardens at Raushanara Bagh and Tis Hazari, the woody hot-weather echo of the koel.
(To be continued..)

Also in the series:
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 1  

About the sketches and paintings
The paintings I have used in this post are by two artists - Michael Kluckner and Jon Duplock. 
Michael is a Canadian artist and writer while Jon is an English artist. Both of them have painted / sketched India in their different styles. Both have gracefully allowed me to use these images. 
For more details, you could visit their websites mentioned below their works.

वाह ताज बोलिए!

पिछले सप्ताहांत आगरा और फतेहपुर सीकरी हो कर लौटा हूँ. ताजमहल, सिकन्दरा (अकबर का मकबरा) और फतेहपुर सीकरी देख कर.
जी, पहली बार.
ताजमहल की हजारों तस्वीरों ज़ेहन में लिए हुए था. फिर भी, असल चीज को देखना एक भौंचक्का कर देने वाला अनुभव था.
पूर्वी दरवाजे से पहली झलक में ऐसा लगा जैसे अँधेरे के पार एक जादुई संसार चमक रहा हो. और इस शानदार ईमारत के रु-ब-रु हो कर तो वाकई माना कि इसे संगमरमर में ग़ज़ल यूं ही नहीं कहा गया है. यह फख्र होता है कि दुनिया के पर्यटन नक़्शे पर इतनी कद्दावर निशानी हमारे पास है.
पर इसको दुनिया को परोसने के लिए थोड़ी मेहनत और करने की ज़रुरत है.
कमोबेश यही हालत फतेहपुर सीकरी और सिकन्दरा की है.
दोनों शानदार जगह हैं. पर अब नए ज़माने के लिए इन्हें, कहना चाहिए कि थोडा user - friendly बनाना चाहिए.
नए, पढ़े-लिखे, इतिहास में रुचि रखने वाले गाइड हों, कुछ ऑडियो-विजुअल तकनीक की मदद हो, गंदगी कम हो, बिजली की व्यवस्था पूरी हो (ताजमहल का संग्रहालय हम इसी लिए नहीं देख पाए क्यूंकि बिजली नहीं थी)... कुल मिला कर देखने वाले के समक्ष वो पुराना संसार जीवित कर देने की ललक और समझ हो तो क्या बात हो.
पर फिर भी, वाह ताज! तो कहा जायेगा, और अब पूर्णिमा की इक रात को वापिस आने का मौका तलाशा जायेगा.
लीजिये, कुछ तस्वीरें नज़र हैं -

सिकन्दरा (अकबर का मकबरा)

सिकन्दरा का मुख्य (दक्षिण) दरवाज़ा 

अकबर के मकबरे के भीतर से बाहर की ओर

बुलंद दरवाज़ा (फतेहपुर सीकरी)

 

फतेहपुर सीकरी के भीतर 

शेख सलीम चिश्ती की दरगाह 

    

सीकरी का दरवाज़ा 

ताज का पूर्वी दरवाज़ा 

पहली झलक 

वाह ताज! 

वाह ताज - एक बार फिर!

एक मीनार 

हाथ छुए तो गात मैला हो!

ताज के बराबर में मेहमानखाना 

ताज के बराबर में मस्जिद 

अक्स 

तालिबानी ऑटो? या, Your friendly neighborhood agony aunt?

मिलेनियम सिटी गुडगाँव के एक ऑटो में लिखे इस मजेदार फरमान को क्या कहा जाये, खुद ही फैसला कीजिये.
(चित्र के लिए माधव को धन्यवाद)

Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 1

In my post The Last Mughal, I had promised that I would serialize the portions of this book by William Dalrymple, depicting the daily lives of the Dilliwalas of those times - Indians and English.
This is the first in the series - Enjoy!

(Painting - Delhi Gate; taken from the Wikipedia)

During the early 1850s, it sometimes seemed as if the British and the Mughals lived not only in different mental worlds, but almost in different time zones.
The British were the first up: in the cantonments to the north of the Delhi civil lines, the bugle sounded at 3.30 a.m., a time when the poetic mushairas of the Mughals were still in full flow in the Red Fort, and while in the kothis of the courtesans in Chauri Bazar the dancing and ghazal singing were drawing to a close, and the girls were progressing to the more intimate stage of their duties. As the Mughal poets and courtesans raised their different tempos, sleepy, yawning Englishmen like Captain Robert Tytler, a fifty year old veteran of the 38th Native Infantry, or Lieutenant Harry Gambier, an eighteen-year-old Etonian newly arrived in India, would be sitting up in bed as their servants attempted to shave them and pull on their master's stockings. A long session of drill in the cantonment parade ground lay ahead.
Two hours later, by the time the sun was beginning to rise over the Yamuna, and the poets, the courtesans and their patrons were all heading back to bed to sleep off their long nights, not only the soldiers but also the British civilians would be up and about and taking their exercise. A woman like Harriet Tytler, the brisk and no-nonsense wife of Robert, or the English community's great beauty, the lovely young Annie Forrest, to whom Harry Gambier was already writing politely admiring letter, would have been back from their morning rides round the cantonment: in order to protect a lady's complexion, it was considered advisable to ride much after sunrise.
By six, Harriet would be busy supervising her large staff of servants in her screen-darkened bungalow. The first task was preparing for the enormous breakfast without which no English-man in Victorian India would consider starting his day: at the very least a selection of 'crumbled chops, brain cutlets, beef rissoles, devilled kidneys, whole spatchcocks, duck stews, Irish stews, mutton hashes, brawn of sheep's heads and trotters, not to mention an assortment of Indian dishes such as jhal-frazie, prawn do-piaza, chicken malai and beef Hussainee. Added to the list were a number of Anglo-Indian concoctions such as kidney toast Madras style, Madras fritters, and leftover meat minced and refried with ginger and chillies. Then of course there was the ultimate Anglo-Indian breakfast dish of kedgeree, a perennial favourite, even though in Delhi it was considered most inadvisable to eat fish in high summer*.
(*From the footnote: Overeating remained a leitmotif of British life in India right up to 1947. As late as 1926 Aldous Huxley was astonished by the sheer amount of food the imperial British were capable of consuming: 'Five meals a day - two breakfasts, luncheon, afternoon tea and dinner - are standard throughout India. A sixth is often added in the big towns where there are theatres and dances to justify late supper. The Indian who eats at most two meals a day, sometimes only one - too often none - is compelled to acknowledge his inferiority...The Indians are impressed by our gastronomic prowess. Our prestige is bound up with overeating. For the sake of empire the truly patriotic will sacrifice his liver and his colon, will pave the way for future apoplexies and cancers of the intestine...)

To be continued

The Why of Painting

Following is a beautiful quote by the renowned American painter Robert Henri, which I stumbled upon on the internet while researching some paintings.
Such a sublime truth it states with so much simplicity, that I could not resist sharing it with you. Here it is:

" The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture - however unreasonable this may sound. The picture, if a picture results, is a by-product and may be useful, valuable and interesting as a sign of what  has passed.
The object which is at the back of every true work of art, is the attainment of a state of being, a state of high functioning, a more than ordinary moment of existence."

(A painting by Robert Henri taken over internet from Artnet.com)

The Last Mughal

After the White Mughals and City of Djinns, the third book by William Dalrymple, which I have just finished reading, is The Last Mughal. And yet again, I have been rewarded with a thoroughly satiating, enjoyable & of course, hugely informative, read. It is painstakingly researched history served akin to an interesting story – complete with a thrilling plot, fleshed out characters, detailed atmosphere and background, and an end full of pathos.  

The Last Mughal is a heart-rending account of the historical events in Delhi during 1857, when emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar of the once mighty Mughal emperor made one last attempt to reclaim its fast fading glory from the British, by riding on the crest of Uprising of the Indian sepoys employed with the East India Company.

In absence of a strong leadership and a cohesive and sustained attack, however, the initiative of the rebels was soon lost, leading to the British company giving a final death blow to the Mughal empire. Bahadur Shah Zafar was deported with his family like an ordinary criminal to another British colony Rangoon, where he died unknown some years later. It was after this that the British became the undisputed masters of the whole of India for the next century or so. Interestingly, let me also put, it seems the idea of India actually took a shape after this.  

The Last Mughal is as much a story of the city of Delhi as it is of Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor.  The renowned author Khushwant Singh is right when he says in his appreciation of the book that it would “bring tears to the eyes of every true Dilliwallah”.

William Dalrymple has this rare ability (for a historian, that is) of bringing empathy to not only the human characters but also to the city, as an organic being, a living pulsating whole of people. With  insightful interpretations of volumnious notes, and riding on a beautiful language, he has created the Delhi of yore as also the detailed sequence of events beautifully. 

There are two Delhis, in fact. One is the Mughal Delhi of Lal Qila, Ballimaran, Paharganj et al, engrossed in its mushairas, mehfils, kabootarbaazi, bazaars and the like. The other is English Delhi, a sort of a little English town the Company were trying to recreate in and around the Metcalfe House, Ludlow Castle, Civil Lines, Flagstaff Tower etc, with their chhota haaziri and Sunday Mass and breakfasts. And both of them, although living side-by-side, are miles apart in their living styles. (Chapter 3 "An Uneasy Equilibrium" consists such a beautiful juxtaposition of their daily lives, which I would like to serialise for your reading pleasure sometime soon).  

Along with all this empathy, Dalrymple succeeds in maintaining a complete objectivity as a historian towards all the principal casts of characters, which puts lots of things in perspective.

While strongly recommending this book, I would go so far as to say that it is time the "dry-as-dust" history books in our educational curriculum were replaced with such elegant narrative history, so that an entire generation could understand its historical coordinates more meaningfully.