Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 7

I resume here with my serialisation of  excerpts from a great book "The Last Mughal" by William Dalrymple. These excerpts are culled from the chapter "An Uneasy Equilibrium'', which vividly describes the daily lives of Delhiwallahs during the reign of Bahadur Shah  Zafar. I insist you read right from Part-1 and be transported to the Delhi of yore.  William Dalrymple has most graciously allowed me to use these excerpts for our reading pleasure.   

Delhiwallahs used to like to surprise visitors from outside by taking them to eat there without telling them of 'the pot of hot chillis" with which Jani would marinate his kebabs. Maulvi Muhammad Baqar's son, the young poet Azad, told of one stranger to Delhi who 'hadn't eaten for a whole day. He stretched his jaws wide and fell on it [the kebab]. And instantly it was as if his brains had been blown out of his mouth by gunpowder. He leapt back with a howl. [But the Delhiwallah who brought him replied:] "we live here only for this sharp taste".
Zafar was also fond of a little chilli in his dinner, which he began to eat no earlier than 10:30pm, a time when most of the Brisits were already well tucked up in their beds. Quail stew, venison, lamb kidneys on sweet nan called shir mal, yakhni, fish kebabs, and meat stewed with oranges were Zafar's favourite dishes, though on festive occassions the Red Fort kitchens were capable of producing astonishingly varied and prodigious quantities of Mughlai cuisine: the Bazm-i-Akhir describes a feast consisting of twenty-five varieties of bread, twenty-five different kinds of pilaos and biryanis, thirty-five different sorts of spiced stews and curries, and fifty different puddings, as well as remarkable varieties of relishes and pickles, all eaten to the sound of singers performing ghazals, while the fragrance of musk, saffron, sandalwood and rosewater filled the air.
Whatever the dish, Zafar was known to like his food heavily spiced - and he was most upset when his friend, prime minister and personal physician, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, banned him from eating 'cayene pepper' in August 1852, following a series of digestive disorders. Another of Zafar's great pleasures, mango jam, was also forbidden by the hakim, who said that Zafar's excessive indulgence in it gave him diarrhoea...

Ghalib
Image from the internet

For Ghalib, the late evening was also the time for indulging in mango-related pleasures, especially the exquisitely small, sweet chausa mango, a taste he shared with many other discerning Delhiwallahs, past and present. At one gathering, a group of Delhi intellectuals were discussing what qualities a good mango should have: 'In my view', said Ghalib, 'there are only two essential points about mangoes - they should be sweet and they should be plentiful'. In his old age he became worried about his declining appetite for his favourite fruit and wrote to a friend to express his anxieties. He never ate an evening meal, he told his correspondent; instead, on hot summer nights he would 'sit down to eat the mangoes when my food was fully digested, and I tell you bluntly, I would eat them until my belly was bloated and I could hardly breathe. Even now I eat them at the same time of day, but not more than ten or twelve, or if they are of the large kind, only six or seven'.
There was one another great pleasure that Ghalib reserved for the cover of darkness. 'There are seventeen bottles of good wine in the pantry, 'he wrote to one friend, describing his idea of perfection. 'So I read all day and drink all night'.

Himmat Khan, the famous blind sitar player
photo from The Last Mughal

As Ghalib was finishing his mangoes and looking forward to his bottle of wine, as the exhausted labourers were heading home to their villages before the muhalla gates were locked for the night, and as Saligram and the money lenders began finally shutting up their shops in Chandni Chowk, so in the Fort dinner was drawing to a close. This was the signal for Zafar's hookah to be brought and the evening's entertainment to begin. This could take a number of forms: ghazals from Tanras Khan; the instrumental playing of a group of sarangi players, or the court storytellers and troupes of the Fort's dancing girls. Most celebrated of all was Himmat Khan, Zafar's famous blind sitar player: 'Nobody came close to him in Dhrupad,' thought Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan...

Moonlight from Red Fort

On other occassions, when Zafar felt the need for some peace, one of his greatest pleasures was to play chess while waiting for the new moon to come up. At other times, he is described as simply sitting after dinner and 'enjoying the moonlight'.

Also in the series
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 1
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 2
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 3
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 4
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 5
Delhi - Those Times and Lives - 6