Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

But Mughal decline, when it came, was as steep as the ascent. During the eighteenth century, the emperor’s power dissolved amid royal infighting, corruption and military obsolescence; great parts of the empire, such as Hyderabad and Bengal, broke off into independence, and most of the rest was snapped up by the new sub-continental empire of the Maratha kings. Delhi was repeatedly attacked, most devastatingly in 1739, by the Persian imperial army which, under Nadir Shah, looted the city and slaughtered 20,000 of its inhabitants. This debacle demonstrated just how complete was the end of Mughal might: Nadir Shah returned to Persia with the Peacock Throne, built for Shah Jahan with over a tonne of pure gold and inset with 230 kilogrammes of gems, including the most famous in the world, the Koh-i-Noor diamond.

A century after that assault, an English traveller named Emma Roberts, standing atop the Qutub Minar, could see the dimmed effulgence of Shahjahanabad in the distance. In contrast to the enormous extent of what she called ‘old Delhi’ — the collapsed cities of the medieval dynasties (which she refers to collectively as the Pathans) and of the early Mughals — it could still, nonetheless, inspire awe:

The capital of the Mughal empire… the modern city, or Shahjahanabad, the designation by which it is distinguished by the natives, who have not yet fallen into the European habit of calling it New Delhi… stands in the centre of a sandy plain, surrounded on every side with the ruins of old Delhi, curiously contrasted with a new suburb, the villas belonging to Europeans attached to the residency, and with the cantonments lately erected for three regiments of sepoys… From the summit [of the Qutub Minar] the view is of the most sublime description; a desert, covered with ruins full of awful beauty, surrounds it on all sides, watered by the snake-like Yamuna, which winds its huge silvery folds along the crumbling remains of palaces and tombs. In the back-ground rise the dark lofty walls and frowning towers of an ancient fortress, the stronghold of the Pathan chiefs; and the eye, wandering over the stupendous and still beautiful fragments of former grandeur, rests at last upon the white and glittering mosques and minarets of the modern city, closing in the distance, and finely contrasting, by its luxuriant groves and richly flowering gardens, with the loneliness and desolation of the scene beneath.

Before the Mohammadan invasion, [this collection of collapsed cities] had been a place of great renown, many of the remains of Hindu architecture dividing the interest with those of the Muslim conquerors: the sepulchres of one hundred and eighty thousand saints and martyrs, belonging to the faithful, were, it is said, to be found amidst the wrecks of temples and palaces, before all had crumbled into the undistinguishable mass which now renders the greater part of the scene so desolate…

From the outside the view [of Shahjahanabad] is splendid; domes and mosques, cupolas and minarets, with the imperial palace frowning like a mountain of red granite, appear in the midst of groves of clustering trees, so thickly planted that the buildings have been compared, in Oriental imagery, to rocks of pearls and rubies, rising from an emerald sea. In approaching the city from the east bank of the Yamuna, the prospect realizes all that the imagination has pictured of Oriental magnificence; mosques and minarets glittering in the sun, some garlanded with wild creepers, others arrayed in all the pomp of gold, the exterior of the cupolas being covered with brilliant metal, and from Mount Mejnoon, over which a fine road now passes, the shining waters of the Yamuna gleaming in the distance, insulating Salimgarh, and disappearing behind the halls of the peacock-throne, the palace of the emperors, add another beautiful feature to the scene… [But] the glory of the Mughals has faded away, and their greatness departed… The celebrated gardens of Shalimar, with their cypress avenues, sparkling fountains, roseate bowers, and the delicious shade of their dark cedars, on which Shah Jahan, the most tasteful monarch in the world, is said to have lavished a crore of rupees (a million sterling), have been almost wholly surrendered to waste and desolation. 15

The wistfulness that touches this outsider’s account was as nothing compared to the paroxysm of nostalgia that had taken over the city itself. In the years preceding Emma Roberts’ visit, the aristocracy of autumnal Shahjahanbad found much of its remaining purpose in the writing and appreciation of a poetry which expresses more extravagantly perhaps than any other the sweet pain of passing. It was written both in Persian, the language of the Mughal court, and in Urdu, a language indigenous to India that had arisen over the previous thousand or so years from the encounter of the Sanskritic Delhi dialect with the Persian, Arabic and Turkish of western invaders. In this sense this poetry bore a family resemblance to poetry from those invading lands, in which the transitory nature of the worldly — of love, beauty and pleasure — had been an established theme for centuries. It was a theme that spoke, ultimately, of the wrench of devotion: for the devout poet must live among the passing wonders of the temporal world, all the time knowing that he must ultimately retreat from them into eternity. But the travails of eighteenth-century India added to this philosophical disposition a particularly experiential edge. There is nothing metaphorical about the “desolation” in this poem by Mir Taqi Mir, who was forced to flee the city after another Persian sacking, this time in 1756; arriving in splendid Lucknow, he was greeted by robed poets who looked with disdain at his rags:

To which place do I belong? You, men of the East, ask

And taunt and tease a poor man.

Delhi, which was once a city unique in the world:

The chosen and the gifted made it home.

Now it has been razed and ruined by the hammer of fate.

I come from that desolation. 16

It says much about the spirit of Delhi that this mood, this sense of living in the aftermath, has dominated the city’s literature until our own time. The capital of a fast-growing and dizzyingly populous nation it might be, but Delhi’s writers have consistently seen it as a city of ruins and they have directed their creativity to expressing that particular spiritual emaciation that comes from being cut off from one’s own past. This is both the reality and the fantasy of Delhi: the city is always already destroyed. The strange edge of desperation that the most distant outsiders seem to acquire when they come here derives from this — as if everyone becomes, by virtue of being in Delhi, a survivor, someone living on after the loss of everything they held dear. Maybe the present book, so apparently taken up with contemporary things, merely reproduces this ancient literary mood, for my ultimate experience of this city where nothing endures is also that of being bereft. Perhaps my father would say the same.

The high-flown regret of the eighteenth century was intensified into apocalypse some twenty years after Emma Roberts’ visit, when the magnificently senescent city about which she rhapsodised was definitively smashed by her compatriots.

By that time the major force in the sub-continent was the British East India Company, a massive monopoly engaged in the production and trade of commodities such as silk, cotton, indigo, saltpetre and opium. Such an enterprise required significant control over Indian land, labour and law, and, during the course of the eighteenth century, the corporation had engaged in ambitious military campaigns to achieve this, conquering much of the sub-continent and subduing the Marathas. The Mughal emperor had become a cipher: his own armies disbanded, he now lived in the Red Fort under the protection of the Company’s forces.