Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

In 1857, the Delhi ‘sepoys’ — Indian soldiers serving in the Company’s armies, whose cantonments Roberts had seen from the Qutub Minar — joined in a sudden uprising against the Company administration. Sepoys in Delhi killed British soldiers and officials and took over the walled city. The British, shaken and terrified, regrouped, blew their way into the city with explosives and, after a devastating battle, suppressed the rebels. There followed an orgy of looting and revenge that terrified even the perpetrators. Tens of thousands of residents of the city were hung or shot, and many more fled. Though the uprising had involved Hindu and Muslim rebels equally, British reprisals were directed most severely against the latter, because they controlled the political establishment, and because there were fears of a holy war in the name of the Muslim emperor. The emperor was tried and exiled to Rangoon; several members of his family were executed. Most Muslim refugees were prevented from ever returning to Delhi; years later they were still squatting in ruined Mughal tombs to the south, exposed and dispossessed — some of them among the most cultivated and, until recently, the richest, people in the world. Shahjahanabad’s Mughal culture of gardens, harems, merchants and poetry was finished overnight.

Mirza Ghalib, a Muslim aristocrat, the greatest of Shahjahanabad’s many Urdu and Persian poets, described the aftermath of 1857 in his letters. Because of his affectionate relationship to the British, he had been allowed to stay in the city, but most of his friends had fled:

. . leaving behind them houses full of furnishings and treasures beyond price These… men of noble lineage had several houses and halls and palaces, all adjoining one another, and it is certain that if one measured the land on which they stood it would equal the area of a village, if not a town. These great palaces, left without a soul to attend them, were utterly looted and laid waste, though some of the less valuable, heavier things, such as the drapings of the large halls, and pavilions and canopies and… carpets, had been left as they were. Suddenly one night… these things caught fire. The flames rose high, and stone and timber, doors and walls, were all consumed by fire. These buildings lie to the west of my house, and are so near that from my roof at midnight I could see everything in the light of the leaping flames, and feel the heat on my face and the smoke in my eyes, and the ash falling on my body, for a westerly wind was blowing at the time. Songs sung in a neighbour’s house are, as it were, gifts which it sends; how then should not fire in a neighbour’s house send gifts of ashes?

About the princes no more than this can be said, that some fell victim to the rifle bullet and were sent into the jaws of the dragon of death, and the souls of some froze in the noose of the hangman’s rope, and some lie in prisons, and some are wanderers on the face of the earth. 17

For Ghalib, the city was dead, and with it, its culture and even its languages. In clearing ground for their boulevards, barracks and military grounds, the British had destroyed not only houses and mosques but also priceless libraries, so that much of the physical record of Urdu literature had ceased to exist. The Muslim nobles who practised and patronised Urdu culture had disappeared too, and those who came to replace them were, as far as Ghalib was concerned, a barbaric rabble. Quoting a verse from a friend’s letter in praise of Urdu — “My friend, this is the language Delhi people speak” — he wrote terminally:

My good sir, “Delhi people” now means Hindus, or artisans, or soldiers, or Punjabis or Englishmen. Which of these speak the language which you are praising?… The city has become a desert, and now that the wells are gone and water is something rare and precious, it will be a desert like that of Karbala. My God! Delhi people still pride themselves on Delhi language! What pathetic faith! My dear man, when Urdu Bazaar is no more, where is Urdu? By God, Delhi is no more a city, but a camp, a cantonment. No Fort, no city, no bazaars, no watercourses. 18

“It’s difficult to relate to the city of Delhi anymore,” says Sadia Dehlvi,* “especially to the people of Delhi.”

As a member of one of Delhi’s old and august Muslim families, Sadia still looks back to the culture mourned by Ghalib in the years after 1857 as her culture.

She has written several books about Sufism, a breed of Islamic mysticism that entered the sub-continent from Persia around 1200 and produced a particularly vibrant intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic culture in north India, drawing on, and in turn influencing, the traditions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims alike. Such intermingling was facilitated by Sufism’s universalist current, which rejected as false the appearance of division and difference, and proclaimed that the ultimate good was one, without label or preference. Sufi mystics also liked to eschew the authority of priests, and developed a moral language that rejected external rules and codes, asserting that right behaviour originated from inner wisdom and conscience. Fondly remembered by liberals, especially from the older elite, Sufism is remembered today as north India’s now-departed aphrodisiac, which brought disparate groups together and spawned from their encounter a shared civilisation rich in music, philosophy and parables.

“One of the only places I really relate to, that I love from the core of my heart, is the shrine of Nizamuddin Auliya. It represents the continuity of the city, at least of the last 700 years: its culture, its soul, its language, its poetry. Go there today and you will see rich and poor, Hindu and Muslim, Indians and foreigners — because Hazrat Nizamuddin continues to foster a culture of equality just as he did in his lifetime.”

The fourteenth-century saint, Nizamuddin Auliya, is a towering figure in the history of Delhi, and one of the few personalities to supply any true coherence to its scattered history. The anniversary of Nizamuddin’s death still brings to his shrine pilgrims from all over north India, who sleep for a week on the streets around, cooking their meals on the sidewalks and sleeping, for safety, under the few hundred buses in which they have made their journey.

Preaching renunciation, love and the unity of all forms of spiritual life, Nizamuddin kept away from those in power and advised his followers to do the same, but he was an outspoken political commentator — not only excoriating rulers for injustice but also praising them for wise government; he said, for instance, of the sultan Iltutmish that “more than his wars or his conquests, it is with the water supply he has built for the people of Delhi that he has won his place in heaven.” Most conspicuously, perhaps, Nizamuddin Auliya was instrumental in fostering, through his disciple Amir Khusrau the ecstatic music form known as ‘qawwali’, which fused Indian, Arabic and Persian styles of music to bring novelty to the music assemblies at Nizamuddin’s hospice. Qawwali became the characteristic form of Sufi devotional expression, one that dismayed orthodox Muslims because it was self-consciously pluralistic, drawing on older, Hindu, styles of music and poetry, and thus establishing a spiritual community that crossed religious divides. To this day, qawwalis are sung at Nizamuddin’s shrine every Thursday evening by some of the same families whose ancestors were trained in the art by Amir Khusrau 700 years ago.

Sadia’s house is in nearby Nizamuddin East, part of the neighbourhood named after the saint, an area of parks and blossoms, whose dreamy views of Mughal tombs and aristocratically unfashionable shops endear it to foreign newspaper correspondents.

“My family has been in Delhi since the days of the emperor Shah Jahan. We were successful merchants, and we owned almost the whole of Sadar Bazaar, where we controlled much of the wholesale trade. We had our own law courts: we didn’t use the British courts. Even now my family avoids filing cases in the official legal system.”