Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

The friend adds,

“And her husband had even been to Pakistan! And he came back with stories of all the good things you can experience there!”

“Anyone who comes here from Pakistan has to hear these things,” says Sadia. “Before, at least, people kept such thoughts to themselves, but now they’re open about them. That’s why I don’t go out anymore. I can’t listen to people talking like that.

“Look at how Muslims live in this city. Look at all the young Muslims who are turned away whenever they try to rent an apartment. Did you know pizza companies don’t deliver to Muslim areas? I was at a friend’s house and I called to order a pizza, and the man said, ‘Madam, we don’t deliver in those areas.’ ‘What do you mean by those areas ?’ I shouted at him.”

She addresses her friend from Lahore.

“What did that woman tell you at the party last night? She asked you if you wanted a ride home and you told her you were staying in Nizamuddin. And this woman — she’s a friend of theirs! — said, ‘Are you crazy? I can’t go to a Muslim area at eleven at night!’ Can you believe it? These are people who studied at the best schools. And they think it is unsafe to come to Nizamuddin. These are the people who live in Jor Bagh, who wear high fashion, drink wine and send their children to American universities. They want to believe they are secular but they are not. They say it constantly because it is their fantasy about themselves.”

Sadia is making a fuss over her Pakistani friends while they are here, showing them that in her house, at least, the old culture is still alive. They talk about the fabulous meals they have had with her. In a couple of days, an evening of Sufi music is to happen in her house. She invites me to come too: her son will play, and a young qawwali singer she has taken under her wing. There will be musicians from Iran.

“I have been so exhausted recently,” she says. “I wanted to have an evening to replenish my soul, with people I love around me, and with music and poetry.”

I do not deny the glamour of the name of Delhi or the stories that cling about its dead and forgotten cities. But I venture to say this, that if we want to draw happy omens for the future the less we say about the history of Delhi the better. Modern Delhi is only 250 years old. It was only the capital of the Moguls in the expiring years of their régime, and it was only the capital of their collective rule for little more than 100 years. Of course, there were capitals there before it, but all have perished, one after another. We know that the whole environment of Delhi is a mass of deserted ruins and graves, and they present to the visitor, I think, the most solemn picture you can conceive of the mutability of human greatness… His Majesty’s Government will be on much surer ground if instead of saying anything about the dead capitals of the past they try to create a living capital in the future.

— Lord Curzon, former viceroy of India, speaking in the House of Lords in February 1912 against the British government’s recent decision to move the Indian capital from Calcutta to Delhi 19

With the assaults of 1857, another metropolis, it seemed, had joined the perennial fate of cities built at Delhi. And in the years thereafter, Delhi became an image for European travellers of the impermanence and folly of human ambition. In 1912, an Italian poet landed there in search of heat to ease his tuberculosis. Journeying southwards from Shahjahanabad across the plain that led to the Qutub Minar, he witnessed a:

… transition from the living city to the city of the dead. Finally there are no more houses inhabited by humans; those populated by monkeys have begun… The ruins extend into infinity; the entire steppe, as far as the eye can see and beyond, is the vast cemetery of a city destroyed and rebuilt ten times over in the space of four thousand years… Here, in this desert of rubbish, the reigning chaos of neglect and oblivion is such that the researcher must have the giddy sensation of being hurled five hundred, a thousand, thirty thousand years back into the abyss of time: from the final Islamic splendour of the Great Moghol to the dark Brahminism of the imposing early Jain and Pali structures, in the dim night of the Vedic origins…

I find native and European scholars on the job: archaeologists, experts, architects making models and taking measurements. England is readying for a colossal undertaking: breaking into the bone cave these dead cities are immured within, restoring the ruins, and reordering them decorously in the light of day. A worthy undertaking, yet one I doubt will be favourable to the poetry of these memories. I do indeed thank heaven I am able to visit them today in their state of desolate neglect. 20

But the poet viewed these goings-on through a tuberculose haze. The “colossal undertaking” for which England was readying was not one of restoration. Their project, like so many Delhi rulers before them, was to level and build again. From that year onwards, the great majority of these “unending ruins” was razed and the next ‘New Delhi’ spread out, like a fresh table cloth over the remains of yesterday’s dinner, on top.

The declaration by King George V that the capital of British India would be moved from Calcutta to Delhi had come in 1911. Calcutta had become a problematic centre for the British. Educated Bengalis, increasingly dismayed by their political dispossession, had made the British capital also the principal laboratory of anti-imperial thought. Gauche attempts to control Bengali unrest through policies of ‘divide and rule’ had backfired. The British decided to run elsewhere, and Delhi was the obvious choice. In a letter of 1911, the viceroy, Lord Hardinge, wrote:

Delhi is still a name to conjure with. It is intimately associated in the minds of Hindus with sacred legends which go back even beyond the dawn of history… The Purana Kila still marks the site of the city which they founded and called Indraprastha, barely three miles from the south gate of the modern city of Delhi. To the Mahommedans it would be a source of unbounded gratification to see the ancient capital of the Moguls restored to its proud position as the seat of Empire. Throughout India, as far south as the Mahommedan conquest extended, every walled town has its ‘Delhi gate’… The change would strike the imagination of the people of India as nothing else could do, and would send a wave of enthusiasm throughout the country, and would be accepted by all as the assertion of an unfaltering determination to maintain British rule in India. It would be hailed with joy by the Ruling Chiefs and the races of Northern India, and would be warmly welcomed by the vast majority of Indians throughout the continent. 21

But despite these appeals to Delhi’s glorious past, the British were determined to build there a city that would negate everything it had previously been. The imperialists would design a city so geometrically European that it would defeat, with its very layout, the benighted orientalism of all its past and set the stage for a new, enlightened future.

In the British city there would be none of those narrow streets with which Shahjahanabad — and numberless other places with a similar climate, from Toledo to Venice to Baghdad — had prevented direct sun from reaching pedestrians. Such tiny lanes, with their unpredictable twists and windowless walls, filled Englishmen with unease. British urban theory was still governed by nineteenth-century ‘miasmic’ myths of pathology, which held that diseases arose out of bad or stale air, and, from the British perspective, Shahjahanabad was a breeding ground, not only for the insidious spells and complots of the oriental, whom white men would never be able to pursue through such winding alleys, but also for foul vapours, madness and disease. The British city would be conceived to attract light and air to disperse the miasma: the architect, Edwin Lutyens, was a lover of the English countryside and took his inspiration from the theories of Ebenezer Howard, whose book propounding the material and spiritual advantages of garden cities was just then generating an intellectual movement on both sides of the Atlantic. Lutyens determined that Delhi would be a combination of city and countryside, like Howard’s utopia: buildings would be sparse, low, and separated by expansive gardens; wide roads and parks would keep the city fresh and well ventilated; a large lake, formed by damming the Yamuna, would give city dwellers access to water and open skies (though this part of the plan was never realised). All in all, a reversal: where Shahjahanabad’s streets were narrow and labyrinthine, New Delhi would have vast, geometrical avenues; where commerce in the old city took place in a profusion of packed bazaars, it would be confined in the new to a pillared circle, eventually named Connaught Circus. Where Shahjahanabad was a city, it could be said, New Delhi was a bureaucratic village — for though it would contain administrative buildings of stupendous size and grandeur, its dispersed, pastoral layout, whose open spaces were emptily monumental, left few places for any kind of urban bustle. There was almost no provision in the plan for venues of pleasure and congregation, nor for merchants and their trades, nor for housing for the poor — all of which had been conspicuous features of the old city.