Delhi Darshan Read online

  GILES TILLOTSON

  DELHI DARSHAN

  The History and Monuments of India’s Capital

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  MONUMENTS IN HISTORY

  The Site

  New Foundations: The ‘Slave’ Dynasty

  Expansion and Division: Khaljis and Tughluqs

  Death in the Park: Sayyids and Lodis

  On the River: The Great Mughals

  Staying On: The Late Mughals

  Starting Anew: The British

  Partition and Growth: Independent India

  SUGGESTED ROUTES

  Shahjahanabad: Red Fort and Jami Masjid

  Humayun’s Tomb and Lodi Road

  The Qutb Minar and Mehrauli

  Rajpath and Janpath

  Kashmiri Gate and Beyond

  Central New Delhi—North

  Central New Delhi—South

  Rajghat to the Lotus Temple

  Hauz Khas to Tughluqabad

  Illustrations

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  Copyright

  To Rebekah and Hadassah

  Introduction

  Its origin and antiquity may be disputed, but Delhi has without doubt been a major city—even a capital city, on and off—for at least a thousand years. It has served as a centre of power for Rajput clans, for the first sultans, for Mughal emperors, for the administrators of the British Raj in the early twentieth century, and for India’s federal government since Independence in 1947. Successive regimes established themselves on adjacent or overlapping sites, adding to Delhi’s vertical layers and its horizontal spread. Old guidebooks speak of the ‘seven cities of Delhi’; but these were all Islamic citadels, built before the coming of the British, and in recent times archaeologists have added more cities to the bottom of the tally just as developers have added many more to its top.

  The Mughals built their walled city in the seventeenth century by the riverbank, as far away as topography would permit from the earliest settlements. Three centuries later the British added their geometrically planned extravagance in the mostly empty centre, between the Mughal city in the north and the ruined sultanate forts in the south. In the late twentieth century, new housing colonies filled up all the spaces in between, and in the new millennium the spread has extended beyond those historic boundary markers, both south-westwards into the farmlands of the hinterland and eastwards across the Yamuna river, to create the new satellite cities of Gurgaon and Noida. The aggregate—officially called the National Capital Region—is today among the largest and fastest-growing urban conurbations in the world.

  Neither history nor geography, however, fully conveys the city’s characteristic layering: the constant interaction between its present and its past. The past informs the present in obvious ways, as we live amid historic sites; but the present also informs the past in the sense that we encounter old sites in our own time, through the lens of recent use. This book, intended as an introduction for anyone who lives in or visits the city, explores its sites not only in relation to their own time, but in terms of what subsequent periods have made of them, examining some of their accumulated meanings and myths.

  To residents of Delhi, for example, the famous India Gate is not just a war memorial; for a long time it has also been a favoured place to go for an ice cream on a hot summer night, and lately it has become a place where members of civil society collect to protest miscarriages of justice. Political protesters traditionally prefer to congregate at Jantar Mantar, an eighteenth-century observatory, despite periodic attempts by the authorities to prohibit its use for politics. The Lodi Gardens is not just the location of some early tombs but a place for picnicking, jogging and falling in love; it is one of the few spaces where public displays of affection are tolerated, perhaps because the relative affluence of the average Lodi Gardens visitor deters officious intervention. The Red Fort, built by the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, now serves as the podium for an annual speech to the nation by the prime minister on Independence Day. Such later uses are as important as the original functions in explaining how the buildings are seen today.

  The Purana Qila, or ‘old fort’, marks a point of origin or new beginning in various time zones. Built in the sixteenth century, it is by no means the oldest fort in Delhi, despite its name: it is called ‘purana’ because it predates the walled city of Shah Jahan and was the Mughals’ first establishment in Delhi. It is also popularly believed to mark the site of Indraprastha—the capital of the Pandavas, the heroes of the Mahabharata—taking the history of the city into India’s epic past. Modern excavations have indeed revealed very early pottery remains, confirming that identification for those who are willing to believe in it. But the archaeologists could move into the site only after the departure of the refugees: at the time of Independence and Partition in 1947, and for some years afterwards, the enclosed sanctuary of the Purana Qila was used as a transit camp by many who were escaping communal violence in the old city or preparing to migrate to Pakistan; and later some of those who had fled from it. Those who came from the western part of Punjab form a significant core of Delhi’s senior generation, and for some of them the ‘old fort’ was the site of their new beginning, in a new nation.

  Such layering is everywhere. Humayun’s tomb is not only the burial place of one of the early Mughal emperors, it is also the place where his last ruling descendant, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was arrested, at the bloody denouement of the 1857 uprisings. Driving around the elegant avenues of New Delhi, lined by government servants’ bungalows protected by high fences and armed guards, you might at first take the scene as typical of Indian officialdom: such apparent self-importance! But look again and you realize that nothing has changed since the 1930s; that this is a colonial city after all, modelled in part on a military cantonment. On the other hand, few people today would regard Rashtrapati Bhavan (the former Viceroy’s House) or the Secretariats as legacies of colonial rule: they may be massive and imperial, but they are more popularly associated with independent India’s successive presidents and ministers. They are proud symbols not of the past but of the present.

  Just as the past erupts into the present, so the present refashions the past according to its own compulsions. This is what makes Delhi so intriguing and makes spending time in it worthwhile. Highly congested and with poor infrastructure, Delhi is a difficult city to live or move around in, but its shortcomings fade if we have an eye for its many layers. The chapters of this book together present a concise history of the city, focusing on its most prominent people and places. A brief concluding section describes some suggested routes for exploring the city. I have avoided cluttering the text with the scholarly apparatus of notes and references. Readers who are curious about my sources for particular pieces of information and quotations, or just want to know more, can look up the section titled Further Reading.

  Having thus conveyed an impression of a wish to be at once brief, authoritative and helpful, I should add that this short book is very much a personal view of Delhi which reflects my own prejudices and preoccupations. Much has been written about the city, especially in recent years, by a number of writers with a range of approaches and specialist expertise. I point to some of this in Further Reading. I have learnt from and draw from this writing; but I have made no attempt to be comprehensive or encyclopaedic. I am an architectural historian, with a range of interests in Rajput, sultanate, Mughal, colonial and modern architecture. I look at design, but I also look at how any building is rooted in history, often in more than one period. So if you share my interests in history, architecture and design—and whether you know Delhi less well, as well, or better than I do—I hope that yo
u will find something of pleasure and profit in reading my take on it.

  Map of Delhi c. 1930, showing the roads of New Delhi laid out between Shahjahanabad in the north and the ruined sultanate cities in the south

  Monuments in History

  The Site

  A river flows from north to south. A range of low hills rises close to the bank at a northern point but then pursues its own diverging line to the south-west. A broken arc of high ground reconnects the hills with the river in the south, completing the boundary of a rough triangular space of flat earth. It is a natural sanctuary, at once watered and sheltered, fertile and of large extent. But no indigenous tribe inhabits this domain. Almost everyone who has ever lived here is of immigrant stock of one kind or another: the Rajput clans and Turkic invaders who built the first cities; the British who began another; the refugees from partitioned Punjab who came here in 1947; the labourers from Rajasthan and Bihar; and the middle-class hopefuls who still come from all parts of India in ever-increasing numbers. But this is no melting pot, as many communities retain their distinct identities—like the proud Punjabis—and even specific residential zones, like the cohesive Bengalis. This is Delhi, a conglomerate of cities built by rulers with dreams of unity and permanence, inhabited by a mixed and ever-changing population.

  The citizens of Delhi are not bound together by ties of common culture or even language. Their sense of identity is drawn from the place itself, from the urban spaces that they share. Delhi’s distinctive character is physical in kind: it consists of buildings in a landscape. The points of reference on our mental map are the forts and tombs of the Mughals; the bungalows, markets and roundabouts of the British period; and the ‘bhavans’, the administrative and cultural institutions of the post-Independence era. Many of the place names—even those of housing colonies like Lodi Estate—evoke ancient dynasties, the landlords of the past, as if we all live in rented houses rather than ones that we built ourselves.

  The first name that we must consider in detail, though, is that of Delhi itself. Its origin and meaning are forgotten. Some historians interpret it to mean ‘threshold’, marking it as the point of entry into India for conquerors from the other side of the Hindu Kush. A rival claim associates it with an earlier and more local hero, Raja Dhilu. Each theory has its confident adherents but neither of them persuades everyone. What we can be sure of, though, is that the current and universally accepted spelling gained currency only in the nineteenth century and was formulated by the British. And it is wrong. It captures neither the spelling nor the pronunciation of the name in Hindi, which is more accurately rendered as ‘Dilli’. The now official ‘Delhi’ is in fact simply a sloppy mis-transliteration of the Urdu version. A correct transliteration would be ‘Dehli’, which was indeed the form that was used by Europeans earlier, but was somehow lost. It is ironic that nationalist politicians, eager to cleanse the country of traces of colonialism, have changed the hybrid but euphonious names of many other cities, such as Bombay, Calcutta and Bangalore, replacing them with pedantic transliterations from the regional languages, but they have been content to leave the name of the national capital in its mangled form. Some old-fashioned scholars still call it Dehli. Subeditors correct them.

  New Foundations: The ‘Slave’ Dynasty

  In 1192, Muhammad bin Sam, the sultan of Ghur in present-day Afghanistan, crossed the Indus river. This was not his first visit to India, and an alliance of Rajput rulers in northern India—determined to make it his last—assembled its armies at Tarain to confront him. But they were defeated, and in the following year the Ghurid forces reached the Yamuna river and swept into Rajasthan to take possession of both Delhi and Ajmer, cities associated with the legendary Rajput leader Prithviraj Chauhan.

  This outcome seems to have taken everyone by surprise. It inspired—either at the time or (more probably) later—an epic Rajasthani poem, the main source of our knowledge of Prithviraj, celebrating his heroism and lamenting his defeat. The conquest may even have surprised the victor himself and was probably not what he intended. His expedition was planned as a temporary raid, following a well-established pattern. A few generations earlier, in the opening decades of the twelfth century, another sultan, Mahmud of Ghazni, had made a series of almost annual incursions into India. He targeted rich temple towns because his object was not conquest but loot.

  Muhammad of Ghur had already imitated this example once and possibly had the same purpose again. He certainly had no plans to settle, given India’s uncongenial climate and the need to return and protect his homeland. But having occupied the Rajput territories, he left behind his principal general, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, to rule in his name as a Ghurid viceroy. Things continued in this way for over a decade with Qutb-ud-din based in Delhi. But when Muhammad of Ghur was assassinated in 1206, rather than pledging his allegiance to his successor, Qutb-ud-din declared himself independent, thus establishing a new political entity, known as the Delhi Sultanate.

  The history of Delhi from this moment on is fairly well-documented. Parts of the cities built by Qutb-ud-din and his successors still survive, as do court histories that record their trials and triumphs. But it is perhaps not surprising to find that many people are dissatisfied that the history of India’s capital city should begin with a defeat at foreign hands. Nationalist historians, and even dispassionate antiquarians, would like to be able to flesh out the period before the conquest. The problem is that what we have is scanty and inconclusive.

  There is, to begin with, a strong and long-standing tradition that associates Delhi with Indraprastha, the capital of the Pandavas, heroes of the national epic, the Mahabharata. Believers point to a village, surviving until a hundred years ago, called Indarpat, contained within but predating the Purana Qila, a fort of the Mughal period. The site is certainly ancient, but professional historians and archaeologists tread warily in a field that mixes emotion, religion and politics. They have excavated some potsherds of a type known as ‘painted greyware’, which is dated to c.1000 BC, but it requires a leap of faith to see this as evidence in support of the myth.

  From the more immediate pre-conquest era, we have a few names—such as that of the ruler Anang Pal—and some locations that are clearly connected with them, such as Anangpur. We have coins and potsherds. There are even some significant monuments, like the large masonry reservoir known as the Suraj Kund, believed to have been built in the tenth century. But these fragments of history are strung together by doubts and questions, rather than by facts. Did rulers like Suraj Pal, known only from bardic sources, really exist, and if so, when? How do the kings mentioned in various inscriptions relate to each other dynastically?

  Despite the uncertainty, a traditional scholarly view persists that Delhi’s oldest and probably first fortification wall, known as Lal Kot, located at the south-western extremity of modern Delhi, was built by the Tomar Rajputs in the eleventh century. Some time in the twelfth century this fort was captured by another Rajput clan, the Chauhans, who came from Sambhar in Rajasthan. The most famous member of this dynasty, Prithviraj, also known as Rai Pithora, doubled the size of Lal Kot and renamed it after himself, Qila Rai Pithora, only to lose it soon afterwards to the invading armies of Muhammad of Ghur.

  This inconvenient historical episode cannot be undone but it can be symbolically reversed. In 2002 (that is 810 years after the event), a section of crumbling wall, identified as part of Qila Rai Pithora, was patched up, and the Delhi Development Authority replaced the surrounding debris with verdant landscaping to create a public park. At its heart, perched on top of a rather uninspiring interpretation centre, is an enormous bronze equestrian statue of Prithviraj, bow and arrow at the ready, all set to reconquer. Even the pigeons—its most numerous devotees—look restless. The whole complex was inaugurated by L.K. Advani, at the time minister of home affairs in the central government, and a prominent member of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which was then (as now) widely perceived as adept at harnessing Hindu religious sentiment. A nearby informat
ion board mentions the Chauhan capture of Delhi from the Tomars and describes the extended Qila Rai Pithora as ‘the first of the so-called seven cities of Delhi’. Er . . . one second. That phrase about the seven cities was coined by colonial-era historians to describe the sultanate and Mughal sites. There is today a well-established practice of pseudo-scholarship that involves reattributing Islamic monuments to Hindu authorship. But there is a nuance here. There really was a pre-existing fort that the Ghurid forces captured and used, so in this case the reattribution is not unreasonable. Even so, deciding that a given stretch of wall was a part of Prithviraj’s fort and sticking a massive statue of him on it rather smacks of trying to replace the monuments of Delhi’s missing Hindu past.

  The Ghurid general, Qutb-ud-din Aibak, developed the fort that he had wrested from Prithviraj Chauhan, strengthening its defences and constructing within it the new buildings required for the first capital of the sultanate. These included a congregational mosque, aptly (though probably only later) named Quwwatu’l-Islam, the ‘Might of Islam’, and the towering Qutb Minar, standing at its south-eastern corner.

  Some of the material remains of the Rajput period survive in recycled form. As the archaeologist Y.D. Sharma noted, an inscription at the eastern entrance proudly records how no fewer than twenty-seven Hindu and Jain temples, perhaps dating from the Tomar period, which once stood in the Qila Rai Pithora or in its vicinity, were demolished to provide material for the building of the Quwwatu’l-Islam. The colonnade that encloses the mosque’s earliest and inner courtyard is entirely composed of temple columns. Though here redeployed in the service of a different religion, they still bear the carvings that relate to their former use: depictions of hanging bells, overflowing pots, the mask-like kirtimukha or ‘face of fortune’, abundant foliage and even, in a few cases, figures of human form. It is hard to know whether Qutb-ud-din appreciated this exquisite work. Many of the columns have been cut and reassembled to make them fit, which hardly suggests a connoisseur’s eye, and it is possible that the carving was once concealed under plaster. Some Hindu idols were originally inserted face down at the thresholds, which indicates a more plausible interpretation of the whole project as a gesture of intimidation over those he had conquered. So too does the Qutb Minar, the tower that stands outside but looms over the courtyard. Nearly 240 feet high, this minar is rather taller than is required for the muezzin to give the call to prayer—indeed anyone calling from the top would go unheard—and it makes more sense as a splendid tower of victory. It certainly casts a long shadow.