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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Interview |
The Transformations of Delhi
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| A conversation on Delhi’s rise and fall and rise |
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Published : 1 January 2011 |
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To mark the anniversary of Delhi’s 100th year as India’s capital, we sat down with two
distinguished Dilliwallas for a wide-ranging discussion about the twists and turns of
the city’s long history.
WILLIAM DALRYMPLE first came to live in Delhi in 1984, then returned in 1989 to write
one of the classic books about the capital, City of Djinns; he has lived here on and off for the
past two decades, and written a series of best-selling histories and travelogues, from White
Mughals to Nine Lives.
MAHMOOD FAROOQUI, a writer, historian and performer, arrived at about the same
time, and has since co-directed the acclaimed film Peepli (Live), penned a history of the
Mutiny of 1857, and spearheaded a revival of Dastangoi, the lost art of Urdu storytelling. Our
conversation took place over lunch on a sunny December afternoon at Dalrymple’s farmhouse
in Mehrauli—a fine spot, it turns out, from which to contemplate the seismic changes that have
defined the city’s history, whether over the past ten centuries or the past 20 years.
Delhi became the capital of British India in 1911, but
it had previously served that role for a succession of
dynasties. Has the city always depended, throughout
its history, on the patronage of a government or a ruler,
whether the Mughals, the British, or the Indian
Republic?
William Dalrymple: I think what you see, looking at a
much wider picture, is that Delhi has this concertinaing history:
growing suddenly, and then shrinking again,and then
growing again—it’s kind of like one of those jellyfish that
you might see in a nature film, expanding and contracting.
You can go all the way back to Indraprastha: it’s a big Pandava
centre, and then it’s destroyed; then it’s a big Rajput centre,
which is then conquered and again destroyed. It grows
again as a centre for refugees from the Mongols—a role that
it has played over and over again at times in its history—it
continues to grow, as the one place that defied the Mongols:
Tughlaqabad is not taken, unlike Baghdad or Balk or Ghazni.
But in the end Timur does take the city, around 1400, and it
is burnt to the ground and contracts again: all of the craftsmen
from Delhi are taken off to Samarkand over the Hindu
Kush—the ‘tears of the Hindu,’ so named at that time. It then
remains a provincial city for another 100 years or so.
Under the early Mughals, there is no formal capital:
wherever the emperor is serves as the capital; it moves between
Lahore, Fatehpur Sikri, Delhi and Allahabad. But
Delhi grows again when a huge amount of money is poured
into it by Shah Jahan and all his daughters and family—
commissions, caravanserais, and so on. Again, however,
within about 30 years of the founding of Shahjahanabad,
the city has contracted again. One of these European travellers
shows up not long after Shah Jahan dies and writes
that the city is already deserted again: Aurangzeb has gone
off to the Deccan, and this brand new swanky city has suddenly
been left deserted—there’s no one there. You’ve got
all these fancy buildings half-finished, still under construction,
and there’s nobody living in the city.
Then comes a period called the Twilight, roughly from
the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 to the capture of Delhi by
the British in 1803, when it’s a centre of poets and all sorts
of interesting things are going on, but there’s very little
money, no trade, very little stability; it’s captured successively
by the Marathas, by the Afghans.
The city grows very fast again between 1803 and 1857.
It becomes a very prosperous city under the British, with
the Mughal court as its centre. But then it’s completely destroyed
after 1857, and remains a provincial city until 1911.
Each of these times it grows and contracts, grows and contracts.
No other city I know of, in fact, has this kind of succession
of deaths and revivals.
Mahmood Farooqui: You could even extend this beyond
1911—until 1947 it’s actually Lahore that is the principal town
in north India: that’s where the fashionable places are, that’s
where the film industry is, the best colleges, the landed elites.
Delhi becomes the capital in 1911, but the two big cities in
north India are still Calcutta and Lahore, at least until 1947.
Becoming the capital in 1911 didn’t immediately make Delhi
into a big city or a cultural centre or a happening place.
What was the city like between 1857 and 1911?
Farooqui: It is still a small town, but it is expanding, because
the railroads are here, because the British educational
institutions are opening up. It’s a great time for trading,
and a lot of the traders of the old regime become middlemen
and servicemen for the expanding the British Empire.
Dalrymple: But we’re talking about growth out of a wasteland:
after 1857, the city is empty for four years. The inhabitants
are expelled and not allowed to return, out of pure
punishment. There was almost no one here. Two cities are
punished for their role in the Mutiny: Delhi and Lucknow;
the centre of UP moves to Allahabad and the centre of this
part of India moves to Lahore—even today, if you want to look at the colonial records for Delhi from that era you have
to go to archives in Lahore.
What happened in 1857 is that—very surprisingly, to our
modern sensibilities—the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys
opt to come and rally under the flag of the Mughal emperor—
who’s not particularly ready to take that role. So all
these guys shoot their officers, beginning in Meerut, then in
Rajasthan and UP, and then come straight to Delhi—100,000
sepoys pour into the city; the very night that they throw
off their allegiance to the British East India Company,
they ride through the night to Delhi, because this is
where the Mughal emperor resides, and he remains a
source of legitimacy.
Farooqui: The Mughal emperor continues to have a certain
cachetx`, continues to enjoy some authority, even though he
has been stripped of his real powers by the British. There is
a kind of aura, and a prestige, that accrues to him. The sepoys
are fighting to rid India of the British, and yet they’re
not clear about what they are fighting for. But in order to rid
India of the British, they need an alternate authority, and
the emperor plays that role.
Dalrymple: When you think about the city after the Mutiny,
you must not underestimate the catastrophe in 1857.
The city was growing—but it was growing from nothing.
Not only was the city almost erased, the culture of the
city—which is what had distinguished it—and the elite of
the city, are deliberately targeted and reduced. You have all
the Mughal names removed: Roshanara Bagh becomes the
Queen Victoria Gardens, all the places with Mughal names
get British appellations; the language of government, the
language of power, is strictly English.
After the events of 1857, and the subsequent devastation
of the city, what led the British to move the capital
here 50 years later?
Dalrymple: There’s two answers for that. One is a straightforward
British political calculation, because the Bengalis
are causing a lot of trouble for the Brits. The centre of political
terrorism is Calcutta; you get people putting bombs
in the Writers’ Building, and you don’t have that in Delhi.
Particularly after the reign of Lord Curzon [from 1899 to
1905], the Bengalis are seen by the British to be troublemakers,
political activists, too-clever-by-half babus, and
Calcutta itself also becomes unmanageably large and chaotic
as an urban space.
Farooqui: The decision to move the capital in 1911 is also
linked, in a way, to a perceived need to pacify the Muslims,
to play the Muslims versus the Bengalis, or the Muslims
versus the Hindus. When Bengal is divided in 1905, the
British see that the Muslims seem to be happy about that,
while the Congress, the nationalists, and the Bengalis are
very unhappy about it.
| SAMI SIVA FOR THE CARAVAN |
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William Dalrymple (left) and Mahmood Farooqui in conversation
at the former’s farmhouse in Mehrauli. |
Dalrymple: In one sense you have a desire to get away from the Bengalis, the troublesome Bengalis. But also the British,
by the turn of the century, have ceased to regard the
Mughals as a threat—as something to be frightened of or
erased from memory—and come to think of themselves as
the successors to the Mughals.
Farooqui: And they are helped by the fact that all the Delhi
elites of 1857, the few that survived, are very much collaborating
with the British regime. They are all teaching their
people to be loyal to the British, trying to get into modern
education and reform their community, so to say. It’s a kind
of a reward for their loyalty as well. Delhi, the capital, is
the reward for the loyalty of Muslims who were supporting
the regime.
Delhi had served as a capital for hundreds of years;
Muslims were attached to the city of Delhi; and the
Bengalis were creating a big ruckus. The British are threatened
by the Bengalis—these Indians with English educations,
politically active, quoting Mill and Montesquieu
at them.
Dalrymple: Do you think it was consciously a kind of philo-
Muslim decision?
Farooqui: To a certain extent, yes. It is done to sort of
please the Muslims as well. The thought, perhaps, is that
we cannot afford sedition from both the Muslims and the
Hindus at the same time.
Dalrymple: At the same time, for the British, it is very
much a re-imagining of the dynastic capital. There is a passage
in Robert Grant Irving’s book, Indian Summer, where
Lord Hardinge, who was the viceroy at the time, says something
to the effect that “As the successors of the Mughal
emperors we must plant our new city in the ancestral centre
of power.”
You can see this even from the 1870s, with the Delhi Durbars.
For 25 years after 1857, the British are going about actively
uprooting all Mughal references from the landscape
of Delhi—renaming all the gardens and parks and places.
And then in 1877, you get the first Delhi Durbar when suddenly the British, for the first time, appropriate the Mughal
pageantry. Queen Victoria is declared the Empress of India
not in Calcutta, but in Delhi. Delhi is a small provincial
town at this point, but they don’t do it on the Maidan
in Calcutta, they come to Delhi to do it, and they erect this
kind of Mughal-style canopy, with a sort of mock-Taj shape
to it. And then there are successive durbars in 1903 and
1911. Even in 1877, when there was no thought of moving
the capital here, the British are very consciously connecting
themselves to the story of the Mughals—the story as
they imagine it, at least.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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ujjwal
19 September 2011
02:48 PM
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this is amazing
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Som
9 June 2011
04:53 PM
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Delhi will remain pathetic despite the show because the people in power in Delhi define it. Fortunately, the Mughal architecture , the Lodhi architecture and the like are a result of pure brilliance subjected to perform under a monarchy and extreme accountability. The current power structure of a quasi democratic government , which operates at a feudal level does not achieve any of those excellence. It is a case of Delhi being between a rock and a hard place.
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Baharul Islam
31 December 2010
09:36 PM
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It always amazing to hear or read William Dalrymple. My idea of Delhi, I graduated from Delhi University, was completely challenged by City of Djinns (I read it the day I left the city) and has left indeliable mark on my mind longing for a past which can't be brought back.
As of me I experienced the grown up Delhi, I had joined college in 2003. During the next five years as I was completing my education, it had changed greatly. Now, I am told after the commonwealth, it has gone beyond recognition. Whoever comes here has a story to tell. Delhi will always remain special for reasons unexplainable in words.
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