Lunch with the BS: Mahmood Farooqui

(Published in the Business Standard, August 24, 2010)

As the most recent chronicler of the Mutiny of 1857 makes the passage from Jamia Milia University to the Saket Mall, he peers out at the current ghadar on the streets. “This city has never stopped being under construction,” he says, “for centuries.”

The tamasha over the Commonwealth Games, the unpreparedness of Delhi and the prevalent corruption are familiar to Mahmood Farooqui: his Besieged: Voices From Delhi 1857 chronicles a similar, if far more historical, upheaval. Unlike conventional histories of the Mutiny, Farooqui’s compilation collects the voices of Vaziran, one of the city’s more influential courtesans, documents the arrests of lunatics (and the rounding up of Bengalis), records a soldiers’ court arraigning corrupt officials and other fascinating minutiae. It is, in its own way, a subaltern history; which is why Farooqui is perversely delighted to be lunching at Brown Sahib, the Anglo-Indian and Bengali cuisine restaurant in Saket’s MGF mall, writes Nilanjana S Roy.

His new BlackBerry rings every three minutes or so. Within weeks of the launch of Besieged, Farooqui’s wife, Anusha Rizvi, hit the headlines because of her excellent debut as director on the Amir Khan-backed film, Peepli Live. Farooqui, co-director of the film, used to either the quiet life of the historian in the library, or the civilised acclaim that greets his dastangoi performances, is handling Bollywood-ishtyle stardom for the first time, and it’s left him a little dazed. “Anusha appeared on Indian Idol so she’s spotted now, recognised,” he says. “But it has its good side. Our paan-wallah has given us extra credit for this month.”

The Dilli he’s written about and the Delhi he knew as a student are both, says Farooqui, in the past. The boy from Gorakhpur won a place in Doon School, and spent his college years at St Stephens’ studying history, and theatre — not the stylised plays that the English Shakespeare Society staged, but incendiary Indian classics like Mahabhoj. “The generation that passed out of college has a homogenous memory of the time — the advent of TV serials, the intelligentsia, the Nehruvian hangover. But that bhadralok world has moved on to big cars, money. And wine.”

Farooqui has a wonderful speaking style, the passion and clarity of the historian blending with the oratory of the professional dastangoi — the storyteller whose only props are a makeshift stage and a mike, and who can make his voice soar without either, if necessary. He interrupts himself frequently: “Am I going off on a tangent? I’m going off on a tangent, aren’t I? Stop me if I go off on a tangent again.”

Walking into the Saket Mall, surrounded by chic women in Prada and far more middle-class, cheerful young couples, Farooqui continues with his exegesis of Delhi. “So the city — the city has expanded in a mind-boggling way,” he says. “It’s amazing how Delhi continues to become new and how fast and how quickly. Forget the previous centuries. 1911, a new Delhi; 1947, a new Delhi; 1982, Asiad and television, a new Delhi. Mid-90s onwards, there was the new Delhi again — bars to go to, everybody had a car! And now in the last five years, the physical landscape of the city has been transformed. The city’s elite have become more democratised, but everyone is a celebrity — we no longer have film stars, or authors, you’re either a big celebrity or a minor celebrity.”

He is clearly, courtesy Peepli as much as Besieged, somewhere in between. On the escalators, I hear the girls behind me giggle: “Wasn’t he on TV?” Yes, he was, and given that Peepli Live is about the relentless invasion of TV into every aspect of our lives, he finds this both amusing and alarming.

Brown Sahib is a small and quiet oasis in the middle of the mall’s mercantile madness, currently empty. A waiter in a splendidly formal pleated dhoti brings us two aam porar sherbets — green mango sherbet in shot glasses — and we settle to the business of ordering lunch. Throughout the meal, Farooqui will unconsciously do what performers always do — shift his chair to face his lunchtime companion, not his plate.

The Memsahib prawns and the smoked hilsa arrive; the latter, to my dismay, insufficiently deboned and insufficiently caramelised. Brown Sahib, where I’ve had some excellent meals previously, isn’t on form today. The restaurant is decorated in a kind of shorthand Bengal Lite — Bankura horses, Satyajit Ray posters, old-fashioned talcum tins and British-era soap dispensers in the unisex bathroom, a short, potted history of Anglo-Indian Calcutta on the walls.

Farooqui has worked with William Dalrymple, as a researcher on The Last Mughal — the project overlapped with his own work into Shikastah Urdu translations. Most of the documents in Besieged are drawn from the “hundreds of small biographies, with no claimants” that he found in the 1857 archives. He calls the lack of translation or excitement about these and other forgotten records a “third world lack really”.

“I suppose I was writing Besieged for Dilli, but I don’t really know for whom,” says Farooqui, following my line of thought. “We’re living with a loss of our sense of history — it’s a universal moment. Move out of the salons and go to the streets, whether you’re in London, New York, Delhi, and the average person has no sense of history. Why should he? We live in a contemporary present where what happened two years ago is retro, so who are the takers for history?” My “monsoon khichudi” special arrives, with besan pumpkin and aubergine fritters on the side; his mustard hilsa arrives, but without the steamed rice.

“Dalrymple’s way of writing history is very useful — he is not addressing the arguments of the past or the future, he is writing within a period, about that time.” I offer Farooqui my khichudi, since the rice is still missing, and he continues. “My account of 1857 reclaims the Indian version of history, which is based on a simplistic, populist understanding: the Angrez came and looted our country. So I have bypassed the big debate — what did the English really do, how was India created and constructed? Instead we’re having a desi argument about the virtues of desiness and the vices of foreignness.”

Farooqui is warming up nicely, as the rice arrives and allows him to tuck into the hilsa, with another wonderful rant. He insists that he is not a historian (“I have studied history, I am very interested in history, but being a historian is tied to scholarship in a manner I am not — there is a certain idleness of spirit that refuses to go away.”) But his real theme is who Delhi belongs to, and who are the true heirs to the history of 1857. He settles the first question with swiftness: “Delhi belongs to no one — it never has, it doesn’t today, not the Gujjars, not the migrant workers. Perhaps the people who see Delhi as their city are the international artists and writers — it’s become a global choice, whether to live in Delhi or New York.” He contemplates the plastic chutney, made of translucent slices of papaya. “Or both. Ideally.”

How important is it, then, to reclaim history — the Indian view of 1857, for instance? Farooqui’s argument is that our sense of history as a necessity, as “the most integral part of human heritage”, is not more than 200 years old — it’s an Enlightenment concept. As he’s wandered through the city, performing dastangoi in its best-known monuments and forgotten gallis, he has arrived at his own doubts. “I am not sure I can talk about protecting tombs and monuments from, say, squatters, on the grounds that it’s a collective heritage, that we should have respect for history,” he says. “That collective heritage is unequally shared. For 200 years, the elite have tried to force the idea of history on the masses, and the masses have escaped history.”

He breaks off to marvel at the bhappa doi — steamed, baked yogurt — which is hands down the best part of the meal. “This,” he says happily, “is better than any kheer or firni I’ve ever had. Do you know why Indian Muslims can’t handle meat the way the Europeans cook it? Because in India and Asia we cook meat like a vegetable, with plenty of sauces and masalas — we don’t like the smell of the meat to come out.” It’s another classic segue from Farooqui; his mind moves in connected, beautiful tangents, which will make him a historian and writer to watch for the future.

On the way back to Jamia, Farooqui pulls out his BlackBerry sheepishly. “I broke my first BlackBerry,” he confesses and after some prodding, explains it had to do with the media storm around Peepli Live. “All right, all right, I’ll say it into the tape recorder. I broke a BlackBerry in anger at the commercialisation of Indian cinema. I smashed it on the floor, with force.” He thinks about it. “You can’t be seen with a BlackBerry if you’re writing subaltern history.”

The writer-saheb among the Mughals

(Business Standard, November 03, 2006)


“Do you know the place where Bahadur Shah Zafar very nearly was buried?” asks William Dalrymple. The author of The Last Mughal, an account of “the fall of a dynasty, Delhi, 1857”, and I are walking—sprinting, actually, given the brisk pace Dalrymple sets—around Zafar Mahal, Bahadur Shah’s summer palace in Mehrauli. The Red Fort was where Zafar conducted, with much prevarication, little funds, and great reluctance, the business of politics and statecraft. This mahal, little known and little visited in a city often indifferent to its own past, was where he relaxed, despite the watchful gaze of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the British Resident who built his home, Dilkhusha close by, to keep an eye on the Emperor.

Dalrymple trots along the courtyard and points to a patch of bare earth interrupted by a few feeble blades of grass, flanked by two graves. This is the “do gaz zameen” of the famous verse often attributed to Zafar, who loved his poetry more than the rest of the acoutrements of kingship, but probably not written by him at all: “Kitna hai badnaseeb Zafar dafan ke liye/ Do gaz zameen bhi na mili kue-yaar mein.” (How ill-fated is Zafar, who for his burial/ Cannot find a bare two yards of earth in his beloved land.)

Bahadur Shah Zafar, descendant of Timur, the last Mughal emperor of India, ruled over the remnants of a once-great Empire until the 1857 Rebellion. Caught between a beleagured British citizenry and an influx of rebellious sepoys that felt, to him and the citizens of Delhi, more like an invasion, the emperor threw in his lot with the sepoys. After the British recaptured Delhi—avenging the massacre of Englishmen and Englishwomen in full and grisly measure—the poet-king was exiled to Rangoon and died of natural causes there on November 1862. He was buried in an unmarked grave, instead of the do gaz he had set aside for himself in the palace where he had presided over mehfils and mushairas rather than statecraft, and where modern, garish houses bristling with electricity lines and TV antennae have encroached so close to Zafar Mahal that they cling like limpets to its outer walls.

“This is the Last Mughal’s graveyard,” says Dalrymple, gesturing at this fragile oasis of quiet caught between the clamour of the Sufi dargah next door and the saans-bahu soap operas blaring from the TV of the neighbouring house. “And this sad empty plot should have been Zafar’s.”

The Last Mughal is the first in Dalrymple’s ambitious project to write a series of popular, accessible histories of the Mughal empire. “Indian historians write for one another, with a very few exceptions,” he says, trotting out one of his favourite grievances—the lack of good biographies and histories in India for the common reader, the lack of fierce and genuine public debate over figures such as Netaji Subhas Bose and Shivaji. This baffles him now as it did when he first came to India, over two decades ago, as an 18-year-old student from Scotland who knew nothing of the country.

He writes in the introduction to The Last Mughal of that first glimpse of Delhi: “I would take a rickshaw into the innards of the Old City and pass through the narrowing funnel of gullies and lanes, alleys and cul-de-sacs, feeling the houses close in around me. In particular, what remained of Zafar’s palace, the Red Fort of the Great Mughals, kept drawing me back, and I often used to slip in with a book and spend whole afternoons there, in the shade of some cool pavilion. I quickly grew to be fascinated with the Mughals who had lived there, and began reading voraciously about them. It was here that I first thought of writing a history of the Mughals… a four-volume history of the Mughal dynasty which I expect may take me another two decades to complete.”

Dalrymple’s first book, In Xanadu, published when he was just 22, established him as a travel writer equipped with boundless enthusiasm and a natural exuberance. Over the next two decades, he wrote several works of non-fiction. City of Djinns is a memoir of Delhi that still reads like an unbridled love letter written by a swain who notes every fault of the beloved but stays true to his passion; The Age of Kali is a collection of essays on Calcutta; From The Holy Mountain took him to Jerusalem and White Mughals looked at the lives and loves of Englishmen who went far more native, Dalrymple suggested, than the official histories of India cared to acknowledge.

The Last Mughal examines Bahadur Shah Zafar’s sadly trammeled reign in some detail, but it is really a revisionist view of the Mutiny of 1857, and an ode to the Delhi that vanished with the fall of the Mughal dynasty. Dalrymple draws heavily on the Mutiny Papers, an archive of letters, diaries and other records made by the citizens of Delhi in and after 1857 that were left undisturbed in the National Archives for years. These papers restore what has been missing from historians’ accounts of 1857-the Indian perspective.

His history offers a radically different view of what the rebellion meant and what lay behind the abortive uprising. There were tensions between a growing, radical wave of Christian missionaries intent on civilizing the savages and the more pluralistic and tolerant Islamic culture that was the norm in Zafar’s court. “For the British after 1857,” Dalrymple notes towards the end of The Last Mughal, “the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.”

The citizens of Delhi themselves saw the sepoys who came in from elsewhere as outsiders, “purabiyas”, who had no understanding of the sophisticated, cultured ways of the great city. After 1857, Dalrymple writes, “...As Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths… [After Partition] the time would come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.”

Back in the present, Dalrymple is headed towards Dilkhusha, Thomas Metcalfe’s house, when he’s waylaid by one of the organizers of the Phoolwalon ki Sair, the famous flower-sellers’ procession through the streets that is an annual fixture.

“Bill!” he says, beaming. “I read about your book in the papers.”

As Dalrymple’s new friend leads him off to meet the organizers of Phoolwalon ki Sair, a quiet gentlemen in an elegant sherwani materializes at my elbow. “Let him finish, then I will talk to him. I know all of his friends but he doesn’t know me.” When Dalrymple comes back, the quiet gentleman mentions several friends—Delhi historians, journalists, writers—and introduces himself in a lateral manner. “I’m the cousin of Pakeezah.”

Dalrymple is delighted. “Aha, Pakeezah Begum!” He turns to me and gestures at the quiet gentleman: “He’s a Mughal, a pukka Mughal—so (to the gentleman) Bahadur Shah Zafar is your great-great-great grandfather? (To me) He’s the real thing!” The gentleman makes a small, deprecating gesture and says gently, “I wanted to tell you to write about Zafar’s court, many mistakes have been made in the accounts, about Ilahi Baksh and others.” We stand in a small knot, flanked by the dargah, Zafar Mahal and nouveau kitsch buildings, discussing the members of Zafar’s court with as much passion that contemporary Dilliwallas bring to a discussion of, say, Sonia Gandhi’s inner circle.

“So modest,” says Dalrymple as we make our polite, courtly farewells. “He identified himself as ‘Pakeezah’s cousin’—another man would have said outright, I am the descendant of Bahadur Shah Zafar.” He should be used to the unusual encounter, the strange coincidence, but there is something rather wonderful about meeting a descendant of the Emperor as we emerge from Zafar Mahal, on the day of one of the best-loved festivals of Mughal and modern times.

In City of Djinns, Dalrymple records similar serendipitous encounters, unexpected guides to a city that fascinated and repelled him, as it does all of its inhabitants. He wrote in that 1993 work: “Delhi, it seemed at first, was full of riches and horrors: it was a labyrinth, a city of palaces, an open gutter, filtered light through a filigree lattice, an anarchy, a press of people, a choke of fumes, a whiff of spices.” In The Last Mughal, he acknowledges the hold the city has on him—except in the summer months, when he retreats judiciously to cooler climes, calling Delhi the “city that has haunted and obsessed me for over two decades now”.

“I took [Salman] Rushdie around,” says Dalrymple, striding into Mehrauli’s Archaeological Park, “and he read the Arabic script very easily. One forgets he has that training.” I follow in Rushdie’s footsteps grimly, somewhat hampered by a broken sandal strap. Tucked away in the prickly, straggling patch of forest is a beautiful gem of a structure, a cross between a baoli and a madrassa. “At the time of Zafar, pilgrims and visitors would camp here during the phoolwalon ki sair,” Dalrymple says. “In any other city, something like this would be a huge attraction, you’d have Japanese tourists clicking away. Here, you have—” he scans the empty, silent horizon—“two goats. Look at the view—you can see the Jogmaya temple, Adam Khan’s tomb, that tower there is Zafar Mahal and that is… [photographer] Raghu Rai’s house.” The goats eye us with bleary interest before returning to their exploration of Zafar’s madrassa-sarai.

Unlike the Red Fort, this part of Mehrauli has retained its charm and the imprimatur of the past, despite the encroachment of human habitation on all sides. Dalrymple spent a lot of time in the Red Fort researching The Last Mughal, and writes: “Yet however often I visited it, the Red Fort always made me sad. When the British captured it in 1857, they pulled down the gorgeous harem apartments, and in their place erected a line of barracks that look as if they had been modeled on Wormwood Scrubs. Even at the time, the destruction was regarded as an act of wanton philistinism.”

Much more than the glories of the past, today’s Red Fort recalls the place where a local thanedar, Muin-ud-Din Khan, went in search of the emperor to ask what the citizens should do when the sepoys of the Mutiny looted and pillaged the capital for provisions. He found an ageing, solitary king: “I am helpless; all my attendants have lost their heads or fled,” Zafar told Muin-ud-Din. “I remain here alone. I have no force to obey my orders: what can I do?” Zafar would be surrounded by disrespectful soldiers over the next few days, sepoys who wore their shoes in the presence of the king, jostled him and expected silver and gold from the empty treasuries for their loyalty. He would, fatally, give his blessing to the Mutiny, and briefly dream of reviving the glories of the Mughal Empire before the British imprisoned and exiled him and left Delhi in ruins.

The pepperpot-ruins of Metcalfe House call forth another view of 1857 from the British perspective. Dilkhusha was built, Dalrymple explains, on the ruins of a Mughal tomb. The Metcalfes installed a billiards table in place of the sarcophagus—“A display of sensitivity that was the hallmark of the Metcalfe family”. Sir Thomas kept Zafar on a tight leash, though the Resident died of suspected poisoning in 1853. His son, Theo, took some of the harshest and bloodiest measures against Delhi and its citizenry after the events of 1857.

But Dilkhusha must have been a pleasant place, with the channeled rivulets of water leading down to the boathouse, and the “honeymoon rooms” reserved for young married couples, the stiff and formal procession of servants who kept the house running perfectly. Harriet Tytler, who survived 1857 and whose memoirs of the siege of Delhi are extensively quoted in The Last Mughals writes of coming back to a ruined, devastated city in 1858. “She’d seen British soldiers hurl sepoys off the Qutb Minar, half the city had been ruined, her British friends had been massacred, and yet sitting neatly on the mantelpiece at Dilkhusha, absolutely intact, was her wedding invitation.”

The sun is setting over the Qutb Minar, and Dalrymple has a plane to catch, another round of interviews to give, before he can resume work on the next volume in his Mughal series. He is suddenly serious, as he speaks of the importance of popular history: “If you don’t have accessible, accurate books that speak to the middle-class reader who reads his or her Vikram Chandra and Vikram Seth, then you leave a gap. Myth hardens, as it has done in the case of figures like Shivaji and Netaji, and it becomes impossible to discuss them in any meaningful manner as historical figures—hagiography takes over, legend takes over.”

This absence, and the absence of a community of strong non-fiction writers in India, is one of Dalrymple’s few regrets. This, and the fact that he didn’t buy Bahadur Shah Zafar’s wife’s gatehouse. “Zeenat Mahal’s gatehouse was up for sale last year,” he says. “I almost bought it, could see myself running a Mughal-style gatehouse pub in the middle of nowhere. And then I remembered I have three children to feed, books to write—too impractical. But me, owner of Zeenat Mahal’s gatehouse—what a wonderful book cover it would have made!”