Speaking Volumes: Under construction-the great Delhi novel

(Published in the Business Standard, March 22, 2010)

Drawing a literary map of Bombay, or Calcutta, is a relatively straightforward exercise: writers fall into neat categories, and time periods, and claim their neighbourhoods easily.

But as a recent collection of writings on Delhi indicates, this is the original Trickster City. In most of its centuries, Delhi has hosted more writers than it has nurtured them: the capital has been the resting place, the halt between stages of a writer’s career rather than the inspiration for great writing. Foreign correspondents and old Asia hands pass through Dilli on their way to Ayodhya or Kashmir or Maoist Chattisgarh. After the last mushaira in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s time, Delhi has housed poets, but there has been no great outpouring of Delhi poetry—nothing to match Bombay’s line-up of Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes, Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawala and Jeet Thayil.

At Penguin’s Spring Fever festival, a final session was dedicated to the Trickster City. That’s also the title of a collection of writings, translated from Bahurupiya Shahar, which illustrates one of the big problems of writing about this city. Literary Delhi is usually either South Delhi or Old Dilli, with the party palaces, bleak concrete jungles and constantly resettled slums of North Delhi unchronicled, until now.

For some of us, listening to William Dalrymple and Mahmood Farooqui brought in a sense of déjà vu. Dalrymple was at the threshold of his career as a flamboyant historian when he wrote City of Djinns in 1994, and as he said, the city he captured in that book doesn’t exist any more. Mahmood Farooqui began his dastangoi performances several years ago, as a kind of literary curiosity, a revival of the storytelling traditions of the past: his book on Delhi in 1857 will soon be out. For Dilliwallas, much as we celebrate the achievements of Dalrymple or Farooqui, watching them in performances that have become familiar over a decade is a reminder of how few Delhi writers, and great Delhi novels, there have been.

Part of this is what might be called the Great Washington Novel conundrum: there are great writers from Washington, but no iconic fiction to match the great New York novels. Nayantara Sahgal chronicled political Delhi in novels like Rich Like Us and A Situation in New Delhi, but it is hard to pull off truly great writing about administrative capitals—it’s like pulling off the great oil novel, as Amitav Ghosh once remarked. It is theoretically possible, but it doesn’t happen that often.

Among younger writers, there’s been something of a shift. An earlier collection of short stories, Delhi Noir, had a rocking premise—capturing the underbelly of a city that has only a thin barrier of gated communities dividing its pleasant surface from its extreme darkness. But its version of Delhi was closer to flabby paunch than dark underbelly; Trickster City with its blend of rough-hewn, unstylised writing and sharp, acute observations offers a much more disturbing take on Dilli.

Aatish Taseer and Mridula Koshy have both produced debut works of fiction that take you into the complexities of Delhi: instead of the seven (or thirteen) cities of its historical past, today’s Delhi offers seven (or more) cities co-existing uneasily with one another. And novelist Rana Dasgupta is working on a non-fiction narrative about the city—it’s hard to capture a city that is constantly reinventing itself, a city always Under Construction, but Dasgupta has the skills and vision to pull it off.

The classic, iconic Delhi novel was evoked by Dalrymple in his reading—Ahmad Ali never published another book after Twilight in Delhi, and was an unhappy exile who felt himself neglected in Lahore. But he refused to come back to Delhi, because his city—the city of his past, and the city of his imagination—no longer existed for him. He didn’t want to see what it had become.

In the Delhi of the 1980s, bahurupiyas could still be found in the Old City. A bahurupiya is, literally, a person of many faces, an inhabitant of many avatars. Most bahurupiyas stuck to imitating the gods and goddesses—more money in that—but sometimes, they also commented, behind their shifting masks, on the political scandals and struggles of the day. In the Delhi of 2010, there are few practicing bahurupiyas left, but few images capture this city better. It’s a trickster city, a shapeshifter, occupying many versions of itself at any given point of time—and it may finally be finding its chroniclers.

The BS Column: Writing faith: alternative histories

(Published in the Business Standard, October 20, 2009. Dalrymple wrote in to tell me about the link between his book and Doniger's: "I was the moderator at the infamous SOAS lecture at which the saffron egg was thrown at Wendy, and that it was my clumsy version of Kevin Costner's Bodyguard routine, attempting to protect Wendy from the yoke-- which in the event landed behind us both, splattering on the screen where images of Sita were being projected-- that led her to dedicate the book to me as 'comrade in the good fight'.")

The launch of Nine Lives, William Dalrymple’s search for the sacred in modern India, was the kind of spectacle that gladdens even a publisher’s withered heart. The Char Bagh in Delhi was packed, and between Baul singers and a dancing Dalrymple (he joined in when the theyyam dancers took stage), we were much entertained.

Missing from the audience were egg-throwers, the kind who prevented the Sanskrit scholar and writer Wendy Doniger from being in India for the launch of her book, The Hindus.

Dalrymple’s Nine Lives is very much a travel writer’s book, an exploration of nine practitioners of different faiths in modern-day India where the writer remains an offstage presence, the silent holder of the tape recorder.

Wendy Doniger’s The Hindus: An Alternative History asks how many versions of Hinduism we might have. The perspective shifts as she examines the sacred scriptures through the lens of Dalit history, through the silenced, edited but often surprisingly explicit voices of women and through explorations of the role of animals in Hinduism.

Personally speaking, I’m glad that no eggs were sent sailing in the direction of Dalrymple at his book launch, but there’s an interesting question here: why would Doniger’s brand of scholarship hit a visceral vein of resistance, while Dalrymple’s travelogues fall into the category of the acceptable?

Nine Lives is a fast-paced book, moving swiftly from the perspective of a Jain nun contemplating the slow and voluntary relinquishing of her life to the dilemma of the Dalit theyyam dancer, Hari Das, who shuttles between his job as a prison warden to his life as a man in the grip of religious ecstasy. Today’s devadasis are haunted by the fear of an HIV-positive report; a Tantric in Tarapith reveals a place where “even the most damaged and marginal can find intimacy and community”; the Sufis of Sehwan battle the demands of neo-Wahabbis that they stop preaching their brand of ishq. These are compelling contemporary stories, and at times Dalrymple seems to be channelling a modern-day avatar of Kipling, who was so fascinated by India’s multiplicity of faiths.

Nine Lives is written simply, perhaps too simply — the author’s withdrawal into the background gives these stories the feel of journalistic snapshots, and more of Dalrymple’s insights might have given the book more rigour and staying power. But embedded in each individual’s stories are disturbing questions about faith and the way it’s practiced in 21st century India. “I have tried… to keep the narrator firmly in the shadows,” Dalrymple writes. “By rooting many of the stories in the darker and less romantic sides of modern Indian life, with each of the characters telling his or her own story, I hope to have avoided many of the cliches about ‘Mystic India’ that blight so much Western writing on Indian religion.” He has succeeded in both aims, perhaps all too well with the first.

Why is Dalrymple’s book, with all its questions about the continuing exploitation of the devadasis and the struggles of a devout Dalit, not seen as offensive? Perhaps because he presents himself as that age-old figure, the old India hand who is privileged to be a traveller, who can witness “our” traditions from a different vantage point.

Doniger’s work has been challenged for years by the Hindu rightwing, whose essential point is that her reading of the scriptures is sexualised and sacrilegious. Perhaps what really disconcerts and offends those who throw literal or metaphorical eggs at the professor is that she lays claim to a far wider corpus of knowledge than is commonly found to be acceptable.

Whether it’s her re-interpretation of Sita, or her calm unbundling of the many different versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, or her questioning of the rites listed in the Vedas, Doniger is threatening because of her immense scholarship. She’s the “outsider” who knows as much, and in many cases, more, about the Hindu scriptures and traditions than her most fierce opponents. I find it more than a little saddening that she would be advised to stay away from India at this point, or that she evokes a knee-jerk reaction from the egg-throwing brigade. (Shouldn’t egg-throwing be condemned as a ritual unsanctioned by our holy traditions, incidentally, since it’s a rite that we’re importing from foreign, Western shores?)

“This is a history, not the history, of the Hindus,” Doniger emphasises; and this is perhaps why she is seen in some Indian circles as so dangerous. By its very title, The Hindus: An Alternative History suggests that Hinduism has several competing histories rather than one sanctioned version. For today’s religious fundamentalists, this is a terrifying idea that threatens the authorised version of history they would prefer to preach, uphold and impose.

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!”

Speaking Volumes: An insider's history

(October 23, Business Standard)

At the Kitab festival earlier this year in the capital, William Dalrymple read an excerpt from The Last Mughal, his account of the sunset years of Bahadur Shah Zafar's reign as the events of 1857 tore Delhi apart. He chose a passage that demonstrated the growing and implacable divide between the British and the Indians, in marked contrast to a period just a few decades before, when the two communities had overlapping lives and mixed far more freely.

Outside the auditorium, after he'd finished, an Indian publisher said, bristling slightly, "I wonder how the Scots would feel if one of us went over there and started lecturing them about their own history." The comment struck me with some force, perhaps because like many Indian readers, I've grown accustomed to thinking of Dalrymple as one of "our chaps", despite his Scottish upbringing and heritage. One of this popular historian's early works, City of Djinns, is an exuberant account of Delhi's history that remains a tourist bestseller, but that Delhi's "natives" also enjoyed.

Dalrymple abandons India in classic British fashion for a few months every year when the heat and dust becomes too much for him, but has lived here with his family for years, first in Sunder Nagar and now in a sprawling farmhouse on the outskirts of the city. He belongs to a venerable tradition of foreigners who have gone native, much as his hookah-smoking counterparts in kurta-pyjama with a begum tucked away in the backyard did in a previous generation.

When I look at the shelves of popular works on Indian history—this means, of necessity, discounting the massive body of strictly academic work that's delved into the history of the country—I can see where that publisher's grouse comes from. I've heard the same complaint, in different versions, repeated over the years about writers like Dalrymple in the field of travel and history, and it's worth addressing.

Much of the most accessible, and occasionally even scholarly, work on the history of the subcontinent has always come from outsiders, starting with Ibn Battuta and Hsieun Tsang and working one's way through James Todd, Max Mueller, Percival Spear and writers of popular travelogues such as Tim Mackintosh-Smith. If you look at Indian history through the centuries, much of it consists of what are effectively political memoirs—the Baburnama, for instance—or commissioned hagiographies—the Padshahnama, or the accounts of the Deccani Sultanate. There are many brilliant historians in contemporary India, but most of them have written for their peers, with a very few—Rudrangshu Mukherjee and Ramachandra Guha among them—addressing a more general audience.

In a more crowded field, The Last Mughal wouldn't stand out as one of Dalrymple's best or most astonishing works, though it is an extremely illuminating read. He seems to struggle in the first part of the book with the vastness of his subject—the life of Bahadur Shah Zafar, puppet Emperor turned puppet leader of the rebels, the 1857 uprising and the subsequent massacres, the religious politics that turned part of the Mutiny into a war of Islam against an encroaching Christianity and the schism created between the British and the Indians as a result. Even for a historian with Dalrymple's gift for deft, concise and always entertaining summary, this is a massive canvas—perhaps too massive.

Though the 1857 Uprising (or, according to taste, Mutiny/ Rebellion/ War of Independence) has been covered fairly comprehensively, Dalrymple's great contribution has been to bring in the Indian perspective by using "the 20,000 virtually unused Persian and Urdu documents relating to Delhi in 1857, known as the Mutiny Papers". Towards the middle of the book, when the voices of Ghalib, Delhi's merchants, Zafar's unruly and unwanted army of sepoys, marauding Gujars on the roads outside Delhi, courtesans and poets come in, The Last Mughal comes alive.


I was left with several questions. Why do so few "native" Indians (as opposed to certain Scotsmen we're happy to claim as Dilliwallahs) attempt popular histories or biographies of this kind? The National Archives, the libraries of the Deccan and other archives in India contain many records, like the Mutiny Papers, that are unexplored—are we really this uninterested in our own history, or is this interest beginning, finally, to take off? And most important, I'm thinking about addressing that publisher's grievance by writing a book on Bannockburn. Any interested\nScots publishers are warmly encouraged to get in touch.