But the biggest draw of all were the poets and intellectuals, men such as Ghalib, Zauq, Sahbai and Azurda: ‘By some good fortune’, wrote Hali, ‘there gathered at this time in the capital, Delhi, a band of men so talented that their meetings and assemblies recalled the days of Akbar and Shah Jahan.’35 Hali’s family tracked him down eventually, but before they found him, and hauled him back to married life in the mofussil (provinces), he was able to gain admittance in the ‘very spacious and beautiful’ madrasa of Husain Bakhsh and to begin his studies there: ‘I saw with my own eyes this last brilliant glow of learning in Delhi,’ he wrote in old age, ‘the thought of which now makes my heart crack with regret.’36
Meanwhile, on Chandni Chowk, although Mr Beresford, the manager of the Delhi Bank, had been at work since 9 a.m., it was eleven o’clock before the first shopkeepers began turning up. They opened the shutters of their booths, fed their canaries and caged parakeets, and began fending off the first of the beggars and holy mendicants who bounced coins in their bowls as they passed up the gauntlet of shops. Some of these figures were well known and even revered Delhi characters, such as the Majzub (holy madman) Din Ali Shah: ‘He is so careless about the affairs of this world’, wrote Sayyid Ahmad Khan in a sketch of Delhi’s most famous citizens, ‘that he remains naked most of the time, and when surrounded by a crowd is likely to break out into intemperate language. But when the desirous seekers ponder over the words, they find that behind the outward senselessness there is a clear answer to their queries.’37 Some of the most revered mendicants were women, such as Baiji, ‘a woman of exceptional talent who spent all her life under a hay thatch near the Old Idgah of Shahjahanabad. While conversing she often quoted Quranic verses … whatever she had said would take place exactly as she predicted’.38
Out on the pavements, tradesmen too humble to have their own premises were now filling their appointed places: the ear cleaner with his pick and probe, the tooth cleaner with his bundles of neem twigs, the astrologer with his cards and his parrot, the quack with his lizards and bottles of murky aphrodisiac oils, the kabutarwallah with his fantails and fancy doves. Meanwhile, in their workshops off the main street frontage, away from the eyes of passers-by, the jewellers were preparing their emeralds and moonstones, topaz and diamonds, rubies from Burma, spinels from Badakshan and lapis from the Hindu Kush. Shoemakers took their cured leather and began curling the toes of their juties on the last; the sword-makers began lighting their forges; the cloth merchants pulled out their bolts of fabric; the spice merchants smoothed into shape their orange-gold mountains of turmeric.
In the largest premises of all, guarded by mace bearers, were the great Jain and Marwari moneylenders of Delhi with their family credit networks and groaning registers stuffed full of debtors’ names, which included, after Mirza Jawan Bakht’s wedding, Zafar himself. Down they slumped against their bolsters, dreaming of schemes for recovering the implausible sums of money they had so unwisely lent to the impecunious princes of the Red Fort – men like Lala Saligram, Bhawani Shankar and the richest of all, Lala Chunna Mal, the largest single investor in Mr Beresford’s Delhi Bank, in his massive and opulent haveli in Katra Nil.39
Just as Chandni Chowk was waking up, 2 miles to the north, in the cantonment, the working day was already drawing to a close, and most of the soldierly duties were already completed. A bathe, a quick read of the papers and a game of billiards filled an hour or two, before the heat in the small brick bachelor bungalows became unbearable and all that remained to do until late afternoon was to sprawl around ‘in loose dishabille, reading, lounging and sleeping’.40 With little to occupy them most of the day, for many British soldiers boredom was the principal enemy they faced in India: ‘My disgraceful laziness is appalling,’ wrote Allen Johnson of the 5th Bengal Native Infantry in his diary around this time. ‘I have hardly opened a book or written a line for the last ten days. In fact I have done absolutely nothing but lounge and saunter about, now taking up a book and gazing at it with a lack luster [sic] eye or kicking about restlessly in my bed. My only fixed idea have been yearnings for home and a detestation of natives and native things.’41
For Sir Thomas Metcalfe, a little to the south at the Residency offices of Ludlow Castle in the Civil Lines, the day’s work was also nearly done: his various meetings were finished, the queries from the kotwal* and courts were answered, his letters were written, and the news from the Palace had been studied, summarised and forwarded to Agra and Calcutta.
Soon after 1 p.m., as Sir Thomas was heading back to Metcalfe House in his carriage, his day’s work completed, things were just beginning to stir in the Red Fort. Zafar was quite capable of rising early if a hunting expedition was in store, something he enjoyed well into his late seventies;* but after a mushaira (poetic symposium) or a mehfil (evening of courtly entertainment), he preferred to lie long abed. His day would begin with ‘the arrival of the water women coming bearing a silver basin and silver water pots. They would spread a mat (made of either cloth or leather) and on it place the silver basin and the water pot. The female towel bearers would then come in carrying napkins to clean the Royal face and feet, and towels and handkerchiefs for cleaning the Royal nose’.42
Morning prayers would follow, after which Dr Chaman Lal was on hand to rub olive oil into Zafar’s feet.43 There had been calls from the ‘ulama for the doctor’s dismissal after his conversion to Christianity, but Zafar had replied that the doctor’s faith was his own private matter and ‘there was no cause for shame in what he had done’, so the doctor continued to give his daily ministrations at the Palace.44 A light breakfast followed, eaten cross-legged on a sheet, during which the metre and rhyme pattern (tarah) for the evening’s mushaira might be discussed.† Then Zafar would take a quick round of the Palace, escorted by his troupe of Abyssinian, Turkish and Tartar women guards, all of whom wore male military dress, and were armed with bows and a quiver of arrows.45
Afterwards, Zafar would attend to petitions; receive visits and gifts from his gardeners, shikaris and fishermen; administer justice to any more slave girls caught in flagrante or salatin caught stealing; and then receive his ustad, Zauq, who would help correct his latest verses. Occasionally he might also receive his own pupils for composition and help correct their verses: one March, for example, the court diary records him as taking ‘A Khasburdar and a female – Piram Jan – as pupils in poetical composition.’*46 Certainly writing and correcting verses took up several hours of the Emperor’s day: as Azad put it simply, Zafar ‘was madly in love with poetry’.†47
Meanwhile, elsewhere in his apartments within the Shah Burj tower on the river side of the Palace, Mirza Fakhru would be busy with his calligraphy, or writing his History of the Kings and Prophets, while his younger brothers would be beginning their schoolwork, something the Mughals took very seriously: ‘All of them are kept continually at their studies and watched with great caution,’ wrote one visitor. ‘Few or no princes in India can vie with any of the royal persons [of Delhi] not only in acquired qualifications but also in those qualities of the mind, generally the gift of nature, and consequent to a good and virtuous education.’48
A serious princely education at this period put great stress on the study of logic, philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, law and medicine. It was also expected, as in the courts of Renaissance Europe, that any truly civilised prince should be able to compose verse, and the Garden of Poetry, a biographical dictionary of Urdu poets produced in 1850, mentions no fewer than fifty members of Zafar’s immediate family. Several of these are women, and Bishop Heber particularly noted the emphasis Zafar put on female education in the Palace.49
In his youth, Zafar was himself a good example of the sort of rounded Renaissance Man that a serious Mughal education sought to produce: he was fluent in Urdu, Arabic and Persian, but had also mastered Braj Basha and Punjabi sufficiently to write verse in both.*50 By the age of thirty-three he had already produced a volume of his collected poetry, a long verse-by-verse commentary o
n Sa’adi’s Gulistan (The Rose Garden), ‘a three volume dictionary of prosody’, and a treatise on the Deccani language.51 He was also, in his youth, a renowned rider, swordsman and archer, and remained a crack shot with a rifle into old age.52 Even Sir Thomas’s chilly elder brother, Sir Charles, no fan of the Mughal court, had had to admit that Zafar ‘was the most respectable and accomplished of the princes’.53
One Mughal prince who did not show the slightest interest in studying was Mirza Jawan Bakht. He frequently skipped lessons to go off by himself on a shooting expedition, not always with happy results: on one occasion, according to the Resident’s court diary, ‘it was reported that Mirza Jawan Bakht had fired a pistol at a pigeon and that two of the shot had lodged in a man’s leg, who was bathing in the Yamuna. HM was much displeased and sent 6 rupees to the wounded man and directed Mahbub Ali Khan to send all the guns and pistols and tulwars [swords] in the Prince’s possession to HM and that the Prince was to pursue his studies’.54
Breakfast in the Red Fort would often coincide with the light tiffin lunch served at 1 p.m. in the cantonment – a grilled fowl perhaps, modest in comparison to the gargantuan proportions of the Anglo-Indian breakfasts and dinners with which tiffin was flanked. Metcalfe House, however, as ever worked on its own routine, precisely set by Sir Thomas. Here dinner was served at the unusual time of 3 p.m., for Sir Thomas found this was ‘conducive to his health’, after which he read for a while in the Napoleon Gallery, before descending to the cool undercroft for a long solitary game of billiards, ‘that was a great amusement to him and gave him the exercise he required’, it also kept him occupied during the worst of the day’s heat.55
For three hours, during seven months of the year, the Delhi afternoon heat emptied the streets, leaving them deserted: a blazing white midnight clearing the lanes and galis, and hushing the city into uncharacteristic silence. In the cantonments, the sweating young soldiers tossed and turned on their beds, shouting to the punkah-wallah outside to pull harder.
In the city, however, inside the cool shade of the courtyards of the high-ceilinged havelis, life would continue as normal: the khas screens made of fragrant grass would be soaked in scented water and then raised over the arcades of cusped arches; beautifully woven shamianas would be raised by ropes run through metal hoops in the projecting eves of the baradan pavilions. Those who had cool underground tehkhanas would retreat there, to continue uninterrupted the day’s chores – sewing, letter writing and teaching the smaller children – and pleasures – smoking and playing cards, pachchisi and chess. One British traveller who was taken down to one of these subterranean catacombs was amazed at what he saw: ‘So much is the temperature decreased’, he wrote,
that twelve and even fourteen degrees have been discovered between the atmosphere of the Ty-Khouna, and the atmosphere of the room above ground, and seldom less than ten degrees … The descent to the apartment was about thirty feet, and the surprise and pleasure were equal, to find such beautiful rooms and so elegantly arranged and furnished. Coloured to resemble marble, the eye is at first deceived by the likeness; the deception is countenanced by the coolness, so different from the oppressive sensation always felt above. Long corridors lead to different apartments, embellished with coloured walls, and other decorations … many exquisite drawings of places of celebrity in Delhi and its neighbourhood add to the appearance of this fairy palace: light is admitted from above … a retreat of this kind in the hot months of April, May and June is a luxury scarcely to be described, when by every precaution possible to be taken, the thermometer above stairs can rarely be brought below eighty five; very often it is ninety …56
It was only towards late afternoon, around five o’clock, that things began to stir above ground and life returned to the Delhi streets. The bhishtis would be the first out, emptying their goatskins of water on the dust and chaff covering the roads; in their booths, the paan wallahs would begin preparing their betel leaves; the kakkarwalah or hookah man would begin roaming the dhabas; the opium shops would soon be doing good business too.* In the Sufi shrines, the pace would also quicken, as the thin stream of afternoon devotees thickened to the crowds of evening, as the rose-petal sellers in the lanes near by woke from their squatting slumbers, and the qawwals with their tablas and harmoniums struck up the qawwalis: ‘Allah hoo, Allah hoo, Allah hoo …’
In the Red Fort, for the salatin, this was the best time for practising archery, for quail, ram or cock fighting, and for falcon and pigeon flying.57 In summer, some went swimming or fishing in the Yamuna just below the Palace, though this was not without its risks: one May, for example, the seventeen-year-old ‘Mirza Kaus Shekoh was carried off by an alligator’ only three weeks after celebrating his marriage with dancing and fireworks.58 In the monsoon there were kites to fly (for the men) and swings to enjoy (for the women). Zafar, meanwhile, was settling down to his favourite early evening occupation of watching his elephants being bathed in the river below his apartments, or ‘looking at the fishermen at work’.59
This was followed by an evening of airing among the orange trees of the Palace gardens, sometimes on foot, but usually in a palanquin.60 For the Mughals, gardens were regarded as reflections of paradise, and a connoisseurship of plants and scents was considered a central attribute of a civilised mind. As he passed, Zafar would inspect the gardeners at work, and give orders for ‘mango grafts to [be sent to] the Hyatt Bakhsh Bagh’, or orange saplings and ‘plaintain grafts’ to be arranged in groups in the New Garden that he had personally planned, and had planted, on the riverbank below his apartments.*61
Occasionally, when Zafar was feeling energetic, he would descend to the riverbank and go fishing, or spend the evening flying kites on the sand near Salimgarh.62 Sometimes he would send for Ghalib to keep him company and entertain him, though Ghalib did not much enjoy being an attentive courtier and found the whole experience fatiguing. ‘My friend,’ he wrote to one correspondent in December 1856, ‘I swear by your head [that after a day of assiduous flattery at court] I lie down to sleep at night as exhausted as a labourer.’†63
Up in the cantonments, some of the more officious colonels would order an evening parade; others would save themselves the bother and head straight for the mess. Meanwhile Theo Metcalfe, released from his magistrate’s court, would be out riding on the riverbank north of Metcalfe House, with his dogs running beside him, and dreaming perhaps of winning a prize (and beating off the tough competition from the Skinners) at the annual North Indian Coursing Club Meet, of which his father was president. The club’s annual competition for best puppy, held each winter, was an event of such central importance to the British community that the Delhi Gazette was known on occasion to give over a whole issue to it.64 Sir Thomas, meanwhile, was sitting on his riverside terrace, looking forward to a quick evening meal and early bed. His terrace was his favourite place, and this time of day found him most relaxed. ‘Three or four chairs were placed [around the terrace], and here he sat for a couple of hours till it was time to dress for dinner in the evening. It was the custom for his friends to come at this time to see and chat with him …’
As the sun set, the churches, mosques and temples filled again: the ringing of the bells of the evening arti, the final call to prayer from the minarets, and the basso profundo of the organ chords concluding Padre Jennings’ evensong in St James’s, all fusing together with the rumble of British carriages heading out towards the Civil Lines through the bottleneck of Kashmiri Gate – where the bricking up of the second of the two arches was a cause of frequent complaints in the Delhi Gazette.65
As the gloaming thickened, the lights were lit in the Red Fort by a procession of torchbearers accompanied by tabors, trumpets and pipes, while out in the city the streets were filling with the Delhi College students and the madrasa boys returning in the half-light, exhausted from a day’s hard study and memorising.66 The two streams would rarely mingle, however. As Hali recalled many years later,
Although the old Delhi College was the
n in all its glory, I’d been brought up in a society that believed that learning was based only on knowledge of Arabic and Persian … nobody even thought about English education, and if people had any opinion about it at all it was as a means of getting a government job, not of acquiring any kind of knowledge. On the contrary our religious teachers called the English schools barbarous67
For the English, sunset was the beginning of the end of the day. They had another vast meal to look forward to – more mulligatawny, ‘an overgrown turkey (the fatter the better) … an enormous ham, at the top of the table an enormous sirloin or round of beef; at the bottom a saddle of mutton, legs of the same, boiled and roasted down the side, together with fowls, three in a dish, geese, ducks, tongues, humps, pigeon pies … mutton chops and chicken cutlets’, devilled bones, and stews and curries of any game the sportsmen among them had shot during the day;* but there was little to look forward to thereafter.68 The French traveller Victor Jacquemont was particularly unimpressed by the after-dinner entertainments offered by the British society of Delhi: ‘I have not seen the slightest exhibition of pleasure amongst the idlers at [Delhi] parties,’ he wrote. ‘None of the conditions which make a ball a pleasurable thing in Paris exist in the European community at Delhi.’69
It was certainly true that the British community in Delhi were an eccentric lot, even by the standards of Victorian expats. Emily Metcalfe was particularly struck by the Civil Surgeon, Dr Ross (‘short and corpulent and very ugly … a shocking bad doctor’), whose three standard prescriptions were leeches, senna packed into dirty ‘black beer bottles, and huge pills sent in a rough wooden box’;70 and Dr Alois Sprenger, the Principal of Delhi College, whose wife (‘worthy but common’, according to Emily) used to hide her husband’s trousers to prevent his going out in the evening and leaving her alone.71
The Last Mughal Page 13
